following up on my mini-review of the iPhone, i thought i'd post a list of the apps that i've installed over the past week, and quick thoughts on each. IMO, it's really the apps that set the device apart from other phones. sure, the touch screen is nice and the accelerometer is cool, but it's the apps that really make the iPhone unique.

in no particular order...

a couple of days after x-mas, with the blessing and well-wishes of my lovely wife, i headed down to the local at&t store to pick up my x-mas present. a shiny new 8GB iPhone 3G.

i hadn't really been big on wanting one in the past. i've had windows mobile based smart phones, which i liked a lot... it felt like i was carrying around a mini-me version of my computer. my assumption had been that the iPhone was the same type of "toy", but for mac users. being a pc person (not to start the inevitable flame war... nothing at all against mac, i've just always used a pc, i'm used to it, and haven't had the issues myself that have driven others to make the switch), i didn't really think a little portable mac (as was my perception) fit well with my desktop pc.

the much anticipated new-look of the http://www.halhelms.com web site was unveiled today. aside from the face-lift is an assessment to determine your "OO-Readiness". of course, i failed miserably with a score of 46.9%. altho admittedly that's about what i'd have expected, so no big surprise there.

think you're OO-Ready? take the quiz and find out.

UPDATE: as mentioned on ray camden's blog:

Be sure to scroll down when you get your results. I didn't notice it under his ad, but he goes through every question and explains the ones you get wrong. This is where the really valuable advice is."

over at amcom the boss has been asking us developer types to make use of the amcom technology blog a bit more than we had been. ok, a bit more than *i* had been (jon messer's been an animal posting about coldbox and transitioning from procedural to OO and is in the midst of a yet-to-be-published flex entry (rhymes with 'whizz')).

i've posted my first two entries, and will likely start transitioning to posting more frequently over there. if you're subscribed here, feel free to subscribe over there to follow me, jon, tariq, and the rest of the team.

as much as i hate to do this, i'm getting tired of the loser(s) posting WoW spam links in the comments. i don't particularly mind cleaning 'em up... but for the 3 or 4 people that actually cared enough to subscribe to the blog... i really don't like the thought of them getting the spam in return.

at some point, i may look into incorporating jake munson's cfformProtect or some other measure to try and eliminate the spam. but for now, between work and a couple of side jobs that i'm desperately trying to finish up, i simply don't have the time.

if anyone's interested, the spammer in question posted from the following IP addresses (updated 11 dec 2008). feel free to add 'em to your blacklist:

67.180.242.3
121.24.171.92
85.254.186.161
78.37.225.89
125.214.254.171
58.61.82.111
218.18.190.89
59.40.36.103
218.18.191.107
88.249.98.46
91.194.191.250
72.3.137.82
122.234.50.22
122.234.49.8
85.26.161.48
122.234.52.25
125.120.151.48
122.234.49.5
122.234.48.176
218.108.223.26

on one of my current projects, i needed to barcode a document (via CF) and subsequently read the barcode (again, via CF). the documents would be sent via fax and rerouted to the CF server.

because of its durability, my client wanted to use a data matrix barcode. as luck would have it, ryan stille had already gone through the trouble of putting together a CFC for reading and generating data matrix barcodes (thanks, ryan!).

the CFC is a wrapper for some java libraries that read and write barcodes. in the docs for the CFC, ryan suggests a company called Java4Less.com. i grabbed evaluation versions of the appropriate libraries to ensure they'd work, which they did. i then instructed my client to go ahead and make the purchase and told him which 2 libraries we needed. now, Java4Less offer up a few components and i've been a bit sleep deprived and long story short, one of the libraries that i told the client to purchase was not the correct library.

the purchase process involves making a payment, and then receiving a link where you can access the product(s) that you've purchased. payment was made... and shortly thereafter we got an email from one of the Java4Less guys double checking to make sure that we were ordering the right components (we weren't). i'm guessing that the incorrect component we requested didn't quite "fit" well with the other one, and sent up a red flag. but it was very cool that the company noticed that red flag, and acted on it.

i responded, explaining what we were looking to do and got a confirmation back that we had definitely ordered the wrong item, and that they'd make sure the right components were in place at the download link.

the customer service didn't end there.

the other night i was implementing the barcoding, and got errors while instantiating the reader. java errors. not being a java guy, i immediately panicked. fired an email off to Java4Less with the error message (big old cfdump), our JVM version, and anything else i could think of that would help them to isolate the issue. less than a day later, i got an email response that i was missing a jar file. one of the components (which come zipped) had 2 jar files. apparently i had only extracted one. disaster averted.

it's really been a while since i've seen that kind of customer service. both proactive (in the case of our incorrect order) and reactive (in the case of me being an idiot). if you find yourself in the market for one of the following products, you can definitely buy from Java4Less with confidence.

over the past few weeks, i've had the opportunity to start playing around with some of the AJAX functionality built into ColdFusion 8. cfajaxproxy makes me happy.

in a nutshell, cfajaxproxy creates a "bridge" between client side javascript and a ColdFusion CFC. it's nowhere near the full blown AJAX framwork that jQuery is, but rather reminds me of JSMX, which is a very lightweight AJAX framework that does little beside facilitating communication between client and server. while it allowed you to pass data from the client to the server, and receive data back, it assumed that you would write the corresponding code to manipulate the client based on the data that was sent back from the server. i'm pretty comfortable with javascript, so i was ok with that. cfajaxproxy is essentially the same thing. no bells-and-whistles per se, but as far as i'm concerned, that's perfectly ok.

day 2 with chrome, and i'm still liking it quite a bit.

no, it doesn't necessarily "rule" (as stated by t. fleming in the comments on yesterday's post), but it's off to a very decent start.

it doesn't "rule" yet, because it's been available to the public for all of a day. it's in its infancy. it won't compete with firefox until such time that plugins are available (but i understand that's on the roadmap). there are some options that are lacking, or not at all available (or so hard to find that i'm under the impression that they're not at all available). how can i tell chrome to check for newer versions of the page with each page request? don't think i can. i'd also like a more robust means of organizing my bookmarks. oh, and i did manage to crash it earlier today. not even sure what happened... it just... crashed.

in spite of these "issues", i still like the browser. just like the gtalk client when it was first introduced (anyone remember... no file transfer options, no voice chat options...), it seems to be laser focused on doing what it's meant to do. browse web sites. i'm fairly confident that the additional "bells and whistles" will follow.

of course, the biggest issue surrounding chrome right now seems to be the EULA, which indicates that by using chrome, you're granting google permanent and irrevocable rights to your content, data, photos, and children. i'd been waiting to see someone at google step up and address this, and earlier today someone finally did. i'm sure there are those for whom this won't be "enough", and there still exists some paranoia about one company having such a far-reaching grasp. i remain of the mindset that, until they do something evil, something that gives me a reason to not trust them... if they're putting out a good product, there's really no reason for me to not try it. i won't try and convince anyone who feels differently... we're all entitled to our opinions, and i respect that. i'm simply stating mine.

some notes from day 2... liking the fact that it still doesn't crash as often as firefox, or seem to consume as much memory. noted that highlighting text on a web page and right-clicking gives you the ability to search google for that highlighted text (neat!). dragging a tab out of a browser window creates a new window. built in javascript debugger/console (that i've not yet had the opportunity to play around with).

still a fan, and looking forward to seeing what enhancements are added to this still very young product. yes, it's still rough around the edges... but there's very little denying that for a product this young to be as solid as it is points to a potentially very sweet mature browser in the (hopefully near) future.

the blogosphere and twitter are both ablaze today with talk of google's foray into the browser market with chrome. my first impressions, and some accompanying screenshots...

up until it was actually available, i'd not been following the story too much, so i hadn't seen screenshots or read about any specific features. my first impression upon loading it up was, "wow... there's like... no chrome". i haven't messed around yet with configuration options, but there's no status bar. no toolbar. it's literally just an address bar (which seems to also serve as an integrated search bar), and tabs. it's minimalistic in it's look, as is standard with most things google, but i like it. it's uncluttered, but i'm not sure the general public will see it as such. the plain design that i see as a plus could easily be seen as... well, plain.

which raises an interesting point. i'm not sure what market google is after. are they trying to be a mainstream browser and compete directly with IE and firefox? i don't know that i see that happening. but given some of the features that they've implemented, i definitely see them competing for the affections of techie geeks.

most web developers that i know generally use firefox for testing during development. why? the firebug plugin. this plugin is far and away one of the most useful tools ever created for debugging a web page's display and behavior in a browser window. out of the box, chrome provides a tool that will allow you to introspect any page element, and its functionality certainly rivals firebug's... as far as CSS goes. as far as i can tell, there is not (yet) any functionality to debug scripts or to monitor network traffic (useful for debugging AJAX calls). still, for core functionality, it's very slick for what it does.

in further appealing to the geek, right-clicking above the address bar brings up a "task manager" window. the window shows you how many tabs you've got open, as well as what resources (memory, CPU, network) each tab is utilizing. should you run into any issues with a particular tab, you can end that specific process. i haven't had the opportunity to test that yet, but if it works, that'd be a pleasant change from firefox, which generally crashes as an application if a single tab locks up. to further support my theory that google is targeting the geek audience, the task manager window contains a link entitled "Stats for nerds", which displays some fairly detailed data about the browser's memory usage.

overall web pages seemed to load noticeably faster than in other browsers. of course, gmail seems to work a treat, which is nice as i'd sort of gotten used to gmail crashing firefox (to be fair, this hasn't happened in firefox since the latest update. w00t!). i haven't done extensive testing, but some cursory browsing seems to indicate that both javascript and css look as i'd expect them to look.

bottom line is... i like it. i actually like it a lot. it's sleek, it's fast, and it's got some nice built-in tools to satisfy your inner geek. have you tried it? i know that a lot of folks seem to be hesitant, taking this as a sign of google's further intent to dominate all things web (which is not inherently a bad thing folks, if they do it right and continue to not be evil), but i think it's certainly worthwhile to give it a glance and judge it based on its own merits, rather than only a perception of the company that provides it.

*update* it was just brought to my attention that CTRL-SHIFT-N will launch the browser in "incognito mode". and yes, i can think of a situation or two where that could come in handy

click on the thumbnails below to embiggen 'em: