(Originally posted 2011-04-15.)
Every once in a while I come across a particularly good idea: Where someone has done something particularly clever to solve a problem. Here’s one very recent example:
On the iPhone (and iPod touches) you can only display icons. They can be augmented with a numeric counter, but that’s all. (The idea is the app shows you the number of unread emails, for example.)
But here’s the idea, in a nutshell: If you tried hard enough you could display any number you wanted (actually any integer).
Those clever people at International Travel Weather Calculator have produced a pair of iPhone apps – Celsius and Fahrenheit. (I guess they needed to create two for the hard-of-converting.) š
These two apps display the local (or remote) temperature permanently – without you having to open the app.
So they’ve subverted the counter – and that’s the clever part (weather apps being ten-a-penny).
(And this post is the first one I’ve created using Ecto. I mention it because it creates better HTML than the one built in to developerWorks and I hope it formats better. You can be the judge of that.)
Mainframe, Performance, Topics 