Pytey confirms my NDA suspicions July 15, 2008

From today’s TUAW Live Chat with Pytey,

pytey – This is a tricky one, Apple have made some sole distribution clauses in app contracts. It is a shame, I’m guessing people will have to make the choice of big bucks or free of charge.

The confirmation of my NDA speculation (I had only guessed) helps me with my new hobby, but interestingly enough the issue where MooCow whatever’s “Band” being for jailbroken iPhones (it’s still in installer.app I’m pretty sure) and for the App Store, similar to Twinkle (except Twinkle got a major overhaul, i.e. he removed the suck and didn’t backport, lame!) has not been addressed.

Twitter acquires Summize, we’re doomed July 15, 2008

Oh boy. Twitter acquired summize. We’re fucked! Summize, used to power some pretty awesome sites (like Get Satisfaction’s “overheard” feature), will now start failing more often, and the part about adding other services is now gone.

Here’s the About Summize section from the Summize.com about page (courtesy Google Cache):

Summize’s mission is to search & discover the topics and attitudes expressed within online conversations.

Our home page currently features realtime conversations on Twitter. Also check out Summize Labs for prototypes that harness conversations within blogs and reviews. Additional sources of online conversations are coming soon!

Now here’s the About Twitter Search section from the search.twitter.com about page:

Keeping up with interesting news and people you care about is one dimension of Twitter, but what if you need to find out what’s happening in the world beyond your personal timeline?

There is an undeniable need to search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second. Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information coursing through our service.

Notice what is no longer there? The searching of other services! I left this comment on their blog:

NOOOOOO!

Now Summize will start to fail, have tons of downtime, and worst of all, will completely drop their previous commitment to add MORE SERVICES to their search! Poor Jaiku, Pownce, and whoever else nobody cared about.

Tweetscan, you just got your lucky break to take over the Twitter & other site search market (they already search Identi.ca!), will you take it?

Will they accept it? I don’t know.

Update: Summize blogged it too, so I commented there as well. Just in case it gets lost:

I too dislike a little bit that Summize finds deleted tweets. It does help, sometimes, for conversations where one side doesn’t want to keep a record of a spat, though.

As well, I’m not happy about the acquisition. Aside from the obvious “lol now summize will failwhale”, the statement about wanting to include other microblogging services has been completely obliterated.

Interestingly enough, Summize has just made way for competition.

(Andy Mabbett had commented “Congratulations. Now please teach your software to stop “finding” deleted tweets.”)

Wayne is good June 24, 2008

Creating Our Own Happiness

by Wayne Coyne

Stacks as list visual glitch on Mac OS 10.5.3 June 23, 2008

Safari is not designed for tabbed browsing June 22, 2008

There’s two firefox features that don’t exist in Safari which give it an edge, but some Safari users don’t happen to know about them…

I know this first one has caused a stir, because I saw an article that I can’t find now where someone mentioned Safari devs really don’t think much about tabbed browsing, as the “History” tab has an item named “Reopen Last Closed Window” (which comes with the back button history, very useful). However, there’s no Reopen Last Closed Tab (Firefox does have tab close undo, and it goes back a ways, I have done 5 in the past. This also brings along back button history.).

Another feature of Firefox that doesn’t exist in Safari which exists in Firefox (and Seamonkey, originally) is the ability to make items that have target=”_blank” (i.e. open in a blank window) launch their item in a new tab instead of a new window. Bug 19715 was filed to hopefully resolve this missing feature.

iPhone developers have no excuse June 22, 2008

If you can write an iPhone app this easily, for jailbroken phones, there is no excuse. none.

I’m testing Jotting… June 20, 2008

I’m testing Jotting to my WordPress blog. Just making sure that it works out fine. I was interested to know if it will post an audio link of my words. And I do not like domainers. listen

Powered by Jott

Worse than sitefinder June 20, 2008

You know how site finder made every domain name resolve? Well, how is it different with the dozens of parked domains that DON’T EVEN HAVE A buy this site LINK THESE DAYS so they can’t be domaining.

I came up with a few good domains for my serious blog, but they’re all parked. They’re not used properly, just parked, and with no way to purchase the domain. LAME. This should be against ICANN rules because it causes spam addresses to resolve, the main problem with sitefinder. It also annoys me.

We have the technology to prevent Jap suicides June 19, 2008

I brought up real life social networking before in an incoherent rant, and there’s now even more proof that it needs to become a reality.

Obviously Twitter could be helping a little bit, who knows how bad it would have gotten if Twitter didn’t exist (for background, Twitter is _huge_ in japan, and seems to be slowing down the lack-of-contact social problems).

I really think that getting people together in person as well as online is mega important. Brightkite is already starting the process, and people need to stop joining just to act twittery, and start using it to say “hey! we both use brightkite! we must be into similar things!” (brightkite actually lets users tag themselves, but that’s a bit awkward)

[EOF]

How to make web form bring up phone keypad on iPhone June 18, 2008

I seemed to recall a web form bringing up the phone keypad (nice big numbers, for when you only want to input numbers) on my iPhone’s web browser, Safari. I looked into it, and found a apple web dev thread (in reverse order, as it’s an e-mail) saying that if you use name=”phone” in the input field, it will bring up the phone pad. That’s great. Sadly, it apparently breaks in iPhone OS 2.0. (Don’t know about zip, as Ben Nadel found, though).

I was looking at Web Forms 2.0, a part of HTML5/WHATWG, and it seems to make all this unnecessary. There’s the ability to specify what a field is, and hopefully the iPhone will adopt it and act better. But non iPhone users might not understand what I mean here…

On the iPhone, in the address book, clicking in the e-mail field (or clicking in the to field in a new e-mail) will produce the keypad you see advertised, but at the bottom there will be buttons for @, ., and .com. This is because these are things that go in an e-mail address, not a space button. On websites, it’s / . and .com. Again, things that actually go in a website address. This is why the input types of email and url are great. date is great too, because the iphone uses… well, it’s like an odometer with rolling wheels, and you can ‘roll’ to Dec 31, 1955 easily. Much easier than typing it in.

In short, Web Forms 2.0 will enable the iPhone “virtual” keypad, and other virtual select options, to be just so much more awesome.