January 2010 Archives
Jan30

A humbling experience

Posted at 7:11 PM • No Comments

A huge shout out to Nick who had a pretty bad off on his ‘09 ZX-10R SE recently. As he put it, it’s a humbling experience. It’s great to hear good riders are willing to air their mistakes in public – it happens to everyone.

Anyway, thanks to Nick for sharing, glad to hear you are okay and hope to see you back on 2 wheels soon!
Jan30

Really, read this

Posted at 8:34 AM • No Comments
I don’t want to make this blog a list of links to things I like. There is a list in the sidebar and over at my Google Reader page. Still, this one was too good not to post. It’s everything I have been trying to say since the Launch of the iPhone in 2007.

I am guilty of being the tech guy in this article for sure, but deep down I know it’s entirely right. Read it to the end, it’s entirely true.

[via @gruber]
Jan29

Apple and Multi-tasking

Posted at 6:29 PM • No Comments
Many people consider the lack of multi-tasking on the iPhone a “killer” blow. Over the past days even more people have said the same about the iPad. I have to disagree however, and as briefly as possible, here is why:

I believe multi-tasking is a myth, as the wonderful Merlin Mann would say. You can’t actually do more than one thing at a time. A computer can for sure, but right now of the 7 apps I have open, only one is doing anything – TextEdit. This is the case on the iPhone. While I can use multiple apps to accomplish a task, only one is in use at a time. If these apps launch spritely enough and have persistent state built-in then I don’t see the difference.

Of course there are times it does make a difference, such as wanting to run Pandora while surfing the web, but those times for me are limited. I’ll listen to my iPod app instead. Better still, I’ll have a 16GB iPhone 3GS full of music/Pandora/radio apps, and a 16GB iPad full of photos and movies. Problem solved.

Another common example is twitter. I use Tweetie on both the Mac and on the iPhone right now, and I am sure I will use it on the iPad also. When I am on the Mac, I like that it’s not intrusive – I can ignore the small blue icon if I wish to. Equally, on the iPhone I like that I can receive notifications of tweets I deem important (@ replies, DMs etc.) but I don’t get distracted with nonsense when I am working on something else – only when I am checking for it. There is a productive comfort in that mindset.

So in short, it’ not that I don’t want multi-tasking. I just want the machine to multi-task as well as I do, and no better*. It’s more enjoyable, more productive and ultimately a more simple and happy existence.

* Of course, by no better I mean unless it’s a workhorse rendering video in the background while I skive off on YouTube or something.
Jan27

A different kind of Apple speculation

Posted at 7:38 AM • No Comments
With Apple’s announcement only hours away, there has been plenty of rumour and speculation as to what will be unveiled. Though not from entirely trustworthy sources (viz. outright laughable), some of the rumours have caught my attention for their angle, if not their content.

Instead of specs and pics, we are hearing about how Apple may be thinking of this device, and how Steve Jobs feels about it. A couple of sources have reported Jobs is excited about the product, and that he considers it more important than the iPhone.

These kinds of rumours have lead to speculation that the device is more than just a music player, or a telephone. Conjecture is that the announcement is more than a device, it’s something designed to transform history. Some have pointed to Jobs personal love of education, some to a new way to interact with computers, some even a reform of the national healthcare system.

Whatever the truth, expectations are high. I have to wonder though if it’s fair to put moral values and national inadequacies on a private technology company. Good luck living up to this Apple, I hope January 27 2010 is a date we can all remember, but I doubt it.
Jan26

What’s the quickest method of text entry?

Posted at 7:34 PM • No Comments
I have spent a couple of days considering if I should write up a decent blog post about this, but instead I think the link talks for itself. An interesting (if not entirely scientific – I am sure Blackberry users will point this out) study of text input speed.

I have long said I can type on my iPhone very quickly, more so than on my old Nokia or the demo Blackberry at work. I can type faster still on my laptop and my handwriting not only looks awful, but is very slow. Time to put it to the test.

Jan26

SublimeVideo HTML5 player

Posted at 7:26 PM • No Comments
SublimeVideo is a beautiful HTML5 video player that will be made publically available soon. It will allow you to embed any video into any webpage without the need for Flash, and will work in any good, modern web browser.

The player itself looks to take a lot of design cues from Apple’s QuickTime player, and is already fairly feature rich. It has the ability to expand video to full-window (browsers do not currently support full screen), has floating controls, buffer from scrub point and live re-sizing. Firefox support, volume controls and Flash fall-back (for IE users) is also planned.

I can’t wait to see more players like this one in the wild. This is a wonderful start and will be free for non-commercial use. See what it’s like in action here.
Jan26

The Era of Location-as-Platform Has Arrived

Posted at 12:39 AM • No Comments

The Metro newspaper has made a deal to deliver location based resterant reviews through foursquare. It is really exciting, but neither side of the coin has really been explored yet as this article explains.

[ReadWriteWeb article]

Jan25

Most important thing Steve Jobs has done?

Posted at 7:34 AM • No Comments
The original source is TechCrunch, so take the whole thing with a pinch of salt. Still, if this was murmoured about an upcoming announcement, tablet or not, it should be pretty interesting. Big words from a great man.

Jan24

Dedicated services

Posted at 12:40 AM • 2 Comments

I have mentioned previously that I like everything in it’s place. I am a fan of dedicated services. That is, I like my photos shared through a service dedicated to providing the best photo sharing experience possible, such as Flickr. Meanwhile, I like my videos shared through a service dedicated to providing the best video sharing experience possible, such as Vimeo. I realise it’s probably a little pedantic, but it’s the way I like it.

At the same time I’m a fan of rich desktop clients (or mobile ones for that matter) and the interfaces they have to offer. For example, I love the service Google Maps provides, but I love it even more in the iPhone client. I love Wordpress, but I prefer being able to blog through Posterous (or rather, Apple Mail). A lot of the interfaces and rich clients I am seeing now (such as Posterous and Droplr) seem to want to aggregate, and host all my files themselves. Even if they share with other services, aggregators still retain a primary copy.

I ask, what’s wrong with being a delivery mechanism, an uploader? What’s wrong with being a rich client, or an interface? I would like to see the emergence of a company who understands it’s okay to be just that, and leave the hosting and sharing to those who specialise in the particular field (including short URLs people – use bit.ly).

I wonder if I’m along in this, or if there is really any merit in the idea. I leave it to you to decide.

Jan24

Droplr

Posted at 12:03 AM • No Comments

Droplr is one of the most simple apps ever. Take a text file, an image, a video, a URL, just about anything and drag it to the Droplr icon in your menu bar. The item is uploaded to the Droplr server and a short URL is returned, displayed and automatically copied to your clipboard. Now go and paste that into an email, a tweet or wherever you’d like to share it.

This is a very simple, but brilliant idea. I like all my stuff to go to the “right places” (photos to flickr, videos to vimeo, URLs to bit.ly etc.) but the sheer simplicity of this app is great. I want to support it despite the issues I have had. Since I downloaded version 1.1.0 all has been well, so I won’t dwell on those issues.

It’s a free service, so while the shortened URLs behave as expected, images will be displayed on a page with ads, which is only fair really. The same goes for other files, though they will be displayed with a download link also. Check in on the website to see what you are using your 1GB free storage for, and to delete old files. Oh, and you can click the twitter button on your successful upload notification to instantly send your drp.ly URL to a Twitter client of your choice.

Simple, effective and brilliant. If only it would upload to the services of my choosing and return a short URL to that. I will only find out over time how much I will end up using it.

Vimeo