Google Wave
Finally got an invite onto Google Wave. If you’ve never heard of it before, here is a short video on what it is and some of the things it can do.
I’d like to setup my own wave server long term and just federate over to Google’s (and other people’s systems).
Firedfox
I started using Firefox as my web browser when it was still called Phoenix around version 0.5/0.6. Previously I was using Netscape Communicator which had become a bloated mess.
At the time Firefox was a breath of fresh air. It was just a browser without all the mail, IRC client, web page designer that came with Netscape. It was very fast. It had cool features like tabs. Linux was well supported.
Over time this has changed and I find Firefox getting slower and less relevant. The developers seem to be under the impression that Firefox users are their personal army to push web standards. I only used Firefox because it’s a tool not because of any social movement.
Things like how Firefox handles SSL, specifically self-signed certificates are a pain compared to other browsers. I hate it when my browser crashes and I lose all open tabs/windows. Things seem to get worse every new Firefox release.
In the past I didn’t have much of a choice, I had to put up with this as under Linux there wasn’t anything else available. That however has changed with Google Chrome. It’s much better than Firefox ever was and I’m now using it full time.
The GNOME developers have also dropped Firefox/Gecko and are moving to WebKit. This is the same engine Google Chrome uses as well. In the very near future, I except Firefox will no longer be the default browser in most Linux distributions.
On Windows, I also expect Firefox usage will drop. Microsoft has made Internet Explorer v8 much better and somewhere in Redmond they are working on v9, v10, etc. As people upgrade to Windows 7, willl they keep using Firefox? I suspect IE will start be “good enough” for most people.
On the Mac, most people are going to use the default and that is Safari.
When you look at the mobile scene it’s much the same. Microsoft is going to use IE in Windows Mobile devices. Google has another WebKit based browser for Android. Apple has Safari on the iPhone. Nokia will use WebKit as they now own QT.
Notice how the industry seems to be standardizing on WebKit? The odd man out there is Firefox. Who is going to use Fennec on their phone?
Another thing to consider is that the Mozilla Corporation gets most of their funding from Google. It’s not very hard to see that coming to an end too as Chrome becomes more important.
iPhone 3GS
Finally got a iPhone 3GS. They have been sold out in Canada and some what hard to get up here. Got a friend to pick me one up in Hong Kong. As a bonus the phone is unlocked (it’s against the law in Hong Kong to sell carrier locked phones) so I can use it on any GSM carrier.
I defintely noticed the speed increase on the 3GS compared to my old 3G. New camera is nicer. Haven’t tried the video out yet or the compass.
It’s a decent upgrade for sure.
Snow Leopard Install
Got my copy of Snow Leopard today. I’m in the process of installing it now on my Macbook. The install was straightforward as you can see from the screenshots below. I don’t expect any issues.
Note there is an iPhone SDK available for Snow Leopard now (400MB download) at the iPhone Dev Center
Snow Leopard
Apple is now taking pre-orders for OSX 10.6 a/k/a Snow Leopard. It will ship on Aug 28th. It cost me $35 CDN to upgrade from 10.5. If I had bought a mac recently it would have been $9.95.
Too bad Apple insists on phyical CDs. Would be nicer to just buy an ISO and I could burn my own DVD to upgrade.
Hopefully this upgrade won’t cause any issues with XCode/iPhone development.
MMATracker 2.4
MMATracker v2.4 has been submitted to Apple. Changes in this release:
- Fixed problems with MMAJunkie news feed
- Show title/description for news articles
- Replace WAMMA with Strikeforce in Champions view
- Remove deprecated APIs
Note that MMATracker now requires OS 3.x so if you are still using 2.x now would be a good time to upgrade.
Screenshot of news view in portrait:
In landscape:
ASCII vs UTF8
We got some email from MMATracker users saying that the MMAJunkie RSS feed wasn’t working in the application any more.
The code that I was using:
NSURL *xmlURL = [NSURL URLWithString:URL];
NSError *err = nil;
NSString *xmlFeed = [[NSString alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:xmlURL encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error:&err];
if (err) {
// handle error
}
After some trial/error, I determined the problem was the encoding. It was ASCII instead of UTF8. The feed is coming from Feedburner which is owned by Google. Seems odd they would stop using UTF8.
To fix this, I used the following code:
NSURL *xmlURL = [NSURL URLWithString:URL];
NSError *err = nil;
NSString *agentString = @"MMATracker";
NSMutableURLRequest *req = [[NSMutableURLRequest alloc] initWithURL:xmlURL];
[req setValue:agentString forHTTPHeaderField:@"User-Agent"];
NSData *data = [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:req returningResponse:nil error:&err];
NSString *xmlFeed = [[NSString alloc] initWithBytes:[data bytes] length:[data length] encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
if (xmlFeed == nil) {
xmlFeed = [[NSString alloc] initWithBytes:[data bytes] length:[data length] encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding];
}
if (err) {
// handle error
}