Archive for July, 2008
Jul
28
Jul
23
in Rants, Technology
About 4 years ago i made the switch. You know, the one they used to talk about in all those ads. I bought a little 12″ Powerbook and loved it. OS X - Panther (10.3) at the time - was infinitely more stable, attractive, and functional that Windows which i’d given up a few years before and didn’t require as much work as my Gentoo/Fluxbox setup i ran at the time. The laptop itself was just as portable as and much more powerful than the Gateway (remember them?) Solo i was replacing.
I wouldn’t call myself a fanboy - really who would wantonly label themselves as such - but i’d been fairly loyal for the most part since that powerbook. But lately things have just felt off with AAPL. Specifically with their mega product launch recently of the iPhone 3G, the iPhone 2.0 firmware, and MobileMe. All of which have been getting less than stellar reviews.
Updating to the iPhone 2.0 firmware was a rather painful experience for most on release day. I for one was left with the dreaded Error -9838 as were many others. The firmware itself is getting bad press over slow downs, problems answering calls, battery life, and unresponsiveness as well.
MobileMe has been down for ages and Apple has at least had the sense to extend the trial twice. I was personally able to access the syncing features and email of MobileMe fairly early on but wasn’t able to log in to the website. I sent in a support ticket and was eventually responded to with how to reset my password which i’d already done. I replied as such and got no response. Shortly thereafter i was unable to log in to any of the MobileMe services. No phone service is available for MobileMe and the website simply greets you with this gem:
I’m sorry but insanely large amounts of support requests are not exactly the same as “overwhelming interest”…
I know i’m being a little bias right now as i’ve had a slew of issues with Apple’s latest release bonanza but i just worry that maybe they’re spreading themselves a bit too thin at present and should dial back a bit. I will likely continue to support them in hopes that this is a mid-life crisis of sorts and that things will settle down soon.
Update: Just ran across an article on the 37 Signals blog on iPhone 2.0 that i felt appropriate to link: iPhone 2.0: The glory wore off in wash.
Jul
22
in Meta
Wordpress just released an iPhone application allowing users to post from their mobiles. While it was technically possible to do so prrviously via the web interface it was a bit nasty.
Just trying it out now. I’ll have to come back and add links later I suppose (insert copy and past complaints here).
Jul
20
- Processing Blob Detection - This library is aimed at doing computer vision by finding ‘blobs’ on an image , that is to say areas whose brightness is above or below a particular value.
- Rear-Projection Basics
- Jeff Han (NYU)
- Build Your Own FTIR Multitouch and Display Device
- NUI Group Forums
- Touchlib - Touchlib is our library for creating multi-touch interaction surfaces. It handles tracking blobs of infrared light for you and sends your programs multitouch events, such as ‘finger down’, ‘finger moved’, and ‘finger released’. It includes a configuration
- vvvv - a multipurpose toolkit - vvvv is a toolkit for real time video synthesis. It is designed to facilitate the handling of large media environments with physical interfaces, real-time motion graphics, audio and video that can interact with many users simultaneously.
- Adding Dictionaries to the Built-In Dictionary in Leopard
in Design
Wandered across this a few days ago on another site (which one in particular slips my mind at present) and really liked it. Wordle is a tool to visualize tag clouds in a more pleasing way. I really like how it rendered my del.icio.us tags.