October 2010
22 posts
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Ridiculous Source Code Commentary →
A couple of my favorites:
// somedev1 - 6/7/02 Adding temporary tracking of Login screen
// somedev2 - 5/22/07 Temporary my ass
// Replaces with spaces the braces in cases where braces in places cause stasis
$str = str_replace(array("\{","\}")," ",$str);
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Android: My Perspective
After using my new Android phone for two weeks now, I have some thoughts.
First, Android is an OS that gives you a lot of power in the most user-friendly way it can. Unlike iOS, however, when faced with a tradeoff between flexibility and user experience, Android prefers flexibility. For instance:
The Android homescreen supports widgets. They’re not bad widgets, of course, but some of...
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The Boxee Box Wins →
Jon Hicks evaluates the Apple TV and the Boxee Box for his living room media needs and finds the Apple TV lacking. I would agree, but even better I think would be a Mac Mini running Boxee or Plex, using my now-unused iPod Touch1 as its remote control. The Mac Mini would also be able to run Hulu Desktop,2 which would be really nice to have on the TV.
No, I’m not thinking about selling...
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What the Google
I’m very skeptical about Android tablets for two reasons: one, there’s no tablet-specific market for tablet-specific apps which will probably result in badly-scaled apps and a bad experience, and two, every Android device must have a cell connection - or at least cellular capability - to use the Android market.
This cuts off every non-phone device at the knees. The Samsung Tab is...
Tradeoffs
For all the effort Apple puts into their phone design, they still have to stick FCC info on the bottom of the phone. If they had a removable battery they could put all that inside instead.
I’m not saying thats even a good idea, but it’s an interesting thought.
First Impression of My New Android Phone
I’m impressed by this phone. It seems too much cooler than I was expecting, so I’m gonna wait a week before giving my opinion, and hope that reality sets in before then!
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How to Build Your Own Open Source Dropbox Clone →
This is certainly worth looking into, particularly if you got more than 2GB of remote space and Dropbox’s free account is too limited for you.
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"New Web Code Draws Concern Over Risks to Privacy" →
Great, the New York Times is trying to scare everyone about HTML5, putting a dramatic but vague-in-details article as the most prominent link on its site. It’s probably about the new database technology, and I fail to see how that could end up being worse than cookies already are. But no, we gotta scare the hell out of everyone because it sells papers. Jackasses.
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I'm Finally Getting a Smartphone!
As I am writing this, the mobile devices I own include a first-gen iPod Touch and an Alltel Samsung phone. The phone is actually newer than the iPod, but you wouldn’t think so at first glance. Soon, probably tomorrow, I’ll be finally replacing that phone with a Droid Incredible.
I’ve pointed out a lot of flaws with Android on my blog, so this might seem to be an odd decision at...
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Marco Arment on The Pipeline →
If you love to develop stuff, then you should give this podcast a listen tonight. It’s quite the interesting & entertaining interview. I also recommend any Talk Show podcast, and there’s lots of good Conversation and Big Web Show podcasts too. Better yet, load up on them and play them during your daily commute!
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PaintbrushJS →
It’s about time that I linked to this, after seeing it on Twitter, but PaintbrushJS is a really nice Javascript photo filter library. I could see it being really useful on Tumblr - you can take every photo on your blog and turn it grayscale or sepia-toned, for instance.
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Could This Be a Problem?
I’m probably doing too much worrying again (I think I might need a worry hat), but this quote by Engadget is concerning:
Shockingly enough, a “possible acquisition of Adobe by Microsoft were among the options” of stopping the skyrocketing growth (of mobile devices).
Now, I think someone jumped to the wrong conclusion on this one. What technology does Adobe have that would...
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Gap Inc. ‘Crowd Sourcing’ the Gap Logo →
Cameron Moll:
…if Gap hasn’t enraged the design community enough already, crowd sourcing the redesign of its redesigned logo will only make matters worse.
Sadly, they’re probably going to get a better logo out of this, because some hobbyist designers would be thrilled to see their design chosen. Then, of course, all but one of those will be miserable when their design is tossed in...
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Tweetie-Style Sliding Nav →
I’d like to see something like this implemented in several web applications that I use on a regular basis.
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Secrecy, Surprise and the Real World
There are two ways you can launch a product: launch by surprise, or launch several months after the announcement.
If you launch by surprise, you can’t easily gauge the public response, or generate a wave of hype (at least, not for the initial release). You also can’t get public support easily for things like app development. The tradeoff is that, if you’re truly innovative, you...
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“The .ly Domain Space to Be Considered Unsafe” →
If this means that I can’t use CloudApp’s wonderful http://cl.ly short URL’s then I am going to be very disappointed.
EDIT: Never mind, apparently I worry too much!
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Introducing My New Redesigned Tumblr Blog!
My year old, bright blue green, Marco-approved Tumblr theme has been replaced by my brand-new theme!
The first thing you’ll notice is the cool noise pattern, zoomed up to 800% so it looks more like random tiles than noise. I then put a dark blue gradient up top to give it more of an atmospheric look. One thing I learned in the process is that CSS3 multiple-background support is...
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Google's New Format Naming Scheme
Notice Google’s new WebP image format? Notice that its last video codec was called WebM? How long will it be until we see the WebS open-source sound codec, or the WebA animated picture standard?
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Google WebP →
An interesting new image format Google came up with for the web, that can be contained in a PNG wrapper for current browsers. Sounds interesting, but is it worth the hassle, especially for sites with smaller amounts of traffic?
I tried out the example demos on Google’s site, and though it claims the file sizes are smaller, they took a hundred times as long to load the WebP images as the...