Well I made a simple iPhone application a couple weeks ago; it was approved rather quickly, but the contract took awhile to process. It’s called DieRoller, does what it says, and does it quickly, clearly, and cleanly with no fuss. You can find it in the App Store.
So I picked up a 16 pound Boston Butt pork shoulder at Sam’s this weekend for my next barbecue / smoking adventure. It is a behemoth slab of meat and I can’t wait to light up the fire. I just need to decide what type of rub recipe I will use on it, whether or not to inject it, and if I want to do the whole thing as pulled pork or if I want to try to do some as sliced. Pulled will definitely be more forgiving, and will ensure that the 16 pounds feeds a lot of people. And I’ll need to cut it into 4 smaller slabs or it’ll take 30 hours instead of 10.
BlogWriter for iPhone has been updated to version 2.6, and the bug where the keypad would cover your text area has been fixed, which was the biggest concern in my previous review. Also added is better support for UTF-8. The app still has a long way to go before I would consider using it to publish to my site from my iPhone instead of just going to my site’s control panel, but it has been improved. It also still only supports MetaWeblog proper, that is to say, one content field only.
Leopard PHP Security Update - Interesting, as part of the 2008-005 patch for OS X 10.5, PHP is getting updated to 5.2.6.
I’m posting this entry from my iPhone today, using a new app called BlogWriter. It works, kind of, though it’s abundantly clear to me that to be great, such an app really needs an improved way to enter URLs, and needs to not cover up the text of your post with the keyboard. It’s impossible to see what you’re typing past one or two sentences. I had to edit this in my normal control panel after submitting with the iPhone, because after the words "such an app", my typing was all taking place behind the iPhone keyboard, completely obscured, with no way to scroll or move things out of the way.
On top of that, it’s a poor implementation of the MetaWeblog API, as it only supports one field. For a $10 app, this really isn’t acceptable. Or a free app for that matter - a distributed app should do what it advertises, regardless of the price. Oh well. :\
Update: I was reminded that the default MetaWeblog API does in fact only have one field. I’ve just never used it in a context outside of the Moveable Type API which extends the MetaWeblog API to allow four fields. My apologies to the application author, as on that particular point, it does in fact do what it says, though it would be infinitely more useful to support the additional fields that the aforementioned extension to the API affords.
The new search engine, Cuil, from some ex-Google peeps, is horrid. I see a lot of bloggers fauning because, well, it’s the hip thing to do, Cuil’s new, and because Cuil is challenging The Establishment, i.e. Google and Microsoft. Well fine, praise their boldness and their politics, but don’t let that color your view of how the service actually works, because it works horribly.
First, the 2 and 3 column layouts not only look horrible in a respectably sized browser window, but it’s incredibly difficult to scan to find what you’re looking for, especially when page titles end up on multiple lines. The attempt to associate an image with each result is even worse. Sometimes it will pick a random icon or image from the actual site, and sometimes it will slap down a maybe relevant image from some other random site, giving the impression to the end user that the image is relevant to that search result, when it’s not. Example: my picture is associated with the ExpressionEngine wiki...wha?
Next we have a wrong image associated with the EllisLab blog, and an example of the often funky text handling of the page titles. The ampersands you see below are all in the markup.
Lastly, this stranger is yet again associated with the wrong site, this one. Odd since Cuil obviously figured out my association to ExpressionEngine, but it can’t make that association for my own site? Also notice the URL. For about a month when I was changing domains, that would go to an Apache generated 404. Now it is a permanent redirect to derekderekderek.com. I don’t know when the index was made, but either behavior is incorrect for a search engine, whether Cuil spidered my site when it was a 404 or a 301 code. Definitely not friendly for site owners, and will lead to loads of incorrect content in their index.
I didn’t have too look hard for these examples either; it’s par for the course. Do a few searches on content that you know will bring up sites that you are familiar with, and you’ll readily see the resource matching issues and the page title malformation. And sadly there’s no way to customize the output beyond their classified ad multi-column approach. That might be forgivable if they were liquid and filled your browser based on its width.
The goal of a search engine is to get me from the idea in my head to relevant content as quickly and accurately as possible. Cuil does not fit that bill in any size, shape, or form. At least they don’t have a big "Beta!" badge on the front page, though in this case, perhaps that would be entirely appropriate. I hope they get their act together on the presentation of material, because their goal I must admit, on paper, is noble. Relevance is supposed to be determined solely on content, and they do index more pages than any other engine. Of course, if they’re counting things like associating my content from derekderekderek.com with koruproductions.com as additional pages or sites despite the fact that that domain has always used proper HTTP status codes, their number is wildly inflated.
My observation for today: If you have to keep reminding people, you probably aren’t.
iPhone Field Test Diagnostics - Secret menu on your iPhone to give you information about your current network, signal to noise ratio, etc. Just dial *3001#12345#*
The technical and security limitations are certainly well understood here, so Apple can’t be blamed, but it is annoying to have a household with two iPhones, an iMac, and a MacBook, coupled with a desire for separate user accounts for family members, but with a single iTunes library.
Sharing the music between Macs works great with zero config. Sharing the library between two user accounts on a single machine works fine if you select a shared location for the library. Using two iPhones syncing different material on a single machine works great with zero config. But any combination of the above, and things get hairy, very quickly. If I come up with some clever solution, I’ll be sure to share it. Surely my situation is not so unique. There must be many such Apple Households where each family member has no desire to share each others’ desktop, documents, contacts, calendars, and email, but wants to share music and iPhone Apps.
Derek Allard Comments on PHP 4 Support in CodeIgniter - "its gone from interesting, to funny, to boring, and now its back to funny again"