Saturday, November 17, 2012

Cloud Player, hurrah

I finally bought a downloadable song from Amazon, playing about with my Galaxy Note.
So I got an email congratulating me on the next great stage of my life: now I have Amazon Cloud Player!
Wow. Now, instead of having all my music in my hand or pocket, they sit in "the Cloud" thousands of miles away, and I download them when I want to use them. Or I try and try, if the connection is poor. Or I give up, if I don't have a connection, and so no music.
I'm actually not sure what the great advantage is, and why everybody is pushing so hard for this.

Spell checkers advance?

I was looking up a Kindle book on Amazon, and I had typed in "Mocke..." when my iPad's auto-complete suggested "Mockenhaupt", which was actually the name of the author I was looking for! (Brian Mockenhaupt, interviewed on TKC.)

I wonder if the auto-complete software have new ways of working, where it is getting word lists from much wider and fresher sources than the built-in lists they traditionally have? I wonder how that works. They can't just scour web pages willy-nilly, they'd get all kinds of junk and "misspelligs", as it were.

Hmmm... it seems not, because it does not work now when I try it again. Perhaps it only got the suggestion because I had actually a minute before typed "mockenhaupt", and the iPad had unhelpfully replaced it with two other words, so I had to start again.

But still, this is quite intelligent programming. "If he rejects the words our auto-complete gave him and starts typing again with the same letters, let's look at what he typed last time and give him that as a suggestion, even if the word is not in our word list/dictionary." Very smart.

Friday, November 16, 2012

Vanessa wallpaper (Phineas And Ferb)

Here's my newest favorite iPad wallpaper. A scene from the wonderfully funny Phineas And Ferb show, featuring the daughter of the Evil Scientist, Vanessa.

(Click for large)

The art in this show is just amazing, especially in HD.

Oh, and it seem the newest iPad system is smarter about wallpapers, fitting them better to the space available instead of always cropping them ruthlessly.

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Kobo, no direct sales

Apparently Kobo has decided to not sell their own devices on their own site.
Who made that suicidal decision? That's like having a big store on a main street, and when people get out their wallet, telling them they have to somebody else's store on the other site of town to actually buy the product. WTF? as the youngsters say today.

The first rule of business is so obvious it's probably not even written down anywhere: When people are trying to give you money for your product, don't get in their way! 


Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Laziness Made Virtue

Apple Pays $21 Million to License Swiss Clock Design for iOS, article.
Apple paid US$21 million to license a clock design from Swiss rail operator SBB that the Cupertino company had improperly used as part of iOS 6...

Holy mama.
(Sticks up hand, jumping on seat) Hey! Can I design a clock face, too, please? I'll do it for one million less!


Having said that, it is a striking clock design, designed by Hans Hilfiker in 1944. It proves again that KISS works. Keep It Sweet and Simple. Otherwise known as Laziness Made Virtue.

It's what I've always done on my own sites. As much out of laziness and lack of skills as out of my love of simple designs. But it has the unforeseen advantage these days that the sites, unlike many web sites, work well on smaller hand-held devices.