David Jack Wange Olrik

Im happy to announce that I have just signed a contract with Microsoft, and as of May 1st I will be part of the Windows Phone 7 Series team where I will be responsible creating the user interface of the future.

I almost can’t wait – It’s going to be insanely great!

Update: As many of you¹ had guessed this was an Aprils fool joke, and hell didn’t freeze over and I’m not going to work for Microsoft anytime soon.

1. But not all, I did manage to fool a few people. [↩]

Once again John Strand is spreading FUD in the danish press. This time Apples new iPad is the target, and this insanely stupid quote from Politiken.dk says it all:

Apple indfører i iPad’en et nyt SIM-kort, som giver brugeren teknologiske håndjern på. Der er ikke andet end kommercielle tanker bag at indføre et nyt format, og det ser ud, som om denne teknologilås alene skal gøre det nemt at malke kunderne.

Roughly translated, John Strand says “Apple is chaining their customers to one carrier by introducing the micro-SIM standard when only one carrier is supporting it – and they are doing it solely for commercial reasons”.

Guess what…  All current and future danish carriers support the micro-SIM standard!

The micro-SIM was developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute. It has been around since 1998 and was agreed upon in 2003 by the SMG9 UMTS Working Party which is the standards setting body for GSM SIM cards. The micro-SIM was created with backwards compatibility in mind, and the contact surface of the SIM card is exactly the same as on a mini-SIM and on a full size SIM card.

Dear John, if you want to bypass these technological handcuffs from Apple, simply go to your nearest hardware store and buy a good pair of scissors and cut¹ the excess plastic from your current SIM card.

It’s really not that hard…

I find it sad that “experts” like John Strand get this kind of exposure in the danish media. I find it equally sad that Politiken didn’t bother to fact check the so called “expert” statements set forth in the article.

Don’t spread Fear, uncertainty and doubt – I.e. don’t pretend to be an expert when you so clearly are anything but an expert.

1. Just like we did back in the day when we ditched the Nokia 2110i for the next great phone – its called progress… [↩]

I seem to have fallen behind on my weekly picks, Christmas, $work and life in general have kept me very busy lately, but I’ll try to get back to my weekly¹ schedule again.

This weeks pick is DocScanner, an iPhone app that allows you to have a flatbed scanner² in your pocket. While DocScanner isn’t the most pretty or well designed iPhone app, it certainly doesn’t lack in the feature department.

Notable features include both really good edge detection, OCR and WiFi sharing. There exists quite a few scanner apps on the App Store but this one is definitely the one to get.

On a recent business trip I used DocScanner to keep track of all the receipts I accumulated during the trip. Back home I exported them all to one huge PDF file and emailed it to our accounting department. No need to fiddle with those old school analogue receipts anymore.

My wish list for future versions³ of DocScanner are: A cleaner⁴ user interface, PDF files with the OCR’ed text included and direct upload to Dropbox.

Update: As of version 3.0.3⁵ DocScanner will embed the ORC’ed text into the pdf files!

1. Please don’t kill me if it isn’t precisely weekly. [↩]
2. and a whiteboard scanner and just about any other kind of scanner you can think of. [↩]
3. and they release new versions quite frequently – About once a month. [↩]
4. and by cleaner, I mean more iPhone-ish [↩]
5. Released on January 30th 2010 [↩]

Nice response to the Droid teaser from Motorola. Should I care? I have yet to see Motorola create any kind of usable phone, but I welcome the competition.

I have blogged about this weeks pick before but I never made it a pick of the week before. The recent update to Tweetie rocks, so if you are into Twitter¹ I suggest you head over to the App Store and pick up a copy.

The first version of Tweetie for the iPhone was cool, and even won an Apple design award. It was easy to use, looked nice and was very polished.²

Tweetie 2 raises the bar for all iPhone applications, not just Twitter clients. It has been stuffed with all kinds of new and useful features – but in a way that doesn’t make it feel cramped at all! The user interface is very polished³ and it quickly grows on you.

The feature list is too long to repeat here, so I’ll just mention a couple of my favorites:  Nearby tweets superimposed on a Google map, Pull to refresh⁴, Multiple drafts, offline mode and full persistence i.e the user interface is restored to the same state after a relaunch or a phone call.

Tweetie 2 also takes advantage of some of Twitters new features that haven’t been launched yet – I’m so looking forward to the new Geolocation stuff. @Twitter: You may release now!⁵

Oh… and Tweetie 2.0 for Mac will soon be released, and will feature sync with the iPhone version and other goodies!

1. And who isn’t these days? [↩]
2. Except for the refresh button that looked like it had been placed with a shovel. It had to be there and this was the only place it would fit, well kinda… [↩]
3. Some might say too polished, as in eye candy for the sake of eye candy [↩]
4. The ugly button has been hidden, and only comes into view when you need it – nice! [↩]
5. Pretty please! [↩]