I’ve found my use case for an iPad: working without wi-fi.

I’m sat on my sofa watching the superbowl and my Internet connection is down. I’m left trying to write blog posts on my iPhone, which, by the speed of my typing, is not going to be fun. At this point, I’d like an iPad. I’d like a laptop which isn’t quite a laptop, it just does what I need it to do. Thanks to lots of apps, the only thing I couldn’t do on an iPad would be code, and I’m sure that won’t be far away. All I want to do is write a blog post from the comfort of my sofa, without getting cramp in my hands or the battery running out.

The wi-fi only version is an interesting prospect, though wouldn’t solve my current internetless problem unless I could tether the iPhone to it. I wouldn’t be against the 3g version, though the data would have to be allowed to be shared with my current plan, or I simply couldn’t justify the expense.

I’d also love it if it was intelligent enough to use the home sharing feature that iTunes 9 introduced. Music over wi-fi seems like a no brainer to me.

Well, will I get one in April? Maybe. If the price isn’t as silly a conversion as Macs are, it may be worth a look. Otherwise, it looks like i’ll make do with my old laptop

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If you’re like me, with an eye on Google Reader even over the holidays, you won’t have failed to notice the upcoming Apple event at which the Apple touch-screen tablet, likely to be called iSlate or the Slate, will be announced. Such is the predictability of this event, given the number of rumours that have appeared, it is now completely without interest. Even the stock market takes more notice of Apple’s rumours, rather than their product announcements.

So, I’ve gazed into my crystal ball, looked at the last few years of product announcements, and have come up with the major headlines for the next two years of Apple products.

Apple product roadmap 2010-2011

The major events, spread throughout the year, all have very specific themes. January is iLife/iWork and major product announcements, March is a developers preview of new software, WWDC in June is a major product launch, September is a big iPod event and November is pre-Christmas product refresh time. For those reasons, the above list shouldn’t be too surprising to most people in the know.

I’m predicting next year will be the Slate’s year, rather than the iPhone. It’s too soon for a form factor change and it’s got all the features it could have at this time, so 2011 will be the next iPhone update. The Slate will fit into the iPhone’s product release schedule, now being Apple’s flagship product, with yearly updates for the first few years depending on its success. The Macbook Pro line will be somewhat ignored until the end of 2010 when it gains Intel quad cores like its iMac brother. At this time, I believe the first details on OS X 10.7 will come out, probably with a new UI paradigm, potentially merging with the Slate’s modified iPhone OS.

2011 will see “Westmere” Mac Pros, though it’s possible that this will be quite a quiet event, given i7 iMacs are more cost-effective than Mac Pros. An updated iPhone/Slate OS will follow in March, and a second generation Slate in June (which will be the one I’ll get). Some controversy to follow then with a new iPod on the horizon; my thinking goes that the whole product line there needs a kick to keep people buying them, and by this time, technology will be good enough for something amazing. Finally, after that will come Intel i9 iMacs, with those processors being available for Macbook Pros by the end of 2012.

Honestly, you could probably try and predict further ahead than that with some accuracy, but forecasts become quite hazy more than two years down the line. Still, if there’s any betting shops out there willing to give me good accumulator odds on this, drop me a line!

Update 1 (March 2010): I got the Slate/iPad right, though not the release date. Still, by the time it reaches the rest of the world it probably will be July. Not so sure about a March “Town Hall” event, though I’d still expect iPhone OS 4.0 with the iPhone update this year. Also, people keep going on about potential Core i3/i5 updates for the Macbook Pro line. This hasn’t happened yet and I still think I’m in with a shout of November. The problem will be power consumption and heat, which may need a bit more work to keep the 8 hour battery life promise that Apple have made.

Update 2 (April 2010): it seems I got the iPhone 4.0 OS announcement right at the town hall event, just seems that it was in April rather than March. Unfortunately, the i5/i7 Macbook Pro announcement was in April, not November as I said. Better luck next time for that one

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When I created this blog, I wanted it to be about user interfaces, CSS, and maybe a bit of client script and design. That’s what I do and what I love doing, truly it’s what I got into this business to do. My last few months, however, have been spent dealing with all sorts of other technologies that exist nowhere near the front end.

The technology I’ve been using has actually been quite fun. I’ve been dealing with the .NET Entity Framework, which is an auto-generating data access layer similar to LLBLGen or Hibernate for Java. It’s free, works very well and has saved me a heap of time on this project. There are quite a few problems with it though, namely handling of scalar stored procedures, mediocre data model updating and the usual Attach/Detach context problems that it shares with Hibernate. It could do with some “scaffold” functionality too, but I think that’s included in .NET MVC Framework.

I’vealso  been playing with .NET AJAX which works ok, though it’s not as lightweight as doing the posts to another page (or in another language, damned viewstate), it has built-in fallbacks for non-javascript users, which is exactly what you want to do when making a AAA accessible site! I’ve had exposure to iTextSharp, a .NET PDF assistant. I found it very easy to use and getting .NET to populate some PDF form fields was very easy. Having to use Adobe Acrobat Pro to make the PDFs was not as fun

I’ve also been playing with SQL database mail, SQL’s bcp function,  and fighting with Visual SourceSafe and IIS. Yes, I’m working for a client who likes Microsoft

In reality, I’ve been sidelined from what I like doing because I can also do the server-side gubbins. Some days I’d rather not know how to do it, but I’ve now been a programmer for nearly 6 years (!!!) and I’ve realised that I know quite a lot about the entire process of building a system architecture that works (I know the following languages, Java, C#, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, SQL, Objective-C, Haskell, Prolog, and lots of specific libraries like DirectX, OpenGL, jQuery).

My next project looks like it will be iPhone based, so whilst I need to brush up on my Cocoa, I may get back to doing what I love: creating beautiful, usable interfaces that improve the way we work with technology.

I’m looking to complete work on an article on “Designing for Touch” soon. Looking good so far…

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This week, Roger Johansson of 456 Berea Street posted about unique IDs in web applications. I read this and thought, “you’re right, they should be unique, but what if you’ve got an AJAX repeater?” By this I mean when I’m loading functional parts of my application that I’ll be referencing with JavaScript again, do I have to maintain a unique ID? Surely it knows what I added last or how to make them into an array?

This problem is common with certain kinds of forms where you want to let the user add another item but don’t want to have a large form on a page. For this I then append a bit of my form to the page. However, if I want to manipulate that field again, I have to assign it a unique ID, but what should that be?

Say the field had and ID of “cheese”, what would you add to the end to make it unique? Would you continually increment and hope they don’t hit the button 65 million times? (unlikely I know, but possible). Do you assign it a random number, then have to remember this random number and hope it doesn’t come up again?

What I would love to see is to be able to (naturally) access arrays of IDs, allowing IDs to be duplicated without the browser falling over. Is it too much to ask, or do I have to keep appending random numbers to my fields?

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I’ve been using Opera since it reached version 9.0 in 2006. I have used it every day since in one form or another. I use Opera on my PA laptop, on my Mac, on my TV, my games console and on my Phone, and since Opera’s rendering engine is now built into some Adobe products (Photoshop, Dreamweaver and GoLive) I’m using Opera even when I don’t realise it.

I use Opera for its productivity features. Opera Desktop contains keyboard shortcuts for almost every action, but I’ll start with the most important features:

Speed Dial – Opera lets you pick 9 web sites that you visit the most and assigns them to the number keys. Now, if I want to go to my e-mail, I simply press Ctrl+3 and the browser goes to the page I want. I could also type 3 into the address bar and press enter or use the voice commands.

Searching with letters – With the multitude of services on the internet, I find myself having to go through many pages and lots of tedious loading in order to get to a search page. Opera does have a dedicated search box for many services, but you can do it another way. In the address bar, I can type “g PA Consulting” and it’ll perform a Google search for PA Consulting. It works for any search too and can be set up by the user, so I often type “a Web Design”, which will search Amazon.co.uk for “Web Design”.

“The Wand” – Password manager – A very simple and effective solution. On any form you can save the input to “the wand”. If you return to that page and want to put the same information in again, hit Ctrl+Enter. If you have saved more than one set of data to the form, it’ll ask you to select one. Managing your passwords couldn’t be simpler.

Built-in RSS reader – Most browsers have some form of RSS syndication functionality, but few come close to Opera’s easy-to-manage feed reader. It’s not as fully featured as a stand-alone feed reader or Google Reader, but it loads stories very quickly and does its job. Other features that I’ll mention here are an in-built download manager, BitTorrent client and POP3/IMAP e-mail program. Opera is a Swiss-army knife that doesn’t need extensions to make it powerful.

Presto Rendering Engine – The Opera team has produced their own rendering engine that renders web pages faster than any other browser (even Safari, depending on the test). Opera supports the full range of CSS2 and most of the CSS3 feature set. Put simply, if a web site renders incorrectly in Opera, the web site isn’t correct (according to W3C standards). Whilst this used to cause a lot of problems, this really isn’t the case today. In your day-to-day usage, you shouldn’t find many popular web sites that render incorrectly in Opera.

Opera is also the fastest web browser for JavaScript. Run the SlickSpeed test on all the modern browsers and Opera will come out on top every time (the 9.5 release excels at this test).

Voice Commands and Screen Reader – From a testing perspective, screen readers can be right at the bottom of the list for resource requests. With Opera, the UE expert need not worry about accessibility because Opera has a voice module built in. You can issue commands to read the page, go to a certain page (or a speed dial choice) and do all the commands that are available throughout the program.

The next few features are in the upcoming v9.5 release:

Bookmark synchronisation – A very popular extension for Firefox is a built-in feature for Opera. This allows you to synchronise bookmarks, speed dials and search engine preferences between instances of the browser on multiple computers. Perfect for using Opera on your desktop and your laptop.

Opera Dragonfly – Developer tools – Opera now has a suite of developer tools, including a full DOM and CSS inspection tool, JavaScript debugger and multiple error consoles. It will also be able to debug Opera Mobile and Opera TV devices. Whilst Dragonfly is not as developed as Firebug, it can be considered as a genuine alternative.

Opera includes even more features including mouse gestures, fraud protection, individual site preferences, thumbnail preview of tabs, widgets, notes, custom themes and a very useful kiosk mode. It’s also the least memory-hungry of all the browsers and the fastest to load.

So why isn’t it used more?

It’s used a lot on mobile devices (40 million phones have shipped with it pre-installed), though its take-up on the desktop is around 1.5% of the market. It’s partly to do with Opera’s rendering “problems” and the reputation that has gained it. Firefox tends to be kinder to web pages that are less standards-compliant, and so has gained a greater following. Opera has only recently (i.e. 6^th May 2008) received developer tools, something Firefox and Internet Explorer have enjoyed for years. This has discouraged developers for developing to Opera, which starts a vicious cycle of errors, a bad reputation and fewer developers fixing problems on it. It also doesn’t help that many large companies simply ban Opera from some of their services (RBS Banking doesn’t support Opera, though it supports Firefox).

It may also be that before version 8.5. Opera was supported by advertisements. This image has been a hard one to shake off, especially as Firefox was coming to fruition at this time and was completely free. Opera has recently gained some popularity in other channels like on the Nintendo Wii and mobile phones, emerging markets that will increase the profile of the company and hopefully the use of the full browser, though that remains to be seen.

Why should I change my browser now?

Most people simply “make do” with the browser they are given. Now people are realising there is a choice (Firefox), but they are simply making do with that. Changing to Opera will boost your productivity and supports the features that other browsers only seem to copy. If you’re even remotely interested in where the internet is headed (i.e. mobile devices/integrated computing), Opera will be at the forefront of that movement.

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A few weeks ago, the Camden Roundhouse played host to one of Britain’s great underestimated bands. Perhaps to call them undiscovered would be a misrepresentation for Athlete have had 3 top-ten albums and a couple of top-ten singles, but the sell-out crowd would call them one of the country’s most unappreciated bands. The crowd was mostly middle-class 18-30s, a lot of couples and close groups of friends, which is probably one of the biggest indicators of why Athlete have never taken off in the way they should have. They’re not a band that your whole group of friends will like, some people will understand and some won’t. Truth be told, I didn’t get in to their latest album, Beyond the Neighbourhood, until the 3^rd listen, but after that I was hooked. Its beautiful balance of soft guitar, electronic noise and traditional rock has made it one of my favourite albums of 2007.

The gig started somewhat badly. When I discovered that Boy Kill Boy would be supporting, I was quite excited at the prospect, but the reality did not pan out as I had thought. The audience simply weren’t engaged by Boy Kill Boy’s raucous strumming, and tunes that would have other audiences bouncing fell on deaf ears. This wasn’t completely the band’s fault (though the drummer could hardly stop his eyes rolling into his head, looking like he was in intense pain with every beat), the sound was completely wrong for this band. My sound engineer friend kindly pointed out that you couldn’t hear the guitar at all, just the bass and high-end keyboard. It certainly didn’t help that the vocals then were lost in the Roundhouse’s high ceiling, echoing at every opportunity. That’s not to say it was all bad, the band loosened up and sound problems were remedied, but not before the audience was returning nonchalant looks to the front-man’s wry smiles.

After a short break, Athlete took to the stage to rapturous applause and quickly launched into “Second Hand Stores’” (one of my favourite tracks), which buoyed the crowd with their energy and upbeat choice of opener. The gig progressed flicking between all three albums, playing crowd pleasers and all the singles, front-man Joel’s smile exuding happiness and energy back to the crowd. Twenty minutes in and everyone had settled into a rhythm, Athlete continuing to delight the audience with every new song. The crowd certainly seemed to enjoy the melancholy a lot more than I thought they would. This seemed like an audience who would actually sit and marvel at Pink Floyd rather than enjoy bouncing off the walls to Muse. Athlete’s brilliance shone through with some excellent instrumental sections, notably at the end of “The Outsiders” where their keyboard player worked his magic on the sound banks, producing a calming notion on the crowd.

When the lights came up everyone looked satisfied, as though they had came expecting greatness and had received their dues. The out track, “Flying Over Bus Stops” provided a sombre end to a show that had been brimming with life. Whilst some bands like to go out with a bang, Athlete left the audience in no doubt as to their musical style; understated, never compromising on quality, and most of all, absolutely brilliant.

Steve

Currently listening to: Radiohead – In Rainbows
Currently Reading: still reading that Anthony Lloyd book
Currently Eating: Goooood food
Currently Watching: Cloverfield and Lost, both brilliant
Currently praying for the writers strike to end because: I miss scrubs

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Wandering around London today, I found myself in the Apple store on Regents Street, firstly to find out who’s supporting Athlete tonight in Camden (Boy Kill Boy was the answer), but secondly to test a rumour I heard. I’d been told that the iPhones in the store all had working sim cards and you could make and receive calls! I had to find out if it was true.

In the Regents Street store, there’s a lot of iPhones. One big table with 8 phones, a row of 3 behind that and then another 4 upstairs (and probably some more but I didn’t go round the whole store). I tried to test this rumour this subtly, but there’s no way to conceal that you’re going around trying every iPhone seeing if they worked. I was pleasantly surprised to find that all of them called my phone, and they all left their numbers behind!

On the tube on my way home, I started to think about pranks you could play, having such a list of numbers. Ideas such as calling every phone at the same time saying they’ve all won a free iPhone, or putting the numbers randomly in phone boxes around London (some people will know what I mean, others are probably too young and shouldn’t know what I mean). You could sign all the phones up for spam or Jamster ringtones (same thing), the possibilities are only as twisted as your imagination.

So, instead of playing these pranks myself, here are 9 of the numbers:

• 07515847360
• 07515847036
• 07515847549
• 07515847519
• 07515847517
• 07515847039
• 07515847479
• 07515847408
• 07515847406

Remember, if you’re going to call these numbers yourself, place 141 before the number to hide it from the receiver.

I am, of course, not encouraging people to use these numbers maliciously. These numbers are quite easily available and anyone who has been into the store can get access to these numbers. I also do not know if the store changes the sim cards.

Enjoy!

Steve

Currently Listening to: Athlete – Beyond the Neighbourhood
Currently Reading: Another Bloody Love Letter – Anthony Loyd
Currently Eating: Sandwiches in Green Park
Currently Watching: Family Guy – Blue Harvest (very funny)
Going to see: Athlete, Camden Roundhouse (Flickr will be updated)

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Whilst at work today, I, like almost everyone else in the office, was being updated in some way/shape/form on the Macworld keynote speech, in which lord Jobs announced a number of products including the Macbook Air. Possibly the most talked-about piece of hardware since the iPhone, the ultra-portable macbook looks mighty pretty (see picture below) and is incredibly small. I’m writing this on a 3rd generation Macbook with the same 13.3″ screen, but the new Air will be almost as thin as the lid of the macbook!

?

However, there are a few problems that I’ve gleaned from the press release, and for these reasons, I won’t be buying one for a long time.

1. There’s only 1 USB port and no firewire - which for me is a no-go area. I’ve got somewhat of a complex external storage problem in that all my music is stored on an external hard drive that connects with either firewire or 2 USB ports. So, without also carting around a USB hub, I can’t use my external drive, which sucks. However, Apple wants you to do everything wirelessly, so I’d have to somehow permanently plug my external drive into the media center at home and wirelessly access it any time I want anything (or buy one of their Time Capsule devices, also announced. No thanks). That, of course, defeats the purpose of having the external drive and significantly reduces the macbook air’s portability for me.

2. You can’t replace the battery – which isn’t always going to be a big thing, but if it goes wrong it’ll mean sending the whole thing back to Apple. I’m one of the lucky ones with an Apple store in my home town, but otherwise, Apple will have to send a courier to pick up my laptop and then I’ll be laptopless for 2 weeks. Hmmmm…

3. It’s incredibly expensive – and I’m not talking Sony expensive, this is another level. Me and my colleague Jon were chatting and trying to guess how much it would cost. I said $1599, the same as a top level Macbook Pro. Nope, the answer was $1799. So, we thought, what’s that in proper money? At the current exchange rate, plus a bit of tax I said £999. When the apple store came back online, I was once again, shocked

My macbook, now £700 for the same size screen, a more powerful processor, an optical drive and all the gimicks compared with £1200 for a thin, cut-down macbook air. Sure, it may look prettier, but who cares about that when you can nearly buy 2 macbooks for the same price.

I then looked at the customisation options. Another £190 for a 0.2GHz speed increase, that might be worth paying for. £689 for a 64GB solid-state drive! That’s astronomic! There’s also no word on how much faster the SSD will make the computer. I know Windows Vista is optimised for SSDs, is Leopard? There’s also Apple being cheeky and making you pay again for a display output (it’s different on the macbook, macbook pro and macbook air!) and this time they’re making you pay another £9 for a remote control! They used to hand those things out, now you have to pay! I though Apple were a generous company that included all the extras, and that’s what made them so good.

All-in all if you want to get a fully loaded macbook air including portable superdrive, you’ll pay £2102.00

In the other announcements, they put 5 new apps onto the iPod Touch for $20 which is frankly ridiculous as a simple trip to jailbreakme.com will allow you to get all those application for free! They also announced the iPhone update which turns the iPhone into a GPS device which is pretty cool, and a NAS (network attached storage) solution for wirelessly backing up macs. To be honest, just let me use time machine to target a hard drive on my media center and that’ll do nicely thanks.

So, that ends my wrap-up of Macworld. When my macbook dies and I get a monstrous bonus, I’ll get a Macbook Air. For now, I’ll stick with my macbook.

Steve
Currently Listening to: Radiohead – In Rainbows
Currently Watching: QI
Currently Reading: Another Bloody Love Letter – Anthony Loyd
Currently Eating: Bangers and Mash
Current utilisation: 213% (somehow)

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Well, facebook have certainly shaken things up a bit haven’t they. Almost totally opening up the API so developers can write applications that fit inside facebook itself! Utterly unheard of before, but potentially brilliant. Lets have a quick look at what you can do with all this new technology.

From the developer’s pages, developer.facebook.com they’ve created their own markup language, FBML. This allows for quick access to certain functions and their layout styles. Great stuff. You can also add in flash and mp3 files so people can listen to music. You can also add in an <iframe> element to display an off-site page. You can upload pictures from external applications and you can query the database using FQL (Facebook Query Language). This all sounds really great, but lets look at the limitations.

• No Javascript – though not a surprise, some applications and advanced forms rely on it
• No external stylesheets – boo and hiss to this one, all your styles must be in <style> tags
• No AJAX – well, they provide automatic form submission, but that’s it. You can’t perform your own queries though the usual AJAX way
• You can’t edit user details or post stuff to groups – still a bit disappointment as this limits the level of interaction with the user profile.

The big thing really is the ability to put iframes inside the canvas. From there you can do whatever you like inside the frame.

So, it all sounds good. Now it’s whether I can use it. Today I sent out an e-mail to all uni-sport.org members with a link to a survey on it (http://www.tigersurvey.com/survey.php?survey=2815) so I can get some feedback. One of the questions is about facebook and if people would want an extra feature, would it be better pictures, commenting, facebook integrates with profiles or uni-sport integrates with facebook in the way of an app. At the moment, I’m hoping a lot of people don’t go for the last option.

After some thought, I’m not sure if it would be possible to use facebook apps for such a complicated application as uni-sport. For it to work as it does at the moment, if a club asks for a web site, they will have to have their own unique facebook application. This is because of the team selection idea. If a group wanted to do team selection from within an application, only people in that group would be on the list. However, there is no way to make an application private between a group of people and AFAIK, no way to moderate who uses the application. There can’t be a global application as team selection wouldn’t work very well (it’d have to be select from people in network X who are members of group X, but that forces people to be in a group, which isn’t how it should work).

At the moment, Uni-sport is a glorified group page with team selection, match reports and a calendar. With team selection being at the heart of uni-sport, until private applications can be written, Uni-Sport will not be appearing as a facebook application.

Well, I’m glad that that decision has been made, now I can get back to my revision (lol)

Steve

Currently Listening to: David Ford
Currently Eating: Birthday Cake
Currently Reading: CSS Mastery and facebook documentation
Currently Watching: Lost season 3 finale. Amazing
Days left at University: 13

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