Monthly Archives: January 2012

Interesting Sites

jQuery Mission Statement

“jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.”

…and it sure does. Thanks jQuery!

~JCF

Misc

The Age Old Question, “What Came First, The Apple Or The Droid?”

It would seem that things are heating up in Europe over the alleged patent infringements in iPhone VS Droid.  An interesting case where Apple claims that Android (google) has blatantly copied the Apple slide to unlock feature.  While technically android requires a sliding of the finger to unlock, I think it is more of a password and is not the only option available.  If the patent described a slide a pattern on the screen to unlock then I would consider that Apple has a case.

…and the phone wars continue:

http://allthingsd.com/20120120/apple-escalates-android-attack-fires-at-samsungs-galaxy-nexus/

~JCF

Misc

Wikipedia Blackout

I’m actually a bit surprised that Wiki(media) is protesting about some US gov’t bills by shutting down wikipedia. Its quite a bold statement that just might work.  It has me thinking that kids won’t be able to complete their essays on time now… how did they do them before?

“Today, the Wikipedia community announced its decision to black out the English-language Wikipedia for 24 hours, worldwide, beginning at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 18 […]. The blackout is a protest against proposed legislation in the United States – the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate – that, if passed, would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia.”

More here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia_anti-SOPA_blackout

~JCF

Interesting Sites

MakerBot printers

Does anybody have one of these printers yet? I really only want a 1MB chip printed… They  are using something called extrusion printing.

You can see them at makerbot.com; they were on exhibit at CES2012.

~JCF

Mental Note

Eclipse IDE is meh.

I’ve been using the Eclipse IDE for a bit now working on some android development projects.  I find the interface okay to use; the auto complete features are not nearly as good as what you get in .net studio which I find a fair comparison since they are both free.

What I don’t like is how amazingly slow it is testing my honeycomb (3.1) apps within the IDE.  I have 4 GB RAM on a core 2 duo and the test system still takes 5 minutes to provision and install.  I’m not sure if the slowness is just the JRE which is probably the case.  Java has never really been a great experience for me in windows.

Not many choices, either beef up the development environment or give up on android development.  I would rather not give up so I guess I will just put up with what I have until one of my apps pays me enough to upgrade ;).

Happy coding…

~JCF