iPhone AppStore Secrets – Pinch Media

iPhone AppStore Secrets – Pinch Media

Endgadget: Ten reasons why Windows Mobile 6.5 misses the mark

Editorial: Ten reasons why Windows Mobile 6.5 misses the mark
1: It’s exactly the same as Windows Mobile 6… er, 5.
2: The interface improvements are still way behind the curve.
3: The UI tweaks are mostly just skin deep, and third-parties have already gone way deeper.
4: It doesn’t support capacitive touchscreens.
5: It’s not due out until “later this year.”
6: You probably can’t upgrade your phone.
7: No Zune integration. Not even a new Windows Media Player.
8: Where’s the keyboard?
9: The browser is still weak.
10: It doesn’t innovate in any way.

My Future Netbook Or Something

If I ever buy a netbook it needs to have a proper OS. Windows is even more of a joke on a netbook than it is on a normal laptop and since I don’t foresee apple coming up with a netbook in the near future, linux is all that’s left. And no, that crap Asus ships and calls linux is not an option. Windows wannabe Xandros with a lame interface – no thank you. Ubuntu is currently the (only) way to go. And I mean normal Ubuntu not Ubuntu with weird interface (DJ Silly Remix). Sure you can install something like Ubuntu EEE if you have an eee pc or similar but that still might not get all your hardware runing properly plus why did you have to do it yourself? That should’ve been done by the manufacturer imo.

I also find some of the hadware on the current generation of netbooks lacking. There’s nothing that can be done about the SSDs at the moment. They are all slow, low-capacity energy-vampires. One could go with the traditional mechanic drives but that’s soooo last century. The memory is a different story. 512MB is definitively not enough. 1GB is usable but 2GB would be nice. But the biggest let down in my opinion is the battery life. Assuming you don’t stick with windows or the windows wannabe that comes pre-installed, you won’t get past 5h of battery life. And knowing the reviewers and my own careless use of computer resources, that probably translates into 3h in my hands

Granted some may say I’ve missed the point of netbooks. That all netbooks are for is browsing the web, reading email and instant messaging. Nope. That’s just all you can do with the current hardware. Ok the truth is you can do a lot more but you’ll soon run into limitations. Say I want to fire up eclipse and work on my JADE powered project for the Distributed Intelligent Agents course. It’s painfull enough on my macbook I can’t imagine it being bearable on the current crop (read crap) of netbooks.

But that’s not what netbooks are for right? And if it’s just browsing and reading email, an iPhone will do. But work still needs to get done and while my macbook is great for that, I’d still like a more portable option. One I wouldn’t be too afraid to drop/lose. A more task-oriented option (e.g. work on proj A for 2h at a random place with wireless) without the hundreds of applications I keep conveniently open on my macbook would also be nice.

Obviously there are already many options in the market and more to come. But I’m not paying more than 350 eur for one. That’s the price of an eee pc 901. So all I have to do now is wait for another 12 months for it (or rather its sucessor(s)) to reach the kind of hw specs I want and for them to either drop the pseudo-linux or for ubuntu’s netbook support to improve a bit.

iPhone SDK now includes Interface Builder

The second beta version of the iPhone SDK is now available and includes Interface Builder, a powerful tool that allows you to visually build your interface and makes creating a UI as simple as drag and drop.

Screenshots:

Download at iPhone Dev Center

School Days

From anime.mikomi.org via anidb:

A shy and unconfident teenager has become very accepting at only stealing glances at a cute girl as they ride the same train each morning on their way to their high school. At least until Saionji Sekai surprises Itou Makoto and chances to get a peek at a photo-snap of the beautiful Katsura on his cell-phone. After evilly teasing Mokoto about his forlorn crush, Sekai offers to support him in his romance. So after many Makoto-pep-talks and lots of scheming, the three become close friends. Close enough that Makoto braves asking Katsura out on date. And she agrees. Later that day, Makoto finds a quiet moment express his thanks for all support that Sekai has offered him, and makes clear his intent on finding a way to repay her kindness. But he is totally unprepared and very surprised at the reward that Sekai has chosen. Sekai steals a long kiss from his lips, before breaking away to run for the train. Sekai turns and wishes Makoto well on his date.

Not my usual type of show so I liked it partially for being different from what I usually watch. I gave it at rating of 8 at anidb.

The ending, “nice boat” (it’s a joke, you’ll get it if you watch it), was awesome!

Services Left Behind

I’ve recently started using my macbook as my only personal computer.

One of the big side effects is that I no longer need to synchronize multiple computers running different Operating Systems. This had been one of my major headaches with computing. My solution was mostly rsync/ssh synchronization of certain directories with my home server and a switch to web applications.

So, now that the need is gone, I’m migrating back to conventional desktop applications.

Gmail
The first web app I started using. I tried to migrate to thunderbird but I simply don’t like thunderbird. So I’m now using Apple’ Mail App.
I still use the gmail service, I just don’t use the web interface regularly.

Google Calendar
The second web app I started using. I like it a lot but it did make 2-way synchronization with my cellphone and palm (up until Palm Desktop stopped working) painful. Yes there is software around to do it. BusySync looks awesome but I don’t think there’s any reason for me to pay money to use a service I don’t really need anymore. GCALDaemon is Free but I was unable to get it properly configured plus I just don’t trust software that’s hard to setup.
I now use just Apple’s iCal to manage my calendars and in case you’re curious I used the BusySync trial to migrate – it was painless.

Remember The Milk
Less known than the google services, Remember The Milk is an online task manager. I started using it less than a year ago – only after Palm Desktop stopped working. Before that, I used just my Palm TX and I had started using iSync to synchronize my Palm and my cellphone. The side effect was I couldn’t use 2-way sync with my cellphone which isn’t that much of a problem as it seems because I don’t really like using my cellphone for that. Still, there’s just no point in using RTM anymore, so I now use iCal/Mail App to handle my tasks. Since I only had a handful of tasks to complete, I migrated by hand.

What’s next?
I’ll consider switching feed readers from google reader to NetNewsWire. Migrating is painless since I can just download my OPML from google reader

I use a private blog as a notepad of sorts. I previously used just regular .txts in a specific directory and then switched to Journler. But Journler wasn’t available on Linux.
Maybe I’ll continue to use the blog for my longer notes but switch to Mail App for smaller ones. Maybe not. I’ll need to think about it and try it.
Plus there’s the issue of wether it’s gonna be easy to get the data into whatever application I choose. I migrated from Journler to a wordpress blog via an Automator script and MarsEdit.

The Elephant In The Blog
The iPhone. With the SDK out and App Store, I want one. So I now have to think what will work better with the iPhone. For instance, how good is the Newsgator iPhone web app compared to gReader? What’s the best way to synchronize my notes with the iPhone? Etc. I’ll want to speak with iPhone users about this.

The iPhone SDK

It’s been months since I was insulted by Apple fanboys for saying that the iPhone needed an SDK and now Apple has officially released a beta version of the iPhone/iPod Touch SDK.

I can’t access developer.apple.com at the moment but Levi Figueira was kind enough to upload both screenshots of the pages and the PDFs of agreements involved during a twitter discussion with me and David Rodrigues (also read his post on the iPhone SDK in Portuguese).

The good news is apple provides the App Store to distribute your applications with the iPhone Developer Program and all you have to do is pay them $99 and 30% of what your customers pay for your app.

The bad news is that, from what I understood, there’s no other way to get apps on an iPhone, even if it’s your own apps on your own iPhone or if they’re Open Source apps.

The other good news is that if they’re free apps, they don’t charge the 30% (30% of 0 is 0 so…). So as long as someone paid $99 to be part of the Developer Program, they can put free apps on the Store at no additional charges.

The other bad news is there won’t be porn games on the iPhone I wonder if they consider hentai (Japanese eroge visual novel) games “porn”.

I think the iPhone Developer Program is a really Great Thing (TM), think Steam for the iPhone/iPod Touch but more open. I just wish it were “optional”.

LOLCODE

From Wikipedia:

LOLCODE is a humorous esoteric programming language heavily inspired by structures found in many common programing languages, as modified to be expressed via common terms, stylings and informal spellings found in Internet memes (primarily lolcats) and the communication style found in internet slang, instant messenger chat, and cellphone text messaging (“TXT”)

    HAI
    CAN HAS STDIO?
    PLZ OPEN FILE "LOLCATS.TXT"?
        AWSUM THX
            VISIBLE FILE
        O NOES
            INVISIBLE "ERROR!"
    KTHXBYE

UPDATE: removed the example – wordpress and indention… sigh
UPDATE2: example back in using /pre

Additional Links: lolcats

One Retarded Thing In Mac OSX – No Easy Shortcuts

There is no easy way to create application shortcuts (a shortcut to an application that may or may not have arguments). It’s extremely easy to do in Windows and Ubuntu (<your-favorite-nix/linux-distro>) but not in OSX.

I’m sure that as usual, some idiot apple zealot (sorry for the pleonasm) is going to try (yeah try, comments moderated but they still try) to post a comment saying how that’s a good (great) thing, Steve Jobs is a genius and I’m dumb for not knowing that it’s such a good thing or even knowing what a shortcut is (like when I posted about the iPhone lacking a SDK and guess what? It will  get one – in your face zealot ).

Humor – HOWTO tell a mac zealot from a normal mac user

“It’s great that the iPhone doesn’t need an SDK and we can just write web2.0 apps.”

New Toys: Part V – Samsung D900

I mentioned the D900 before. I finally got one. It’s everything I expected and more… except for one little detail – some frikin retard at Samsung decided it was OK or even a good idea to cripple the phone by not allowing people to use their own message tone (instead you can only choose from one of the 10 that come with the phone and suck). Sigh I wanted to use an excerpt of Senator Ted Stevens “Series of Tubes“* speech as a message tone…

Anyway I’m extremely happy with this new toy – finally a phone I actually like and don’t find anoying (i.e. crippled by Nokia Crap OS TM and the brick-fetishism of their design team).

Seriously this phone pwns! Samsung has a clear technological (both in software and hardware) and design lead over it’s competitors in the cellphone market (at least Nokia, Motorolla and anything lame enough to use Windows – it’s bad on the desktop but it’s a lot worse on a phone).

And since today I feel like giving things “scores”, I give the Samsung D900 a 9.9/10 – not a 10/10 because of that retarded message tone thing I mentioned earlier.

*the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention another annoyingly stupid “feature” of the D900 – Samsung decided to include proprietary headphones – crappy, uncomfortable ones at that – instead of simply including an adapter. Fortunately there are adapters. I wonder if I can find them here in Portugal.

iPhone

3 letters: DOA.

Black Carbon

Samsung’s latest and greatest is the SGH-D900 better known as Black Carbon. You can see a small video of it here. To match the amazing design it also has what looks like a great interface. It’s not easy to judge from 1 minute of video if the interface is as cool as it looks. It does remind me a bit of the interface of my sony camera (the p200).

I’ve been looking at possible replacements for my Nokia 6230i (which I didn’t actually chose in the first place). It’s a bit slow and I don’t like the interface but my main problem with it is that it just feels like a huge brick in my pocket.

While my 6230i and it’s limitations can sometimes annoy me, I’m in no hurry to switch. But when I do, I’ll probably switch to Samsung: I never liked the Nokia bricks, Motorola sucks in both hardware and software quality and I have yet to meet anyone happy with their Motorola phone, Sony-Erickson seems more interested in selling Walkmans that actual phones and do other brands even exist nowadays? Besides I like the Samsung design and features – even if their interface is still lacking… I wish they’d license Palm or something. The thing is, I don’t want to listen to music, watch TV, play games, browse the internets or whatever manufacturers and carriers are trying to push these days. I want to make/receive calls/SMS and it’s is extremely convenient for me to have a camera on my phone since I don’t usually carry around my camera. That’s it. How hard is it to make a phone with those features that looks good, feels good (i.e. doesn’t feel like a brick) and has a decent, fast, responsive, easy to use interface? Apparently either I’m the only one to have these requisites or it’s mysteriously hard because manufacturers sure seem unable to do it though the only one that seems to even be trying is Samsung.

UPDATE:
Review: http://www.mobileburn.com/review.jsp?Id=2733

New Toys: Part I – Sony Vaio FE11S

My new laptop is a Sony Vaio VGN-FE11S. Some highlights:

Intel Core Duo Processor T2400
15.4 Display (X-BLACK) – 1280 x 800
1GB RAM
160 GB Harddrive @ 4200 RPMs
NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400 with TurboCache 256MB
Pic1 | Pic2 (Both taken with a cellphone camera i.e. bad quality pics)

The vaio (which I named sonic as in Sonic The Headgehog – don’t ask me why) dual boots between included Windows Media Center Edition and Ubuntu. Unfortunately the nvidia linux drivers don’t currently support the Go 7400 so I don’t get to run the pretty OpenGL screensavers… at least not at decent framerates. The next nvidia drivers are expected to support it though.

Overall I’m happy with my vaio. My major complaint is the short battery life (about 2h30min). Maybe I should try and tweak some power settings or something but considering that in most places I use it in I can just plug it into the wall, it’s not really a problem for me. I would’ve also liked a faster hardrive.

This Week inSecurity

I just made a note to check out AntiExploit (documentation) sometime in the not so near future. Might actually be useful if it can detect and stop exploits that aren’t publicly known. Not exactly a new concept but might actually be very good at stopping script kiddies. Obviously if the attacker takes the time to test the exploit against AntiExploit in a box she (legally) owns before using it to 0wn someone else’s box, she can tweak the exploit to bypass AntiExploit. Nothing new here.

Escaping the Hamster Wheel of Pain – read this, it’s worth it. Metrics in computer security are now a hot subject but at this rate I don’t think we’ll get good, standard, widely used metrics before the end of the decade. Related post.

Anomaly Detection 101

First Look at Windows Vista: Secure at Last? – fool me once… I absolutely love it when I read stuff like “philosophical position” in a computer security article.

DDoS by mobile phone: is it a goer?

Ups, almost forgot to mention The Cross-site Scripting Virus.