Mostly Cloudy is no good.
With the cloud, you don’t own anything. You already signed it away… the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we’re going to have control over it.- Woz
A Colourable iOS 7 Map Pin (Photoshop)
For anyone developing iOS 7 maps-enabled apps, you probably know that the pin image has changed for this version of iOS. iOS has long limited the provided pin colours to Red, Green and Purple. Here is a layered Photoshop file that we used in the latest version of AthensBook and you can use to change the pin colour. Besides the base layer, there are two hue-saturation-brightness layers. You use the first layer titled ‘Brightness’ to change the brightness of the colour. Don’t touch the hue or saturation sliders on this layer. The second layer allows you to change the hue…
Ten Dollar Fonts.
Some weird, some cool, only three seem to contain Hellenic glyphs (and two of those only seem to have uppercase glyphs). The lack of good, free (or affordable) hellenic typefaces is extremely disappointing.
Mind your Mind Share
It is almost 6 years since Apple announced and released the iPhone. I still remember Steve Jobs mentioning that his goal for the first year was to get 10M iPhones shipped; at the time almost 1% of the global mobile telephony market share. The goal seemed totally unrealistic to anyone involved in the industry as that would amount to several millions of units sold for a device that was, in many ways, severely lacking and overpriced (at launch). The iPhone came out, and despite having significantly inferior technical specifications in some of the most crucial benchmarks, such as the quality…
SimCity (2013)
Of all the games that I’ve played over the past twenty five years or so, SimCity, in its various incarnations, has to be the one that I cherish and have spent time playing the most. Ever since I laid my eyes on the first version of SimCity in the early 1990s, I became enamored with it: it possessed this rare and seemingly magical quality you’ll get by reading books — one that you seldom get by playing video games, at least as far as I am concerned: it allows you to engage your imagination, think about aspects of the game…
On CalDAV and Google.
People are annoyed about the demise of Google Reader. Yet more than Google Reader, a service I've used and loved for more than 7 years, I am truly annoyed by the fact that Google is canning CalDAV. And not just because CalDAV is an open, free and widely used protocol (all very good things), but because, in the past, Google has been a champion of open protocols, because its support for CalDAV was reaffirmed only two months ago when it dropped Exchange Support from its Google Docs apps. Because it demonstrates that Google has been somewhat cavalier with its use of 'Openness'.