I’m not ready for that I guess….

The only reason I caught this was because I was seeing weird activity in NoScript’s list of blocked domains. You can see from the user reviews they’re none too happy about it either.

If you use any of their other add ons, I suggest you remove them as well. After all, can you trust a developer whose home page link is PPClick.com?

PS. The original author of the add on is no longer affiliated with the project.

They certainly know how to ruin a good book. I’ve no idea why they added extra nonsense like a wizard that looks like he escaped from a mental institution or mountains that fight each other. Oh, and Martin Freeman, please say your lines without sounding like you don’t give a damn if the film succeeds or not.

With all the recent drama around the Pebble watch and the potential Apple iWatch, I was surprised to read so many people have replaced their watches with phones (granted, these were comments on tech blogs, so obviously a biased sample). I’ve been wearing a watch ever since I can remember, including the calculator ones (although the ones able to control TVs evaded me). I, for one, can’t imagine my phone replacing my watch, and while I can see the appeal of a smart watch, I don’t see myself buying one any time soon.

You see, there’s nothing like a good ‘ol watch, built to last and built with quality. I currently own 2 watches, an every day Accurist watch which has been going strong for a couple of years now and an expensive Rotary watch for interviews, weddings, etc. The Rotary has an awesome feature where you can swing open the back and see the inner working of the watch, there’s something quite beautiful about it (shown above). You can also hear the internals of the Rotary working away when you hold it to your ear, just awesome.

As you’ve probably guessed, I like a nice watch. But lets move on to some practical reasons why a phone can never replace my watch:

• I’m on a crowded train and need to check the time quickly
• I need to get away from a meeting or someone holding me up to get back to finishing something, simply take a sly glance at my watch instead of pulling out my phone
• I’m walking down the road and need to check the time, just a quick glance at a watch will do
• I’m walking down a rough neighborhood and need to check the time, it’s safer to look at my watch than to pull out my phone
• I’m at the gym and need to check the time quickly while in the middle of an exercise

Fairly reasonable and practical reasons I’m sure you’ll agree. But why not a smart watch, after all, I can do all those things with one:

• There’s nothing like a watch built by a company with experience of building watches for decades, if not centuries. A Pebble watch or iWatch will never be able to replace the feeling I get when I put my Rotary watch on
• Battery life. I don’t care how much battery Apple or anyone can squeeze into a watch, unless someone has a smart watch to match the battery life I can get with my Accurist (battery not replaced for at least 2 years) or Rotary (wind up and then runs through physical movement like walking, etc). If your watch needs to be charged within a few months, count me out. I don’t need the headache of needing to charge my watch.
• Information overload. Ya rly, I’ve actually turned my phone off a couple of times, just to stop checking my phone for messages and constantly fiddling with it. Last time I need is a watch telling me stuff or another gadget which I can fiddle with constantly.
• Another thing to worry about damaging. My watches are resilient. They’ve been banged around so many time, I’ve shocked I haven’t shattered the glass on it yet. Now, I don’t know what Accurist use for the glass on their watches, but I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to use that type of glass at the moment on smart watches. Gorilla Glass doesn’t even come close.

To add to the above, when my old Ben Sherman watch stopped working (damaged water seal *sniff*), I hit it a few times with a hammer to see how long it takes to crack the glass. I can tell you now – no smart watch glass will last being hit 5 times at full force with a hammer.

Now that’s quality built to last.

The newer cars I’ve driven do some mind bogglingly stupid things, you have to wonder how the ideas got into production.

Take the Renault Megane. I drove this as a courtesy car after my accident. Decent car with one big flaw: the hugely distracting digital speedometer.

Yes, it’s important I know how fast I’m going, but don’t stick a massive digital speedometer in my direct line of vision which, with its constant changing digits and contrasting colours, keeps distracting me from the road. Make it subtle or give me a good ol analog speedometer. I’ve been driving an Astra for 5 years and can’t remember thinking once, oh jeez, why didn’t Vauxhall stick a massive distracting speedometer in the middle of the dashboard? Didn’t anyone at Renault test drive the Megane at night and spot this?

Another car – the 2012 VW Passat. I drove this for a wedding just yesterday, it was all fine and dandy until it started pissing down with rain. Having been driving for more than 5 years, I’ve had my fair share of driving in the rain. No problem I thought, I’ll just use the wipers to clear my windscreen. Oh boy.

Not only are the front wipers frustratingly slow, even at top speed, but there’s no rear wiper! Yes, I’m having to do a 300 mile round trip along the motorway, driving at speeds of 70 mph in torrential rain (faster when overtaking), and I have no way to a) get decent visibility up front, and b) no way to clear the rain to see directly behind me when overtaking (or eventually – parking up)!

Which half-wit at Volkswagen decided to take a perfectly good solution to a problem and replace it with….nothing. Zilch, zero, nothing. Which moron at VW decided this was acceptable? Why on earth are they taking away the rear wiper? Which non-existent problem were they trying to solve? Fuck you very much VW.

And what is it with the button handbrake? Not only does it leave me feeling insecure when using it, if I press the accelerator hard enough, it automatically releases it? What.the.fuck?!

The entire point of the handbrake is to keep the car from moving no matter what. So not is there no way to check, with a single glance, that you’ve pulled the handbrake, it doesn’t even do its job properly. Call me old fashioned, but this doesn’t sound like progress to me.

Dear Car Manufacturers, stop trying to kill your customers.

Ok, just kidding, but at least stop taking away perfectly good solutions and replacing them with crap. I love VW cars (can’t say the same for Renault), in fact, I hope my next one will be a VW. But if your cars have shitty ‘solutions’ to non-existent problems, don’t expect to see my money in your coffers.

Anyway, that job’s coming to an end, so back to job hunting (which I should be doing right now, instead of writing a blog post…

Firstly, there is a lot of work being done to make AndChat work great on ICS. The main improvement being worked on is the userlist handling, which will be similar to how it works on Honeycomb and slight changes to the UI. The challenging part with the userlist is the small screen real estate and nick selection and I’m working hard to find a nice way to get it to work.

Secondly, after the release of version 1.3.8, an increasing number of users are joining the AndChat channel, which is added by default in the set up screens. This has been a valuable source of information for me about what problems users encounter when using the app.

The main problem is users don’t know how to add a server, some users are not even sure what the menu button is.

To counter this, I’m implementing the Action Bar UI pattern across all AndChat screens that use the menu key. Not only will it make the available options obvious to the user, the app experience will be uniform across all Android versions supported by AndChat. Obviously screen real estate for chatting is important in a mobile screen, so the custom action bar will be hideable on Gingerbread and below.

As Honeycomb and beyond have their own Action Bars built into the framework, so this change will only be visible on Gingerbread and below.

Another problem which I’ve been aware of for a while is users not knowing that long pressing a server name provides options for various things. The resolution I’m working on for this is to provide an image next to the server name that shows the context menu you get by long pressing a server.

Lastly, I’m dropping support for Android 1.5 (Cupcake). You might be shocked to hear I supported it all this time, but given the effort involved in supporting it, I’ve decided 1.3.8 will be the last version that supports Android 1.5. From the next version of AndChat, only 1.6+ will be supported.

I’m hoping these changes will make AndChat more user friendly and as always, feel free to email me with comments, or open a bug report at the bug tracker.

Below are various screenshots of the new UI (click for larger), including a comparison between the implementation for Gingerbread and the system implementation for ICS and Honeycomb, to give an idea of the consistency of the UI.

Gingerbread:

Ice Cream Sandwich (overflow icon not shown due to emulator issues):

Honeycomb: