July 13, 2010: I Guess It Isn't A Dynabook Yet
Status
Back to link posts today. The book is still lurching forward on the legacy chapter. Thanks to those couple of you that asked questions on the forum and made it look a little less lonely over there.
Quick Review
Quick iPhone 4 impressions, but understand that I haven’t actually, you know, used it yet, just took it home and set it up.
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The screen sharpness really is notice able. It’s amazing how small text can get and still be basically readable. Apple’s also updated the system font and a couple of the dingbats, and it looks really nice.
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My first FaceTime call froze five seconds in. It was cool for that five seconds, though.
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I like the physical look of it, but haven’t yet gotten over the “hey, it’s glass, be careful reaction”. I haven’t seen the antenna issue, but then I haven’t been on 3G much yet, and I’m not lefty.
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I have to get used to the multitasking and the idea that I can sometimes switch between apps without going back to the home screen. I wonder how hard that’ll take. I was also very used to my first page, and as much as I’m glad I can organize things, not used to it yet.
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Weirdest design decision I’ve seen so far: iBooks for epub has really too wide margins and as far as I can tell, now way to fix.
Links
John Petersen has a brief comparison of some .NET and Ruby code. It’s interesting especially for how much he’s eventually able to clean up the .NET code. That suggests to me that at least some of Ruby’s power is in the community standards for clean code. (Note to self: make a list of favorite Ruby features some day)
Dave Chelimsky has two more posts on RSpec 2, this time some changes in how the generators work. Part 1 and Part 2. At this rate, I’ll be able to update the RSpec chapter soon.
Envy Labs has a new screencast up about LiveReload, which lets you update JavaScript and CSS during development without updating an entire page.
Jeff Kreftmeijer has a nice example of cleaning up a test base with Timecop.
Mark Guzdial writes a little bit about the iPad as a paper replacement versus something that goes beyond paper. Be sure and scroll down for Alan Kay’s comment about whether the iPad is his Dynabook (Spoiler alert: He thinks it’s too consumer package software oriented and doesn’t let people write code on it.) I wish that Apple had let Scratch in to iOS, that would be really cool.