New Theme, iPhone, Google AppEngine
My brother provided me with a theme for my blog. Its pretty clean and simple - yet not a simple or clean as I would have wanted it to be, but that's entirely my fault. Its a matter of modifying the structure of the various elements and using font families and colors that make sense.
I purchased two iPhones from Las Vegas ( Thank you for the invitation Patrick ). I used to dislike cell phones with a passion. Especially those engineered by Nokia. Complicated for no reason, cumbersome to use, fancy for the sake of being fancy and loaded with a gazillion crappy applications and 'services'. The only cell phone I actually liked was the original Nokia phone ( short-lived moment of glory for them ) used in the Matrix 1 movie. So, naturally, my expectations were rather low when it came to putting the iPhone to the test.
"The iPhone is a revolutionary mobile phone". It actually is. Everything just works, supported by an ultra sleek UI, robust facilities and solid design decisions. It is by far the best mobile device I ever used, far surpassing any expectations I may have had.
Amazon kick-started the cloud computing era by introducing an ever expanding array of facilities and services, from S3 to EC2, to SimpleDB. Microsoft is entering the game with SSDS. Google made available a dozen APIs and WebService as a means to interfacing with their core services but everyone knew Google would come after Amazon and co, big time. It did. What is perhaps the most important benefit and side-effect of the availability of such a platform is that the everyone can build any web application without having to shelling out for the kind of resources that would have made this application possible. The AppEngine service is going to provide everyone with free access to resources and documentation - all one would need to do is signup with them, build the application on his computer using the provided SDK and then push it back to the cloud. Once the application gets successful (say, 4-5 million page views / month ) that said developer would pay Google for access to more resources. Everyone wins.
I am looking forward to similar offerings from IBM and Sun. For those who are into buzzwords, Web3.0 is here.
Tuesday, 8 April 2008 10:08 pm
WWDC 07 - the rundown
The Stevenote came and went; overblown expectations replaced by the collective uhm? and 'where is this and where is that?' concerns from Apple fans users/advocates. 300 new features are included in Leopard, yet Steve chose 10 of those to demo during his keynote. Initially we were hoping for 10 brand new(=not demoed before or mentioned or whatever) features, the kind of features that would be deemed super secret and super valuables, the kind of features Apple wouldn't demo so that Microsoft wouldn't (once again) 'adopt' them for their Vista Windows revision.
We were mostly wrong. 3 new features were revealed. Not really that amazing, mind blowing or otherwise worth celebrating for, yet worthy and interesting as a whole. The new desktop, which seems to be heavy on Core animation and whatnot and also comes with 'Stacks', a nifty feature which I am really going to put to some good use once I get access to it. There is also ( at last ) a new, really slick finder which is a whole lot like iTunes, only for files. The third new feature demoed is called Quicklook, which is about being able to live-preview files ( based on their file-type ) without having to launch an application. Very handy. The other 7 selected features were basically overviews of previously demoed/confirmed features (Phaistos Network ) can't wait to get their hands on this baby and build apps for it. A release date was provided ( June 29th ) and that was basic it.
The one more thing turned out to be ( thank God ) Safari 3.0. It is now available for both Mac and PCs ( Windows ). Its way faster, it sports draggable tabs, super slick in-line find and a very cool textareas resizing system ( so that you can resize it if you feel like doing so while writing some text, just like I did when I started posting this ). It doesn't work at all on my brother's Windows box. Then again, its beta, take it with a grain of salt etc. I love Safari.
I really hoped they talk about iWork, iLife and the new iMacs. That was by far my biggest let-down. I hope they 'll make up for it by releasing them within the following days though.
Monday, 11 June 2007 11:50 pm
Scatter Gather
While at GBC 07, George briefed me on his ultra interesting project, which is still a work in progress, but fully functional and extremely useful already. The idea is that people are increasingly looking for the latest in (news|information|commentary|...) for specific topics ( say, Apple or Linux ) but, due mostly to the proliferation and the wide range of blogs ( which is a wonderful thing ), its hard to get access to that kind of content. George's phidz.com service is an indispensable guide, which collects and organizes blog posts from an ever-growing number of sources into themes/topics. This allows you, for instance, to read the latest scoop on computer games by going to a single, constantly evolving - by means of adding more related sources into the mix - page. I love it.
Apple unveiled the updated MacBook Pro's today. The new 17" one ( 1920x1200, upto 4G RAM, ubber powerful Graphics card, LED backlit display... ) is absolutely dreamy. I wish I could somehow send them my 17" one along with whatever money sum is required for getting hold of that engineering and design marvel.
Speaking of Apple, I just pre-ordered Parallels 3.0. It won't ship until, presumably, WWDC though.
Tuesday, 5 June 2007 8:42 pm
