:: TheOneAndTheOnly.com – Andrew Buckman ::

What were they thinking?!

• No Flash
• No multitasking
• No video camera(s)
• No iChat

Yes, I’m extremely disappointed that the “ultimate web device” doesn’t have support for Flash. While I hate Flash as much as the next web developer, it’s far too ubiquitous to ignore. Maybe it’s Adobe’s problem, but I find it hard to believe Apple couldn’t get it to work if they really wanted to.

I’m still getting one.

The other problems are mostly non-issues.  I did think a video camera would be pretty slick for a mobile video conference device, but oh well, probably in version 2.0 next year to make me upgrade.

Being able to utilize the iPhone apps I’ve already paid for is a nice bonus, though I’m sure many developers will release new versions for additional money that better utilize the screen space of the iPad.

iWork

Interestingly during the keynote this was the feature I was really looking for the most.  I don’t give many presentations, but being able to put together a Keynote presentation on a touchscreen device and hook the very portable device up to a display and give the presentation rocks.  I hope they make it work with the iPhone remote app as well.  Spreadsheets are huge for me too, so I’m pretty excited about being able to have a nice big display for portable spreadsheets.

Multitasking and the OS

The lack of multitasking is actually the biggest downside for me with that big beautiful display, and I suspect it’s a bit of misdirection at this point.  There’s a reason it was announced showing off iPhone OS 3.2 and not the major 4.0 update people were expecting.  I’m betting that within a few months of a successful launch there will be another announcement presentation for a new and improved iPhone, at which time the more major update to the OS, to 4.0, will be shown off.  They’ll save it for then to blow everyone away with the multitasking features that are supported on both the iPad and the new iPhone.  When this hits, hopefully an iChat app will follow, but if not, there will always be the AIM app or other equivalents.

The Future

In the end, I think the iPad looks like a pretty slick little device.  Hopefully if it proves as popular as expected, it will help catapult the state of Flash and video on the web to the HTML5 future, it’s definitely something I’ll be moving up my research and testing list now.  As with the iPhone, I’m confident most of the limitations will be addressed going forward, the latest iPhones (hardware + software) may not seem as revolutionary compared to the first one as it did to devices before it, but they are significantly more advanced than the initial release.  So too will be the iPad.

So yes, I’ll be getting one.  I think it may serve nicely as a third display for running something like TweetDeck during the day, will be nice to have lying around for access to the web in a better format than my phone, and most importantly for the web developer in me, to keep an eye on the sites I manage and ensure they work as best they can on the device for my clients and their customers.

I bought a new router the other day, I was having some odd problems with my current one and thought it’d be nice to move to an 802.11n router.  I picked up a Netgear WNDR3700, my first foray into Netgear products.  Overall I’m pretty happy with the router except for one extremely annoying problem… it’s been timing out on my SFTP and SSH connections after just a 5-10 minutes.  I’m regularly working on a file directly off an SFTP connection and I often go more than 10 minutes between saving or interacting with the server.  Transmit gets kind of hung up with that happens and if you’re trigger happy on closing a window, you can end up losing your file altogether (not cool).  Suffice it to say, that happened yesterday and I had to quickly rewrite the code while I could remember the gist of it, and prompting me to get this annoyance straighted out.

I presume the problem I was having was related to the new router timing out the NAT tables more frequently than my old router and not doing anything with my requests after it timed out the connection.  Unfortunately, I could not find any settings in the router configuration to adjust this interval, however it was an extremely easy fix in Mac OS and it solved the problem for me with both SSH and Transmit.

The Fix
To fix the SFTP and SSH timeout problem in Mac OS, go to your home folder and look for a folder with the name .ssh (note it will be hidden in Finder, I just used Terminal).  Inside the folder you probably already have a known_hosts file, and you may or may not have a config file, I did not.  Create or modify the config file, including the following code, taking care to make certain you indent the second line:
Host *
       ServerAliveInterval 240


This should tell your computer to keep the ssh connection alive every 240 seconds (4 minutes).  You can adjust this number as you see fit, as long as it’s lower than your router’s NAT timeout, it will resolve the problem.

NOTE: You will have to do this on every computer you’re using with the router.  I was hoping to fix it on the router itself and not have to deal with it, but this is certainly better than nothing.

No doubt you’ve seen the nifty Share this on Facebook links on websites, maybe you even have them on your site already.  Did you know that you can also craft titles, descriptions, and a thumbnail for the page to pre-populate in the sharing box?  Follow the instructions after the break to get share this links on your site if you don’t already have them, and below that you’ll find some tips on getting titles, descriptions, and thumbnails added.
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My girlfriend, the darling over at Spleen Chronicles, was lamenting the lack of line styles in Illustrator today, specifically the ability to put a double-line stroke on a path.  I being a big fat cheater, gave her a way to get the effect she was looking for at the expense of the inside area between the two lines not being transparent.  After the break you’ll find my walkthrough for the double-line stroke, screenshots are from Illustrator CS4, but it is possible to achieve the same effect in CS3 and perhaps earlier.
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Google recently announced support for a new meta tag to designate canonical URLs as an alternative to using 301 Permanent Redirects. For those unaware, a canonical URL is the primary URL you want your content indexed as, often times duplicate content can be found on multiple URLs, especially when using a CMS or eCommerce platform. If a product exists in multiple categories, there may be multiple URLs for that product, all with virtually identical data. In certain situations, such as the product in multiple categories, a redirect to a canonical version may not be ideal, and in other situations, it may not be possible to set up appropriate redirects. For these circumstances, the new meta tag was created. The format for the new tag is as follows:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mystore.com/my-book/" />
You would place this in the header of all similar pages. As an example, http://www.mystore.com/books/my-book/ and http://www.mystore.com/authors/andrew/my-book/ should both include the meta tag. This should also help with the myriad of tracking variables that can show up on the end of URLs.

Notes
You can use the meta tag across subdomains, thus http://books.mystore.com/my-book/ can point back to http://www.mystore.com/my-book/, but you cannot use it across domains, so http://www.mybooks.com/my-book/ will not work.

Relative URLs are allowed, however I would strongly recommend specifying an absolute URL, the entire point of the meta tag is to specify a URL that is the definitive canonical version of a page, best to specify it absolutely to reduce the chance of errors.

The meta tag is supported by all the major search engines: Google, Microsoft Live, Yahoo!, and Ask.

For more details, see Google’s excellent writeup on specifying your canonical.