Archive for May, 2010

1
26
May

Seven-Piece Minimal Lego iPad Stand

After seeing a couple of Lego iPad stands, I decided to make one myself.
This is my first generation version, look for second generation in the coming  days…

Link to photos

1
19
May

First impressions of Twitter for iPhone(formerly Tweetie)

Seems to be a decent update, has a number of interesting features. I encountered a couple of quick frustrations with it:

  1. I had to re-enter my credentials. Seems to me they could have converted this themselves.
  2. My direct messages that I have already read were marked unread, and the only way to mark them read again was to tap on them to read them. All 250 of them. Should have a mark all as read feature.
  3. Tweetie had this issue too, but I wish it would show in your timeline the tweets you retweet. (this is of course a feature request seeing as it didn’t have this functionality before)

Apart from these 2 things, I like it ok. UPDATE: Although I do miss the little broken barrier that indicates that the current update began here. Makes it easier to catch up after having quit the application.

I do love the search features, and trending topics, and the nearby tweets. These are all welcome additions, all in all a great job, only a couple of annoyances that could have been avoided pretty easily. I am looking forward to future features!

0
14
May

OneSocialWeb: a new open “facebook”

Hmm, looks like facebook and diaspora* have some competition.  These guys are using openfire and the XMPP protocol to create a social web that allows you to control your privacy and your data on your own computer instead of relying on a centralized server model like facebook.  The guys are desperately seeking the same kind of recognition as diaspora* has received, and they are much further along.  Go check out their site and get involved if you can help out.  They have even suggested that the diaspora* guys come and spend the summer working with them since the projects are so aligned already.  I’d love to see this kind of coordinated effort bring down facebook!

Original article on techcrunch: OneSocialWeb: We’re Ahead Of Diaspora In The Creation Of An ‘Open Facebook’

0
13
May

bjango software bad practices

Recently a company named Bjango decided to take their free iStat Menus application for the mac to a pay model. That’s fine, its a great app and I used it daily. I was considering upgrading from my free version. They announced this by popping up an upgrade window that had 3 buttons on it, Skip this version, remind me later, and upgrade now. I have this running on several macs, so it popped up on all of them. No problem, its only $10, I’ll probably do it to support them, so I hit the remind me later button. Popped back up the next day, I hit it again, remind me later. This went on for several days, by now I think I will remember to do it, so I hit the skip this version button and I will revisit it when I am ready to. Next day, it popped up again. Hmm, I hit skip again. A little later that same day, it popped up again. I thought it was just my laptop so I hit skip on my desktop. A little while later it popped up again. Well, now I’m a little bit miffed. You had me due to the benefits of the application, so I would have upgraded. Now you are spamming me on my screen using the free version that didn’t use to do this, and you put a button on the screen to make me think I can stop it.  Lost a customer.

There is no way I will use this product anymore, and I hope others will join me.  I found another app that does many of the same tasks, and I am really liking it so far.  And the best part is its still free, its called atMonitor.  Check it out, it has a mode that puts graphs on your desktop and/or in your menu bar.  So long iStat Menus, its been real….