It finally gelled in my head what bugged me about the iPhone's lack of simultaneous processing.  It's not truly a digital convergence device.  It's a sequential task device. A digital convergence device is a device that does lots of things: MP3/FM music player, alarm clock, cell phone, web browser, calendar, address book, GPS-enabled map, pedometer, etc.  The purpose of such a device is to do all of these things, not each of these things.  If I can't do them all simultaneously, it isn't a convergence device, it's a sequential device.  The iPhone is exactly that: a sequential task device. If I've decided...

The iPhone.  It's a wonderful device.  It was a game changer.  3 years ago when it was released, it revolutionized the phone landscape.  For the first time, people had a portable digital convergence device.  (Ok, maybe it wasn't the first, maybe it wasn't the best, maybe it was just targeted at regular people instead of corporate users.)  For the first time, we could walk around with a web browser, a calendar, a music player, an address book, and really manage our lives on the go.  (Ok, I'll grant that BlackBerry defined that niche for business users, but the iPhone made...

I've gotten quite a bit more feedback than I anticipated about my prior post about Google Maps and the iPhone. Who would've thought that not being able to mash up live GPS data, maps, and one or more external files of geographic data in a generic, consumer-driven way would be such a stir? Since then, I've made some progress on this rant. LocWidget: this handy iPhone app allows you to send Latitude, Longitude, and Altitude measurements as query parameters to a website of your choosing. It also takes it a step further, sending the...

Google Maps is awesome.  It is phenomenally cool.  It is the quintessential definition to many of what is Web 2.0: a very dynamic, very interactive, very usable site that presents what I want in a way I want it right now, lets me use it intuitively, and publish it to anywhere else easily.  Some may argue Google Maps is the reason cell phones now have GPS's in them: for turn-by-turn directions based on map data downloaded to the phone on demand. Google Maps is also the quintessential example of a mashup: take two unrelated services, push them together, and you've got...

Since converting from Outlook 2003 to Outlook 2007, I've noticed I never got the new mail arrived popup nor the task bar envelope icon.  I noticed that periodically throughout the day, I'd have to open Outlook, notice that the urgent email I didn't know I had came in 3 hours ago, and then run around in a panic for the rest of the afternoon doing damage control.  Or I'd open Outlook incesently every few minutes to note that I had nothing new.  Both were annoying scenarios. Every search on the topic pointed me to the standard location for such things: Tools menu...

I finally sat down to load up all my RSS feeds from Google Desktop to Outlook 2007.  Um, oops. My RSS needs are simple: - I want to group feeds and aggregate their results - I want multiple groups of these aggregated results so I don't lose infrequently posted sources Group 1: I download my daily 'newspaper' by aggregating cnn, slashdot, abcnews, engadget, the register, wired, etc.  I consider this for the most part disposable knowledge: if I miss a post or a day's worth of posts, so what.  I want to read my news as an aggregated list: newest first, combine all the...

I sense I'm spurring a holy war discussion when I raise the issue, but some have asked why I code with curly braces on the same line rather than a new line.  My answer is simple: readability. The goal with any code is not solely to accomplish the problem at hand, but to make the code legible for the casual reader who will come by it later on.  Maintainable code is written legibly. As an example, consider the Visual Basic type "variant".  It defines a variable as "something".  Um, gee, thanks. Dim myvar as Variant myvar = "1" myvar = 1 myvar = 1.0 myvar = Workbook.Worksheets[0] What is...

Ok, I don't know who the wise guy is who keeps trying to give me feedback spam about [use your imagination here], but I'm really not thrilled to delete as much feedback spam as I get.  A new version of Subtext should cure it.  If not, I'll have to get drastic.  You have been warned...