Thursday, March 20, 2008

I can't stand it anymore, I have to say it

I love my iPhone.

There, I said it. I feel dirty.

My Windows-based SmartPhone got crushed in an under-the-motorized-car-seat retrieval operation that went horribly awry. Faced with a rapidly diminishing usable space on the cracked LCD screen, I went to the AT&T store to get the new hotness.

I suspected I wanted an iPhone. I didn't want to pay a lot for a phone, but what can you do? I carefully considered each and every phone they had and compared it to the iPhone. The results fell into one of two catagories:

1) This phone is complete crap and they have the nerve to charge [$100..$200] for it.
2) This phone isn't an iPhone, but costs just as much.

So I bought the iPhone.

The installation experience was harrowing. I found out you have to activate it through iTunes. I hate iTunes. I hate QuickTime. I hate all Apple software. I hate all third party software. I don't like the way it infects my machine with little processes that run without asking and little icons littered about the desktop and quicklaunch and systray. I hates it all.

But my wife has an iPod, so it was already installed. What can you do?

However, I had to upgrade to the latest version of iTunes. So I fired up IE and went to apple.com. Halfway through the download, IE crashed.

So I used FireFox to download iTunes.

As a developer who used to work on Internet Explorer, you have no idea how much that hurt me. It was a sad, sad day. Snow flakes were reported in Hell.

But now I have the iPhone and it's the best phone ever and probably the best UI for anything other than PicLens.

Friday, March 14, 2008

WikiTalk redesign

My previous project, WikiTalk, has just undergone a major face lift this morning. I didn't know it was coming and was quite shocked to see it when I loaded it before work this morning.



Congratulations guys. It looks really good.

Sunday, March 9, 2008

PicLens: new version and news round-up

We worked hard all week, some team members staying awake for inadvisably long periods of time, to bring you all our latest work: PicLens 1.6.2.

This new version fixes many performance and stability issues, and most notably, improves graphics support for a significant number of people who may have had issues with previous versions of PicLens. We added Direct3D 9 support when running on Windows. This means you must have Windows XP Service Pack 2 (or the DX9 redist) installed or you will be running with a software renderer.

In the news, the New York Times has an article on PicLens and the future of web browsing. And we've been slashdotted.