Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Yet Another i from Apple

Apple released its much hyped iPhone a few days back and reviews have started coming in. Here is what Ryan Block has to say about it

    • The mobile version of OS X or whatever it is the iPhone runs takes up 700MB of the device's capacity. Damn son!
    • There's no way to cut, copy, or paste text! WHOA! Big, big mistake.
    • No A2DP support. That, friends, is such a huge bummer right there.
    • Sorry, music can't be used as a ringtone -- even if it's just a raw MP3. No additional ringtones will be sold at launch.
    • On a PC the iPhone syncs with Outlook for calendars AND addresses! Noice.
    • It supports Exchange in some capacity, according to Walt, but he doesn't exactly say how.
    • Pogue again confirms document file reading -- but not editing -- for PDF, Word, and Excel (only).
    • Adobe Flash support is officially out. It's just not in the browser. Neither is there any other kind of embedded video support. Sorry everybody, that's that.
    • It will take snaps, but won't record video. How can Apple love YouTube as much as it does and not realize cellphone-shot movies make up a sizeable chunk of the crazy crap you find on there?
    • Oh, and no MMS. And sorry, no voice dialing, either.
    • Contact groups can't be emailed as contact lists.
    • Apple sez between 300-400 charges the iPhone will lose battery capacity -- you'll send it in and get the cell replaced for a fee. Meh. We knew this would be the case, but still, meh.
    • Apple can (and supposedly will) be rolling out periodic updates -- no surprise there.
    • Battery life is, somehow, almost as mind-blowingly good as Apple claims for calls, music, and movies.
    • As we suspected, users are prompted with lists of WiFi networks if you're not nearby a trusted hotspot. We've seen this on other phones, and we're afraid this would get friggin annoying.
    • It's said to be very scratch resistant. The facade both front and rear apparently just doesn't pick up marring like regular iPods do.
    • Voice quality is said to be good -- not great.

Well... Not that everyone dislikes it, there are others who did like the new iDevice and thought it is worth the hype.

Anyway, I am not going to pass any comment on it (as I have not seen it!).

But, I would recommend people to take a look at this new device from HTC running Windows Mobile 6.

Monday, June 25, 2007

Lets help Earth cool down a little!

Its normal for me to leave my computers ON for longer than they need to be kept ON. I believe there are many more people doing something similar. I don't know how others feel about doing it. At least I regret doing so, but I still do it. Its become a habit now. It ends up wasting a lot of energy which in turn is taxing on the environment.

Uniblue Labs (a Microsoft certified partner) took note of it and made a cool tool to help us save some energy without having to leave this bad habit of ours. The tool basically minimizes energy consumption by our computer in several ways, turning off monitors in sometime, lower/turn off the hard disk spin, hibernate the computer. All the settings are configurable. The coolest part is, it shows you how much energy you have saved and how it has helped the earth. Take a look at the screenshot below :-

Localcooling

I have installed it on my machine and I urge everyone to download it and use it.

However, it doesn't mean I will continue with my bad habit. I'll work towards improving on it :-)

Lets help Earth cool down a little!

Friday, June 22, 2007

A quick lite note

Just happened to stop by this . Watching the video makes me feel happier. I am not the only guy who feels miserable about things. There are others who feel more miserable than me :-)

It reminds me of a saying. Well! I don't quite remember the saying but the essence was "We feel happy about others being miserable and we feel miserable about others feeling happy". Though most of the times I disagree with the quote, at least for now, I am with it :)

And above all, it's Apple facing the heat. There is nothing else that makes me happier.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

25 years of a hard plastic disc

Today, Compact Disc (CD) completed 25 years of its existance in the Market. Nothing much to talk about it. Everyone who can read this article pretty much knows about CD.
However, if you are interested in knowing a bit more about it, you can do that here.

Monday, June 18, 2007

How miserable can you feel

I lost my bike keys on Thursday. I had lost it inside the campus so I had high hopes that I would get it back somehow. And finally I got it back today. Had left it in the Gym Locker. However cool I pretended to be, I was feeling miserable inside. It felt awful leaving my bike in the office and taking a cab (specially in a very nice weather when you want to cruise along on your bike). Anyway, the chapter is closed now. Now I love my bike more than ever :)

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Safari for Windows

#define WinSafari "Safari for Windows"

Apple released their famous (???) Safari browser’s beta for both OS X and Windows. Before getting into details, I must say, it definitely is a welcome move from Apple. Apple had been very close ended so far targeting Safari only for just about 5% market share that they have in the Desktop market.
On day 0, hackers around the world put their brains to work and wrote exploits for WinSafari . Here is a quick compilation of some of them:-

You can find many more if you search on the internet (or if you write one)!!!
I downloaded Safari today out of curiosity. I didn’t get into details of writing an exploit on Safari. But I just tried to surf a few websites that I visit quite often. All I can say is that it is highly immature for at least rendering. CSS breaks most of the times, Unicode doesn’t work, JavaScript breaks every now and then and many more. This is not a hacker’s perspective. This is a naïve user’s perspective. As a simple user who wants to surf the web, one would assume that the pages will at least appear as they should.


Here are some side by side comparisons of how the same page looks in IE 7 and in WinSafari





















PageOn IE 7On WinSafari
iGoogle
Windows Live Image Search
Unicode characters (Hindi)

#if