Posterous, are you lying to me about the post views?
With the same amount of links (that is, just my little twitter) my new site gets 10-50 views.
Or you're promoting my posts somewhere? Let's check. The screenshot is uploaded to Droplr. It'll show me how many times the pic was loaded. And I'll compare it with Posterous stats.
So Google is going to drop H.264 support from Chrome. This is a very stupid move. John Gruber asked some questions that seem pretty obvious. To me, not to Google fans.
Yes, Google did something for web standards and this “open innovation” (a new buzzword from Google?). They made a compliant browser and promoted it. They acquired Android and made it popular along with mobile WebKit.
After Apple. Safari is much older and iPhone was already popular when Android made it to first real phones. Plus, Apple invented the HTML canvas and more stuff. They maintain WebKit. Yes, Google sends them some patches, but they're mostly about speed, not support of HTML5. Apple are the ones who make web standards look cool. Apple love them. Apple really loves them so they don't allow Flash on iOS and don't ship it with new Macs (only MacBook Air for now). Apple supports open source at all. Both iOS and Mac OS X run on the open Darwin kernel and the open WebKit engine. Mac uses the open printing system. They maintain all these projects and they ship Mac OS X with Ruby, Python, Subversion, Apache, PHP, zsh and so on.
Google has a code hosting and some open source projects (including Google Web Toolkit which was one of the reasons of Wave's FAIL), oh yeah, don't be evil. But now they're destroying web standards. Isn't that evil?
They can pay Adobe now for shipping Flash with Chrome, but they can't pay MPEG LA in the future for supporting H.264? Everybody will encode videos with WebM? Of course, from Google's point of view, everybody = YouTube. They (and mostly their fans) think with numbers. Stupid.
Quality is the thing, not quantity. YouTube may have lots of videos, but Vimeo has good videos. And they won't re-encode everything just for a not-so-popular browser. They'll just show a Flash H.264 player to Chrome users. Video hosters may encode Ogg for Firefox, the most popular browser in Europe, but not WebM for just Chrome. Yes, Firefox 4 will support WebM, but it will take a long time for everybody to upgrade. People will stil use Firefox 3.
Yes, of course, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and IE “when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows” support (or will support) WebM. Only Apple doesn't. Why? Because they're a design company. Designers are the most respected people at Apple. Desingers, not salesmen. Quality, not quantity, again. They won't support WebM unless it will be really popular and there will be a hardware decoder because they won't let a video eat up your whole battery. That's also one of the reasons of not allowing Flash on iOS (the others: Flash is proprietary and Flash isn't optimized for touch screens at all).
So WebM might be a “silver bullet” for future videos on the web (assume that Apple will support it), but Google's method of promoting it is way too much evil. Dropping support sucks at all. Yes, everybody drops IE6 support and there's nothing wrong. It's just a different case. IE6 is outdated, it doesn't support modern standards. H.264 is a video codec which can't support anything, it only can be supported, so it can't be outdated. Well, again, content providers already have videos in H.264 so if they use WebM for new videos, browsers should support both. And they don't seem to do it (because H.264 is the only codec supported on iOS, dammit, recursion), so H.264 is still the most popular codec.
Now about Android. I won't say anything because Marco Arment already said everything:
...Google is “open” with the products that don’t make them money and closed with those that do, using “open” as a marketing buzzword against Apple and hoping nobody notices how incredibly closed and secretive most of their products and operations really are. iOS is far more “closed” than Android, but at least Apple doesn’t try to bullshit me about it. They put it right out there. “We control everything because we think it’s better that way. If you don’t like it, there’s the door.” And since they’re honest with me, I trust them more.
Looks like Google hates the video tag. It won't be actually used because they don't support the most popular codec in Chrome and the support totally sucks in Android:
HTML5 video on Android is badly broken. Resolution support varies from one handset to the next (often just 480x360), the fallback image usually doesn’t show and the code requires special adjustments. The Android emulator is completely useless as it doesn’t represent any real hardware and does not play HTML5 video. THERE IS NO WAY TO TEST ON ANDROID WITHOUT A PHYSICAL PHONE. BLAME GOOGLE.
Yesterday I've found out that I open Evernote rarely. Very rarely.
A few years ago I totally stopped using Delicious and bookmarks at all. I used to clip everything to Evernote. Now that “antisocial bookmarking” app Pinboard made me switch to bookmarking again.
I was using RTM for a long time, then tried keeping todos in Evernote (using Egretlist on my iPod, which requires a lot of taps for adding a tasks. And its multi-list paradigm totally sucks). Now I finally bought Things, which really stays out of my way and makes me productive.
And now I'm moving my ideas, thoughts and stuff to Simplenote. Because their iOS app is much faster and there's an Emacs mode for it. Well, the iOS app also has a fullscreen mode and tapping the text makes it editable (with Evernote, I have to tap “edit”). And, of course, because I don't have to name my notes! Tapping the note makes it editable (with Evernote, I have to tap the “edit” button).
So Evernote remains for photos of things that I need to remember. When I see something like a printed announcement of something or a business card, I take my phone and snap it to Evernote. Then I can find it at any time. Well, I'll also use it for sketches — their WinMo app has tha
I still like Evernote, even though I use it so rarely. They have an awesome product, an awesome branding/logo, well, they love green after all! :)
There's a lot of apps for adding lyrics to songs in iTunes automatically, but they all work with LyricWiki API which returns only a small part of lyrics and a URL of the page with full lyrics (because of damn copyright owners).
The solution is to parse LyricWiki HTML pages. BeautifulSoup is great for that. Then we can use a simple AppleScript which will call our Python script and insert the result into the right place.
First, download soupselect and put it somewhere at your PYTHONPATH. Save getlyrics.py to /usr/bin (or to some other place and make a symlink to /usr/bin) and chmod +x it. Then save the applescript to /Users/<your username>/Library/iTunes/Scripts under the name "Get Lyrics.scpt". Go to iTunes, select a few songs and click Scripts → Get Lyrics.
Select only two-three songs at once - looks like LyricWiki throttles our requests and we must have a small delay between them.
P.S. Thanks to Pepelsbey for Year to Album Sort script.
Non-annoying: you need to open the page in Safari.
You don't know why people jailbreak their iPhones, iPods and iPads? Here's why:
When I first saw the iPhone in 2007, I thought that the weather icon shows the real weather, just like the calendar shows the real date. I was kinda frustrated when I realized that it doesn't… Now I'm happy with this hack (: It supports any weather application.
The same, but for the clock icon.
A thing that Apple forgot — status bar icons for mail, calendar, messages, missed calls, etc. Really useful — now I'll never miss an email when I'm reading my Twitter timeline with 0% sound volume.
A small Safari patch that disables opening bookmarks automatically when opening Safari (not Fast App Switching to it).
Private browsing for Safari. Even IE has it — is Safari any worse? Not now.
Bind anything to any touch gesture or shaking the device. Finally you don't need to go the long way: Home → Settings → Wi-Fi → On/off. You can bind something like a swipe from top and enjoy.
Quick settings. Just do an Activator gesture (e.g. swipe the top bar) and you can toggle WiFi, BT, SSH or something. Or you can adjust the brightness (!!!). It also includes an interface for libhide, so you can hide some icons on your Springboard.
Tweak yo look! You can change every icon or just a few colors. Or hide the icon labels. There's a lot of themes in Cydia.
Or six icon dock. Or five icon Springboard.
App Store apps can't change screen brightness automatically. Cydia has a flashlight that can. It also has a tweak for App Store flashlights which does the (b)right thing.
Well, iPhone users may also like MyWi, My3G and more phone-related stuff. I use an iPod touch so I haven't put them in the top ten :-)
P.S. The newest and coolest jailbreak for new devices: limera1n
