Boardmad

Absolutely loving this piece of work !

Then clicking on these summaries takes you to a detail view

Not particularly groundbreaking you might think but the implications are significant…data (the bard’s poems in this case) reside in the Google App Engine ‘Cloud’ and the heavylifting gets done by a little python scripting to get the content down to the iPhone client.

For extreme programming or agile delivery prototyping the opportunities are considerable and not just limited to the iPhone client (which was picked in this instance) it could as easily have been leveraged in a silverlight RIA or an Adobe Air.

I own an iPod Touch…it’s a great device and all the millions of words that have been written around the web on it, I’m not going to add further on it except to say I think it’s great…but!

iTunes sucks ! It’s the worst bloated sluggish piece of desktop software I’ve seen in the last 5 years. When it updates itself it’s patches are enormous, it loses it’s connections to Apple’s own ‘Remote’ applet on my Touch, it can’t remember where I like to navigate to in the UI as any decent portal should…ugh the list goes on and and on.

Then there’s the content and here the Register comes up trumps ! When the cheaptards continue to keep buying poorly-written, crash-prone, resource-hogging applications “…because they’re only 59p !” where’s the incentive for the gimps that knock these out to really innovate and take this platform to another new level ?

Sigh…

Two very interesting articles on teh interweb [sic!] show a serious change in the state and direction of internet…I wonder if in 20 years time we’ll look back and identify this as the tipping point  ?

Macs to get AV

Windows usage dips

Time will tell ;0)

IT Media sources reporting on the Googlephone release and it’s manifest inadequacies when compared to the Jesus Phone quoted Steve Jobs…

“I laughed so much a little bit of wee came out”

• No headphone jack
• No bluetooth stereo
• No iPhone-like touchscreen ability
• No Client for sync’ing your calendar, contacts etc
• Keyboard quoted as ‘mediocre’
• Plastics and build quality reported as poor

Wow…what an own goal !

Yum ! This imagineering concept converges communications, data, UI and OS into one seamless and beautifully conceived platform…if only one thing comes of this pllleeeeeaaasssssse let it be the semantic, clustered file system?

Have been tracking the IE8 release cycle for a bit now and am thoroughly underwhelmed by it’s lack of innovation.

Then along comes Google’s Chrome with almost no fanfare and re-writes the browser paradigm. JS virtualisation in the app, threading in web apps presented as tabs…this is nothing more than an OS in a browser !

Then a little further research brought me to Aurora from Mozilla Labs…just delicious use of interface, component manipulation, semantic and relevance clustering in the FS and data sharing and manipulation between users in real time. Hope the UK BB environment evolves to be able to support this sort of interaction !

Mainshill to Drem
Find more Bike Rides in Haddington, United Kingdom

Apple has recently polished up it’s Safari for Windows browser codebase into some less reminiscent of an alpha-hackfest (much like it was when i tried their original release on a clean vista machine some months back) and have now slipped it in below the radar on many people’s machines as an automatic download/update on iTunes & Quicktime.

However the disclaimer and EULA you have to sign up for is a beaut…

Now click accept on that in good faith…:0)

Sigh…here’s the reason I hate flash ! Got into a huge scrap at work with a colleague arguing our customer-facing offering needed to be Web2.0 and RIA and that flash was the way to go as AJAX wasn’t ubiquitous yet etc etc and I politely pointed out that I personally, on all the browsers I use at home, block flash content.

And here’s why and here’s the original PoC code. Nice bundled-up, serialised SOAP call over an embedded flash object using an XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) vulnerability and UPnP (Universal Plug n Play - it makes those tricky little apps like MSN Messenger and Skype slip through your hardware and software firewalls like a hot knife through butter).

So the ongoing rule is learn to use your hardware properly and configure ONLY those ports on your firewalls that you really, really, really, REALLY need open and go home this evening and make sure UPnP is disabled on your router.

You have been warned…again !

If this isn’t the final nail in the coffin of this abortive attempt to see off the Leopard advance I’ve no idea what is…

Windows Vista SP1 RC Refresh as it’s been snappily entitled has now been released to a slightly wider audience that those bleary-eyed nerdlings initially supplied with the hyoooge service pack earlier last year.

I’ve got a Vista Home basic on my second laptop at home, it’s fine but I’ve yet to get used to the wholesale changes they’ve made to where everything now resides (maybe if I made the switch and just got on with it !) but this ma-hoo-sive SP is just beyond a joke. There’s no doubt whatsoever in my mind that they rushed this codebase to RC1 last year to avoid a publicity meltdown as this scale of a Service pack is just taking the piss !

It ain’t going to be on my primary machine for quite some to come I can tell you…in fact I’m seriously, seriously considering this as my next machine.

I’m turning to the dark side…no doubt.