Yes, this is not a typo – printing To your iPhone, I know it sounds weird! It is actually very handy, saves plenty of trees and makes “printouts” easier to carry around and find in the future. There are specific cases where you want to “print” a confirmation of an appointment from a website, both to remind yourself and to show at the business you are heading to. Other times it could be a receipt for online order, or any other “generated” page which you can’t easily link to, but may need to reference in the future. Some places will accept coupon printed this way, where you can simply show it to the cashier or scan it from the phone.
Today I want to reflect on Zen of iOS and overall Apple philosophy. But first, there’s a disturbance in the force that I must deal with. My overall tranquility has been compromised, and by Apple Genius Bar employees, no less.
My son and I went through rather painful ordeal with this Event 11 that Windows quietly generates. It took us few weeks to fully work out why Windows suddenly started hanging, misbehaving or even crashing with blue screen. Now that I feel it is fully resolved, I thought I’d share my conclusion (and the process) – hopefully it will help few others out there who are struggling with this. Ridiculously, many people are likely affected by this issue, but unless they open Event Viewer and search for this event id 11, they will not realize that hanging is not “normal” behavior, even for Windows! OS seems to silently recover from this problem 10 to 60 seconds later, which is really strange in my book – considering that user isn’t even alerted to this serious atapi error.
Short post – more of a call to arms, to discuss burning point for many people today. That is, What Platform to choose to purchase this iconic Steve Jobs biography eBook. I am completely at a loss – what could have been price war between heavyweights in this category, turned into a paralyzing situation for consumers (like me) preventing our purchase completely. My interpretation is that Publisher insisted on same pricing across all platforms! What Gives?
While earlier in a week I read (just like many of you) that HP is getting out of Tablet (and most PC / Mobile Hardware) business, I only reflected on how that will change landscape of our mighty Industry. Instead, I should have been pondering what will HP decide to do with hundreds of thousands of HP Touchpads out there in supply chain!
Just a quick post regarding the Software Industry drama unraveling here, here and here. Quick recap: Google is upset with “patent trolls” extracting fees from Android manufacturers via Patents. This ends up costing device manufacturers, and probably ends up making more money for Microsoft than they make from their Windows Mobile 7 sales!
Now that Apple’s iPad is officially a hit, all the computer makers (and computer makers Wanna-Be’s) woke up and are planning to Flood the market with Tablets. Most will try to rush something out for this holiday season, even half-baked, so around Black Friday and shortly thereafter expect to see them Everywhere!
Yesterday IE 9 Beta landed on the web. It’s a major rework of the most popular browser, with support for fancy new features (like HTML 5 and CSS 3) and Hardware Video acceleration. I of course installed it right away, and then was even more ecstatic when I saw in my Google Reader feed that Adobe (Finally!!!) released 64 Bit version of their ubiquitous Flash Player.
The Apps Store is all the rage nowadays and everyone says how “Apple Invented this Revolutionary Concept”. As I recall – Windows had a Marketplace for Apps and Accessories going way back…
Ok, here’s the summary: Wow!!
Overall I really love it so far, and although I experienced the famous disappearing bars issue first hand, I am really not concerned. One negative so far I noticed is the camera. There are comparisons to other smartphone cameras that say iPhone 4 is better, so maybe I just expected too much… Here’s best shot I managed today, judge for yourself (click for original). This one was outside, but inside photos not as nice, even with flash…
Yep, my iPhone 4 arrived via FedEx today and so far all I did was Shamelessly Fondle It all over. It is in the long process of synching with iTunes, and filling it up with Apps and Stuff.
As you may have heard from me in the past, I was very impressed with Beta and RC version of Win 7, so I was among the many people preordering a copy when special $50 offer was available for a limited time. In fact, local MicroCenter store offered $40 preorder option at the time, so I jumped onboard. I also decided to use this opportunity to migrate to 64 Bit and fully utilize my 4Gb memory (which I think I will upgrade to 6 GB or more in the future).
I am excited, awestruck, humbled and overall happy and serene, all at once! What brought on these emotions is my first interaction with newest version of Google’s amazing Picasa product. But of course, it’s years of photos in my collection that bring on these wonderful memories, and combined with amazing new technology to present and organize them, is where Picasa really shines.
Word gets around on Internet quickly, but apparently not quickly enough for me. I do recall noticing somewhere a word about small security breach in WordPress 2.8.2 few days ago, but it wasn’t clear to me that all earlier WordPress versions were affected, so I did not rush and act right away.
Yes, there, I am out in the open now, ready to admit it. For the longest time I’ve been watching Netbooks, saying to myself – it’s really a useless toy, why spend money even?
I am back from vacation, and it was very rejuvenating. To totally relax this time I spent few free minutes between activities on some casual gaming, mostly on Facebook and Steam. I have been a long fan of Steam, but the improvements in Facebook games were a surprise for me. I love how Steam lets you purchase digitally and then just install and play on your different computers, as much as needed, with no discs to store or find.
In the future, there will be No More Files (and most likely No Folders either). Have I completely lost it, you probably wonder just about now? All modern Operating Systems, from latest Linux to upcoming Windows 7 or Mac OS Snow Leopard, still share this fundamental flaw. I think designers and engineers have long known that Computer Industry has a major trouble with how it gets our generation brought up and used on the concept of “Files”. Bill Gates was very bold to try and change this notion with a Database based file system, but it was too soon and the biggest issue of backwards compatibility couldn’t be properly solved at the time.
I have decided to have a few posts focused on discussing what’s next in the world of computing. The idea is to look at progression thus far, and see what makes sense to be researched and improved next. This simple formula can be surprisingly effective, due to collective “creationism” that defines computing industry. In other words – we create our future (just like in real life) by focusing research efforts (aka: wishes) on particular things. Thus, we can foresee now what will the future bring, simply by assuming that our research pans out.