Bits

Fascinating concept.

All Sophiestication Software apps are $0.99 for the Christmas period.

I own all of them and am a big fan of Groceries and Articles for both iPhone and iPad in particular. Go check them out!

Check out the updated company page at Realmac Software and our new avatars!

The UCL Computer Science department has released a list of short courses for the summer of 2012.

The Time-Series Modelling one looks quite nice (and would remind me of the time when I used to be a student there actually!). I also like Popular Writing. Many of us can indeed very well write when targeting a technical audience but writing for the general public is definitely another story.

Google+ for iOS. Keeping up with good design and inconsistencies.

Today, Alfred app version 1.0 has been released on the Mac App Store (it's actually been available to download from their website for a couple of days).

I love Alfred. I've never been a fan of Quicksilver or LaunchBar, always preferring the simpler Spotlight but Alfred seriously got me!

Also, if you feel like you want to give some money to the developers, make sure you check Alfred Powerpack. Plenty of awesome additions.

Check out the new goodies.

This is getting seriously ridiculous.

Not sure I like it.

The 1.01 version of Analog has just been approved this morning and is available on the Mac App Store. Update through the Mac App Store or if you didn't purchase it yet, go get it!

A very poignant article from Mona Simpson, Steve Jobs' sister. Such a touching story, extremely well narrated.

I haven't had much time to blog about it since I made the switch but you might have noticed the new feel and look of my site!

I have moved away from WordPress for various reasons but mainly because I really did not like the idea of having my content living in a database. Also, I wanted to code the CSS myself and did not particularly want to go through the whole WP theme stuff.

So, the story in a nutshell, I am now generating a static version of this site with Jekyll. I write all the posts and bits in Markdown that I store as plain text files. I have written all the CSS using Sass (highly recommended by the way). I store my media files on Amazon S3 that I access with Amazon Cloud Front. I use TypeKit for serving and managing the fonts and the MathJax JavaScript display engine for rendering the mathematics formulae written with LaTeX. I am also using DISQUS for the comments on the posts.

I use quite a few new goodies of HTML 5 and CSS 3 so the site will render best on WebKit and fairly alright in Firefox. I checked that the site looked ok on the latest version of IE but I have no idea how it does on former versions. But frankly, I don't even give a rat's ass!

I am very happy with the look of the site on a desktop browser and Safari on the iPad (and I guess this applies to all tablet even though I haven't tested it). However, I still will have to write a mobile stylesheet for the iPhone (and other smartphones).

The very cool stuff is that I can now version control my entire website.

Donald A. Norman in The Design of Everyday Things, 1988:

Would you like a pocket-size device that reminded you of each appointment and daily event? I would. I am waiting for the day when portable computers become small enough that I can keep one with me at all times. I will definitely put all my reminding burdens upon it. It has to be small. It has to be convenient to use. And it has to be relatively powerful, at least at today's standards. It has to have a full, standard typewriter keyboard and a reasonably large display. It needs good graphics, because that makes a tremendous difference in usability, and a lot of memory - a huge amount actually. And it should be easy to hook up to the telephone; I need to connect it to my home and laboratory computers. Of course, it should be relatively inexpensive.

What I ask for is not unreasonable. The technology I need is available today. It's just that the full package has never been put together, partly because the cost in today's world would be prohibitive. But it will exist in imperfect form in five years, possibly in perfect form in ten.

In my opinion, even if PDAs have existed for quite a long time, almost 30 years later, the first device that actually meets every criteria mentioned by Norman (apart from the cost maybe) is the iPhone.

When iOS 5 came out, I logically turned on iMessage on both my iPhone and iPad. What I liked with iMessage was not being able to send free texts (I have 500 texts included in my plan for free and rarely use more than 50-100 a month so cost is definitely not in the equation here), but rather the idea of having my messages delivered (and stored) to all my devices seamlessly.

Well, at first, my iMessages were not delivered to both devices but only on the iPhone. We later discovered we had to set the callerID to the email rather than the phone number, that should work. Well, that solves the problem is someone iMessages me to my email address but if an iMessage is sent as a regular text to my phone number, I still only receive it on my iPhone.

The major problem so far, however, has been reliability. I don't seem to receive every message sent to me. Also, I often sent a message to a friend that seems to be routed via iMessage. The message seems to be sent, nothing comes back (the user might not have turned on the "Send Read Receipt" setting). However, 30 minutes later I receive an alert from my carrier (I am on pay-as-you-go hence the alerts) that a text has been sent. I go to my messages and discover that the message has been sent as Text Message. I'm ok with that, the only problem is that it took 30 minutes for my text to reach its destination without myself knowing about it. This is definitely a problem for me. I use text messages for fast communication with friends and I really expect any text I send to be received the second it leaves my device.

I have disabled iMessage for now. I will keep looking at it and I can wait to enable it back, but it seems not reliable enough at the moment.

With all the repetitive, low quality games hitting the App Store these days, I am very rarely surprised by a new one. Once on a while, however, a simple game comes out and blows my mind away. Whale Trail is one of these.

The concept of Whale Trail is nothing really innovative. You are some sort of a flying whale (!) and you fly up and down (in a similar fashion as Tiny Wing), trying to catch bubbles. Bubbles actually give you power and when you run out of power, well, you loose. There are also evil clouds that when you fly into electrocutes you and consequently diminish your power.

More than the concept, what really makes Whale Trail such an amazing game are the graphics and the music. Both are extremely well curated. UsTwo really took extreme care in creating both an ambient music and sound effects that completely enhance the game experience.

Go get it on the App Store!

This is my first bit. I will blog in bits rather than posts whenever I have some short stories that I want to talk about that wouldn't fit in (a series of) tweets but wouldn't be long enough to become a proper blog post.