Reflecting Clouds

Last weekend went hiking to Pinnacles, weather was mosyly cloudy and caves on west side were closed due to high water level. Still we had pretty good time clocking over 10 miles of hiking up and down peaks, although it’s not much for adults for our kids that, especially for 5 year old, it was quite an achievement.

Why do kids love yogurt in small plastic tubes so much ?

Watched a demo of Siftables on TED yesterday, it’s amazing! Very simple idea with great application potential. Check it out:

I hope they will start selling those soon and have open system so people can write programs and extend functionality even further. There are many interesting things that can come out of it from education to simple travel games. Puzzles, equations, coocking…

Rating:  

Craig’s List is pretty good free alternative to eBay. Weak part of craig’s list is interface which is while functional is fairly simple and outdatted, it does the job though.

Someone come up with the Mac client for Craig’s List (is there windows one?) called Marketplace great idea, but implementation is… meh. Their motto “Craig’s List, without the Ugly” which is only true from visual point of view but not if you actually try to use the application.

Marektplace feels like work in progress unfinished and unpolished – UI is odd and sometimes plain wrong, for example it’s not resizing friendly or hititng cancel doesn’t dissmis panel. Functionaly its badly designed too, for example it tries to download all search results immediatelly instead of getting first 10 or 25 and only fetching next batch when needed. While download doesn’t block main thread and UI is responsive… but useless, for example you can not view items which are already downloaded untill everything is downloaded.

Why do I care ? – I like craig’s list and it’s first stop for my buying/selling needs and I would like to have good client for it, but Marketplace isn’t it. Now I wonder if APIs for craig’s list are publicly available…