So we managed to sneak one additional feature into the upcoming Appcelerator 2.1 release. Those of you developing for the iPhone will be pleased to know that we added a new condition – ‘orientationchange’ – so you can handle the origintationchanged event on the iPhone in an on-expression. How cool is that? Very. So throw this onto the pile with the new build process, project command line tools, the eclipse plugin/ide (written by Mark Luffel), the developer network (it’s slick — just wait’ll you see it), and a ton of little features and fixes all over the place. Not to mention improvements to a bunch of the widgets (like the datatable which now supports custom formatter functions, sticky sort, etc.).
Monthly Archive for February, 2008
If you need a separate CSS file for your iPhone stuff (sometimes little things just don’t look as good as they can without specific style sheets), you need to put this in your head:
<!–[if !IE]>–>
<link media=”only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)” href=”css/iPhone.css” type=”text/css” rel=”stylesheet” />
<!–<![endif]–>
Then, of course, define your iPhone.css.
..using Emotiv’s headset which will be available this Christmas for ~$300 bucks. It’s not quite as neat as simply reading your mind and telling computer what to do, though; it has to be “trained” for a user to recognize commands. More precisely, you think of something in some sort of training mode and when you “think” the same thing during the game or demo or whatever, the same action is repeated. I’m curious to know how the technology actually works at a technical level. I’d also _really_ like to know what sort of APIs, if any, might be provided for the thing. The training thing does sort of suck, but it’s not so bad given that you could get around the multi-user issue with profiles or the like. This is definitely something I’ll be watching for.
AMChat is no longer freeware, but I’ve put a lot of great features into the latest version. You can buy AMChat 2.0 at getamchat.com. It’s much more customizable than the original but still super simple to install and run. Major props to my buddy Tyrus Smalley for the webdesign — you’re the man. 
A group of Princeton researchers have found attacks rendering many popular whole-disk encryption mechanisms useless. It’s pretty interesting stuff although one has to question the methodology of removing a stick of ram from a computer. What was “more nifty” was the attack shown in the later half of the video that required nothing more than a thumb drive or the like to grab the BitLocker key on a Vista machine (they said similar methods could break the others as well). I suppose the moral of this story is keep tabs on your laptop, even if you do use something like FileVault or BitLocker. Really though, it’s not like your average laptop thief is going to have sophisticated software like the stuff demonstrated in the video.