Archive for the 'Momentos' Category

iPhone – Ripped Apart

Published on Friday, January 12, 2007 in Entries, Momentos and Tagged. 2 Comments

For the record, I love Apple. I have been waiting with patience for a while for the ‘iPhone’, all the rumors aside, it was an obvious move for them and it was bound to happen. On Tuesday I watched the keynote, and was in utter joy with everything the iPhone could do. After a good 24 hours of giddy-ness I was able to calm down, realize that no one touched on what the phone couldn’t do, so I looked into it and found out some things I really don’t like.

  • No third party apps

Now this is a real show stopper here. What good is having a phone that runs OS X if I can’t run Adium or Newsfire. Now, I don’t expect these app’s to work out fo the box, that is asking to much. But they should be able to scale down and port these applications for the iPhone. I see a huge market for third party developers on this platform, and can’t think of a reason Apple wouldn’t want that around. It brings more people to the platform, especially current Mac owners. Confirmed by Apple VP

  • EDGE Data Transfer

Now this is something I can live with, but would prefer not to. For those not-in-the-know about all the different wireless data transfer acronyms. EDGE is basically the DSL of wireless data where EVDO and 3G are the cable internet(GPRS is the dial-up). EDGE gets a realistic 70kbps download speed on average. Even this site would take a while to download on that kind of speed. Now, my opinion has always been that if I am doing the web surfing on my phone, it’s because I need to look up something specific and waiting for it is not an issue, but if you are going to make a state of the art phone and tout the greatest technology including “200+ new patents” … you should use the highest wireless data transfer technology available! I am surprised Cingular signed on to the deal without any 3G data. Cingular has been pushing 3G majorly and wants to get all their customers onto 3G phones within the next couple of years.

  • GPS

Where is the GPS? Jobs touted Google Maps as one of the killer apps of the phone, why can it not tell where I am at and give me directions, or local attractions. I can pinch a digital image to a smaller size, but I have to tell the phone where I am at? Bad form Apple.

  • Battery Life

Now this one is more confusing than aggrivating to be honest. The “iPhone technical specs page”(which doesn’t have anything terribly technical on it) says that the phone has “Up to 5 hours of talk/video/browse” and “Up to 16 hours Audio playback.” Now … does this mean that one battery can last 5 hours of solid talking OR 16 hours of solid playback? Or is it how Kevin Rose said it would be last month on Diggnation with one battery dedicated to Audio playback that lasts 16 hours, and another battery for everything else that lasts 5 hours? Also, why is there no standby battery life listed?

  • Syncing

Apple put Wi-Fi(a/b/g[/n?]) and Bluetooth 2.0 EDR in their phone. Good job Apple! They did something right with the phone part of their phone! Oh … but wait … you can’t use either of them to sync your iPhone with your computer, you have to dock it. I personally don’t see a reason for Bluetooth 2.0 EDR when the only thing you can use it for is a wireless headset, a lesser version of bluetooth would have been fine(and might have dropped the hefty pricetag a bit).

  • IM

I know the text messaging looks a lot like IM, and you can AIM over SMS. But where is the true, honest to goodness, text messaging? iChat anyone? I’m not a huge fan, and there are better alternatives on the Mac, but for mobile IM, iChat would do just fine. What I really want? Adium on my iPhone. AIM, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, GoogleTalk(Jabber). All of them done right with a pretty interface.

  • Cingular

I am not a huge fan of cingular. Thier plans are overpriced and they use Rollover to justify it, when in reality, I would hardly, if ever have rollover minutes. I am paying a $20 premium for a service I will never use. With other phones, this is not an issue. Go online, download a phone utility(or instructions), unlock it, and pop in your favorite sim card. But I think a few of the features of the iPhone will only work with cingular. Visual VoiceMail being the most obvious, as something like that requires a fairly large infrastructure change on Cingulars part.

  • Expandable Memory

To be fair, I see a little slot on the side of the phone that COULD be used for expandable memory. But nothing was mentioned about support. Photo’s are another killer app for the iPhone. Why can’t I pop my SD card out of my camera, drop them to my iPhone, and email them out? 2 Megapixels isn’t enough for a lot of people.

  • Battery

An internal battery on a phone? Palm tried that with the Treo 600, we all know how that worked out. Having worked in cell phone warranty/support I can not tell you how many issues were solved by removing the battery and reinserting it(also knows as second level reset, or a hard shock, or one of a hundred other terms used). iPod battery inside, phone battery outside(if they are seperate) would be an ideal configuration. On the contrary though an internal battery does make for a more solid feeling product. But practically I don’t think it is a good thing.

In the end? I will still get one. I might wait for Rev. 2. I might not. I am pretty impatient. Hopefully enough people will complain and allow third party development on the phone. Which would let me overlook the rest of the downfalls. I also give Apple a lot of slack on these downfalls, because they are new to the phone market. There is only so much you can learn from research and surveys. A lot of people don’t even know that they want to run third party desktop class applications on thier phone, but they do. Apple also has another 5 months to finalize this product. I am 100% positive that we have not seen a final product because there were so many standard phone features that were not mentioned. Does it vibrate? What kind of ringtones does it support? How many contacts can you have? MMS as well as SMS? Will it run current java phone applications? What kind of utilities does it have(calculator, alarm, chrono, etc)?

Popularity: unranked [?]

Show coComments

Published on Sunday, March 26, 2006 in Momentos. Closed

I know I haven’t written in a while, but I am getting ready to move back to Phoenix, been quite busy. I had a couple hours free yesterday and so I whipped up this alpha version of Show coComments. A WordPress plugin to display your most recent coComments. Download the plugin and get more information on how it works on the plugin page.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Disecting K2’s Live Search

Published on Thursday, February 16, 2006 in Momentos. 6 Comments

As you may notice if you have visited this site before, my header looks alot different than it used to. Thanks to Kristin and here series of ‘Diving Into K2′ posts I was able to figure most of it out pretty easily. One thing I wanted to do was change around the Live Search results a bit, which I couldn’t find covered anywhere. I did some digging, some FUBARing, and eventually I figured it out. Here is what I learned for the masses. All of this is based off the assumption that you be using a K2 custom style. Explaining how these work is beyond the scope of this article and has been documented in other places.

The first thing I did was resize the #LSResult div so that it fit to my new search bar length. My search bar was 220 pixels wide. I found that I needed to set the #LSResult div to 2 pixels larger, you may have different results but this is the code I used in my custom style.

Next we need to change the styling of the rows to fit with the new size. The live search page uses a background image for the header row, each result row, and each hilighted row located in the /wp-content/themes/k2/images/ directory called livesearchbgdark.jpg, livesearchbg.jpg, and livesearchbghilight.jpg respectively. In order to get these to display right you will have to edit the images. I am no artist or Photo Shop efficianado by any means, so take these directions with a grain of salt. For each image you will want to …

  1. Open the image in <insert favorite image manipulation program here> … I used Photo Shop, directions might vary if you use something else.
  2. Use the ‘Rectangular Marquee Tool (M)’ to select the left half of the image
  3. Copy that selection(Edit->Copy)
  4. Create a new image(File->New) … it should automatically insert the height for you, and the width will be whatever the width of your new search bar is plus 2
  5. Paste your selection into the new image
  6. Use the ‘Move Tool (V)’ and move the selection so that the top left corner of the selection is flush with the top left corner of the image
  7. Go back to the original image and use the ‘Rectangular Marquee Tool (M)’ to select the right half of the image
  8. Copy that selection
  9. Go back to your new image that you created and paste the selection into the new image
  10. use the ‘Move Tool (V)’ to move that selection so that the top right corner of the selection is flush with the top right corner of the new image

    11. *note – If your new search box is smaller than the original you should have an image that looks just like the original except smaller, if your image is larger, continue with these steps

  11. Go back to the original image and copy a portion of the center of the image
  12. Go to the new image and paste this selection in
  13. Use the ‘Move Tool (V)’ to move this selection so that it covers the empty space. You can copy in as many time as you need to cover the empty space

You should now have an image that looks just like the original Live Search image except it is the size of your new search box. Save and upload the images in a directory within the ’styles’ directory and add your CSS accordingly. Here is mine …

Again, I am no graphic artist, and really had no choice but to modify the originals to fit. Feel free to create your own background images if you have the skill.

The next thing I wanted to do was to change the number of comments to be more obvious. The following CSS code did that for me …

You may need to mess around with the font-size and the top settings to get it to look right for your site, but that is what looks best for mine.

Then there is this nifty little bug(feature?) that whenever you use the keyboard to select an entry and then mouse over the results div, the entry you hilighted looses it’s padding and expands it’s width. I didn’t like this so I fixed it …

The last thing I wanted to do was change the styling of the searchbox itself. I decided to remove the border on it entirely so it is part of the background instead of popping out or sinking in. I used this CSS code to modify the input box …

There is one pesky little problem I have found with this though … Safari doesn’t like your idea of how an text input should look, and decides to add some styling to it anyways. It kind of makes the results box not fit as well and just generally annoy’s me that Safari thinks it has a better idea of how my site should look than me. If anyone knows how to over ride this please leave a comment letting me know. There are a few other quirks with Safari but they don’t relate to Live Search so I will save them for another post. That is all I really felt the need to change, but I dug into it pretty well. If there is something you want to change and can’t figure out how, leave a comment and I will see if I can help you with that.

Wow, that was alot of writing to explain so little code. BTW, I know I suck at writing and I know it’s probably not the easiest instructions to follow and understand, but come on, i’m a technical person :-P

Popularity: 9% [?]

New Host!

Published on Sunday, February 12, 2006 in Momentos and Tagged. 1 Comment

This morning I switched hosts away from Budget Dedicated to Start Logic. BD was a great host but I found have a virtual server being just a tad more than I needed. When I signed up for the account I had plans for the server. Plans which never really came to fruition. So today I move on. SL is only a temporary host until I find one that I really like and is not mind blowingly expensive for hosting. I have this SL account because I used to work for them, they are not a bad company to host with. Servers are fast, they give 5gigs of space and 100gigs of bandwidth. I personally don’t like thier control panel very much and so I will be spending the next few months searching for another host. If you have any suggestions I would be glad to hear them

Popularity: 1% [?]

Diving Into Web 2.0

Published on Friday, January 27, 2006 in Momentos and Tagged. Closed

So I have finally fallen into the web 2.0 craze and started using some of the web 2.0 services. Some of them I am happy with, some of them I am not so happy with.

43 Things

43 Things is basically a to-do list on crack. You can enter anything you want and they are treated as tags. Anyone can search them and add them to thier to do list. You can use this as a daily to do list or a “things I want to do before I die” list, or somewhere in between. Every ‘thing’ created on the site has it’s own page that lists who has finished it, who want’s to do it, has a discussion board so people can discuss thier experiences with it. Ties in with 43 Things is 43 Places, 43 People, and All Consuming.

They are all pretty much the same. 43 Places is for places you want to go or have been. 43 People is for people you want to meet or have met. All Consuming is a bit different than the rest beig a list of things you have ‘consumed.’ From the obvious food and beverages to books, movies, and anythign else you may want to put on the list. Sort of a ‘Social Consumer Review’ website. Everything said I really like this network of websites. You can view my profile and get started with your own ‘things!’

Newsvine

Newsvine is the newest in News 2.0 offerings. Basically it is a news website that combines the best of editorial news postings and user contributes news postings. Think a combination of Digg and Slashdot. It encompasses much more than technology however. It allows you to add certain tag’s to your watchlist so you can keep an eye on certain topics or categories of news stories.

It has many different types of news stories you can view. There is the ’standard’ edtiorial posts, usually tha main news article and topics for things you would fine on CNN, BBC, and the like. It also allows users to submit stories and tag them. Users are allowed to vote on these stories ala Digg, however that does not play a huge part which is something I am a fan of. I won’t go off on that rant as plenty already have. It also allows any user to write thier own news articles, tag them, and have them read. A great way for any up and coming journalist to get some cred and gain a following.

This is currently in a private beta stage. Although as far as I am concerned, that is just a media hype, it is definately reday for the masses. They are giving everyone who signs up 20 invites and invites are easy as pie to come by. Kinda like when gmail started giving out invites like crazy once it was ready for the masses but still wanted to keep the hype going as long as possible. If anyone want’s an invite, you can reach via my about page and I will hook you up.

I have also started using the typical web services some would consider web 2.0 more frequently. flickr has alot more than I ever thought it did. I have been using it to store photo’s for a while now, but there are flickr groups too. Communities for anything and everything where they post discussions and photos. Really liking that right now. GMail is an obvious one, no need to go into that. And one that alot of people won’t agree with me on is Digg. It has it’s problems of course, my main pet peeve being that just about anything useless can get onto the front page and take up space. It does often have some decent news stories worth reading however. I subscribe to my friends digg feed’s only and occasionally check the front page or search for something. There is also Feendlounge which I wrote a review of a few days ago. I am not currently using this service as my paypal account is not in order just yet, but I fully intend to be using it by the end of the month.

That about wraps up my web 2.0 experience thus far. I knew I wouldn’t be able to avoid it, was just a matter of time before I fell in.

Popularity: 2% [?]