Category: mobile-technology

WebOS the BeOS of Mobile Operating systems?

Flickr de cerca

Everyone is talking about HP’s announcement that WebOS is going open source… Which is great news and one of the best moves they could have done with WebOS. However I do wonder if WebOS might go the way of BeOS?

What I mean really is… by the time WebOS goes open source, will it be too late like I would conclude BeOS or rather haiku was/is…? Linux become the de-facto open source platform and BeOS took too long to finally become open source. HP really should be taking advantage of the fact there are a lot of people who bought Touchpads and Hackers are falling over themselves with the possibilities, now! Or at least sooner than 2013! Which would be a real shame because I actually quite like WebOS…

The Eatery…?

A few people have recommended the eatery application to me, which is from massive health. (Aza Raskin’s new startup).

I have a lot of respect for Aza Raskin and some of his view points, although I do disagree on quite a few. Massive health’s ethos has certainly spiked my attention in the past and the eatery should do the same. However…

  1. I’m frankly fed up of apps only being on the iOS platform
  2. The crowd sourced methodology is useful but too fuzzy for myself
  3. It underplays the possible importance of such an application (which might be its plan from conception)

Most people know I use Foodfeed.us a lot to document what I’m eating by tweeting @having. I use to take pictures but as I discovered my NHS dietation’s computers block the images and won’t allow her to click on most of the social sites. So the description has to be reasonable enough.

The eatery might be very useful for little groups of people trying to help each other to eat better if it works the way I think it should/could. As a global thing, its not that interesting and I’d go as far as to say, its actually counter-productive. No one wants to know/be told there in the lower end of the healthy eaters. I won’t even go into the gaming element, what a way to make everyone else feel like crap?

Might be wrong and once again I can’t play with it because its iOS only! So I’ll reserve judgement till then…

Which Galaxy? The Samsung Galaxy…

Been thinking about getting a Tablet for a long while for the purposes of aiding with my needs to better write notes, recite things, etc. I was hoping the 7inch Samsung Galaxy tab would have dropped to much lower price by now but its holding its price quite well still.

So avoiding all the Apple crap, I was pushing for the Samsung galaxy tablet 10.1, then they announced the galaxy 7.7inch (not to be confused with the older 7inch) and at the same a 5inch sudo tablet which actually looks like a oversized phone. But I quite like it because it reminds me of the ipod touch (not in looks but more in how could be used) and I’m it would make a very good note taking device specially if I can get a bluetooth keyboard working with it?

Yes it won’t have Honeycomb (android 3) on it but to be honest I’m not that fused. Gingerbread (android 2.3) has most of the things I need, would use. I’m also expecting Icecream sandwich (android 4) will be hacked on the device once the source is made publicly available.

Will be interesting having a stylus too, specially since theres very few apps which support the stylus…

OK Cupid Locals (beta)

Okcupid locals

It wasn’t long ago that I removed the OKCupid application from my android phone because frankly it wasn’t all that and it was more like an extension of the website. But I was talking to my friend Nicola who I had been telling for a while to stop paying for online dating sites. In the past she has filled me in on the problems Guardian Soulmates was having post there redesign. But today she filled me in on OKCupid’s new beta application feature called Locals.

In actual fact Locals I’d heard about but hadn’t tried till she explained it.

Simply its Grindr for the OKCupid crowd… Sam Yagan (OKC founder) explains why its anti-grindr

So Grindr is obviously the most successful mobile dating app out there. The things that make it so successful—I’m going to terribly stereotype this community—but it’s larger used as a vehicle for short-term, physical relationships. Now it turns out, taking the stereotypical heterosexual case, that the vast majority of women don’t want that. In fact that’s what creeps them out the most about this. They’re worried about stalkers, they’re worried that it’s 10:30 at night on a Friday and you know someone at the bar next to you thinks you want to have sex with them.

How is OkCupid Locals different?

Number one, we’re populating Locals with the OkCupid database. Our entire reputation is built around the fact that we have this data-oriented way to understand people’s personalities. We can actually layer in compatibility. So now, when you make yourself available in Locals, it’s not just, “Oh, who are the people around me who are hot and horny at this moment.” It’s sliced by who are the people around me who are compatible with me. Instead of it being like everyone’s out there in this meat market, it’s more like I can say, “Who wants to go to karaoke.” You can post that not to just everyone in the West Village, but you can say: everyone in the Village who has a compatibility with me over 80 percent.

It sort of cleans the unwashed masses. It’s like, ohhhhh. You’ve been on OkCupid for a couple years, you know that people with high match percentages tend to be people that you could tolerate having a beer with. (Or not—there are creepy people everywhere in every compatibility index.) But in general we’ve got this sort of filter of the users, which I think is super valuable.

And I he’s right, you can just say something like I’m in X place for Y amount of time. Then set who you would like to see there (based on your OKC profile), so for example mine options is Girls who like guys and everybody.

The thing which makes me think this could be a success is the fact I was already doing this on twitter as such. For example I’d say, I’m in central London tonight, anyone fancy joining me for a meal or a drink. Because I have quite a few twitter followers I tend to always catch someone but now I can do the same and hopefully meet some real cool people who, who knows might be rather cute.

Locals really hits the head of what makes OKCupid so cool. One of the secrets of OKC is its social nature. Its more like a place to hangout, do quizes, talk to people, etc, etc. Dating is a massive part but I know people who just use to chat to people in passing, read there journals and fill out the weird and wonderful quizes. If they can get people to do locale too… then there on to a new massive success

I know most people will screw up there face at the notion of Locals but for someone as public as myself, its going to be a whole lot of fun…

Android on your laptop

Android on x86

Iris Todorovic showed me her netbook and I was interested in the fact it had Android on it along side Ubuntu. It was Android Donut (or 1.6) so a very early version of Android, plus it was a Intel ATOM CPU. So I got thinking surely someones ported Android to a x86 / AMD64 processor architecture and made it work on a standard PC?

And I wasn’t wrong…

This is a project to port Android open source project to x86 platform, formerly known as “patch hosting for android x86 support“. The original plan is to host different patches for android x86 support from open source community. A few months after we created the project, we found out that we could do much more than just hosting patches. So we decide to create our code base to provide support on different x86 platforms, and set up a git server to host it.

Excellent, I’ll be giving it a try…

O2 tries to muscle in on Orange Wednesdays?

Has anyone else noticed how mobile network O2 are trying to muscle there way in on Orange Wednesdays and in actual fact setup there own groupon thing?

What is Priority Moments?
Priority Moments is an innovative location based mobile service that takes Priority to O2 customers by serving up nearby exclusive offers and experiences from brands they love. Available to O2 customers around the UK, Priority Moments makes location-based offers useful, relevant and mainstream for the first time.

O2 tried many times to offer tickets to gigs, etc in the past but nothing has stuck or had the disruptive effect of Orange Wednesdays. I now know people who stay with Orange simply because of Orange Wednesdays.

O2’s list of discounts and offers (priorities as they call it) is pretty impressive but is too lengthy… The thing they don’t get about Orange Wednesdays, is that, its exactly that… Orange Wednesdays. For example on O2 you get this from the Odeon. Half price adult & teenager tickets (Sun – Thurs). Well thats the same as you get from Orange really. Sunday – Thursday is interesting because Sundays are still popular and Thursdays are usually when the previews show. However thanks to Orange Wednesdays, thats bouncing back and forth between Wednesdays and Fridays depending on the distributor.

All the other offers and theres a lot of them, puts 02 in the Groupon & Living social fields for sure. Lots of useful discounts but no real focus, and to be fair focus of attention is maybe what is needed. Orange should stick to there guns.

Securebook update adds real Social Steganography

After all the comments and blog posts about secure book, rob best added real steganography to Securebook.

I paid the money for the full version and will be posting some secret messages to my flickr and twitter friends in the near future.

Its clearly amazing how this project has progressed and I’m really happy to have had a tiny helping hand in making this what it has become. Now I need to run this pass some to the guys at work to see what they think. But in the mean time Rob really needs to get this in front of Schneier and Steve Gibson on the security end  and Danah Boyd and Stowe Boyd on the social tip.

I’m wondering if there is a interesting tie up with Google plus’s automatic uploading of photos and securebook’s social steganography? On #Techgrumps it was already mentioned that this would be great for those taking and sharing sensitive photos if there camera was later seized. Not only would your photos be online straight away, but they would also include hidden and secret information which you could only see if your a friend.

Google Boots Transdroid Torrent Manager from Android Market

The feature in question

I am very disappointed with Google… After reading this on Torrent Freak

For many Android users Transdroid is the perfect remote access app for managing their BitTorrent clients on the go. The app allows users to start and stop torrents, search torrent files and even use the barcode scanner to find matching torrent files.

Transdroid offered both a free and a paid version of the app, and judging from the 400,000 downloads people seemed to appreciate it. However, as of this week, Google decided that Transdroid is no longer eligible to be placed in the Android Market.

“I have just received an e-mail from Google that Transdroid, both the free and donate version, have been pulled form the Android Market. This is due to apparent violations in the content policies of publishing in the Android Market,” Transdroid’s developer announced.

The developer of the application has wrote up his exchanges with Google and looks to be building a lite version which doesn’t including ezRSS feeds and Torrent Search.

I guess the good thing about Android is, even if they block it from all the stores, you can still download it and install it yourself.

The HTC, slowly feeling their way around

All my current phones

HTC you got to love them…

From obscurity they rose via Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform. I’ve always been a fan because frankly they packed in a ton of technology into their devices and then sold them at a reasonable price. Mainly because they signed exclusive deals to the likes of Orange in the UK.

When they started producing Android devices, things really picked up and HTC started making a real name for themselves with the general public. Hackers also enjoyed Android HTC devices because they were more like a PC than anything else. HTC must have understood this when they jumped on the Social media bandwagon…

However they may not have expected the 2 way nature of the early adopters. Here’s their backtracking in action…

First case… HTC decides to lock all there bootloaders on future devices

Then… HTC changes its mind after all the comments on its own Facebook page…

Second case… HTC says the Desire won’t get Gingerbread

Then… HTC backtracks, says the Desire will get Gingerbread after all‎…

A month into my rooted HTC Desire

With help from a friend, I rooted my HTC Desire so I could put CyanogenMod on it using the Rom Manager.

When I first rooted it, I didn’t do anything to it but after a while the same problems started happening with the lack of storage again even under Android 2.2 Froyo. This time, I installed Rom Manager and wiped the whole thing clean.

The Rom was the CyanogenMod 7.1 which means I’m now running Android 2.3.3 (Gingerbread)

For the first week I wasn’t sure I liked everything, it was too basic. I had to install all the apps which usually come preinstalled. I had the basic Google apps but for some reason some of them were not installable so for a long time I couldn’t install Google Maps and Amazon Reader for example.

Having the raw Gingerbread Android operating system took a little while to get use to but its just so great not having all that Orange crap on the phone and not being able to remove it. Memory for storage was always a issue and because not every application can be moved to the SD card, it became a balancing act of not installing too much and clearing the cache a lot. But now those days are long gone, thankfully.

One of the highlights so far is the personal Wifi hotspot (MyFi) which was introduced in Froyo but for some reason never worked with my Kindle ever. Now it works and seems pretty stable, which is great. On the other hand the standard Gingerbread camera application is pretty crap and I’ve not really found a replacement worthy of keeping.

It is a real shame I had to root the device just to take control of the HTC Desire. I’m glad to see HTC finally did the right thing and decided not to lock down the bootloader.

Rooting your phone isn’t for everyone and I do have quite a bit more respect for what Orange do to a operating system to provide a usable experience for the most people. Its just a shame they also put all that crapware on the device too. If they allowed people to uninstall the crapware, I wouldn’t have had to root my device.