BlackBerry – DevCon10 – day 1

September 28th, 2010

Big announcement today:

PlayBook – the tablet from BB. Impressive hardware, impressive OS, limited dev tools

Hardware wise:
- dual core 1 GHz cpu – fast, very fast – the only doubt is the battery life, let’s see what the tests will reveal
- 1 GB ram, good, really good – will be enough for the next 2 years
- the screen is close to the retina display from Apple (I don’t know the spec, but is very close, I was able to see the pixels in the photo zoomed)
- missing the 3G module
- good addition 2 camera – one being the front facing camera

Software wise:
- QNX – many of the readers will be in the mist reading this name, let me gave you some background: 12 years ago windows 98 was shipping on a cd or on many, many floppy, QNX was downloadable as a demo version on a single 1.4 MB floppy. And was fast, I mean really fast. In 1.4 they crammed a full OS and a graphical interface. And was really impressive, with a microkernel architecture and  one of the very few RTOS (real time operating system) was  the best thing available. I never had the chance to play with the QNX as a developer but they were having a full SDK and the time demonstrated they were right, today we have the QNX around us all the time, is the quite hero.
- the down side – for now only HTML5 and Flash apps will be available on the PlayBook

Comercial wise:
- no news – no prices (yet)
- looks very thin

I will come back with some more news later

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iPad and ebooks, or I should say iBooks ?

April 19th, 2010

I will publish my findings about publishing books on the iPad. Follow the blog for more info on tools and tricks.

First trick: if you try to add a book to the iPad, don’t drag the book to the iPad in iTunes. Drag the book to the Library. If is your first book you will not see a Books category but, the category will be added. Then syncronize the iTunes with the iPad.

Publishing tip: The books with special diacritics (special romanian characters) are looking ok for only 3 of the fonts. Also they are taking a long time to update after a font change.

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Tfl – very funny.

April 18th, 2010

Sunday night.
Warwick, my PM, decided is late and after all tomorrow is Monday so a new week is starting, so he sent everybody home.
Got to Liveerpool street station and guess what, my train will leave in 15 minutes. Normally I will use the Metropolitan line but, for some time now, the Met line is closed during the weekend.
Anyway, gotthe train, close to home, 2 more stops. Right, the train stop. And I mean: STOP. Everybody is shuttered, we got the driver announcing that the train is broken. In a few words:35 minutes later the driver with his shopping is going to the other end of the train. 2 more busses and I will get home. Till now: 2 hours and 20 minutes. Let’s see what else.

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iPad – how is the positioning working

April 15th, 2010

Today I started the iPad maps application.  Very strange, the iPad picked my location with an excellent precision.
So the positioning/location/find me feature works.

So I started to investigate how is that possible.
At first Paola suggested based on some article that she found online that is based on geo-IP or is doing a triangulation of some kind.
Triangulation can be done on 3 different ways (at least using main stream technology). GPS, GSM or WiFi.
The iPad has no GPS or GSM yet. Will be available on the next release, soon I hope.
So the only options remaining are geo IP and WiFi triangulation.

Walked out, and got disconnected from the WIFI. And the maps locate me still works. Also I bet that the IP of the company is not actually mapped as precise.

SO, the only remaining option is WiFi triangulation. I wonder if Google, with the street view, had anything to do with mapping the WiFi coverage.

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