Posts by Shell 100 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Aug 2007
It appeared to knock our POS card devices as far away as Edinburgh, Scotland too - at least my fave cinema lost their card facilities, with their provider pointing the finger at BT. I thought the whole point in the Internet was in the event of something like this happening everything would still 'just work'.
It wouldn't take much to re-train from Flash to JavaScript y'know: AS3 isn't that different. It's just like JavaScript with classes.
I wouldn't miss Flash if it died tomorrow - I loved coding for it, but these days I can do so much more with jQuery and JavaScript and never worry about plugins!
Adobe have an opportunity to become "the" development platform for iPad/iPhone though with their up-coming Flash CS5. Building apps right inside Flash in native iPad/iPhone format sounds rather cool - AS3 is heck of a lot more forgiving than objective-c.... plus you wouldn't necessarily have to write any code at all yourself (looking at Flash Catalyst). Flash lends itself to the slick UIs we see on these devices.
IMO Flash is doomed as a browser plug-in, with the infinitely more flexible open tech like HTML5 and powerful frameworks like jQuery: Adobe need to find a new market, and perhaps this is the one. If they can get Flash to compile apps specifically for other platforms, like Android, or even (gasp) Windows Mobile, they could 'own' the cross-platform development field.
Long-time Flash advocate (in the absence of anything better) but IMO Flash has had it's day. There is little in Flash that you can't do with JavaScript and HTML5 now. While I think Flash still has its place (games) I certainly would not recommend it for regular web sites and frankly flash-heavy sites are a PITA even on a meaty computer. The only 'killer feature' that Flash really adds over HTML5+JavaScript is the ease of putting together sexy UIs, but given frameworks like jQuery or Scriptacul.us that gap is rapidly narrowing: plus iPad is a app-driven platform so you can create your sexy UIs in objective-c instead, no?
They said that about the iPhone tho. "Nothing new here". Have you any idea how many iPhones I see on the commute to work every morning!? Those buggers are everywhere (um... including my jacket pocket...). The iPad isn't "new" - it's a pooling of some of the best interface ideas in a format that is more easily consumed. I'm really excited by the idea of what this could do to the publishing industry. I'd much rather have an interactive stack of digital magazines that the backpack of design mags I usually lug around with me.
But I'm cautious too: I dont know if there is a market for an expensive device like this. And it'll only be a success if the content (such as interactive mags, lots of good books, a few killer apps) is there. And the idea of spending £499 + 3G contract on top of my iPhone contract... meh. Is there anyone rich enough left in the UK (apart from bankers) who can actually afford that any more?
@masterpikey
You have cleanly demonstrated the problem; people seem unable to hold a frank and unemotional discussion when it comes the religious rights.
Perhaps we in the UK should take a leaf from Turkish secularism - a large, faithful Muslim society that STRICTLY separates religion from work/politics/public services.
I'm British, non-Christian (married to a Turkish Muslim), and I'm happy (and more than welcome) people to express their beliefs in any way they like - in their personal space and time. But when this starts to encroach on politics or public services, paid for from my taxes or otherwise, as a non-religious person this makes me very uncomfortable.
Too much WoWTime? (Or, applied to me, for knowing!)
I agree with the other comment re: WikiP is what it is - it's a great place for finding information that you're not to worried about the validity of - or a place to start if you're research a subject. But it should NEVER be taken as "fact". The journalists involved should be fired. What other lazy reporting for these authors has slipped by without being noticed?
Jacket because... I'm late for am Ulduar raid.
WoW's "message of the day" stuff is in an HTML box sat along side your 3d avatar (occasional game crashes can expose malformed HTML tags in that box, and other popup messages). So I guess it's covered.
Not that I've ever played WoW, honest.
I know it's probably naive, but is there no mechanism for fighting the patent system itself? Surely nobody takes it seriously any more. Why aren't people turning their lawyers against the system instead?
Mac Pro: Bootcamp to Vista to enable other half to watch 'Driving Hazard Training DVLA' DVD (no Mac support). Keyboard suddenly does not work (drivers magically forgot how to talk to blue-toother Mac keyboard). Finally get that working again, and half way through mock exam, Vista interrupts "Important system updates", ruins test. Apply updates, reboot machine. Half way through next mock exam "Windows is configuring your updates", ruins test, then reboots the machine with no warning. When it comes back, mysteriously lost the keyboard AND mouse this time. Finally get that working again. Half way through the next (3rd) mock exam, "Blah program blah wants to run...", ruins test... It finally all worked after that, for an hour. Totally frustrating, how can anyone use this!?
Rebooted Mac into OSX, noticed there were updated (10.5.6) applied them. No problems. No interruptions. No work lost. Carried on working rest of the evening with relief, knowing I wont have to load Vista again for a very long time.
Like the BBC news site, or most other news sites?
Users always hate change, but sometimes it's just something you have to do. I can't decide if I like the design yet. It seems a little more readable on an iPhone screen (flame away, I don't care), but there is heck of a lot of wasted space on the right column in any browser. But then, same goes for most news sites. You can never please everyone: personally I don't use browsers full screen (trust me, even the wonderful Reg full-screen on a 30" Apple Cinema Display would be totally overwhelming), so I'm quite happy for fixed width sites. Fixed with allows for a wider range of design choices that doesn't destroy the layout soon as a user resized the browser.
BBC and YouTube provide Quicktime alternatives of all the content that the iPhone is able to decode. The iPhone does not support Flash. It's never likely too either. Anyone following the Adobe development blogs will know that Adobe currently have no plans, or real incentive, for making a Flash player for iPhone. Apple aren't pushing for it either probably because it would just drain the battery so fast (Flash is pretty intensive). As the Flash player isn't open source, nobody else can make a Flash player for the iPhone legally (without paying a hefty license fee to Adobe I guess). I'd love to see Flash on the iPhone, but I doubt it'll happen.
Well the 3G here in Edinburgh spotty at best with the iPhones. Three times this week I've had no coverage, or apparently connected but unable to actually *get* to anything over 3G (mail/web/apps all time out). My other halfs 3G iPhone is just the same.
It's a shame, because when the 3G does work, it's brilliant. But it's fecking annoying with all these outages (and there's no free WIFI near my office). I really hope it can be fixed via software, but I have my doubts :(
That would be true only if you ignore bloat. Meanwhile in reality, you see the OpenSource OS's and even OS X get leaner and better performing with each release, while Windows does the reverse. It SHOULD be about the users - the majority of people want something that is simple to use, quick, lets them run the programs they use most -and- looks good. Does it require a 3Gb install to do that? Microsofts insistence on support "old" applications is their major downfall I think - there *are* some nice ideas in Vista, but it's all choked up with compatibility issues and so many layers of technology the average person doesn't need to know about, nor will ever care about. That's why Windows requires such high-spec machines. This is why the Leopard can run perfectly smoothly on a relatively low-spec laptop. Apple don't care so much about backwards support. Now this is not always a good thing either (forcing all your users to update their software), but I really think Windows would benefit from a reset. Throw away everything; launch a sleek, small new OS with no backwards compatibility and a UI that doesn't require game-running video cards just to draw a desktop. Personally I don't think there should be a Windows 7 - there should be something else entirely.
Who needs email when you have email? Email exists outside of my iPhone, where MMS is resolutely stuck in "phone world". It's not a feature I'll miss. Same goes for video calls; while like most folks I was caught up in the early 3G video call thing (and I really did love my SonyEricsson k800i), I only used the feature a few times!
Since I got my iPhone (1st gen) I've used it's web features every single day. Now I've upgraded with an iPhone 3G 16gb and I have no regrets.
I also use Mozy's excellent unlimited service (circa £100 for 2 years sub) to backup my Macs at home. Like most folks I'm lazy about backups, but Mozy takes all the thinking away from it. My backups are running to around 200Gb... that would be heck of a lot of DVDRs! I feel a lot happier having off-site backups too.
I just hope EMC aren't tempted to start bloating the Mozy agent with "features"...
So, I managed to actually upgrade my phone on Friday, but had to snatch it from the dock before it went through the restore stage - hey the pub is more important, right? So when I finally got home (several hours later, ahem) I plugged it into my trust Mac and managed after about 30 minutes to get it activated. Lovely. Installed lots of cute apps (the Facebook app is ace! And the AIM client is... dangerous), all worked perfectly. So of course, I get back to the office early this morning, and plug my phone into the dock here to give it a charge... and it promptly wipes the phone of all my apps, and everything else I'd done on it over the weekend. Stupid restore runs without asking!!! Talk about blood dumb software :( So off I go downloading and installing all those apps again. And I hope I didn't get any important SMS over the weekend...
The GPS *is* something new: all your photos are automatically geotagged, and the phone allows Apps to be aware of where the phone is and behave accordingly. There are already some apps that ping other phones nearby for social networky stuff. It's both scary and cool. Tried one App on sunday that looks for other iPhones close by and shares "moods" with them. I have no idea what new level of useless waste of time this is, but it has a unique Apple twist :P
It does seam that their servers have had a meltdown. I filled in the form around 9:45am, only for it to crash out on the payment screen - it seemed to dump the hex of a JPEG to screen then give up. Refreshing after that resulted in the maint page appearing :s
I just called O2 and they are totally overwhelmed - big queues. Think I'll give up and try my luck at an O2 store on Friday instead.
We're not there yet. Sat here on a National Express train from York to Edinburgh screaming at my "3" 3g dongle that disconnects me from the 3 network every ... three minutes! Very irritating. So I am using the free Wifi service on the train and it's excellant!
Until the phone network costs come down and reliability goes up, I'm not convinced cellphone networks are the way to go.
That's because you are using the wrong tool for the job. If you just want to quickly edit an image, PhotoShop is not the tool. PhotoShop is a professional package - I never have to wait for it to start as it's an essential part of my work; it's open all the time.
PhotoShop and the other CS3 products are not bloated considering just how astoundingly powerful they are. I use these products all the time, and while I don't think I'm a particularly inexperienced user, when I see a dedicated PhotoShop/Illustrator artist at work I'm left in awe. There's so much functionality, flexibility and interoperability between the CS3 products, I seriously doubt there's much fat that can be trimmed there under the hood.
The one exception to Adobe's line up, of course, is the abysmal Acrobat reader. It takes forever to load, uses stacks of memory and is just UGLY. I use a Mac most of the time, so I dont understand why the reader exists at all - I can view any PDF just by hitting the spacebar in Finder. Who the heck wants to load that 20mb beast Acrobat!?
*shrug* Flash is amazingly small (just a few Mb) and includes a VM and HD codecs. AIR is also extremely lightweight (Flash 9 + WebKit + SQLLite). Adobe have learned some new things during their gobbling up of Macromedia.
I'd disagree with Adobe products being "cruddy". PhotoShop is still the best image editing suite on the market, and pretty much bug free. Nothing compares to Illustrator as far as flexibility goes.
The only problem I have with Adobe products is the terrible install process on Windows... but then that serves you right for using Windows (installs perfectly smoothly on Macs).
While I'm not convinced with AIR yet, I think it's a great product. I'm just not sure people will bother downloading AIR apps (yet another runtime? no thanks). But anything that seamlessly bridges the desktop to the Internet is going to be exciting stuff (not least for people worried over security...?).
I prefer this route anyway - I don't want to see Adobe stuffing this kind of technology inside the Flash player; it needs to be kept small and fast, and so far they are keeping to this.
"Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) with tools for programmers building applications that run inside the browser and that integrate with the desktop"
AIR doesn't run inside a browser. It *is* a browser. You dont need a web browser installed at all on your system to run AIR. This is why I like it... does away with all those nasty browser issues.
Iie! Hollywood... wakari masu ka... DONT DO IT! They're ruined enough of my fave comics/anime/manga already (anyone seen the Japanese live action version of Death Note? The CGI is just astoundingly poor that it ruined the movie... and the manga all in one go).
It already worries me enough with the James Cameron remake of Battle Angel Alita on the horizon...
Now that the Hollywood writers strike is over, perhaps they should spend more time actually coming up with something new and interesting :s So this summer with have Shutter, no doubt another terrible re-make (another fantastic Asian horror flick). Having seen the US remake of Pulse (another of my fave Japanese horror flicks), I pretty much wanted to gouge my eyes out by the end - not because the movie was horrific, but because it was just utterly horrible.
Make it stop!
WTS, one Xbox 360 with HD-DVD player... :s
*sigh*
My 360 sounds like a hoover while playing HD-DVD movies. Which kind of makes our expensive theatre sound setup pointless. I have quite a large collection of HD-DVDs now... so thinking of moving the Xbox HD drive to my Mac (I believe there are drivers kicking around out there) and going BR with a PS3.
What's really irritating is both camps, BlueRay (Sony) and HD-DVD (MS/Tosh) really screwed up; Sony made a dogs dinner of the PS3 (inspired device, dumb price, arrogant support for devs) and MS totally screwed up the 360 (no built in HD-DVD drive, massive failure rates, roars like a hoover while switched on). And that leaves us, the poor (even poorer now I have to buy a damn PS3) consumers , in the middle :s
Of course when you buy an iPhone it is yours. You can do what you want with it. But Apple don't have to support it. If you choose to modify any device you own you cannot expect the latest updates for that product to work - how could they possibly support all the modification you could do?
I've not jail broken my iPhone. I'm happy to wait for the SDKs to come out and smarter ppl than me write cool tools for it, without risking the stability of the phone or it's usage on the O2 network.
The iPhone is a consumer device, like an iPod, not a techie toy. So long as it remains a relatively sealed box, Apple have complete control over the UI and in turn the usability (for all of Apple's woes, they are very good at this). The instant the iPhone becomes another device cluttered with poorly designed apps (Nokia phones, from a usability "user experience" point of view).
It's for the Turks to protest, and if they find the banning by their government unwarranted they have the power to do something about it - we're not talking some backwards 3rd-world country with no rights here.
Turkey is a modern secular country, culturally (in the large cities anyway) not unlike any other European country. They have just as much freedom of press, and speech as anywhere else. While personally I find the banning of YouTube pretty dumb, I'm not Turkish, and I don't live in Turkey, but I do know the level of respect Attaturk garners with the majority of Turks. In some ways Turkey is closer to the East than the West; they still respect their history, family, and are fearlessly patriotic, balanced with the open multi-culturism of say, Paris or London. It's hard for an outsiders to grasp the disrespect that these videos cause. I'm not a fan of censorship though, but at the same time you need to respect their culture. Who are we to say what they can and cannot do?
Yeah I'm in Edinburgh too. Around 21:30 I got kicked off World of Warcraft, and had a life for an hour. Because I'm all so Web2.0 (yeah), I connected to Virgins site via an iPhone to get a status update... which wasn't updated. The number on their site also reported "this number has not yet been activated".
@ Dan
Had a similar conversation with my wife...
What kinda of SLA do Fasthosts offer their clients? There must be some sort of uptime guarantee in customer contracts. If all these password reset bring your sites down, through no fault of yours, surely this would count as downtime? Really glad we're not hosting anything with this joke of a company. Any customer that sticks with them after this mess will get everything they deserve I suspect...
Given I can get nowhere near my 20Mbit line speed (most I've ever see is around 8Mb, central Edinburgh), even if they did cap me I'd see no difference then. The Virgin network is horribly slow at the best of times. Can't wait until they release their 50Mb service. At least then maybe I'll get over 10Mbit. *sigh*
I didn't follow the link, so perhaps they qualify their results... however, given most people these days have a fair amount of experience in using standard mobile buttons to type out message... and very little experience of using touch screens, I'm not that surprised.
Run the survey again in a year or two and then we'll see.
It didn't take me long to get up to speed with the iPhone keypad. After two days usage, I can type much much faster on the iPhone than on my old SonyEricsson k800i's keypad.
Went down to our local O2, in a quiet shopping centre in Edinburgh. Queued with 20 other bemused folks. I was home by 6:15 with my phone activated.
Personally I think this device will change a lot of things. It is *so* easy to use, it opens up the Internet to technically challenged folks who would be otherwise to scared to buy a computer etc. To me, it's all about that UI - it easily outwieghs the lack of some hardware features. I think, to be honest, people really don't care about 3G or Edge or whatever technology it is you use to get access. The people who know what all these technologies are techies, who probably have laptops or need phones with PDA features anyway. The iPhone is something new - a true consumer device for the Internet. It is expensive, but works perfectly, with no setup or fat technical manual to refer to. It just works, and anyone can figure it out inside a few minutes using the very natural interface.
This is the first step I think. If Nokia or iPhone 2 or SonyEricsson can improve on this, it can only be a good thing for everyone
Sure I'd love more features in my iPhone, but not if it complicates the usability, or adds new buttons, or drains the battery. I could give my iPhone to my mother and she would have no problems using it inside 5 minutes.
S.
Year sure you enable a firewall and it blocks stuff. So what!? That's what it's supposed to do. Same happens under Windows XP. By default, most games will NOT get out of the Windows firewall so you have to add the ports games use to the exceptions list... including WoW. I had to do this on my old PC (before I got a router with a firewall). Same thing for the Apple firewall. You really expect Apple to go around unblocking all the ports games could possibly use, just in case? Everyone would then accuse them of having a firewall full of holes!
@loyd
The chap who was in Stargate did audition for the role. The actor (I forget his name too) did a signing at my partners shop in the summer, shortly before his Stargate characer was killed off and he was spilling the beans about the new Trek film. I guess he didn't get the part then!
And... Pegg... no!! I think he's great, but he's totally wrong for the part. I bet we find it's just some Hollywood spin or something by next week. I don't think it's serious.
I listen to most of my music on the go - on a bus, in a noisy office or walking around. Even with expensive Sony noise-cancelling headphones picked up in Japan, it doesn't kill all external sounds. So of course, for me MP3 is more than good enough. I'm pretty sure most folks don't listen to music in an nicely isolated studio.
MP3 is also not very CPU intensive to decompress, so you can expect a good battery life on whatever device you are using. Look at how poorly "superior" formats like WMA perform, battery wise, to a device playing back MP3.
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