Jason Toy

ipad review

2010-05-03T00:00:00-07:00

ipad review

03 May 2010

I wanted to share my thoughts on the ipad. I bought the 16gb wifi model the day it came out. There are many reviews of the iPad that discuss pros and cons, I will only be discussing technical cons.

iBooks – I’ve read a few books on the ipad. Overall it is a good experience, but there are also a few issues. The device does get a little heavy after holding it for a few hours to read. About half the time when I turn the page, it doesn’t register. This is extremely annoying and the only way for me to deal with it is to make large exaggerated page swiping motions to turn the page. It gets tiring on my hands to have to make so many movements to turn the page. I hope that apple tunes this a bit more. I’ve also had some issues with the free books. I know this is not apple’s issue, but the formatting of many of the books from the Gutenburg project are messed up, missing table of contents, no pictures, and other various problems. One way this could be fixed if is there was a website that allowed anyone to submit changes and fixes to the books and then push the changes back upstream. Anyone using the Gutenburg books will have this problem, not just apple. Another annoying issue with iBooks is that every book I have wanted to but is not available on the iBooks bookstore. This makes it hard for me to read on the device. Books I’ve tried to by so far are: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Getting to Plan B, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I hope that apple selection grows over time, but currently it’s not feasible for me to use.

Safari – I do enjoy browsing in safari, but there are quite a few annoying issues. I often have multiple tabs open and when I switch between tabs, it reloads the page so I have to wait several more seconds to view the page I want to see. The issue seems to be that the iPad has very limited memory and so has to reload the pages. I also can’t use safari as a “real” browser. When I surf on my computer, I usually have at least 20 tabs open that I use as list of things I want to read later. For example, as I am reading an article online,I will see other articles I want to read and open them in new tabs. The iPad currently only supports 9 pages so after you have more then 9 pages, it will start overwriting other pages you had open. This forces me to constantly check to see if there are tabs I don’t want to read anymore and then delete them. The process of opening new tabs is also very annoying. When I open a new tab I usually switch back to the page I was previously reading. This means for every page I open, the browser switches to the new page, I then click on the “all tabs” view and then jump back to my previous page. What would be great is if safari had the ability to add new tabs in the background like you can do on OS X. Alternatively, you could try iCab, an alternative browser, it has a lot of functionality for power users(including opening pages in a background tab and not having to reload the page from the website every time), but it was fairly buggy. The latest update seems to have fixed a lot of these bugs though. Apple likes to tout safari as the best experience for browsing the Internet, but there are many functions that the browser cannot do. Safari should allow plugins so that people can augment their browsing experience. For example, I will never use the built in bookmarks manager because I store all my bookmarks in delicious. I want safari to be integrated with delicious. Another service I use is instapaper where I can save articles for later viewing. These are simple plugins that make browsing so much easier for me. If apple does not do this, then they should allow another browser onto the appstore that allows plugins.

Charging – Most people will need to plug in their iPad into a computer and a wall socket. This is because most computers don’t support the current (9w) that the iPad needs to charge. This is extremely annoying because it means you need to plug in your device to your computer to sync your device and then you need to go plug it into a socket to actually charge it. I wish I was able to charge and sync from the same computer. If my iPad was like the iphone, I would need to plug it in several times a day to get power and that would be extremely annoying, but fortunately I only need to charge the iPad once every few days or even once a week depending on the usage.
Random bugs – For some reason the AppStore and iBook store seems to forget my password and I need to input it several times a day. I read online that some people fixed it by reinstalling the operating system.

Mail client – Mail is a great client, I use it all the time for composing emails, the only issue I see is that there is no unified mail box to see mail from all your different accounts, but that will be fixed in the next operating system update.

Multitasking – Not being able to multitasking on the iPad severely limits the device, for example I use Skype a lot and not being able to view other documents while on a Skype meeting prevents me from getting work done. It’s painful knowing that the iPhone will have multitasking in June, but that the iPad will not get multitasking until the fall.

Guest accounts – The main issue I see also effects the iPhone, but its more dramatic with the iPad. When I bring my iPad outside to where a lot of friends will be, many people end of playing with it. I have a lot of private data on my iPad and people playing around with it will have access to all my data. There should be some way to restrict access to my data, ideally by some kind of guest account where they can still access all the applications on the iPad, but separate from my data.

Fortunately most of the problems I have seen without the iPad can be fixed via a software update and in fact most issues are already being worked on. I do see the iPad as a wonderful device and as a game changer, I look forward to the day where I could potentially replace my laptop with an iPad.

Sent from my Ipad

facebook like translations for your rails app

2009-10-07T00:00:00-07:00

facebook like translations for your rails app

07 October 2009

Last year I wrote a plugin for Sanbit, the language learning site I was working at the time that allowed you to add a facebook style translation system to your application, I call it Sanbit Translations. When a user turns on translation mode, all the translation strings in your application appear with an underline to notify the user that they can translate those strings. The user then right clicks on the strings and a window popups where the user can add their own translation or vote on the other submitted translations. The plugin uses jquery and the jquery right click plugin to work. When Sanbit Translations sees translation mode turned on (just an instance variable), it then adds a translatable class to all elements in the DOM that are translatable. It is up to you to put in your own styling for how you want the text to look while in translation mode. Using this plugin can help you save time when developing your app because users of the site can help you translate the site into other languages. I didn’t publish the plugin because I wasn’t and am still not satisfied with the design. The plugin has dependencies on specific javascript code, controller code, and views to function properly. I do think the system is really cool though and I’m publishing it now in the hopes of getting feedback and new ideas. The tests are all passing, so please fork away and start editing the code.

Delicious and Instapaper

2009-09-21T00:00:00-07:00

Delicious and Instapaper

21 September 2009

I’ve been using Delicious for the past few years to bookmark my websites, a lot of people don’t use it anymore, but it gets the job done for me. Just recently I’ve also started to use Instapaper to read offline articles on my iphone. I didn’t want to have to save a url in both delicious and instapaper so I wrote a sintra application where you put in your delicious and instapaper credentials and it will copy over the bookmarks from one service to another. You can also tell it what tags you want to pull bookmarks over from, if you don’t put any tags in, it will just copy over all your bookmarks. I call it del2ip, you can use it here. The only major thing I don’t like about it is that it requires your delicious password. The bookmarks are public anyway, so I don’t understand why yahoo forces you to authenticate with your password. I might change the code later to just scrape the bookmarks so a password is not required. The source code is also available on github. Check it out

Why do event sites suck?

2009-09-11T00:00:00-07:00

Why do event sites suck?

11 September 2009

It is 2009 and I still really hate all the event finding sites that exist. I have tried very hard to use many of these sites to no avail. I can’t find anything I’m interested in, often I know of an existing event, but it doesn’t show up which makes me think that their databases are extremely inaccurate, and the user interfaces are crowded with too much stuff that I don’t care about. The event sites are explicitly designed around location, meaning I should search for events based solely on what area am I at. This works for most cases, but there are several cases where I don’t really care about the location. For example: rubyconf is a yearly weekend conference that changes its location every time. I don’t care where it is, but I definitely want to go. Another example: a few months ago I started to do a lot more iphone development work, I was living in Boston during the time, I wanted to go to some iphone related conferences. I found out from lots of google searching that there was an iphone development conference coming up in a week at yahoo’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, CA. I decided to go and I had a blast, but I would have had a hard time finding this event if I was using a location based event search, let alone if that event site even had the data pertaining to this event. The biggest event sites seem to be upcoming.org, zvents.com, eventful.com, craigslist.org, and meetup.com

On each of those sites, I tried searching for the events “startup school”, “rubyconf”, and “Burning Man.” Only Burning Man returned any results at all, and none were related to events, but instead results for people’s profiles.

Meetup.com has lots events that I’m interested in, but they only store their own meetups and not all events. The part that is really frustrating to me about their site though is that they force me to receive emails for each group I join, so if I am want to follow a few different groups, then I receive lots of SPAM mail everyday.

In regards to craigslist, when I view the events listings, a large portion of the listings are not even events, therefore it wastes my time.
Eventful and zvents just have so much other non event related stuff that I am not interested in.

Here is what I propose:

To solve the problem of inaccurate data, I think a spider should be employed that searches the web for events and adds them into the database. This along with allowing users to add and update data on the site will result in a more accurate picture of what events are going on.

A user should be able to choose categories that they are interested in, then when they come back to the site, they will see upcoming evens for those categories.

Events should have some kind of reputation/score system that is calculated per user. So for example, if I am interested in ruby, then I would see all the upcoming ruby events in my area, but if there was an upcoming huge ruby event (like rubyconf) coming up that was way out of my area, then I would still be presented information about this event.

There should be some kind of lightweight way to notify users of upcoming events so if there is an event that the user is likely interested in, then the site will email that user, but if the user has visited the site and already knows of these events, then they won’t be notified via email.

There should be other ways to notify a user of upcoming events. Email is great as lowest common denominator, but personally I don’t like receiving so many notifications via email because I have to manually delete each email. Other notification systems like twitter or facebook should be an option.

The user interface should be as simple as possible, I have no need to to see a list of restaurants nearby the event or movies playing nearby, I can use a dedicated site for those things that will do a much better job.

Tight integration with calendering software so that I can easily keep a record of attending this event. For example I keep my personal schedule in ical, but any software could be used.

My tastes might be a little bit different from mainstream audiences, but really all I want to do is follow all the upcoming programming and entrepreneur events and conferences around me. I don’t think my requirements for an events site are that high, but why does such a site not currently exist?

I think that building a new piece of software around these concepts will make a good events site that will create value and save more time for people.

Rails plugins and routes

2009-08-19T00:00:00-07:00

Rails plugins and routes

19 August 2009

While extracting some code I wrote for sanbit to put into a rails plugin, I ran into a few problems getting the routes to work. I finally figured it out after wasting a couple of hours debugging. The rails docs say that if you have a plugin with a routes.rb in “vendor/plugins/yourplugin/config/”, then it will automatically load up your routes file. That is partially true. For that to work you must also have an apps directory inside of your plugin root. It doesn’t matter if the directory is empty, it just needs to be there. This seems to me like a case of too much magic in rails and not enough documentation. Well, hope this can save other people some time.

iPhone Dev Camp 3

2009-08-02T00:00:00-07:00

iPhone Dev Camp 3

02 August 2009

A few days ago I decided to attend iPhone Dev Camp 3 at Yahoo’s Head Quarters in Sunnyvale, CA. It was a 3 day event starting Friday evening. Most of the event consisted of a hackfest where teams built a project of their choice and present it towards the end of the conference.

My team choose to build an iphone app that uploads your photos based on your gps location to a public “event” where everyone can share their pictures. Its a cool app because it creates a shared photo album online. The vibe of the event was awesome because everyone was working really hard on their projects. My team was the last team to leave the yahoo campus becuase we were working hard to get the project done. Another cool thing about my team was that we all met eachother on the first day of the conference.

I took this picture while we were on stage demoing our app

The team that one “coolest app award” wrote an app that showed a wall of twitter users, everytime they sent a tweet, their avatar would bounce a send a wave to the surrounding avatars, pretty much they copied the idea from WWDC that showed what apps where being purchased. it was a pretty cool looking application, but not of real practical use.

One app presentation was pretty lame, they “wrote” an app that allowed you to rent out your car to other people, turn on the car you are renting, and beep the horn of the rented car. During the presentations though, they just explained their idea and showed a video of what their app was supposed to do, they didn’t have the code completed, but they won an award for “most potential to make money” :(

I’m somewhere in that picture, can you find me!

Besides the hackfest, there were also various talks given, although I didn’t attend any of them as I was busy hacking away. One thing I noticed about the event was that there were lots of people who were novice iphone developers and even a bunhc of poeple who had never programmed for the iphone. I wish there was a more even distribution of developer levels, I wanted to meet more of the advanced developers so I could learn more tips from them.

I really think that these kinds of confereces are really awesome to meet other cool developers and get a chance to work on some cool projects. This dev camp had over 500 people attend!! All in all it was an awesome event.

Railscamp

2009-07-22T00:00:00-07:00

Railscamp

22 July 2009

I just came back from railscamp New England edition. It was one of the best programming events I have been to. It was a mix of a hackfest, tech talks, binge drinking, and LAN parties. One of the things that made it great was that there was no internet. It was in the middle of the woods up in Maine, fortunately qrush brought a copy of all the rubyforge gems so we were able to continue hacking away on our projects.

I’m sure there have been other events like this, but this is the first time I experienced it, I definitely think there should be more events like this. It allowed everyone to get to know eachother very well in a short period of time. The event was for a weekend, not too long or too short. The only thing I would have changed is to make it a little bigger, maybe 50 people, there were about 30 people there. Any bigger and you would have lost the intimacy.

The event was purposely loosely organized, which made it awesome, we spent most of the day hacking away at code sprinkled in with a few talks about various projects. Then at night we drank, had a LAN party, and played some werewolf. Railscamp was held at Maine MountainView House in Bryant Pond, Maine. Pat Allan and Brian Cardarella put up the event, but it could not have been so much fun without everyone there, thanks guys! I highly recommend that other ruby groups put up theses events, I would definetly go!

I also uploaded a bunch of pictures.

Introduction

2009-07-02T00:00:00-07:00

Introduction

02 July 2009

This is my first time writing my own blog. I don’t believe I have anything interesting to say, but I will post random thoughts about coding, traveling, and life. The source code for this blog is also available at http://github.com/jtoy/blog. So currently in my life I am spending a lot of my time programming in ruby, jquery/javascript and Objective-C. I have also been playing a bit with clojure, but have not had a chance to use it in a real project. I just recently got my scuba diving license and plan to scua dive as often as I can. I have also been learning how to sail, that is pretty fun, I think it would be a good idea to one day try sailing around the world, anyone interested in going with me :) ?