Posts by batfastad

Nah

If you're going to have a proper keyboard you at least need to have desktop applications available to make use of it. Otherwise you may as well choose a tablet. If you're buying a device of that size with a keyboard then you may as well buy a netbook, rather than be tied to a cut-down OS.

What are they thinking?!

Ts&Cs

Always read the fair use policy.

Nominet are b*ggers

If this isn't about money and actually about simplifying customer choice, then they would give all current .co.uk/.org.uk/.net.uk/.ac.uk registrants first pick of having their name in the .uk top level.

It would be easy to offer that priority through the Nominet online account system. But since this is about money, they probably won't do that. They can charge more for .uk as well, like many other ccTLD registries do.

On a marginally-related rant, I hate not being able to manage my domain contact details with my registrar and having to do it directly with Nominet. So there.

Video

What video formats can these things handle? Pretty much everything? What are the decent open source media players for Android?

I like the idea of just playing video without having to downsample/transcode. That's what has put me off going anywhere near video on my phone. And the fact that my phone barely does 2 days despite spending most of its time in my jacket pocket so with video I'd be charging it at least every day.

I still can't see myself using a tablet for much more than video playback (having to prop it up on something or buy one of those covers with a wedge) or light web browsing though. Anything more then the lack of a keyboard would drive me insane. And a cut-down OS without the abililty to run my essential desktop programs. Price is double what I paid for my 3 year old Asus 1005HA-P. Less storage, width/height probably not that much different but much thinner. Mass is over half that of my netbook (1Kg) and I don't notice carrying that around with me all day.

The cons of tablets still outweigh the pros for me. If they could run a real OS then that would be a start. Until then I would probably still end up carrying a laptop in addition to a tablet when travelling, which would relegate a tablet to pretty much just video playback. But I am tempted!

Mine's the coat with a netbook bulging out of the pocket. Battening down the hatches to avoid the inevitable storm of downvotes!

Last time

I made the grave mistake of using the Facebook Android program (the same with Twitter) and discovered all my Facebook contacts were munged in with my phonebook contacts automatically, without prompting, with no way to undo. I knew I should have just trusted my instinct and stuck to the mobile web versions. Never again.

I just want

I would just like to be able to buy a device and do whatever I want with it and put whatever I want on it. Unfortunately there's no smartphones or tablets for me. The next best alternative is Android.

Not that I even want a tablet, I prefer something with a real keyboard, better battery life and ability to run all my desktop programs (Asus Eee 1005HA-P). It seems like I'm in a minority these days.

I guess I've just never found computers and gadgets difficult to use. Most people buy iWhatevers safe in the knowledge that they will just work. They are designed for the lowest common denominator to be able to operate with minimal technical knowledge needed. And that's a very good thing in consumer electronics. They look different enough from all other devices to stand out from the crowd so there's more of a brand awareness, plus more expensive is always better, right?!

What I don't like is closed ecosystems and Apple is the boss of closed ecosystems these days. Most companies operate a closed ecosystem to some degree, it's a natural way to exploit sales, but Apple is the boss. I also don't like shoddy, slow, bloated software and iTunes is the boss of shoddy, slow, bloated software.

Each to their own but Apple's products are just not designed for people like me.

<Ducks the inevitable downvotes>

Three

"Three is not known for keeping to itself at the best of times"

Three users certainly are... HELLO? CAN YOU HEAR ME? beeeeep.

There is no Gozer only XUL

So how does the web application actually get to the client if the HTML is never transmitted over the internet? CDROM in the post?

Also without some sort of server-side processing are they suggesting that JavaScript directly sends data to a database? So you would leave your database daemon port open to the internet and JavaScript connects, authenticates and runs queries? I'm not sure they've thought this through.

Though if they could make the web interface of Twitter not bloated and generally terrible then that would be super! If Twitter exposed an XMPP interface for tweets then that would be great as I wouldn't have to use the web interface. I'm aware of people running Twitter-XMPP gateways but they're always a bit clunky.

I'm going to go a bit ranty here so I don't know where I'll end up...

Firefox (and Thunderbird, Mozilla addons etc) are built using JavaScript and XUL (an XML language that describes a Mozilla interface) and quite a few years ago there was an example out there of someone using remotely-hosted XUL to query the Amazon API and return results to search for books/CDs etc. It was very cool. And it really made me realise how poor HTML/CSS actually is for building UIs in the corporate landscape. I would have loved to be able to develop intranets using server-generated remote XUL code.

The downsides of remote XUL were: i) there was no official water-tight spec, since ii) only Mozilla programs ever needed to run it, iii) it relied on JavaScript to send data to and receive data from the server, iv) there were quite a few bugs when running remote XUL as it was never really recommended/supported. If there had been a form action="" method="" equivalent in XUL then that would have been such an elegant way of building consistent interfaces for corporate and intranet applications.

For describing complex interfaces XUL is pretty much good to go. Look at the Options dialogue box in Firefox and imagine if that was replicated in HTML/CSS. I built a really good private test one evening on one intranet project, where you could query the server using a search plugin and my PHP code returned invoice information in XUL. The XUL code for 10+ intranet screens and dialogue boxes was returned using a single HTTP request. Now I know you can do that easily with DOM manipulation using jQuery and other libraries. But XUL was designed for this from the ground-up (apart from the remote part). My demo looked the part and was snappy to use, just like I'd written it in a client-based language like C / C++ or whatever MS are calling their client language these days.

It just seems like alot of the new "HTML5" technologies are trying to bolt features on to a language that isn't quite fit for full client-side use. And these features already exist in numerous client-side programming languages, or can be easily built using the bare-bones of the language itself. I wouldn't be surprised if you see websites written (designed) entirely in SVG code and JavaScript in a few years because of the inherent limitations of HTML/CSS.

Recently Mozilla disabled remote XUL by default in FF, needing it to be whitelisted. It could have been glorious :(

Disgusting

It's just such a shame to see so much money wasted on a 1 month binge when many parts of the rest of the UK are in such a depressed state. That could have been alot of schools, teachers, nurses, hospitals, infrastructure etc. nationwide... providing a real legacy.

It was a disgusting decision to bid to host the 'lympics. Those who approved the decision should be ashamed of themselves. Especially when the bid was won through deliberate dodgy accounting and lies. The Olympics requires far too much development and construction by the host nation and is not sustainable in its current format.