Via T3:
First off, there’s support for dozens of languages, so if you happen to be a fluent Cantonese speaker, the phone has all the relevant character sets so you can display your language properly.
There’s full support for French and German, with special keyboard lay-outs on the ready to tackle accented characters – perfectly understandable, of course, what with the phone heading for launch across the channel this month too.
This is very good news for people like me, who crave the iPod Touch’s “languages” button to switch autocompletion dictionaries to Dutch, German, or whatever you may need. I hope we’ll see a hack for this firmware soon.
I have been working on a few technical things over the course of the weekend; first meshing my home wireless network by letting two routers form a single network, and after I was done, setting up MRTG (Multi-Router Traffic Grapher) for my Airport Extreme, which is the border gateway.
MRTG produces pretty graphs of networks statistics, and I integrated them into my Leopard desktop using a space station icon I am working on, a bit of Photoshopping and Geektool 2.1.2 (since the website is down, I’ll host it here for the interested). Geektool, in turn, is a preference pane that lets you show console output or images on your desktop, refreshed at a certain interval.
I’ll let the result speak for itself (click for larger version over at flickr);
If there’s any interest for it, I’m willing to write a nice how-to for setting all of this up easily. Drop a comment if you want to see such a post.
I was going on a trip today and I was loading some videos on my iPhone of DEFCON 15. DEFCON is a conference in Las Vegas for security professionals with many ludicrously technical yet casual talks. I found that the Defcon Archive website didn’t offer the videos of this year’s conference up for download, but an excellent blog did; Roysac’s blog also had a small side note of a video dating back a few years, but certainly worth sharing.
This video (over an hour) goes into detail about text art. You have probably seen ANSI or ASCII artworks before in your life, but this is the most complete video I have ever seen about its development and background. Going back a thousand years before the dawn of computing, the speaker demonstrates how humans have been making text art over the ages and how it reached a spectacular peak in the age of BBS’es, before the dawn of the World Wide Web. “Underground” art groups were competing on bulletin boards for pure honour, making textual artwork (sometimes even animations) with painstakingly mundane ‘manual labor’. If you decide to see just one bit, check the last third of the movie for some pretty insane ‘textmode’ 3d animations.
The Roysac blog features a lot of information about the BBS scene, and specifically the art culture around it. Worthwhile addition to the artistically inclined geek’s RSS feeds.
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In my free time, I have been experimenting with the iPhone home screen icons. I was initially pleased by the icons, but found several to be lacking after having looked at them for prolongued periods of time. Since I don’t want to be greedy, I will share some techniques, know-how and tips with you to help you get up to speed designing icons for your own iPhone. I will also look at my upcoming set of icons and discuss why I am changing so little to the look of the default icons.
Today, Photon was released by Green Volcano Software. Photon is basically the missing link in your photography workflow and a lot more; it helps you preview, arrange, sort and organize images, even when they are still on your camera or memory card. It’s exceptionally fast in handling large images in equally large quantities. I helped the developer, Michael, with a bit of testing and made the application icon. Read on for the process of making Photon’s icon.
October 2007 has changed a lot around here; the blog redesign, a whole new series of posts and a very large increase in traffic for the fourth time (in the short while it’s been around). A small roundup of articles of the last month and thoughts on the ‘transition’.
The Delicious Library 2 preview I posted up has been followed up today by new screenshots over at Wired. I can’t say I am too impressed looking at the screenshots, but I guess only actually using an application makes for a good judgement.
My graphical look at Final Cut Server was followed up by quite a few emails concerning Apple’s ‘icon rage’ lately. It seems Leopard’s gotten a lot of love (save perhaps the Expose and Spaces icons) but some applications were left out with pretty bad icon work.
And then there was the Dock frenzy after Leopard hit the stores; in the meantime, we’ve seen large-scale customization and even complete disabling of the newfangled Dock. Some (slightly) acceptable modifications struck my eye on Macthemes’ forum today (click images to go to the release in question);
I still have my fingers crossed for a nice application that lets you customize the Dock easily – perhaps I’ll even start using it again.
With a few other minor posts this month, I’d say it has been a very nice lineup of news, curious little developments and interesting things. Your input on how I have been changing the blog is welcome as always, although I’ll mention in advance that I intend to keep up the posting as you’ve seen lately, with occasional personal bits in between a succession of the things that pique my interest.