James Andrews

For the last hour I have been playing around with “Chat Roulette”. A website designed to randomly select a person on the site for you to chat with over video chat.

It is the strangest place. I have seen groups of 3 people, 1 person. Mostly men, a pot plant, and the one that has freaked me out so far. A man hanging from the ceiling. Not sure if it was a hoax or an actual suicide, but the man hung motionless. Chair tipped over on the floor.

One group of 3 were these 2 girls and a guy from France. Montpelier to be exact. They spoke very little english, I tried to chat with them using google translate. Then the guy tried to hook me up with his “sister”. Who was overweight. Not that I am picking on the fact she is overweight, but more the fact that he kept saying it, and calling her miss piggy. Which I thought was rude. They were from France, so I guess the saying is true.

Most of the users seemed to be men in their teens and 20s. Who would click the “next” button when they saw me. One group even went on to call me “old and stuff”. Which I found amusing.

I do have to say it’s amazing how many penises that have flashed by. Not a site for the kiddies. No real way to flag clean content only. Oh look, there’s another penis… *sigh* The one thing that thrives on the Internet….

Right now I am talking to a girl, Sophie from switzerland, and studies medicine. She asked my why I was on chatrt. I told her to chat, she then asked if it wasn’t to find a nice girl, I then told her I was married, and she was very surprised.

So, the concept is neat, who knows if it will last or if it’s just a fad, but you should give it a try if you like meeting random people.

Apple is at it again. Wired is reporting that Apple has started to remove that detect open WIFI signals. The reason? Developers are using “private frameworks”. By private framework I assume Apple means a framework that it has no documented and made public. Developers have been doing this for years on Apple computers. Apple has a history of innovating, and keeping it’s frameworks hidden, and then after a few years, opening them up to the public once it has found a better innovation. There action is not surprising, and I don’t necessarily agree with it.

My family and I are due to go to Japan in 4 weeks. We learned this week that my father needs to submit a Yakkan Shoumei. This is a document that will allow my father to bring in the syringes and the and insulin he needs to control his Diabetes. It’s a lot of documentation that we have to send along with an envelope of a specific size, and either Japanese postage, or a “International Response Certificate” (IRC). We learned about needed this document a week ago, it took us this long to get everything together. We get to the post office to send it out this morning and we find out that they were instructed by the head office to send all the IRCs back that they were now invalid. Which they did.

What I don’t understand is why would they do this with out sending new IRCs to the locations so that they had them on hand if they were needed. I am extremely angry, I’ve talked to 4 people on the phone who have only been able to give me phone numbers of local post offices. No real customer service what so ever. I am extremely frustrated over the lack of competency at all levels.

Once again Apple has decided to be big brother. To decide what people should and shouldn’t use on the hardware they paid for. Over the last couple of days Apple has removed any application that would be considered “risky”. They have done this at the expense of the developers who have spent time developing applications, and building a business off of the app store. Developers who were generating thousands of dollars a day in revenue are now generating nothing.

Apple states that it received many complaints from womens groups about the apps objectifying women, from parents because their children had access to this material. It seems Apple wants to be politically correct. Instead of letting the end user decide what they want. Not everyone finds this material objectional. I know a few women who probably own some of these apps. Parents should learn how to parent and watch what their children are buying.

Part of the problem though falls on how the App store actually works. Instead of forcing these “risky” apps in to a category that is set aside for them. Instead of putting the parental controls in the App store so that minors don’t see this material. They destroy the lively hoods of those who have created legitimate thriving businesses.

Way to go Apple.

Last night I was browsing twitter when one of my tweeps mentioned an article about iPhone and Flash. The article basically stated that before the release of the iPhone there were discussions of using flash on the iPhone for application development. That talks went south and since then there was no turning back. Now whether there is any truth to that I don’t know. What made the article interesting was the mention of an SDK called Corona by a company called Ansca Mobile. Essentially it’s a scripting language similar to actionscript/javascript that allows you to build iPhone apps as if you were building a Flash application.

I’ve wanted to write Cocoa apps for a while, but with work, and life I haven’t been able to get enough time to wrap my head around Cocoa and bindings and all the fun that goes with it. I know Javascript very well. Since I am a web developer so I thought I would give Corona a shot.

Corona cost $99 but there’s a 30 day trial version. I downloaded the trial version, and started reading through the docs (ok skimming through the docs) and sample applications. I found the APIDocs to be poor. No real explanation on how to capture events, which on the iPhone is important. Touch events are everything when it comes to the phone. Also, the company seems to be indecisive about some of the touch event naming, like “drag”. They thought it didn’t make sense, but I easily knew what they were talking about. Though I probably would have called it “swipe”. The sample code however was full of useful snippets, and from that I was able to build a 45 line application. That’s right in 45 lines I had the application I have been wanting to write for 5 months. Now I haven’t been able to test it on an iPhone or within Apple’s iPhone simulator. I have tested it in Corona’s iPhone simulator, in order to test it elsewhere I need to pay the $99, so for all I know it could totally break. I will give them the benefit of the doubt that it will work fine on the iPhone, and could revolutionize iPhone development for those who want to quickly get something out without the time consumption of learning Cocoa Touch, or paying an iPhone developer up to $150/hr

I am looking forward to them having a version that supports the iPad, I am sure they are working diligently on it.