I’ve had what could be called a “smart” phone since around 1999, when I worked for a wireless ISV that wanted to make data available to any device at any time, be it a desktop screen phone, voice-read data calls, PC’s, or to uber-small black and white mobile phone screens… yes, hearing people talk about multiple screens and clouds is not a new concept. Sorta like how Facebook is a glorified BBS from the 80’s.
Anyway, since 1999, I tooled around with HDML, WML, skipped the Handspring phone and the Pocket PC Phone, and eventually fell in love the non-touchscreen Windows Mobile 5 because I hated having to use a stylus… when the v1 iPhone hit, it took me a while to get past using the on-screen keyboard – and having to re-learn how to TXT – but I eventually got there and have stayed through to my current iPhone 4. I’ve been around the block more than a few times with devices and have watched them get better with each generation.
This ended up being a longer list than I expected it to, but I felt it needed to keep it going… you see, there’s a bunch of devices that I own and use on a regular basis that are good. Really good. Good enough that I would recommend them to other people. But most of them have one or two irksome things that hold the device from being a great device. It’s usually some missing feature that you look at the thing and say “why can’t they do that?” For me, I ask “why don’t they do that?” because, after writing software for two decades, I know that most anything is possible even on new mobile devices. For me, it’s not a question of can but it’s a question of will and there’s almost always a CEO saying “It’s better this way, so we aren’t going to change it” rather than sucking it up and giving the public what they want.
Guess I can start talking about this finally: Windows Phone 7 launches today in Europe and the application is in the Zune Marketplace already:
Shuffle By Album is a simple application that randomly selects an album, plays the entire album, and then randomly selects another album to play.
Why? Because I have a very eclectic music collection, ranging from modern rock to ancient art rock to classical to soundtracks… ever jump from Vivaldi to Green Day? Randomly get dropped into one piece of 2112 after listening to an Elvis track, without warning? Realize that all of your music has been recorded at different volume or bass levels that keep you adjusting levels between songs, rather than albums? That’s why I love this app: by playing through an entire album at a time, all of these issues are naturally dealt with.
Mostly a note for myself, but something to share – for a couple of years now, whenever I went to http://www.apple.com with Internet Explorer, I found that the majority of the site was painfully slow. And by slow I mean that I thought I was on a modem. Over the last twelve months I tracked the problem down to QuickTime and Apple.com. No other site and no other plug-in caused these issues. Disabling QuickTime in the Manage Add-on dialog didn’t help but uninstalling did. Over the last six months, I’ve attempted different things – like the freakin’ search box being the thing that blocks the longest – but the safest bet was to just keep QT off my box.
Making an even longer story a little shorter, I found that QuickTimeCheck.ocx is cause of all the issues. I have no idea what it does or why it’s useful to anything on Apple.com but if you unregister this piece of shit control, Apple.com speeds back up to, well, usable speeds.
Adding to my list of tweaks for every new PC install: regsvr32 /u “C:\Program Files (x86)\QuickTime\QTSystem\QuickTimeCheck.ocx”
And before anyone jumps on the “Just use a Mac” or “Just use [insert browser that’s not IE here]” the problem was reported on Firefox as well – if you wanted to offer either of those pieces of feedback, please use the time to: ask Apple why they continue to say they support PC’s with such crappy support – do it right or get off the platform.
Engadget: Entelligence: Will carriers destroy the Android vision?
I would say that it’s a good article to read, but to be honest, I can already answer the question as the wireless industry has been lamented on this blog many times over: yes.
Carriers can destroy a wet dream without even trying… when they try to make things “better for the customer” you can be sure that they are attempting to increase their profits at the expense for the customer. Trust me. Android is in the same came that Windows Mobile was, and WM followed J2ME which had already followed BREW. This is one of the things that I will praise Apple for, over and over again: they told AT&T no to every little forced integration that AT&T wanted – AT&T is free to put their apps in the App Store (and they do – 5 apps at last count) but they aren’t allowed to junk up the phone out of the box.
It’ll be interesting to see if Windows Phone has learned from the mistakes of Android, WM, J2ME, and BREW – looking forward to seeing how that works out.
Got an email the other day for a couple of new features for MultiFilez. In all honesty, I always thought of MultiFilez as “done.” I wrote it in Visual Studio 6.0 using MFC for a class library (and string class). Over the years, I found that I didn’t use it as much, especially since I don’t work with web pages anymore and Visual Studio has its own capacity for multi-find/replace. The feature request email mentioned that MultiFilez could handle far more files than the VS Find/Replace did and he had some modest asks, so I thought that maybe it was time to give it an update.
MultiFilez 2.1 doesn’t add many new features but it does now open to a larger dialog now. It made sense to me, since 640 x 480 isn’t the “default” size of most monitors, as it was when I first wrote it. I also tweaked some of the UI so it would support the latest common UI controls from Windows 7 and I cleaned up a couple of UI things. With this change, though, support for earlier versions of Windows has been dropped – because of this I’ve left the 2.0 version online as well as adding the new 2.1 version. After all, it could be another eight or so years for me to get out a new version!
Xbox Engineering Blog: “Wait a Minute. Are You Telling Me that My Avatar Gets to Wear Halo Armor and I Don’t?” I actually had this conversation with one of our Program Managers, when I heard about Avatar Marketplace for the first time. Avatar Marketplace — known as AMP to the internal team — was something that had been talked about for a while but hadn’t really started to take form until the summer of 2009. By that point, Xbox already offered multiple forms of downloadable content through the Marketplace — Games, Themes, Gamerpics, videos, and so on — and there was a full closet of existing clothing for Avatars, but we really wanted to make Avatars as customizable as the users who created them. Basically, we wanted a full marketplace.
Just a little cross-post of something I wrote up for the Xbox Engineering Blog a little while ago and just hit the website… some “behind the scenes” views on how the Avatar Marketplace got to where it is today.
Some day soon, I hope to have a little something more on where it goes tomorrow …or more accurately, November 4th.
I don’t care about Ping and I’m not sure about the “new” interface. I like that they dropped the CD on the icon and all, but the only other UI difference I’ve noticed is that they now selectively show album art in the default view… so selectively, I had to go check to see if I lost album art when I brought over my library. I didn’t but it’s just a difference from iTunes 9 to 10.
One welcome feature, however, is the ability to play content right off a docked device even if the computer you’ve connected to isn’t the Sync’ing computer. For example, I plugged my iPhone 4 into a PC that has none of my content. In the past, iTunes would have tried to take over the phone and eventually tell me to piss off; most I could do was take photos off the thing using Windows Explorer. Now, with iTunes 10, I can browse all of the content that’s on my iPhone. Went to the movies section, played one, and it even started when I had last left off.
No matter what else iTunes does to me this release, this one little perk is worth it.
With the introduction of iTunes Ping (and the ongoing existence of Zone Social) I would like us all to visit a favorite topic of mine that’s about to become a very public problem for people, and offer it up as a Public Service Announcement:
Oh, look: there’s a storm brewing in the Caribbean… tons of news stories, four full days of warning, and lo! likely not a piece of bread or bottle of water to be found on a shelf from Miami to Bangor. Me, I’m waiting for “Will this storm be another Katrina?” My answer? No, because the people that are in danger of the storm will prepare for it, unlike the residents of The Big Easy years ago.
QJ.net: Italian American group slams Mafia II, Take-Two responds An Italian American organization is demanding Take-Two Interactive to hold back the release of Mafia II, which will be out next week. Calling the game “a pile of racist nonsense that perpetuates stereotypes of Italian Americans as violent, murderous mobsters,” UNICO National, which claims to be the largest Italian American service organization in the United States, is apparently not happy with the portrayal of Italians in the game.
Mission accomplished, UNICO: I wasn’t even thinking about this title… didn’t play Mafia, still stinging from let down of The Godfather II game, and I general let down when I saw what Mafia Wars on Facebook actually was… but after seeing this article… Now I want to buy this game.
People following my Facebook status updates already know that I finally got my mitts on an iPhone 4. No yellow spots on the screen. No reception issues that I didn’t have before. Using a Bumper, but that’s because it’s best “thin” lightweight case I’ve seen so far. One tiny scratch on the front already – before I left the house, in fact – and I have no idea how it got there… but with all things iPhone, you never notice the scratches once the screen is on and I really hate losing screen crispness with a screen protector. I’ll just resell it in 11.5 months as “relatively used”.
In other news, I’m watching the “reception issue” fallout with a good amount of amusement because it’s beginning to effect the stock price, which I know is going to confuse Apple’s leadership. You see, Apple is handling this PR problem just like they have every other one – “ignore it because we are right and people will forgive us! – but the difference this time is that the public they are expecting forgiveness from isn’t the same that they are used to.
The Voice of God and The Boss both pass in the same week? The Yankees aren’t going to have enough room for the black arm bands for both of these giants… I hope there’s enough room in Monument Park for another plaque for Steinbrenner, because he needs to be in there. Plain and simple.
As the Voice of God, we can be sure Sheppard is going up; as a teacher for years, as well as PA announcer for the Yankees and Giants, he’ll have a space reserved. The question then is where would you put George, after all those years of iron rule, strife, drama, and chaos? After all, the man did hire and fire Billy Martin until he died. Drove an unflappable Torre all the way to the west coast… yet seven World Series rings and eleven Pennants in 37 years?
God is a proven Yankees fan: George should be talking to Captain #9 about how to beast catch a game while wearing wings right about now.
