I will be attending the festivities of BarCamp Conway on August 20. Hosted at the University of Central Arkansas College of Business building, the un-conference will have lots of attendees (over 60 last time I checked) with plenty of topics for everyone. Lunch and swag will be provided. I’ll be making the three-hour trek there to meet and enjoy lots of new company.

I’ve gone through a couple different apps trying to find a replacement. Apps like the beautiful Expenditure left me craving simple functions (reconciling?). Others were just hideous (I can’t remember the name, but it cost $1.99 and had an ugly orange interface).

Yesterday I bought Accounts [iTunes link] for iPhone (at $0.99). It’s not as pretty but it’s almost as functional. Try the full or free version out.

Frankly, this idea is stupid.

I won’t bother with explaining the simple stuff since anyone who has interest in reading this probably knows a decent amount about HTML and coding for the web. But I am going to quote Metcalf and show how his statements are just stupid.

The reason for this incredibly long gap [in finalizing the HTML5 protocol] is largely because of the difficulties the leading browser manufacturers — Microsoft, Apple, Google, Mozilla, etc. — have in agreeing to a common standard. Experts have predicted it could take years before an HTML5 specification is finalized.

He’s got his facts partially right. The companies listed are the leading browser manufacturers. But, he leaves out the votes of the other 327 members of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the governing body of web standards.

My biggest problem with Metcalf’s argument is that he values a closed, proprietary platform (read: Flash) of which a single company (read: Adobe) has final say over development, accessibility, and usability. Metcalf’s argument is flawed—how can he find fault in Apple’s position, claiming the company could control a platform that over 300 members must vote on, while he completely ignores the fact that Flash is a closed system in which only one company decides its fate?

It has prohibited Flash from running on its iPhone in any capacity and is requiring developers to use its version of HTML5 to play audio, video, or display highly interactive content.

True, developers should use vendor-specific prefixes to access all of Safari’s HTML5 elements, but vendor-specific prefixes are only temporary in nature. They are used so developers can target specific browsers to add style and functionality. These prefixes are adoptions of draft elements that may or may not make it into the final standard. If, for instance, the border-radius style in CSS3 makes the standard, Apple will drop the -webkit-border-radius prefix in favor of the standard border-radius. But HTML5 elements are widely supported among most modern browsers, from Safari 4-5, Firefox 3-4, Opera 10, or the currently-vaporware Internet Explorer 9. Alexis Deveria’s extremely helpful website, When Can I Use…, shows specific elements and styles and which browsers are capable of rendering them. Safari follows along with all the other modern browsers. Internet Explorer is left in the dust except for the current vaporware version 9.0.

Flash can be a memory hog and certainly isn’t perfect, but I find it pretty obnoxious that Jobs wants to single-handedly decide the future of the internet while ignoring its evolution for the past 10 years.

I hardly consider evangelizing the continued development and future standardization of HTML5/CSS3, the language which, as Metcalf says, “is the most basic language used to make websites,” as single-handedly deciding the future of the Internet and ignoring its evolution.

On a note of personal taste, I hate most Flash. These “developers” and “designers” are polluting the web with inaccessible and horrid user interfaces.

Jobs occasionally blames the technical requirements of Flash, claiming it wouldn’t run well on a phone.

I believe Jobs doesn’t believe Flash will perform properly, not run well. It’s a matter of choice words. Any program can run on a platform if it’s coded for it. Not any program can perform properly on a platform though, especially if it’s not coded for it. This is Flash’s circumstance. Sure, it may run well on iOS, but will it perform well? I doubt it.

What’s funny to me is that this sort of anti-competitive behavior is exactly what Microsoft was sued for in 1998. Back then, Microsoft was accused of maintaining an unfair monopoly in the browser market by packaging Internet Explorer with Windows. The prosecution alleged that Microsoft could require developers to code specifically for its browser by supporting non-standard code, and therefore control the development of web standards.
Sound familiar? Whether that lawsuit was fair, legal or necessary is up for debate, but judged by that same standard, Apple is equally guilty.

Microsoft’s case was clear and absolute negligence of web standards. Apple is pushing web standards forward. The use of vendor-specific prefixes is and will be up for debate, but the progress in the last two years shows that Apple (and many other companies) are pushing for HTML5’s standardization and success on the Internet.

Of course, we were able to see some of God’s greatest natural wonders along the way. We travelled through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma, all states I’ve never been to before. We saw the white sands of New Mexico and the massive Grand Canyon. I posted several pictures on Flickr, but here are a few of my better ones.

If you like Gowalla, you can see my journey.

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Update: After about a week of tinkering, I think I’ve narrowed it down to an overheating issue. I used the Fan Control Preference Panel to increase the base fan speed from 1500 RPMs to 1800. This has helped, and I can even play Call of Duty 4 rather well. There were a few pixel glitches, but nothing that caused system-wide hangs. The GPU heatsink was actually hotter than the actual GPU, reaching 135 degrees while the GPU reached 130, as did the CPU. iStat Pro gives the old Mac an uptime of 1 day, 17 hours as of this update, so looks like I may have solved the bulk of the problem (for now).

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My wife bought me a new 15″ MacBook Pro for Christmas, completely unexpected. So, last week I sold my first-generation MacBook Pro to a friend for her daughter’s birthday. This 2006 model MBP has run near flawlessly for three years now, except for a failed hard drive over a year ago. I replaced that myself with a new 500 GB Samsung drive. Except for the occasional software glitch, the machine was great.

Until I sold it. Today I got word from my friend that the Mac’s monitor was displaying random colors and lines, getting pixelated, and freezing up. So tonight she brought it by for me to look at. What I found was rather disturbing.

After some Googling, I found out this type of failure isn’t a first with this MBP model, and it’s quite saddening to see that Apple will do nothing for you. Granted, the product is way beyond the manufacturer’s warranty, but these cases all show that defective materials went into the production of the machines.

I’ll probably give my friend her money back and keep the MBP until it completely dies. All I can say is I’m grateful my wife had the foresight to get me a new one, because I’d be lost if my only machine was acting the way this one is, and I’m sad the company who is supposed to care about the product and its customers doesn’t seem to.

I guess I could e-mail Steve Jobs himself. That seems to work.

Back on track. As I recalled the rumor of multitasking for iPhone OS 4.0, I thought how cool it’d be to have Gowalla run in the background, automatically checking you in when you get close to a known location. Then I thought of the main stretch in town, where over half of my local Gowalla locations are within one or two kilometers of each other. How would Gowalla know exactly which location I wanted to be checked in if it became an automated process? (Because let’s face it, checking-in is a work-around method for these popular iPhone apps because of the lack of running apps in the background). And how would it know I moved from place to place, with such proximity to each location? Sure, GPS can be pretty accurate, but sometimes it’s not. So how would Gowalla know? Then I had an idea.

Gowalla could be setup to automatically check in a user to a location if that user has been to that location x amount of times. For instance: I have checked into my home over 50 times, so it stands to assume I like people knowing when I’m home. Gowalla could incorporate some settings the user could change, something like “Check-in automatically at locations with over x visits.” This could be user-modifiable, allowing a personal degree of automation.

It doesn’t solve the issue of GPS-reliability, which is really beyond Gowalla’s control any ways, but it keeps the check-in process on an interactive level (in that you must choose to let people know you’re at different places), while giving you the opportunity to automate the process for the locations you visit the most.

Of course, this idea is moot with such a shoddy battery life for the iPhone 3G/S. I live two hours away from the nearest 3G-blanketed area, so my 3G is always disabled. I keep my screen’s brightness around 75%, and WiFi enabled. With this, I’m lucky to get a whole day. Toss an app running GPS services in, and you’ll be lucky to make it to lunch.

• The Smashing Book
• The Elements of Typographic Style, v 3.2, by Robert Bringhurst
• Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0, by John Allsopp
• Web Standards Solution: The Markup and Style Handbook, Special Edition, by Dan Cederholm
• Sexy Web Design, by Elliot Jay Stocks

These are the most recent books I’ve delved into. Actual, physical books are so much better than PDFs or online sources. I just picked up five PDFs from SitePoint for $25 (as part of their Christmas specials, wrapping up with this sale today), but they won’t be read “cover to cover” like the actual books will be. I dig the paper so much better.

I’ve also become addicted to buying books on Amazon thanks to their free 30-day Prime trial. Since I signed up, I’ve ordered several books, all of which I’m exited about, but there’s three in particular:

The first I actually bought on Amazon some time ago, but haven’t been able to devote the necessary time to it. It’s The Life and Teachings of Jesus Christ: From the Transfiguration to the Triumphant Entry, edited by Richard Neitzel Holzapfel and Thomas A. Wayment. It’s volume two of a three-volume series, a collection of essays written about the different events in Christ’s life. Holzapfel and Wayment are, like myself, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the seventeen essays in this volume are by LDS scholars who provide insight into the Savior’s mortal ministry. These essays touch upon subjects like the apostles and the seventy, the Transfiguration, the parables of Matthew 13, more details on the Apostles, the death of the Baptist, the Olivet Discourse, and the family of Jesus. The first volume was great, and I’m excited to read this one.

The second book I recently ordered, and it’s the continuation of the The Life and Teachings of Jesus Christ, and this volume is entitled From the Last Supper Through the Resurrection: The Savior’s Final Hours. Again, very excited. This volume contains fourteen essays and is, rightfully so, the largest of the volumes. The essays discuss the historical setting of Christ’s prophecies and His life, then the story of the Last Supper, broken into the accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, with a separate essay regarding John’s testimony; Gethsemane; the arrest; the Jewish authorities; the Romans; the Crucifixion; the Burial; and the Resurrection, and more. On a side night, this volume has one of my favorite paintings of the Savior, composed wonderfully by the LDS painter Simon Dewey.

The third book is for the design geek in me. It’s Robert Bringhurst’s design “bible,” The Elements of Typographical Style. I’m hoping to gain a lot of understanding from this book, considered to be one of the best on the subject of typography. My design education opportunities in my neck of the woods are rather limited, with UAM offering rather basic art classes. So I’m undertaking a lot of the education myself through the web. In the end, I found books—those tangible, paper wonders—to be the best teacher, though the web is, of course, awesome in its own right.

Needless to say, I’ve got a lot of reading ahead of me, with these books and others I hope to read in the following weeks.

I recently decided to use my left hand as my mouse hand after years of giving in to using my right hand, and I can say that it feels much better to be able to do so. Here’s a few remarks I have about it and some things that have helped along the way.

Moving the Mouse

I ditched the ugly Apple Mighty Mouse several months ago when it pieced out on me. Apple has since remedied the problems that plagued me by introducing the Magic Mouse, but months earlier I purchased the Logitech M555b Bluetooth mouse, and I love it.

Last month, I set the mouse on the left side of my MacBook Pro and switched the buttons for a left-hander. I decided to do so since I am the only person who uses my Mac, and, even if someone else needed to use it, the trackpad would still functional normally for them.

My movements were awkward at first since I have been primarily using my right hand for twenty years. I’m the only lefty in my family, so I never won with the mouse. Even when my brothers and I would play the same first-person-shooter games like Quake II, they’d get mad at me for leaving the gun displayed on the left side of the screen.

⌘ (Cmd) + Tab

After re-adjusting to the use of my left hand, another big challenge frustrated me: the ⌘ (Cmd) + Tab function. For right-handed people, it’s easy to use the left hand to switch between applications using the Cmd+Tab function. If you’re a lefty, you may have run into my frustration. It’s too much work to move your left hand off the mouse to use this function. So while I felt improvement with usage of the mouse, my keyboard functions suffered. The problem is prevalent because there’s no Tab on the right side of the keyboard.

Cue the Maestro

I searched Twitter and Google for an answer to my ailments. I needed an application to remap or assign buttons on my keyboard. I decided since the \ button is relatively symmetrical with the Tab button, I should be able to assign a shortcut of Cmd+\ to act as a left-handed version of Cmd+Tab. I came across Keyboard Maestro. The full version is available for $36, but I’ve yet to fully dive into it because of the steep price.

I mapped Cmd+\ to KM’s “Application Switcher’” which mimics Mac OS X’s quite nicely after some simple changes, like enlarging the icons. One nice feature KM has that OS X lacks dims apps that are hidden. This visual cue is helpful to me because I hide most of my applications when not in use (even though I have them spread across nine Spaces).

Happy Camper

I wish I could say using my mouse with my left hand has quadrupled my productivity, but it hasn’t. It really hasn’t improved any, but I feel comfortable using my dominant hand. I’ve also given a few tips to some people that I wish I would’ve thought of years ago myself. I told one lady that has a left-handed child surrounded by righties to plug in an additional USB mouse for the lefty child. Buttons for that mouse should be able to be configured accordingly, then every family member is comfortable.

Do you have any stories as a lefty to share? Comment below so we can discuss.

That aside, Google sucks at designing intelligent and accessible user interfaces. I ran into one such example of suckage tonight.

The User Input

I have twenty-three RSS subscriptions on my gReader right now. That fluctuates as I add feeds I think may be interesting, and get rid of ones that are junk—like the News & Advance’s RSS feed, which often gives me the same stories half a dozen times a day.

Tonight, I wanted to add a new feed to gReader—Dustin Curtis’ site. I wanted to put it in a new folder called “Fun Reading,” because I wanted to try more reading, for, you know, fun.

The Misleading of the User

After adding the feed, it appeared in the feed panel under no folder, so I needed to create my “Fun Reading” folder. Solid enough. Folder time. After clicking on that tiny “Manage subscriptions” in the lower-left panel, I clicked “Folders and Tags,” where my mind intuitively told me to click after reading the menu options at the top.

Here I’m presented with a list of my folders. I can change privacy permissions and I can delete folders. Yep. That’s about it. Oh, I can partake in some sharing options with that annoying Your shared items folder. But I cannot create a folder from here. Why not?

Because, silly user, to create a folder you have to go to Subscriptions, click any of the drop-down boxes in the list of subscriptions, and choose the “New folder…” option. That’s how you add a folder—tucked away in a spot most people probably don’t look for first.

The Deceived Asks for Penance

It’s not a severe problem, and one that probably hasn’t come up a terrible lot, but gReader’s interface is relatively simple enough that something so simple shouldn’t be hidden like it is. I’m not going to stop using gReader (even if this corpse-of-an-information-spreader continues to rot while Twitter blossoms more), but little things like fixing this folder issue would be a nice and sweet gesture for us imbecilic users.

Fix it, Google.