Dvyjones

Norwegian programmer and lover of technology.

[trentreznor-blog]

[dvyjones]

do-you-have-a-flag:

poor doctor

Teehee.

[dvyjones]

Why do I buy Apple products?

I've lost count of how many times people have looked at my Apple products with scorn (actually, no I haven't; it's about a dozen), and asked my "why do you buy that iDevice?" They list of several other products that they think is "better", and say that I should get that instead.

Most of the time I'm told that this other device is better it's because of the tech specs. People tell me "you will never be able to play games on that thing" when they see my MacBook Pro. Number one: I almost never play games, because there are not that many games I enjoy playing. Number two: I've played through Portal and Portal 2 many times (with a trackpad, I might add). I daresay both of those are games. No, I probably won't be able to play several graphics-intensive games. However, the few games I do play work perfectly on it.

Some people just throw pure specs at me. "This laptop has a CPU that's umpteen gigahertz faster and only a third of the price". "For that price I could've gotten a laptop that can run five games at the same time". "My laptop has way more RAM than yours and I only paid half of what you did". That last one was actually wrong, since I had upgraded my RAM after I bought my computer and I bought it in the US where the prices are about half of Norway's, but you get the point. Most of these I can't argue about. Yes, there are definitely computers that are faster and otherwise beefier than my MacBook Pro. However, I don't need a beefier computer than what I have right now. Again, I don't play many games. Most of the time I run a web browser, IRC client, Spotify, text editor and a terminal window. That doesn't call for a quad-core processor or RAM sizes in the double digits.

People also complain about Apple's clearly overpriced products. I don't think anything is overpriced if people keep buying it, but ok, it's a fair point. Apple products are expensive. However, in return for all that money, I get a device that looks really nice (no, it's not sexy), a device that just works from the moment I first start it up until I decide to replace it (except for a few cases), and last but not least, a product I love. I've owned several computers in my life so far. Only one can I say that I have loved. Same thing applies to my phones. This is why I keep buying Apple things, no matter how much it hurts to give away that cash. I know that what I will get in return is a product I love.

[dvyjones]

I still burst into laughter when seeing this.

[dvyjones]

iPad disappointments

Ok, I have to admit it. I'm completely, utterly in love with the iPad and I'm probably one of the first I know to get it. However, having an iPad Mini (AKA an iPhone) there were some features I was disappointed not to see in the iPad: * Multitasking. I can understand why Apple don't want to do this on the iPhone, and even though I've jailbroken my iPhone I could survive without multitasking. However, with 1 month(!) of standby battery time there should be plentiful to run Pandora or Spotify in the background... * Flash. I'm not quite sure if I want flash or not, but I wanted to write it here to state my opinions. I don't like flash. Or rather, I don't like most sites that use Flash. You can now use HTML5 for most things you would use flash for earlier, although there's still some things you have to use flash for (like copy-with-a-button). However, do we need this on the iPad? I think the lack of flash on the iPhone has forced web creators to make non-flash versions of their pages and I think keepig flash off the iPad could help doing this even more. * More ingernationalized keyboards. As of the time if writing there's really few languages and keyboards available. Why? Doesn't it run (a slightly modified version of) the iPhone OS? Can't Apple just port the keyboards over? I can understand the languages if there are many new strings, but going back to holding "a" and "o" to type "æ", "ø" and "å" would be a real setback for me. So, what do you think? Would you buy the iPad? What do you think is missing? (I'm still considering myself as a blogging newbie, so feedback on the post would be great too :D)

[dvyjones]

The musical genius @torley has struck again, this time with some beautiful piano ringtones. I haven't visited his site in a loong time, and I was very pleasantly surprised when I discovered he has made some ringtones. Go and listen to them, they are really beautiful and different from your usual ringtones :)

[dvyjones]

Is your server sending malformed JSON? Like {foo: "bar"}? Then you should probably fix that, as jQuery 1.4 won't parse that anymore. Yehuda Katz proposes a small hack to fix this easily in javascript, but you probably want to fix it server-side.

[dvyjones]

Ok, this is my third (I think) attempt at "blogging", and I have a feeling that this will be more successful than the others. Once a day (or I hope so) I will post a link, image, video, or any other post that I think is nice, and I'll start of with this one.

Questionable Content is a webcomic that I just discovered, and I read daily now. I'm not quite sure why I like it, but it's funny and drawn well. I still love XKCD for it's geekiness, but this is a real competitor in my mind. What do you think? Wait, do I have comments? Ah, that nice checkbox on the side says so. So, what do you think? XKCD or QC?