Micro blogging for a while...
I've got a lot of things coming up, so I'm not going to be able to write full blog posts for a while.
I'll instead be doing mini updates on Twitter, and hopefully normal service will be resumed soon...
Why oh why the wires?
Why oh why the wires?
The latest iPod Nano is a beautiful piece of engineering. It's
amazingly thin, light and compact for the amount it stores, has a
clear, bright screen, and it's aluminium body is remarkably resistant
to scratches.
It's elegant interface and design have been praised and written about
endlessly, but there is one thing which is not quite so elegant - the
mass of wires you need to listen, charge or sync it.
Apple are so good at making wireless bits "just work" - my wireless
keyboard and mouse connect to the Mac without the awkward
button-pushing, code entering pairing rituals of Windows; the iPhone
Remote application picks up and controls any copies of iTunes which
happen to be nearby on the network.
There's three wired functions which would be made so much more elegant
and simple if Apple could cut the wires for the next version...
1.
Five suggestions for Dreamwaver
I'm a regular user of Dreamweaver, and while CS4 has demonstrated some excellent new features and enhancements, there are still several areas of the product I would like to see improved. While it may be too late for CS4, here's my top five areas I'd like to see addressed in the future (in no particular order)
1. Code hinting - JS and PHP
CS4 has massively improved the way it deals with custom JS coding - in
terms of smart introspection of functions, classes and objects, and how
it code hints and colours them. Brilliant! I take it as an indication
that Adobe is catering not just for the WYSIWYG audience, but for the
professional developer who hand codes, rather than relying on
out-of-the-box widgets.
However, these currently assume that everything is done through one
static HTML document, with scripts linked off it.
Trying out MS Photosynth
Microsoft Labs' Photosynth software wowed many people last year with its ability to automatically matching sets photos into a 3D space. There was a great demo showing Notre Dame, based on photos pulled in from Flickr.
Last week they released a browser plugin on Photosynth.net which allows you to try it out with your own sets of photos.
I've got plenty of sets of source panorama photos which nicely line up because they were taken with a panoramic tripod head, but I wanted to try it out with something a bit more challenging - a set of shots taken handheld from a few different spots with a compact camera.
everything.sucks - a TLD for complaints
I wrote an article on my work blog yesterday about the new rules for top level domains (TLDs) that were approved by ICANN this week. In it, I gave a list of a few examples of the new TLDs that we are likely to see - one of them was .sucks
It's almost an internet convention that if you want to build a complaint website about a company, it has the name "xxxxx sucks". For example www.microsoftsucks.org, www.googlesearchsucks.com, www.mac-sucks.com, etc -- you get the idea.