...more recent posts
When debugging in PHP I've always used the crude method of inserting echo statements all over the place to print out my variable values. I'm a bit embarrassed to say that I never thought to use syslog() for this purpose. Much more elegant.
These IBM developerworks articles are great.
New, much longer video of Jeff Han demonstrating his giant multitouch interface. I blogged about Han and multitouch back in February of last year. It's all very Minority Report-ish. Obviously, since the iPhone debut, this stuff seems much more mainstream. And it is really cool - but only for certain data sets. For instance, it's hard to see how this augments any text based work. But for manipulating photos it's incredible.
My guess is that Apple is taking this very seriously. Adding coverflow (stolen from iTunes) to the Finder in Leopard makes it hard to think that multitouch isn't coming to all Macs. I expect the next round of laptops to have some sort of multitouch track pad.
And, while not specifically multitouch related, this Apple patent application for keystroke tacility arrangement on a smooth touch surface might offer a glimpse at the solution for touch screen keyboards. I hadn't thought of that route. Could you really deform a screen into something like a keyboard? That would be incredible and would solve the biggest issue with the iPhone. Sounds a little too sci-fi for me to believe it's anywhere near production though.
Interesting, although I'm not sure very useful, interactive CSS generator for styling text. I guess this idea could maybe be folded into a blogging/CMS system.
Longtime Apple appreciator and WSJ columnist Walt Mossberg likes OS X 10.4 Leopard:
On Friday evening, Apple will release yet another new version of OS X, called Leopard, to replace the current version, known as Tiger. I've been testing Leopard, and while it is an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, release, I believe it builds on Apple's quality advantage over Windows. In my view, Leopard is better and faster than Vista, with a set of new features that make Macs even easier to use.Evolutionary, not revolutionary, sounds right to me. Still there's nothing wrong with a little evolution, and there are some cool new features, plus some long standing annoyances have been worked out. Definitely worth the upgrade, but I won't be standing in line on Friday night or anything.