The Web 2.0 invitation system has often made Web Apps famous overnight. That trend continues along with the trend of using the word “invite” as a noun.

Quoted from http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/invite.html:

“Invite” (accent on the second syllable) is perfectly standard as a verb: “Invite me to the birthday party and I’ll jump out of the cake.”

But “invite” (accent on the first syllable) as a noun meaning “invitation” is less acceptable: “I got an invite to my ex-wife”s wedding.” Though this form has become extremely popular, even in fairly formal contexts, it is safer to use the traditional “invitation.”

I have used this extremely popular form countless number of times. The usage of “invite” as a noun has become somewhat acceptable these days; purely a form of Colloquialism. The problem is that people(including me) start using such forms of English even in formal modes of communication.

I continue to hate occasions where I get to hear people saying “anyways” instead of “anyway”. What I don’t realize is that I may be making mistakes such as this because of the lack of awareness. Linked below is a list of common errors people make while speaking/writing that people need to be aware of.

LinkConnect - Common Errors in English

Microsoft has been making good operating systems. They have not stopped doing that. But just by continuing to do so will not help them sell Windows. The marketing techniques need to change with time and so do the product highlights. Clearly, getting help from Seinfeld or retaliating just because the Macintosh community keeps defining Windows is not the solution here.

To start, there are too many editions of Windows Vista: Home Basic to the Ultimate edition. The result, too difficult a choice to make. For most users, Windows Vista Home Basic would not look anything better than a modified version of Windows XP. And their Windows Vista Capable PCs have not managed to remain capable of running a copy of Windows Vista smoothly. Microsoft made a big mistake printing Vista Capable stickers on machines barely capable of getting Vista functioning well. They made a bigger mistake by not correctly identifying this bare minimum configuration. The expected result of an experiment and the actual result may point in two different directions. Thus, defining the minimum configuration list just by processor speed, RAM and hard disk space is not sufficient.

Apple enjoys building software for restricted hardware that they support themselves. They do not have to worry about a million hardware components’ compatibility issues. Microsoft’s approach has always been different. The more popular personal computers become, the more personalized they are. People have more options to choose the components they need. They look at Microsoft’s system requirements page and build computers that just manage to install and run a copy of Vista. Buying a poorly performing computer during a sale or clearance should not cause Microsoft the damage. But it does. The performance is limited because of the hardware. A high end Windows XP PC, may just be a low end Windows Vista PC. So you are probably fine installing Windows Vista Home Basic, but not the other editions. The “Capable” tag is not well defined.

This is not a post defending Microsoft. It is again a post about a problem Microsoft needs to tackle well. A start could be having a website which allows prospective buyers to look at various hardware combinations that are well tested by Microsoft. Microsoft needs to rate hardware for various editions of Windows rather than people rating Windows based on the hardware they use. The biggest problem for Microsoft with Windows Vista has been its negative critical analysis, the cause of which according to me is the pathetic hardware choices consumers have been offered by manufacturers.

Addendum October 8, 2008 at 11:13 pm
A point to be noted is that I have talked specifically about upgrades. Updates and fixes that Microsoft released have had little or no effect on the original performance of Windows Vista systems. On my system, Vista’s startup time and general performance have improved having installed Service Pack 1(SP1) which is merely a combined update.

Just got my copy of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. I am now shifting my all my attention to development of desktop applications, for Mac OS X and Windows. Building multi-platform GUI applications for something specific(and simple, like a superb blog client) is something I’ve always felt like doing but I never felt motivated enough.

After school, I have really lost focus and I have not done anything to satisfy my intrinsic needs (like the feeling of achievement). I realize now, that the fault is mine and mine alone. In addition to building GUI applications, I need to master Systems Software Programming before next summer so that I can spend my vacation doing something worthwile instead of just finding ways to satisfy my addiction to devices which are of no real use to me.

Time to publish Post 555 and get back to Chapter 3: Objective-C…

You cannot gift someone a phone without them suspecting that it has been opened, used and repackaged. The reason - when you are sold a mobile phone, the box is opened to ensure there’s a charger, a battery and of course - the phone itself. The shops where you buy from don’t trust you and you in turn will not trust the people running those stores. Since there are so many of these small shops, apparently, a company like Nokia or Motorola will not give them importance.

I find that a little hard to digest especially when they call themeselves premium resellers. When everything comes factory sealed, if there is a defect, it will be in an entire batch of products and such batches would obviously be recalled. Not trusting the customer wouldn’t make the customer feel welcome. The problem of something going missing in a factory-sealed box that has it’s seal untampered should be handled by the manufacturer. It shouldn’t become an issue like this.

I know three people who have bought mobile phones in the past two weeks and none of them were allowed to leave with a sealed and unopened box.

MobileSafari(Safari on the iPod touch) comes quite close to how a web browser on a computer works but it still needs polish.

MobileSafari displaying xAbhishek.com. Notice the fixed-position buttons scrolling along with the content on the right.

My theme had a footer which would remain fixed even while scrolling up or down. This footer rendered my website useless on MobileSafari. What it did was align itself on the bottom while loading the page. After that it would scroll along with the content thus constantly overlapping on some of the text. Now even though this is a flaw in MobileSafari, I have had to remove the footer and position the links on the right just like I have had to make this theme IE friendly.

Basically, what MobileSafari does is make all the fixed position div tags absolute in -place. Which means the div tag loads in the correct position initially, subsequently becomes absolute and starts scrolling along with the rest of the content. This is somewhat irritating.

The bigger pain-in-the-arse is media support. Many, not all, YouTube videos work fine because of native H264 support. But when you have a great touch screen device that behaves like a pocket computer, you have greater expectations. When you see Safari listed as an application, you expect to see a browser that’s equivalent to Safari on Mac OS X or Windows. You want Flash support even though Apple wont let you have it. Adobe is ready to make a Flash application, Apple wont publish it on the App Store. Forget Flash, there isn’t any Java support either. If there’s no Flash and Java, you can stop dreaming about Silverlight coming to the iPhone OS anytime soon.

Copy+Paste is the almost easily noticeable as a missing feature, the absense of which affects not only MobileSafari but all applications.

Other than all this, I’ve faced no other issues on MobileSafari. Gmail works beautifully on MobileSafari, both the regular version and the iPhone version. So do Facebook, WordPress and Twitter.