Here is a list of things [he] do[es] on every project these days and I highly recommend that you do the same. The result is that: (1) It is very easy for new developers to come up to speed on a project like this to quickly; (2) The installation process for the users of the project is very simple and simple will aid adoption of your product.
MIT has a nice set of video lectures from a course about Algorithms. Good stuff if you’re into it.
Here’s my predicted list of features for the next version of the iPhone (3.0, probably next year):
So I’ve been internally conflicted for the past few months about the state of my cellphone/mobile status. From October 2007 to June 2008 I owned an Apple iPhone, and it was the best phone I’ve ever used. But I found so many things were left wanting, mainly because of Apple’s corporate policies, and the dismal state of the Canadian Cell phone market. With the announced release of the iPhone 2.0 in Canada on July 11th, I thought I would get ready to upgrade, meaning I sold my iPhone on eBay for approximately the same price as I bought it for, and picked up a HTC Touch Cruise (aka Polaris) to fill the gap in my mobile lifestyle.
The iPhone 1.0 was lacking in a few areas that I found essential:
and the iPhone 2.0 didn’t fix any of those. In fact, what it did was to add insane costs and commitments to the cost of owning one through our local phone carriers (Rogers and Fido, one company with two names). I’m not willing to make a commitment to a company that offers nothing and asks everything.
To avoid the obvious carrier contract issues, I thought about an iPod Touch, but that lacks bluetooth completely, and all the other restrictions still apply. That’s a no go.
So I went back to Windows Mobile on the Touch Cruise, and that’s a platform that can do everything I want, and so much much. But let’s be honest, there is nothing attractive or elegant about WinMo. The functionality is there, but it’s hard to use, non-intuitive, and often buggy. Plus, for some crazy reason Microsoft now requires that you purchase Visual Studio Professional if you want to do any sort of development for a mobile platform. No thank you Microsoft. You might also be thinking that I could have used spbShell or HTC Touch Flo software on my phone, but I would say that they are bandaids at best, and represent closed packages that can’t be extended, and have limited functionality. In addition, I’m realizing that I’m unwilling to pay for mobile software, because so much of it, no matter how good, doesn’t meet my needs.
So I thought I was doomed to be unsatisfied for the forseeable future, when I came across a thread on xda-developers.com about how someone has gotten Google Android running on their Polaris. Aha! Hope. But it’s alpha, unstable and quirky. But there’s a lot of promise there. Android is an open source java-based phone operating system. That also means that the tools to develop for it are free, and the excitement in the developer community is huge. After trying out the developer releases, I think there’s some definate potential there. The SDK is missing a few things, like a calendar, and todo list, but it looks like a quality package. I won’t go into comparing it to OpenMoko, or the recently open-sourced Symbian as that’s a whole blog post in itself.
In the mean time, I’m going to put my Polaris away until I can replace WinMo with Android, and get up to speed with development on the new platform. What will I be using in the meantime? A Sony Ericsson k750i, a good phone that does little else. And now I wait.
So why am I writing all this? I guess it’s just a wordy explanation that I’m going to be looking into Android development, and hope to post some of my projects here as I learn to speak its language.
Here’s a non-silverlight list of direct links to videos from MIX08.
vcfSplit is a simple WinForms application written originally in .NET 1.1 and recently upgraded to .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2008. Basically what it does is to prompt for an input file and an output directory. (The input file should be a .vcf file containing multiple vCards) It will then create a .vcf file for each vCard in the output directory.
I wrote this orginally because some of the contact management apps I was using didn’t handle exports very well. In general they would create one big vCard file with all my contacts in it, and I wanted them at a more granular level. This app was the result.
If you’d like a copy of the source code, you can access the SVN reposity at http://andlewis.com/svn/vcfSplit/
“The true way to render ourselves happy is to love our work and find in it our pleasure.” - Francoise de Motteville
Welcome to sourcecodr.com, a website run by me, Andrew Lewis. This is where I’ll be posting software and code that I have written, mostly in C#. I intend to post links to SVN repositories if you want to check out some of the projects yourself. I appreciate your feedback, and the fact that you’re even here. Cheers!
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