I will post screenshots etc. of what I have already got shortly.

Tonight I updated the version of PVRShell I was using to the 2.8 release. Tricky part was merging in my touch handling code – I deal with 11 touches, the POWERVR SDK only does 1. Sadly, I can’t see an easy way of feeding this back right now as I have to hackily include the PVRTools in the PVRShell to achieve this at the moment. It’s probably not that hard, mind.

I’ll probably update the PVRTools that I’m using soon as well – although I’ll have to merge in more improvements there, I suspect.

Oops.

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

Confucius

Why? Because it is very true and I wish I’d understood this earlier (see Mr Russell’s observation too).

Although it wasn’t obvious that this why an orange appeared at the top of my emails in Mail – no tool-tip or anything.

Why on earth do people assume that touch interfaces to desktops, laptops or whatever, will remain vertical and not be adjustable to an angle that’s comfortable to work at? My 6 year old laptop screen already does this and it doesn’t even have a touch screen. The iMac in front of me can lean back a bit already. I’ve read so many complaints like the one above, often from apparently very knowledgeable people on sometimes very specialist forums, it beggars belief. Every one seems to forget that your real desktop that you reach about on and touch is still horizontal, just like it was 30 years ago before computers became so typical. Obviously, one reason for this choice of inclination is to stop things falling off, but, for instance, draughtsman working on large paper designs used to work at an angle, because it was easier for them – touch screens will be adjustable to the angle you want to work at. I could quite easily imagine multiple surfaces at different angles depending on their function – think about the Nintendo DS or imagine a music studio with mixer channels at a shallow angle with sound information etc. displayed on a more conventional screen. Would these all be touch enabled? Perhaps not initially, perhaps not ever. Perhaps not until the technology became so ubiquitous that not having it would be considered unusual. After all, reaching out and touching a vertical surface might be the most intuitive thing to do occasionally, even if it is a little awkward for constant use.

The other huge assumption is that as soon as touch screens become available then we’ll suddenly have to throw away all our mice and keyboards and be entirely restricted to working/playing with the touch screen. Doesn’t anybody remember when computer mice became popular? We had all these complaints then – it never seemed to occur to people that 25 years on we’d still see “QWERTY” every time we sat at a machine. On the whole, computer interfaces are additions to each other that may overlap in use, but entire replacements are rare. This will be exactly the same. Perhaps the reason people are getting so upset is because of the way mobile devices are developing, but in a stationary environment, space and weight concerns are not so severe and so input choice can be much more varied.

• Install Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard
• Run Bootcamp assistant to partition your drive to 2 partitions
• Install Windows XP on the bootcamp partition after reformatting it to NTFS
• Boot back into Mac OS
• Reduce the size of the Mac OS partition in disk utility and add a common FAT32 partition in the space you’ve freed. Don’t touch the windows partition at all.
• Install MacFUSE and NTFS-3G so that you can edit the boot.ini file on the Windows partition.
• Change where it says partition(#) in the boot.ini file to partition(#+1) (This worked for me – you may want to try adding 2 or 3 on some setups).
• Voila! You should be able to boot into Windows and Mac OS by holding option at start up (that’s alt for all you new Mac users)

Disclaimer: this worked for me – your mileage may vary…

So I was saddened to see that the cancer that plagues Wikipedia, specifically the insistence of ignorant people with too much time on their hands to meddle with information posted by professionals and other specialists in their areas, had spread to this article:

“Hacker” article on wikipedia

I suppose I should just be glad that there’s no suggesting that passwords consist entirely of three letter words and that computer pros all wear inline skates constantly. As if I’d get to fool around in a swimming pool with Angelina just ’cause I can bypass a Windows login…