Wireless

Palm Pre is selling a wireless charger with their phone. That's brilliant, but why do you still need to tether it to sync with a computer? Confounded! This got me thinking. Why do I need to tether my iPhone at all? It could easily do it over bluetooth or a wireless network. It will probably definitely be slower than USB 2.0, but for small syncs that would do the trick. I hate that stupid little cord.

StylizedLabel (Viola!)

I got tired of browsing the web for a solution to stylized UILabels and decided to take matters into my own hands. For the record, Three20 is pretty robust but I didn't want to import his entire project just for one control, on top of the fact that it wasn't compiling under 2.2.1. So I created my own solution. Which is great because it's lightweight for what I want done. This isn't a perfect solution to the problem, but it's pretty damn near good enough.

Markup on the text looks like this, "<color ="0000FF">Blue</color> <bold>Bold</bold> and <italic>Italic</italic>!"

The markup is simple and descriptive. Feel free to modify my code.

It's also fast. 100 cells in a iTouch was very smooth.

XCode Project

Where am I now?

Foursquare, Britekite, Loopt. They all want to know where you are, but only you can tell them. Every single time. How annoying. For location based social networking to take off, the mobile device is going to have to update your location for you or you'll never do it. Yes there are privacy concerns, but an opt-in/out policy would be great. Or use a feature like fireeagle where they will pin point your location based on your settings. Exact, street, city, state, country...

Regardless, "always on" is the only way location based social networking is ever going to be really effective.

Signup

I love the facebook homepage. Sign in or sign up. The sign up process is 6 fields and done. What's even better is the sign up process that some iPhone applications take. Usually involving 2 fields. Username and password. Done. It's brilliant and stream lined. Somewhere along the way sign up became a hassle. I was so stunned the first time I created an account through the Run Keeper iPhone application that I opened the web browser to verify that it actually created an account for me remotely. It's so simple it's brilliant.

Now I want the feature to sign into any site with my email address and password without ever having to sign up for anything and we'll all call it a day.