January 2010
39 posts
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“With JooJoo, the Internet is the application. JooJoo makes connecting to the...”
– JooJoo.
I’d completely forgotten about JooJoo (neé the Crunchpad) until I saw a sarcastic post to Twitter about it.
Looking at the price ($499, the same as the iPad) and specs (which value a larger, widescreen display in preference to battery life, or storage capacity), I have to say this...
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“At CES here on Friday, graphics chipmaker Nvidia showed a tablet, or slate,...”
– Brooke Crothers, a couple of weeks ago, in Tablet runs Motorola-Verizon software, Android. Maybe Google might not want to compete with a tablet, but ICD/Motorola/Verizon might.
On the other hand, even this short demo feels like it shows a lot of the dangers for an Apple competitor. For example, the...
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“Google has [also] decided to target the market in between the laptop and the...”
– MG Siegler in The iPad And Chrome OS Netbooks Are On A Collision Course, a comment piece on TechCrunch that’s, unsurprisingly, garnered far more attention than my effort on the same subject.
Siegler may well be right: Google, especially in the short term, will probably respond to the iPad by...
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Slippy Maps and Scale
I have a problem with slippy maps, especially as used in the iPhone’s Maps app. They have no sense of scale.
Admittedly, this isn’t entirely true for the web’s version of Google Maps: there’s a small ruler in the bottom left, giving some idea of distance. However, Open Streetmap’s default renderer is missing such a feature, as is the aforementioned iPhone interface.
...
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Competing with iPad
Everyone’s talking about the iPad, so I started thinking a little further down the road. After all, if windows and mice really aren’t the future of computing, and touch screens are, you’d hope there’d be more than one manufacturer of devices in Our Glorious Computing Future. At least, I hope there is.
So, who’d make them? I can tell you who won’t: anyone...
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“The Greater London Authority has confirmed that Saffron Brand Consultants has...”
– Saffron confirmed as Brand for London winner
via Dave Hill, who notes that Saffron is chaired by Wally Olins, formerly of Wolff Olins, designer of the London 2012 identity.
Oh dear. I’d kind of hoped the nonsense had gone away. (via teflon)
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Google App Engine notes
I’m working on a project that’s using Google App Engine’s datastore for the first time, and I seem to be learning things as I go along, so I thought I’d make a place for jottings.
To do a join efficiently, add a list of people an object belongs to to the object. Fetch with, eg, Objects.all().filter(‘contact_of =’, contact_of)
If you have a meaningful...
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“We are no longer just consumers of content, we have become curators of it too....”
– ‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com (via interestingsnippets, via megpickard)
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“For consumer web apps today, design matters more than technology. Much has been...”
– Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, talking about Tumblr vs Posterous (via knaveofdiamonds)
I’d take issue with the “everyone is on EC2 and RoR” part. While the EC2 bit feels right for new projects - everything I worked on at Six to Start over the last year has been hosted there - I’d...
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“Indeed, rather than negate the need for travel (a common promise of futurists)...”
– Bobbie Johnson in a comment piece on CES 2010: Is it time to end consumption electronics?
There’s a good comment in here about 3d TV, too.
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“despite our best efforts, ice will form in freezing temperatures and trains...”
– Southeastern’s press release / news post about the reduced service they’ve been running during snowfall, complete with odd use of quotes.
Shamefully, I hadn’t though about the fact that “‘third’ rail” was more vulnerable to snow and ice until I saw a BBC...
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"How to build an iPhone app"
According to Wired UK:
3. Prototype
Now draw your idea. Making paper models and moving things around on a table is a much simpler way to test the app than coding it up and hoping for the best. Have lots of people try out the paper prototype. Only when you’re happy with your paper design should you have it turned into code.
4. Submit, release
Now you have a working app, you’ll be wanting to...
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WatchUnderworld’s Cowgirl, one of 20 videos at MySpace. Why did I not know this existed?
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Per-tag RSS feeds for Tumblr
I didn’t think that Tumblr offered per-tag RSS feeds, but after spending some time trying to hack the JSON output from the Tumblr API into my aggregated front page, I tried appending “/rss” to the URL of one of my tag archive pages, and somewhat to my surprise, it worked.
Of course, RSS is more useful if it’s discoverable, so in addition to the standard
<link...
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On New Year
I’d forgotten - until yesterday - that the epic post on calendars and blue moons, on the Panic blog, had made me think about doing a post about the changes in New Years. So, before 2010 properly gets going (with most people going back to work tomorrow), I thought I’d try and get this out while it’s still topical.
You’d think the concept of a new year was straightforward....
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“Slagging people off for saying “nice” and “good” is what...”
– David Mitchell in Pedantry isn’t boring – it’s essential, a comment column for the Observer (via)
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“Most of my Twitter tweeple, in expressing their mild hopes for the decade, seem...”
– Bruce Sterling, in the customary WELL conference on the State of the World 2010.