Simon Toon

I've been using my Apple Magic Mouse this evening and it does not disappoint, though I feel now like the whole Mac OS needs to be updated to take advantage of the subtleties of the mouse/large trackpads on modern MacBooks. (I'm also hoping for an update to the MacBook trackpad software to incorporate the marvellous momentum scrolling feature from the iPhone and Magic Mouse.) The additional quality now endowed on these touch interfaces is great and enhances the efficiency of interacting with the existing O/S's (both iPhone and Mac OS X), but I feel there are further enhancements to be made and I'm sure Apple have these in mind. Snow Leopard gets us ready for something radical to come. Coverflow makes much more sense with Magic Mouse, and is probably indicative of the future of all file navigation. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Today, for the first time in my life, I had my daughter open the front door to let me into the house.

I can't believe the BBC are scapegoating the bankers . Looks like the UK Government is trying to pull the wool over everyone's eyes by making it seem like the fault of the greedy bankers and their excessive profiteering and bonus-awards, taking advantage of the public outrage at the bankers being awarded such large bonuses using tax-payer bail-out money. Okay, so the bankers are not going to be popular folk heroes, but the Government shouldn't be allowed to make it look like it's not actually the Government's fault. It is the Government's fault . Face it, bankers are employed by corporations to make as much profit as possible in the next reporting period (a year, a quarter, whatever). They are not incentivised to look after the long term interests of the bank that employs them, or the nation as a whole. So of course they behaved in the way that they did. Unless they did something illegal then there is nothing for them to apologise for! It's like blaming the ...

Emilia doing some more walking on 27-Sep-2008

Later that same day, we captured this footage of Emilia walking unaided, and managing more than just 2 steps!

Well, she only really has the confidence to walk for more than one step if she is holding onto someone with at least one hand.

If you haven't checked it out yet, please go on over to http://nippernews.co.uk/ and have a look at the new blog my wife is doing on there. There's a iPhone-optimised page too, which you can see here: Nipper News . Some of the most important stuff she's posting on there is about safety issues , and of course some great bargains for parents , whether you have a baby or teenagers or something in-between. And you can subscribe to it as an email newsletter, too!

I've been working on a web page formatted for iPhone, and in this context the width of the page and the content on the page, is very important. First of all you don't want the page to be too wide, because then the text might be too small to read. But you also want the entire page to fit within the width of the screen, because no-one wants to have to scroll from side to side when reading lines of text. So, of course, you can use a table and specify the width of cells and table, but this actually sets the minimum width - if the content is wider than the specified width, then the cell or table will expand to suit. In my case it is a long string of continuous text without spaces in, specifically a long URL. I'm sure the wiser ones of you reading this will already be thinking CSS. Indeed, it gave me the answer. Specifically, CSS version 3, which is not supported on all browsers. Luckily iPhone's Safari browser is one of the few browsers that does support CSS3. The answer cam...

So, now that that's working , the next question is what is the minimum? Can you get away with just having the first 5 words in your posting being in bold, or do you really need to have a mixture of italics in there too? This one just has the first 5 words in bold. We will see...

Well, something seems to have inserted unintended carriage-returns into my last post, so that proves, I guess, something . Maybe if I include some italics in this post, and some bold , then the richness of this text will prevail...?

So, that is good news. Sending a rich text email from gMail does not prompt those spurious carriage-returns to be added. So, what about Apple's Mail program on the Mac? I have just set up my gMail account on my Mac's Mail program, just so I can test this, and the email I am writing is rich text, in the sense that if I go to the Format menu at the top of the screen it gives me the option to "Make Plain Text" -- which implies that it must already be in rich text form. But so far I have not included any italics or bold or any other formatting, so maybe it will make an executive decision when I hit 'Send' and will unilaterally send it in plain text form only...

Well, there we are, the plain text email from gMail seems to have put in those unwanted carriage-returns. Annoying. Okay, well this time I am going to try with a Rich Text email within gMail. This sentence should be in italics. All the text so far is all on one line, so we'll see what happens this time...

What is it with spurious carriage-returns, or line-feeds, or whatever is the correct name for them? First we had some problems at work because some Javascript Include files were being exported from our repository on a Windows PC and therefore included Windows-friendly line-feed characters at the end of every line, and therefore made the file itself slightly larger than it was in Unix format, and this then caused the Javascript compilation limit to be reached, breaking the page. Not good. Just goes to show another reason why Unix is better than Windows. And then with this email posting to Blogger shenanigans! It seems that somehow in the email to blog post process, some additional line-feeds or carriage-returns appear. Why is that? Anyway, this is a plain text email written in gMail. I wonder whether it will be affected...

So, my starting point was the old problem of the lack of copy and paste functionality on the iPhone. How on earth would one be able to post links to interesting web pages on one's iPhone without memorizing and typing back in the URLs? The answer comes via the use of email. So when you're on an interesting web page you can hit the plus button and there's a choice of 'Mail link to this page'. You can then craft an email that includes a link to that URL, along with any commentary, and send that off somewhere to an email address. And blogging services such as iBloggin and Blogger have facilities that allow you to publish blog post via email. Here's the help page from Blogger: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=41452&topic=12461 Well, I set this up for this blog, but I had some confusing teething troubles. It seems this help page was not as helpful as it could have been... 1. When it tells you to keep the email address secret as anyone could post on you...

I noticed Emilia's first tooth emerging yesterday! It's the lower left incisor. I'm so proud! Merry Christmas!

Check out what Mike's doing on BlogTV.com!

Nipper News has been featured on Podfinder UK, episode 33! The bit where Jo talks about us is from 4:35 to 5:49. Thanks Jo! Find out more at PodfinderUK.btpodshow.com

Let me tell you about my new podcast: NipperNews! It's the UK news show for Mums and Dads all about babies and children, and how to raise them. Presented by Jana and Simon. Expecting a baby? Interested in parenting news? You can find out all about the show at www.NipperNews.co.uk

Here is Katie's excellent article on poetry podcasting, written with help from several members of the APP . In the spirit of full disclosure, I publish her questions to me and my answers here: Q: When did you start the APP and why? How many members does the APP have? A: It started out in August 2005 when I suggested to Will Brown that we might start a Poetry Podcasting banner exchange, to allow some cross-promotion between podcasting sites with an interest in poetry. This exchange quickly grew, and an organic community grew around it where we discussed poetry podcasting issues via email. In June 2006 it dawned on us that the Poetry Podcasting community needed to have a focal point for any parties interested in the subject, for instance, an authoritative voice to speak to journalists, a place for poetry podcasters (both established and new) to get together, and a place for listeners and poets to find relevant podcasts. We launched the APP on July 1st 2006, with 10 founding members....

When I attempt to import Full 1920x1080 video into iMovie '08 on my MacBook, it tells me "Selecting Full on this computer may result in degraded video playback". It doesn't tell me, however, what I can do about it. Is it the CPU? The graphics card? RAM? The slower Firewire 400? Is there a list of Mac models that can support full 1080 resolution? Do I need to switch to Final Cut? There is a discussion on the Apple Support forums, but no answer yet...