The Blog of Brad
Posts tagged dream
Adventures in iPhone: Day -5
Jun 24th
I guess this will do. This is my personal announcement that this Monday, as in 5 days, I will be getting an iPhone. After a trip to the local Rogers store here is what I’ve come up with:
32 GB White iPhone
| $20 MegaValue: 200 min, unl nights/weekends, 1000 sent SMS |
| $30 Data: 6GB (as close as a Canadian can get to unl data) |
| $6.95 SAF *BOGUS* |
| $0.93 NS e911 fee |
|
|
| =65.40 (incl tax) |
| -15% Eastlink bundle Rogers discount |
| =55.59 (final monthly total) |
Currently I’m paying $30 for my current phone; a prepaid Keybo (aka enV2 on Verizon in the US) on Telus which includes a few minutes, text messaging, and ‘wireless web’ (WAP), so for jut $25 more per month I’ll actually get something that I will use and love. Going back to that, I love the Keybo—the simplistic nature of it, the relatively low cost, and the lack of contract: but it isn’t a Smartphone, which is what I now realize is what I need. I do have some revisions to my previous recommendation of the Keybo: This phone is great for a phone, but not as a smartphone.
I’ve grown tired of the less-than-fluid interface and usability of the Keybo and although the iPhone is significantly more expensive and it’s like comparing a $25 pair Wal-Mart jeans with a $150 Abercrombie & Fitch pair—with the Wal-Mart pair not fitting just right so the pockets don’t really feel comfortable.. But I digress.
Suffice to say that I’m excited about iPhone. I’ve been in anxious preparation for a few days now, but have been ready for this for my whole life. It’s true love.
However, the whole iPhone experience isn’t new to me, I’ve had an iPod touch for more than a year now and have continued to upgrade it at the not-free-cost of $9.95 twice (for the 2.0 and 3.0) and so have been able to discover great apps like Tweetie, Tap Tap, Jelly Car, Crayon Physics, Touch Physics, Last.fm, CalcRPN, RSSPlayer, and Evernote. But on an iPhone with a persistent data connection, location aware-ness, and a camera will make some apps so much better, such as:
- Tweetie will be (4.0924 x 10^129) times better because it will give me Twitter when I’m board, not just when I’m home.
- Evernote is enhanced with both the data and camera in the sense that I will be able to make notes AND make picture notes everywhere | Last.fm is music—and I have music stored on the iPod-so if I have data everywhere then it could potentially replace my need to carry music entirely (for a small fee, that is)
- RSSPlayer—the built-in podcast client doesn’t allow podcasts over 10MB to be downloaded—however because I’m paying $30/mo for data, I’m gonna use it for what I want-and RSSPlayer allows you to download podcasts of any file size to your iPhone anywhere—and you can get them much before Apple has refreshed their podcast feeds.
One final reason that the iPhone is awesome: it gives me the reason to subscribe to (and pay for) Geoff Smith’s Ringtone Feeder.
I’m sorry for the length of this post, but I’m just so excited! :^)
Wiki: TNG
Jun 3rd
I had an amazing idea for the next generation of Wikis. PBWorks (previously known as PBWiki) is the first really usable in the real world wiki service that is as easy as PB&J sandwiches and today released their ‘Project Edition’ which focuses on milestones, goals, and task management, however is still a wiki. What about when the wiki market has reached saturation and something new needs to happen, like a graphical wiki (“giki”?, “g-wiki”?). But what does that actually mean?
I came across this thought when investigating office collaboration and how amazingly wikis work, we’ve seen that (corporate wikis, PBWorks, Wikipedia), but what about those situations where a group is working on a project/document that is includes graphics, specialized fonts and layouts (like Publisher documents, for example, or a PDF). Te problem is that wikis work well for mostly unformatted text, but what about a wiki that would allow a user to create a template in Publisher or in itself and allow the wiki content to be mapped to it.
A good possible UI could be borrowed from Google Books, a mostly Javascript based interface that allows the user to toss pages around, uses AJAX to dynamically load pages as they’re called, and provides text search and indexing that is just plain cool. What if this could work in a wiki? This could be somewhat easily done by just mapping content from sections of a wiki onto a page, or using some voodoo software it’s possible that the user could change the text in a WYSIWYG style editor.
I’m just proposing something that would be SO cool, and would definitely create sales and encourage those not using wikis for the reason of not being able to have pretty, Word or Publisher layouts of their content. From what I’ve seen from PBWorks, this is definitely possible for them.
The Computer Solution of the Future: the Toaster Model
May 6th
To summarize the next many paragraphs in just one: A toaster operates for only a limited amount of time (‘3 minutes’), and therefore the efficiency of the code running it (if it’s digitally ran) is irrelevant to your life in the kitchen. So if a computer environment was only evoked for ‘3 minutes’ what does it matter if it leaks memory or bogs down over time, assuming that the reliable running time is greater than ‘3 minutes’.
New Theme: Atahualpa
Apr 1st
This is a new theme I’m trying as of April 1 (this is not a joke)…. it’s called Atahualpa. It looks like a neat theme, however I will have to perform some CSS tweaks (I don’t like the fluid width)… guess I have another excuse to use MacRabbit’s CSSEdit. I’m interested to hear what you think, I like it.
Summer Project: Arduino
Mar 30th
I got an email from a friend a while ago showing me Lady GaGa’s (at the time) new video, Poker Face, in which for about two seconds shows her wearing (as she called them) ‘TV glasses’. She had asked if I could do something like that for her. Again, at the time I hadn’t considered using a micro-controller.
I finally decided to listen to an episode of FLOSS Weekly (with Leo Laporte and Randal Schwartz) entitled ‘Arduino’–it’s a micro controller which seems to have exactly the right amount of power to do what I’m looking to do (and for a reasonable cost).
Arduino is an open-source micro-controller which is programed in a unique language which steals from C an C++ (so it’s fairly easy), and costs only $20-$40. In discussion with this friend, she can’t decide whether she wants a (many)x(many), pre-packaged LED matrix or individual LEDs, the deciding factor is whether I can find a small enough LED to fit behind a lens of a pair of sunglasses. (This is the key to the whole project). The biggest issue with the LED matrix is the size of a backing controller.
I still have to find the electronics I need for this, find a way to effectively display intelligible characters or simple images without having to write to the LED, meaning I need to write a layer of abstraction.
Links:
More information about Arduino.
Lady GaGa’s video on Youtube, Poker Face.
Errata,
Sample image from Poker Face video:
