Alex Hardy

So says Steve Ballmer.

You know, I had my doubts about the iPhone, but Apple must be breathing a sigh of relief at this resounding vote of confidence.

If that clueless oaf wants us all to know that iPhone is a lemon, then it must be destined for great things.

My 85-year-old uncle probably will never own an iPod, and I hope we’ll get him to own a Zune.

I hope so too. Competition is always healthy, and if Ballmer’s uncle buys one it would double the Zune’s market share.

As promised, here is an update on the contact system that I alluded to previously.

I’ve given it the working title of simpleContact. Depending on how it fares, I have lots of ideas for improvements, which include a snappy name (TBC) and branding for version 2.0. So I’ll get to the bad news first:

The bad news

I’ve made a great deal of progress, but due to other things in life which take precedence, it’s not finished.

The good news

It’s very nearly finished! To tease you, here are some screengrabs of the inbox, message view, recipients and automatic response email setup pages.

Remaining tasks

In the interests of transparency, I will list the remaining tasks:

1. Contact form options page
2. Installer and admin account creation
3. Browser testing
4. Web page on this site to present the application

See? I told you there wasn’t much left to do The next post I write will announce its availability, and I will cross out tasks on this post as they are completed.

[UPDATE] Contact form options are done (9pm, 3rd May)

[UPDATE] Web page visual done. Tested A-OK with Safari, Firefox, Camino, Opera and Netscape on Mac (4pm, 4th May)

[UPDATE] Everything fine in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox, Opera and Netscape on PC. That’ll do (5pm, 4th May)

[UPDATE] Got the installer script done (phew that was a slog). Just need to add admin account creation and I’ll send it to my crack squad of testers… (8pm, 13th May)

[UPDATE] Done and sent. I should have a downloads page live on here in the next week or so (10:30pm, 14th May)

[UPDATE] Everything is done and ready to go live. It’s not a great idea to launch something on a Friday though, so I’ll fix the navigation to make it available on Monday (11am, 18th May)