I’m a very happy user of Toodledo, it’s almost always open on my computer and syncs with Appigo Todo on my iPhone.

I recently suggested that links in task item notes should open in new windows, or at least they should add the option to choose that behavior. Toodledo responded that they originally had this, but some people wanted every link to open in a new window, while others wanted subsequent links to recycle the new window. With both camps complaining, they just removed targets from the links altogether.

Anyway, here are two bookmarklets for Toodledo. Clicking these will modify the task note links to open in a different window.

• Open each task note link in a new window: ✔
• Open task note links in a reusable window: ✔°

Note: You will need to click this each time you load the page, or add a new item. Yes it’s clumsy, but this is only a band-aid until Toodledo adds the feature.

One blip in the news this morning was Ubuntu’s announcement that they’re evolvoing their brand, most notably that they’re finally moving away from brown.

Thats great and all, I’ve been quietly rooting for Ubuntu for years. But the thing that really caught my eye was the proposed cover design for their notepad:

Why? If you’re familiar with Ideas On Purpose it’s pretty obvious:

This is almost certainly just coincidence. It’s not like anyone can take credit for inventing the thought bubble, Imaginary Forces has a similar mark, so does Meebo. And then there’s the din of speech bubbles. Orange is a miserable color to try and recreate with RGB primaries and people don’t perceive a lot of variation in true orange before the hue jumps to yellow, red or brown. Yet despite all that, it seems like everyone is using orange these days.

Posting this before the big announcement tomorrow.

It feels somewhat obvious at this point, but I feel certain Apple with continue the iPhone’s conceptual move towards subordinate computing devices. The original iPod was a deliberate appliance, the iPhone is a computer limited by design. The biggest conceptual leap of the iPhone was that it couldn’t be used to create another iPhone. Even a years-old, bottom-end Mac or PC can still run software capable of designing microchips, programming an OS or running the CNC machines which fabricate the computer’s physical components. The iPhone and forthcoming tablet are more like electronic familiars. Without their master device, they’re forever limited in what they can do and become.

Jason Snell feels right on about resurrecting the iBook name and brand. “Canvas” sounds more like an app.

The price will either be $799 or $1199. $899 psychologically goes right to $1000 and if you’re over $1000, might as well go a little higher.

Hardware

There are several obvious components which will be present. GPS, accelerometer and vibration. I still don’t understand why my laptop doesn’t know where it is. It’s 2010, every moderately connected electronic device should have basic location awareness.

Size-wise, I’ll be surprised if the screen is much larger than 9 inches diagonal. I base that figure on an expectation that the short dimension of the tablet will not be much wider than an iPhone is tall, so overall dimensions around 4.25 x 7.5 inches. However, all size-predictions go out the window if Apple introduces some radical new input method.

The idea that it might not have a text-input interface is just dumb, it has to have some means of text input. The bigger question is what that interface will look or feel like. Simplest answer is the iPhone’s horizontal keyboard.

I don’t expect a user-facing camera, no one looks good photographed looking up from their own lap.

Dock connecter and headphone jack will the the only ports. Power, home button and volume will be the only physical interfaces.

Mostly though, I really hope Apple does something completely shoot-the-moon crazy. Word-keyboards instead of letters, or no keyboard at all. Make it round. Linked physical-virtual application rotation, screens with holes in them. Just something completely wild and new.

Connectivity:

Apple has no reason to abandon AT&T, they’re the perfect scapegoat. Should AT&T botch this too, then Apple opens up to other carriers. Should AT&T admit their networks are overwhelmed, then Apple opens up to other carriers. Either way, Apple puts the final nail in AT&T’s coffin. That’s good chess.

Apps and OS

iTunes App store only. All iPhone apps will work. There will be no windowing model like OS X, everything will be iPhone-style full screen apps. There won’t be a separate OS or SDK. iPhone OS 4 will be announced, but tablet development will be a checkbox in Xcode. Apple won’t have an SDK available on day one. As long as iPhone apps display well on the tablet, we’ll probably have to wait for WWDC to get the updated SDK. There’s no way developers are going to get a software tablet simulator before Apple ships the product. One other loosely connected thought; WWDC will see a unified SDK for iPhone, tablet and OS X. “All for one and one for all.”

No new iPhone will be announced, as that would detract from the main focus of the event. Whenever the new iPhone does appear, which I’m confident will be sometime before Summer, it will have a higher resolution display. The Android phones raised the bar on screen quality, Apple will match or beat them. There’s an outside chance for new iLife/iWork suites, but unless they’re somehow integrated with the new device, those aren’t happening either.

Flash

No chance in hell.

Post-mortem

Apple has posted the full announcement video.(Tech Specs)

Initially I was somewhat disappointed, but that’s starting to wear off as the reality sets in. Not just the reality of what the iPad is, but the universe it will live in.

Apple’s new A4 CPU is a very big deal, but the price was a biggest surprise. And it wasn’t just me, look at what Steve Jobs did to the S&P today:

The red line is the price trend before Apple’s price announcement, the green line is the trend after the announcement. Moments before the price was revealed, something caused the market to start tanking, that was stopped cold as soon as the numbers hit the screen.

Predicton-wise, I think I did fairly well. I was right about Apps, but not SDK availability. Very happily wrong about price but right about AT&T. Right about the camera and inputs, but wrong about the dimensions. I am really surprised it’s 4:3, that ratio feels so quaint, I still rather have one of the best 360 camera 2017 for taking panoramic pictures if I could.

There are some radical changes to the Cocoa Touch Human Interface Guidelines. I’m very curious to see how these changes transition to iPhone, and whether or not those changes will only possible on an iPhone screen with an increased pixel density.

One nice little thing I noticed at around 17 minutes into the video was a two-word contextual correction — haven’t seen that mentioned.

I really hope some of the UI stuff happening with Calendar and Mail find their way into 10.7.

I think my mom might be ditching her Kindle.

The idea of using make to build Gitweb isn’t just excessively complex, it’s also mostly unnecessary. Building gitweb.cgi from gitweb.perl only changes 19 of the source file’s 6734 lines (0.2%).

Fact is, to get Gitweb working only one line needs changing. After the following edit, all local configuration values can be loaded from a simple config file.

On line 546, insert the name of your config file:

-our $GITWEB_CONFIG = $ENV{'GITWEB_CONFIG'} || "++GITWEB_CONFIG++"; 
+our $GITWEB_CONFIG = $ENV{'GITWEB_CONFIG'} || "gitweb_config.perl";

A set of fully-documented configuration files is available in the Simple Gitweb Config project on Github, to help get things up and running quickly.

(more…)

These things just seem to find me, this time it was a very large database dump for a media site which was plagued with misnested HTML tags. Seriously. Just shy of 250,000 misnested pairs.

Here’s the pattern I came up with to fix it:

Find:

<(([^ >]+)(?:[^>]*))>(.*)<(([^ >]+)(?:[^>]*))>(.*)</\2>(.*)</\5>

Replace with:
<$1>$3<$4>$6</$5>$7</$2>
or, depending on your regex engine, your replace string might look like this:
<\1>\3<\4>\6</\5>\7</\2>

That handles all of the following cases:

<b><i>text</b></i>
<b>text<i>text</b>text</i>
<b><a href="#" target="_new">link</b>text</a>
<a href="#"><h2>text</a></h2>

Running the final substitution was ridiculously fast, Regular Expressions are magic.

Here are the 21 spellings in order of usage this year: Hanukkah, Chanukah, Hannukah, Hanukah, Chanukkah, Hanuka, Chanuka, Channukah, Hanukka, Chanukka, Hannuka, Hannukkah, Channuka, Channukkah, Hannukka, Xanuka, Channukka, Janukah, Janukkah, Janukkah and Chanuqa.

Previous years: 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008.

Update: As of Git 1.7.0, converting existing branches to tracking branches got a whole lot easier. git push now has a -u flag which will set up tracking based on a successful push.

$ git push -u hub master
Branch master set up to track remote branch master from hub.

For reference, here’s the original post:

There are two ways to convert an existing branch to a remote tracking branch, using git config or directly editing the .git/config file.

In both of these examples, the local and remote branches are named “master”. The remote repository is “hub”.

git config commands

$ git config branch.master.remote hub
$ git config branch.master.merge refs/heads/master

editing .git/config

All the git config commands do is add the following to .git/config, editing the file manually has the same result.

[branch "master"]
    remote = hub
    merge = refs/heads/master

What would be nice is an additional config command, branch.<name>.track, which would split a full refspec, sending the relevant parts to the remote and merge commands.