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December 30, 2009

Gingerbread Dreidel

http://theworld.com/~kriss/gingerdreidel.html

How to make a Gingerbread Dreidel, by Kriss Barnhart

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December 28, 2009

iPhone App List

One drawback of iPhoneOS - for me - is the limitation of 9/10/11 screens of apps. Sad as it is, I have something like 300 apps downloaded...

So - this idea is to have an app that works roughly the way the Contacts app does, or - gasp - the way Palm's App Manager worked.

1: Present a list of "All Applications". Primarily sorted alphabetically, though could be other options. With the 0-9 A-Z scroller on the right.

2: Allow a user to create a category / folder, and import apps to that category (probably through a multi-select of some sort).

3: Provide a view of 'Categories' that drills down to select apps.

4: Probably allow an app to appear in multiple categories.

5: *Important* Have a 'New' category, for apps which have not yet been categorized.

6: Ideally (but, not initially) allow management of the categories on the desktop. ;-)

7: Place no restriction on the number of apps which can be supported/managed by this app.

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December 22, 2009

Switching from scripting languages to Objective C and iPhone: useful libraries :: Hackdiary

http://www.hackdiary.com/2009/01/26/switching-from-scripting-languages-to-objective-c-and-iphone-useful-libraries/

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December 11, 2009

Thoughts on Thunderbird 3.0

I upgraded to Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0 a day or so ago. It seems faster, and a little 'prettier', but there are a few UI things that I don't like.

* Old problem - open a new mail message, start it, decide to cancel it. hit command-w to close it. Dialog pops up, "Don't Save / Cancel / Save". There is no way to do "Don't Save" from the keyboard. 'd', command-d, or at worst tabbing to 'Don't Save' should allow me to trigger that button.

* New problem - 'walking' through messages, deleting them, goes backwards. Let's say I have 5 new messages at the bottom of my mailbox. I read the first, delete it. Read the second, third, fourth, delete them. In each case, the NEXT UNREAD message opens when I delete the old one. Now I read the fifth and delete it. Behavior in TBird 1 & 2 was that when I delete the last message in the mailbox, my 'message' window closed. Behavior in TBird 3.0 is the 'newly' last message in my mailbox opens. I'm not entirely sure why this bothers me as much as it does, but it does. :-)

* New (documented) problem - More a feature I don't like... I read some mailing lists "sorted by sender". Sometimes I want to delete a bunch of messages across lists. In TBird 2, I could delete messages from a number of groups, and only the 'visible' messages were deleted. (If I had a 'thread' collapsed, TBird would leave those messages alone.) In 3.0, it deletes the messages in collapsed threads. It DOES warn me, so I won't (probably) get screwed up by this, but it's frustrating and I haven't found an option to put this behavior back the way it had worked. At least they documented it.

* New bug, related to the above -- If I cross the 'thread' boundary, even when there ARE no collapsed threads in the selection, TBird 3.0 gives me the same alert message as above ("Will delete messages from collapsed threads"). I'll say again, there -are no- collapsed threads, all threads in the selection are expanded.

More as I find them, but those are the immediate frustrations. Not frustrating enough for me to go back to 2.x though... :-)

[eta 1]

* Great feature - not sure if it's new or if I didn't notice it before... If I'm on a message and delete it, the active selection jumps to the next message.
- A related bug / misfeature, if I'm on a message and hit 'b' or 'f' to move to the last or next message (or 'p'/'n' for last/next unread), the active selection in the message pane does NOT change.

* In 2.x, hitting 'compact folders' twice would queue the command. In 3.0, it seems to tell me "Can't do it because I'm already compacting" or something like that. Not a big deal, but in-my-face.

* BUG - in 1.x, 2.x TBird would clear the search box when I switched folders. (Sometimes I wanted that, sometimes I don't. iTunes does the same thing). In 3.0, TBird does NOT clear the text in the search box, but it also does NOT do the search on the newly selected folder.
[/eta 1]

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