Angus Thinks

Author: AngusThinks

  • USB connectable mobile phone

    Simple thought today: a USB mobile phone. So you could just plug it straight into a laptop or something, without bluetooth or infra-red. I think Motorola tried something like this with the timeport 280 and also the A920; but I never learnt whether it was much of a sucess (unlikely given earlier timeport designs).

    Better yet if the phone could be charged and synchronized over the usb cable while connected.

    Obviously that doesn’t mean that I don’t like bluetooth any more, I’m still very much in favour of bluetooth. But now I like USB as well. 🙂

  • SQLEditor Cocoa B6 Due for release.

    SQLEditor Cocoa Beta 6 has been released. Beta 6 offers a number of significant enhancements and improvements, plus several bug fixes.

    • Fields can now be dragged from one table to another.
    • The list of data types can now be edited and changed
    • Improved preferences options
    • Better printing, including scaling, tiling and fit to page.
    • New buttons to add a sibling field to a table or delete the currently inspected one
    • C-shaped connectors are back. (This is where a connector loops back on itself if it would otherwise overlap either the source or destination field)
    • You can now change the colors of objects. This is a global setting at the moment. Individual color changing is coming soon
    • A few minor bug fixes
    • Slightly altered the appearance of the table object view
    • First version of online help. As yet incomplete.

    This new version expires on September 30th 2004.

    Why not download it now?

    SQLEditorCB6.dmg[355k]

  • Very slight redesign of MalcolmHardie.com website

    Observant readers may notice a slight change to the malcolmhardie.com website (if you came in from there). The fonts for the titles have been resized and the stupid red boxes have been removed. Hopefully it all looks more visually cohesive. Titles now reduce in size as they become less important for instance.

    I’m still intending to switch the whole lot to xml/xslt/php, but I’ve deferred deployment for a while until some other things are out of the way. The new version is up and running on the test server but I think it needs a bit more work before it can be released.

  • NSLog

    I just realised that NSLog allows parameters. I’d previously been using

    NSLog([NSString stringWithFormat:@"%d",randomVar]) ...

    But now I realise that the I don’t really need to do this. A simple call to NSLog will work as well.

    NSLog(@"%d",randomVar);

    It still isn’t as easy as php or even java, but it’s shorter and tidier and so better.

  • Missing Email

    I just had the thought that there is email that I should have, but can’t find. Which is bad, given that I’ve been trying to archive all of my email. The key question obviously is where has it gone? And I suspect the answer may be that it is gone forever.

    This might be really bad, alternatively it might not. Who can tell?

    I think the best thing might be to convert my email to html at intervals, rather than leaving it in my email imap server. If it was carefully indexed and sorted it would probably be a better way to to do things.

  • SQLEditor Cocoa B5 Released

    Good news everyone!

    SQLEditor Cocoa version is finally available for download.

    SQLEditor Cocoa offers a Mac OS X native cocoa interface, an improved SQL parser, better performance and some bug fixes.

    Download (325k)

  • Shareware and Serial Numbers

    Not much posting recently. But I’ve been working getting SQLEditor ready for release. The big things recently have been bug fixes and developing a serial number system.

    It’s extremely annoying to have to spend any time at all working on the serial number system, because really the time would be better spent actually improving the software. But given that I actually want people to buy copies of the thing it is sadly necessary.

    I have a simple test program working already and as soon as I develop some kind of key generator system I’ll be able to add it (probably to beta 6).

    Beta 5 is complete, so it should be released tomorrow.

  • Ringtone pricing vs Other Content

    David made an interesting point in a comment recently about the ridiculous prices people are paying for ring tones and how this may be encouraging news for more sophisticated content (like video). If people are willing to pay 50p or more for a few seconds of music in a ringtone, how much might they be willing to pay to see a key goal scored in a football match or an important news story?

    Of course Mazingo tried pocket video stories a while back using a system like avantgo. I think it worked by syncing a pocket pc or palm unit with a server somewhere. Then you got video clips pushed to the unit. The costs eventually got the better of them because the company isn’t really doing that anymore. I think the most likely reason for failure was because they had difficulty charging for a service that was extremely expensive to provide.

    Video over 3G networks has two crucial advantages over Mazingo. The first is that the people operating the system have a proven solid billing and payments system. Ring tone buyers have been useful guinea pigs for more sophisticated products and Vodafone has been running it’s Vodafone live service for some time now. So the payment side of things is working. The other key advantage is people seem willing to pay for services on mobile phones that they wouldn’t if they were buying the service via the internet and a regular PC (Or even to sync to a Pocket PC or Palm device). Somehow the networks have managed to convince users that their mobile phone is something different (and more expensive) and that they should expect to pay. Whether this view can be sustained is difficult to guess, but I suspect that it will probably last a little while yet.

    I don’t know whether this means that 3G services will be sucessful or not. I suspect that eventually people will realise that the wider internet offers more scope and lower prices. The mobile networks may have to accept that their product is really just a commodity.

    How long this takes is the key question though. It makes the difference between recovering the billions spent on 3G licenses and not. I suspect the networks will be paying very close attention to this indeed.

  • Parsing SQL in SQLEditor

    Good progress is being made again on the Cocoa version of SQLEditor. I have recently rewritten the parsing system to use javacc instead of my own home built parser. This allows for better, simpler and more reliable parsing. Writing my own parser was interesting but wasn’t really the best strategy. This new parser should make its way into the java version of SQLEditor eventually.
    A key new feature is that the import system can now report parsing errors to the user. Previously the whole thing just kind of gave up without any indication of what went wrong. BAD!
    Now you get a nice little window (actually a panel) that appears and gives a list of errors. The current development version always shows this window but I’m still trying to decide if it is better to show it on every import or just when something goes wrong.
    The new parser is also much easier to expand to support new features. The old version required a complicated system to add new tokens, the new one has a standard format and requires only a single line.
    The new version should also work reliably on Mac OS X 10.2 or Mac OS X 10.3. Which is a change over the previous version that crashed oddly on 10.3.

  • TV on 3G Mobiles

    According to this BBC Article there is a growing move towards tv programming on mobile phones. The key disadvantage is the amazingly high cost; one of the people interviewed paid $50 for 45 minutes. High pricing seems to be a problem as it so often is for mobile services.

    It does seem like a handy thing though. I suppose Three in the uk is doing something kind of similar, but in a much more limited way, with their streaming video services. It’s even possible that if the price was not unreasonable then I might even use the service myself. Although I would probably have to upgrade my phone to do so. I don’t think anyone is going to manage to offer streaming video on a nokia 6210 🙂