High-Tech Humanities

I bought an unlocked Google Nexus One. Two weeks later, I was shocked by the headphones. Herein is that story.

I wanted an iPhone. I bought a Nexus One. At the end of the day I wanted to be able to load the SDK and the iPhone SDK requires a MAC, which I don't have. The next closest competitor was the Nexus One. Until this point, my last experience with a phone that wasn't challenged (aka: not a smart phone) was my foray into medical software for smart phones in 2004.

I like the Nexus One; Didn't care for being shocked. At first, the battery life seemed abysmal even after following the performance guidelines of shutting off unused items (vibrate, lower backlight, disable GPS, bluetooth, and WiFi when not in use) but, around the time of the early February update, it's been much better.

The user interface has been hit or miss. It's very nice and sporty, with a few random gotchas. In conference calls, where I'm tapping the mute-button quite a bit, the UI transposes the finger-tap to other parts of the screen and I wind up sending numeric tones to the attendees.

On one such call, I switched from speaker to the included headphones. After some minutes, I stood up and the earbuds delivered a mild shock. A quick search turned up a similar issue with iPhones.

Over all, in the first few weeks, I've enjoyed the new phone and hope to be able to spend some time mucking about with the SDK.

The Hemi Framework project page was updated to include the Hemi_3.0.2.zip and Hemi_3.0.2_build.zip distributions, as well as a little more content.

The examples section still needs to be fleshed out. Rather than use static examples, I'm thinking of using the included unit-tests to drive the examples, and fixing up the Framework Designer for better anonymous use. The Framework Designer includes builders, with example implementations, for DWAC projects, tasks, components, fragments, templates, a runtime container, and pseudo-debug linkage to the Framework Profiler. I like the experience of opening one of the in-page editors and, for example, making a new task-list with selectable feature examples, and then being able to run it right there on the page, than making static examples of various combinations.

I also think the Framework Designer and Distributed Web Application Components (DWAC) features fit very well with Net Books and OS's like Chromium because authenticated and authorized users can create new Hemi facets (components, templates, fragments, tasks), projects, or deployments in the browser. These features would also work well in environments where Web pages with multiple client-side frameworks, and their corresponding widgets and tools, could be instrumented, updated, and deployed in-page and on-demand while being compliant to security policies and, if desired, released by a workflow.

A brief note - I'm making significant revisions to the site, including the introduction of Hemi, the third major revision to Engine for Web Applications.

I cleaned up the site templates (A MasterPage, some static skeletons for HTTP Handlers, and XSL for the static documents) to remove extraneous HTML and tweak the navigation. In particular, session and login related items were pushed to the right, adjacent to the framework developer tool. I also cleaned up the CSS and reduced the amount of startup scripting used to instrument the Engine Gizmos, primarily by using better use of CSS as well as new features in Hemi.