Tag development

Rollercoaster.

Για την ομάδα του AthensBook οι τελευταίοι μήνες είναι ένα rollercoaster από πολλές πλευρές. Μια αέναη ακολουθία projects, χτίζοντας υποδομές, λογισμικό, συνεργασίες. Προχθές ανακοινώσαμε τον κύκλο Private Beta για το Android, μια έκδοση για την οποία πλέον λαμβάνουμε πολλαπλά email την εβδομάδα — και ήδη μέσα σε περίπου δυο ημέρες από την ανακοίνωση έχουμε δεκάδες […]

The Olympic Legacy

I just read this article on Guardian (via Buzz) regarding the legacy of the sporting venues created for the Olympics and whether they're worth it. Living in Athens for the past three years it's become clear to me that most people --- including myself until very lately --- is unaware that they can, cheaply, access some of the facilities created for the 2004 Olympics, for example the Olympic swimming centre. It has been clear that most of the facilities have been under lock and key and unavailable to anyone wishing to use them. Then there's the case of 'The Mall', the huge shopping mall that was created just after the games and which seems to be illegally built (a story widely publicised [in Hellenic], but largely ignored), but also a recent report [in Hellenic] by the Hellenic private TV station 'Alpha' claiming that the main building of the Olympic Village was given by the Hellenic government to a monastery which then sold it. It's, therefore, unclear to me whether the Olympic facilities are really a burden or whether Athens is such a bad example upon which this conclusion is drawn. With proper management, more public interest and --- if anything --- no multi-billion euro scandals, I'm pretty sure that the Olympic investments could be beneficial to many hosts. Barcelona comes to mind.

It's been really exhausting porting stuff to OS X

Justin Frankel lists a few reasons why Apple's developer resources suck. While OS X has some of the most modern, most powerful APIs around, much of their functionality is undocumented, forcing developers to spend countless hours reading header files or even reverse engineering while getting to know how to use them.

Resampling Needed

Those using Firefox 3.0 may have noticed that by default when someone scales the content of a page, the images are resized too, a behaviour long-pioneered by Opera. Those using Firefox 3.0 on linux will be sorry to find out that upscaled images are not resampled using anything but what seems to be nearest neighbour (I haven't checked the code): they are ugly, pixelated and definitely not pleasant to the eye. This is well documented on the Mozilla Bugzilla repository and sadly it may be the case that it's not fixed until Firefox 3.0 final is out. Which is a shame, as many people with higher resolution displays, especially high-resolution laptop displays that sometimes reach approximately 150dpi actually depend on the scaling functionality to be able to read stuff properly. Ironically GTK+ offers pretty decent image scaling functionality and hopefully it's not that hard to make use of it in Firefox in the near future. Here's an illustration of the problem. The picture on the left shows the original (unscaled) content of the ΜΠΛΟΟΓΚΛ hellenic blog search engine. The one in the middle shows the scaled version, as shown in Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 that shipped with Ubuntu 8.04. The one on the right shows a resampled version of the image using the (pretty computationally expensive) lanczos algorithm, which although not probable as a solution it's quite close to the (realistically possible) bilinear resampling for upscaled images of this size. Image Upscaling in Firefox 3.0B5 (Linux) You can follow the progress on this issue on the Mozilla Bug tracking page here.

Exploring Android: Preliminaries

Android is out and it seems pretty well designed. This is the first of what’s hopefully going to be a series of articles covering Android from cosmix.org. It’s also going to be the least technical in nature as I haven’t had much time to play around with it and also because introductions should rarely be […]

Android and the Open Handset Alliance.

Apple may have produced a great, polished and closed device in the iPhone. Revolutionary? Nope, but very impressive nevertheless. As a device, as a user interface and — soon — as a platform. Yet in some years from now, what will probably be the iPhone’s single most significant contribution to the world was the belief […]

Open Sesam…err iPhone.

A few completely unfounded (arguably bordering on stupid) excuses by salesman Steve. GBs of criticism on the web. A botched attempt at Reality Distortion. Numerous hacks. Dozens of semi-illegal third-party applications. Many bricked iPhones. And, now? Apple's spectacular realisation that the iPhone won't glitter forever. It was about time Apple did things right. The industry is not kidding. This is only the beginning...

Arduino

I foresee countless hours of fun with this. I'll try to find one or --- if I don't --- I'll build a board over Xmas. If only my undergrad PIC/digital design courses were that much fun. Check out the video from Makezine for a short introduction.

Photo by Nicholas Zambetti. Taken from arduino.cc

The UI Ghosts

A common joke amongst Mac developers is talking about the Apple HIG, or more specifically the subject of how Apple manages to flout every single principle in user interface design and especially its own in successive revisions of OS X. I've written about this, in one way or another, several times ever since Jaguar came out in August 2002 and the first signs of this disturbing trend became obvious. New UI widgets, new styles and disregard to the HIG continued over the years with Panther, Tiger and now Leopard --- each revision bringing its own flavour of user interface widgets, colour themes and designs, each proving that Apple has no idea what 'consistency' means and that contrary to what they may tell you you should write your own custom widgets or you're probably screwed if you don't (Apple probably writes and uses more undocumented and custom widgets and controls than anyone). With Aqua so close to becoming part of UI history and Leopard just around the corner, bringing with it yet another completely different UI theme to OS X, it should probably not be surprising when Apple's own Developer Connection web site sports such an inconsistent look. The UI ghosts of yesteryear are still around!