Monthly Archives: September 2008

iPhone UI ain’t perfect

Posted on September 19, 2008 | 9 Comments

I’ve wondered about this myself from time to time, as i organize (or try to) the apps on my iPhone. I find myself wishing the lame stocks and weather app would go away. I mean, i totally broke up with Weather.app long ago. I packed p her stuff, nicely told her I had found a more useful application that did more and that I liked better. I thought we were on the same page, but since she hasn’t moved out yet, I guess not.

Stocks.app, well he’s just that creepy guy that never leaves but you’re not quite sure why he’s there or who invited him.

I’m glad Apple chose to bundle some apps with the iPhone, but it’d be nice if they let me remove them. Heck leave them copied in iTunes so if I ever break up with weatherbug.app, I can go crawling back to Weather.app and see if she’ll have me.

TUAW has a post on a work around, though it’s not for the faint of heart. Not because it involves crazy terminal stuff, or SSH’ing or anything, but because it requires you to have 9 pages of apps!

Yeah You read right. 9 pages. Apparently the 10th page is hidden from view, so apps on that page are not seen.

I think I’ll wait and see if a better options arises.

But it does raise an interesting point, Apple has decided that we not only need, but absolutely must have those apps, that the phone is not complete with out them. Interesting (though not surprising) approach.

the TUAW post also raises some interesting questions about overall iPhone UI, and how better to handle applications. Stacks appears to be a common suggestion.

Another iPhone UI element that is un represented is themes. in the jailbreak world, themes are HUGE. Like Ryan Stewart huge! Yet even now in our controlled app dev world, themes are taboo.

I had hoped that much of the cool features in jailbreaking would find their way to Apple. Themes, some of the cooler apps that still haven’t shown up, like video encoding, etc.

There’s still hope. I’ve held out jailbreaking my iPhone, I may re-think that though.

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Posted in I am a Consumer, iPhone, Mac, Technology

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setting up WordPress on a mac, easy minus one lame small gotcha

Posted on September 18, 2008 | 2 Comments

I’m installing Word press locally on my work laptop so I have a test bed for something bigger that I’m doing. I found an old OS X 10.4.x blog post guide, which was really helpful, until it got to connecting Word Press to mySQL.

Then I lost all sense of self, and slowly went insane, for an hour.

I’m no dummy, but man, setting up PHP and Word Press on my mac was PAINFUL.

Getting PHP up and running, check.

MySQL. been there done that, check.

word press install, no check. kept getting “error connecting to database”

Googling revealed many posts on this topic, in the Word Press forums, the MySQL forums, and Apple. All talking about where the mysql.socket is kept, and how it should be in one place, but isn’t and many ways of working around that.

No joy.

Finally I did another search for Word Press on 10.5.x, which yeilded even more threads on the database error topic.

Then 6 months ago, on this thread, jonokane posted this gem,

Followup: After spending what seems like an absolutely ridiculous amount of time on this, I have figured out the embarrassingly simple issue.

localhost != Localhost

My Mac identifies itself as Localhost, NOT localhost! Learned something extremely obvious…. :)

So the config should look like this:

It certainly shoulda been obvious! I know the Mac is *nix, and capitalization is key, but it was just too close, too obvious. It was also the default, so it never occured to me to think on it.

So, lesson learned, and now, next time I do this. This blog post will light my way!

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Posted in EffectiveUI, euicommunity, Mac, Technology

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EffectiveUI R&D Project, Android Comic reader

Posted on September 17, 2008 | 4 Comments

I had no idea people were reading comics online! I knew Marvel had their eComic thing going on for the last year or so, but didn’t think anyone was using it. Or cared.

Who knew that there was another alternative, that’s existed for who knows how long, the CBZ and the CBR.

Essentially they’re zip and rar files with a different extension, that comic reader apps know how to unpack.

I got turned onto this scene at 360|Flex San Jose, and found an app for the mac called, Jomic. It’s not an easy experience but certainly interesting to read comics on my laptop on long flights.

So my point (other than wanting an excuse to post my Domo Halloween pic) was to say I heard about a really kick ass Android R&D project we’re working on here. With today’s Tmobile announcement, Android is officially leaving the vaporware space and hitting the mainstream.

Android has (or might have, or will have) some cool potential, and we’re making sure we’ve got that knowledge when the train leaves the station. We set up an R&D project, and the team on it, decided to create an android comic reader. It takes the comic archive files from an SD card (An emulated one at the moment) unpacks and handles all the images. Totally a proof of concept, and purely research, but how cool!

It allows navigation by touch screen, and nav buttons, so that no matter what kind of android phone it is, you can navigate it.

I asked josh, one of the developers working on this project, what his thoughts on Android were,

“Android dev for me so far has been a breath of fresh air after doing as3 for so long.  I’ve missed java.  The xml based layout is nice and has obvious similarities with mxml, but has a long ways to go until it
catches up with the quality and power of that present in flex.
However, the android team has done a lot to even improve that aspect during the beta.  I have also come to appreciate that Android is basically a mini version of linux, so that also makes a lot of the aspects of how the phone will operate fairly intuitive.”

I asked what the hardest part of developing this app has been so far,

“The hardest part so far with our application has been the relatively
small heap size restriction (16MB).  One high res image alone can
easily bring our app crashing up against that limit.  But it’s still
manageable for the most part, and we’re figuring out ways in which we
can optimize our data caching to work around that restriction.”

Gizmodo has a video demo of the G1, which looks like it’s running some things that aren’t currently in the SDK. Wonder if there will be ‘flavors’ of Android that are carrier specific?

The G1 becomes available October 22nd. The video shows some pretty compelling features, it’ll be interesting to see how Android changes/improves the iPhone market, assming Apple pays attention.

*Watchmen is a trademark of DC Comics

Wanna work on cool and compelling Android apps? iPhone apps? Let us know

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Posted in EffectiveUI, euicommunity, Google Android, Technology

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Messed up link to my EUI R&D Post

Posted on September 17, 2008 | Leave a comment

Prepping posts for future release seems to be causing me some trouble in the latest blogCFC. Working on that problem, but in the mean time, the actual link to my post is this Sorry for the confusion.

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Posted in EffectiveUI