I've used fring occasionally for a long time now. I first used it with the Nokia N95, and then most recently with Android and iPhone 4 for video chat. I had also used it as a generic SIP client, too.
And now I've just been told by my wife that it's spamming her and, presumably, everyone with status update messages. And frequently! Just check out that screenshot.
I've set both the iPhone and Android client to not do that. But, guess what? It's still doing that. Amazingly annoying, especially since I don't even use fring for IM.
With the recent removal of Skype, I don't see why I should keep using it. Maybe I'll go back to it later. Maybe not. The video quality was decent, the audio quality was great. And, unfortunately, there are basically no other alternatives yet. So, we'll see... for now, that, I have to remove it and hope that the status updates stop!
I haven't been posting here much. Small thoughts are usually on twitter or even buzz. Longer writing energy and time is generally saved for articles. All of our writing lately has been focused on Android development. Of course, we do develop for other platforms, too. We're very platform agnostic. ;)
When Android FroYo SDK (Android 2.2) came out, we got some requests to write about it. Here are two of the articles:
You got a shiny new Apple iPhone 4, right? You love that retina display! But, none of your other devices have one! What are you to do?
All your peers have a shiny new Apple iPhone 4 with its amazing retina display! Your phone is feeling blue, not having a retina display of its own. What are you to do?
It's simple!* Just create your own retina display. All you have to do is follow these easy instructions and all of your devices will have their own retina displays! We'll call this Retination: that act of making a retina display out of a normal display.
Stage 1: Determine Device Pixels Per Inch
First, you need to determine the pixels per inch of the device you want to retinate. You can do this by looking up the specifications for "ppi" or "dpi" or use simple measure the width and divide the width in pixels by the width in inches. Apple's documentation says their retina display is 326 ppi. Your display will be different. As an example, we'll use the Motorola Droid. It has a ppi of about 265.
Stage 2: Determine the Distance of Retinality
Now, using the same trick Apple uses to call the iPhone 4 display a retina display, you'll determine this for your display. The human eye has specific, well known optical characteristics. That is, the effective resolving power of the human eye for someone with 20/20 vison is, and has been, measured and agreed upon (just check Wikipedia!).
Using this data, we can determine the distance at which a display becomes a retina display. For the iPhone 4, Apple states this is 10-12 inches. My own calculations show that this correct; I get 10.4 inches. I don't know about you, but I don't hold my phone up that close to use it. I do a pinch-zoom and hold it farther away.
Anyway, the formula to convert PPI to DTR (Distance To Retinality) is 3438 * (1/PPI). The 3438 number is the scaling factor number derived from a 1 arc-minute visual acuity for a person with 20/20 vision.
Keeping to the Motorola Droid, we can now calculate that its display needs to be a whopping 13 inches away to be retinated! Gosh, more than a foot away before you can't distinguish pixels? The Horror!
Stage 3: Using Your New Powers of Retination
Now that you're empowered to retinate all of your displays, don't hold it over your Apple iPhone 4 toting friends too much. Their display is still a higher density and retinates so close you'll feel cross eyed when trying to unretinate it. And, there's no doubt; it's a nice display, retina or not.
Some Examples
I went ahead and calculated the distance to retinality for a number of common devices.
A Nexus One display retinates at just under 14 inches
The Evo 4G, with it's large display, retinates at nearly 16 inches
The Archos 5, with an even larger display, retinates at almost 18 inches
The T-Mobile G1, having a small, but low resolution display, needs 19 inches to retinate
The Nokia N900 has a 3.5" display and high enough resolution to bring it's distance to retinality down to just 12.9 inches. That's 2nd only to the iPhone 4, currently.
That is, every one of these devices -- even the low resolution T-Mobile G1 -- can easily retinate within arms length.
What about your computer, laptop, and TV? I've calculated a couple of common display sizes:
A 15.4" MacBook Pro sporting a 1440x900 display retinates at 31 inches, just over 2.5 feet. That's about my normal working distance at my desk.
A 24" monitor with a standard 1920x1200 resolution takes 3 feet to retinate. That's not a terrible working distance, but I'm usually closer and the display definitely appears grainy.
A 30" monitor with a standard 2560x1600 display, however, needs just 34 inches to retinate. That's definitely a great working distance for these beasts. Apple even makes one of these. Apparently they didn't realize they already had a display on their hands that was often used at the retinality distance.
A 40" FullHD (1920x1080) TV needs just over 5 feet to retinate. A 40" TV with a sloppy 1280x720 Half HD (720p) display needs nearly 8 feet to retinate. This means two things. First, it means that if your TV is closer than either of these numbers, it's big enough to truly see the details. Second, it means if your 40" TV is under 8 feet away, an average person can easily see the difference between 720p and 1080p. For bigger TVs, this distance increases. Going Full HD does, mathematically, make a difference to the average human eye. ;)
Did you enjoy this retination of your display?
Now go out and retinate something!
(*Note: Yes, this is meant to be a little tongue-in-cheek. However, the math should be accurate. A Discover magazine blog post brought these numbers to my attention. I also checked with Wikipedia.)
So, you like the idea of an OS that's just the browser? It brings lots of nice things to the table, such as fast boot times, access to a plethora of great web applications, no worries about storage (it's all online), and all the greatness of the web without the hassle of everything else bundled with operating systems these days.
Except, what if you want to run native applications? What if something requires a much higher level of performance than JavaScript can provide?
Turns out, Google thought about this long ago: they recommend using NativeClient. Right now, though, it's a download for your operating system of choice (Win, Lin, or Mac). The implication, though, is that it will be part of Chromium OS. This could be the missing key for filling in the gap between web and local performance issues and interfaces. Would we ever see a version of Premier, or even Photoshop, written to support such an environment? Yeah, probably not. But it could enable such types of applications and games that require more than what a Javascript environment can handle.
Yet, it could still be delivered through the network, so updates are always applied. Local caching can fill in for when the network isn't available (which happens, regardless of how pervasive it becomes).
But, is it enough? I suspect it would be for most folks. But, for creative folks, back-end business work, engineering, development, and other things, it won't be enough for a while.
And where does Java fit in to this? It fills the gap -- plus some -- on Android.
Google Public DNS is certainly fast to type, 8.8.8.8, and as easy to remember as other top level DNS servers, such as 4.2.2.1. However, it's performance seems to be really lacking. That's quite odd, considering their whole reason for launching it is to have a fast DNS server for really fast web browsing. It's a great concept, but something is missing: the goal of the concept.
Have a look. That's just not a very good showing for a system that's documented to be on the other end. I used a tool called namebench, which is open source and created, apparently, as a Google 20%er project.
For kicks, I decided to run this on a dedicated server I have.
It may be called "Private Browsing" or "Incognito" or, more colloquially, porn mode. But, there is a perfectly useful reason to use it: multiple accounts with the same service.
For instance, you can start a new Incognito session with Chrome, login to a different GMail accounts, and then close the session without ever worrying about your primary tabs getting confused with Reader, Calendar, GMail, etc.
This works because the cookies and session information isn't kept. On Chrome, though, it is shared with all incognito tabs that are running at once until they are closed. This means you can only do one additional session at a time (in addition to your primary one). But, it's often faster than opening a new browser.
Over at the Chrome Techa blog, they ask if you'd take a free netbook from Google. I would. Why not? Chrome OS basically just runs Chrome. I use Chrome. So what's wrong with that? More machines accessing the net gives Google more revenue. Why? They have such pervasive advertising that simply getting more people online is good for them.
It's a bit wierd, considering that dictionary.com works so well, but I'm finding that I use the Mac OS X built-in dictionary more than using a web one now. It even sometimes defines words within Spotlight, but not reliably enough.
Without looking, I don't even know if one comes with Vista or Windows 7, by default. I didn't even know about this one until I started seeing words defined in Spotlight, either. It also serves as a thesaurus, too.
But wait, there's more! Did you know it also has Wikipedia? This is pretty cool stuff! I don't know that I'd use the Wikipedia part more than just searching in Google, but it's neat. Unlike the Dictionary and Thesaurus, though, the Wikipedia portion requires a web connection. A locally cached version would make it super cool -- and, then again, super big.
The New Kindle 2 has been highly anticipated. It's now available for pre-order and will be shipping within a couple of weeks. Back in November, Amazon sent out Kindles to some people for a free 30 day trial (e.g. no upfront costs like when you order and return). We tried it out.
We had a few problems with it. First, the battery life was terrible, especially considering we had wireless off (more on that later) and that it doesn't use any power to display a page (I tested this by pulling the battery with a page showing -- pretty fun!). It would last maybe a day or two before needing to be plugged in, so we had to keep it plugged in all the time.
Second, the buttons were all in the wrong places. The page turn buttons ran along the sides and would be clicked by just picking it up. Considering page turning was very slow (distractingly slow), this didn't work so well.
Third, the wireless didn't work. There is no Sprint 3G coverage where we are, apparently, so we couldn't use any of the store features, regularly updated content, the browser, etc. None of that could work.
Finally, it was way too expensive for what it was. The books cost almost nothing to be reproduced in digital form, yet Amazon is charging more than a paperback book ($10) for them. This doesn't work and since they can't be sold, it's money completely gone. Considering renting a book from a library is free, and buying a book for $8 that can be resold for $4 is easily 60% cheaper, this just doesn't work. Then, add on to that $400 and you've got a perfect storm of exorbitant expenses that really don't make any sense at all.
So, when I started hearing about the new Kindle and how it was going to improve upon the last, I was hopeful. Well, all of the details are out today. Sadly, it looks like they've failed to solve any of the problems we had with it.
I'm a huge advocate of doing OS updates right away, especially on critical systems. Some may argue that it could introduce side effects and other problems. Although this is potentially true, most updates these days really are security fixes and are tested quite well before being pushed out as critical because of this very issue. This applies across Windows, Linux, and Mac machines (plus some other OSes out there, I'm sure). Not updating a machine, though, puts other machines at risk. At some point, there may be liability issues for having a compromised machine because you didn't update. So, make sure you update -- and frequently!
I usually have automatic updating on my systems. This works great for systems I use all the time or that are on all the time (typically the same, these days, since having a machine on all the time is expensive). However, lately there's been a machine that isn't being updated. Why?
The simple answer is: When it does get used, it's not for very long and an update would be very distracting. For me, it's an inconvenience and I just ignore the notices so I can get to what I'm doing on it (watching TV, in this case). By the time I'm done with it, I want it off or I've forgotten that there was an update it needs.
Problem is, I suspect this is how many folks use their primary machines and why they don't get updated. I'm still convinced the a large majority of people who don't update find it far too complex to do. Now, though, I think there may be other reasons. And this is one of them.
Please streamline updates and make them faster. A big part of this would be figuring out how to do them without a reboot. Yes, that's a complex problem. But... figure it out. It will make computers safer, friendlier, and more usable. That's a good thing for everyone.
And now I've just been told by my wife that it's spamming her and, presumably, everyone with status update messages. And frequently! Just check out that screenshot.
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It's a bit wierd, considering that dictionary.com works so well, but I'm finding that I use the Mac OS X built-in dictionary more than using a web one now. It even sometimes defines words within Spotlight, but not reliably enough.
But wait, there's more! Did you know it also has Wikipedia? This is pretty cool stuff! I don't know that I'd use the Wikipedia part more than just searching in Google, but it's neat. Unlike the Dictionary and Thesaurus, though, the Wikipedia portion requires a web connection. A locally cached version would make it super cool -- and, then again, super big.
The New Kindle 2 has been highly anticipated. It's now available for pre-order and will be shipping within a couple of weeks. Back in November, Amazon sent out Kindles to some people for a free 30 day trial (e.g. no upfront costs like when you order and return). We tried it out.
I'm a huge advocate of doing OS updates right away, especially on critical systems. Some may argue that it could introduce side effects and other problems. Although this is potentially true, most updates these days really are security fixes and are tested quite well before being pushed out as critical because of this very issue. This applies across Windows, Linux, and Mac machines (plus some other OSes out there, I'm sure). Not updating a machine, though, puts other machines at risk. At some point, there may be liability issues for having a compromised machine because you didn't update. So, make sure you update -- and frequently!