I would absolutely love to have this - I can’t even tell you how fun this would be. It would make dict.cn and nciku.com usable when away from the computer. Man… my iPhone wants this badly.

I hope this is true, and I really hope it doesn’t have some sort of regional lock down or something. This would be such a boon while studying.

Ok, enough drooling…

I downloaded the first SDK, but I found it to be less than useful since you had to build the UI by hand. It seemed to be kind of like AWT when it first came out - where you had to instantiate controls, and place them by hand in code. I just couldn’t find the time to try to mess with that - guessing Apple would do this update at some point.

Interface Builder is the standard UI building application on Mac, and it’s probably the best one I’ve used. I can’t wait to have some time to checkout this version of the SDK.

I want my iPhone to act like an old Nintendo controller that controls a game emulator running on my Mac either via the USB connector or bluetooth.

Now if you are not into retro Nintendo games, and don’t immediately see why this would be totally cool, hear me out - this would be my nirvana situation. (plus the whole "iPhone UI changing to a controller that does things to my Mac via bluetooth" has many other applications)

A lot of people in my generation like old Nintendo games. I still play them, and some of my friends do too. (I am not sure how prevalent the market is, but I would be willing to bet it’s somewhat large, and would be larger if something like this existed).

The whole backlog of the Nintendo catalog could be sold over iTunes, and you could play the games on Apple TV on your computer. Emulators already exist for Mac OS X, and the resources these emulators require is not huge.

Apple could get a sense of the casual gaming market, and Nintendo could make some money off items that are just sitting there. Heck, I mean if they charged $4 per game, it’s money they were not getting before. If it worked out, they could open it up a bit more…

This might even work with the WII titles. The iPhone has XYZ sensors - you could make some really neat games using that. Of course, iPod touches would work as well.

There could even be "lite" versions of the games that continued on the iPhone when you disconnected from the main platform (the laptop or Apple TV or whatever). Like you have to keep feeding your character or it’ll die - I don’t know things like that.

I would be fun if Nintendo released an SDK, or set of tools, to start new games on the old platform too. I’d like to play a new Legend of Zelda game. (I wish they would do that anyway.)

But in it’s simplest form, I’d like a controller application to play emulation games on my Mac. All the pieces are already there. The emulator, game roms (which are currently only legal if you own the physical game I think), and the ability to use USB to control the emulators.

I think if a non-company (aka hacker) is going to make this, they’ll have to use a jail broken iPhone as I think the Apple SDK doesn’t give you access to the USB (an bluetooth?). There is already a jail broken application that does all this already on the iPhone itself, but I almost always have my laptop and phone with me and I’d rather use a bigger screen.

Oh well, one can dream.

The main problem with using it in the browser is I can’t Command+tab to the application to jot down or check off items. I also frequently Command+h (hide) applications, and if it’s in the browser all browser instances hide.

As a quick and dirty fix, I put this lite application together that will give you a GlueyNotes instance on your desktop that you can use as a regular application. It is basically just a web kit wrapper application, but it does the job well enough.

It’s lite because there are some real APIs and web services in place for GlueyNotes (and for the most part working), but I haven’t had time to write a real application that use the APIs - this quick hack works well in the meantime though.

It looks like this:

If you’re using GlueyNotes on Mac, you can download the application here (I’ll slap together a windows and / or linux version if someone wants it).

Since I wrote a couple posts voicing my frustration, I thought I’d post a follow up to say that the new iTunes, and the new firmware update to 1.1.3 have fixed my problems. The iPhone works as it did when I first bought it - ahhh joy.

I’ve used the new location bit in maps quite a few times already, and it works great. I haven’t gotten too far out of civilization yet, but in populated areas it seems to work very well. I also like the map UI overhaul, the old one was confusing.

One really nice feature using location: if you do a route, and then click the location button, it keeps the route information visible so you can see if you are on track.

I also dig the web clip icons. I use my glueynotes application constantly, and having an icon for it is quite a time saver.

(The one think I am still scratching my head on is why is there no contacts button)

iTunes movie rental looks great too. I foresee us renting a lot of movies using iTunes. First one tonight… we’ll see how it goes.

I was watching the demo of the Macbook Air (I wonder if Adobe is upset at that Air thing), and I was thinking, aside from sales people, who’s going to use that? Granted, it is the thinest laptop I’ve ever seen, but I didn’t know thick laptops was a problem.

If you ask me, and I know you didn’t, I think the Macbook Air should have been Apple’s ebook. If they could have slapped another screen where the keyboard is, made the whole thing all touch-sensitive iphone-like, with page flipping with finger flicks - that would’ve been awesome.

I mean, iTunes for the book store… books are so small you probably can deliver them over the cell network, maybe even daily newspaper subscriptions… Heck, Apple is already big in schools… what college student wouldn’t want to carry a single 3 lbs. book as opposed to 5 books the size of my head? Even in addition to a laptop, most students have like 30 lbs of books.

I haven’t actually touched a Macbook Air, but from the looks of it it looks like it would even rest in your hands correctly like a book. And Apple is traditionally about publishing. I think they could have / would have crushed the ebook market (if indeed there is money in it).

Maybe this is the route they are going to be taking, and this is a first run with the manufacturer or something. However, as I sit here in my arm chair with my $600 in the bank, my obvious superior strategic sense says Apple missed the mark a bit on this one.

I just put up a new version of GlueyNotes, there are quite a few under-the-hood changes, but not many client visible changes.

One new visible feature (that is often requested) is you can now be logged into several devices at the same time. Before you were limited to one device due to possible edit conflicts. However, now there is a conflict checker, and I boosted the number of logins to 4. This should also limit the number of times you have to login, as you wont get logged out when switching devices.

Another visible change is basic help - another oft requested feature. The help documentation is somewhat nasty looking at present, but I will be updating it soon (I am using it as the main testing ground for WebArchive Extractor).

I also put a forum together for the application - it is currently quite bare, but if you have questions, comments, or suggestions you want to get in the queue you can post them there.

For a bit of history, I moved off of Windows in 1997 and on to Linux - Debian mostly (Wow, I haven’t used Windows as my main OS for 10 years!). Back then it took a lot of tweaking to get Linux to work right. I don’t mean customizing, I mean tweaking to get it to even work.

While tinkering under the hood was educational and fun, it was a bit of a pain when it was time to do some actual work. I frequently found myself spending time working on getting my environment to work before I could do any work. I couldn’t get much work done that way so I moved to Mac about three years ago - specifically for the work flow, ease of use, and stability.

Now, however, Linux just works (in so much as Mac and Windows “just work”). Ubuntu installs easily, supports most hardware (WPA wireless with no tweaking on my part!), and comes with a slew of free programs.

It is not my intention to bash Mac or Leopard. I think they are both amazing feats of engineering and craftsmanship; however, Leopard isn’t working for me. I find it unstable, buggy, and disk thrashing - I want to use it I truly do, but it doesn’t want me to. It’s the nicest looking OS I have ever seen, and the improvements are theoretically cool, but for day to day work, it’s failing horribly for me.

So I have a few choices. Wait for an unspecified amount of time for bugs that are unacknowledged to be fixed, downgrade to Tiger, or peruse other options. Number one happens by default and number 2 and 3 are such a pain in the behind, that I might as well look at number 3 just to see (in case this kind of situation is going to become a trend).

My Leopard Workflow Problems

To cut off suggestions that I am over reacting, or making things up, here are a few things that have been happening since Leopard:

* Everyday at least one application crashes while I am working on something. This was unheard of in Tiger, and one of the main reasons I moved off Windows 10 years ago. I haven’t lost this much work since I used Windows.

* Sometimes every application crashes. It’s the darnedest thing, but every couple of days every single app will crash at the same time. The OS doesn’t crash, just every running program. I get an array of “Would you like to send…” windows, then everything starts working again (for a while).

* My account got removed from the admin group for no reason.

* My iPhone now only syncs 30% of the time (I suspect USB code changes, but I have no proof). The rest of the time iTunes beach balls and I have to force quit. Sometimes I have to reboot the OS just to get my very expensive phone to sync (and that is only good for one sync, then I need to reboot again).

* My firewire iSight doesn’t work with some programs anymore.

* The hard drive starts thrashing every once in a while causing the beach ball and I can’t work. I have to sit there and wait. Sometimes it lasts 20 seconds sometimes 4 minutes (one time 15 minutes).

* Sometimes in Mail.app the create new message button doesn’t do anything, and I have to quit and restart the app just to send a message.

* My wifes keyboard on her MacBook randomly stops working. 10.5.1 seemed to fix this for her.

I have clean installed the OS four times (twice on my Powerbook, twice on my PowerMac), and both computers exhibit these behaviors. Odds are if it is happening on two computers it’s not just me.

It is important to note that I have more problems on my G4 computers then my wife has on her intel computer. So it could have something to do with that, but I can’t spend another $2,000 to buy a new computer when the two I have fall well within the specs for running Leopard.

Ubuntu Powerbook Install

I tried to install Ubuntu 7.10 on my PowerBook G4 as a test. Sadly this didn’t work out very well. After a bit of messing around, I got it to install; however, it had some random problems - the worst being that it lost all network interfaces after apt-get upgrade (NetworkManager seems to get horked after the first security update).

Some quick tips for anyone trying this:

* You’ll probably need to be wired when you install because the network card needs proprietary drivers. I used a netgear pcmcia card I had laying around.

* When you first boot the livecd, you’ll likely have to boot the kernel with flags. What I used was (enter this at the boot: prompt):

live-nosplash-powerpc resolution=1024x768 vga=795 video=ofonly

* If you get it to install (I had the computer freeze once during install), to right click press the F12 key. You can setup ctrl+click = right click by editing /etc/default/mouseemu and uncommenting out the lines:

MID_CLICK="-middle 125 272"
RIGHT_CLICK="-right 29 272"

and then:

$sudo /etc/init.d/mouseemu restart

(via viraj.org)

* The cool effects (comp-biz or whatever) worked very well on my PowerBook G4 with 1.25GB RAM.

* The Apple function keys seem to work fine (volume, brightness, eject, etc)

* There is no Adobe Flash support for Linux on PowerPC

Installing Ubuntu on an Apple PowerBook G4, for me, was like it was installing Debian back in the late 90s. It is not as easy as most other installs with Ubuntu, and not everything is going to work (You wont be able to just close the lid and have the laptop go to sleep anymore, you’ll have to shutdown every time). Prepare for a lot of file tweaking.

In the end, I think if you’re looking to move to Ubuntu, sell the Apple hardware on eBay and buy new computers with the money you get from that.

(For example, I am running Ubuntu on a Thinkpad T23, and it works flawlessly).

Yikes, I am locked in.

The one thing I learned from this, is I am currently locked into Apple stuff. I didn’t quite realize it until now though - it never really hit home. For example, if I moved back to Linux I would have no way of syncing my iPhone. I also have an Airport Extreme, and near as I can tell, I can’t edit any of the Airport settings from Linux. Let alone my iTunes purchases. Wow, I am toast.

I always imagined I could just install Ubuntu on my Apple hardware if it ever got down to it, but it seems that it is not that easy. By the way, hats off to the open firmware guys and yaboot - I was impressed that Ubuntu actually could install on and support most Mac hardware.

If you are running intel hardware, you are not likely in this same boat. You can probably use boot camp to easily dual boot or use vmware.

My lesson learned here is - single vendor lock in is limiting on your personal maneuverability, no matter how cool the products seem to be. If the company you are hooked in with starts putting out stuff you don’t like, the economy takes a dump and you can’t afford their stuff, or you disagree with something, your options are limited.

(Written on my Ubuntu Thinkpad T23 while I am installing Leopard for a third time on my Powerbook. Holding to the hope that the problems I am having were things I somehow did wrong.)

It looks at your browsers preferred language and if it’s Chinese (zh_CN) displays the UI in Chinese. So if you want to see the Chinese site, you have to set your preferred language in the browser. If you’re just curious as to what it looks like, here is a screen shot:

There are not many people that use GlueyNotes in China, but there are a few actually.

I also added support for the Android platform. I am not sure if there are any Android phones in the wild yet, but it seems to somewhat work with the emulator. Since the browser is based on WebKit I am not all that surprised, but it’s kind of neat that it works almost out of the box (if you have an iphone web application you might want to check out Android too).

Consider Android support beta though. Android seems to have problems with a few ajax calls, and text area entry oddities; however, the bugs could be due to the emulator.