#“Google be very scared, PayPal search is spookily brilliant”
Seriously PayPal, WTF?
A search for "card" gives zero results.
They even have a dead image error on the page.
Lob someone $100 to fix your site, would you?
25 Mar 2011, 16:30
25 Mar 2011, 10:30
#“Irish Blog Awards Coda”
The Irish Blog Awards took a raggle taggle bunch of solitary bloggers and online commenters and built a real-world community.
Thanks Damien, everything you did for Irish blogging will be remembered.
25 Mar 2011, 10:21
#“Loving the sexy new cover on my iPad2”
24 Mar 2011, 18:07
#“Very cool, Inkscape can import a PDF so you can edit it”
A constant problem in dealing with design agencies and others is that most of them only deliver the print-ready or web-ready files (PDFs, JPGs etc) and don't give you the original source PSD, AI, SVG etc. This means that you always have to go back to them, even for the smallest tweak. We have an old flyer from a trade show last year and I want to do a quick re-spin for the lowest cost possible for a trade show next week. All I have is the PDF. For fun I tried importing it into Inkscape. And whaddya know, it works!
If you aren't familiar with Inkscape, it is a free vector drawing app for Windows, Linux etc. The big difference between vector drawing and bitmap drawing (like GIMP, Paint, Paint.net) is that you can scale vector drawings as much as you like and they stay smooth rather than bitty or pixellated. The Inkscape UI is an absolute horror and after listening to a podcast last year with the developers, that's not going to change since they think it's fine. But once you get the hang of it (and there are tons of tutorials), it's brilliant for doing vector stuff and then outputting PDF, EPS for print and PNG for web. I use it for a bunch of banner ads we have on a partner intranet and also for any logo requests we get for big signs at shows etc.
I was chuffed that today's PDF import worked. It's not ideal since it only sees some of the text as text and the rest as individual vector letters but it's enough to let me remove some extraneous bits and add others. I'll be shooting the output to a printer tomorrow.
23 Mar 2011, 18:35
#“RT\u00c9 Radio launches its first Android Apps - Install them now!”
via rte.ie
You know me, I bitch about RTE all the time (I'm allowed, I'm a licence payer) but stuff like this makes me very very happy.
The PocketPlayer App has all the RTE Radio stations. My Dad was well impressed with it on his ZTE Blade. Tis far from listening to Irish dancing on his parents' tube radio in Rosbercon he has come in 72 years!
The Documentary On One App has a big archive of material.
I've used both of them and they are great but there is something very deep about the Documentary one and how it goes way back. Part of our history and culture in the palm of my hand, any time I want to listen.
23 Mar 2011, 08:42
#“What a Google AppInventor App looks like on an Archos Tablet”
I'm not so sure it's supposed to scale like that. Would Honeycomb scale it any differently/better or is the issue AppInventor? That Archos 101 is running Froyo.
22 Mar 2011, 17:53
#“The Utter Imbecilic Brain-dead Stupidity of the Amazon App Store for Android”
We Irish Android early adopters railed against Google for their slowness in making paid Apps available outside of a tiny group of countries. Finally last year Google got their act together and we’re all now good buddies again. No more 3UK SIM tricks for me (except for Flixster, strangely).
Amazon has just announced their own App Store for Android. Just what the world needs, another stripped down Android app store with fewer apps than the built-in one. Sure sure, if you bought an Archos tablet or slightly dodgy no-name (Sonly Ericcsun maybe) Chinese phone, you won’t have the official market but 2 minutes Googling for a workaround usually sorts that out.
But, ever the inquisitive, I downloaded and installed it. The offer of a free “Paid App” a day was a nice carrot. Of course I had to try the Angry Birds Rio App.
And then I got that message. That goddammed message we all thought we’d seen the back of. Not available in your goddammed region cos you’re too goddammed small a country but we’ll put our goddammed datacenters here because of the nice tax breaks, thanks very much.
Blah blah, country specific licensing, blah blah, copyright issues, blah blah blah. I wonder was that message actually delivered from a server sitting in Dublin? The ultimate insult.
Ye know Amazon, we’re already dealing with this bullshit on your Android MP3 Store and on your Kindle Store, so you can take your Android App Store and stick it where the sun don’t shine. If Google can figure it out with their legendary ability to negotiate with content providers (cough), surely you can.
20 Mar 2011, 13:19
#“The Joy of The Irish Blog Awards #IBA11 is finding things like this…”
via davidairey.com
Universal Wrapping Paper!
Well done to David on his win in the Awards last night.
20 Mar 2011, 12:45
#“Has the Horror of upgrading Windows on your Sage machine improved?”
One of our admin machines is stuck on XP for a very good reason - Sage Instant Accounts. It's a piece of software we truly detest but we started using it in 2004 and moving to another solution has never looked easy. Also none of those solutions looked much better.
In an ideal world, Sage (or a competitor) would figure out SaaS properly, give us one-click import of 7 years of data into a cloud-based solution and work seamlessly from then on with local Irish accountants, Irish VAT etc etc. Jam in online payroll software and we'd have total win. No more stupid disks or end-of-year manuals in the post, no more paying for maintenance that we never use. Just a low monthly fee based on our feature usage. Then we could say goodbye forever to those Windows 3.1 dialogs that still hide under the modern skin they applied around version 10.
"Would you like to back up to a floppy disk?".
Every time we upgraded machines in the noughties, the brain-melter was Sage. You literally had to install the original 2004 disk and then apply every upgrade after that in sequence until you were up to date, then you re-imported your most recent backup. Invariably I'd screw up some step and have to do it all over again. Same for the Payroll app.
So here we are in 2011 with Sage v12 installed on XP. What are the chances that our upgrade would consist of:
- Backup all data
- Install clean copy of Windows 7
- Install Sage V12
- Import backup
Anyone know?
20 Mar 2011, 11:10
#“Today Matthew, I’m going to be Sally Field. #IBA11”
This brain-fart of a blog won Best Tech Blog at The Irish Blog Awards in Belfast last night. I’m still in shock.
Really thrilled for all the other winners too. Particularly the awesome Daily Spud.