22/01/2010
Let me get the cheesy redundant joke done right off the bat:
On top of my list of things to get done is to finish Dave Allens Getting Things Done.
How droll. What fun.
On top of the personal hit list of Andy Kim of The Potion Factory I’m willing to bet a few shillings you’ll find “Finish The Hit List Touch”, the fabled iPhone companion app to The Hit List Mac. I’m not sure that’s sound prioritizing though. I think perhaps he should bump up “Reconsider customer communication strategies” to number 1.
If you’re unacquainted with the app, its history and the state of things today, let me offer a brief summary.
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8/01/2010
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.
12/12/2009
Update 2: New versions of several of these apps have been released. Things are
a lot better.
Update:I’ve had feedback on this post from O’Reilly both by email and in the comments. Both Andrew and the other O’Reilly representative I’ve been in contact with seem sincere when they say that these apps will be updated with fixes for the downright broken content and that they intend to invest in further development for the mobile platform.
Since this was pretty much what I’d hoped to hear, I’m going to say that this little outburst served its cause.
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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12/11/2008
Lately I’ve been teaching a 5 week crash course in ActionScript 3. The first few classes were pretty basic stuff, so ad libbing the whole thing wasn’t too much of a problem. However, as the students got ready for increasingly advanced stuff I had to come up with increasingly advanced projects, and in order to ensure a smooth flow through the allotted three hours of each session, I inevitably had to start bringing notes.
I loathe having to print out anything and for some reason it feels particularly dumb to print out code. Luckily I found DataCase, a $6.99 iPhone app which easily lets you transfer any file to your phone, and lets you view it right there in the application, so you can quickly swap between files. I know there are several apps that has similar functionality, but DataCase seemed to me to be by far the cream of the crop. I wish TextGuru was a tad less buggy and sluggish as it supports a large number of formats, but until then I’ll be using DataCase whenever I need to bring notes with me for any reason. iTunes link.
16/08/2008
Perpetrating some hackery on my iPhone I stumbled over my custom generated dictionary file. I found a odd sort of pleasure in the fragmented and / or randomly constructed phrases it contained. Since I’ve nothing else to contribute with today, I’ll share it with you. No I have not been drinking.
but feels so damn sluggish dear god yes let’s just hope will be out soon and will be painless for unlocked phones things that gather windows show hide remove files rename all files in folder saturday night slightly just by breathing air wondering i’ll to for using because this is some black magic shit then remembered don’t believe in haha time for some to see that of the visitors my mainly tech and web related use what the are four people thinking oh wait tell lie only guess my mom and dad and their dog then the dog only counts as tenth of person since it passed and over iphone apps being useless input feeds tv books where’s the time to think safe as in the easily the best mouse ever for those tasks just can’t find course plo fine my secret trick slamming my genitals on the desk scream am fear me and just in itunes plo caution however you’ll lose and jailbreak apps totally worth it to me since they’ll be out soon anyway hear one more word about i’m going to scream and will so shall bin it how clipping test this is stupid her okay first smoke today i’m quitting first smoke today i’m quitting temperate really naturally spent two hours making the to get work done for for my blog fail sure but as you average computer user user i’d expect it to heavily slanted away from oslo fire it feels sad the first time your don’t recognize grandparents didn’t recognize me me for the first time no joke i’d love for this to work nicely although wish would come with an iphone app soon just isn’t what i’m after test for text recognize bin test venter can’t edit but can depressed all were it’s too early for to think of anything witty to say just pretend that whatever says next was really said me html plo several methods none of them optimal i’m using these days and it’s not too shabby waste so far this day has failed to amaze and dazzle with it’s awesomeness something extraordinary better happen soon on the bus test bin does the dictionary suck here as well seems it’s good anyway still have problems loving this app maybe it’ll improve sure hope so what is this bullshit fix it cheers found it then promptly lost interest thanks anyway create iphone flex du i’m i’m talking about flash dag was better at object oriented programming illustration singing climbing cooking sex the last once upon time web professional was supposed to know both design and programming is there place for this middleman anymore worries may not cut as programming in this context even alex book as list tasks make i’m confused import flash display but only use some of the in my code does or just plo ring agree but it’s nice to know clients don’t suffer when up if this but see my update after umpteen secs plo agreed just good to know clients don’t for my men now that we’ve got to know each other and do hope think too forward but please what are your feelings feelings regarding you don’t right now at this well i’ve better and i’ve felt worse suppose i’m happy and lift in the wee hours better catch some deadline day is my favorite joke perversely last minute up up and away on bike what kind of up place do you work oh right get drunk instead den money for beer ashamed wish hadn’t wished wished money for beer wish wished had money and secretly spent it on beer nmr nmr ok i’ll bite what’s trying set up compile and be on saturday bowdlerized ipsum gidder opp blir z’s misc hadde ikke tenkt typen ser textmate swf’s fuck lazyness meh i’ikke nme yojimbo dder opp blir z’s misc hadde ikke tenkt typen ser ikke nme yojimbo mbo e yojimbo ikke yojimbo o bo tive hotkey yojimbo mbo bo imbo
That is all.