a nice widget i've now used a few times to help define where widgets should be placed
A nice screen layout optimizer [mac]
This is really nice for finally taking full control of your screen realestate
Initial thoughts on windows phone
This week i upgraded my wife's phone to a new Nokia Lumia 900, from her aging iPhone 3GS. while many have blogged about the pros and cons for switching and what you lose gain but making the switch. I'm taking a development approach to how i assess windows phone as a platform.
I currently develop for both Android and iOS and the development experience is mostly the same with each platform having small differences in the overall experience but for the vast majority of apps moving from iOS to Android is not a huge shift in UI development. In our short time as owners of a WP there is a fresh and newly engaging way the best apps are presented to the user. Comparing the major apps on each platform, your twitter, facebook, netflix, etc. the windows phone apps just have a sort of polish and cleanliness to them, which to be fair is the point of the metro UI Microsoft is building for WP and Windows 8. However, more to my point he departure and ability to make apps that look that way is very attractive to me as a developer. I want to make my apps look that good and it makes me want to support windows phone as a platform because i think design this good is key to pushing mobile further and building more engaging experiences for our users.
That being said just as there are bad apps on the other platforms a badly done WP app is just a hideous and some times even more so as it jars you from the niceness that you get accustomed to looking at.
So my verdict give WP a chance its pretty good right now and I think it has the ability to be a really good very soon, so please don't disregard it because it's a Microsoft product, I would have to say that just like the xbox its not your standard Microsoft product. In speed, smoothness, and overall quality I think it has advantages over the other platforms the only thing it lacks is a full catalog but that where we as developers need to step up and deliver. This is a platform we should want to support.
CSS Fluid Corners
this is a really sweet proof of concept
24hrs with a Transformer Prime
This weekend i've been setting up and testing the new ASUS Transformer Prime TF201. We acquired it for work to better tune the UWO Mobile app for andriod tablets, which currently is very broken on honeycomb and ICS tablets. I have not been and will probably never be a big android phone fan, it feels like a second rate experience compared to iOS and Windows Phone. So i really didn't have high hopes for the transformer. Here my experience
Setup
Unlike every other tablet i've had the initial honeycomb firmware couldn't connect to my home WIFI, after trying to figure out why for an hour or so, changing setting on the tablet/router. I found a number of posts suggesting i upgrade the firmware manually. After a fair number of attempts to get it to see that i had copied the firmware to it I finally got it to take the firmware upgrade. once it got the upgrade magically WIFI began to work and another firmware update installed via OTA will no issues.
Initially after the last update I realized that i could not purchase or download updates from the Play Store (Android Market) but a after a reboot things began to work again.
User Experience
Compared to Android phones I've used the Prime feels more polished, the home screens and widgets make more sense and make using the device, dare I say more enjoyable than an iPad. I still have issues but they're not with the Prime as a device more of issues with the UI and overall lack of polish in Android and many of the apps out there. One of my major issues is that very few apps are made for tablets, and there isn't a great way to tell; looking in the market if the app your about to install is optimized for tablets. Google needs to address these issues if they want to even make a small dent in the iPads strangely hold on the tablet market.
Verdict
The tranformer is a really nice peice of hardware and actually a contender for me as a daily use tablet. But The lack of tablet apps makes it hard to recomend over an iPad and with windows 8 coming out in a few months anyone looking at productivity tablet should definitely hold off on that tablet purchase IMHO.