June 8, 2010: iPhone, iPhone, it's off to work iPhone
Okay, There’s a New iPhone
Don’t really have a whole lot to say beyond what’s already been said. It looks very slick, and if anybody can actually pull off getting people to use video chat, it’s Apple. The form factor of video chat from a phone seems at first glance to be significantly better than from either a laptop or the iPad, in that it seems easier to hold the phone in a position to get a good angle. And as much as everybody is kicking around Google vs. Apple, it sure seems like the company that lost big was Flip. (Oh, and I’m not the first person to say it, but there’s now flash on the iPhone… well, an LCD flash for the camera, at least.)
And a new Safari
Safari 5 was released with a lot less fanfare. Big new features include an extensions system similar to Chrome, which will fully launch later this summer. There’s also a nice Reader function which is similar to the Readability bookmark. So far, I find it very pretty, a touch flakey about what sites it decides to pop up on, and downright magical at automatically following next links to stitch together a multi-page article. It also adds support for a bunch of HTML 5 features and a new JavaScript engine.
Links
All the RailsConf keynotes are being live streamed at http://en.oreilly.com/rails2010/public/content/livestream.
Feature Flipper is a simple little gem to allow you to semantically tie certain features to certain environments, making it easy to have a specific feature live only in development until it’s ready.
Oddly, this came up in conversation just yesterday. Chris Lowis points to a number of full Rails apps that are open source and can be used to learn how Rails apps are put together.
Quick snippet – an Array#only method for when you know an array only has one element. I think I would actually use this.
Finally
Neil deGrasse Tyson, speaking off the cuff on a rant subject near and dear to my heart, namely how it’s socially acceptable for otherwise lovely people to say “I’m no good at math”.