This is hilariously effective. It scrapes a few online lyrics databases and does some analysis to determine the quality of a rhyme. Be sure to check the bottom of the whitepaper for some sample output.
For a little less than a year, I’ve been writing code built atop Twitter, specifically Matt Gemmell’s MGTwitterEngine. I’ve got a few things running on this code, which I’ve not talked about publicly (other than minor hints on Twitter), but have been well-received by the few people who have seen it. Still, these projects have needed to extend both MGTwitterEngine and related libraries to add functionality or fix bugs. I’ll spend this blog post documenting some of those changes across the different projects.
Technical details of the upcoming Flash Player for Mac, wherein the Adobe team is switching to using Core Animation to do faster rendering of non-video Flash files. It’s worth noting that the performance will only initially be seen in Safari on Mac OS X 10.6, as the plugin is fully Cocoa-ized now.
Also interesting to note is that Flash is still using the ancient QuickDraw APIs which have been deprecated for years.
iPhone had the first two store UIs; the iTunes Store for content like music and movies, and the App Store for software. The iPad will add a third, the iBookstore, for buying eBooks. These stores all provide content for users to extend the utility of their device. But each has a pretty different user interaction model for accessing, purchasing, and consuming that content.
- The iTunes Store is a separate app that is completely distinct from the iPod app. When you find something to buy, prompting you for your iTunes account password. It then adds the purchase to the app’s Downloads tab. Once you have purchased the content, you must then switch back to the iPod app to listen to or watch it.
- The App Store is a separate app. When you purchase something, it prompts you for your iTunes password, and then exits to the home screen, switching to the screen where the app will live. The state of the download is reflected in the app icon. When the download is complete, you tap the icon on the home screen to use it
- The iBookstore (the one word is the official name as used by Apple) is not a separate app, but lives within the iBooks app on the iPad. Purchasing content prompts for the iTunes password and downloads in-app, which can be directly accessed after it has finished downloading.
Each type of content follows a different workflow when going from access to purchase to use. If a goal of the iPad’s low price is to drive content sales through the three stores, as some speculate is the case, then the purchase model should be as streamlined for the different types of content. Forcing different workflows will only confuse users who can’t remember which type of content comes from where.
We’ve all got our thoughts on what the Jesus Tablet will be, so here are my guesses. I fully expect to be completely wrong on all of this, as many of these answers are completely blind shots and that Apple will blow my expectations out of the water.
“Luckily I speak l33t.” This is painfully bad.
Open donations, so if you’re a Redditor, give them a hand. Their goal is to make it to $314,159.26 in donations (100,000 * pi).
Beyond impressive. This is more than some governments have contributed so far.
This uses the new <video> tag in the HTML5 spec, but only supports browsers which implement the H264 codec.
Two interesting bits. First, this is great news for anyone on a platform where Flash is either unavailable (like iPhone) or where performance is terrible (like Mac and Linux). Second, there is a debate about the HTML5 spec’s video codec, as it supports video in Ogg Theora or in H264. Safari and Chrome support the H264 codec, while Firefox and Opera support Ogg Theora. But this player only supports the H264 codec. I wonder if other sites will follow suit, and implement a de-facto standard based on H264.
I only knew about 30% of the quotes. But then again, I don’t watch many movies with Arnold Schwarzenegger.