Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Nizam dropped me a im to say, my Bluetooth Keyboard has arrived I just need to pick it up and pay. I'm glad its the ThinkOutside keyboard because Mobileburn just reviewed the top 3 bluetooth keyboards and it came out top. Lets just hope its at least compatable with my tablet and pocketpc. If it works with my mobile phone I will be truely amazed.
An anonymous reader writes “CPU magazine has written a very straight-to-the-point editorial on the lack of quality and innovation in software for the mainstream OS. They compare it to the Mac, which is found in a much different light. Where has all the innovation gone?” From the article: “There's too much coal and not enough diamonds within the sphere of downloads. The greatest pieces of software are plagued by unintelligent design, and very few rise to the level of ubiquity. Windows users don't have a strong sense of belonging; there's no user community rallying around the platform. We use the computer, certainly, or is the computer using us?”
You are damm right! I dont totally agree with the article but generally most of the newer software out there are just that, ugly, boring and uninspiring. Some examples…
Blogging applications: Show me a really good blogging application for Windows which was not a port of one on the mac platform? The best one I've seen and used is Ecto which was for the mac and then got ported over the pc later. Wbloggar is good, stable and works but wheres the Atom api support? Yes I know Atom is still in that unstable state but come on! Wbloggar is also a pain to use if you got multiple blogs and blog alot. I actually use Blojsom's bookmarklet because wbloggar is a pain when inserting trackbacks and technorati tags. Its good for quickly bashing out thoughts or a post but nothing else really. Compare it to Ecto and you got something very different.
Ok taking things up a notch, wheres the innovation in this area? Yes you guessed right on the mac side. Flow which Miles showed me a while ago seems to be one example of this innovation on the mac platform. Not only is it a well thought-out application but its not bad looking either (dont have a mac to try it out sorry). The nearest thing to Flow is Blogwave which is far too complex and somewhat ugly compared to Flow, but to be fair there not quite the same. Blogbridge seems to be the only cross platform aggregator which does much more than just read news.
Look at the instant messenger client field, I wasnt exactly impressed with iChat then iChatAV came out and I was unimpressed with the unknown protocal used for video and audio. But saying that, iChatAV, Proteus and Adium all work well and look good. Compare it to GAIM which Adium is actually based upon. PSI which works well but looks pretty poor (interestingly works on the mac too). Only Pandion and Neos MT looks good. However I'm starting to use Grush which I'm sure I will write more about soon.
The other area where the windows platform is so far behind is in the widget area. Konfabulator has been out for ages and the widgets on the site are pretty good and useful till Apple launched Dashboard in OSX 10.4. Now look at the differences between Dashboard widgets and Konfabulator widgets. For example, a search for google map on konfabulator and dashboard returns 1 for konfabulator and 9 for dashboard. A search for flickr returns 1 for konfabulator and 5 for dashboard. Do you see a pattern emerging here? I still wonder how hard it would be to convert between konfabulator and dashboard widgets. But honestly at this very moment Dashboard widgets are way better than Konfabulator widgets and the innovation in them are amazing when compared. I'm sure Konfabulator can do the same but konfabulator widgets are smply uninspired.
So generally Chris is so right about Windows, I dont know how this can be fixed but it seems a lot more software is going cross platform now.
Just recently I upgraded my PocketRSS software. Wow the speed difference is amazing! Honestly my 235 RSS feeds are a pain in the ass to load in the old version and it would sometimes take up to 2mins to load. Now it takes seconds and navigating around is quick and easy. If your using PocketRSS, honestly upgrade you will thank the guys at Happyjackroad for the move to opensource SQLlite.
Even I when first read that, I thought no way is it going to be that much faster? But honestly it feels like 10-15x faster is an under-estimate on there behalf. Good work guys! I've actually run out of features and bugs for them to consider.
About the Database: Previously, PocketRSS was using Microsoft Pocket Access and ADOCE as its database solution. However, it was not an ideal solution for all devices and is not support with the new WM 5.0 OS. As a result we have switched to the open source sqlite database format. Our low-level testing has shown this to be 10x-15x faster than Pocket Access and is working so much better on storage cards than Pocket Access does.
So at long last I'm finally going to get one of the Think Outside Bluetooth Keyboards. According to Nizam its going to be Dell branded but I couldnt give a crap as long as it works well and looks somewhat like the normal version. I was saying to Tom today that I use to be quite quick with the ipaq on screen keyboard but since getting my laptop all that time ago I have become much quicker with a normal sized keyboard although I prefer the ergonomical keyboards for work and long typed documents like my paper which I still need to rewrite soon. I'm also finding that now I'm using OPML for all my note taking having a outliner on my ipaq and laptop means I can choose which device I use. But recently the battery life on my laptop has pushed me into using the ipaq more while the lack of speedy input on the ipaq makes it not as perfect for note taking. A Bluetooth keyboard should make the ipaq the prefered choice now.
Well this is certainly an interesting move by the council. I am interested to see what extra business or experience it will bring to Upper street in Islington. I certainly know where to go next time I need somewhere to chill out with my laptop.
There was a comment about Streetnet being quite evil. I kinda of agree, I know someone who was involved in Bristol mobile but its happened now and there is little which will change now.
Generally the uptake of independants like easton wireless, etc in the UK is a good thing while local councils slowly bring public places like Libraries online via wireless.
Is it safe to say Jabber support in OSX 10.4 (Tiger) is not all its cracked up to be? Apple did a good thing embedding Jabber support in not only the client (iChatAV) but also the OSX 10.4 server. But according this article it certainly sounds like it.
Apple chose to leave a few other pieces of Jabber functionality out of its client as well: Though it's able to use them if they've already been set up on another Jabber client, there's no option within iChat to do the service discovery needed to access Jabber gateways.
Off the back of this, iChat users have been sharing hacks around the gateway problem.
Whether iChat offers the ability to register with Jabber gateways or not, iChat users have been busy figuring out how to use third party clients to sign on to public servers, register with those gateways, then return to using iChat.
It was also noted by developer Missig, that iChat diverges from the XHTML-IM specification. Apple are using some kind of rich text which will need to be hacked or reverse engineered to allow for compatable applications elsewhere.
Yes before people start, most of these things are nitty picking and yes if Microsoft even dared to do anything like this it would likely be so far removed from the standard. Not that Jabber will ever come to the core of Windows ever, specially with Microsoft fully behind the Sip/Simple specification.
After installing it and playing with the new version for a matter of minutes, I have noticed an increase in general speed and performance. But anyhow, here's the official list of whats new…
Whats New in Konfabulator 2.0 for users
Multi-Pane Preferences dialogs for Widgets
New Widgets
Improved Proxy support for web resources (AutoProxy)
Whats New in Konfabulator 2.0 for authors
COM support
Inter-Widget messaging
Image Tiling/Scaling
ClipRects on Images
vAlign on images and text areas
Colorization (colorize, hsl adjustment, hsl tinting)
Context menu addition support
filesystem.read/writeFile (utf-8 only)
filesystem.volumes array of currently mounted volumes
filesystem.move/copy
filesystem.getFileInfo
filesystem.getDisplayName
chooseFile/chooseFolder dialog functions
saveAs dialog function
chooseColor dialog function
Trash/Recycle Bin open/empty
Multiple Window support
Multi-Click handling
New Timer object
Hot on the news that Opera 8 will have support for SVG Tiny, the Firefox team have confirmed support for SVG. This is pretty awesome news, I have to say thank you very much to the Mozilla team. SVG will be disabled as default but can be enabled from the preferences now. Beats building a new version just for SVG support.
In an update, SVG will be turned on as default and can be turned off from the preference if the person wants to use a SVG plugin or turn off SVG. Even better! I also wanted to take this chance to explain the difference between Native and Plugin. Plugin's are usually invoked by embedding the media object in the page, as in the case of Flash. However Native SVG means you can write SVG directly into XHTML code and the browser will know what to do with it (aka it does not just hand it off to a plugin). This is another huge advantage SVG has over Flash, however some would disagree and say because Flash is bundled with most of the browsers out there that its pretty much native anyway. Anyway before a Flash vs SVG debate breaks out, heres a list to consider.
I made the mistake of letting SUN install Solaris 10 on my laptop on Tuesday afternoon. The guy did say it would take about 15mins over the network because obviously my TabletPC has no CD Rom. I had to rush off before 6pm and to be fair I didnt turn up till 5pm, so I was always pushing it. And as you'd expect there was problems, solaris wouldnt detect my network card which is essential when your network booting over PXE! By about 5:30pm it was starting to install but the solaris server must have choose to transfer data at 10BaseT instead of 100BaseT. So it was going so slow that I had to switch off half way through the transfer and go. To be fair the Sun guy gave me a DVD of the Solaris 10 with wireless drivers and also instructions and contact details if I get stuck.
I didnt know my TabletPC was screwed till the day after when I switched it on and was given a cryptic message about the Master boot record. Yep, I thought – My tablet is screwed again!
A couple of good things did come out of this mistake. I now know my Sanyo 3G Camera phone supports EXIF metadata unlike a lot of the camera phones on the market which is pretty cool to know. And I also learned how to boot my TabletPC off a compact flash card. Roman swears you can boot the Tablet off a USB key chain but I tried and tried and gave up. But lets step back a second, how on earth do you create a bootable disc in Windows 2000 anyway? I remember in Windows NT and 98 you could click bootable when you format a drive, but theres no option in windows 2000.
In the end I reliased I could fake a PCMCIA CD Rom by using a Compact Flash card and PCMCIA card adapter. I then built a Custom bootable CF card using this nice HP application and this bundle of DOS tools. I then stuck the DOS version of Partition Magic 6 on the same CF card and was able to boot in to DOS by using selecting the PCMCIA CDROM and load up PMagic 6 for DOS. Where it fixed the MBR problem and set the Windows Partition to Active. Then I was sorted! The URL which helped me through all this was this tutorial – Tip: Boot from USB Key Addendum. But the key for TabletPC's is using the CF as the booter not a USB key.
Simple and fun thing to do. Take everything out of your bag place them on a table or floor and then take a picture and upload it to flickr. I got the idea from some blog but I forgot where sorry, Found it – Boingboing. But its important that you tag your photos using whatsinyourbag or whatsinmybag. Once your done its a good idea to make some notes for others to read and then watch as you get some really silly comments back… yes knock yourselves out guys…
I was listening to a IT Conversations a while ago and some guy talked about services at the access point which made me think but I was doing the washing up so kinda of forgot about it. Then I saw Project placesite via http://www.cheesebikini.com. I honestly I couldnt find the IT conversations talk I was listening to but if I do I will update this entry. I'm also sure slashdot had a thread about this a while ago which I will need to find also.
It makes so much sense to do this, at the moment when you connect to a public access point you get some crap half baked tabled driven page from the company which runs it. The best one I have used is the Sony wireless network node in the Sony Centre in Potaplatz, Berlin. That node provide you with information about the area, how to book a viewing for the consumer flats and general Sony stuff. I guess the question is if people will actually stick around on such a screen if theres bandwidth? I certainly dont but then again I've not come across a access point sporting a range of services like the ones suggested by Placesite.
The ability to see who else is using the access point is a great idea, and leads on to great uses of mDNS. I mean iTunes with rendezvous at a open access point is fantastic when your after something a little different from the Starbucks lounge music. But going deeper into community and mesh networks, you could offer so many services at the access point. From Webdav for temp storing of digital camera pictures to radio streaming using icecast or something else. So to the question asked by placesite can we use these technologies to strengthen local community?
I would say yes you can with carefully picked services and applications picked for there location and people connected. Placesite is a good step forward, and honestly I would actually fill in quite a bit of the optional information if asked on a open access point. I look forward to placesite in the UK soon…
If you have not yet seen http://cebit.150.dk then i highly suggest you check it out plus the comments on Slashdot. A guy walks around Cebit with a camera on his head and stores the footage on his Archos multimedia jukebox. Awesome stuff, and just the kind of thing I thought the Panasonic SDAV series of Mpeg4 cameras would be perfect for along time ago.
Theres a couple of things I would suggest to the guy whos doing this or anyone who tries this next time. First thing, get in touch with legal torrents and ask them to help you out. Dont worry I've wrote them a email on behalf of the guy already. Second, upload your stuff to Archive.org if possible. I know it takes a while but it will much more accessable to people later, plus you can place a licence on it if you like. Third, provide RSS feeds with Bit Torrent enclosures for people who use Azureus and the TV Torrents plug-in. That would easily take some load off your site because not everyone will be hammering it for new stuff everyday.
Even though its very tempting to do this for Xtech 2005, I may not. Maybe just images and audio will be good enough. But not taking anything from Charbax, this was clever and great to watch on the way into work today.
I have made the choice to move away from using my server to host cubicgarden.com. Last month I used over 10 gig of upload bandwidth just serving cubicgarden.com. This is not ideal while on my standard 512k down | 256k up ADSL broadband connection, which may be strange for some of you guys else where in the world with DSL connections. Also next month the cubicgarden.com domain name is up for renewal, and I'm not sticking with UK2's stupid framed redirect crap. It drives me and others nuts everytime I suggest going to cubicgarden.com, I also swear once I sort out the paragraph and blockquote validation issues – I will mighty ignoyed to know the frame is invaliding my site.
Anyhow with my rant over, I'm looking for a cheap hosting company which runs either Tomcat, Resin, Jboss or some other upto date Java Servlet container. Will transfer my domain name over from UK2 and are cheap and come with about 100+ meg of server space. I need to run Blojsom, Cocoon and Flock on the server and I do not need PHP, Perl, Frontpage extensions or CGI's. I may use some kind of database like MySQL in the future but its not needed right now.
So thats an open offer to hosting companys to get in contact with me, or if anyone knows hosting companys I should consider or could get a discount on let me know soon.
So far http://www.interadvantage.com seem to be the best value for money, and it would seem even there sales people are clued up going by the answer to one of my questions yesterday.
4. Would it be possible to disable PHP, Frontpage Extentsions, Perl, etc support? I also will unlikely need the databases, can these be disabled and enabled later?
FrontPage is only enabled on an as-needed basis. We run Apache as a front-end to Tomcat on port 80, so I don't think disabling PHP for one site will be much of an option unless you just put some PHP directives in the root directory's .htaccess so as to limit what PHP can do. Perl can't really be disabled. Are you wanting to disable PHP/Perl for security reasons? I've never seen any successful hacks at all on Tomcat-only sites. Nearly all hack attempts are brute-force password guesses or exploitation of specific security holes in popular open-source software (PHPBB has been hit hard during the last few months, but PHP-Nuke used to be a hacker favorite, so was the Coppermine Photo Gallery).
Yes shock horror, I am selling my TabletPC in the hope of getting a Apple PowerBook. For everyone who knows me well, this is a very difficult thing to admit. I somewhat like Windows but cant deal with all the crazyness of Windows XP (specially Tablet edition which has this crazy bug), so I'm moving sideways and changing to a Mac. I would move to Linux but the Mac will do for now. Apple have done some good things in the laptop world and I could deal with changing to Apple for my general laptop computing. So who will take my tablet off my hands? I mean no disrespect but at somepoint Microsoft are going to dump the TabletPC (in my own eyes) and then where we all be?
However this move to Apple does not mean I will turn into one of these nerdy apple boys! Dusting and polishing there apple laptops while the playing with there Sony Ericsson Phones! Oh no, I'll use the laptop but it doesnt mean I'm part of the cult of Apple! I pledge I WILL NOT GET A IPOD, IPOD Mini or IPODSHUFFLE ever!
Anyway has anyone got a clue of where I can actually just swap the tabletPC for a Mac laptop? Ebay does not seem to have the greatest range of TabletPC's which could be a good thing or a bad thing. And no matter how tempting, I'm not going to sell it abroad through ebay.com. I've also been thinking I must beable to get a educational or some kind of discount, as I should just buy the Mac new from Apple. I mean 1100 for the G4 powerbook, I'm sure the price wont go down much 2nd hand. I'm really hoping I will get about 1000+ for the TabletPC which is a little less than half of the street price.
So after a super humorous conversation with Harry on the phone where I almost laughed to death of hysterical choking. Why have I made the change? Well let me explain a little more.
I will buy a Apple Mac, but it doesnt mean I will love or like it *smile*. Now who will take this TabletPC off my hands?