http://www.arpitonline.com/blog "I write pretty software" Fri, 05 Mar 2010 04:05:30 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en So, Apple sues HTC with over 20 patents, most of them idiotically trivial, including for example, Time-based, non-constant translation of user interface objects between states, which to the lay-developer should read "transitions". Ah so Apple patented transitions in 2001, somebody better tell all the developers who are using things like ... http://www.arpitonline.com/blog/2010/03/04/collected-links-from-the-whole-applehtc-lawsuit-thing/ For the last few months I have struggled different apps for taking and managing notes. There seem to be a fair number of tools out there but all seem to fall short of being the one "aha" application I can commit to. These days one of my primary use case ... http://www.arpitonline.com/blog/2010/02/28/what-applications-do-you-use-for-notes-and-personal-productivity/ The reactions to the recent iPad launch have been fascinating to watch. My personal reaction is kind of mixed. For the last month or so I have been looking at ebook readers and am tempted to get the Kindle. The reader itself is a means to an end for me: ... http://www.arpitonline.com/blog/2010/01/29/ipad-and-the-era-of-the-digital-magazine/ Quotes from the post and counter arguments: Apple isn’t trying to replace Flash with its own proprietary thing. They’re replacing it with H.264 and HTML5. This is good for everyone but Adobe. h264 is NOT part of the open web. Its proprietary technology that Apple (and Adobe) happen to own rights to ... http://www.arpitonline.com/blog/2010/01/25/thoughts-on-apple-and-flash/ This is something I thought would take me a couple of hours to implement for the application I am working on but ended up taking way too long validating behavior and the gotchas between the PC and Mac OS's so its definitely good utility code to keep in your toolbox. ... http://www.arpitonline.com/blog/2010/01/20/air-utility-code-window-management-for-applications-that-run-in-the-background/ There is a lot of blood sweat and tears behind this product, but its pretty satisfying when you see how much people like it. CIM's MyDVRManager application for remotely managing your DVR hit Gizmodo yesterday. The service is being rolled out in phases and a good way to check if ... http://www.arpitonline.com/blog/2010/01/16/congratulations-to-the-cim-crossplatform-team-comcasts-mydvrmanager-gets-gizmodod/ I dont think I have done an end of the year post ever, but 2009 was definitely eventful enough so here goes: Goodbye Flash Team: I began 2009 less than super excited. The Flash team I had worked with for the previous 4 years was disbanded in an internal reorg and ... http://www.arpitonline.com/blog/2010/01/05/the-obligatory-2009-recap-post/ Wordpress version 2.9 came out this week and one of the features that made me sit up and take notice was the new support for oEmbed for embedding content (Thanks Brajeshwar for the link). oEmbed is one of those things that I feel not enough people know about, well at ... http://www.arpitonline.com/blog/2009/12/19/oembed-and-why-its-a-big-deal-specially-for-video-sites/ I just saw Waltz with Bashir, a fantastic animated documentary chronicling Ari Folman's journey as he tries to regain his lost memories from the 1982 Lebanon War. The direction is fantastic and the story is powerful and shocking and definitely blew me away. The Wikipedia entry goes a lot more ... http://www.arpitonline.com/blog/2009/12/13/the-flash-platform-continues-to-amaze-me-check-out-the-fantastic-movie-waltz-with-bashir/ I always seem to trip up on these language version issues. I spent way too much time on this so, as usual with such things, I thought it was worth a post. Early this week I upgraded my work machine (MacBook Pro) and the new machine came packed with Snow ... http://www.arpitonline.com/blog/2009/11/27/google-appengine-app-issues-in-snow-leopard/