Archive for March, 2008
30 Years Of Apple: We’re So Excited
Mar 24th
A tribute to a company that touched the lives of millions.
Hello, Tomorrow. iPhone launches in Ireland – Today.
Mar 14th
Ireland is one of these countries which always gets things more at the bottom of the list. Even UK got the iPhone earlier than the country inside which I live in. The iPhone – or Jesusphone – continues its winning streak in Ireland, starting today. O2 is – as expected – the carrier of the almighty multi-touch phone, and it is landing in its 8GB and 16GB configurations. EUR 399 for 8GB, and EUR 499 for 16GB, respectively.
Visual Voicemail is not here yet, but they are working on this – at least that’s the last I heard. Rates start from EUR 49 per month, which includes 1 GB of data transfer. So if you’re not necessarily downloading movies all the time, this should be plenty of transfer for websites and email. Be careful with YouTube though. H.264 codec is higher quality than what you see on YouTube’s players on the website normally.
Well if you are looking to get one, you better run to the store NOW. As before, same restriction applies: a maximum of 2 iPhones per customer, only credit card / Laser payment.
First COSMOS application: TextPad
Mar 10th
Not only is it my birthday today, it is also the day at which I am happy to announce that I have completed the first application that fully utilizes the COSMOS UI Framework (COS Presentation Base). The tool is able to open and save text files, as well as modifying them and performing basic operations such as copy and paste. In its current form the editor was written in only one day and has a bit more than 300 lines of code.
The program is entirely based on controls that I have written on my own in Smalltalk, and utilizes many of them.
I am very happy about this progress and paves the way to more applications yet to come that will complement the finished COSMOS software when I am ready to release it. First screens after the jump.
TextPad showing its all-new Menu Shelf on the right, the menu system that is going to be introduced with COSMOS.
The Open File window, showing the current available file types that TextPad can open. Also, when one hovers above a file in the Open File window, a band is displayed on the bottom containing information about the file. The band disappears when the cursor goes away from the file, or another band is displayed when another file is beneath the cursor.
This is how the File Menu looks like.
And this is the Edit menu.
As of today the COS Presentation Base features a window template for About windows, and TextPad is the first to use it.
When a program is iconified and one hovers over it, a band comes up which displayed the window as a thumbnail in the moment it was when iconified. Also, the name of the program is displayed. What is not shown here, is that each corner of the icon has halos, allowing the user to restore the window, close the program, adhere the icon to one of the screen’s edges, and release adherence.
If you are interested in knowing more about my project named COSMOS, then jump over the About Page.
The Borg release Internet Explorer 8
Mar 6th
In a surprising turn of events, the Borg have decided to lay the seeds out to bring even more people close to them and assimilate their brains. Internet Explorer 8 is now available as a public Beta 1 and seduces people with new features such as W3C compliance (okay, I give you that one) and other flicks, such as Facebook integration. Most of the features in that direction are kind of similar to what you have in Flock.
Anyways, the browser looks much like IE7 so far. So you if you want it, you can have it. It’s available for all Windows flavors.
One year ago: OS X Mercury Beta 1 releases
Mar 1st
Exactly a year ago today I have released the first Beta version of my now popular Mac-like desktop project, OS X Mercury. Beta 1 was the first version to sport feature-completeness, and included all programs and tools for the environment in a stage that was ready to test. Despite the agreement that it was a closed Beta, many have posted the link to access the code in forums anywhere. At the time, the project was developed under the Code Name “Asteroid”, as a quote to a product from Apple with the same code name, which however never released.
OS X Mercury Beta 1 has slight display issues in Firefox 3 Beta 3…
The feedback was generally positive, the code appeared to be working as expected across platforms, mainly targeted were Windows and Mac OS X. I have had people who tried it on Linux platforms too, which (except for the fonts) also seemed to be working. About four weeks after Beta 1, a second version was released, Beta 2, also closed. Beta 2 nearly eliminated all known issues and was almost identical to final release.
Shortly after general public release on May 18, the desktop got pretty popular and even made it into Lifehacker.