(a bit late to the party, but 30 april is a national holiday in Holland, so I missed this discussion earlier) I use it all the time, and I love it. The great thing about it IMO is that it's a library of functions I can use in my own code as opposed to a framework that forces me to recode everything according to it's guidelines. And I love the tight integration with VS. Mark C Hagers New Media Ventures Amersfoort, the Netherlands

martin_hughes wrote:

Yeah, Apple do design well. Graphic Design, though, is a completely different discipline, skill set and talent than software design that not everyone can do, and not that many of those that can do it well. Which, of course, means those resources have to be brought in and that costs money. Money that could be better spent on making sure the software actually works as it's supposed to rather than adding "visual clues" all over the place. On the other hand, I'm all for a nice combination of both.

One common misconception about user interface design is that it's basically a form of graphic design. Good user interface design has as much to do with good graphic design as with good programming. Both are instrumental to the implementation, but the real expertise in UI design is making realistic assessments of what the user wants to accomplish (based on real-world user tests), and devising clever ways to enable him to do it as easily as possible. Just because Apple products tend to be beautifully designed doesn't mean that design (or "eye candy" depending on your personal preferences) is all there is to it. The reason why iPhone and other Apple products are successful is because they reward user expectations: if you expect it to work in a certain way, it almost always does.

Mark C Hagers New Media Ventures Amersfoort, the Netherlands

Hmm, I'm afraid that might not work if IE is not present on the system. It depends whether they will remove all parts (dll's) of IE, or just the UI front end for the "European" release of Win7

Mark C Hagers New Media Ventures Amersfoort, the Netherlands

You must be referring to the first gen iPhone, the 3G has excellent support for Exchange email AND GPS. Exchange support is also set to be improved with the next software version.

Mark C Hagers New Media Ventures Amersfoort, the Netherlands

It seems there are two kinds of people, the ones that like the onscreen keyboard, and the ones that hate it. I'm in the former group, I really like the fact that the keyboard is only there when I need it, and the screen real estate is available for other things when I don't. I can only say that (after an initial period of mild frustration) I have become more expert at typing on it than I could ever hope to be on a physical micro-keyboard. The lack of 'tactile feedback' is IMO more than compensated for by some nifty software tricks that help you: - press the wrong key, keep it pressed while you slide your thumb to the key you really wanted and release and it will type the latter character (a tiny popup appears while your finger is down showing the char that will be typed). - switch between localized keyboards instantly (great for multi-lingual users), soon (tomorrow) with version 3.0 of the software, we'll be able to switch between vertical and horizontal keyboard layouts with the orientation of the iPhone. - excellent spell checker, language corresponds to the keyboard localization (I can type english and get english spell checking, and switch to dutch with corresponding spell checker in the same message). - spell checking is adaptive, you can reject suggestions instantly and it will learn from your corrections. I'd say it's a no brainer, but then I'm an Apple fanboy of course so you can just disregard everything I say. ;-)

Mark C Hagers New Media Ventures Amersfoort, the Netherlands

It may not help you much, but Apple's time machine comes pretty close to what you want, actually it's a full backup of every state of every file on your system. You can open a folder that once contained the file you're looking for and then move back in time until you see the file popping up, if it was moved or deleted.

Mark C Hagers New Media Ventures Amersfoort, the Netherlands

Wrong: if ( <some boolean expression> == true) { ... } should be: if ( <some boolean expression> ) { ... } I find it irritating because it's just needlessly adding another operation to the Boolean expression. Even though the compiler will probably optimize it out, it looks amateurish. Of course this is even worse: If (<some boolean expression> == true) { a = true; } else { a = false; } Should be: a = <some boolean expression>;

Mark C Hagers New Media Ventures Amersfoort, the Netherlands

Some years ago I had to convert a quickbasic program to VB6. The original developer had a variable called drol (for diameter of the roll). However in my (and his) native language, dutch, this also means turd.

Mark C Hagers New Media Ventures Amersfoort, the Netherlands