23 August 2008

03:52	Mac Mini Mods Yum.

20 August 2008

23:08	Live from the iPhone factory Guys flirts with colleague, is interrupted by supervisor… via macenstein.com

16:01

WritingPad (iPhone)

So you see those weird screenshots of an iPhone app with a custom keyboard and you scoff — damn, they’ve got to be so stupid if they think they can make a third-party application that has a better input device than the system provides. (Nevermind that I wouldn’t scoff at all if someone decided to port Palm’s Graffiti to the iPhone.)

Well, actually, they can, and it’s really impressive. Instead of tapping each key, you just keep your finger on the screen for each word, and zip from letter to letter; once you’re used to the keyboard layout it definitely feels faster than the iPhone keyboard (I don’t care about measured speed; only perception really matters when it comes to those things), and as a bonus the list of alternative possibilities is much more convenient than the iPhone’s tap-here-to-refuse suggestion system.

The system needs a bit more polish, and I don’t see myself really using it (for one, there’s only an English dictionary, and I don’t want to get used to a different keyboard than what’s available in all other apps), but the application is free, so you ought to try it. I figure they intend it as a tech demo so that Apple would buy their code; it’s not too bad an idea.

14:36	What Makes for a Good Blog? Good writeup from Merlin Mann. Good blogs are weird. Blogs make fart noises and occasionally vex readers with the degree to which the blogger’s obsession will inevitably diverge from the reader’s. If this isn’t happening every few weeks, the blogger is either bored, half-assing, or taking new medication. via daringfireball.net

12:45	Has iPhone 2.0.2 removed the "Update All" button from the App Store application?!

18 August 2008

23:30	Re-enabled iPhone backup before upgrading the firmware; it would be faster to copy all application data with a quill.

12:11	Ah, the Google iPhone app is now available in Europe. And, yeah, pretty useless.

16 August 2008

22:20	That free solitaire game for the iPhone was commissionned by a society of evil proctologists, by the way.

15 August 2008

20:12

AdSense for Feeds

Requires going through the FeedBurner platform to insert ads into your feed — that means changing the feed URL you give your readers, transferring your existing readership (a simple redirect) and trusting an outside service with the entire future of your blog. Basically, it’s the same as if the only way to have AdSense on your blog was to syndicate your contents on a Blogger page, and having to give that address to all your readers. That’s not why I bought a domain name (or fifteen).

I never understood why so many blogs decided to rely on FeedBurner for some dubious additional functionality (I’ve never seen anyone attribute any reliability to the subscriber counts), even if the service is now managed by Google. And the possibility of inserting ads on my feeds won’t change my mind; it’s not like anyone clicks on ads in their aggregators anyway.

Still, the principle of the thing is lame; there’s got to be a way to do things more openly, with some kind of API.

10 August 2008

17:41	How cheap can you get a rudimentary hackintosh laptop?

9 August 2008

14:06	Dynolicious An iPhone app measures your car’s speed, acceleration, horsepower, and the distance it has passed — all with the device’s accelerometer. I had no idea that was possible.