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This is about the iPad
I've now spent one entire week with the iPad and although most of both the hardware and software has already been discussed online, I feel that, considering the fact that I heralded the iPad as the future of computing (not that I've been the only one or even in the minority), I ought to at least say a little bit about my experiences with it.

First of all, what am I using my iPad for? Well, to be quite honest, I hadn't carefully thought about use cases for the iPad before I bought it, but I wasn't too surprised when I found that the iPad has now replaced my MacBook Pro for most of the things that I do at home. This includes, but is not limited to: browsing, chatting, email, instant messaging, watching videos on YouTube, reading, twittering, facebooking, and listening to music. That's a lot! So, as you can imagine, I'm using my MacBook Pro a lot less now. I feel that perhaps it's foolish to go into a list of things for which I still need my MacBook, because it is far, far too extensive. iPad is the future of computing, not the present, and it can be very few people's primary computing device. However, I have to say that the first version is very, very mature already, especially for a home user. However, as of now, it's tied to a Mac or a PC for too many things such as software updates, getting data in and out, etc. that it will be a while before it can stand alone. (iPhone OS 4 will address some of these concerns though; for example, you'll be able to send arbitrary attachments to the iPad via email.)

Is it an oversized iPhone? A lot of people have asked me this question and I really don't know what to say. Sometimes my answer is "Of course not, it's an entirely different experience", but sometimes I feel that it's almost exactly like an iPhone. A couple of examples. For me, an iPhone was never a viable device for any kind of extended activity such as reading, gaming, or chatting. Not so on the iPad. I transferred all of my RSS feeds from NewsFire to Google Reader the day after I got this thing and started using NetNewsWire on the iPad to read all my news. The text is crisp, and most importantly, large! It's an amazing reading experience. And even though it sounds corny and a lot of people have said this already, when you visit a website on an iPad, you feel one degree closer to the site. Some people have described it as having a more "intimate" feel to it. It feels good and it feels right. This was not a feeling I ever got when I was browsing sites on my iPhone because it always felt so constrained. Another thing that is completely different on the iPad is writing. I'm writing this whole entry in the Notes app on my iPad and it does not feel painful. On the iPhone, I would be screaming for a real computer with a real keyboard about two sentences into anything.

Now, when does it feel like an oversized iPhone? Mostly when you discover things like, oh, Safari still can't do a Find inside a webpage, or that you can't edit any of the song information inside the iPod app, or that I still can't type in Hindi (or for that matter, that the one RSS feed I can't read on my iPad is my Hindi news feed, because the Hindi font support is still half-baked and all the matras are messed up), or that I can't truly multitask between my IM app and a browser... the list goes on. Limitation-wise, the iPad is virtually identical to the iPhone, and it's just as annoying. And iPad users will have to wait until September or October for all the iPhone OS 4 goodies, and longer still for the makers of popular apps to adopt those APIs.

Speaking of development, the iPad is a very, very exciting platform for developers like myself. Of course, it's a pain that I will have to completely redo the UI for my app, but on the other hand, there are so many exciting things that I can do with the user experience on the iPad that I couldn't have even imagined attempting on the iPhone. It's an exciting new world out there, and I am craving for some free time to spend on developing an iPad app. Perhaps next weekend.

It's funny that I feel it hardly "relevant" to talk about the hardware just because it barely feels like it's there. I never thought the iPhone was a particularly good looking device and the same goes for an iPad. With the screen turned off, both the iPhone and iPad look like plain old black slabs. All the magic lies in the software. The one thing I feel like I just have to mention about the hardware though is the battery life. It's phenomenal! My usage pattern for the iPad is more akin to a cell phone than a laptop. With my laptop, I would never even think about leaving its power adapter behind when going anywhere. When I think of my laptop's battery, it feels more like a tiny power backup device to keep the computer from turning off while I move it from place A to place B, both of which are equipped with a power adapter. It's a completely different experience with the iPad. A single percent point of battery power seems to last forever. I think I might have charged my iPad last on Thursday night or something (it's Sunday night now). The fact that I can't even remember exactly when is remarkable. I started writing this with the iPad's battery at 9% and now it's at 4%. It's been more than an hour! (All while the music was on too.) So, when I heard that the innards of an iPad looked more like a computer strapped to a battery rather than a battery strapped to a computer, I wasn't surprised one bit.

I know I wanted to write more about the iPad, but there is so much that I'm rather glad I've forgotten all the rest of it. Otherwise, I'd be here for another three hours, tapping out paragraph after paragraph about how this device makes computing (finally!) awesome.


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5 comments
  • Really enjoyed reading this. Thanks
    By Blogger Jim Rowe, at April 12, 2010 8:29 AM   
  • Great post n great review..
    N yes i totally agree with the intimacy issues with the iPhone and its safari..
    By Blogger Arjun Goel, at April 12, 2010 11:44 AM   
  • I just cant imagine how u manage to type so much on a iPad.... It really doesn't look like a comfortable device to type on...
    By Blogger Souvik, at April 13, 2010 12:37 PM   
  • I'm surprised you still use the word "computing" in the last paragraph. That word will need to be re-coined. "Connecting" perhaps is more apt since you're using it for reading and writing. I'm not sure.
    By Blogger renewableguy, at April 24, 2010 1:24 PM   
  • Thanks for your good comments. I have just started using an iPad and agree with them. I find I like it much more than anticipated. I use The Qingwen dictionary all the time, and am delighted you are considering an iPad app, especially the handwriting. I eagerly await it. Thanks for your efforts, and keep up the good work!
    By Blogger lzrdoc, at May 8, 2010 10:06 PM   

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This is not about the iPad
When I started using the iPhone, both as a user and a developer, I finally saw freedom. Freedom from the ridiculous way in which software - Mac or PC - is made today. Here was an entirely new UI paradigm that finally - finally! - did not have the horrible and messy baggage of desktop operating systems. The very same menus, windows, pop up buttons, etc. that, in the 1980s, were the saviors of computer users everywhere, rescuing them from the abyss of the command line interface, are now the devil. We all know this because we know how incredibly hard it is for people like our parents and less "tech-savvy" friends to even become close to proficient at using them.

The iPhone came and showed us that we don't need all that! Hell, it didn't even have Cut, Copy and Paste for more than a year, and I almost never felt it missing. And yet, when they finally added it, the way they did it just blew me away with how clever and minimalist it was. (In contrast, look at how Windows Mobile or Palm Pre tackled the same problem, and you'll see how they're still burdened with the baggage of desktop OSs - it's just all too easy to give in to following the tried-and-true way, right?)

This is big. Forget about the iPad itself, but look at what it is saying. It is saying that we can have a fully usable desktop operating system (for that is what the iPad has, believe it or not), while simultaneously throwing away most of the crud that makes a desktop operating system what it is today. Many will complain that there is no Finder. But I don't want a fucking Finder! I've had it with manually managing a ridiculous file hierarchy on my computer. I've also had it with hunting for commands in menu bars, toolbars, contextual menus, and pop up buttons! I absolutely love the UI innovativeness that both iPhone and iPad are brimming with; this is the kind of fresh slate that was previously thought of as impossible to attain, and the kind of fresh slate that any other company would give an arm and a leg for.

And I have to give Apple kudos for playing it off as well as they have done. If this had been directly pitched as a successor to the Mac OS, there would have been massive booing, since it didn't run any Mac software, couldn't work with any of the existing peripherals, and so on. What they've done instead is to let their brand new OS with its brand new UI paradigm mature alongside the Mac OS, letting this new OS build its own base of both users and developers (140,000 apps!), so that when they ship the successor to the MacBook in a couple of years and it runs what we know today as the iPhone OS, no one will raise an eyebrow, because it will be the most natural thing in the world. I look forward to that day.

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3 comments
  • Oh Skar, you are still a Mac lover after all! I agree with you completely. From an HCI standpoint Apple is re-inventing how we interact with these devices in an easy, sexy and intuitive way. The next task? Figure out how to make development for these devices as easy as using them!
    By Blogger Jorge, at January 28, 2010 5:36 PM   
  • I agree with you. I have subscribed your feed. If a saw your post early I will quote some of them in my post:)
    By Blogger Shawn Lee, at January 28, 2010 6:06 PM   
  • So... Can we look forward to seeing Qingwen on the iPad? ;)
    By Blogger chrisq, at April 7, 2010 11:13 AM   

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And Another Thing...
One good sign of a very bad fan is when he finds out about the latest book in a "trilogy-ish" written by one of his favourite authors only by strolling into a bookstore and being told about it by the pleasant, hippie-like shopkeeper. But then again, I wouldn't go to great lengths to blame this faithful reader given the fact that said author is dead, and would it really be too presumptuous to think that people ought to stop having books published once they're six feet under? Apparently so.

Out comes "And Another Thing...", the sixth instalment in the H2G2 hexology (formerly pentology, originally trilogy), written by Douglas Adams' ghost Eoin Colfer, who was the anointed writer for the book. Douglas Adams had supposedly cherished this wish to write a sixth book to sort of wrap things up, tie loose ends together and what-not, and since he couldn't be bothered to live long enough to write it himself, he let somebody else finish the job. Of course, the fact that the H2G2 franchise is worth more than some small countries might also have had something to do with it.

So, I bought it last night and just finished reading it. It's surprisingly short. Maybe I'm just too used to those Harry Potter books, so that any book with less than 700 pages looks like a pamphlet to me. Anyway, I won't go on about the story too much, but the writing is something of a curiosity, given that it clearly endevours to replicate Adams' style. Yes, it's funny, um, in parts. Unfortunately, a fair bit of it is a just a tad overdone. A lot of H2G2 is about made up names of made up planets, solar systems, species and the like, but there's just too much of that in this book. It's pretty much impossible to read a single paragraph that does not contain at least one made-up word. It goes from entertaining to tiresome really quickly. Finally, there's no Marvin, which leaves the reader with a there's-something-missing-but-I-just-can't-put-my-finger-on-it sort of feeling.

Go get it while it's priced, uh, okayishly.

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1 comments
  • I really like "part six of three" though.
    By Blogger Kimberly, at January 2, 2010 10:14 AM   

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Google Latitude
Of the newly introduced Google Latitude for iPhone, which is a web application:
We worked closely with Apple to bring Latitude to the iPhone in a way Apple thought would be best for iPhone users. After we developed a Latitude application for the iPhone, Apple requested we release Latitude as a web application in order to avoid confusion with Maps on the iPhone, which uses Google to serve maps tiles.
This is one of the major issues with developing apps for iPhone. Apple tells you they won't accept it after you have done all your hard work, and this ought not to be underestimated. The only thing that is a bit surprising is that Apple has the balls to give the same crap to Google.

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Modal Particles in Hindi
I think one of the best things that has happened for me as a result of having studied Chinese is a much better understanding of Hindi. Chinese and Hindi have more differences than similarities but the similarities they do share are quite fascinating.

Both languages have this really interesting concept of a "modal particle". A modal particle is a term that linguists use, which approximately means a small word which doesn't mean anything on its own in a sentence, but which has an influence on the overall meaning of the sentence. The examples below should clarify what I'm talking about:

"यह बहुत ज़्यादा है, मुझसे और नहीं खाया जाएगा, तुम खालो ना."
"Yah bahut zyādā hai, mujhse aur nahiⁿ khāyā jāyegā, tum khālo nā."
"This is too much, I can't eat any more of it, won't you eat it (please)."

"तुम खेलने क्यों नहीं आये?" "अरे भाई, मैं कल के टेस्ट के लिए पढ़ाई कर रहा था ना!"
"Tum khelne kyoⁿ nahiⁿ āye?" "Are bhāi, maiⁿ kal ke test ke liye padhāi kar rahā thā nā!"
"Why didn't you come to play yesterday?" "I was studying for tomorrow's test!"

"तुमने ठंडे दिमाग़ से सोच लिया है ना?"
"Tumne thaⁿdey dimaagh se soch liyā hai nā?"
"You've thought it out carefully, right?"

"हैं! तुम पागल हो गए हो क्या?"
"Hāiⁿ! Tum pāgal ho gay ho kyā?"
"What! Have you gone crazy?"

"आज तो मेरे पास टाईम नहीं है, मैं कल आता हूँ हाँ."
"Āj to mere pās time nahīⁿ hai, maiⁿ kal ātā hūⁿ hāⁿ."
"I don't really have time today, why don't I come tomorrow instead."

"हे भगवान्, तूने यह क्या कर डाला रे..."
"He Bhagvān, tūne yah kyā kar dālā re..."
"Oh my God, what have you done..."

"क्या है भाई?"
"Kyā hai bhāi?"
"What is it (with you)?"

In these examples, the words in bold are the "modal particles" (at least, in my opinion, they ought to be considered modal particles in Hindi). These words work to add emotion to the language. These kinds of words are not used much in English, which is why I feel that when I get angry, I can convey my opinion to the other person much better in Hindi. These words solely exist to add emotion to a sentence, which is proven by the fact that removing any of them from the above Hindi sentences will not change the essential meaning of the sentence.

Both Chinese and Japanese are also full of words like these. In Chinese, they are called "语气词" (yǔqìcí) which translates to "language tone words". In Japanese, they are called "叙法の助詞" (johō no joshi) or "modal helping words". To find out more about these, you can read Wikipedia's articles on linguistics, although Wikipedia also only has limited information about them.

This article (the Hindi version) was edited using Rungta's Hindi Transliteration tool.

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More Rejection
This time it's not my story but this guy's. Basically, they're rejecting his iPhone app because it requires a companion Mac application. This is beyond fucked up. This is just kicking the man in the groin. I mean, not only has Apple provided precedent for this kind of application (the Remote app, which needs iTunes as a companion), but that it makes no sense at all! Rejecting based on objectionable content is one thing, but this is just ludicrous. Might I remind you that making these applications takes months of hard work and if it's rejected, that's it, the work all goes to waste. End of story. Not to mention, Apple is never willing to talk to you nicely - emails are ignored and those annoying "can't comment" responses honestly make me want to take up a career in violence.

In other news, I've resubmitted Qingwen to the App Store with even more new features and bug fixes, and now I await even more of Apple's senseless displeasure. Maybe they'll want me to take Mao Zedong's entry out or something because they find it offensive. Seriously, I don't know what's going on with this whole App Store approval situation. I just hope that either Apple gets its act together or other competing platforms like the Palm Pre come up to speed quickly and offer a friendlier solution.

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With Hands Tied Behind My Back
I started reading Garrett Murray's post about his annoyances with the way the iTunes App Store works, and I have to say, it's made me way more pissed off at Apple and the way they handle App Store submissions than I ever imagined.

Yes, in writing this post, I realize what a marvelous piece of work the iPhone platform is and how the runaway success of the App Store means that it's definitely doing a lot of things right. The thing is, most of that is from the customer's point of view. From the developer's standpoint, regardless of how many times Apple tells me that the App Store takes away all the pain of marketing and distributing my app, I have to say that this is not the way I want to be doing it.

What stirred all this poison? An email I got from Apple yesterday telling me that version 2.0 of Qingwen has been rejected because of two reasons: one is a minor bug that I've fixed and that the email did not even have accurate reproduction steps for, but the second is the one I'm pissed off about. Apparently, they've "reviewed Qingwen Chinese Dictionary and determined that [they] cannot post this version of [my] iPhone application to the App Store because it contains objectionable content and is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states 'Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple's reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.' Please refer to the attached screenshots." Here are the screenshots they sent me:

  

I hope you're looking at the screenshots and thinking something along the lines of "you've got to be kidding me". I'm sorry, did I mention it's a dictionary? Dictionaries have words, all sorts of words, including, yes, swear words like "fuck" and also words like "penis", which of course is such a lewd word that I should be smited (well, technically, smitten) for having included it in Qingwen? And all of this somehow falls under their so-called "reasonable judgment".

It's hard for me to imagine precisely who Apple is trying to "protect" by keeping these words off the iPhone. But that's not even the right question to ask. My question is, can they keep these words off the iPhone? Of course not! As is clear from the screenshots, Qingwen doesn't bombard you with words like "cock" and "penis" the moment you start it up. No, the Apple employee who took those screenshots specifically searched for those words. As far as I'm concerned, it's the same thing as opening a website that contains swear words (like the page you're reading, for instance) on the iPhone. If they don't want Qingwen on the iPhone because it can show you "objectionable material", then why allow Safari, Mail, YouTube and pretty much any other app, which can easily show you all sorts of even more "objectionable material"?

But that's not all. First of all, Qingwen 1.0 contained most of the words they've pointed out in those screenshots as objectionable and it's on the App Store right now! In fact, it's been downloaded more than 20,000 times since it came out earlier this year. Not only that, but every competing app I know of contains all these same words and these apps are all out on the store gathering downloads. Meanwhile, Qingwen is stuck on what is now a completely outdated version 1.0, not because of some hairy bug that I haven't fixed, but because of some bullshit company policy.

Here I am sitting with this idiotic email from Apple, while users are going on the App Store, giving Qingwen bad ratings and writing it bad reviews, and I have this new version of the app that addresses nearly all of their issues and more just sitting on its ass. And this is another chord that Murray's post struck with me. Loads of "customers" on the App Store are just complete asses. They download your app, don't even bother playing around with it for five minutes or contacting the developer, but instead go and post a negative review on the App Store, talking about missing features that are not even in the list of new features in version 2.0 because they're there already in version 1.0! And it's for this reason that I am no longer going to be distributing Qingwen for free. It was an app that I made for my own use and thought it'd be nice if other people also got to use it, but you know what, I'm done dealing with all the freeloading jerks whose only job is to make my day worse. From now on, if they want to bitch about it, they at least have to pay me first. And for those who feel it's an app they like and is worth having, well maybe it wouldn't hurt for them to dish out about the same amount of money as it takes to buy a Crunch bar.

Anyway, that's enough raging for today. I want to end the post on a lighter note because, really, overall Qingwen has been a great thing for me. Not only is it my first real-world app, but it's also been way more successful than I ever imagined. As I mentioned, it's had over 20,000 downloads last I checked, and that's way, way more than I ever expected to have in its entire lifetime. Also, if you visit Qingwen on the App Store, you'll see that most people have written extremely gracious reviews and it's a great feeling to see other people appreciating what you've made even more than you yourself do. Reading these reviews and watching the downloads counter is a bit like an addiction–I want more and more happy users–and for Qingwen 2.0 I've added at least a couple of significant features that I don't really use myself but which others have requested. And that is something that I wasn't expecting to do at all when I starting developing it, because I kept telling myself it's an app made only to suit my needs and mine alone. This is all the more reason as to why I wanted Qingwen 2.0 to make it to the App Store as soon as possible, because this is really the first release that I've actually developed more for my users than for myself. So, I do hope Apple gets a little smarter about this whole process, and soon.

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5 comments
  • This whole App Store relation with the developers comes across as, like you said, "you've got to be kidding me".

    All those words they find offensive, they're there in the shipping Dictionary.app in Mac OS 10.5, and for good reason too. It's a dictionary for crying out loud! Maybe the reviewer should've checked the meaning of a dictionary before reviewing you app.

    Congrats on finishing and shipping (on your part) 2.0!
    By Blogger Prateek, at April 22, 2009 2:15 AM   
  • I'm not sure why they've changed their behaviour since iPhone OS 2.0. I remember 'f**k' was a word that the iPhone's auto-correction dictionary supported before 2.0. If I reset the dictionary on my 2.x device, I immediately see the auto-correction suggestion 'duck' for the word.

    Dictionary.com's app requires network access if users want to access everything they would find on a real dictionary. The other $3.99 'Dictionary' app that uses only a built-in word database doesn't have the word.

    If this censorship is for the benefit of kids then they should allow apps to use the Restrictions feature on the OS(is this allowed already?).

    This is just the beginning. I wonder how long this manual approval process is going to continue. I think there will be a saturation point where they will have to open up the App Store.
    By Blogger Abhishek Nandakumar, at April 22, 2009 12:05 PM   
  • As I sit here waiting on my own v2.0 release (the longest wait I've had since August 2008), the only words that come to mind reading your post are expletives. How many of us have dictionaries based on CC-CEDICT in the AppStore with all of those same entries? That's not to mention all of the other dictionaries based on whatever source that likely have the same entries.

    What's your plan? Are you going to censor the entries or resubmit and hope you get a sane reviewer?
    By Blogger Jason, at April 24, 2009 6:37 AM   
  • Well all I have to say is that you have done some fine work with your app and I am sad that apple doesn't see that. I bout a palm a year ago for $150 and student edition Pleco dict for like $90, just so I can have the functionality you have in your app. I could have bought a touch AND your software for way less. Keep up the good work and don't let the app store keep you down!
    By Blogger The Cat Family, at April 29, 2009 10:00 PM   
  • I was wondering why this wasn't free anymore and now I know. But I am going to buy it anyway because it sounds to be the best and looks like you put lots of work into it!
    By Blogger John, at May 25, 2009 7:50 PM   

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VoiceOver in the iPod shuffle
The new iPod shuffle released today has VoiceOver which can read out songs, artists, albums and playlists to you and it supports a ton of languages. Apple has a little section at the bottom of this page which demos all the languages they have and all this makes me think is, "Hey, where are all these languages in Mac OS X?" For example, Mandarin Chinese is definitely not available in Mac OS X, but it is available on the new iPod shuffle. And the fact that Apple claims you'll hear different voices depending on whether you're synching from a Mac or a PC, makes me wonder... Are these voices stored somewhere on my Mac? Can I use them? Please?

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The Inexplicable Safari 4
Yesterday, Apple released Safari 4 (Beta) out into the world. Although I can't say I can feel the speed boost Apple claims with Safari 4, I believe all the benchmarks conducted by a bunch of tech blogs and they all say it kicks every other browser into the netherworld with varying margins (Internet Explorer 7 receiving the worst kick) in terms of its JavaScript execution engine. I also love the fact that my URLs are now much better auto-completed as I type them (à la Firefox 3) and that the History is now more extensive. The new developer tools are also pretty amazing and I look forwarding to using them, especially if it eliminates the need to use FireBug for testing websites. Also, I really like the fact that someone finally came to their senses and made the Windows version use Windows UI widgets and not look completely disgusting.

However, I am saddened - yes, saddened - to see how much time has been wasted on what I feel are completely useless feature additions to Safari. I absolutely do not understand why Apple is trying to make Safari be Google Chrome. Has Chrome picked up a particularly good slice of the browser market? No. Have people really expressed the opinion that the Chrome's "tabs-on-top" UI is vastly superior to the regular tabs in other browsers? No. In fact, most people I know played out with Chrome for a few days and then relegated it to their pile of unused software. As with Safari 4, the only thing I liked about Chrome was under the hood, that is, the fact that every tab ran in its own process. As for all the "UI innovativeness" that Chrome brought to the market, I don't have much to say. I certainly fail to see its merits.

And that is why I feel that Apple has wasted a lot of precious effort for nothing. Not only do the tabs on top look ghastly to my eyes, but they also don't make my tabbed browsing experience even an iota more pleasant. The "Top Sites" feature, which is also a direct rip-off from Chrome, is again something that I initially thought I'd find useful; but it never ended up falling into my workflow, and, believe me, adding a cool 3D effect to it is not going to change that. It was also the first thing I turned off in Safari 4.

Then there's CoverFlow, which was the second thing I turned off. I honestly don't know if there was any significant thought behind this at all. CoverFlow in Finder already gave off the vibe of "eh... this is kind of superfluous" and in Safari it seems to be shouting "we made this cool thing called CoverFlow and we're going to shoehorn it into every new app we make." Even in iTunes, where CoverFlow originated, I only used it for the first couple of weeks and can easily count on one hand the number of times I've used it in Finder.

And most painful of all, why the hell did they take out the progress-in-address-bar? Not only is the progress bar an essential feedback element, but Safari's was also most ingeniously implemented.

Thankfully, there seems to be some hidden preferences that can bring back some of Safari 3's goodness. However, I feel that Safari 3 definitely trumps Safari 4 as far as usability and sheer UI elegance is concerned and the Safari team should think twice about making Safari 4's the standard UI. At the least, these hidden preferences should be exposed in Safari's Preferences.

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3 comments
  • One reason the new tabs might look so strange is that they’re set in Helvetica, rather than Lucida Grande. Someone deserves a chance encounter with the cluebat for this.

    Interestingly, Apple claims that Safari was the first browser to have a combination URL/progress bar. As far as I know, Opera (surprise) was first with that feature: I noticed it way back in Opera 2, but it just wasn’t shiny like Safari’s. Safari more clearly copied MSN Explorer, which used an identical design, featured in a series of “MSN butterfly” commercials aired nationwide.

    Too bad the actual progress bar was removed. Safari’s progress bar was much more accurate than the ones in Firefox and IE.

    I’m not surprised at the superfluous eye candy. Apple likes these things (cf. glassy Dock).
    By Blogger Minh Nguyễn, at February 25, 2009 7:25 AM   
  • i actually like the tabs on top because i get slightly more vertical space to display actual page content. i just wish they disabled click-through for those tabs because you can accidentally close them when switching from another window.
    By Blogger James, at February 28, 2009 12:26 AM   
  • spot on with the review of Safari 4.0
    Even i had to revert back to the old progress bar in address bar thingy.
    N even the tabs don't come out so easily.. U have to click on the top right ( diagonal Lines ) to take a tab out..
    N in Safari 4, i dont think there's any way to stop a page while its loading. Even +. doesnt stop anything..
    is any way out ?

    I might be heading to back to safari 3 soon.. Damn
    By Blogger Arjun Goel, at April 20, 2009 12:08 AM   

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Qǐngwèn
The product of about three weeks of on and off work is finally complete and uploaded on the App Store for everyone to download for free. Given the choice, what do I end up making for the final project of my iPhone class? A Chinese dictionary, of course! It's called Qǐngwèn (请问/請問) and has the following icon:


I know it screams "Japanese!" and well, for people who don't like that, I can't help it. It's the first thing I came up with in Photoshop after spending a couple of minutes fiddling around with colors and I couldn't make anything else that looked better. The unfortunate part about making apps is that the icon is the last thing you do and the thing you spend the least effort on, but the most important aspect in the initial attraction prospective users feel towards your app and a bad icon can dramatically reduce the number of people who try out your app. And since most of us small developers can't afford professional designers, we're left with whatever we can come up with in Photoshop in a few minutes before submitting the app to the App Store.

Anyway, a decent icon will make the user tap your application's name in the search results, but then you have to keep the experience going with some screenshots, which are the next thing a user bases their decision of whether or not to download your app on. So, here's one of those:


Of course, there are additional screenshots and also much better presented on the website I've made specifically for Qǐngwèn, which is karanmisra.com/qingwen. Which brings me to the other thing you do in a hurry once you're done making the app: the website. In my case, I needed something that looked decent but definitely did not have the time to sit and do hand coded CSS (not that I'm good at that sort of stuff anyway), so I ended up making it in iWeb which is absolutely superb in the way that it lets you take your ideas and directly convert them to a website as long as you don't care about the fact that all the CSS is inlined. So, don't go look at the source of that website.

Of course, as far as the app itself is concerned, there are two main features: search and word lists. And all I did was to try to make those two features as smooth and simple to use as possible, trying to eke out as much performance as I could out of the iPhone's little CPU. Apart from that, two major components in the app are actually not done by me. The dictionary comes from the free (and slowly growing towards excellence) CC-CEDICT and the handwriting-based input method, which by the way is abso-fucking-lutely incredible, comes from Apple itself, and I need to write an accolade to it at some point (for instance, look at this screenshot in which I wrote that character by hand and its first guess was exactly what I was going for.)

And that's Qǐngwèn, the Chinese dictionary for the iPhone and iPod touch, that I made mostly over winter break. Of course, I've already started work on version 2.0 and there's loads of stuff I have to both fix and improve upon.

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20 comments
  • Congrats on your first iPhone app! I really like the brown shades you went with for the app.
    By Blogger Prateek, at January 17, 2009 10:10 PM   
  • Thanks! I really thought the brown shading would be appropriate for a dictionary, since it reminded me somewhat of books.
    By Blogger Karan, at January 17, 2009 10:11 PM   
  • Congratulations on releasing the app -- this looks like it'll be a really nice addition to the iPhone.

    Feature/pony request time: One killer feature would be if it supported custom dictionaries. WeDict Pro supports StarDict-format dictionaries (which brings all kinds of Chinese-Chinese dictionary goodness -- I use Chinese-Chinese dictionaries a lot more than Chinese-English dictionaries), but the implementation is lousy and the app frequently refuses to download dictionaries. Any chance of seeing this happen in 2.0?
    By Blogger bokane, at January 22, 2009 4:59 AM   
  • Nice work. You've raised the bar for the rest of us.
    By Blogger Jason, at January 28, 2009 12:41 PM   
  • Beautifully designed app. I can't decide whether the aesthetics or function is better.

    Request: export word lists
    By Blogger Richard, at February 2, 2009 4:24 AM   
  • The link to the screenshot you've linked is broken.
    By Blogger Abhishek Nandakumar, at February 7, 2009 8:40 AM   
  • Hi, it's perfect app! Just a small bugreport: even after switching the traditional character set, the logic remains simplified (as well as button captions): i.e. the screen for character 颱 offers a search for words containing 台 or a search for 只 returns also results like 隻 etc.
    By Blogger Hans, at February 7, 2009 11:22 AM   
  • @Everyone: Thank you!

    @Abhishek: Fixed the broken link.

    @Hans: I'm aware of that bug. It should be fixed in the next release.
    By Blogger Karan, at February 7, 2009 11:24 AM   
  • I can't find a way to draw a character. Do i have to install something else?
    By Blogger Pieter, at February 9, 2009 3:26 AM   
  • I also can't find a way to access the handwriting input screen. All I can get is a keyboard. Advice?
    By Blogger Verre, at March 5, 2009 12:20 AM   
  • You need to activate the Pinyin and/or Handwriting keyboards from Settings > International > Keyboards using the iPhone's Settings app.
    By Blogger Karan, at March 5, 2009 12:22 AM   
  • That worked, thanks! I think a lot of us iPhone noobs aren't aware that this functionality has to be enabled through the phone's general settings.
    By Blogger Verre, at March 5, 2009 4:18 AM   
  • you should contact the developer of ktdict and perhaps hybridize your two apps. His/her app has instant lookup, whereas yours has wordlists and traditional/simplified, which is really cool... some kind of combo of the two apps would be the best chinese dictionary out there and you could sell it for $5 or something
    By Blogger Skateboard P, at March 15, 2009 3:23 AM   
  • Very nice dictionary, good ergonomy (the best free Chinese dictionary at the moment in my opinion).

    Ideas for improvements in next versions :
    - quality and number of entries (some usefull words are not in the dictionary, but maybe this "lightness" is the reason your dictionary is faster than Dianhua)
    - management of wordlists (last word in at the top of the list instead of the bottom, import and export options, options to hide translation and/or pinyin in "study mode")

    Thanks again !
    By Blogger Adi et Noé, at March 17, 2009 9:55 AM   
  • Also a bug report : sometimes (I can't really say when it happens) some wordlist entries get lost, more precisely if my list looks like this:

    word1
    word2
    word3
    word4

    It might become like this:

    word1
    word1
    word1
    word4

    so one word entry replaces other entries
    By Blogger Adi et Noé, at March 17, 2009 10:04 AM   
  • when I make multiple word lists, the program abruptly quits when I scroll down to add new words to the newer lists. Very annoying for a program that is otherwise excellent.
    By Blogger Ervin Massinga, at March 17, 2009 6:11 PM   
  • Hi, please contact me by email, thanks!
    By Blogger MDBG, at March 20, 2009 1:12 PM   
  • Hi. I loved the app; used it during my vacation in China to write new words down. Then I restored my iPhone from Scratch, forgetting I had QingWen :( , hence losing all my precious vocabulary list. What a shame. My suggestion would then be to have an "online backup" system (by email adress); or at least an Export feature; as someone suggested. But definetely, the online backup (such as the one implemented in the app "Weightbot" by Tapbots) seems the best.

    Regards,
    By Blogger Gilles Lemagnen, at April 12, 2009 10:08 AM   
  • Hi, the bug I mentioned above (word entries get overwritten by a single one repeating itself) happens when I use the delete function for some words in my list.
    By Blogger Adi et Noé, at April 14, 2009 7:07 PM   
  • Thanks for reporting the bug! I will definitely look into it very soon.
    By Blogger Karan, at April 15, 2009 10:18 AM   

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Dostana
This movie was hyped up a bit for me by some of my friends and since my mother brought home a DVD, I thought "Why not, let's give this movie a try." So, we popped it into the DVD player and off it didn't go, because the DVD player is now officially a piece of crap and claimed there was "No Disc" after "Disc Reading" for a few minutes. So, we hooked up a laptop to the TV and off it went.

As I said, I was excited for this movie because the idea of a fake Indian gay couple being found out by a theth Punjabi mother was fairly amusing. And you know, that part did end up being very amusing. Unfortunately, that bit only lasted about ten minutes. There were then another 130 minutes or so of putting up with the storyless piece of crap produced by Karan Johar and enterprise. Spoiler alert here (a bit too late anyway), but there's only so long you can stretch a movie about two straight guys who pretend to be gay guys to live in a particularly nice apartment (the premise, although, is a bit over-stretched from the beginning, not to mention the fact that it's ripped off, badly mind you, from this recent American movie.)

Also, amongst other things I would like to make clear to the rest of this world is that Abhishek Bachchan, to me as a straight male, comes off as not anywhere nearly good-looking enough to be working in movies, and particularly not this one in which the entire fucking premise of the movie is supposed to be two extremely attractive straight guys who pretend to be a gay couple. And no, he's not one of those actors whose acting is so par excellence that it can compensate for his average or below-average looks. Also, can't the fellow shave? Ever? Looks completely dreadful, especially because he's always in stark contrast to J. Abraham who, I'm sure even most straight males can agree, is an extremely attractive man. Thankfully, the director at least succumbed to this truth that even though he picked Bachchan for this role, he could never make the bloody fellow take his shirt off, and I honestly would have thrown up right then if he had.

So, in short, what is worthwhile is really to find a YouTube clip with the one scene from the movie that is priceless which is when Bachchan's mother comes to terms with her son's gayness and does a grih pravesh for her new son-in-law. What is unfortunate is that movies like these make me even less likely to watch the new Bollywood production to hit the silver screen.

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3 comments
  • Yeah, well the only reason I think they chose Abhishek was cuz he acts ... gay. As does Bobby Deol. Blearrgh.
    And no, I disagree, that fictitious love story was really funny as well.
    By Blogger Espèra, at January 3, 2009 6:10 AM   
  • haha.. actually true.. thank god K. Johar didn't make banchan take of his shirt seriously..abhishek shud have morally rejected this role opposite ( supposedly ) abhrahim. Where John cudnt wear nething more than undies but our handsome ( god knows how ) bachan was all the time wrapped in chunnis
    By Blogger Arjun Goel, at January 8, 2009 5:51 AM   
  • Heh.. So glad I didn't waste time watching it. And Abhishek Bachhan taking his shirt off??!! That'll be one shocking sight!

    Anyway nice to find your blog. Keep posting!

    --
    Rasagy (Exun.. Remember?)
    By Blogger RaSh, at January 19, 2009 1:03 PM   

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Hating on English
I'm now about four or five weeks into the first term of what can possibly be my last year at Stanford, but the eventfulness or uneventfulness of this one of the last few terms of my undergraduate career shall be reserved for a more opportune moment. For now, I want to talk a little bit about a foreigner's observations about English. Before I start though, I want to clarify that I love English a lot and let's face it, English is probably going to remain the language I'm most expressive in for the rest of my life as well.

My obsession with Sinitic languages continues and so, this term I am taking a class on the structure of Modern Chinese. As expected, the professor is Chinese, and so has learnt English as a foreign language, and since we talk about language so much in the class, it is inevitable that comparisons frequently get drawn between English and Chinese (Mandarin Chinese, for the purposes of this entry.) And sometimes I feel that the class name should be altered slightly from "The Structure of Modern Chinese" to "How Modern Chinese totally kicks Modern English's Ass, 'cause Modern Chinese is Fantastic" because the professor can occasionally go on endlessly about how certain things in English just don't make sense (His latest one is "How do 'put', 'up' and 'with' have anything to do with 'put up with' which means 'to tolerate'?") Truly, even though I feel his comments are always a little off topic, they do have some reasoning to them, and even if they don't really teach me anything too useful, they are interesting factoids about a language whose lexicon, grammar and idiosyncrasies I have rarely given much thought to.

The Chinese people have had a history of using ridiculously terse language, with Classical Chinese's syllables-to-meaning ratio unparalleled by any language I know of, and Modern Chinese comes in at a close second on my list. Whenever you want to introduce someone to Chinese grammar, you first have to introduce that person to what all Chinese grammar does not have, and this list includes: conjugational inflections, adjectival/adverbial agreement, plurals, gender and tense. Or, at least, that's all I could think of off the top of my head. So, this professor of mine argues as to why English also can't be the same way. If Chinese people manage to get along perfectly well without all those language features and still communicate just as well as any other people, why are other languages so complicated in this respect?

For example, if you have grown up speaking Chinese, you will wonder why English has this almost fanatical obsession with having a subject for every sentence. For example, take a sentence like "I should go to sleep", which is not only a perfectly good sentence but also a very natural one. The same sentence translated in the most natural way into Chinese would be "gāi shuìjiào le", which translates word-by-word to "Should sleep le", where "le" is a marker that conveys any of change in situation, when it is placed at the end of a sentence. English, as you saw, had the subject "I" in the sentence, while the Chinese didn't require it. Sure, English was more wordy in other senses but the sentence can be shortened down to "I should sleep" if one wishes. The "I", however, is fundamentally necessary. If someone said "Should sleep" out of the blue to me, I'd think the sentence sounded a bit incomplete.

Another example of English's determination to have a subject is sentences like "It is raining" and "There is a car outside". First of all, what baffles most foreign learners is "it". Most of them, after having learned English for years, still can't get over the "it" and wonder what the hell it refers to. I, certainly, don't think of anything in particular as being the "it" when I say "It's raining" or "It's hot outside". I just say it. It's part of the construction. In the end, I feel it stems from English's obsession with having a concrete subject at the beginning of every sentence. The Chinese would say "Xià yǔ" ("Falls rain") instead of "It's raining", "Tiānqì hěn rè" ("Weather very hot") instead of "It's hot" and "Wàimiàn yǒu chē" ("Outside has car") instead of "There is a car outside". Many English speakers these days also tend to mess up and say "There's five cars" instead of "There're five cars", and both forms are accepted in colloquial speech. This points to the fact that "There is/are" has become such a set phrase that 'there' is no longer looked upon as the 'subject' of the sentence.

And that's just the beginning. You don't have plurals in Chinese, so "shū" could mean both "book" and "books". So, it baffles my professor why one needs to add the 's' at the end of 'book' when "five book" leaves no ambiguity in the fact that there are five books. And if you say a sentence like "Book are expensive these days", you'll note that 'book' doesn't agree with 'are', so it sounds awkward. But, if it's a matter of pure communication, there are no two meanings you can interpret from this. It is clear that the sentence is simply "Books are expensive these days".

Then you can take it to the next step and question why the verb 'to be' needs to be conjugated. This concept of conjugation is completely alien to a Chinese person. For them, the most natural sentence would be "Book be expensive these days". Since no particular book was pointed out, it's obvious that books in general are expensive.

Then there's also the thing about "pointing things out" which leads me to the topic of articles, such as 'a', 'an' and 'the'. Let's not even talk about the fact that there are two articles 'a' and 'an' simply because it's unfashionable to say "a umbrella", why in the world would you need 'the'? I know that some people reading this might know Hindi, and so you can relate to the fact that Hindi doesn't need 'a' or 'the' either. The context makes it pretty darned clear whether you're talking about a particular thing or a thing in general. And you'll see that if you want to draw attention to a particular thing, you can use the word for 'that' in English, Hindi and Chinese. "The car is parked" would go into Hindi and Chinese as "That car is parked" and "A car is parked" would go as "One car is parked". So, the reason as to why English and many other European languages need articles is a mystery to many foreign learners. Unsurprisingly, they mess it up quite often as well.

Then there's pronouns and their myriad complex uses. For example "I drive a car", "That is my car", "The car is mine" and "Give the car to me" all involve the person 'I' and yet they all have a different form of the pronoun. In Chinese, they'd go "Wǒ kāi chē", "Nà ge chē shì wǒ de", "Chē shì wǒ de" and "Gěi wǒ nà ge chē". In Chinese, all the four sentences have the same form for 'I', i.e., 'Wǒ'. The same thing goes for 'you', 'he', 'she' and 'they'. I have to note that even many native English speakers get confused about the conjugation of certain sentences, such as "It's me" or "It's I"? "My friends and me went to dinner" or "My friends and I went to dinner"? Unsurprisingly, both are accepted forms, the former more accepted in colloquial speech and the latter in formal speech.

Another thing with pronouns, besides conjugation is why English differentiates between the pronouns for humans and non-humans. For example, "It is ugly" can never refer to a person (unless derogatory), while Hindi and Chinese both use the same pronouns for 'It' and 'He/She' ('Vo' in Hindi and 'Tā' in Chinese.) Interestingly, in spoken Chinese, there is also no differentiation at all between 'He', 'She' and 'It', just as there isn't in Hindi. Context makes it all so clear that native speakers might not even notice this.

Then of course there's also tense. I don't think there's any native English speaker that hasn't written a story or an essay in which he discovered half way through that the tense he had chosen for the starting line somehow shifted from the past tense to the present tense or past perfect tense by the end of the paragraph. Then the author invariably has to pick one or the other and go back to change the entire paragraph such that it has the same tense and everything matches up. In Chinese, there is no tense! How do they tell when something happened, is happening or will happen? Let's take the example "She went to the market yesterday". If you change it to "She go to the market yesterday", does that change the meaning at all? No. And that's how you would say it in Chinese. In fact, there exists a particle in Chinese which can be added after a verb to show that the action has completed, but in sentences in which a time word has been mentioned, that particle is optional. So, for example, one could say "Zuótiān, tā qù le shāngchǎng" or "Zuótiān, tā qù shāngchǎng" and they would both mean the same. The 'le' is the "completion marker". However, this 'le' is not a "tense marker" because it means the action has been completed; however, it could have completed in the past, present or future. For example, "Míngtiān, tā xià le kè, jiù qù kàn yīshēng", which is "Tomorrow, as soon as she is done with class, she will go to see the doctor". Here 'le' is used in the future 'tense'. So, there are no 'be', 'am', 'is', 'are', 'was' and 'were'. It's all one word. And no 'go', 'goes' and 'went' either.

In short, even though English is nowhere near losing all of its various grammatical idiosyncrasies (and I don't think I even scratched the surface), the take-home lesson for now is that Chinese is a ridiculously easy language to learn for a foreign learner, while English is the exact opposite.

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7 comments
  • Criticism of English is something up with which I will not put.
    By Blogger Minh Nguyễn, at October 20, 2008 9:50 AM   
  • Also, while Chinese might be incredibly easy to learn grammatically – since, well, what grammar does it have? – that doesn’t help Westerners trying to learn the ideographic writing system or the very concept of tones.

    So your arguments boil down to the fact that, yes, Chinglish is very easy. ;^)
    By Blogger Minh Nguyễn, at October 20, 2008 9:55 AM   
  • I share your sentiment about the Chinese writing system, in that it is extremely difficult to learn, and is viewed by many to be quite impractical and a hindrance to both native and foreign learners of the language. However, do note that I have written perfectly acceptable Chinese sentences in this post without a single one of these "ideographic" characters and without any ambiguity in meaning.

    As to your comment about tones, they are a language feature unique to some of these East Asian languages and yes, they do take getting used to. But then again, if you learn Hindi, you suddenly have to distinguish four T sounds that you never knew existed or four D sounds, along with long and short vowels. All this is just the phonology of the given language and, in learning most foreign languages, the phonology is the initial and most difficult step. However, the structure of the language is a completely different topic and it was the structure that was my primary focus in this post.
    By Blogger Karan, at October 20, 2008 10:57 AM   
  • This post has been removed by the author.
    By Blogger sid, at October 20, 2008 12:05 PM   
  • Great entry! This entry made me think about how we love words in the English language compared to Chinese where structure often relies on directness and simplicity. Our highest income earners and socialites include lawyers, consultants, and politicians, whose eloquence over words is probably the most important piece of their economic success. These members of our society embrace the fact that communicating in English is a complex exercise full of nuances. As Americans, we think of math and reading, analytic thought and it's expression, as roughly equal priorities when we talk about educating our children. Could this explain why we prioritize different sorts of knowledge differently in societies as different as China and the West? I agree that a shorter solution is often elegant, but is it truer for geometry than for the spoken word? Perhaps, being verbose makes it possible to achieve in English what can't be achieved in a terse language such as Chinese. Right now, I'm not convinced either way. How do you think the terse structure of Chinese affects being tactful or being able to weigh one's words carefully to convey the right tone and meaning especially when conveying a reality that's difficult to absorb or react positively to for the listener?
    By Blogger sid, at October 20, 2008 12:09 PM   
  • I thought you were busy with CS140?
    By Blogger Alan You, at October 20, 2008 2:58 PM   
  • I think the difficulty is more that you have to learn language features so different than those of your native language. For those of us who grew up knowing (to some extent) a tonal language, things like tones don’t really trip us up. Similarly, you wouldn’t find it hard to pick up another language’s retroflex consonants, since Hindi is so abundant in them, but most others would.

    So I don’t think the issue is that English or Chinese is difficult in an absolute sense. Whenever someone learns their second language, they have to learn certain skills, like circumlocution and metacognition, that likely haven’t come up since early childhood. If it’s an English speaker learning a Romance language, they have to relearn conjugation. A polyglot who dabbles in a diverse array of languages probably wouldn’t find learning English, Chinese, or Latin to be more difficult than the others.

    I often sell people on learning Vietnamese by telling them there’s no conjugation (tense, person) and no declension (case, number, gender), and any word can be any part of speech as-is. What I don’t tell them is that pronouns in Vietnamese are diverse beyond disbelief, and that the /ng/ sound is notorious for Westerners. Every language has its rough spots.

    There are quite a few Vietnamese words and expressions for which I don’t know the English equivalent, and English is my native tongue. That’s why I feel sorry for someone who knows only one language: they’re missing out.
    By Blogger Minh Nguyễn, at October 20, 2008 9:47 PM   

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NSWindow and Animation
NSWindow, it seems, was never designed with the aim of supporting animation, which becomes slightly problematic when that's precisely what you're trying to do. This is the result of all the research I've done on NSWindow in the past few days because I was trying to do some animations with it, which proved to be a nigh impossible task.

So, what can you do in terms of animation with NSWindow? NSWindow supports a few basic animations - opacity, frame size, frame origin and frame rotation. If you want to change any of those and have the window animate the action, it will gladly do so. You can do those either using NSViewAnimation, through the setFrame:display:animate: method and perhaps even through the animator proxy. Try this Quickie to help you get started with simple window animations.

Beyond that short list, the next best thing you can do is to create the impression that you are animating the window. This allows your animations to be more flexible but not as smooth and well-blended as they would be were they being performed on the window itself. One way to animate things is using the Core Animation API that was introduced with Leopard. What you need to do to get things started though is a bunch of CALayers which Core Animation can animate. Now, these layers need to be inside something and, generally speaking, anything that you want to show on the screen needs to be inside a window. So, the solution is to create a transparent window the size of the entire screen and use that as your canvas, set that window's contentView to have a backing Core Animation layer and then add images of your windows (but not the windows themselves of course) as CALayers to this big transparent layer as sublayers. Here's some code that demonstrates that:

- (void)awakeFromNib {
    /* screenWindow is an IBOutlet hooked up to a borderless
       NSWindow window and this stuff should ideally be done
       by subclassing NSWindow and making a TransparentWindow
       subclass and putting this code in its -awakeFromNib */
    [screenWindow setBackgroundColor:[NSColor clearColor]];
    [screenWindow setHasShadow:NO];
    [screenWindow setOpaque:NO];
    [screenWindow setFrame:[[NSScreen mainScreen] frame] display:YES];
    [[screenWindow contentView] setWantsLayer:YES];

    /* Get the layer from this empty window */
    NSView *rootView = [screenWindow contentView];
    CALayer *rootLayer = [rootView layer];
    
    /* Create the layer that will animate */
    CALayer *fakeWindowLayer = [CALayer layer];    

    /* Get the window's (another IBOutlet) contents */
    NSBitmapImageRep *imageRep;
    [rootView lockFocus];
    imageRep = [[NSBitmapImageRep alloc] initWithFocusedViewRect:[rootView frame]];
    [rootView unlockFocus];

    /* Now set the layer's contents and add it to the layer tree */
    fakeWindowLayer.contents = (id)[imageRep CGImage];
    [rootLayer addSublayer:fakeWindowLayer];

    /* ... Now do some animation with this layer ... */
}

I don't know whether you picked up on it or not but I never autoreleased or released the NSBitmapImageRep, which was for a reason. The reason is that the CGImageRef we get back from the NSBitmapImageRep is actually half-hearted and is directly dependent on the NSBitmapImageRep, so much so that if the NSBitmapImageRep goes away and you try to access the data in the CGImageRef, your program crashes or you get junk on your screen. I'm currently working on it and trying to find a solution to this, but, for the time being, a memory leak it shall remain!

Anyway, at the end of that code segment, you have a CALayer that looks exactly like the NSWindow (minus the shadow) and can be animated at will. All you have to do now is to hide the actual NSWindow, animate your fake window, and, at the end of the animation, unhide the actual window and make sure it's where the fake window was last seen. Complicated, but so far the only way I've found to "animate" NSWindows.

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1 comments
  • Yeah, it's a shame it can't be easier to do nice NSWindow animations. Thanks for the nice tips in this post, I found them very useful.
    By Blogger Ted, at April 15, 2009 8:22 AM   

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Dealing with NSArray "out of bounds"
NSArray being one of the most frequently used Cocoa classes and being out of bounds being one of the most common errors one would get with an array, I'd have thought that the NSRangeException which NSArray promises to throw if an out of bounds error occurs would trigger the debugger (or, alternatively, the application to crash in non-debugging mode). However, it does not do so. All that happens is that you get this in your Run Log and your stack unwinds:
*** -[NSCFArray objectAtIndex:]: index (2) beyond bounds (2)
The fact that such a basic but critical error (who knows in how many devious ways an application could mess with your data once it has a bad state that made it go out of bounds?!) defaults to being silently acknowledged and subsequently ignored unnerves me, and frankly, it annoys me, because, just like any other developer trying to make a half decent program, what you want to do at that point is to jump to the stack trace and see what went wrong. Now, since we're very unlikely to convince Apple to change basic functionality it hasn't touched in about eight years, it's time for workarounds.

The first question that should come to mind is, "What the hell is actually going on? Is the promised NSRangeException being raised at all or is the documentation just lying? Giving the documentation the benefit of the doubt and assuming that it is being raised, what in the world is happening to it before it reaches us?" This kind of reasoning led me to search for ways to catch exceptions in the debugger. Some Google searching revealed that setting a symbolic breakpoint at -[NSException raise] might do the trick. So, I did. And it didn't. Cleanly flew by that breakpoint as if it was a man raising his kilt to hitch a ride.

What next? Look for an even more basic call to catch exceptions. Going by the fact that most fundamental Objective-C runtime methods eventually go into C functions and going by the example of objc_msg_send, I discovered objc_exception_throw and set a breakpoint on it. Worked like a charm! And now I have that breakpoint always set because I, like any sane developer, wants to catch his exceptions before they reach the end-user.

Incidentally, why the exception was not being caught by setting a breakpoint at -[NSException raise] now came to me with breathtaking obviosity ("obviousness" just isn't cool enough). I looked into the documentation for NSException once more and looked at the stack trace once more (the stack trace that now appeared thanks to my breakpoint). NSException, as it turns out, has three methods which can be called to raise exceptions, and, apparently the other two (+raise:format: and +raise:format:arguments:) do not all eventually call into -raise. Now here's the most ludicrous thing about this affair; read this bit from the documentation for -raise:
All other methods that raise an exception invoke this method, so set a breakpoint here if you are debugging exceptions.
Wow, just outright lying. Very spiffy, Apple, very spiffy indeed. Undocumented exceptions about exceptions. Is this supposed to be some sort of geek humor? हे भगवान!

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2 comments
  • WOW. Just wow. You, sir, are a savior to all programmers having to deal with NSArrays. I would go apeshit every single time I had an out of bounds error. I can now rest easy with this new weapon you have shared with the world.
    By Blogger J.C. Subida, at July 27, 2009 5:04 PM   
  • An huge THANK YOU from me! You saved me a lot of time with this post!
    By Blogger Dzamir, at April 3, 2010 2:07 AM   

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Reminiscences
For the two hundredth post on this new journal, I bring old memories and a new address. The new address comes as part of a shift I want to make to consolidate all my web logging experiences in one place and a want to redesign, not the journal itself (since I still like this simplistic self-designed template very much) but the rest of my website to match the journal. So, that will be coming in a few days. Until then, let me look back at the past year and dig out some of my most cherished memories.

Although it might not be the first chronologically, the first really grand thing that jumps to my mind about last summer - almost exactly a year ago - was reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. What a delight to read that wonderful book was, and still was yet again this summer and I just finished re-listening to it on audio only to move on to Book Six. Perhaps, I can go through them in reverse order this summer. I really enjoyed reading the aforelinked entry because it's just brimming with my excitement and enthusiasm about Harry Potter - a sentiment hard to mask even behind the stillness of written text.

Possibly because my internship was so boring did I get so much work towards personal projects done last year. This year, since my internship keeps me glued so, I barely get that kind of time, not to mention that last year I was friendless in an alien suburb, which gave me more free time than I'd ever imagined having. It got a bit boring, but I feel I made the best of it. And here's something I spent the beginning of last summer working on - the then redesigned Journal, which, as of this writing, is the current design.

Ah, yes and my Chinese adventures continued in full force last year after having studied it for a year at Stanford and having found it to be a supremely interesting language to study, which, if it were not for the characters, would also be counted as one of the easiest to learn languages of the world. And along those lines, I published what I believe is my first post completely in Chinese. And now that I come to read it after a year, I have to really restrain myself from clicking on the little pencil icon and fixing all the numerous errors I'd made back then, which sound disturbingly wrong to my ears now, after another year of having studied the venerable subject.

Toyon, of course! Wow, looking back at the memorable year this has been, living with about ten score sophomores. And these two posts recount the beginning of that adventure, one that would be filled to the brim with endless fun, friends and anime. It was an amazing experience being staff on a dorm and I recommend it to anyone who's considering it. I found out after having staffing that the key point which makes it so much more fun staffing than being a regular person in the dorm is that when you are a staff member, people feel less guilty in bothering you, which gets you, assuming you're someone who likes company, more people to talk to and become friends with than you ever imagined. And afterwards I reminisce over it in Hinglish.

When I discovered Simpu Singh and Indians speaking Cantonese.

When I met Chinese people in New Delhi over winter break. (Hindi)

When I had my best academic quarter ever! God, that made me happy.

When I wrote the first piece of software that made me feel a sense of accomplishment. (Liànxí)

When I finally got a free ticket to WWDC.

And found an internship I really liked.

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2 comments
  • Of course you had a great year at Toyon! You were living next door to me; how could it have been a bad year?
    By Blogger Alan You, at August 3, 2008 4:24 PM   
  • Good use of the semicolon.
    By Blogger Skaran, at August 5, 2008 12:48 AM   

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Trailer
The trailer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is out and it's really nice. This Dumbledore is finally beginning to grow on me even though his tone of voice is almost always off from what I feel the real Dumbledore should be (I feel that Jim Dale captures it brilliantly in the audiobooks). I will reserve judgment on "young Dumbledore" and "young Voldemort" because, honestly, they're only there for one scene and it doesn't matter much to me. I really do look forward to the lake scene though and all their trips through the Pensieve. In other words, I can't wait to see the movie - the crowds are going to be unbelievable, but it'll all be worth it.



Also, a couple of days ago, trusting that future versions of iPhone software will continue to improve (or at least support) Hindi font rendering, I converted all my five hundred something Hindi songs to हिन्दी songs, meaning that my library now looks like this:



This result is achieved by painstakingly filling in "Sorting" information which was introduced as part of one of the iTunes 7.x releases. (Well, technically, you don't need the sorting information per se, but all your Hindi songs will find themselves at the end of the list in a randomly sorted manner if you don't have it.) Unfortunately, not all parts of iTunes have evolved to support all these new features and one of the glaring omissions is the lack of a way to set the Sort fields on multiple tracks at the same time. This is in some part relieved by this iTunes AppleScript, which, although not perfect, gets the job done.

This music library conversion, besides being immensely satisfying in a very OCD way, also revealed lots of errors to me both in the Latin transliteration as well as the Devnagari transliteration. For example, Ishq needs to be spelt इश्क़ but was इश्क in many places, द्र was दर, कुछ was कुच्छ (a rather overindulgent use of the क्ख/च्छ/द्ध kind of consonant cluster) and the odd ि was an ी (an easy mistake) as well as the other way around.



In continuing happiness, I will soon have another great load off my head as I will soon be finally finishing this project for my part-time job (during the school year) that I was supposed to finish in... March. It has bothered me almost every day since then but I simply did not have the time while the school year was going on, and now I'll have finally finished it! What a relief. Also, I think I seem to have done a rather better job of it than most people (who, although they submitted the thing on time, mostly did a shoddy job of it).



Finally, I've been trying out last.fm for the past few days. What it does is that it tracks the songs you listen to and then can play (in a Pandora-like fashion) songs it thinks you'll like. You can also make friends on last.fm and see how "compatible" you are with them. Since I use CoverSutra, which has a builtin last.fm mechanism to send song updates to their server, it's zero disruption to my existing workflow. So, although I doubt it has many uses for me, it does seem like an interesting little thing to play around with.

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2 comments
  • Why don't you give me credit for making you use last.fm?
    By Blogger Alan You, at August 3, 2008 11:23 AM   
  • Why bother, you've claimed it yourself.
    By Blogger Skaran, at August 3, 2008 11:25 AM   

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The Five-Day Picnic
Wow it's been quite a weekend this one. I've been away from work for so long (five days) that it feels a bit odd. So, let's see how I spent this massive weekend of fun and frolic. On Friday morning, five of us interns from the Silicon Valley Microsoft office left for a leisurely 11 o'clock flight to Seattle where a car was convenietly waiting to pick us up. Once at our hotel, we waited for a little bit and went to lunch at the Cheesecake Factory in Bellevue Square (because, of course, all our meals were being paid for by the Company - otherwise it'd have been a taqueria).

Having satisfactorily gorged ourselves on burgers, chocolate mousse and the like, we went to the main campus in Redmond where tens of buses had lined up to take the nearly 1400 interns to Woodland Park Zoo. Now, the bus ride that followed was probably the most entertaining event that evening. When the bus was just about to start, our driver - a sweet old lady in her forties - told us that we had a police escort going with us. And sure enough, when we looked out of the window on our left, we saw about ten or twelve policemen on those gigantic police bikes gearing up to leave. Of course the real entertainment started when we got on the highway. You see, the trip from Redmond to the zoo is about sixteen and a half miles and goes over two major highways - the 520 and the I-5. So, we were quite amazed when we got on to the highway and saw that just in order to let us pass, the entire freaking highway had been corked like a bottle by the policemen who were blocking all vehicles from entering the highway and blocking all cars already on the highway, except the Microsoft buses, which were carrying interns... to a zoo... for a concert. I still can't get over the sheer ludicrousness of the fact that about sixteen miles of highway - interstate highway - was blocked (at a peak hour no less!) simply to allow for the merrymaking of a thousand something interns... at a zoo... for a concert. Hell, I don't even know if it was necessary. Talk about corporate clout! Pretty amazing though. And here's a picture of the blockade:


At the end of the zoo event, in which we were provided with food, drink and music (though ironically not a single glimpse at any kind of animal), we received a free Zune 2.0 each and were ferried back home. I honestly don't know with all these Zunes I keep getting (okay, my second free Zune); they don't work with Macs and are thus practically worthless to me.

On the second day, we went to the Company Picnic which took places at Mountain Meadows Park, which is about 25 miles from the Redmond office. We drove there instead of riding on the armada of Microsoft buses because we wanted to be able to leave at any time we wanted. The field was huge and the weather was really nice. The food was terrible (although all free). The activities weren't as bad. It's organized for Microsoft employees and their families, so there were loads of kiddie events and some daredevil performances by motorcyclists as well. I didn't take part in much except for mountain bike riding for 10-15 minutes which was fun, then went home after meeting a few friends and spending a few hours there eating and drinking. In the evening, we went and drove to Seattle hoping to get IMAX tickets for The Dark Knight but they were all sold out. So, we instead went to a Japanese bookstore in the downtown area, I bought a couple of books, and then we went back to our hotel and had dinner at this really posh Italian restaurant called Palomino. The Chocolate Tiramisu deserves a special mention in the "beyond delicious" category.

On the third day, we woke up egregiously early and drove to Mt. Rainier National Park (about 85 miles from our hotel), which took about three hours with some wrong turns and all, and hiked up the mountain which was completely covered with snow. I have to concede that this was probably my oddest snow experience. The sun was blazing and it was maybe between 15ºC and 18ºC outside. The snow somehow persevered. Our hike was about 5-6 miles all over and throughout the entire thing, our feet were in snow and our foreheads were covered with sweat from the hot sun, appreciative of the intermittent cool breeze. It took us two or three hours to climb 2000 something feet after which we took a break, made a snowman and came back down. This was also possibly the most comfortable climb down from a hike that I've ever had. Usually your legs and feet start killing you pretty quickly because climbing down has a tendency to do that (the faster the worse). However, since we were climbing down in snow, any impact from the ground was completely buffered by the snow and it was the best time during the entire hike. We also weren't afraid of slipping and falling down, because if we did, the hardest thing we were likely to hit was snow. July is definitely a great time to hike on Mt. Rainier. By the time we came back though, I was dreadfully tired, went to eat a great dinner at IHOP consisting of pancakes and omelets and then fell asleep almost as soon as I could.

The fourth day (Monday) was the only relatively free day because we decided not to go to one boring ol' event and instead decided to sleep in. In the afternoon, we went to visit some of our intern counterparts up in the Redmond offices, chatted with them for a while and then went and shopped at the company store. The evening was me meeting up with a couple of Stanford friends, eating burritos and watching the third Pirates movie again, which was entertaining.

The last and final day consisted of getting up lazy-ishly at around 10 o' clock, getting lunch at a Japanese restaurant in Seattle (Todai), which turned out to be horrible for me (because I'm a vegetarian), then taking the ferry to Bainbridge, taking the ferry back and heading to the airport to come back here. And now that I've finished writing this story out, it's time for shower and bed.

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1 comments
  • Those nice n cheesy lines u write between the lines ;-) smart move aye.. i hope u understood which lines am talking abt. !!
    By Blogger Arjun Goel, at July 28, 2008 1:00 PM   

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NSAssert(work == fun, @"WTF?");
It's such a weird feeling. I'm actually enjoying my job? Like, the thing I get paid for? It's true, and sometimes it makes me feel embarrassed when my fellow office mates don't share the same enthusiasm. Today, overestimating how sluggishly I would do the whole waking up ritual, I got to work 45 minutes earlier than expected, at around 9.15am. Now, I'm really not hardworking in the normal sense, but man, I just couldn't leave without implementing that one feature I'd planned for today and crushing that nasty bug in which the windows forgot their positions! So, I ended up staying until 8.15pm... yeah. 吾嫌蟲也。

Also... especially useful for those who aren't super-thrilled about what they're doing (an added bonus for me), there are loads of intern events at Microsoft to keep them busy and excited. For example, just last Thursday, we went on a sailboat to tour the San Francisco Bay and it was amazing! I'd never been on a sailboat before and really loved it. Also, on Friday morning, all of us interns are flying up to Redmond and won't be at work again until Wednesday the next. So, a five-day long weekend, which, as far as I know, includes a trip to a zoo, a hiking trip to Mt. Rainier, and a company picnic. Plus, I really like all the interns who are in my building and it looks like it's going to be really fun hanging out with them for one mega-weekend... in, by the way, a Hilton. Did I mention that this is not only free but that we're also getting paid for the days we're off from work? Wow. They definitely do not treat full-time employees this nicely.

Other stuff that's been keeping me excited is the release of Apple's iPhone 2.0 software which has all but breathed (I don't like the past tense form of breathe, I would like it to sound more like "breatht" perhaps...) new life into my one year old iPhone. I absolutely love the new Maps with its continuous location tracking feature, I am a huge fan of my iPhone's newfound ability to display song information in Hindi, I am pleasantly surprised by the fact that playlists containing videos now behave as I expect them to, I am constantly amazed by the new Chinese handwriting recognition system and am a huge fan of the App Store and many of the apps that have come out of it such as the Remote app.

Also, I've begun re-listening to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for the nth time (summertime always rekindles old interests). So, it's time now to go listen to another chapter.

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3 comments
  • You've achieved Nirvana my friend! :P

    I was under the impression that you were interning at Apple this summer, but clearly that's not the case. Oh and I just finished a Deathly Hallows re-read myself, just to celebrate the book's one year anniversary. :)
    By Blogger Prateek, at July 15, 2008 5:43 AM   
  • Well, since I'm doing Cocoa programming either way, it doesn't make much difference to me where I happen to be. (And I get the feeling that MS probably pays better.)
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 15, 2008 8:44 AM   
  • oh I want an iPhone too. Hindi, or not.
    And glad to see you still read Potter books. Heh. Harry rocks.
    By Blogger The Keeper of the Keys, at July 17, 2008 4:40 AM   

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Eight Hours
It's the summer and I can finally get eight hours of sleep if I want to by going to bed before midnight. So, I can either do that and get a comfortable amount of sleep every night or work on personal projects that I've been dreaming of doing over the summer since forever. I can't decide on which. For tonight though, it's eight hours. So, I'm off.

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WWDC08
WWDC08 ended a good week and something ago, but I finally have some motivation to write about it, since I was busy with moving out of my dorm and moving in to my summer apartment as well as starting my summer internship for the past few days. So, first of all, I know that it's in Apple's interest to provide the WWDC Scholarship and attract student developers because they are younger, more impressionable and more likely to adapt their programming lifestyle to the Mac kind, as well as suitable candidates for employment once they're done with college. That said, it's still more awesome from the student's point of view because the thing I am really glad about (emoticon with tongue sticking out goes here) is that I didn't have to pay a dime for it except for the Caltrain tickets.

Unfortunately, there was the slight snag that WWDC happened to fall right in the middle of the week when I was having final exams, had to move out of my dormitory and my entire family was arriving that same Wednesday. So, even though I had preponed all my exams such that they didn't interfere with anything, it still ended up being one hectic week. And because of that, I did end up missing a lot of really cool sessions, which I hope I will be able to catch up on when Apple uploads the videos for the WWDC sessions, which will hopefully be free for attendees.

Keynote
As for the event itself, it took place in the extremely large Moscone Center in San Francisco. On Monday, the day of The Keynote, to get there by public transportation (i.e., Caltrain), I had to wake up at 6am and make my way to the station. Then, finally, at around 8 o' clock, I reached the convention center. The registration process was pretty much nonexistent in that I just went and showed them my ID and they gave me a badge and that was it. Then, I got in line for the keynote. The line was long. It was a 30-foot wide throng of people crawling up through to the top floor of the convention center. It was so long that they had to lead this throng of people through some extremely lengthy corridors to make sure that the "line" remained within the convention center, such that when I actually entered the hall in which the keynote was taking place, I wound up, after having waited in line for more than an hour and a half and having been around what seemed like the whole convention center, at the same point at which I'd joined the line. Since I joined the line at a bit past 8 o' clock, I was able to easily get a decent seat and could see the stage from where I was sitting. However, to ease viewing for people sitting in the back rows, the hall had giant (approximately 40' by 30') screens mounted at strategic locations which meant that you never got to miss out on the action. Finally, at a few minutes past ten, the action began. Of course, everyone's seen the keynote on QuickTime by now, but it was very exciting to be there, in that room, hearing the details live and first hand, and hastily text messaging details to anxiously waiting friends. A long time ago (2002 to be sure), Apple used to telecast these events live all over the world using QuickTime but has stopped doing that for quite a while now – I suppose the costs must be a bit much. For a while now, I've been harboring negative sentiments towards rumor sites (which now basically means the mainstream press because even the New York Times doesn't want to miss out on a juicy tidbit about the next iPhone), so I just wanted the rumor sites to be wrong about MobileMe, the 3G iPhone and Snow Leopard just to prove my point. So, the only disappointment I felt in the keynote was that all the announcements were precisely as the rumor sites said they would be. Also, the only point where it got a bit boring was the seemingly unceasing demos of iPhone apps, which I feel could have been fewer and more select.

Food
Sucked. I heard there was pizza last year. I would have been more than happy with pizza, but there was the shittiest food imaginable there. It was all cold food. Sandwiches and the like. And forget about any good choices for vegetarians. Pathetic. I don't want to complain much because I didn't actually pay for the thing, but I would have been really pissed if I'd paid $1600 and then had been asked to eat that for lunch. I feel that, as a general human being, food is very important to me and having good food really livens up the atmosphere. Sucky food, of course, does the opposite.

Sessions
I was mostly constrained by time, otherwise I'd have gone to more, but I was able to go to a fair number of them, including "What's new in Objective-C?", "Font Management and Core Text", "Using Leopard Features Effectively", "Leveraging Cocoa's Layer-Backed Views", "Using Garbage Collection" and "Mastering Advanced Objective-C Features". Most of them were really interesting and those that weren't were only because most of the stuff required more background knowledge than I have about Mac programming and so a lot of the stuff went straight over my head. There were seemingly people attending from everywhere at WWDC and I heard a lot of Chinese and, for some reason, a lot of French. I was also really amused when this Chinese man, just before he was about to ask a question at the end of the session, started with a very audible "nèige" (那个), which, if you've seen a certain Russell Peters video, you'll know is the standard filler word in Mandarin, and which, for better or worse, bears a very strong resemblance to a word in English.

Labs
I didn't... really... have anything to do in the labs because I really wasn't having any problems in my Mac application that I needed an expert to take a look at but I went to one of the labs - the Core Data lab - to check it out anyway. I feel like I ended up just wasting my time (and the time of the person who was helping me) because I didn't have anything very worthwhile to ask him. But meanwhile I saw some other people being helped and I realized that this was basically what many developers came to WWDC for and was, in effect, upwards of a $1000 to attend a very grandiose "TA help session" for a week. I felt like the guy who hadn't started the homework yet and had come to pick up feelers to see how difficult it was going to be.

And that, I think, was WWDC08 – my very first – in a nutshell.

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4 comments
  • "preponed." wow, that's the first time i've heard that word.
    By Blogger James, at June 22, 2008 1:41 AM   
  • Are you making your app public anytime soon?
    @james: I think it's become part of South-Asian English.
    By Blogger Abhishek Nandakumar, at June 22, 2008 10:59 AM   
  • @James: As Abhishek said, it's been part of the Indian English vocabulary for a while, but another of my friends challenged me on it, so we checked and it did exist on dictionary.com at least. :-)

    @Abhishek: It's still very immature. It doesn't crash or anything, it's stable, but it has very few features. You can find it at http://tinyurl.com/6lazsp.
    By Blogger Skaran, at June 22, 2008 12:45 PM   
  • I feel this one was one of the worst apple keynotes. it was boring for most of the duration because of the app demos. A little less on that and a little more on snow leopard would have been better.

    And i agree... bad food is a real "turn-off".
    By Blogger Souvik, at June 25, 2008 1:30 PM   

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地獄
It's 8.30am and I'm about to take a "nap" after having worked all night on a programming project and then having quickly skimmed through the handouts and the textbook for this exam which is at 12.15pm, in less than 4 hours. Then an exam tomorrow and another on Sunday. Then a paper to write, and if I am alive on Monday morning, WWDC. I also have a spare $200 to spend thanks to the Kung-Yi Kao Prize.

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1 comments
  • Congrats on the Kung-Yi Kao Prize, Karan! Cuppa noodles beckons. And thanks to impulsive highlighting, i can see things :)
    By Blogger Manas, at June 9, 2008 8:48 AM   

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#define DEBUG
I am doing a lot of low level programming this quarter... a lot. Firstly, for a networking class in which the coding component is completely in C and although it's a complete pain to be coding in C and constantly trying to do things that C doesn't permit, it gives me a very wonderful feeling of savage success when I get something cool working in C. C code is the lonely-hiker-in-the-mountains equivalent of the computer world – lacking all the "bare" necessities (like, classes or a sense of responsibility) and extremely unclean. Pretty much everything in C is like using twigs together to make fire. Possibly one of the better examples of this is the standard C library that ships with some BSD systems such as Mac OS X. Do a man queue in the Terminal on Mac OS X to get exactly what I mean. The freaking thing is simply a shitload of #defines 而已.

Also, if I haven't mentioned at some point before, I am the biggest fan of my computer security class and its professors. "Computer Security" basically involves finding out how systems are broken and how to fix them, so it involves learning both aspects (just like the dark side of the force, or alchemy). Our first assignment basically involved seven programs that had vulnerabilities in them due to stupid or careless programming and we had to identify said vulnerabilities and exploit them so as to gain root access on the machine. It was extremely painful work but I came out of it having achieved: (a) extreme at-home-ness with using gdb in the command line, (b) the ability to work with hex numbers directly (and a great deal of respect for the Programmer mode in the Mac OS X Calculator) and (c) more actual experience in writing and exploiting assembly code than I actually got in my compilers class. This class is basically the equivalent of getting mentally laid – I feel that this class elevates me from being a CS major on paper to a person who actually feels that he is a real CS major.

Also, in more developer-related news, I found out yesterday that I've been awarded the WWDC student scholarship that I applied for a few week ago for. Excitement more profound than I can express using my limited vocabulary. I've always wanted to go to WWDC because it's the more serious of the two Apple conferences and being so freaking technical in nature, it weeds out all the Apple fanboys and leaves only those people who either have a lot of money (because it takes upwards of $1300 to attend the event), or those who are responsible for the existence of the Mac universe in the first place, i.e., the hardcore developers. I don't know how many or how few people Apple grants the student scholarship to or whether my hoping for a seat in the keynote presentation is just wishful thinking, but I can't wait for June! Unfortunately, June also brings final exams, and WWDC is incidentally smack in the middle of them. I don't have a plan at this point as to what I will do if there is an exam scheduled during the keynote speech (beg the professor?), but something will get figured out I'm sure.

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3 comments
  • Congrats on the WWDC scholarship! I'm both jealous and happy for you :P

    Computer Security sounds extremely painful yet fun.
    By Blogger Prateek, at May 1, 2008 11:42 AM   
  • the equivalent of getting mentally laid, huh? wow, looks like i'm going to have to take that class...
    By Blogger James, at May 1, 2008 10:30 PM   
  • Heh, at least you see why I wanted that concentration in systems ...
    By Blogger Nisheeth, at July 14, 2008 10:47 PM   

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Pac Man at the Library
The funniest YouTube video I've seen in quite a while.

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1 comments
  • Huray! for the UofM Patriots. I go to a wonderful school!
    By Blogger asdfghjkl;, at July 30, 2008 6:29 PM   

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Apple Demo Day
Last quarter I wrote a character-learning software for my Mac programming class and since it was a project that I really wanted to work on – in fact, probably the first project I've done for a class that I actually wanted to work on as opposed to being forced to work on it for a grade – I continued working on it all throughout the one week spring break and up until now. Our professors for that class had told us that they would organize a Demo Day at Apple Campus where we could show our projects to Apple engineers and get feedback from them, and that Day happened to be today. Basically, we went to Apple, hooked up our computers and loads, loads and loads of Apple engineers came by and asked for a demonstration. I have to say that it was really fun and encouraging. First of all, I had this bug in a class called NSLayoutManager and what ho, here's the guy who works on it who wants to see my project; after I demo it to him, I tell him about the bug and it's solved within seconds. Awesome! Secondly, hey, it feels good to be appreciated and I liked how people were impressed by (a) the software itself, and (b) how short a while it took to take the thing from scratch to where it is now. There was an engineer who asked me, "How many months did it take you to make it?" "Two and a half weeks," I said.

Here are some screenshots of the software itself, which is called Liànxí (means "practice" in Chinese):








Also, it's finally been decided that I'm taking three Computer Science courses towards my CS major this quarter – networking, introduction to artificial intelligence and computer security. I'm also continuing my Chinese, although I've shifted to the bilingual class which meets only thrice a week instead of all five days and, as the name implies, mostly consists of native speakers of the language. Finally, I have to make a decision about a class to take towards my Chinese major – there's the History class about the Qín dynasty, towards which my interest is very questionable because I really, really don't care about Chinese history and their twenty gazillion empires; anyway, the more interesting class that I'm possibly taking is a Chinese Literature class which as I found out today is taught completely in Chinese! It was a fun experiment – I discovered that, at least at this level, I was able to understand most of what the professor was saying (as long as I'm paying attention), but there were a lot of characters in the reading exercise I didn't know. So, I have to decide in the coming few days whether taking this class would be an act of boldness or foolishness, and whether I should stick to classes taught in English for now instead of reading novellas written by twentieth century Chinese authors.

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2 comments
  • Happy Birthday!
    By Blogger Maanick, at April 7, 2008 9:25 AM   
  • hey...belated Happy Birthday!
    and by the way, that software looks really neat :)
    By Blogger » sahil, at April 16, 2008 8:02 AM   

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Winter Break
You know what I always think? People try to do too much on breaks. And, I've got no qualms with it if they do it, it's just that I hate being dragged along with them on these unfortunate excursions. What do I want to do when I'm on a two-and-a-half week break from the murderous college lifestyle? Sleep, eat and futz around on the Internet. Perhaps meet up with some old friends, visit the good ol' school, read a book or two, learn some new characters; you know, fun stuff.

Still, there's always the minimum number of window shopping I must go do and get dreadfully bored doing it, attend a certain number of parties and marriages and get dreadfully bored doing it, listen to a lot of people who meet me every time I come back home after a stretch and who always ask the same old questions and repeat the same old things and, without question, get dreadfully bored doing it.

Still, somewhere between dreadful boredom and the intense bliss of sleep, there are some rather good "things" I've come across recently. One of them is PotterCast, which is this podcast about, as can be easily guessed, Harry Potter and they recently had J.K. Rowling on the show for two entire episodes of considerable length. Now, normally, I tend to stay away from Potter-ness on the Internet in general. It's not that I don't like the topic - I love it immensely - but that, just like being able to speak, say English, fluently doesn't get you much in terms of credit in this world anymore, being a person who knows about Harry Potter wouldn't give me the same pleasure as knowing about something rarer would, something about which I would be one of the few people to know about. And, as much as I love Harry Potter, I know that thousands others love it and know it with the same intensity as I do, and so, the market is, as the economists say, saturated. Still, if you like to talk about Harry Potter with friends of yours for hours on end, this PotterCast thing is indeed for you.

As far as entertainment material goes, I have also recently been able to watch some episodes of "Jeeves and Wooster", a TV series of whose existence, I was hitherto unaware. Adaption of some of the stories written by P.G. Wodehouse, quite amusing and everything. Jeeves is played by Stephen Fry and Bertie Wooster by Hugh Laurie (who is now most popular for his role as Dr. House in the TV show "House"). Worth a look into if you're a Wodehouse fan.

And lastly, another neat thing I've recently stumbled upon is this website with Sino-Platonic papers on it, a bunch of which are available for download for free and some of them are a delightful read, although I would be remiss if I did not mention that it is only interesting if you are at least a little interested in Sinology in the first place, as the writers generally tend to assume that you are, er, in their fold. If you have tried to learn Chinese in the past and have banged your head against it, I highly recommend "Why Chinese is so damn hard"; the cathartic effects are unmistakably remarkable.

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  • Aah. Well. The weddings and parties. And all those mouldy aunts and uncles who are always pretty shocked to see that you've grown .

    And with Harry Potter, well, ever since JKR shut down the series, it's been, shall we say, a little bit old? I mean, every conspiracy and every plot has been laid bare so there's hardly much to discuss. Except, maybe what Harry and Ginny do as married couples.

    Which, shall we say, is not worth lengthy debates.
    By Blogger Espèra, at December 30, 2007 7:31 AM   

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Home...
Food. Finally, something I can call proper food has reached my craving mouth after an entire year. My craving for proper home-cooked food pretty much describes all of last week which I spent wishing for some awesomely cooked Arhar ki Daal, Bhindi ki Sabzi, Dahi and Karari Roti. Oh man, this place is brilliant.

On the other hand though, the air pollution situation in Delhi is getting seriously out of hand. If you step out of the house and breathe in the air, in pretty much any place with half-decent air, you'd begin to wonder if your house was on fire. I am not kidding. Delhi pollution is bad year-round but it's worst of all in the winter when the dust and smoke settles down and causes devastating smog and constant smell of burning substances. I suppose if you live in Delhi long enough, don't leave for a year and come back, this might feel normal. But, it totally is not.

On the bright side though, more food tomorrow, meeting up with some old folk and going to school!

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  • you came to school today?
    By Blogger » sahil, at December 17, 2007 6:37 AM   
  • I just landed in Kolkata today and now I know exactly what you were talking about. Air pollution levels are way out of normal.
    By Blogger Prateek, at December 24, 2007 10:35 AM   
  • Yay air pollution!! Maybe I'll work in India one day
    By Blogger Secret Embrace, at January 19, 2008 9:30 PM   

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Earthquake
We just had one. The first one I've really felt in all my life.

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5 comments
  • Why, where were you on Jan 26, 2001? I was in Delhi, and I felt the Bhuj effect.
    By Blogger Geetali, at November 1, 2007 5:41 AM   
  • I was there, my father felt it and pointed it out to me. Then I saw the fan shaking. But I didn't really feel it myself.
    By Blogger Skaran, at November 1, 2007 6:04 AM   
  • Ohh, I have actually exp. quite a few. :-) Worst one was when I was in Toilet.. Felt so helpless :( lolz..
    By Blogger Arjun, at November 5, 2007 5:35 AM   
  • Fascinating, Arjun. How's it going Karan? Long time no see.
    By Blogger Manas, at November 8, 2007 11:06 PM   
  • Wow. Man.
    We just had a major one right now. Like, half an hour ago.
    By Blogger Espèra, at November 25, 2007 3:47 PM   

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Indians speaking Cantonese
This blows my mind.

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Training
Surprisingly, I've really enjoyed all our RCC (Residential Computer Consultant) training and the sessions have mostly been very informative – many of them surprisingly so. A bunch of them have also been really funny. I liked those. They also have this policy of passing around sticks of gum to everyone in the room to keep them from falling asleep and I think that's the most brilliant idea. So, we learnt all kinds of stuff about networking, how to allow and disallow people from accessing the network (and thus the Interwebs), how the computer clusters work, why sexual harassment is not as cool as it initially seems, how we should all come to terms with Windows Vista's general shittiness, etc. There were also some rather memorable quotes from today's session such as one from our Residence Dean - "She calls him a bitch, he calls her a ho" – and one from our Senior Network Administrator – "The University shouldn't care if I'm freaking watching monkey porn on my computer." And such. Tomorrow is the last day of training and there is only one session of one hour, where we get to hear stories from past years' RCCs. Oh yes, and here's another memorable quote from our Senior Network Administrator – "Anyone got any good sexual harassment stories to share?"

Apart from that, my room is finally well organized, and if I may, shiny. There are loads of errands that I'd been wanting to run for a few months now and they're finally getting done. One of them was getting my blankets (which were used on the futon in our triple all last year) dry cleaned. Now I know how expensive that is – namely, enough to buy a new blanket. Another errand was getting framed the pieces of calligraphy that my calligraphy professor had written for me. Getting them properly framed would have cost about $60 and I wouldn't have wanted that anyway because it would have made them a pain to store. Instead, for $15, I bought some supplies (thick piece of cardboard and some 0.005mm thick transparent sheets) and framed them myself. I'm really pleased with how it's worked out. Perhaps I'll post a picture when the room is completed. Also, today I finally got my Microsoft bike after it'd been assembled by the bike shop and man, it is so superb. I went into Palo Alto for the first time on bike this (academic) year and I was simply stunned by how quickly I got there. I'm looking forward to some serious biking this year.

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2 comments
  • This post has been removed by the author.
    By Blogger Michelle, at September 15, 2007 1:50 PM   
  • no anonymous comments? I'm confused.
    also, sometimes michelle logs into blogger and doesn't tell me.
    this is kimberly.
    and I really want to see your room! (I mean. and you.)
    and I have your chinese name for you.
    sooo wednesday? thursday?
    By Blogger Kimberly, at September 15, 2007 1:53 PM   

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Toyon
Campus just has this property of being busy and involves having to look a lot more at the clock than should be legally permissible. Which is why, although I have been back since last Wednesday and have had tons to talk about, I've never had more than fifteen minutes to spare which greatly inhibits journal-writing and sleep usually takes precedence. In fact, come to think of it, almost anything takes precedence over journal-writing. Food, for one.

Anyway, amongst the bigger things, I have made some recent technological acquires. One of those is a brand new MacBook in the colour black, which I picked finally after realizing that buying the white one would be the equivalent of ensuring lasting brain damage which would occur once I saw how easy it was to stain the laptop. It, of course, has a couple of gigabytes of memory while the rest of the specifications are standard. Incidentally, the memory was purchased two weeks before the notebook itself. In a more, erm, unexpected and exciting turn of events, I bought an iPhone last Thursday after they announced the price cuts on Wednesday. It's an extremely sweet device and I love it.

I spent the entire weekend with my dorm staff for this year (the Toyon staff) at beautiful Half Moon Bay. There was a lot of discussion which almost invariably tended to put me to sleep because a lot of the discussion about "dorm issues" like alcohol, etc. was very circular. Still, the beach house we had for the weekend was this fabulous place with really beautiful architecture and a living room with a fantastic dome-shaped ceiling with a mural on it. A mural that involved Sponge Bob. There was also a fair bit of beach and frisbee, some sun and something that looked like an Orc-house. Fun times.

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  • A review of the Macbook and iPhone on ImHi?
    By Blogger Abhishek Nandakumar, at September 11, 2007 2:39 AM   

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Three - Two - One
Right, day one of four is over. Gosh, I am so stricken1 with being in between looking forward to finishing this internship, but also with worrying about what little time I have to accomplish all my goals. I want to do well. I want to write good, clean, lean, mean code that works fabulously and gains me the respect of my colleagues, but I also hate the programming environment I'm working in. I love the place, the people, the work environment, the food, everything. I just don't like the work I'm doing. Just plain don't. So, I'm looking forward to being rid of that computer that I'm using, that build system, that desk and that keyboard but I'm sad about leaving all the interesting friends I've made and all the delightful conversations we've had. Sigh. I like the wireless mouse though.

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Hālì Bōtè
I mentioned this in my last entry, but, since hardly anyone who reads this Journal reads Chinese (Chinese is one of the languages in which speakers cannot be necessarily expected to be able to read and write, unless they were raised in China, Hong Kong or Taiwan), I'll reiterate some of the facts. One thing I mentioned was that, yesterday, I visited Seattle's China Town and found it to be really beautiful. There was Chinese everywhere - characters I could actually read and understand – and I was biking slowly down the streets staring up and pronouncing the characters under my breath, probably looking like an ass. My main aim in going there was to visit this bookshop called Kinokuniya, which, internationalists would realize, is a Japanese name. I had feared that it would be a rundown little Asian store with mostly Japanese books and a tiny Chinese section, in which I would find nothing useful. But I was very pleasantly surprised and happy, for once, to have been mistaken. Kinokuniya is a huge bookshop with loads and loads of both Chinese and Japanese books. On their second floor, I found the entire collection of Harry Potter books in Traditional Chinese script. Really amazing stuff.

When I came home, I found a note in my mailbox telling me that there was a package waiting for me. When I went to pick up said package and inquire what it actually was, I was, for the second time in one day, pleasantly surprised. So, in a move to combine two of my favourite interests, Harry Potter and Chinese, I have started reading Harry Potter in Chinese. Yes, very clever indeed. These books (I ordered Book One, because it's the simplest, and Book Six, because it's my favourite) are in Simplified script, and are thus easier for me to read. I have great reverence for the Traditional script but I have reasons to think it is occasionally less practical, and even, gasp, occasionally less beautiful (I could get stoned for saying this in certain parts). That is what deterred me in buying any of the HP books at that bookstore for myself - reading in Chinese in any case is very demanding for me, and doing it in Traditional would be even more so.

Reading Book One has been slow work. I decided to read what the inside cover said before I moved onto the actual content, and that proved to be a wise move because it foreshadowed clearly what an uphill task reading the book was going to be. This book, whose English version I can read in the time between a fairly late breakfast and a fairly early lunch, is one whose inside front cover took me one hour and a half to fully decipher. Of course, I could have read the thing in five minutes and gotten the gist of it, but my aim in reading this book is to document all the words I don't know. So, for every character and every word I don't know, I stop and look up in my dictionary, and looking up characters, you ought to know, is an absolute pain. I wish, I really wish they would switch to a phonetic script for Chinese! Today, I spent about two and a half hours in reading approximately one and a half pages of text, and most of the time was spent in looking up characters in the dictionary. By the middle of page 2, and including the inside front cover, I have learned 180 new words already.

Of course, as far as using a phonetic script goes, this is viewing the situation from my point-of-view, being a foreigner learning Chinese and one who is simply daunted by the thousands of characters I would need to learn in order to be able to read anything interesting, and I acknowledge that, in essence, I am putting forward the view that the language be simplified to make it easier for the learner to learn. I do know it is very much arguable whether this is a practice that should be encouraged at all. After all, the government of mainland China did try to do exactly this (in principle, not in practice) in the 1950s. Although Máo Zédōng's original intention was to abolish characters altogether and just used a romanized script like the Vietnamese do, in the end, what they actually ended up doing was just simplifying the most common characters such that they needed fewer strokes to write. For example, 歡 is written 欢 amongst Simplified characters and 儀 as 仪. Most of the Simplified characters are easier to read than the Traditional ones, especially at small font sizes, but the debate lies not in that but in their beauty as characters. In their proportion and balance. For example, 氣 looks like 气 in Simplified and you can see that it looks like something is missing in the latter. In fact, that's what I thought when I first saw it, and went and asked my Chinese teacher about its weirdness. She wrote the Traditional character for me and I saw, and understood. The Japanese have gone a third route in simplification by turning the same character into this 気. In this way, they've maintained the proportion and balance that Chinese calligraphers cherish, while still making the character easier to write. However, the Simplified script, in favour of making itself easier to learn, has forgone aesthetic principles in many cases and has given us ridiculous characters like 广, 产, 气, 国 and 飞. This is why, in my previous entry, I have chosen to use the Simplified or Traditional form for each character depending on which one I prefer and have not stuck to any standard.

And this is why I feel that the simplification of Chinese characters was a huge disaster. Not in that it wasn't a good idea, but in how the idea was implemented. It would have been terrible (aesthetically and practically) if the Chinese had abandoned characters for a Pinyin-based system, but I think it was worse that they chose to artificially concoct a new script. If nothing else, it created two competing standards of Chinese, and now there are even more characters for anyone to learn if he wishes to become accomplished at Chinese, because, in the end, you simply have to learn both Simplified and Traditional.

The Japanese, I feel, have struck a decent balance between giving up characters entirely (which the Koreans and others have boldly done) and between using characters for everything. What the Japanese do is that they take the key meaning-giving words in the sentence and write them out as characters, while writing out all the grammatical particles (prepositions, tenses, etc.) in their phonetic script (Hiragana). This greatly reduces the number of characters you need to know to be literate in Japanese (around 1200) as compared to Chinese (2000). This kind of a hybrid system would greatly benefit Chinese because a lot of the words are disyllabic and thus use two characters to write, such as 美丽 (měilì; beautiful) and 事情 (shìqing; affair, matter, thing), but their meaning can be deciphered from just one character alone. So, 美 alone means beautiful and 事 alone means "thing (to do)". But, in order to use their disyllabic forms (which, I guess, are often used because they give a better rhythm to the sentence and are also used to disambiguate), I'd have to learn two more characters, which doesn't really give me any more meaningful information about the word but adds to the number of characters I have to learn. And having a phonetic script also means the language is a bit more forgiving. For example, you can write out words you don't know the characters for. In Chinese, unless you're on a computer, you're just stuck and have to resort to Pinyin which simply looks ugly when placed side-by-side with proper characters.

Anyway, it is unlikely that the Chinese are going to do this any time soon because they just love their characters too much.

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2 comments
  • Interesting analysis, but I think it would be really sad if Chinese became like Japanese. I prefer that the East Asian languages retain their diversity.

    Japanese can be more confusing though, considering that many more possible readings exist for each character than they do in Chinese. Especially when it comes to people's names.
    By Blogger Jean, at August 27, 2007 8:56 PM   
  • Well, I should just clarify that I don't want Chinese to become exactly like Japanese. If you want implementation detail, here's the way I think it should be implemented.

    First of all, I don't think a Korean-like system or, in fact, even a Japanese-like system would fit well with Chinese. Those characters would look too alien or too sparse to the Chinese eye. No, my suggestion would be to take popularly known phonetic characters such as 马 for 'ma' and and 青 for 'qing', choose radicals to represent each of the four tones (the neutral tone can just be represented by the plain character, without any additional radical), and then construct characters.

    So, měilì can become 美㔹, with 㔹 as lì (I randomly picked one out), and shìqing can become 事青. And similar words in which the meaning is already well-specified by the first character would use these 'designated phonetic' characters. Now, basically, people don't have to learn all the secondary characters which only go with certain words and only in certain combinations, but just the main ones. So, in 葡萄, the first character already means 'grape', so the second can be in 'designated phonetics'.

    This will also be a great boon for transliterating foreign names into Chinese because there would be standard characters for use for transliteration.

    And, in fact, it will even benefit reading in many cases such as words like 暖和 in which the reading of 和 is not 'hé' but 'huo'.

    And regarding the ambiguities in Japanese, they are of their own making and do not, in my opinion, come about because of Hiragana. In any case, ambiguities will be much fewer in Chinese because it has tones to distinguish between various words, and, phonetics will only be used when there is a single word that fits that combination. For example, if you type měilì or pútáo into an electronic Chinese dictionary 美丽 and 葡萄 are the only words with those sounds and tones. But, since there are at least five separate words with the sound chūshì, characters will be used in full for all those words. So, ambiguities are not a necessarily evil that comes with a hybrid system.
    By Blogger Skaran, at August 27, 2007 10:27 PM   

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