Leonard › Comments

"Ah yes, a Home->Menu->Settings ->scroll->About phone->Battery use away to get that listing and another simple click->Application Info->scroll->Force stop to stop. What more could you want? ;P I prefer webOS's Home->swipe up method better, but since Android already uses the long-press on the Home button to bring up a task-switcher, ideally I'd like to be able to either drag the app icon from the switcher box outside (a la how the OS X Dock works for removal), or dragging to an "X", or being able to long press on the icon and choosing to kill the process. Aaron: as ProfessionalGun touches upon, it's moreso battery-life issues than performance problems per se. Some apps don't behave in the most power-efficient way..." - Leonard

Verizon's underhanded data billing practices - they're the only company that i have a lifetime boycott on. - Leonard

Great little comic about coffee. - Leonard

"You might want to give Swift a try - I found that I like it much better than Twidroid. My biggest annoyance w/ Android (which remains in Eclair, I believe) is that even though they're non-modal, notifications steal focus when they come in." - Leonard

Building javasqlite on OS X is a huge PITA. the 10.4 JNI wrapper binary on this site works w/ Snow Leopard and TrekBuddy 1.6.1 w/o problems (copy to /Library/Java/Extensions)... - Leonard

Lets you create offline maps for various Android/WinMo apps. I'm using the Mapnik OSM tiles for Buenos Aires, which are visually nicer than the GMap Tiles. - Leonard

RMaps is the best offline-mapping app I found. It requires offline loading through a TrekBuddy and doesn't load vector data like MapDroyd, however the GPS works reliably and it has compass autorotation. - Leonard

OMFG. SO GOOD! - Leonard

In-depth discussion of shady monetization and campaigns on FB - Leonard

Interesting writeup and ensuing discussion about shady monetization of Social Games - Leonard

holy crap... - Leonard

wow, that's pretty depressing. - Leonard

Great infoviz (and debunking of false danger scares) - Leonard

how to make a shake shack burger at home. (awesome) - Leonard

Standard tale of organizational/technology development mistakes (bad PMs burning resources, ignoring reality) - Leonard

Fascinating writeup about Jure Robic, a Slovenian ultra-endurance biker who pushes his body (and mind) beyond previously thought limits. - Leonard

A great piece on the relationship of art and commerce. Well worth reading and thinking about. - Leonard

Good list... - Leonard

Fantastic writeup on how Fanfarlo (a great, but unknown band) worked the new media landscape to their advantage. The future of music is happening now - Leonard

Well, there are $100 homes, but confirms my assumption that it's the closest you're gonna get to Mad Max post-apocaliptia in the US today. There's a certain appeal to guns and cyclone fencing for your intentional living art commune. (but why not do that somewhere w/ better weather?) -- the comments has an interesting counterpoint of where this stuff is happening in Detroit (but again, at the end of the day, you're still in Detroit...) - Leonard

"Less than 18 months after the introduction of the Radeon HD 4800 series, AMD has produced a new chip that's roughly the same size yet promises to double its predecessor's power in nearly every respect, including shader processing, texturing, pixel throughput—and, yes, GPU-compute capacity. The Radeon HD 5870 is more capable, too, in a hundred little ways, not least of which is its fidelity to the DirectX 11 spec. And in a solid bonus for its target market, the card based on it looks like the Batmobile." - Leonard

"Today at their headquarters in Palo Alto, Facebook’s design team walked through their philosophy and approach to designing for a quarter billion users. In particular, they emphasized the importance of writing code, sharing designs early and often, being involved with a project from start to finish, and not falling in love with your work. Making sure designers are technical enough to write code came up a lot.' - Leonard

And the duct-tape programmer is not afraid to say, “multiple inheritance sucks. Stop it. Just stop.” You see, everybody else is too afraid of looking stupid because they just can’t keep enough facts in their head at once to make multiple inheritance, or templates, or COM, or multithreading, or any of that stuff work. So they sheepishly go along with whatever faddish programming craziness has come down from the architecture astronauts who speak at conferences and write books and articles and are so much smarter than us that they don’t realize that the stuff that they’re promoting is too hard for us. - Leonard

"WebCom displays comments in a dynamic web instead of a traditional list. As new comments come in, the web gets bigger. The web, however, is not organized by chronology. King and his team believe that the most valuable comments are those that are rated highly by peers and those that spur responses. WebCom uses those criteria to organize the web." - Leonard

Extended writeup on Spike Jonze, his filmography, and the making of Where the Wild Things Are. So looking forward to this (I suspect that 1) it'll be great and 2) that it'll be a surprise hit - maybe not with kids, but with Gen X & Yers) - Leonard

"Yeah, on a better day I would have just deleted the comment, but layovers make me cranky. I have comments enabled for interesting conversation, not for anonymous manchildren to come and crap in my internet living room you know? (there's cerainly enough space to do that, although I suspect that if more people enforced community standards, that these sort of pointless posts wouldn't be quite as common.) As far as inferior product or not, my point is that there are many dimensions. There are aspects of the product itself beyond the UI that contribute to UX, like the service, as well as other things like developer friendliness, openness, etc. Lastly, and perhaps even less quantifiable are the strands of... Justness (this probably gets lumped in by product people as part of brand strategy/identity). "Appleseed" may scoff at that, but it's what kept Apple alive through the 90s, and although the irony may be lost on him, what get's people like him to post on random blogs about how awesome..." - Leonard

"Hey semi-anonymous Internet Jackass. Normally I don't get baited by mouth-breathers without the self-esteem to post with their true name, but your lack of reading comprehension, simplistic worldview, and my hour-long layover makes this your lucky day. In case you missed the very first bullet point, the fact that the Pre on Sprint actually has connectivity and doesn't drop calls really sort of blows away your "inferior product" construct right out of the water. Now, how about you tell me how many clicks it takes to check new mail messages in 7 inboxes in iPhone Mail? Or how your experience is when you're typing a text or email and receive notifications? How's the Facebook sync? Or running background apps? That's OK, those are rhetorical questions. That means I already know the answer to those questions because I've had an iPhone since literally day 1. And I still carry around my iPhone 3G with me in my bag and I use it both for development testing and for running some sweet apps. Did..." - Leonard

"Yeah, I suspect all phones will have built in social addressbook syncing soon. It *is* magical, and actually bumps up the FB usefulness even more. Honestly, I'd rather have a "FBPhone" than a GPhone..." - Leonard

"In theory, Palm and Apple are both gatekeepers, although having multiple gatekeepers is probably preferable to having a single one. In practice, however, my Palm experience has been a lot better - developer mode is easily accessible, which gives full system access, and homebrew apps are available (and tacitly approved) without jailbreaking (and without disappearing w/ system updates). (While Palm has made some noises about being more developer friendly, they haven't committed as publicly as Google has to openness, so we'll have to wait and see I guess.)" - Leonard

"Yeah, I like WebOS a lot, and hope that it can get the refinements it needs to remain a contender. That being said, despite my less-than-stellar Android end-user experience, I suspect it'll "win" as the iPhone alternative - w/ a couple dozen devices coming out, it shouldn't have any problem getting to critical mass (at least 5-10M devices?). And, w/ HTC's Sense, Motorola's Blur, and Sony's Rachel, it also has a number of 3rd party UI's that should be, at the very least, interesting. I wonder if there's going to be anyone that tries to compete w/ Apple on fit-and-finish. It seems like right now no one is even *trying* to make a product that has a responsive, non-laggy UI..." - Leonard