Operation Gadget

Yahoo announced a new user interface for Flickr today that is a huge improvement.  Kudos to them.  I am a bigger Flickr fan than most people know.

What concerns me is that Flickr's search hasn't improved as much as the rest of the UI.

What I was hoping was that when I searched for "moore, ok", I would get photos that gave me an idea of what had happened in the area that was hit hardest in a devastating tornado that occurred in Oklahoma today.

Instead, what I saw was a beautiful sky, pictures of thunderheads from 10 days ago, and photos of some specimens in a skeleton museum.  Yahoo, can you guys improve this?

Our prayers go out to the people of the Oklahoma City area at this time of tragedy.

You may have seen that the NHL announced two outdoor hockey games at Yankee Stadium next season, including the game between the New Jersey Devils and the New York Rangers scheduled for Sunday, January 26, 2014, and a game between the New York Islanders and the Rangers on Wednesday, January 29.

Way back on January 1, 2008, in an article called How Cool Was The NHL Winter Classic? on this site, I said:

I think the NHL could put on two or three of these games next season in the week between Christmas and New Year's Day as an alternative to College Football on television. I wouldn't be surprised to see games happen in places like Yankee Stadium or Gillette Stadium in Foxboro.

Five years ago, the Winter Classic was held at Ralph Wilson Stadium in Buffalo (Orchard Park, NY), and I thought the NHL would prefer football stadiums to baseball fields.  Subsequently more baseball stadiums than football stadiums have been used.

It's interesting that the NHL decided to feature a single outdoor game for each of the first five seasons of the Winter Classic, and it's only now that they choose to expand it. The NHL is calling the U.S. outdoor games other than the Winter Classic the NHL Coors Light Stadium Series.

I still think that NHL outdoor games could be effective counter programming against college football, but the apparent rationale for the dates of the outdoor games next season is:

• The Winter Classic is always January 1, and is a signature event for the NHL.  The Toronto Maple Leafs will play the Detroit Red Wings at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor.
• The outdoor game at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles will take place on Saturday January 25 at 7:00pm Pacific Time (Los Angeles Kings versus Anaheim Ducks).  You can't take the sun out of the equation in Southern California, especially since the average high temperature is 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celcius).
• The two outdoor games at Yankee Stadium are scheduled close to each other (which makes complete sense), and in the week leading up to Super Bowl XLVIII which is scheduled for Sunday, February 2, 2014, at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.
• The final outdoor game in the United States will take place during Hockey Weekend Across America, which will run from February 28 to March 1.  (The Pittsburgh Penguins will take on the Chicago Blackhawks at Soldier Field on Saturday, March 1.)
• The outdoor game in Canada, known as the Heritage Classic, will take place on Sunday, March 2 in Vancouver.  The Canucks will be hosting the Ottawa Senators at BC Place.

Earlier today Phil Liggett reminded me that Paris-Roubaix is airing tomorrow morning on NBC Sports Network:

Live NBCSN coverage of Paris Roubaix presented by @compcyclist & expanded to 3hrs.This Sunday 8am - 11am et on NBCSN

-- Phil Liggett (@PhilLiggett) April 6, 2013

I'll be watching.  But the question will be, how do I watch the early part of the coverage without ending up having to watch Scooby Doo?

Earlier today, John Gruber at Daring Fireball pointed out a recently released app in the MacOS X App Store called PaintCode (on the Web, in the App Store).  As the PaintCode website says, "PaintCode is a vector drawing app that generates Objective-C code in real time."

This is a fantastic idea, I'd like more than anything to have a use for it.  The idea immediately sparked a question in my mind:

Has anybody ever developed an app that like this that generates HTML, CSS, and JavaScript?

I could really use an app that generated code for the web in this fashion.

Is the closest thing to this to a code generator for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript the Mac application called Hype?

My wife, Kathleen Aiello, MD, recently launched a website called PedsApps.com which covers iPhone and iPad applications that are of interest to Pediatricians, nurse practitioners, and other care providers, as well as to the parents of their patients.

The most interesting article she's written so far is a review of The Concussion Recognition and Response Tool, an app that implements the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention "Heads Up" Concussions in Youth Sports initiative.

According to Kathleen, "The app guides an evaluator through an assessment of the injured player, as well as providing an evaluation tool for home monitoring of symptoms and return-to-play guidelines."

The app is really excellent, because it gives coaches and parents a framework they can use to objectively assess a young athlete's head injury.  I've heard from parents that the guidance they get from administrators in youth sports when concussions are suspected is not always clear.  So, it's good to have a resource that you can turn to that provides some peace of mind.

I think The Concussion Recognition and Response App could be used by anyone who has experienced a head injury.  It should be useful to adults playing body contact sports, officials who are injured on the field of play, and in a number of other real world scenarios.

Congratulations to Kathleen on an excellent review.  Please take a look at PedsApps.com and follow it for more information in this important and interesting area of the handheld application space.

One of the most useful gifts Kathleen has given to me since we got married is the Mophie Juice Pack Plus rechargeable battery case for my iPhone 4S.  I really could not get through an entire day meeting with clients in New York City without it.

I generally start the day using my iPhone without a case.  I take good care of my phone and I like the small form factor that made the iPhone famous.

When my battery level hits 20 percent for the first time, I take my Mophie out of my backpack and snap the case on to the phone.  This increases the size and weight of the total iPhone package, but not that significantly.

The Juice Pack's design allows it to act as a booster for the iPhone's internal battery.  This means that the iPhone can show up to a 100% charge after it's been connected to the Juice Pack for a while.  But generally, the Juice Pack will boost the iPhone's battery reading to between 60 and 100%, at which point the Juice Pack's battery will be exhausted, and I can take the iPhone out of the case again.

This solution allows me to spend a whole day in New York City meeting with my customers, business prospects, and partners, and generally never have to seek out a wall socket.  It can also get me through the day when I need to participate in a long conference call in the middle of the day, but I can't get home until dinner time.

For iPhone 4S users who are not as focused on business as I am, the value of the Mophie Juice Pack is that it can get you through a wedding, a trip to an amusement park, or a child's sporting event with the confidence that your iPhone won't run out of power before you get home.

If you are serious about using an iPhone 4S for personal productivity or for the sheer enjoyment of the experience, you should really consider adding a Mophie Juice Pack to your arsenal.

Update: If you have an iPhone 5, you may be interested in David Chartier's article, A review and comparison of the Juice Pack Helium and Air for iPhone 5, which gives good recommendations for that phone.

In a few weeks, no one will remember what Operation Gadget used to look like.  Let's keep some memories alive by capturing screenshots of a few of articles that turned out to be milestones that were originaly published with the original website theme .

My dad and I have a phrase that we use to each other to convey a sense of just having realized how much things have changed:

"It's been a long time since we laced up the blades."

Operation Gadget began life in mid-November 2003, as a way for me to express my views on technology and my belief in electronics and handheld devices as a form of therapy for people like me.  Folks who spend too much time doing technology systems integration.

After a long hiatus we're bringing it back-- at least a little-- to give me a platform to say some opinionated things I really can't say to customers, competitors, or business partners in my day job.

Rather than talk about politics or religion, or something that else that would lose me friends, I'll talk about technology.  That was safe until three or four years ago, when Apple started kicking most of its competitors about as hard as RPI beat Clarkson tonight.  Now if you talk favorably about Apple, you are considered a fanboi.

I like most Apple products a lot.  I have for years.  I don't think the world needs another John Gruber, but I think my views differ sufficiently from his to not be considered a mimic.

The biggest problem with bringing Operation Gadget back is that this site looks like The Land That Time Forgot.  Everything my friend Robert Minton says about the visual design of most old sites published with Movable Type is true about Operation Gadget at the moment:

• Too much margin on each page.
• Really terrible display fonts. 
• Meaningless, partially broken sidebars.

All of this means that we can make huge improvements if we want to invest the time.  My colleagues and I have come a long way with in bringing modern web design to some old, neglected websites.  But I'm not sure how much time I'll have to indulge our design whims.

To all of you Operation Gadget insiders, welcome back.

It's hard to believe how long it's been since I've said anything on the best blog I ever published.

I want you to know that I was able to upgrade this site from Movable Type 4.25 to Movable Type 5.2.3 in about half an hour, door-to-door.  I completely rebuilt the site and everything works.  Pretty cool.

Some day soon we'll have to start the countdown to the 10th anniversary of Operation Gadget.  Well... let's see if I can string together a couple of posts in March first.

Patently Apple reported that the US Patent and Trademark Office published a patent application called "Systems and Methods for Integrating a Portable Electronic Device with a Bicycle" that was received from Apple, Inc.  According to the article, "Apple's patent is about using a new iPod or iPhone system primarily on a bike so that they could share information with other cyclists riding in a group. It could also provide feedback to cyclists regarding their performance or the performance of other cyclists with whom they are riding."

Images copied from Apple's patent application filed
on August 5, 2010. [ Source: Patently Apple ]

This is really interesting and I didn't expect Apple to have worked on any such device.  There are many iPhone apps that offer some of the features discussed in the patent application (such as iMapMyRide+, Fitnio, etc.) but no one has developed an iOS-based app that provides so much integration with bike and personal sensors as well as real-time communications capabilities.

In my opinion, this is not a device that would appeal to the pro peleton at this level of conceptual refinement.  For one thing, I think that the user interface described in the patent illustrations will be extremely difficult to operate while moving.  Implementing something that sophisticated would need a radically different input mechanism.

I want to say that voice recognition would be helpful, mainly because pro riders wear a radio headphone already. But I have no idea if Apple could implement something like that in any foreseeable iPhone hardware configuration.