Category Archives: Projekte

Meine Projekte oder Dinge, die ich gelernt habe und die ich euch gerne weitergeben möchte.

The Big Anti-Apple Rant

Fanboyism

Apple is not perfect, and I know it. I’m not trying to be a Fanboy, even if some people have a hard time distinguishing between Fanboys and and people who like things that are well-designed. No real ordering for my criticism:

Podcasts

Apple supports these, and the built-in support in the iPhone is better than any other app in the AppStore out there as far as I can tell. But I’d still like it to be better. I want to be able to subscribe to podcasts and have them download in the background when there’s WiFi. This feature is clearly missing (and please don’t tell me to 24/7 run my computer for this). Why do I have to do that manually?

Creative Commons License photo credit: eriwst

iCloud lock-in

Steve Jobs said that iCloud’s purpose is to lock people into Apple’s ecosystem. This is not the best for the consumer, unless to turn the argument around and say it’s better for the customers to go with Apple’s products only. Apple, open up an API for external software.

Windows compatibility

Another lock-in argument is that other times, the compatibility with computers running Windows is not great. For example, if I connect to the computer of my girlfriend, copying files is kinda slow and using her printer doesn’t work instantly (which differs to using some networked printer).

Window Borders in Lion

Yay, we can now drag windows on every side to with the mouse pointer to make them bigger or smaller! Sadly, most of the OSX windows were not programmed with this in mind and have zero pixels of borders. This means while I drag the pointer over the border a very short time the icon changes and I can grab the border, but often times I don’t hit this time-window. Apple, how about adding 1px of border on the outside of the window when I hover in it’s direct surrounding, so I at least have a change of grabbing it?

AppStore

The AppStore is your only hope to make money on Apples platforms as a developer. So, if you don’t get featured, you’re most likely lost. This is a lot of power on Apples side, and it should be more obvious how to get featured in the app store other than to make great apps that Apple’s employees like. You should also get more statistical data about the usage of the AppStore, so you don’t have your marketing guys spam keywords all over the place.

AppStore Search

It would also nice, if the Appstore would rank abandon-ware and very poor software lower in searches if was was a) seldomly downloaded b) poorly rated or c) not updated for a very long time. Maybe it should even forget thing that are too bad.

Network connections in Hotels or Academic Networks

Oftentimes, I connect to Hotel networks, free WiFi networks or networks in academic institutions and it just works. About 50% of the time, it doesn’t work and there’s a lot of fiddling with network specific settings involved before I get it to run. How about making this better, as usually Windows is king here.

Next generation programming language

Apple sticks with its old programming language Objective-C without having a contender for the next decade. For example, C# with .NET 4.0 is such an advanced language, that I barely have the heart to compare them. Please don’t comment this. I know you know better than me, but Apple has no solution for stronger machines other than making the devices more competitive by making them smaller.

Contracts

The iOS ecosystem is pretty locked down, with apps having only hacks to communicate to each other. How about stealing contracts from Windows Phone and Windows 8?

Sandboxing

That being said, Sandboxing is pretty bad for app developers if you forgot some entitlements that are necessary to run the software.

Preview

Preview doesn’t always work very good if the PDF is very big. Why, Apple?

Ergonomics vs. Looks

When there’s a design decision between the looks and the ergonomics of an Apple product, the looks win out (explained by John Siracusa on Hypercritical). Apple, please give us bigger arrow keys and better mice! (And Samsung, please don’t copy the questionable design-decisions from Apple!)

iChat / Messages / Twitter

Why is Twitter not integrated into Messages? Why is iChat not integrated with the iOS messages?

Conclusion

Apple is not perfect, and this is what I criticize. I’ll try to fill this list with more that I don’t like about Apple stuff, and remove things that get better. If you have comments, please leave out the price debate, as copying companies like Samsung show that the hardware in Apple-quality cannot be done cheaper.

Struts2 Präsentation für Programmierer

Grade wollte ich mir bei Scribd dieses längere und scheinbar sehr interessante TechnoPhilosophische Paper zum Thema Risiken von künstlicher Intelligenz runterladen, als ein Popup auftachte, dass ich dafür was hochladen solle. Aber was?

Bei Ascora / Abelssoft machen wir jeden Monat eine interne Veranstaltung um uns etwas weiterzubilden und schöne neue Technologien kennenzulernen. Diesen Monat war ich dran und habe was zum Thema Struts2 erzählt, DEM aufstrebenden Java Webframework.

Also, für den Fall dass sich jemand einleiten lassen möchte (oder dass ich diesen Vortrag nochmal woanders halten möchte, wo es eine Internetanbindung gibt), hier die Präsentationsfolien. Aber Vorsicht, ohne Erklärungen machen zuminstest die Codebeispiele wenig Sinn.

Struts2-Einleitung-für-Programmierer

What should a good ToDo Tool do?

About a software – and what you would need it to do so you think it would be useful for you

After trying out many different ToDo tools, I found that none of them makes using these tools fun. I don’t have a mac, otherwise I would certainly use something like “Things“, as the introduction movies look pretty nice and simplicity defines the software.

Nothing on the PC? Well, not entirely: we have A LOT of REALLY BAD solutions for Windows. Firstly, Outlook. This one is too simple, and office is high priced. You cannot organize ToDos with Outlook. Then an unlimited number of applications that fill your screen and give you 1 million buttons. Require about 10 hours to use first time. Missing a good PC-ToDo-tool, I looked for web applications. Toodledo is a nice service, but the interface just sucks. And you won’t use a bad interface anymore, as we’re living in modern times where usability engineeriing is reality … sometimes. Additionally, the web-software needs me to keep an eye on the browser everytime, which I just don’t like. If I want to get things done, I shouldn’t need the browser for that as we all know where that leads (youtube).

Therefore, I only depend on the iPhone-”Todo”-app, the only one thats pretty much usable. Sadly, I don’t have a 3GS, and the 3G needs about 5-8 seconds till I can see the screen and the app is started, so thats not perfect too. I often let this app run at work, but seeing the screen still takes 3 seconds.

So, what would you do? Usually, if you want a certain software-tool that exactly fits your needs, you just try out some, and after you didn’t find what you were looking for, you just use the next best thing OR just decide to throw away the idea completely. Well, that is, if you’re not programming software. So I decided to write down some requirements and asked at Abelssoft (the company I work at) if we could do something like this. Well, we could try :-)

So I’m asking you: What is the most important requirement, a todo-tool should fullfill, so that it would help YOU? What we found out is that it needs to fullfill the following:

  • easy to use, intuitive to use
  • small, compact interface thats in the background, popping up from time to time to ask if you still do <this>
  • tells me what I should do next
  • rapid way of adding new todos (and a rapid way of setting importance, due dates and stuff)
  • only necessary properties of todos (some want projects, some categories, everyone contexts, some tags, some planned time…)
  • good organisation of todos (projects? recurring todos? inbox?)
  • good filtering (if I search something, I need to find it instantly)

We had another giantic list of things that COULD be nice, but we’ll be trying to keep it sleek. And we found out that most people have very different ideas, what a todo tool should do more than the above. My boss wants project planning stuff like how much hours will this item take (I won’t want this). I want it to be able to synch to my iPhone (others don’t use iPhones). Some want dependencies between single todo-items (like this one can only be ready after another one), but how can you build this in without blowing the tool up to one of the complex tools already available? Some want projects while others find them confusing. Some want time-management-functions inclused. Some want further project-planning stuff like delegating ToDos or connectors to projectmanagement solutions like JIRA included. Choose and divide, young jedi.

Also, the GTD-philosophy seems to get in the way sometimes. For example, “Folders” don’t make any sense to me when you have contexts. They’re some kind of tags gone worse. That said, I like tags more. For these and some more reasons, I’m not sure if we should follow a certain philosophy (like the 30-year old GTD), as these were born in times when computers were not that essential in people’s everyday lives.

What do you think? Which feature would let you use a ToDo-organizer?

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Eclipse Initializing Java Tooling Error on 64bit Windows 7

Just a short note about an error I resolved lately.

Eclipse Initializing Java Tooling hangs at 1% while eclipse uses a lot of resources while configuring org.eclipse.jst.j2ee.internal.web.container … I’m on Windows 7, 64bit, 64bit JDK, running as non-admin.

This error seems to have some connection to the installed plugins, or with the last exit of eclipse. I found a forum entry “on the internets” where one user said he just deleted the lock file in his workspace’s metadata folder. This didn’t work for me. Another user mentioned that you can delete or rename the folder to resolve the issue:

WORKSPACE_HOME/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.resources/.projects

This worked for me, eclipse starts back on error-free again – BUT when closing eclipse, another error appears, that says that metadata in this folder could not be saved (something to do with the servers). Starting back up again after this gives me the same error again, Java Tooling hanging at 1%

Switching the workspace seems to help. Saying that, the workspace is corrupt somehow.So the single working workaround is deleting the .metadata folder for your eclipse workspace and start that workspace anew, importing projects, generating a new server. Can’t reproduce the error now, but I still guess that its something one of the plugins save wrongly in the project-metadata. I suspect its the JavaScript support, the springide-plugin or the subclipse plugin, as these are the plugins that a guy from this forum-thread had installed that I also use.

Well, never mind. Its a bunch of plugins in one giant IDE-framework. Can’t work on a 64bit Win7, right?

RDFa Editor Presentation

I just finished my final presentation as the finishing-line for my studies in computer science. I wrote about the inclusion of a RDFa-Editor in a blogsystem, where a user can include semantic annotations in their posts. The goal was to create a tool for editors that would enable them to enrich the posts they make with individual semantic markup. Its mainly focused on usability and is based on the WYMeditor and two servlets. It should be easily portable and perhaps this can be an inspiration for CMS-vendors, so normal people without domain-knowledge (in RDF and Ontologies) will be able to post semantic markup for their contents.

The presentation is made with the flash-tool of prezzi.com and is completely in GERMAN. You can find it shared here. Let it first load the media before you go on watching. If you experience lags, you can download the more smoothly runningoffline-exe-file.

If someone needs a translation, I might invest the hour of work doing so (just post a comment). This is the presentation … click on the forward button to move forwards, in the downloaded version you’ll find the forwards/backwards-butons in the lower right corner and can also use standard powerpoint-presentors:

I hope you like the idea – and I hope that the semantic web world gets more usable for “usual people”, otherwise it might not come to reality for many more years. If you’re interested in the thesis, let me know.

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