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Category Archives: things can be easier

5 Annoying Things about the iPhone

I’ve had my iPhone for a few weeks now and here are the real issues I have come across.
1. No MMS Text Messages. I do not know of any cell phone which can not receive photo messages, except the $600 most advanced phone on the market. This one just baffles me. I [...]

Posted 25 July 2007 † marcus § ‡ Comments (5) °

Incompatible Adapters, Why Apple Why?

I don’t get this one, some very poor incompatibility between Apple power adapters. The key to modular systems is that the pieces should fit together. Did Apple engineers as kids always forced that square peg through the round hole?
The new iPhone dock comes with a ridiculously short cable and the USB adapter only has [...]

Posted 09 July 2007 † marcus § ‡ Comments (3) °

Goodbye XML, Hello JSON

About four years ago I wrote an article on the limitations of XML, I’m here to back that up with some numbers. All of the same issues apply to XML today as they did then. It is still a bloated format, still requires external libraries and still takes plenty of code to parse.
Our search [...]

Posted 03 February 2007 † marcus § coding § geek ‡ Comments (0) °

Specials Characters = Special Pain

Things can be easier. It amazes how difficult simple text processing can be. The crazy thing is after 10+ years of doing it for the web, things don’t seem to be getting any easier. Copying and pasting text from Word always is a problem, plus now people like fancy quotes, accents and all sorts of [...]

Posted 24 January 2007 † marcus § coding ‡ Comments (0) °

Rich Text Editor - IE, Firefox, Safari ?

Things should be easier.
Why can’t I do the following with HTML:
<textarea richtext=”yes”
buttons=”bold,italic,copy,cut,paste,lists,…”
resizable=”yes” … >
It would display something like this:

When submitting the rich textarea it would simply POST well-formatted HTML as you would expect. You wouldn’t need a huge download, buggy javascript, different editor widgets for each site. You could have the same consistent spell [...]

Posted 17 January 2007 † marcus § coding ‡ Comments (1) °

Computers, we have a long way to go

After trying to remember the HTML character code for the fancy quote mark for the 1,00th time, I realized we have a long way to go with interactions with computers. I’m not talking just pretty GUI’s and simple keyboard and mouse interfaces but the whole HCI gambit; computers are supposed to be smart and make [...]

Posted 16 January 2007 † marcus § geek ‡ Comments (0) °