Feliz 2010!!!

Thanks to everyone who visited this old, unupdated for a while, site which has been giving u the most interesting stuff I have got from my personal life and the internet. May all your wishes come true in this new year!
The image above identifies one of the supercomputers, the HAL9000, whose bday is coming this year from the popular series “2001: an oddisey in space” and is related with the Apple world, because the company created an ad in which the supercomputer was jealous of the new Macintosh that Dave, the protagonist used.
Anyway, cheers and blessings!

Behind the Scenes:

The idea for Orbit comes from this Exposé concept for the iPhone, which what bascially does is making multitasking on iPhone easier by not draging as we usually do to navigate between screens, but tapping on the one you desire.

This is one of the few ideas I say, why, but why does Apple doesn’t include this needed UI changes between big releases (e.g. 3.0) and why the heck does any “great” developer puts their hands on the concept. Just imagine Mac OS X without Expose! Boring isn’t it? I use it every minute since it was introduced in the OS X family. Well, there is people who is different in making stuff happen and thank God, Steven makes part of this group.

Let’s go on with the review…

So, as you can see, what you do is to press the Orbit icon and you see a quick view of your home screens, then you can select one and  it will take you to that screen with a nice animation. No need of scrolling or dragging of home screens.

Orbit support unlimited screens because, by itself, when the screen is full it makes an automatic black slider so you see your other screens. Of course, the iPhone DOES has a limited screen quantity of screens supported.

Orbit on my iPhone

This app in my experience is a dream come true. And yes, it sounds cliche, but what it does best is that it improves your iPhone workflow in an elegant way (thing that I expected from Spotlight Search, but writing the app name and the whole keyboard process is just not fast enough).

The app also offers caching of your home screens, so just the first time it launches it will take like 1 second per screen to load its preview, after that is automatic and fast.

The only inconvenience for me is the lack of this app in the use of multitasking. I just can’t multitask when the icon is sitted on my home screen only. Users need to take advantage of this app by, let’s say, been surfing the web or playing a game in the iPhone and call Orbit to take a note or play another game in another whole different screen.

Orbit sitted in the dock. Bored. ;)

There’s several solutions I tried, one was with SBSettings (on its dock) but it was too painfully slow. Custom HomeButton is another app for that, you can assign the double home pressing to any app. Problem is that it didn’t work at all with the app. Just showed the screen black and returned me to the home screen. UPDATE: Steven is working with the developer to ensure his app works with Custom HomeButton. He says is their fault.

So , in conclusion, with everything Orbit offers, I will suggest for those that haven’t jailbreak your iPhones, do it now and download it right now from Cydia, is $1.99 for future development and Steven dog’s food. There’s nothing bad this app can do for you. It’s more than worth the price for all the saved time you’ll get.

-FCA

UPDATE: Turn out there’s a new interesting way of approaching multitasking, via pinching, and it may or may not come in the next version of Orbit, here’s a demo:

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

Blog Review by Fernando Castro

Following my tradition of writing reviews and opinion about my favorite pieces of art, I recently joined the blog reviewers team from publisher Thomas Nelson, and to be honest, for a particular book (from which I’ve been hearing talks months ago in expectation from friends and twitter contacts) which is Donald Miller’s latest piece of inspiration, “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years”. Since last year I’ve been a fan of this author for some specific reason. The style of writing (which catches my attention, thing that is hard to do because I get distracted easily) use of some words, the clear honesty, and the weird and sarcastic humor are some of the elements that Miller provides, which I can’t get enough. When I finished my first Donald Miller book, “Blue Like Jazz” (a self-declared “memoir of Miller”, a New York best-seller) I was left with a little bit of hunger or thirst or whatever word of desire you want to add here, of reading more about this. In simple words, I can relate with people that say “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years” is part of this following-up about doing something useful with your life, and precisely the main theme is that, making your life story something meaningful, reinvent yourself in order to get the most of the beauty and opportunity of life.

When the book arrived at my door, I couldn’t read it right away because I was in exams, so the book had his own lateness, hence the fact I haven’t finish reading it and I’m about one-third of finishing it, but I will try to be clear and direct with what I’ve learned during this short period of time because of this book.

Since I open the book, I once again felt the Miller’s characteristics of writing, that intriguing -yet-funny appeal of the stories and principles he teaches in a very dynamic way, and for me that is really contagious and absorptive. So much that while I was reading the book in middle of classes and free time in school, I had a weird sense of a guy from your own class passing you post its, with interesting stories written in notes that surely, other people with like to read, even for the sake of the fun of it.

As an intro to his movie story, he speaks about how he has always liked movies because they’ll fresh him out, taking out some of the stress, making him go somewhere else in the world, in another’s life story. This is how I felt about this book, but in a bigger way, because it wasn’t only refreshing but teaching something meaningful about something we do every day. That is, to live. I like how Rob Bell (author of Velvet Elvis) puts it, “I felt like this book read me more than I read it.”

The first chapter of the book has the name “Exposition”, as it is called one of the elements of the plot, because the way he makes us understand the value and malleability of life is via the elaboration of a good story. This provided by his talk to two filmmakers who, ironically wanted to make of “Blue like Jazz” a movie.

In “Exposition”, we can relate some of the elements of life, how we write it everyday and how we have the power to make it meaningful, just by knowing which elements use, how make of ourselves a dynamic character (who has a deep characterization). First few pages is just the basic explanation of how he understood this, how all what philosophies did in his life was to mix up the clear focus, making it blur. But at the end, the final statement was simple. We all are stories, we need to edit them in some specific and special ways in order to be successful and in its basic form, a story is “A Character Who Wants Something and Overcomes a Conflict to Get It”.

An example and testimony of this is explained on the last part of chapter 1, “How Jason Save His Life”, in which he explains how a friend of his changed the story his daughter was living by making the family getting involved in creating an orphanage that costed a lot of money that they didn’t have (with two mortgages in their heads already), the daughter started living a hero life, instead of her past life as a drug addict with a jerk boyfriend. Her environment changed for good and his dad, Jason, made her live a better story.

Good read? I hope…because it’ll continue next week with my review of Chapter 2: “A Character.” Stay tuned because this can only get more interesting.

You can read more about the book’s info, tour and to purchase it here and read Donald Miller’s blog here.

Thanks for reading with me

-FCA

Yep, that flag behind Bono is Costa Rica’s flag at first I thought it’ll be Paris or something like that, but in the whole motion video, you can see with this screenshots that it was indeed Costa Rica’s. Really good to see U2 fans traveling around the world, including my own country.

-FCA

Via iLounge…anual family picture