Month: April 2008

Categories
Blog

Fun With Wordage v4

I haven’t redesigned this blog since 2005. As I mentioned recently, it was long overdue. It’s finally here. Some of the more notable changes:

  • Much wider content area – The old design was optimized for 800×600 displays. It didn’t allow for anything much wider than 400px, meaning images often had to be cropped or scaled in ways that I really didn’t like. Now optimized for 1024×768 there’s over 600px of useful layout. That’s much better!
  • Movin’ on up! – The old design has a huge header that pushed real content way to low. This design pushes content much higher meaning less scrolling.
  • Related Posts – Simply because it’s convenient. It’s rather accurate and brings up stuff that even I forgot about.
  • Now in a blog directory – This blog is now located at: robert.accettura.com/blog – This url hierarchy makes more sense. Don’t worry, old posts all redirect to the new location. The front page is pretty plain right now, but that will change slowly over time.
  • Components rewritten – Several parts of the blog’s templates and various widgetry have been totally rewritten including my AJAX comments. Lighter, faster, and (hopefully) less bugs.
  • Not done yet – It’s not even done yet. I’ve got more in the works, but those things will see the light in weeks to come.

Check it out (yes you in your feed reader) and let me know if you see any issues. I’m sure there’s still some bugs that need to be ironed out.

Categories
Apple

iPhone 2nd Generation

So more is coming out about the next iPhone, which we all know is going to be 3G. Someone found evidence of it in the recent update to the iPhone SDK. The SGOLD2 chipset will be replaced with the SGOLD3, which supports 3G networks (as we all expected). Looking at the specs some interesting things come out:

  • ARM 926 CPU capable of running up to 312 MHz – This isn’t that much more than the existing iPhone which is said to be underclocked to preserve battery life. Don’t expect much change here.
  • 5 Megapixel camera support – Capable, but don’t expect to see 5MP. I suspect it will be upgraded to 3MP and no higher to conserve costs.
  • MPEG4 / H.263 hardware accelerator – Sigh, no H.264 support. That’s a bummer. Apple could still use hardware support via another chip.
  • Support for video telephony, streaming, recording and playback – I wonder if Apple plans to utilize this. Video telephony could work over 3G networks (AT&T already did it with an LG CU500v). But it would require a potentially reworking the location of the camera on the phone.
  • 3G upgradeable with WCDMA coprocessor – Very interesting since this could allow Apple to offer the iPhone on CDMA networks, though the largest (Verizon) is going to become LTE a varient of GSM. That’s the largest CDMA network in the US. Still CDMA support will be needed for Japan.

Walt Mossberg initially said this is going down in 60 days, but now he’s retracted that statement. I still think a June timeline sounds about right. WWDC 2008 is June 9-13, 2008. Sounds about right.

Categories
Around The Web Funny Google Mozilla

April Fools 2008

As usual, my list of April Fools that I saw today: