Have you ever been using your iPhone, in the middle of sending a text message to a friend when you realize it would just be easier to call them and talk it out? With the current interface you have to leave the SMS application, navigate to your contacts using either Phone or Contacts, find the number and tap it. Not the end of the world if only happened rarely, but I find myself going through this pain quite often. ...
Disclaimer: I am a mac user, but a windows programmer. MFC is Microsoft’s old Window framework. Basically it is an object oriented wrapper around the traditional Win32 programming environment presented by Microsoft to help develop windows. Win32 is many years old, and so is MFC. Microsoft’s new frameworks, .NET and WPF (Windows Presentation Framework) are supposedly better than MFC, but I have yet to play with them. MFC has tools for many different types of controls, from buttons to dialogs, windows, and menus. MFC allows the user to create the button, override some basic functionality, provide message callbacks and otherwise manipulate the application. Buttons are particularly interesting because the base class for buttons actually provides a ton of functionality for many different types of buttons. From this one class, you can get push buttons, check boxes, radio buttons, owner draw buttons (the programmer handles the rendering of these buttons), etc. ...
John Gruber nails it: Apple’s biggest problem isn’t with its product quality (which, overall, remains very high), but with its communication to customers. If your reading this blog, you probably know that I’m a big Apple fan. I will stand up for Apple all over the place, but I have been increasingly frustrated with their communication, this needs to change.
Wil Shipley wrote a blog post on the Mojave Experiment whereby Microsoft “proved” that Vista is a great operation system. I think Wil makes a couple of really powerful points in his article, but there is one that I feel he leaves out. These people were shown what they thought to be the NEXT version of Windows. I think there is probably some tolerance built in for people looking at what they believe to be the next version. Something like, “If this OS was ready, they’d be shipping it already, so this probably just some sort of prototype.” If they said you had to use this OS, starting today until the end of time, I’m sure they would have had more questions and perhaps formed a very different view on the whole situation. ...
Mint.com is a financial site that allows you to log into one system to see all of your finances. Basically, it is as if you were able to take all your separate accounts and move them to one bank view. It’s really quite interesting, and I”m excited about getting on top of all my finances on a daily basis. Also of note, it has a really good feature to tell you if you are saving money or losing money over the past 6 months. Even though I’m still in debt, I was very excited to see that I was still going in the right direction! ...