movieos

"What Are Tablets For? · The trade-off is obvious. You win because you can show a bigger picture,..."

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:48:54 +0200

“What Are Tablets For? · The trade-off is obvious. You win because you can show a bigger picture, which is important, and you lose because it just won’t fit in many pockets, which is important. It’ll go in most purses, though.”

- ongoing by Tim Bray · Galaxy Tab

Tim thinks tablets are big phones, then. And maybe the tab is. But my iPad is a computer, not a phone.

(via Instapaper)

Unread Count Tracking

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 23:44:56 +0200

Unread Count Tracking:

I wrote up my unread count sparkline generator code. It watches my various online services and tracks how many unread items I have in each. For instance, you can see that today I suddenly got a lot of unread items in my RSS reader. I blame the Economist.

Having these graphs has had 2 interesting effects. Firstly, I’ve found it lots easier to keep my unread counts down. For instance, immediately after building it I realised I had far too many things in Instapaper, reminding me to actually read them.

The other effect it has had is that I’m slightly more inclined to read things just before I know the hourly monitoring script triggers. I know I’m being observed now. Maybe I want to deal with this email now, so the graph moves down a notch. I know this is silly and irrational. I assume it’ll fade once the novelty of the tracking has worn off. But I felt it was worth mentioning.

Wii Exercise Doesn’t Beat the Gym

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 01:07:18 +0200

Wii Exercise Doesn’t Beat the Gym:

During a nine-month period in 2008 following the introduction of the Wii Fit, users of the technology suffered 308 injuries that led to an emergency room visit, according to an estimate from a researcher at Ohio State University.

(via Instapaper)

Paul the Octopus

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 12:35:07 +0200

Paul the Octopus:

the Iranian president accused the octopus of spreading “western propaganda and superstition.”

(via Instapaper)

"Roger Ebert I already said I like, and I always put Mark Kermode’s radio show on when..."

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 19:41:00 +0200

“Roger Ebert I already said I like, and I always put Mark Kermode’s radio show on when I’m working on ZP. And both those critics have expressed dismay for the rise of stereoscopic 3D in films. I’m beginning to see that motion controls are to me what 3D is to Ebert and Kermode. A desperate gimmick being overplayed in lieu of any lasting innovation, which sufficiently impresses Joe Tosspot but leaves the critics - the actual thinkers and philosophers of the industry, the ones concerned with the cultural substance of it all - waving their arms trying to get everyone to see just how shallow it really is.”

- Extra Punctuation: On Kinect and PlayStation Move

The Rambles and the panopticon

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 23:58:00 +0200

The Rambles and the panopticon:

When people obsess over the privacy architecture embedded in Facebook, this is what they’re worried about. They worry that they are in a space that deliberately creates the illusion of privacy in order to tempt participants to engage in revealing behaviour, which can then be leveraged for fun and profit by the observers secretly taping the proceedings through one-way mirrors.

(via Instapaper)

The iPad keyboard

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 15:53:46 +0200

I got me an iPad.

The keyboard is good. I can certainly touch-type in landscape mode. Something that surprised me is that I can touch-type on the pixel-doubled iPhone keyboard almost as easily. (Why am I using pixel-doubled iPhone apps? Carcassonne.)

There’s a tiny thing that bothers me about it, though I will need to explain some background.

On the iPad keyboard, you can hold shift with one finger and tap a letter with another finger to get a capital letter. Of course you can, that’s how shift keys work. You can also press your finger onto the shift key, drag to the letter you want, and let go, and get a capital letter that way. Also nice, and I use this all the time on the iPhone, so it’s what I expected.

The ‘numeric’ key in the bottom-left that alters the keyboard to type numbers and punctuation also does the press-slide-release thing. But it doesn’t do the ‘hold the key and tap the letter’ thing.

Now, this keyboard is so large that I never do the press and slide thing - I’m using two hands here, and the letter I want is a long way from the shift key. On the iPhone I always do the side thing because I’m typing with my thumb. So the iPhone is fine, but I’m finding typing numbers on the iPad harder because you have to tap numeric tap number tap numeric again to type a single number.

Of course, as is usual with Apple hardware, on any lesser device I’d just be thankful I had a keyboard that I could type on. Only Apple stuff is good enough that the tiny things annoy you.

Wasting my time

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 17:57:00 +0200

RPGs are many things, but they are almost never hard. As I realized in childhood, the vast majority of RPG challenges can be defeated simply by putting in time. RPGs reward patience, not skill. Almost never is the player required to work hard - only the characters need improve.

…

[..] when I finally had all 160 emblems the game offered, I knew I’d crossed a milestone. I, not Sonic, had improved until I could pass these challenges. I had developed actual skills, even if they were objectively useless ones.

— Doctor Professor, Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement

I read this a while ago. It bothered me then. Still bothers me now. Not that I’ve even logged into World of Warcraft in weeks, but certainly there’s nothing challenging in that game (bar the absolute tip of end-game content) that can’t be surmounted by doing easier things until the previously-challenging stuff is also easy.

Of course, I mainly consider Warcraft to be a chat client with some pretty pictures nailed to it, so there may reasons left to play.

Bits of your iPhone app don't run on the phone

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 19:37:15 +0200

A while ago I mused,

The ‘application’ as a user interaction experience can keep running in the background, do things, and notify you when there’s an incoming call. Where the code is actually running is irrelevant.

A further thought on this: It’s a design that benefits the ‘owner’ of a web app over third parties. Suppose I want to write an Android twitter client. The official app polls in the background. I can also write an app that polls in the background. Equal footing.

But suppose I want to push all of my twitter updates to the phone. (I don’t follow very many people. This might be reasonable for me.) Twitter have a huge advantage - they run the site. They know when I have a new tweet. If I want to write an iPhone app with push, I still have to poll the twitter servers.

So maybe this is a bad example. Twitter have a streaming API that might actually make this possible. But I think the point is reasonable.

iPhone multitasking and background updating

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 19:31:06 +0200

Marco on multitasking:

The application gives the system an NSURLRequest and an ideal refresh interval, such as every 30 minutes, every few hours, or every day.

iOS executes that request, whenever it deems that it should, and saves the response to a local file.

This is a classic ‘Apple don’t do it this way because it’s not good enough’ answer. If I need to make an OAuth-signed request, for instance, this isn’t going to be good enough, because OAuth signatures have timestamps in them. I can’t queue them up in advance.

Marco’s solution solves Marco’s problem. Which is fair enough.

This would allow Instapaper to download updates in the background, and would also greatly benefit RSS readers, Twitter clients, chat programs, weather and news widgets, and a huge number of other applications.

Twitter needs OAuth. Some other app might need to make multiple requests, based on the response to the first one. My use case might be different still. When Apple produce a solution to this one (and I’m sure they will), I expect it to be cleverer than this.

The End of Privacy

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 14:36:00 +0200

If the end of privacy comes about, it’s because we misunderstand the current changes as the end of privacy, and make the mistake of encoding this misunderstanding into technology. It’s not the end of privacy because of these new visibilities, but it may be the end of privacy because it looks like the end of privacy because of these new visibilities.

— Matt Webb

Old, but still relevant. Also, the last.fm stuff is still something I wrestle with.

Links on iPhone and Android

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 22:02:00 +0200

Pages that have caused some sort of emotional response in me. There’s a bias here towards things complaining about App Store policies, because they annoy me, but there’s the odd pro-Apple piece in there as well; they might count as balance.

They’re listed in the order I came across them. I may add to the list later - I’ll probably add things to it as I find them.

Ben Ward’s Scattered Mind

So, the original, 3 years old EDGE iPhone, which has not been on sale since the iPhone 3G was launched in 2008, and which has been supported with every iPhone OS update so far, is a comparable ‘legacy’ situation to the fact I can go to Verizon right now and purchase a ‘Motorola Devour’ that only runs Android 1.6?

— Ben Ward

Sayonara, iPhone: Why I’m Switching to Android

What makes this even more insulting is that Jobs tries to dress up his selfishness as a kind of altruism. He says it’s all about creating a beautiful experience, that while he may be selling you an intentionally crippled device, he’s doing it for your own good.

— Dan Lyons

Android vs. iPhone Notes - Steven Frank

A long list of pros/cons that I can’t reasonably excerpt here.

I’m Abandoning iPhone Development

Ask permission environments crush creativity and innovation. In healthy environments, when would-be innovators/creators identify opportunities the only thing that stands between the idea and its realization is work. In the iPhone OS environment when you see an opportunity, you put in work first, ask Apple’s permission and then, only after gaining their approval, your idea can be realized.

— Dan Grigsby

*cough* bullshit *cough*

Apple is a company that produces amazing, human-usable products. I love them for the same reason I love any such company, and I forgive them their eccentricities because their products are so amazing. They make decisions that I’m told are bad for me, yet I don’t see that reflected in their products as I use them.

— Mike Lee

revMobile and Apple’s new iPhone SDK Agreement

In response to a question in a recent Apple shareholder’s meeting, Jobs said that a HyperCard-like product for the iPad would be a good idea “though someone would have to build it”.

…

Steve Jobs has now rejected our proposal and made it clear that he has no interest in having revMobile available on the iPhone or iPad in any form

— Kevin Miller

[C4 release];

Apple is crazy-innovative in terms of hardware and software design, but I can count the total number of software engineering advances they’ve made on one hand.

Section 3.3.1 makes developers wholly reliant on Apple for software engineering innovation.

— Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch

iPad definitely a threat to Windows

I love my ThinkPad T400. But when I go to it, I have to pray whether it’ll come out of sleep. If it does come out of sleep, it’ll be slow. Maybe it will be out of batteries. Who knows.

— frogboy

Open is for losers

When Costolo asked whether he would invest in a company building for the iPhone versus Google’s Android platform, [Paul] Graham answered, “Of course, iPhone. I’m talking about what I hope will set us free, not what will generate opportunities.

— Anthony Ha

Regarding John Nack on Apple’s Control Over Native iPhone OS Software

Apple is testing whether a tightly controlled and managed app console platform will succeed or fail based on its own merits, as determined by customers.

— John Gruber

Cocoa, Flash, and Safari

HTML5 is an open standard. Yes, the W3C process can be frustrating. But Apple is a W3C member, and more importantly, it has a product in Safari / WebKit that not only tracks the standard, but drives it. WebKit has been a leader in modern web technology adoption for years. Apple happily gives its improvements back to the public WebKit branch, because leading is the next best thing after owning.

— Matt Drance

Is Android Evil?

Is Android evil? No, it isn’t. It has done no harm – quite the contrary, Android has boosted the level of innovation on mobile software. The point of the article is not to vilify Google or concoct visions of Darth Vader; but to balance the level of openness hysteria with a reality check on the commercial dynamics of mobile open source.

— Andreas Constantinou

Five rational arguments against Apple’s 3.3.1 policy

It’s hard to build a business on a platform where you feel like you cannot trust the men in power. If they can take down Adobe a few days before the launch of their flagship product, what hope do smaller players hold?

…

[..] This is especially true when Tier A developers like EA gets away with things that Tier C developers in their basement don’t. It breeds an air of aristocracy where the lords can roam as they please but the peasants are kept on a tight leash.

— David Heinemeier Hansson

Apple’s wager

Cumulatively, these actions represent a huge bet placed by Apple. The proposition is this: Apple is betting it can grow its platform fast enough, using any means necessary, that developers will stick around despite all the hardships and shoddy treatment. Each time it chooses to do what it thinks is best for the future of the iPhone OS platform instead of what will please developers, Apple is pushing more chips into the pot.

— John Siracusa

Why Apple Changed Section 3.3.1

If you’re a developer and you’ve been following Apple’s advice, you will never even notice this rule. You’re already using Xcode, Objective-C, and WebKit. If you’re an iPhone developer and you are not following Apple’s advice, you’re going to get screwed eventually. If you are constitutionally opposed to developing for a platform where you’re expected to follow the advice of the platform vendor, the iPhone OS is not the platform for you. It never was. It never will be.

— John Gruber

Pain Is A Gift

Pain is a gift: the signal that prevents a burned finger tip from becoming a body engulfed in flames. Apple is numb from success, and I hope the emerging competition from Google and others will re-sensitize them to the threat of failure.

— Daniel Jalkut

Android VM Performance is not a Factor

Fifteen years ago, all we thought that Java needed to rule the known universe was a faster VM. If we just had that, Windows and all native UI applications were toast. After lots of hard work by wicked smart people, and more than a few years, Java VM performance was increased to the point where it wasn’t a problem any more. But that didn’t change the equation of where Java did or didn’t succeed. Most notably, the Java GUI applications didn’t suddenly kick native Windows or MacOS applications to the curb.

— James Duncan Davidson

From iPhone to Android

Where Android shines in some areas, it really falls apart in others. Things that are ridiculously simple on the iPhone such as taking a screenshot involves installing an SDK and going through a 15 step tutorial to do on Android.

— Justin Williams

Gameloft Keeps Getting it Wrong

According to our refund policy, once the game is successfully installed, we cannot resend it for any reason, unless you buy it again. One purchase entitles you to one download of the game to one phone number and on one phone model only. If you delete or otherwise remove the game from your phone, or change your handset, you will have to buy it again.

— Scott Webster

(Turns out, a single app store does stop people pulling really nasty moves)

Sentence first — verdict afterwards

Our application is being removed for a very murky reason, one which is nowhere to be found in any documentation that Apple give us developers, even worse one which Apple themselves refuse to explain, or put in writing.

— ShiftyJelly blog

Steve Jobs Live at D8

“We’re just trying to make great products,” says Jobs again. “We don’t think Flash makes a great product, so we’re leaving it out. Instead, we’re going to focus on technologies that are in ascendancy. If we succeed, people will buy them and if we don’t they won’t….And, so far, I have to say, people seem to be liking the iPad. We are selling an iPad every 3 seconds.”

Stance

I don’t think Steve Jobs or Apple is evil, but I do think that the App Store is an idea that’s been executed in a way that deeply offends everyone involved that isn’t Apple.

— waffle

Pulse iPad App Gets Steve Jobs’s Praise in Morning…Then Booted From App Store Hours Later After NYT Complains

[..] by the afternoon, that flush of entrepreneurial success had turned sour, after Apple informed the two that Pulse was being pulled from the App Store after it received a written notice from the New York Times Company declaring that “The New York Times Company believes your application named ‘Pulse News Reader’ infringes The New York Times Company’s rights.”

— Kara Swisher

Google protests Apple’s iPhone developers agreement

The updated language — which was first noted by the MediaMemo blog — appeared to put in place significant new restrictions, particularly when it comes to Google.

Hello Lua

While explicit approval from Apple is still required, these new terms seem to acknowledge that there’s a difference between an app that happens to have non-compiled code, and a meta-platform. It’s a step that should allow for many new possibilities.

— Matt Drance

Joyce’s Ulysses Banned Again—by Apple

Again, Apple can censor what it wants, and the rest of us can like it or not. But Apple is making a mockery of its own anti-porn stance in this instance. There is no clear reason why it should define obscenity more narrowly than the U.S. courts do. And even if there were, broadening the definition of porn to frivolous extremes turns the App Store into a joke at a moment when viable alternatives are emerging.

— Kevin Kelleher

Almost on the App Store

When the Apple reviewers saw bs chunks of code littered throughout the documentation, it’s not hard to see how they thought I was running a custom script interpreter on the phone.

— Rob Rhyne

Hard to judge this one. In certain lights, it is interpreting code. From another angle, it’s just loading a document. Is there really a distinction anyway?

On needing approval for what we create, and losing control over how it’s distributed

The problem is that fundamentally, it’s just never going to be possible to prevent the garbage. If you want to have a boutique, like the Apple retail stores, where you can buy a specially selected subset of merchandise from third parties, then great. But instead, we’ve conflated wanting to have that kind of retail control (a smart idea) with the only conduit by which software can be sold for the platform (an already flawed idea).

— Ben Fry

Complexity

[..] the iPad attempts to simplify computing not by some stroke of magic, but by doing less. You can’t have full multitasking and multiple apps oncscreen at the same time and apps installable from everywhere and compatibility with Mac OS X and a physical keyboard AND simplicity.

— Neven Mrgan

Briefs.app

Three fucking months Briefs.app has sat in the review queue, and in that time, the app review team has allowed other prototyping applications onto the app store: applications that do the same basic tasks that Briefs.app was created to do.

— Jeff LaMarche

Getting silly.

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 15:17:00 +0200

Getting silly.

Pushing web pages to your iPhone

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 15:01:00 +0200

One of the things I saw at the Google IO Event - to demonstrate Android Push events, they had a Chrome extension that would push the currently open web page from the browser to a phone. I want that for my iPhone.

Of course, the iPhone has Push Notifications already. So here’s how to do it badly. It’s not as slick as the Android version, because I’m not going to write any new software to do it, but it’s a lot easier than typing URLs in manually, or emailing them to yourself.

First, install Prowl. Although billed as a Growl client, Prowl is at core just a push notification client with a simple REST API. It costs money. Deal with it. Once installed, go to your settings page and note the ‘API key’. Drag this ‘send to iPhone’ bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar or somewhere, edit the address, and change the APIKEY string at the beginning to your Prowl API key (leave the quotes round it):

send to iPhone

Now clicking the bookmarklet will send the currently open page to your iPhone. Opening it is a bit of a multi-step process, alas - tap ‘view’ to open the notification in Prowl, then you can tap the URL to open it in Safari. I’m sure someone could write a dedicated app to skip this step, if they wanted to.

NFC

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 00:19:47 +0200

Apple has approved an iPhone case [..] that includes an NFC chip connected via the dock connector [..] I doubt Apple would do that if it were about to announce direct support for the technology itself.

— The Economist / Babbage

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA.

cough.

Android / HTML Simplenote client

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 19:14:00 +0200

Recently I’ve been bouncing back and forth a lot between Android and iPhone, both platforms now having multiple aspects that I like and multiple aspects that annoy me. In an effort to remove one of the major problems with Android, I’ve written myself a mobile HTML Simplenote client so I can read my notes when away from the iPhone (simplenote being one of the Killer Apps of the iPhone for me).

It’s an HTML5 ‘app’, is as much as android has those. It stores the contents of your notes in local storage, so it’s fast, and it’ll poll for changes, and it’s got caching of files, so it should work if your phone is offline letting you read your notes on an aeroplane or something. If you’re weird and want to use it on an iPhone, it works there as well and has proper home screen bookmark support.

Caveats - It’s an early hack - this represents a few evenings of work (mostly spent yelling at cache manifests), not a real project. It’s also read-only - you can’t change notes yet. 90% of my use case is just reading things I’ve written on the desktop, so it’s not likely to gain this ability any time soon either. I don’t really care about the ability to edit notes.

Most importantly, because of HTML and cross-domain stuff being what it is, all requests made my this app go to MY server, and I proxy them to the simplenote server. This means that (a) I might be logging your password (I’m not, but you can’t prove that), and (b) it all goes over HTTP because I don’t have an HTTPS certificate, so someone else can sniff your password.

DO NOT USE IT IF YOU CARE ABOUT THIS.

Anyway. check out the app itself, or have a look at the inevitable github project.

"The bottom line here is that instead of doing all the much harder work of adding inlining to our own..."

Mon, 31 May 2010 11:05:57 +0200

“The bottom line here is that instead of doing all the much harder work of adding inlining to our own compiler, all we need to do is let the JVM do it, and we benefit from the years of work that have gone into current JVMs’ optimizing compilers. The best way to solve a hard problem is to get someone else to solve it for you, and the JVM does an excellent job of solving this particular hard problem.”

- Headius: Kicking JRuby Performance Up a Notch

"Dr. Freeman, you really should not be out there. At the moment of synapse as I teleport this..."

Mon, 31 May 2010 10:12:03 +0200

“Dr. Freeman, you really should not be out there. At the moment of synapse as I teleport this chamber will be bathed in deadly particles that have yet to be named by human science. Perhaps when I have the leisure to do the work myself, I will name one after you. That way you will not be completely forgotten. When the singularity collapses, I will be far away from here, in another universe in fact. You on the other hand will be destroyed in every way possible, and even some essentially impossible.”

- Dr Breen, Half-Life 2 (on the mac yay). Physicist put-downs, eh?

How to get iTunes to take over your music files

Sat, 15 May 2010 20:24:28 +0200

iTunes has two different ways to deal with files on disk - adding a file can either create only a reference to it in the library, or iTunes can copy the it into a central folder where it’ll be managed for you. Both methods have their fans and their detractors, but I’m in the process of switching from referenced to managed, because iTunes 9 got a new, much prettier, folder structure and I’m tired of micromanaging this stuff.

The approved way to convert your library is to select “Keep iTunes Media Folder Organised” and “Copy files to iTunes media folder when adding to library” in the ‘advanced’ section of iTunes’ preferences. Then you select the ‘File.. Library.. Organize Library’ menu item and tell it to copy all your media files into the new library.

I don’t want to to this, I don’t want 2 copies of everything, and I don’t have the disk space anyway. To do this the easy way (on the Mac, anyway),

Move all your media files into the new library folder. You have to keep them on the same volume or the iTunes references will get lost. If you want the new media folder on a different volume, you’re stuffed, but you’d have to copy them anyway so why are you here? How they’re laid out on disk inside this folder doesn’t matter.
Deselect “Keep iTunes Media Folder Organised” in advanced preferences.
Restart iTunes.
Reselect “Keep iTunes Media Folder Organised”
Click the ‘Change’ button next to the Media Folder location in advanced preferences, and click ‘Choose’ to re-select the current folder. We’re not actually changing it, we just want to pretend we did.
Click Ok.
Watch iTunes happily re-organise all your files.

So, I got bored and started to Google my name..

Mon, 10 May 2010 16:45:06 +0200

So, I got bored and started to Google my name..:

So, I got bored and started to Google my name and found someone named “Jerakeen” (my name, Jeralkeen, without an “L”). I was amazed and searched “Jerakeen”. She/He/It has two(2) websites: FanFiction By Jerakeen and jerakeen.org.

This is exactly why I abandoned the old nick. I’m a nerd / computer programmer. The other jerakeen writes gay fanfic. Not an area where I want confusion, thank you very much. Alarmingly, they seem to own the google results now.

Take this as an important lesson, fellow nerds - it doesn’t matter if you’ve used a particular nick for 10+ years. Normal people use the internet now, and they can DESTROY YOU.