grack.com

I’ve been snooping around the Google+ code a bit and found some more upcoming features.

Hashtags are getting a bit of a boost with auto-completion. When you type the hash character, you’ll see a list of potential auto-completions (this doesn’t appear to be hooked up to any data). When you hit space, it turns into a blue block containing the hashtag, which acts like the blue blocks that contain + mentions:

Circle management looks like it might be dropping the circle visual metaphor. The new interface lists your circles on the left, although this wasn’t working very well, so it’s difficult to say what the final result will look like:

Today I had a chance to play with the Canadian equivalent of the Kindle Fire, the Kobo Vox. It’s an Android 2.3 device, which means that it effectively has access to the entire ecosystem of Android apps. What it lacks, unfortunately, is the official Google Market application. It did appear to have access to the Gmail app, which makes the lack of Google’s Android market surprising.

scp is a great way to securely transfer files from computer to computer, but wouldn’t it be nice if you could just automatically send files over the existing SSH connection you’ve already opened?

Back in the days of modem-based BBSes and dial-up machine access, file transfers were forced to run over the same TTY as your interaction with the system. A number of different solutions evolved for this, starting with the grandfather of transfer solutions, XModem. Other transfer protocols evolved, some starting from the ground up like Kermit, while YModem and ZModem build on the foundation of XModem.

Apple is quickly burning my goodwill towards with these silly patent fights. Two out of three of the patents were found not to be infringing, while the last one is a software patent that basically describes the functioning of a mobile device that deals with photos.

At this point, it’s probably worth pointing out that Apple’s notification bar is pretty much a rip-off of the Android one. And you know what? I really don’t care.

I’m nearly ready to cut a 1.0 version of nanojson. I spent some time merging the two writer interfaces into a single API.

String json = JsonWriter.string()
  .object()
  .array("a")
    .value(1)
    .value(2)
  .end()
  .value("b", false)
  .value("c", true)
  .end()
.close();

There’s a new convenience static for quickly converting stuff to a string as well:

String json = JsonWriter.string(object);