iPad Impressions So Far

I picked up my iPad yesterday morning while in line with a few hundred other people or so at the local Apple Store. I was definitely a bit nervous about plunking down $500+ on a device I had never seen in person, let alone used. I had tried out Safari in the iPad Simulator, but of course, that’s not the same as using the real thing.

My first impression was, wow this is heavy. It’s a very solidly built device – but given Apple’s fixation on aluminum and glass, it wasn’t completely unexpected. This device is definitely more than a bigger iPod touch – it is more like a smaller MacBook Air without a keyboard and running iPhone OS instead of MacOS X. This really is a different class of device.

Apr 04, 2010 Read More »

If you ever find your Mac suddenly going to sleep at odd times while you are using it like I have with my MacBook over the past few years, go check the Desktop & Screen Saver preference panel and click the Hot Corners button. Make sure that one of your corners isn’t set to Put Display To Sleep like mine was.

Highly annoying – I can’t even begin to imagine why I had it set that way.

Mar 25, 2010 Read More »

mrgan:

Marco Arment laments the difference between AT&T speeds in Austin and New York. Portland’s not too bad. (Calls often get dropped downtown.)

By the way, the FCC has made an iPhone app? And it’s sort of nice?

I’m not so sure I would agree that the latency that Neven is seeing is “not too bad” – 1 second is downright horrible, IMO. My results above are from Andover, MA – about 25 miles north of Boston.

Mar 22, 2010 Read More »

Disabling Caps Lock In Linux

To disable it until the next time you log in:

$ xmodmap -e "clear lock"

To disable it for good:

$ xmodmap -pke > ~/.xmodmap.myown

$ vim ~/.xmodmap.myown

Change the line for keycode 66 (caps lock) to look like this:

keycode 66 =

Mar 01, 2010 Read More »

Joel Spolsky’s Fantastic Mercurial Tutorial

A great tutorial on Mercurial by Joel Spolsky. And aptly named, too. If you have been tainted by Subversion or (shudder) CVS, make sure you at least read the first section. Even if you don’t read anything else, read the first section. Trust me, it’s that good.

Feb 26, 2010 Read More »

PathPix on the iPhone (and iPad)

I was introduced to a really neat puzzle game on the iPhone yesterday by a friend. The game is called PathPix. There are 3 versions of the app – a lite, regular and pro version. The regular and pro versions offer different sets of puzzles. It’s best to start with the regular version and work your way up to the pro version later.

The game itself is a cross between a Nonogram (aka Picross) and Slitherlink. Basically, you make pictures by connecting two numbers to form a path. The numbers represent how many spaces the path takes up. They also have a color which represents what color the path will be. To complete a puzzle, all of the paths must be connected and there cannot be any open spots on the board. You can see the first puzzle below:

Feb 10, 2010 Read More »

iPad and Multitasking

I’m seeing a few posts on the web regarding multitasking on the iPad and how the SDK doesn’t say anything about it. Apparently this is surprising to some people.

Without going into too much detail since there is an NDA on the 3.2 SDK, I would like to point out something: the iPad’s OS is called iPhone OS 3.2. It shouldn’t be any surprise that a major functionality change like multitasking wouldn’t be included in a point release of the OS. If Apple is going to introduce multitasking for the iPhone OS, wait for 4.0 at the earliest. But don’t expect to see it in a point release.

Jan 28, 2010 Read More »

Apple and AT&T

There has been a lot of hype leading up to yesterday’s announcement of the iPad. I’m sure that the hype will continue right along until the release of the device and beyond. As interesting as all of the possibilities that the iPad will allow are, I wanted to talk about another subject. One that has also gotten quite a bit of attention over the past few months. And that is Apple’s relationship to AT&T.

Jan 28, 2010 Read More »

AppleInsider | Apple updates Boot Camp with Windows 7 support

Nice to see Apple finally get the Windows 7 support in place with Boot Camp 3.1. I was also hoping for a fix for the issue where one of my CPUs pegs out at 100% when I have a cable plugged into the audio out jack, but I guess that will have to wait for Boot Camp 3.2.

Jan 19, 2010 Read More »

doing it wrong

Blogging with Class