A gaggle of sub-$100 image editors written atop Core Image:
I haven’t spent time on any of these but a comparison would be pretty interesting. Too bad none of them are open source.
I wrote a slightly longer post on this topic but lost it to a rare browser crash. It included nice links to the news story of Floyd Landis’ lost appeal to the USADA, as well as to news of all the doping sanctions, accusations, and outright rumors of cheating, poor handling of athlete samples, and crazy, questionably legal investigations in to various bad behavior on the part of the riders, the teams, and the professional organizations.
The list of confessed, accused, or sanctioned dopers, current and past, continues to grow to the point I can’t keep track of it anymore. I’m tired of hyperbole, hysteria, and hypocrisy! I want to watch epic breakaways, hard-fought come-backs, and all-out sprints, and I don’t want to worry about whether the winner will be accused of doping soon after.
I cheered on TV as Floyd Landis salvaged his 2006 Tour with that incredible solo stage win, and I’m at least as suspicious of the motives and methods of the anti-doping organizations as I am of the riders, so to me, Floyd continues to be the winner of the 2006 Tour de France.
Via Newsweek by way of getrichslowly.org a well-written, gentle criticism of the Trashifarian movement:
The freegans, most of whom are educated and capable of contributing to the economy, aren’t sharing the surplus wealth of the West with those who are destitute by circumstance rather than choice. They are competing with them for it.
The freegans’ Edenic myth is seductive, but there is no way to put the technological genie back in the bottle, or the demographic one either. Six billion people, however much we may deplore their impact on the environment, cannot sustain themselves by foraging for nuts and tubers. The way out isn’t backward, but forward, by using our wisdom, and even our much criticized technology, to forge a better and more humane society.
Scott recently mentioned Google had a free mobile 411 service.
Yesterday I tried it out on a couple of local places. You can say “Map it” when you get the results, and they send you a text message containing the phone number, address, and a link to the location in Google Maps. This technique seems slightly faster than typing the business name, city, and state directly in to the Google Maps location, which yields the same results but doesn’t use up a text message.
Of course you can also stay on the line and you’ll be connected to the business for free. This really makes the land-line telephone company business model of charging extra for every little service seem antiquated, e.g. “Press 1 to be connected for seventy-five cents.” No thanks Cingular, I mean AT&T Wireless, I’ll just use Google 411.
The iPhone is very slick and the available features are intuitive and easy to use. It’s an awesome, Internet-enabled, media-playing monster monster of a modern telephone.
Unfortunately, features that aren’t readily apparent just aren’t there. For example, Google Maps recently gained the ability to adjust routes for its directions. Do you want to travel from Evans, GA to St. Matthews, SC without going all the way to Columbia? I can now do that with Safari on my computers by hovering over the route and dragging it — it will helpfully snap the route to the closest roads to your mouse drag. This evening I tried to the same on the iPhone and quickly became frustrated by the touch-based interface. Unlike a full-size computer with a multi-button mouse and a keyboard with several modifier keys, the touch interface gives you very few modifier options. You lack command, alt, and control keys, as well as extra mouse buttons. I didn’t spot a single place in the iPhone interface where a “hover” was used.
My location and lifestyle kick me out of the early adopter crowd. There is no public transportation between my home and my work. My commute takes 12-18 minutes by car and 22-30 minutes by bicycle. If I needed to decide on a local place to get sushi, one of the impressive video iPhone interface demos that was released ahead of the phone itself, well, my town is small enough that I already know all the places that serve sushi.
I applaud the price drop. If I have a few back-to-back business or personal trips in the next several months that will see me traveling to larger markets, I’ll probably go ahead and pick one up. Otherwise, I’ll wait for the next version. I’m looking forward to 3G, bluetooth GPS, more storage capacity, and more flexible mapping options.
