Untropy

A lot has been going on the past few weeks, and that hasn't left much time for writing substantial content here. But, here's an attempt to catch up. I have been working on Cocoa stuff, the project, (some games), and more stuff on the site. This is, of course, in the midst of normal work and life stuff. How much can I get done during my vacation? We'll see. Read more for details.

Google released Google Earth for the iPhone today. After playing around with it a bit, I'm impressed and I'm not alone. For those who like this app on the desktop, you'll find the this one a comforting addition to the app store. In addition to the maps and terrain views, Google also includes a mini browser which is used to load the images and wikipedia icons on the views. Quite handy, since iPhone / iPod Touch apps are single-tasking and you'd have to reload the whole thing after viewing one of those links. But, with android out, why would they release something like this for the iPhone?

Apple released their quarterly sales data yesterday, and the news was good. To summarize, everything is up. But, let's look at a few more finer details:

• Macs are up 21% unit-wise, and 17% revenue-wise
• iPods (all types) are up 8%, and 3% revenue-wise
• over 6.8 million iPhones were sold in the last quarter

A lot better than some others have predicted. Why? Read more to continue.

Very busy day today; I installed a handful of drupal modules to help with my eventual goal of this site. No, it is not done yet. Not even close, really. There is still theming to do, and a few of my projects are not up here yet in any form. So, more work to be done on that front.

I was working on putting some scriptaculous into one of my current projects. Just a simple little bit to hide a box when clicked a link. Nothing special; the code for this would just be one line of code, a bit of CSS and HTML, and that's it. Not as easy as i thought...

If you have checked my experiments before (see below), you may have looked at my translation tool. The basic idea is to create some canned phrases, categorize them, then translate them into various languages. It seems fairly simple, and actually is. For native speakers, that is.

However, I'm no native speaker. I barely speak English, as it is. So, I set out to translate all those phrases, and develop an interface for this information. The first attempt here shows the results of that.

Lackluster.

A pretty good article explaining why Mozilla likely won't adopt Webkit as its rendering engine. Even though I can't claim too much knowledge on the subject matter, I would say the arguments presented make sense.

Now, I admit bias against this browser, mostly because my mac-loving ways don't allow me to easily use it just yet. I don't know Chrome well enough to judge it. So, I will be kind. However, I can't help but wonder why so many are so excited/afraid/enamored with this new webkit-based browser. Can it be that compelling or that evil?

Aza Raskin & co. at Mozilla have released a preview interface for their new experiment, called Ubiquity. The goal is to come up with a quicksilver-like interface for the browser to aid in completing tasks. This is different from how web interaction works now; today, it is information-based. A user finds disparate bits of information, and combines them manually. With Ubiquity, the goal is to specify the task, and let the software figure out the information needed to complete the task. But, can they do it?

Anyone who has had the rather unpleasant opportunity to work with Lotus Notes before will be pleased to hear that IBM is releasing an optimized version of their Lotus Notes web access technology for the iPhone.

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/domino-web-access/ultralite/