Control Option Command

I use 2Do app on the iPhone to Get Something Done. It’s a beautiful, well-functioning and well-considered application of the Delicious Persuasion, and I’ve mused more than once that the best thing in-danger-of-vaporware company The Potion Factory could do would be to sub-contract these guys to handle their iPhone companion app. That’s a story for another day though. Suffice it to say that Guided Ways has produced a sterling piece of software and regularly updates the app with new functionality.¹

So I was browsing their site over my microwaved cup of mud this morning and stumbled over this FAQ item. For the unclicky of you; It’s a reply to what seems to be an actual Frequently Asked Question about why the Guided Ways Software site contains links to software and utilities for reading the Quran, calculating prayer timings and so forth. Not on the 2Doapp.com site mind you, on the external site of the software company. 2Doapp.com, as far as I can tell contains no references to any religious practices. It is, in its nature, a wholly secular app.

It saddens me deeply that Guided Ways needs to address this “issue”. I had some notion, perhaps naive, that the people who were somewhat ahead in technology ² were somehow above petty religious hatred and bigotry. I attributed that kind of moronic attitudes to backwards and isolated luddites who refused to deal with the inevitable globality ³ of today. Alas. Fear-mongering, narrow-mindedness and hate speech seems to have made Islamophobia ubiquitous.

Personally I find all religion disgusting, but that is my a personal view, and I don’t equate the flaws I perceive in religion with the ethical backbone of individuals of that faith. If the developers were using their site to preach in favor of, say, discrimination and persecution of homosexuals I wouldn’t want to give them my business, just as I wouldn’t with any christian fundamentalist spouting the same crap. So long as that is not the case I have no bigger qualms about buying from Guided Ways than from a christian, hindu, buddhist or atheist developer. I disagree with their view on the world, but as long as they don’t infringe upon the freedom and happiness of others I would die defending their right to hold those views. ^{Reverend Phelps and that of, say, the Bishop of OxfordMuhammad Ali and that of Osama Bin Laden.}

I could go on, but I’ll try to sum up my stance now. If you equate Islam with terrorism and are frightened of muslims, and do not maintain the same attitude towards christians you are a hypocrite, and would do well to read Amin Maloofs texts on religious bigotry.
If you do refuse to do business with both muslims and christians out of disregard for religion you are, as we say in Norwegian “shooting sparrows with cannons”, and as we say in English “throwing out the baby with the bathwater”. Good luck with that.

Oh. And check out 2Do on iTunes.

A short while ago I wrote about my disappointment with the O’Reilly iPhone apps. The other day I noticed that three of the four titles I originally bought had an update. I’ve finally had time to have a look at them and I have to say that I’m pleasantly surprised.

The 1.1 versions are infinitely more readable but also feels a lot more responsive. The code isn’t breaking lines as often and not in such awful ways when it is.

Making code properly formatted on the iPhone is hard, and there’s still room for improvement but these new versions certainly wouldn’t have prompted me to write angry blog posts.
Thanks O’Reilly.

To whom it may concern.

I have for years been a satisfied customer of O’Reilly. I’ve bought and enjoyed several books from you both as dead tree paperbacks and downloadable PDFs.
To my chagrin I also bought a number of titles on the iTunes app store once I found out that you publish a selection of your books as standalone apps there. I’m sad to report that I found these apps to be rather disappointing. In fact they are complete and utter crap.


It’s apparent that what you have done is to adopt the Stanza engine and stripped it down to contain one book per instance. Unless you’ve reinvented an already triangular wheel it also seems that you simply process your Safari PDFs through the downloadable helper app and then push the results to the app store.

Look; Stanza is a great e-book reader when it comes to downloading and reading “Frankenstein” as a Public Domain EPub book. And if you have some totally-not-copyrighted PDF you want to get onto your iPhone the desktop Stanza app does a tolerable job of ripping the file to HTML and reflowing it to read nicely on the small display, but converting PDFs with Stanza in this manner is, undeniably, a hack. It’s a workaround to get a PDF meant for a big screen unto a small screen, no questions asked.

Stanza is admittedly a pretty good solution to get a book onto the iPhone, a few formatting issues aside. There is however a considerable difference between reading a novel and feeling slightly irked because the chapter titles don’t show up in bold and reading a book on programming where half of the code is illegible, broken, or overflows beyond the page and into oblivion.

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