Jawbone ERA vs. BlueAnt Q3
Nicholas Riley compares these headsets for listening to podcasts. I’m very happy with my Jawbone ERA except that there’s no button (or tap) to pause/play the podcast or music. This only works for calls.
Archive for May 31, 2013
C Quiz
The C language is perhaps the most popular computer language in existence, but it’s also quite odd, and because of that often poorly understood. I’d like to give you a quiz to see how much you know about some of the odd but useful corners of the language.
The strangest one for me is that free(NULL) is defined as a no-op. I seem to remember reading or being taught early on that this was dangerous. CFRelease will indeed crash, although some variants like CGImageRelease will not.
Adobe Kuler 1.0
Today, Adobe released an iOS app for capturing and tinkering with color palettes. The palettes can then be automatically saved for retrieval through the Kuler web site, or shared via email or Twitter.
Clear in the iCloud
Milen Dzhumerov (via Drew McCormack):
There has been a lot of talk about iCloud + CoreData (referred to as iCCD hereafter) over the past few months and I think it is a good time for me to share our journey in getting iCloud integrated in Clear. If you do not want to read through all the details: Clear uses a custom system built on top of iCloud File Storage and it works in a similar fashion to Operational Transformation. The post proceeds to cover the reasons for choosing iCloud, then explores iCCD and subsequently builds a synchronisation system from the ground up.
This is a good strategy, although iCloud file storage also has some issues. It’s important to note that both iCloud Core Data and and Operational Transformation involve syncing sets of changes, but they work at different levels of abstraction. Core Data syncs lower level database transactions, while OT works with higher-level user-oriented actions.
The Life and Death of Camino
Camino was my browser of choice during the early days of OS X and it was an incredible browser. It was the Mac’s first Gecko-driven Cocoa browser as Firefox was Carbon-based right up until 2008. Camino was the Google Chrome of its day - fast, slick and a great looking app.
I am saddened that Camino must die in the effort to save Firefox, a browser that has gotten just a bloated as the Netscape Suite it once replaced. By losing Camino we will not only see the end of a browser that once made the Mac great, but the end of a development community focused solely on the advancement of a great Macintosh application.
Alas, though Chrome and Firefox have good rendering engines, they do not have fully native Mac user interfaces. Safari has both, but its engine has reliability and memory problems.
