Just under a month ago, an iPhone developer from Australia — one who’s previously defended Apple’s approval process — had his own app suddenly dis-approved by Apple. According to his blog post about the sudden revocation of approval, “I had convinced my company to take a gamble and make some apps for Apple’s Store. Tennis Stats had […]
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Common Flash UI Mistakes
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 – 8:42 am
One of the biggest problems with Flash isn’t Flash itself. It’s Flash designers. More particularly, it’s Flash designers’ basic failure to understand why certain UI elements are the way they are. This leads to one of the most common Flash designer diseases: The drive to reinvent basic UI elements. Poorly. Page Transitions When a user […]
Facebook and Privacy
Saturday, May 15th, 2010 – 2:22 pm
Okay, so I’m a little late to the party in posting this. All the professional bloggers have already written about it, while I’ve been busy with my day job. Nonetheless, something that’s been on my mind since the beginning of the week, when it would have been timely: I think Facebook has now hit its […]
Calling Something An “Internet Meme” Is Not Complimentary
Tuesday, April 27th, 2010 – 8:43 pm
Think about some of the great Internet memes: (Warning: Most of these links have auto-playing sound.) All Your Base Are Belong to Us. The Viking Kittens, and Longcat (who is looooong). The Badger Badger Badger song. “Don’t tase me, bro!”, “I kiss you!”, and “Leeeeeeeroy… Jenkins!!!” Why do we get “Internet memes”, but not “radio […]
Augmented Reality vs. Low Tech — Ready? Fight!
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 – 9:18 am
I’ve written before about augmented reality, Sixth Sense, and so on. Here’s a question: Is this really augmentation? As augmented reality takes hold, we’ll have more and more people wandering around looking at their smartphones’ screens rather than what’s actually in front of them. The smartphone delivers some extra information, of course, but it imposes […]
Can You Learn From a Prediction That Was Wrong?
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 – 9:07 pm
Recently, a bunch of the blogs and journals I read (including my friends, not just big, famous sources) have had some bones to pick with Clifford Stoll’s 1995 Newsweek opinion piece, “Why Web Won’t Be Nirvana”. Stoll said: “no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent […]
How Failtastic Can One Phone Be? Just Ask Palm About the Prē!
Sunday, March 28th, 2010 – 5:23 pm
Here are a few things that I consider to be basic requirements for functionality in a smartphone, along with notes on how my Palm Prē fails to deliver: When I press the power switch, the phone should turn on. (Assuming the battery is charged, of course. And I’m willing to accept that a modern smartphone […]
Why I’m Ditching Slackware
Saturday, February 27th, 2010 – 1:37 pm
I went to find a package to install Git. The page at http://www.slackware.com/packages/ still says that the Slackware Package Browser has been moved to http://packages.slackware.it/ — it’s said this for years, and I keep wondering when they’re going to move the package browser back onto the main Slackware site. But this time, when I followed that […]
What Would an Ideal Portable-Computing UI Look Like?
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 – 10:51 am
Right now, the question of what you need in a mobile computing platform is most often phrased in terms of “Do you need a netbook or a full laptop? Or perhaps one of the new high-end smartphones will manage?” I think the question isn’t one of capabilities as much as it is a question about […]
Silly Coding Tricks: “Inverted” String Match
Saturday, February 13th, 2010 – 4:20 pm
First things first: Never actually do this. This is just a fun curiosity, for amusement value only. Because of the way JavaScript’s search() method works, you can do: var my_url = 'http://kai.mactane.org'; if (! my_url.search(/http:\/\/kai.mactane.org/)) { alert("Your URL is http://kai.mactane.org"); } else { alert("Nope, your URL isn't http://kai.mactane.org"); } Try running this, and it will […]