Kathryn's Comments

So they announced the “iPad” today. (Insert menstrual joke here.)

It’s 10″ with a 9.7″ diagonal 1024×768 pixel 4×3 aspect ratio screen. They say it’s 1/2″ thick and about 1-1/2 pounds.

The OS is basically a slight evolution of the iPhone/iPod Touch OS. The prices run from $500 to $700 for versions without 3G and $130 more for 3G.

I’d say that the price point is pretty good, but I will not be getting one of these devices. It’s about 2 inches too big to easily fit in my purse, which means it’s not a device I can take everywhere. And I carry a fairly large Coach purse.

And the bezel on it is huge. What’s up with that? If the bezel were rather smaller and the screen were about an inch smaller it would probably fit. My Kindle 2 fits. Anything larger would likely not fit.

I’m afraid the keyboard isn’t going to be touch-typeable, because there’s no tactile feedback for the home row. It does have Bluetooth keyboard support, as well as an external keyboard/mount that will probably make extensive typing tasks manageable, and maybe the keyboard is fine for on-the-go usage.

Aside from the size of the bezel and the physical “Home” key, this is pretty much what I was expecting from Apple. I like the iBook app, at least what I’ve seen, and I think ePub is the way to go.

The big surprise for me was that they’re putting their own processor into it. I figured it would be a standard ARM, but they’ve developed an ARM compatible processor which they’re calling the Apple A4. It’s a 1GHz chip and they say it gets great battery life. We’ll see.

I think I’ll stick with my laptop, Kindle, and iPhone combo. It satisfies almost all my needs, except for mobile computing on the go. My laptop is 17″ and is a pain to take on planes.

The snow we got Christmas Evening is finally beginning to melt. I can see grass in my back yard. My front yard (north side, sloping downhill) is still covered.

Kittie TV is back on, and my two cats are excited. They’ve been bored not having the bird channel on in the back yard.

I see chickadees and mourning doves. And a jay. I heard the flicker, earlier, but didn’t see him.

I await the rabbit and squirrel channels, as do the cats.

We’re still nowhere close to complete, thus the low version numbers, but this is the first version that looks decent on a non-Mac. The transparency doesn’t seem to work on Linux (at least not on my Ubuntu 9.10 system), but the window corners are rounded on Windows.

We still don’t have our own tabbed panes, various dialog boxes and file choosers and the like. I’m using the Mac internal frames on a Mac because I think they look good. Maybe I’ll rework the internal frames for non-Mac, but maybe not.

We now have a Google Group called sea-glass-look-and-feel@googlegroups.com for discussing the look and feel. We’ll still make announcements on our blogs, but I think discussion will be easier in a group/mailing list format.

I’m currently working on getting JTextField to use the client property of “JTextField.variant” equals to “search” to print a rounded search field with an hourglass in it.

My outer glow is messed up, but worse, my internal drop shadow is messed up.

I’m using the Nimbus Effects classes, which I note that Nimbus itself doesn’t seem to use. Possibly for performance reasons. I could just draw the stuff, but then it wouldn’t necessarily work at higher DPI.

Anyway, there are probably more important things I could be working on in Sea Glass, but this is something I really want.

We had snow last night. It’s not the first snow of the year, that was a few weeks ago, but the first snow was gone in a few hours. This is sticking around.

Here are a few pictures from outside my front and back windows.

snow from my front window

more snow from my front window

snow from my back window

Originally, I typed that title as “clound commuting”. Fingers don’t always do the right thing, even on a Dvorak keyboard.

Ron Burk has an interesting comment on cloud computing.

It pretty much mirrors my thinking on these subjects. Do we really want a vendor to keep our data, or would we rather keep it ourselves?

This is not a new problem, and the answer is, both. I have a copy of my birth certificate in a safe deposit box at a bank. The city in which I was born keeps a copy as well, in both paper form and in computer records.

I don’t think computing changes the situation all that much, except to make it more pervasive.

Update: I should add that I own a Kindle and I always keep copies of everything I purchase on my laptop, which is in turn backed up to an external drive.

Update 2: I should also add that I’ve know Ron Burk for almost 30 years. We were in college together.

Ken and I have released version 0.1 of the Sea Glass Look and Feel for Java.

This is very preliminary.

See the project site for more information.

In particular, we don’t have good focus indications, some alignment may not be correct, we’re still using Nimbus controls for tabbed panes and a few other minor things, and I’m sure there are tons of glitches.

But it’s a start.

Post feedback at Ken’s site, and we’ll give it the consideration it deserves.

I’ve been playing way too much Civilization IV Beyond the Sword lately rather than coding. The really awful thing is that I don’t even care about any particular game. If I don’t like something that happens I just quit the game and start a new one.

My favorite part of the game is the map discovery phase, where I’m exploring, meeting other cultures, and building my initial cities. Once that’s done, I’ll sometimes finish the game, but lots of times I’ll just quit and start another.

Why am I doing this? It’s completely pointless.

Blast you, Sid Meiers and the rest of Firaxis!

I’ve been working with Laffy, SwingSet3, and some of my own code to check how we’re doing with the Sea Glass L&F. Here’s an example of Laffy’s tables:

Should the striping continue across the checkboxes? Nimbus doesn’t do that, but it is probably possible to do.

Comments?