I’ve been receiving comments lately from people asking me to update my Crossposterous plugin to use additional features from Posterous, particularly those added by version 2 of their API.

And I would love to do that.

Unfortunately, Posterous has published an incomplete API, and what they call documentation is what I call a joke.

And to add insult to injury, they’ve also removed (or hidden) all the documentation from the V1 API that I am currently using, and seems to work (most of the time).

I’ve worked in startups that were constantly rushing bad code out to production and then fixing it later, and I understand the mentality of deliver-and-iterate. If you’re going to deliver a little now and add to it later, that’s fine. It makes sense. But don’t remove something that’s working just for the sake of adding something that’s not.

And moreover, we’re talking about an API here. This isn’t a UI change that might take a moment for people to get used to later… it’s a change in functionality that requires developers to re-write and re-release software. It’s frustrating and irresponsible.

NASA: STS-42, prepare to disconnect oxygenation system on my mark.
SHUTTLE: Houston, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
NASA: Juliet Kilo, STS-42
SHUTTLE: Roger. Lima Oscar Lima.
NASA: Romeo Oscar Foxtrot Lima.

As a traveler and language learner, I am particularly fond on Lonely Planet’s phrasebooks and I find many of their other travel-related materials useful as well. I follow @lonelyplanet on Twitter, and in general have a pretty good opinion about them.

So it should come as no surprise that when looking for iPad apps, I search on their name, hoping to find some can’t-live-without killer iPad app for world travelers. What I found was 1000 Ultimate Experiences — a complete cop-out of an app, and rightly rated 1.5 stars (out of five) on the app store.

Now, yesterday I see their bogus free offer for their app. It’s clearly in hopes of getting people to rate the app higher, so they can make money from it on the app store. Personally, I find this completely offensive.

Rather than looking at their low rating and learning from the mistakes of their horrible app, Lonely Planet is trying to change perceptions and create a false sense that their offering is much better than it really is.

So Loneyly Planet, I hope you’re reading this, because I’m going to tell you exactly what you need to hear about your app.

• First and foremost, it lacks content. It’s a graphics-heavy presentation of what is essentially just a bullet list of information. FAIL.
• Second, for all of those graphics and animation, the app is not at all interactive. If you’re going to give me something as basic as a list of things to do and see, at least give me a checkbox for the ones I’ve done and for those I want to do.
• It’s not searchable. WHAT!? You give me a giant (disorganized!) 1,000 things to do and see in the world, and fail to give me any tool to break them down by geographic location? Another epic FAIL.
• Too much waiting. I hate any animations that leave me waiting before I can click/touch/tap and do the work I wanted to do when I opened your app.

The bottom line is that Lonely Planet’s app demonstrates a fundamental failure to understand what the iPad is and how it is used. That’s called a mistake, and it’s something that can be overcome. They also fail to recognized their audience, which is a bigger mistake but also able to be overcome.

But failing to learn from mistakes — or worse, trying to repaint history as if they weren’t mistakes at all — that’s much harder to forgive. It puts a stain on the Lonely Planet name as a whole, and makes me far less likely to buy the hundreds of dollars worth of LP products that I buy… and much less likely to recommend them on my web site.

Last weekend I planned a three-day weekend trip to the west coast, and for the first time, I didn’t write and schedule blog posts in advance. I made the decision to write my daily blog entries for Fluent Every Year from the road, on my iPad.

There were a few daunting parameters to this experiment. It meant accepting the iPad’s onscreen keyboard as my only input device, and it also meant depending on WiFi access to be available, since I do not have a 3G version.

The first thing I found was that WiFi is not as ubiquitous as I like to believe. I stayed in a different hotel each night, and only one actually made WiFi available in the room. The other two offered wired internet service in the room, and one had wireless available only in the lobby, and only for a daily rate of $13.

I learned that one simply can not expect to use their iPad everywhere they go, even if the hotel promises internet access. If you expect to have a reliable connection, you’ll need to pack an access point, or else expect to be hunting around for a coffee shop.

For sake of convenience I decided to write my blog posts in the hotel using the Notes app, and then find a coffee shop with internet access and just copy-paste the content into WordPress. That was fine for the most part, but there was another problem which wasn’t so easily worked around: the keyboard.

Any significant amount of typing becomes a terrible burden with the iPad’s on-screen keyboard. It’s horrible even for short messages on Twitter… but for a blog post which typically lands between 600-1000 words, it’s terrible. Painful. Completely unrealistic.

Even worse, the keystroke combinations required to form HTML tags on an iPad are rage-inducing. To make a link, press [123], then [#+=], then <, then [ABC], then a href, then [#+=], then ", then hopefully you’re pasting the URL, then ", then [123], then [#+=], and >, and now you’ve opened the tag…. you still have to close it later.

When I returned home, the first thing I did was test it out with my bluetooth aluminum keyboard, which works like a charm. Next time I travel out of town, I’ll pack the wireless keyboard with the iPad. I expect that will be far more acceptable — especially with HTML!

I’m also going to look around at MicroCenter and/or Best Buy and see if I can manage to find a small wireless access point which doesn’t require a bunch of cables and a big power brick. It would be nice to know I can rely on internet service at the hotel.

However, it should be noted that the small, lightweight iPad is not a bother to carry to a coffee shop. In a situation like mine, I could easily type up my blog post in Notes using a keyboard, and then carry the iPad to a coffee shop and paste it into WordPress. Unlike a larger, heavier laptop with a short battery life and big power cord, carrying the iPad is like carrying a small book or magazine.

And that highlights one enormous advantage for the iPad — it’s size. My flight was much more enjoyable than they have typically been in the past, because I was able to watch movies comfortably on my flight with a very viewable 10-inch screen. In stark contrast, the guy next to me on my flight out was squinting at a movie on his iPhone, and the guy next to me on the flight back was cramped and precariously bending his arms to operate his laptop in the tight conditions of economy seating.

Furthermore, the ability to carry several movies, dozens of books, access to the internet, and a usable (if frustrating) blogging tool all in such a small package is a huge win for a traveler. And for the majority of people, the keyboard shouldn’t be a big deal, since there aren’t a ton of people writing long blog posts on a daily basis.

But even for me, I think packing my bluetooth keyboard along with my iPad is still a huge improvement over carrying a laptop, so in spite of my two severe complaints, I’m still convinced that this is a revolutionary device.

On my language-learning web site, Fluent Every Year, I have a feature that shows a translation inline by swapping out text when the mouse rolls over it. It’s very handy, and it occurred to me that I should make it a plugin, so other people can use it too!

Features:

• Add the “translate” class to a containing element, such as a blockquote or a ul tag. Then, any em tags with a title attribute will automatically swap their content for the title when you move the mouse over them.

Planned features:

• Allow any tag or classname to be specified as the containing element.
• Allow any tag or classname to be specified as the translate element.

Download
The current version can be downloaded at WordPress.org.

Changelog

• 0.1
  • Initial version

This morning there were people lined up around the Apple store, standing in the rain as they waited to be the first to own an iPad. The store opened at 10:00. I went at 12:30. No wait, no line. I walked out at 12:35 with my new iPad.

I didn’t expect to like it so much!

The first thing that’s immediately clear is that it’s not just a big iPod. Its more. The iPad is big enough to read on. It’s completely useable as a web browser, e-Book reader, video player, etc.

Even with the small handful of apps available today at release, I am already impressed. The news apps are fantastic. The weatherbug app is awesome. Kayak is killer. So far, I’ve only downloaded free apps, but most of them are exciting to see and use. The potential for this device is huge.

The built-in apps are updated, too. The music player looks a bit more like iTunes now. The contact book looks like an actual contact book. The photos app has lots of cool new features, including allowing the device to act as a digital picture frame. And I’ve never had so much fun playing with Google maps as I had today.

After playing with it all day (battery life also rocks), I have just two complaints. First, typing with the on-screen keyboard is painful; it would probably be fine for on-the-go use, but anyone making extended use of the iPad is going to want the accessory keyboard. And second, it runs apps designed for iPhone/iPod, but they run small and are a pain to use; though I imagine that over time, most apps will be updated to work on the iPad and this will be less of an issue.

I’m convinced this is the future of computing for many people. Apple has redefined the computing paradigm with the iPad. And thanks to the iTunes Store and App Store, it will be extremely difficult for any competing product to pose a challenge.

I’m also convinced that this will be a Kindle-killer. Or, perhaps more accurately, that Amazon will have to put some serious new features into the Kindle, and lower the price, if they hope to survive in an iPad world.

Менеджер пришел к программистам и сказал: Относительно вашего рабочего времени: вы должны приходить в девять утра и уходить в пять вечера. Всех рассердило это заявление, а несколько тут же уволилось.
Тогда менеджер сказал: Хорошо, в таком случае вы можете сами устанавливать рабочее время, лишь бы ваши проекты завершались вовремя. Программисты, удовлетворенные, начали приходить к середине дня и работать до рассвета.

During a good-cop/bad-cop routine, slamming an iPhone down on the table just doesn’t make the same noise as a phone book did…

After the success I had with Russian last year, and with my goal to learn Italian this year, I have decided to take on a fantastic and fun new project: I am going to learn one new foreign language fluently every year!

Last month, I started a new web site, www.FluentEveryYear.com, and I am excited to report that I have already started to gain subscribed readers and Facebook fans!

There will be plenty of tips and tricks for learning any language, and even more useful information if you’re interested in learning Italian — or whatever the language of the year is — so go check it out!

After being tremendously frustrated with my iMac failing to burn DVDs, and stressing myself out over what media might be supported, I’ve hit upon the solution to my problem: unicode characters.

I wanted to burn a DVD containing AVIs of Russian video, and I had given the Burn Folder a Russian name. Every time I tried to burn, I was greeted with error 0×80020022, and the media was immediately ejected.

Remembering the days of CD-R media and the compatibility hassles I once experienced, my first thought was to go buy a different brand of DVD media. But I experienced the error with the new media as well.

After stumbling onto a Mac support forum in which users blindly suggested that renaming a file had fixed the problem, I realized that I was probably trying to use forbidden characters in the volume name. Spelling my Russian words out in a Latin alphabet did the trick, and I am now burning the files.