I’m not a big Apple fan.  That should be fairly apparent to anyone who’s read my What I Use page.  Today was the launch of the rather unfortunately named iPad from Apple.  It’s now just over 18 hours since it was announced and while ever Tech journalist, Apple Fan boy and random person has been taking sides in the debate whether this is an awesome of crappy product (Quote of the day today was… “It’s just a big ass iPod Touch”) most people usually forget one thing.

This is version 1.0.

As Mr Jeff Atwood once said (not that it was said that long ago) Version 1 Sucks, But Ship It Anyway.  It will also not be the coolest thing since sliced bread on the first go.  The first version is the idea, the feelers, the does this thing have any real future version.  If the first time you released a product you had every single feature and idea perfectly laid out thought out and working correctly, you either have an extremely tiny one feature product or WAY too much start-up cash.

Everything needs a few revisions and more feedback to help grow the product into what it can be.  Look at the iPhone, the PC, Cars, any software be it desktop, web, mobile, service, framework all need more than one revision to get them right.  While I can easily say I’ve got plenty of feature requests for the iPad, I’m sure for many people it will be an awesome product just ready to be used.

In the meantime, find something better to argue about, like Windows Mobile 7 perhaps :P

I don’t subscribe to the whole dreams thing, but there was one dream the other night that I think needs to be retold.  Especially as I’m currently on a health kick where I’m not eating any Fast Food Chain Food and Fast Food in General.

This crazy dream, myself and another person I don’t know, were touring the world, taste testing Fast Food Chains burgers.  Not only were we touring and taste testing we were critiquing the taste of the burgers and in one particular fast food chain (I believe it was a Burger King) one of the staff got to come touring with us back to Australia to see what Fast Food should taste like, somewhere on this return trip to Australia we were playing soccer in some over grown basketball court.  Strange….

I think this is my brains way of breaking out of the addictive bond that is Fast Food… onto healthier options, hopefully…. day 15, 340 days remaining…

Welcome to 2010.  This post is a few days late.. ok maybe 10, but better late than never.

It seems this year many people are leaving resolutions at the door so they can’t be broken within the first few days of the new year.  Technically I’ve tried to do the same, but I have ended up with just one resolution that should impact most areas of my life.  While it sounds like some big massive resolution I’ll never be able to keep it’s actually really simple.

Be More Disciplined.

The idea behind my resolution of being more disciplined is well I suck at it, I’m inherently lazy.  I could think of nothing better than lazing on the couch watching some random TV show or movie or playing an Xbox game.  However this laziness over the past year has meant I’ve also not released any of my little projects I’m working, hardly posted on this blog and feel like I’m really going nowhere.

How am I implementing my little resolution… one tiny step at a time.  My goals are 1 blog post a week, but if I manage more great, I’m doing fairly well with twitter I think (even though I have less than a thousands tweets a year, I’m not telling everyone when I wake up or go to the toilet and never will).  Just by being slightly more disciplined in my online activities I’ve already started to notice I’m pushing myself to be more disciplined in other areas, daily vitamins, better food decisions, meal planning etc and even being more disciplined with work tasks, not starting too many things at once without getting them finished.

I’ve had plenty of people tell me I need to get a year calendar and cross off days as I do such things, but that just wouldn’t work for me, I’m too digital, trying to find a working pen at my place is a mission in itself.  I need a online product that watches my online lifestyle and keeps me up to date on my goals.

Being a developer, I love to write big brand new spanking things to wow people.  Why do the little things if you can make one awesome big thing.  I’ve read many times and seen quite a few times over the past 4 years of working with businessfitness that it’s really the little things that count.  It’s still great to write big new modules to sell, but the little annoyances are the bits that really piss people off in day to day use of software and fixing those really have the biggest effect on people.

HowNow™ being the fairly large program that it is has quite a few little areas that may not work how people are quite used to seeing them work in other areas of Windows.  These can be caused by a number of different things from components that just won’t play nice to small bugs.  A couple of small examples are… the grid within HowNow has never properly responded to Page Up and Down correctly (it used to only move 1 row up or down) in the current version of HowNow we finally found a way to get the Grid to work correctly so Page Up and Down works like it does in Windows.  Already the few clients on the new version of HowNow are over the moon.  Another example was when searching for a contact the contact name was being highlighted and accidently typed over by some clients, simply no longer highlighting the name has improved the day to day use and efficiencies with our clients.

I’d always encourage any users to let us know if they have any day to day annoyances with our products so we can improve them for you. 

Anyone writing software should try to stop and take a look at a few of the little things every release and just see what might be annoying your users and see if you can’t improve their day.  Now back to writing my huge new feature…

I’ve been talking my way around Tech.Ed for the past few days, and decided to interrogate some of the guys about Windows Mobile 6.5.  Unfortunately they are all very tight lipped guys, but I did receive a few stares with raised eyebrows when I started asking questions from Windows Mobile 6.5.1.

What they will give out is the basic information that can be found on the web, Global Release date is October and all the OEMs supposedly already have WM 6.5.  The problem with WM 6.5 is that anyone following the builds that are almost being leaked daily look very different to the stock marketing images.

The enthusiast named “Windows Mobile 6.5.1” looks like Microsoft are going the way of both Apple and Google and giving users OS updates outside of a normal major release.  The new release moves the start and close/ok buttons to a redesigned bottom button bar, where the bottom of the screen has up to 5 buttons across the bottom (Start, Left Function, Keyboard, Right Function and Close/Ok).

While no one would confirm anything with words, there were plenty of looks as we played some kind of software release charades with facial expressions.

Hopefully OEMs can’t block these kind of updates from Microsoft to help make any new 6.5 phones even better as 6.5 evolves on the way to Windows Mobile 7.

There have been a few reports around the net about new features making their way into Windows Mobile 6.5.  Features such as cursor magnification, larger UI Controls and some new ‘good lookin’ button bars.  I decided I had better see what the fuss was about so I’ve now got the new build of Windows Mobile 6.5 running on a device to check out these new features.

When you first boot into Windows Mobile 6.5 you are greeted with the new button bar at the bottom.  From what I can tell the button bar is an unfinished version of the IE Button bar for all of Windows Mobile 6.5.

Welcome screen of Windows Mobile 6.5 with the new buttons.	Mobile IE button bar
New position of the close/ok button.	New tab control slider

It seems that almost all of the default controls have been modified, tab controls are now some kind of flying slide control.

There is also a new magnifier cursor box that seems to pop up at the moment, always when you don’t need it and jumps around your finger like a small energetic dog.  Unfortunately I could get it sit still when I was trying to take a screenshot of it.  I can see it being a good feature, once it settles down.

It’s good to see some more underlying UI controls getting a facelift in Windows Mobile 6.5 but when on earth is this product going to market?  Hopefully over the next few builds the UI receives the fit and finish it deserves and some of the new stability problems are fixed (although that could be the particular build I had).

Firstly, I love Windows 7 (which isn’t exactly a secret).  I think it’s an amazing upgrade over Vista and every Windows user should be running it as soon as possible.  Unfortunately with all software Windows 7 has bugs, yes even the final version.

There have been numerous little issues over the previous builds of Windows 7 which is to be expected with final products but at least on my machine one of these little issues remains.  When using a Jumplist for the Remote Desktop Client (either a pinned connection or a recent connection) the remote desktop connection never starts. 

While not a big issue, it’s very very simple to work around but opening a new Remote Desktop Connection instance and choosing the recent connection from the drop down list; it is a little annoying this program hasn’t been tested properly so it ‘lights up’ on Windows 7.

I think I now realise why there is a huge market for removalists and why they can charge so damn much.  After a crazy few days which saw dirty units, dying vacuum cleaners, lifts being shut off and dying computers the move is almost complete, bar a few small items.

I'm extremely glad that the move didn't have to be completed in a weekend and I continue to be surprised with how much can be shoved into a small unit when you get efficient :)

Now to let my bones and muscles heal.  The good and the bad part about moving I suppose is the huge amount of exercise, next week onto training for the Bridge to Brisbane, it's only 10kms, but I'd like to be able to at least jog some of it.

Unlike most people when they go on holidays, this isn’t a post to warn everyone that I’ll be posting less, in fact I hope it means I’ll get time to post more as I don’t exactly have much of a holiday plan yet.  Feel free to give me some ideas via twitter or the comments.

Currently my holiday consists of moving my unit from one building to another in the same complex, which should be nice and exercise-filled few days.  It has been interesting to see the different personalities that show in people when an event such as a lease expiry occurs.  I’m fairly relaxed about it all and don’t get too stressed, if we found a new place great, if not, then we could sign another 6 month lease and see what happens then.  My housemate however gets a little stressed and a little impatient with the whole process.  Interesting.

The rest of my holiday I hope will be learning some new skills with some personal projects like my main website and new theme for this blog and increasing my fitness level for the Bridge to Brisbane event in September.

As the great Barney Stinsen would say… Ted, SUIT UP!  Well I’m not Ted to start with but it is almost time to suit up.  Today I head back home to ensure my mother isn’t running around like a headless chook before my little sisters wedding tomorrow.  Hopefully everything goes to plan and everyone gets their drink on afterwards :D

Should be a nice interesting weekend.

Also don’t forget about your mums on Sunday. :D