A blog from the perspective of Vlad, a modern-day techie. The content includes elements of design and tech. trends, with a strong emphasis on the beauty of simplicity.
Almost one year later. Embarrassing.
Apple has finally announced it will release the white iPhone 4 tomorrow around the world. Here in the US itll come in both AT&T and Verizon flavors, warming the hearts and minds of those who like a little less pigment on their handsets.
I’m talking about you Ovi, Nokia’s new app Store.
Early criticisms point out the store’s paltry selection, slow performance and sign-in errors, disappearing apps and a less-than-intuitive UI. Nokia blamed the store’s unresponsiveness on unusually high traffic and did its best to address the problem, but even those efforts by its own admission resulted in only “intermittent performance improvements.”
[Ovi, Nokias New App Store, Off to Rocky Start | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD]
Ever wonder why everything just looks a little bit better on a Mac? That’s because Apple OS X uses a different font rendering technology than Windows. That can easily be changed though, and there’s a little program that can do it with ease.
Now before I open up this can of worms, people each have their preference, and we can argue for days about which one is better. Personally, I like the way the OS X looks. GDI++, a Japanese application, does just that. It takes just about 5mb of memory and sits in your task tray, rendering everything on your system in GDI++ instead of ClearType (the typical windows font rendering tool). And when you disable it, it just puts everything back to the way it was. It’s really easy to activate, and gets rid of jaggy fonts. Read the rest of this article »
To remove a defaming page about us on the internet we ask Google to remove it from their search results, and then Yahoo, and then everywhere else. Matt Cutts, SEO expert at Google, discusses this in detail.
Instead, we should be talking to the creator of the page directly and having them remove or modify the content of the page all-together, it will remove the results from not only Google and Yahoo, but everywhere else you haven’t thought of.
We’re signing legislation like the Internet Safety Act that prevents people from accessing the internet anonymously. Supposedly this is going to stop sex offenders and help the police catch them. Instead, it’s going to do more harm than good, completely eradicating available and open WiFi in places like Starbucks and your favorite sports bar.
We also take them off Facebook and Myspace. Instead, we should be figuring out a way to stop them from making sexual advances towards kids all together. Facebook has removed 5,585 sex offenders from their site since May of last year. Great, the only reason we’re doing this is because it’s measurable and easy to enact. This quote made me really think about us concentrating on the things we fear, instead of real problems:
“Why are we so obsessed with the registered sex offender side of the puzzle when the troubled kids are right in front of us? Why are we so obsessed with the Internet side of the puzzle when so many more kids are abused in their own homes? I feel like this whole conversation has turned into a distraction. Money and time is being spent focusing on the things that people fear rather than the very real and known risks that kids face. This breaks my heart.”
[Boing Boing: Internet not full of pedos, the statistical edition]
Last week, I wrote about doctors making patients sign EULAs that disallow them to give feedback on the services they received on review sites like RateMDs.com. Another instance of not concentrating on the real problem, but simply being afraid of losing clients due to poor service. Why doesn’t Apple make people sign EULAs to not review their products? That’s because they try to make great products which customers will review positively. We need to figure out how to make these tools work for us, instead of trying to fight them.
WebKit, the fastest open source web browser engine.
There are a lot of reasons why WebKit is used in so many applications. From Apple’s Safari—the default browser on the Mac and iPhone), Google’s Chrome—their flagship browser on both Windows and Android mobile platform, and Palm Pre’s Web OS operating system, WebKit has proven to be widely accepted amongst the giants of the industry. Even KDE and Nokia’s S60 use WebKit and this is one of the biggest reasons why:
Performance is a top priority for WebKit. We adhere to a simple directive for all work we do on WebKit.