thoughts on iPhone

I switched to an iPhone this week after my trusty Treo 680 stopped working. That is for some reason the sound and voice microphone stopped working. I thought the Treo was the best phone I have ever owned and that was true then. The iPhone is even better.

One thing about the iPhone I find interesting is the design choice to not have drop down menus. I know this greatly simplifies the UI but the Treo had the concept of a button that would trigger a drop down menu to appear at the top of the screen. I found this intuitive and a good way of hiding the menu to gain more screen real estate. I find that the iPhone has to put buttons at the top of the screen for save, exit, etc since it lacks a menu system. It is a tradeoff. Since the iPhone only has a single home button for simplicity sake I can understand how the hidden drop down menu was not included in the UI design.

Garmin adds more Mac support

Hooray

Garmin Bobcat

This lets me cut just one more cord to my PC.

Thinking in Google

I've found it interesting lately how if I come across a topic that I need to research or find more information then my brain automatically begins to think in keywords for a Google search.

This leads me to think back as to what it was like before Google existed. As a software engineer, it used to be far more difficult to obtain useful samples or information for issues with code. One tended to rely on everything provided by a vendor for documentation and if a topic was not covered or not covered well, then it was highly difficult to obtain good information. This goes back to the days of CompuServe forums for me.

Yosemite Reservations

https://world03.dncinc.com/smsworld/yosemite/world_frame.asp?wsi=vyosem&rca=2&rcc=0&rcp=vyosem

Who designed this?

Canon i9900 with Apple Airport Extreme

Arghhh. This pair is just not compatible in some way. The printer tends to flake out over time and the AirPort cannot find the printer. I would sure like to know which printers are 100% compatible since the Airport is a great solution for printer sharing.

Citizens Action Project

Although not necessarily related to software development, I have been working with a group that is advocating fairness in the real estate tax assessment process in Lake County, Illinois.

We just updated the website with more materials to provide information on the appeals process for tax assessment.

Citizens Action Project

Haskell on Leopard

This weekend I got around to setting up Haskell on my personal MacBook Pro. Since I have Leopard installed this wasn't as straightforward as the previous install on Tiger.

The Leopard install didn't bother to update XCode and related libraries so I had to take back out the install disk and update those. Next, I had a few problems with an older copy of gmp that I believe is left over from an install of Ruby on Rails but I'm not entirely certain. Updating with MacPorts and installing readline cleaned everything up.