October 2007 Archives

One thing that I’m having a hard time with in the U.S. is that the price of something is not what you’ll end up paying for it. A minor version of this is that tax gets added to your amount in retail stores on top of what you see on the price tag. It’s sort of weird to a European, but OK, I can live with that.

But then, it gets much more silly. Just look at this bill which is when I bought my plane ticket to Toronto. (Yes, to be fair, it was Air Canada so strictly speaking it’s not the U.S., but many of the fees here are U.S.-related.)

So the basic airfare was $360, and on top of that, I got $100 of more or less hilarious/tragic taxes and fees. (And I know these extra taxes and too little transparency is a general problem in the aviation worldwide with all the fuel surcharges and airport taxes etc, but this is much worse than anything that I have ever seen.)

For example, what the hell is U.S Agriculture Fee???? And why do I have to pay it when I’m flying from Pittsburgh to Toronto? I’m going to sit in a plane, not plough a field, for chrissakes!!!

Or look at this AT&T bill. They keep advertising the iPhone plan as $59.99. Whereas you’ll actually get charged ten dollars more. In my world, that qualifies as deceptive business.

There are good sides to this bill as well… you’ll notice that the scrollbar is huge and it goes on and on, because it lists each individual data connection. The good side, of course, is that I didn’t end up getting it on paper like some other people

Eclipse is a decent Java development environment… until it comes to you actually having to build desktop GUI apps. As of today, it seems to suck bigtime in this department.

So the mission is simple. I want to build a fairly straightforward GUI app, which has a bunch of frames and dialogs. Nothing fancy. I just want to have a simple visual editor for the GUI components, you know, like Visual Basic’s dialog editor or Xcode’s Interface Builder or NetBeans Design view. So that I can lay out text fields and buttons and things on the canvas and later manipulate them in code.

You’d expect that something basic like this would be as a core part of a Java development environment, right? Wrong. Eclipse doesn’t have something like this bundled. And getting the extra component to work is a major pain and I couldn’t do it.

I’m taking a basic communication design class. The stuff that all graphic designers and any other designers took in kindergarten. (Or at least should have.) Where you talk about really basic things like gestalt principles, typefaces/typography and such.

One thing this class has done to me is to make me more aware of typography around me. So very often I now go around and look at letterforms instead of the words. For example…

Does this read “Dundas” to you (a Toronto metro station)? To me, it reads “Helvetica, or some other similar neo-grotesque typeface. And although perspective is a bit messed up because I didn’t want to get the flash reflection, note how the lower curves of U and S go a tiny bit below the baseline to give the letterforms a more solid appearance, instead of making it look like they float in air. Letters are extra spaced.”

Is this “Sony”? Nope, it’s “Egyptian slab serif uppercase (I don’t think those typefaces even HAVE lowercase?)”.

I guess this is a good thing, since this class are actually supposed to teach us this — look around.

I’m just back from Toronto where I was from Friday to Sunday. And I had a truly wonderful time there.

I was very fortunate to have several great local hosts. Jim Courtney took me out to lunch on Friday. I hanged out with Andres on Friday and Sunday. And we went to CN Tower with Kevin and his mom on Saturday, and after that they found they have enough time and energy to take me out to Niagara Falls. Which was completely a bonus for me to the otherwise already wonderful trip. I knew the Falls are great, but hadn’t planned to go this time as it sounded like a hassle for me to get there and I had my days sort of booked already. But since we could drive on Saturday, everything turned out to be just great.

Many thanks again, Jim, Kevin, Kevin’s mom and Andres and I’m sorry I wasn’t in my best condition at all times, as I had got a nasty cold a few days before (but I’m getting better, no worries).

This is just an advance notice that I’ll be in Toronto Oct 19-22. I’m coming Friday morning and leaving Monday morning. I’ll be doing touristy stuff and meeting with some friends and going to some events. If you want to meet for whatever reason or have suggestions for things to do, give me a shout.

On October 1, some news were released. One was about changes in Skype management and some followup to the eBay acquisition structure. I can’t really say that I have strong feelings about that news either way, in any case it was an evolution rather than a revolution.

Instead, on the same date, a piece of news was released that I think is much much much much more important in the grand scheme of things. Nokia buys NAVTEQ. I.e one of the mobile handset manufacturers is going to own the company that provides map data to many navigation systems in the world, including web-based, in-car and special applications.

The other big company in this space is Tele Atlas who reportedly is going to be acquired by TomTom. So now we got a pretty interesting situation where the two major companies in the map data space space are owned by hardware manufacturers. And all the Googles, Yahoos, Microsofts and whoever else is doing location-based stuff needs to contract with either Nokia or TomTom.

Typically it has been said that handset operators are victims to mobile carriers who can dictate pretty much any terms they want and manufacturers must comply by e.g crippling their devices for particular markets. But now Nokia and TomTom have suddenly become navigation powerhouses and are diversifying their businesses beyond just producing phones or GPS systems to actually owning the data and licensing it to other people and thus benefitting from the boom of location- and proximity-based services that surely continue to grow. Interesting.