I’m normally very much in the Anything But Chardonnay club. Wines that seem to be deliberately ticking boxes for oak and vanilla, rather than letting any complexity come through are just not my scene.
But the Mâcon Villages Blanc ‘Les Roches Blanches’ 2011 from Majestic is much more to my taste. If there’s oak there, it’s subtle, but it’s buttery, and there’s a lot of fruit to it. Not the cheapest at £9.99 (7.99 for 2) but if you’re not sure about Chardonnay, give it a try.
Sometimes, you just stumble across a feature in a piece of technology that in its own quiet little way, is rather brilliant. In this case, it’s the Android Travel Widget.
I’m not a huge fan of Android Widgets. I have the Accuweather one which shows me the weather, which I like, but only when browsing through the phone did I spot the travel one.
What it does is quite simple: It tells you the state of travel to a particular destination. You add it, put in a location, and it monitors the traffic state to that location and the calculated time. If it’s clear, it’s green, if it’s orange, not so good, and red is problematic. And it’s right there, as a widget on your screen.
So, you leave work, click the widget, it grabs the data and gives you a simple traffic light about the state of your journey. Which means that if it’s no green that you might consider another route, or maybe call home to say you’ll be late. Simple to use, clear and very useful.
Yes, Games are software too, but you know what I mean.
I like downloadable software. No keeping boxes with discs or writing down CDs. I’m happier having a place where I can login, get some software and use it. The likes of Acronis and Microsoft already do this.
One thing that might help about Steam is that it could provide a service for a lot more companies to get into this, and also give users 1 place to go to fetch all their software. And as a gamer who’s been using it for a couple of years, I trust Steam. The service and speed is good, the store process is easy.
I’ve looked at a number of web-based project management tools in the past, such as Basecamp, but the downside has often been that they don’t provide the features of earlier tools like PMW or MS Project like task dependencies or where a user is overloaded on resources.
Gantter, on the other hand does these things. You can create a resource, tell it when the resource is available, assign tasks to it, level out the resource usage. Based on initial use, it’s brilliant.
It also integrates into Google Drive, which is nice. And it’s currently free, although presumably that’s going to change.
The only real downside I can see for most projects is that your project is hosted by someone else, so if you’re worried about that, Gantter isn’t for you.
This looks really interesting…
http://maperitive.net/
Where to start with this. Let’s start with a number:-
So, the Mobile Market Share (including Tablets) is 8.9%. Around 64% of that is iOS (which represents nearly all tablets). And of iOS, something just over half of browsing is iPad. Being generous, the amount of browsing on tablets is something like 5% of all browsing.
I think the problem is, like so many things in life that people extrapolate their own change and assume that it applies to others, when statistically, it’s clear that this hasn’t happened. And this isn’t about the techies being down on the regular people. I know retired people, teachers, sales people and so forth who aren’t going for tablets. They have a laptop that allows them to buy their online shopping, check email and Skype grandma. What does £300+ of tablet get them beyond what they’ve already got?
Perhaps, eventually, we will see tablet use becoming dominant, at which point, we will have entered the post-PC world. I’m still doubtful, and it has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with the ergonomics and input mechanisms of tablets.
… is like measuring how good an art collection is by square footage.
From TheNextWeb
Most apps, Apple explained during the event, will run letterboxed on the new iPhone until they’re updated to take advantage of the larger screen. In fact, a new default launch image will need to be added to any app that wants to utilize the full screen, so developers must submit an update for that to happen. But the addition is a simple one, so they can theoretically get apps up and running quickly.
I was wondering how they were going to deal with small size adjustments. Android never had this problem because it has structured layout objects that adjust the content to the size of the screen. Whether an app is running on a HTC magic or a Galaxy Note, it will work with the screen and you need 1 set of layouts.
The irony of what’s happening with the iPhone 5 is that for all the talk of Android being fragmented, the iOS platform is, in terms of layouts, more fragmented. A lot of apps are going to have to be changed to handle the fact that iOS now has a device with a different aspect ratio, and either maintain 2 layouts, or rewrite for the new way to do layouts in iOS6.
Just noticed a new option in Google Maps for desktop – UK Bike Routes
It also shows cycle tracks (which appear to be accurate for my area). Nice…
I’ve been putting together a few things that allow for mocking of Entity Framework. I wanted something that was really simple, so, something using T4 templates made sense, as this could then create the interfaces required. This solution is based on database first, which is what I required.
I followed the instructions from Slappy’s Blog which covered most of the solution.
The only part missing was what to do about IDENTITY fields, where I then followed the instructions in this Stack Overflow question which shows how to use an event with the fakeDBSet to create a number.
I’m using Moq, which I’m now preferring to Rhino Mocks.