Ok, maybe a bit of a sensationalist title, but I’ll be honest, this is really weird and creepy. You know that playstation phone that Sony have been so bad at keeping secret? Well, turns out it is official now, and this is the ad for it. With the tagline “Android is ready to play”.
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YouTube
This is just a quick post to moan about people talking about Rovio’s problems with Android fragmentation. This is a load of rubbish, it is nothing new with computers.
First, here is a link – http://engt.co/hDj6o1
Ok, so what they are saying is that people can’t run it because their phones are too slow. Well, first of all this is true with iPhones as well. Ever tried angry birds on an iPhone 1 or 3? Man alive, its slow. Its terribly slow. So, it clearly isn’t just an Android problem.
Second of all, it is something that happens with computers. Period. Every bought a game? Realised that it has minimum system requirements? Yeah…computer games have always had this. If you build something that is heavy on system resources, or has a lot of graphics and gameplay, it will not run on everything!!! For goodness sake, stop heralding this as a big company admitting that there is Android fragmentation. It really isn’t such a big problem, we just need to make sure games run on phones before you release on them.
Thats it…nothing huge.
I understand that the Google people have many more important things to be doing, but personally I feel this is part of Google’s problem. I have been trying to find out about the “history” of android. About when previous android releases were announced, and the source code was released, the gaps between them, and trying to figure out when we could possibly see 2.3/3.0 because of that. I know this isn’t a science, but it is fun anyway.
As far as I can see, there is no “History” page, and the only page dedicated to android releases hasn’t been updated since 1.5 (android.com/releases). The easiest way for me to find this information is using wikipedia:
1.0: 21/10/2008
1.1: 09/02/2009
1.5: 30/04/2009
1.6: 15/09/2009
2.0: 26/10/2009
2.1: 12/01/2010
2.2: 20/05/2010
By my calculations, this would set 2.3 to be released …goodness knows. There seems to be no pattern at all. Thats rubbish. It should be between tomorrow and january.
This is not the point of this post however, the point is that Google need to keep their webpages up to date. Need to have a “history of android” page or something. But noone at Google would ever think about this as they are a company of engineers, as many people have said before.
This is Google’s main problem, thinking about the normal things, the simple things, the little things.
You may know that I recently got a new phone. Specifically an HTC desire. It runs android, specifically android 2.2, and I will be reviewing it and a few apps over the coming weeks and months. For just now, I’m going to talk about a little product on my phone that I use every day. Even if I don’t consciously use it, it still runs. It is called “Google Listen”.
Google listen is a podcatcher. Most of you should know what one of those are, but just incase you don’t, I’m going to tell you. A podcast is a constantly updating list of audio files (ok, thats not quite right, but it is a simple explanation of it) that are posted on the internet and you can download them. Many people use a desktop client to download podcasts, and then sync them to their media device. However another, possibly simpler, solution is to have an application on your phone, and with the dawning of phones that are very powerful, constantly connected to the internet and allow third party apps, this is a great idea. Google listen is one such application.
When you open google listen, you are presented with 4 options. “My listen items”, “My Subscriptions”, “Popular Searches” and “Recently played”. You can add feeds by going to “My subscriptions” and adding a feed, or by searching their database. I find that their podcast database is very lacking. I found stuff like TWiT shows, and Linux Outlaws, but not UbuntuUKPodcast or thecommandline podcast. If they get their database properly up and with a lot of shows on it, this would be a huge plus for it and give it a huge edge over the competition.
Once you have a feed added listen will constantly search it for new additions to it and will automatically download them. You can turn this off in the settings, or tell it to only do it on wifi. This is a huge plus, the fact that it automatically refreshes and downloads them. You will forget to check the feed every so often, and walk out the house and go “aw…I forgot to download that podcast”. I used to do that with my old Nokia 5800 before.This is not a problem when it happens automatically.
A downside to this automatic is that it can’t handle losing network connectivity. If you are trying to download it and it loses signal you have to restart it manually, and occaisionally it won’t ever download the podcast (this only happened once to me, but it is a problem). It is very uncommon, but still not good.
It has problems with the notifications it has, and when it shows it. When I pause my music app, it sometimes shows in the notification bar as playing, which is quite annoying, and the only way to get it away is to play and then stop again. It also seems to steal the “play/pause” button from my bluetooth headphones. I do not know whether this is because my music app can’t handle them or whether google listen is taking them and not letting anyone else have them. Either way, I need to find out what this is and fix it, because it is quite annoying.
There isn’t much else to talk about this app. Apart from the fact that there is only 1 way to automatically delete episodes, and that is by saying how many downloads it can have. After it hits the limit, it deletes the oldest episode. This is a problem if you occasionally don’t listen to podcasts, and you end up having a lot of unlistened episodes. This is 1 thing I would like them to have.
The other thing to mention is that this is beta software. It is prone to bugs, and for that reason if you are worried about that do not use it.
If you are happy with using non-stable software, then I would recommend this app. I have tried many podcatchers (desktop and mobile) and this is the best. It is automatic, it is simple, you can forget about it, and it treats podcasts as different from music. Music players never do podcasts justice. Google Listen does. It does simple things like save the point that you last played it at, that normal music players don’t do, that just makes a whole huge amount of difference. I would highly recommend this app to anyone who is happy with using beta software.
I’ve been thinking a lot about tablets recently. My dad got an iPad recently and seems to absolutely love it. You can read about his thoughts on it on http://gordonsramblings.blogspot.com/. Now, he recently took it to a camp we were involved in, and used it for notes, timetables, etc and it got me thinking. In a paperless world, do we need tablets?
I love the idea of a paperless world. Anyone who knows me will recognise this. I hate paper so much. I look over at the other side of this room, and there is so much wasted space with loads of paper. But, do current computers really cut it? I don’t think so. I think, in a world with no papers, we need tablets/e-reader type devices. I’ve not totally decided what a device to completely get rid of paper would be, but it certanarily wouldn’t be an e-reader, an ipad or many other of the tablets that exist at this moment in time. It would have to have either a screen that is very very low powered, can be seen in bright sunlight, be nice on the eyes, and still be able to view videos and other colour, and fast-refreshing items (possibly like a colour e-ink screen that has a fast refresh rate), or a screen like a pixel qi screen. I have talked before about pixel qi screens which are used in devices such as the olpc XO laptop, and the Notion ink adam. But, as I said, I’m still not sure which would be best.
Then, of course, we come to the question of input devices, and whether typing on a virtual (or physical) keyboard, or using handwriting recognition, or just allowing freeform writing (so that its like paper) would be best. For the 2nd, we would need better algorithms and for the 3rd we would need nicer screens that would allow pressure sensitivity etc, but I don’t think these are that far off.
Obviously, there are many, many questions that there are during thinking about tablets etc, but the point of this article is to say that I think that we need tablet/e-reader/ipad-like devices to enter the paperless world (and also a change of attitude from some people…but that is a different story).
These words may seem like big words to some people. Hey, to me they are even large ones. So, I’ll very quickly explain both of them.
There are many definitions of this. The best one, IMHO, comes from dictionary.com – “a federated body formed by a number of nations, states, societies, unions, etc., each retaining control of its own internal affairs.” So, in terms of software (which is what i’m going to talk about today) means a bunch of programs (desktop or web etc) that all work together but can still be different internally.
This one is more obvious. “The policy or practice of separating people of different races, classes, or ethnic groups, as in schools, housing, and public or commercial facilities, especially as a form of discrimination”. So, again in terms of software, this is when different programs that are similar are split up and don’t work together, and sometimes don’t even know that the others exist.
Well, why am I talking about these? Well, I’m thinking about things in terms of social networking services just now. Facebook is huge. Noone knows exactly, but its probably between 350 and 500 million people. Lets be honest, the biggest social network in the history of the internet. However, they are having a huge backlash just now on their privacy settings, and a number of people are leaving it. Now, obviously a few people leaving it won’t change it much, but what happens when those people leave facebook? What do they do? Where do they go?
This is the horrible situation we have just now. Web apps are mostly segregated. They don’t work together, infact sometimes they work AGAINST each other, actively seperating themselves. Facebook is facebook, twitter is twitter, etc etc.
Well, this is where federation comes in. Let us take status.net into consideration. You can have any status.net instance (identica, or your own instance) and follow anyone on any other Ostatus federated web service. So, say twitter because Ostatus federated. this would mean that I could have 1 identi.ca account and follow anyone on identi.ca, twitter, twitarmy or any other status.net instance. And then, say facebook used Ostatus on their news feed? That would mean that I could have an identi.ca account (or twitter, facebook, or status.net account) and follow anyone on identica, twitter, facebook, or any other status.net instance. That is practically everyone on the internet, isn’t it.
So, the point of what I’m saying is that you could federate any part of a social network. This would mean that a new service (like diaspre) or an old service (like facebook or twitter) could implement these features as well, and then anyone could have 1 account on any of these services, and follow/be friends with anyone on any of these services. No more having 3/4 accounts on different services. Makes everything so much simpler and more open, and stops 1 service having a huge monopoly like facebook does just now.
So, yeah, federation, not segregation…
There has been a lot of discussion recently about Palm, WebOS, the palm pre and android. There are a few ideas about whether Palm could go bust in the near future, and I thought I would pop in my opinions.
The one thing we can all agree on, I think, is that Palm were a hugely innovating company. They made the pda. Name a pda…any pda at all. Was it a palm? Well, if it wasn’t you are just being difficult. I had a Palm T|X, and I am only 19. Seriously, they are the pda company. It was even changed to name after them. Palmtops. Most people call them that rather than PDAs. Whether or not you liked palms, you have to admit they made it in that era. (more…)
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.
So, theres just a few bits of random news that I thought I would share with people. Have a great weekend guys!
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”
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.
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 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.
Not many people will be interested in this, but the Nokia 5800 firmware has been updated to v40. It has features such as
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.
