Thought I would do another blog post with lots of exciting tech news. So, here is what I’ve been seeing over the past few days.
Amazon buys “TouchCo”. Touchscreen kindle in the works? One might wonder if they are going to be using this company for just that. The other question, however, is “If it is made, when will it be available in Britain?”
Symbian is officially opensource. Symbian^2 (previously S60) is now open-source. It turns out the #symbiancountdown was the number of packages left until Symbian was totally open source. Well done Symbian. Now you need to step up and make sure than Symbian^3 is amazing and it better really step up and do what Symbian^2 hasn’t done. It needs to do a lot to be any good.
JooJoo near launch. Fixes lots of problems that would make you not want an iPad (except the price).
With or without you: Arm Ceo to Microsoft. The market will grow with or without Windows arm support. Good news for linux?
Sonic 4 in production. A blast from the past, in high definition. Thats right, Sonic 4 is being made and will be available in the summer on PS3, xbox and wii. On PS3 and Xbox it will be in 1080p. Thats great!!!
Now, you may be thinking “Man alive…no posts for days, and now a post about that iPad thing.”. Well, yeah, I know, it is shocking. Sadly, there hasn’t been much for me to blog about. I’ve been trying to think of something else, and my mind has been mulling over whether or not to blog about this “iPad thing” constantly for the past week. So…I decided that I would hurry up and post about it so I can free my mind to think about other things. So, I’m just going to talk about random things about the iPad.
What the iPad is not:
E-book reader
The iPad is not an e-book reader. At all. Why would you buy an e-book reader rather than a laptop/netbook? The e-ink screen. It is nice to read, and it is very low power. Weeks of battery life and no strain on the eyes are the main reasons why you would buy an e-book reader. Now lets look at the iPad. No e-ink screen, wouldn’t be good in sunlight (I’d imagine) and would cause strain after reading lots. And battery life – 10 hours. That is not even a full day. It has less battery life than my phone, but it has a similar processor. Therefore, the iPad is not a replacement for an e-book reader. Don’t buy it to read books.
No, this is nothing about the iPad. Take a look at this link.
What do you think? Pretty nice in my opinion. Not a huge amount of information about it yet, and I’m assuming it’ll take longer to actually get over here to britain. But it shows that my perfect e-book reader is getting closer and closer.
Looks beautiful doesn’t it. The screen looks amazing. I’d have to see it in real life, but it looks like it could be as good as OLED. And in that case, it would be much better because OLED is rubbish in sunlight, e-ink is nicer on the eyes, and e-ink lasts much much longer.
It also is a really nice size. 13.1 inches is amazing for an ebook reader (about the size of an A4 piece of paper), and look at the size of that border, it is tiny! None of this 7″ screen with 2″ either side of border. Well played. It also has wifi and 3G connectivity, although no details on what networks you can use with it.
A couple of things I want to know about this:
Battery life. How does colour change the battery life? Is it much shorter?
Refresh rate. How fast is it? Fast enough for video?
Video. Related to the last one, can it play video?
Content. Are there any content providers with this? What can I view on it? Can I view pdfs and epuds?
UK availability. It only says that it will be available in “Q2″, which I assume is just in US.
Price. There are no details on price at all.
So, all in all, this looks like a really really nice device that I would love to get my hands on. It has note-taking abilities, so it includes almost everything I want in an ereader. Maybe this is the device I will finally buy. Or maybe not…
Just thought I would put a wee blog post out to let people know that I am now officially engaged to Faye (@framemybear on twitter). I will post picture and explain how it happened another time, but I’m kinda busy just now
**EDIT** Spelling mistake – “not” changed to “now”
Or: “Re-fueling the mono debate.” Or: “I’m bored so I want to see people flame.”
No, but seriously, I did have a few thoughts about the usefulness of mono, and also the openness of it. So, I’ll take some points that have cropped up in the origional mono debate, and tell you what I think about them.
“Mono isn’t open”
Yes it is. What is open??? Seriously, if implementing something closed in an open way is not open, then we are in a sad sad way. Does that mean that samba isn’t open-source? What about wine? Noone ever says they are closed source. As far as I know, mono is a completely open source language that is compatable with .net. Don’t tell me that mono is not open.
“Mono is patent encumbered.”
DISCLAIMER: None of this is total facts. I am not a lawyer, and some of this is just my opinion and not fact. It is what I believe to be correct, but there may be something that isn’t.
Do you care about mp3s because of patents? If so, thats fine feel free to moan about mono. If not, then what is the difference? In many countries patents aren’t valid anyway. For example, as far as I know, in Europe, software patents do not count. So, if you aren’t in a country that has software patents then this is a non-argument.
If you are in the US, however, then you might be worried about this. Well, first of all, as far as I know the patents have never been proved. It is one of these patents that Microsoft say they have, but noone outside the company has seen them to prove they exist. Also, Microsoft have said that they won’t sue anyone that does anything with mono. Granted, this is not a legal agreement, but if they then go and sue someone, it won’t exactly look good in court. “So, you say that Microsoft said it was ok that you could use it? But now they are sueing you? How odd.” Patents are all about use. If you don’t work correctly with them they are unlikely to work.
“Mono is very bulky.”
True. Mono is very large in the sense that it takes a lot of disk space. But, it doesn’t use much ram as far as I can tell. It is not a lightweight programming language, but noone is telling you that you must use it. Most computers nowadays can handle bulky things anyway. Your computer can run firefox, openoffice and compiz but you don’t want to run mono on it? That is a bit silly. What is the difference? The applications themselves don’t take up much space, it is just the language that takes up all the space.
“There are no good applications built on mono.”
Gnome-do. Thats all I need to say to be honest.
“Mono is useful for porting applications to linux.”
Tell me 1 application that has been ported to mono. Oh wait, you can’t? I can’t either. Now, I think it would be a fantastic thing to get people to port their applications to mono, for example mathcad would be great on linux, evernote would be fantastic. But, as far as I know nothing big has been ported. Its all very well and good saying that it is really easy to port applications to mono, but until someone big does it, it is not a reason to use mono.
In the end, I would love mono to be the go-to thing to port your .net application over to linux. I would love to have evernote on linux (don’t tell me it runs in wine, the new version doesn’t) and it would really put linux on the map.
Windows user: “I would love to use Linux but I can’t run ‘application x’ on it, it is written in .net” Linux user: “Yes you can, it has been ported to mono.” Windows user: “Ok, I’ll use Linux then.”
So, I’m sure you all know the details, so I will spare you the details. I will give you my opinion however. I think this is a great thing for Google to do. Now, I am not saying that it is good that Chinese people won’t be able to use google services. It is a good thing that Google are no longer just doing whatever it takes to get money. I’m not saying that Google are an amazingly moral company, but it is a step in the right direction.
I’m not sure how the Chinese government will take this, but I don’t think they will just ignore it. They won’t change their ways, but it is quite embarassing to have a huge company like Google to just up and leave when they aren’t happy with the terms of what they wanted anymore. It isn’t a huge thing that will make lots of changes in the world, but it might help.
Gmail https
Looks like Gmail is using https by default now. This is very good. Means that gmail is fully encrypted. Who can say this is a bad thing, except hackers
Youtube possibly using html5?
Youtube are redesigning there website, and are asking for your opinion. The most popular thing that seems to be dominating the poll is using html5 with ogg instead of the default being flash. Google officially replied to these and said:
We’ve heard a lot of feedback around supporting HTML5 and are working hard to meet your request, so stay tuned. We’ll be following up when we have more information. We’re answering this idea now because there are so many similar HTML5 ideas and we want to give other ideas a chance to be seen.
So, it seems that HTML5 with ogg will be implemented in youtube 2.0. We don’t know if it’ll be the default instead of flash, but at least it’ll be there. It sounds great doesn’t it.
Nokia 5800 firmware update
Not many people will be interested in this, but the Nokia 5800 firmware has been updated to v40. It has features such as
kinetic scrolling
much better homescreen
better sensitivity
new screens for calls
So yeah, I can’t wait till I get this update for my phone. At least it’ll make the phone useable for the next few months, until I can get a new phone. It isn’t the best phone ever, but I’ll survive with these cool updates.
So these are just a few things that have happened recently. None of them get a post of their own, as I don’t have that much to say, but I felt that I needed to give them more than just a tweet.
Ok, what is the point of patents? Now, here I thought patents were to stop big corporations stealing little peoples ideas and selling more than them and running them out of business. Is that, or is that not, the idea of patents?
Today I heard the news that Kodak are sueing Apple and RIM about image processing and image viewing. I, to be honest, think this is pretty pathetic. How are Apple and RIM doing image processing and viewing that Kodak do in their cameras going to affect kodak??? Would you use a cameraphone over a camera? And if so, would you buy a camera if they didn’t quite process them the same way? No you wouldn’t. How is this going to affect Kodak if they didn’t file this.
Software patents are so pathetic. Can you think of the last time you heard of a patent that was decent? I know that software patents aren’t valid in Europe (citation needed), but they are in general a stupid idea. The fact that you can patent an idea, for example apple getting a patent on docks, an unknown company getting a patent on podcasts and another company getting a patent on an xml-based way of saving word processing documents. Are any of these good? No…they are not. They are all stupid. What happens if I code something that is patented, that I honestly thought up all by myself. Does that mean I shouldn’t be allowed to use it? Really? What gives them the right to use it when I thought of it, just a wee bit later than them.
What do you think, internets? Do you agree?
**Edit** Just to prove my point, turns out apple just applied for a patent to “add a contact to a homescreen.” It probably won’t go through, as android and also symbian, already can do that. But still, it shows the patheticness of patents.
Ereaders…a great new technology that is going to go very far, but it isn’t quite there yet. There are such ereaders like the kindle, the nook and the sony e-reader. However, they aren’t perfect, and need some more features.
So, if you know me, and there aren’t many people that read this blog that know me, you may know that I love the idea of ereaders, but there are some specific things they need to do before I would buy one. Hit the jump to read what these are…
Well, some of you will think that I seem to be changing my blog every second week. Yes, that is true, however this time I have moved it to my own VPS. I shouldn’t be moving it for a long time.
I have been wanting to move my blog to my VPS for a while now, and finally did it today. I changed the DNS a few hours ago, and it seems like a lot of servers have already updated it, but if you have problems with my blog, that is why.
I also have a new theme for my blog. I felt like my old theme was a bit…tacky…and this one is much nicer. It is a gpld theme that I have made some changes to, so I will upload my changes very soon. Bear with me on that one.
Just a few things…if there is something wrong with my theme, please let me know. If there is something that is broken with my site and the domain etc…also please let me know, I’m very new to configuring apache, so I may have got it wrong. Also, if you have any ideas for changes in my theme etc, please let me know. There is no decrease in functionality, I think, so please feel free to enjoy my blog.
Also, the twitter stuff is broken, I know, I’m trying to figure it out.
