18th Moon Station

The Wall

There are two kind of Fortress… or have you ever thought that basically a Prison is an inverted Fortress ?

A fortress protects us from threat outside, the same way as a prison protects us from the threat “outside” (or we call it inside because it’s relatively surrounded by our freeman zone).

Wouldn’t it be the same with the so-called Walled Garden ?
We hate walled garden that kept us from going outside.
But… what about a walled garden that kept every of those poor soul outside of our luxury ?

Apps composition in my phone

What is your most important parameter of a mobile platform?

I forgot the detail of which site I read that question or even if the question is about mobile phone platform, mobile phone, or even digital camera (which is totally unrelated).

But for mobile platform, I guess I summed it up as

1. How many first party apps and big name 3rd party apps are available.
2. How often those apps are updated.

The size of the catalogue itself is not that important IMO. It’s those names that matter, which is important. Besides, having thousands of single-site RSS reader and fart apps is more of a liability rather than strength because it flooded the marketplace and make the really interesting apps invisible.

Moreover, bigger developers would need the man-hour allocation in their most likely very efficiency-demanding management. The commitment to build and maintain applications for a platform thus reflect how they put their trust, more than those doing it for hobby. There’s bigger stake involved.

But well, I think most applications are publish-and-forget.

As long as presence is there

Maintaining is more difficult than building. Read the newspaper this morning quoting major of a town in Germany who visit Jakarta for cooperation in reviving the old city area into tourism spot. He said fixing the place won’t be difficult, but keeping it that way would need a lot of efforts.

Same with apps. One of the most important thing is how often updates are made, either bug fix or new features. It’s not just because the application will become better, but it actually showed a commitment from the developer.

Now, Microsoft made a decision in their AppHub. Applications published as worldwide before early July won’t be automatically available in the new 19 new countries (including Chiba prefecture in Japan which somehow is listed as a country). The developers will have to cross-submit it (or maybe flip the switch only?).

The problem is, a lot of the applications seems to be abandoned. High profile examples  are Flickr and Twitter, which both are not available (at least from the marketplace I’m using). The applications has been staying at early version all this time.

So what? Perhaps they have no intention at all. They make the application just to say they have apps for that minority platform. As long as they have one (others are even too ashamed to list it in their website) they felt like their obligation has been done. That way, when a big change (like this one) happened they doesn’t react, because they think it’s not their problem anymore.

Gowalla, Location service and Comma

Gowalla is finally released for Windows Phone 7 in the Marketplace. But this still opens my yet unanswered question regarding the Windows Phone 7 location service.

I had several applications that uses the location service. Some, for example WinGPS Info, and of course the built in Maps application get the right GPS lock of my location. 4th & Major also got the location right.

My problem is with the two Gowalla apps. The official, and the earlier released Macropod. Both returned spots that are tens of thousands of miles off my place. I think, FoodSpotting also holds the same issue.

I then remembered the review in GPX logger application. One of the reviewer mentioned that the application will output invalid CSV file if the phone is set to region which uses comma to separate decimal values. Yes, there are countries that separate decimal using comma and uses dot to separate thousands (me personally prefers apostrophe).

So I tried changing my regional setting to English and wow, it really works. The application now returned the spot names nearby my place!

I think the problem then is in the API for being unprepared to handle this problem. In addition, applications are also not prepared to handle this variation of regional setting. Hope they can fix it soon.

Or, Microsoft should just use dot for the output of the Location Service.

Applications as feature

Bouncing back a misconception I had about applications in Windows Phone, especially the Hub concept.

Back then, when not much details are out about the Windows Phone OS, there are some notions about the Hubs. One of it is that the user interaction with the phone will be centred on the concept of Hub. There will be hub for social (People), communication (Messaging), multimedia (Pictures, Zune), work (Office), etc. The old concept about applications that are opening applications will be gone, replaced with seamless experience.

Well… that’s kind of abstract enough, right?

Then, I just thought of the word recently. What if, this means the platform will encourage developers to build not application, but features/functions ? In other word, building modules, building plug-in to the OS itself, as well as maybe the back end cloud service.

For now, the Pictures hub have extra options to pass the file to upload service or editing application. Peoples hub will be integrated more to Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, even enabling check in. The Messaging hub will also support native chatting with Live Messenger and Facebook.

But application list is still there.

IE9 and the pinned individual sites

Jumplist showing the Tasks and notification overlay on Hotmail from IEBlog

One of the very much promoted new feature of Internet Explorer 9 is the pinned site. This feature enables users to do these to compatible sites.

• Put a shortcut to the site in the taskbar just like applications.
• Have the shortcut showing the website’s icon.
• Give a tasks menu that will act like shortcut to the appropriate sections.
• Give notification overlay on the taskbar icon (like the number “2” on the screenshot at right) as well as blinking the taskbar to get attention.

How is this good for the website makers? For one thing, like you can see, the user in that screenshot have eBay, Hulu, Hotmail, Facebook and Bing’s branding icon staring at them all the time, reminding the user as well as inviting them to click, open the site and look at the ads.

Ruining habit

After installing the newly released Firefox 4, consenting knowingly that several of the plug in I use will become unusable, I found a slight nuisance in the minor change of user interface.

They simplify the context menu by removing the “Open Link” item which after all is using two clicks to achieve what you can do by single click on the link.

The problem is I already had a habit to right click and choose Open Link in New Tab. Like all habit, it’s muscle memory to right click, slide the pointer slightly down, and click. After trying the FF4, I accidentally clicked Open Link in New Window numerous times.

Just have to get used to it, right? It’s just that I used three browsers, Internet Explorer, Opera and Firefox. As my memory serve me right, all of them have three choice to open link with the same structure.

• Open link
• Open in new tab
• Open in new window

I didn’t use Chrome and Safari so I don’t know their context menu,

Add: I just used a PC with older version of Firefox. Apparently, Firefox don’t have the “Open link” menu option, my mistake. They only switch the position of “Open in new tab” and “Open in new window”. My mistake.

Flickr for W7, useless without touch

Yes, I checked the download page for Flickr for Windows 7. It states clearly, this is for touch enabled devices.

Mine can’t be used beyond this state. The reason is simple… seems like the developers are targeting only touch enabled devices, which I don’t have. The result is that nearly all the option is useless, inaccessible. It doesn’t respond to mouse clicks or keyboard press at all.

Well, the option and upload button works, but the upload interface is not working without touch screen either.

There are drivers like MultiTouch Vista that seems to be a driver and service to emulate multi touch input device using multiple mouse. But it’s in Alpha (and probably not developed anymore), aimed to developers, and user would have to compile it themselves, something I’m not too comfortable with yet.

Technorati タグ: application, flickr, multi-touch, windows 7

Speed and features already taken for granted

Recently, I joined to two hobby-based community site. Both are different than those that I used to attend in term of… form. Usually the place I joined is a talk based, online forum where members share thoughts, wisdom and nonsense with words. But this one is gallery based, commenting on works posted (but without personal profile like Pixiv or DA).

And more recently, between both, I think I prefer the smaller later joined community. True it has tighter rules on the gallery post. But the site use phpBB instead of what seems to be home grown solution which might account to the faster loading time and several other convenience such as bbCode for formatting and most importantly persistent login.

Which kind of ironic because the home grown solution should’ve been made ground up to support the site’s requirement, right?

Of course, added to the fact that the later had more talk in the forum I can follow compared to the earlier which are more fixated to the gallery instead with all the politics and drama in it.

SeaMonkey

While not a user of any major browsers other than Internet Explorer and Opera, I do sometimes play with Firefox in my brother’s notebook. But my primary Gecko browser instead is Sea Monkey, which is mostly the same other than some inconvenience.

Sea Monkey can use ABP and NoScript, which is probably the essential extension and function other browsers should provide (whitelisting). Sadly, many other extensions for Firefox doesn’t work, even spell-check dictionary labelled working for Sea Monkey.

But another built-in feature I loved from SeaMonkey would be the cookies. The part where everything is presented in list instead of tree per-domain is not so convenient, but they have the feature to automatically block cookies from certain domain if removed. IE’s implementation require typing the domain by hand and doesn’t accept wildcard.

Firefox doesn’t have the feature, and moreover when trying with my brother’s computer (using latest Firefox release) it has trouble removing certain cookies manually (remove all works though, killing all indiscriminantly).

Opera… while I like it, the content-blocking is less elegant than ABP. Moreover it also doesn’t seem to have the built-in feature to block tracking cookies from specific domain without cluttering the cookies list. And worst from the newest version, my bookmarklets doesn’t work anymore.