There was great hype about iPad. Many were skeptical about this device before it became available. But not including me. There is a place for a such device in my life, I was thinking that it would be good to have something like iPhone with larger screen. Tablet PCs are too heavy, netbooks are inconvinient (I do not need a keyboard for such a device, there are laptops for this), iPhone screen is too small. So, iPad looked like what I need.

We recently purchased iPad for work (we are developing iPad version of MobileNoter). Here is what I felt when I got it in my hands:

- First impression. “Great screen!” (Trying to find MobileNoter in App Store)

- After 10 minutes of playing. “Hmmm it is quite heavy”

- After 5 minutes of walking with iPad in hands. “It would be great if iPad had a handle, like a frypan”

After using iPad a bit I can sum up my personal feelings. I tried to leave what everyone writes about it (yes, it is true that iPad is great for email, web etc…) and list what was kinda surprise for me after the real use.

1) It is heavier than it should be (for purposes it solves). It hard too hold it in one hand for more than 5 minutes (5 minutes is for me, I’m quite big man with strong hands :-)). Even if you base bottom edge of iPad on a table or on your knee, it is hard to hold it by one hand.

2) My 3-year daughter likes it more than me. It is a great toy you can play together with your children.

4) It is not practical for handwriting. Even with this large screen. I did not find it practical. Unfortunately. There are special pens that you can use instead of writing with your finger, but you also need to wear a glove as you palm will rest on the screen and will act as a second large pen (thanks to multitouch).

Do i like it. Yes, undoubtedly. Will I buy it? Not now. It seems there will be more tablets coming this year. I prefer to wait a bit and if there is no better choice, then I will get iPad.

Surely they are. But proven schemes are repeated each time. 'Leaked photos' of iPhone 4g are interesting and boring at the same time...

One, if not the main, principle of the good architecture is its openness against 'possible' changes. It can be viewed on different abstraction levels - some classes can be open for some changes in business logic, entire layers may be designed to be open for global changes like switching to another DB engine. As OCP states, entities should be open for extension, but not for modification. This means that your architecture should support its extension in planned ways easily without changing much code (you should write new of course). That is why seasoned developer likes to use interfaces here and there :-) And that is what dependency injection is for...

It’s a good practice to build Data Access layer in a way it is not tied to specific database. So if you use SQL server and then decide to use Oracle, you need to write new Data Access classes specific to Oracle and do not need to rewrite entire system. 

I was surprised, but it turns out that you can isolate user interface logic for web project in the same way. 

There are many JavaScript libraries that allow you to build rich Ajax based UI that lives inside your browser. The only what is needed from middle tier is to return data in some simple format (JSON, XML). So you can plan your architecture for a possible change of middle tier (ASP.NET to JSP?) if you need to. A good example of rich UI JavaScript library is ExtJS. I recommend taking look at it if you did not do that yet.

When I read blog post about Adobe launching free and online version of their flagman product, Photoshop, I was just able to say "wow". Everyone says now that future of software is online versions that do not need to be installed on PC. There are several interesting examples of such model already, for example Google Docs. 

I was intrigued very much and took a look immediately. What they have created is very attractive and user friendly application, but that is not Photoshop. That is just another web album, where you can keep your photos and share with others. Image editing facilities that are available in current version do not stand any comparison with those available in offline version. Yes, that app is attractive and user friendly. Yes, there are image editing facilities. But, no, that app is not Photoshop. 

Here is toolbox of Photoshop Express: 

A couple of years after introducing Office 2007 Open XML file formats, Microsoft recently published specifications of their doc, xls and ppt binary formats. It seems that it was surprising for everyone how complicated these formats are. For example, the Excel 97-2003 file format is a 349 page PDF file.

Joel Spolsky, who worked on Microsoft's Excel development team, shed some light why the Microsoft Office file formats are so complicated. He provides many points describing why that happened, but it seems that it can be summarized just in 2 main points:

• These file formats were designed long ago in the era of slow machines


They were designed to be fast on very old computers. For the early versions of Excel for Windows, 1 MB of RAM was a reasonable amount of memory, and an 80386 at 20 MHz had to be able to run Excel comfortably

• Microsoft did not care to clean the format or to design new ones for a long time


A lot of the complexities in these file formats reflect features that are old, complicated, unloved, and rarely used. They’re still in the file format for backwards compatibility, and because it doesn’t cost anything for Microsoft to leave the code around.

When reading that, one question continuously popping up in my head. Why it did take so long to switch to a better file format? Computers became fast enough, not to deal with binary formats, more than 10 years ago, Internet is here for 2 decades, XML became popular in 1990s, but Microsoft switched one of their most selling product’s format to a better one only in 2006. If they do not care about its interoperability, how many efforts it took to support those formats and to train new people who became part of Office team….