Apple vs Flash

So, Steve Jobs says Flash is a bit rubbish and not suitable for running on Apple's uber-cool touchscreen smartphones and the like.

Good.

The less use that's made of Flash the better imo. It's hideously overused - I took a look at a Flash website today - for a lodge business. Why on earth the site was built in Flash I'll never know - ages to load, lousy scrolling and really sucky look all round.

So any disincentive to use the damned stuff on standard websites sounds like a plan to me.

Jobs explains his difficulties with Flash - which can be a great tool if it's used properly btw - in a letter. Sound points in general - the lack of openness, security problems and battery issues convince me by themselves. Worth a read.

40 uses for a floppy disk...

Fabby article from the BBC Magazine - seems like there's a lot of technical demand for them and they make handy ice scrappers as well :-)

This week, though, Sony decided it would stop making them. Part of my life just disappeared (of course, I'm old enough to remember floppy disks which were actually floppy...)

Monitoring Progress in Open Workbench

You can use Open Workbench. Yay!

But can you monitor your progress in it?

This thought occurred as a result of reading some little detail in the markscheme for the sample piece of work we have. In AO1 - Row 2 the comment explaining why the candidate didn't get 4 marks says:

Project is used to plan time, which is appropriate, but candidate has not shown that it has been used to monitor progress, so the explanation does not warrant the fourth mark

So, we need to use Open Workbench to try to monitor our progress. Hmmmm....

NB: Before you do this BACK YOUR FILE UP!

Having discussed this in class, James "The Machine" found the Status Update tab - look down on the left hand side in the Controlling group. From this you can try:

• click in the Total Actuals (hours) column and put in the amount of time some jobs actually took - look, stuff happens
• check back on the Gannt chart and look at the phases bar - look: there's a little bar showing progress on the phase!
• take some screenshots now
• now change the Started box on the far right to Completed - it goes when you click away - not yet, but later! It disappears. Take some more screenshots - this shows that you're monitoring the progress that's occured as you're going along. You can see why, in a complex project, this would be a good idea yes? Good.
• check the Gannt chart view as well - the Gannt bars will eventually start changing some colour - and might shift (if you start a task which is dependent on another one!)

Take care with this. I think you need a couple of pages of screenshots to show that you monitored it. But be aware that you will lose views and information - which is why a backup copy's a good idea because me and JTM haven't worked out how to get them back again yet!