The Tao of Mac

Apple offers free licensing for Mini DisplayPort spec

Rui Carmo — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 23:19:36 GMT

This is clever, and most welcome – one of the things that’s been irking me about the new MacBook lineup and the companion 24” display is the Mini DisplayPort connector, which makes it a pretty bad investment to buy both. Now, what if some enterprising PC manufacturer adopted this for their laptops as well? Hmm?

Technorati Tags: apple, displayport, free, hardware, licensing, links, macbook, pc, standards, video

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MPEG Streamclip

Rui Carmo — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 11:49:58 GMT

Streamclip is a free multi-platform (Mac and Windows) video encoding tool.

Here’s a set of sample settings, courtesy of Vitor Domingos:

Technorati Tags: editor, encoding, h.264, mac, video, vitor_domingos, windows

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Braindump

Rui Carmo — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 23:54:08 GMT

Yeah, I’ve been busy again. Very.

The thing about working in large corporations is that you usually have fairly big things going on now and then, some of which tend to take entirely too much of your time.

And although I’m all for being enthusiastic about work, I find it that I am much more enthusiastic about a fair balance between work and private life, more so when it’s obvious that I need to compensate for the excesses of yore and aim to have proper amounts of rest and relaxation – without which I now find myself functioning below par.

There’s a lot to be said (and written) about the transition from gung-ho knowledge worker to middle-aged parent and how you need to be careful with the order in which you mix such sensitive ingredients. I suppose that will be a recurring theme here over the next few years, but I might as well take a stab at it right away (I hate postponing things).

To me, it’s all about getting the right mix of flexibility, enthusiasm, and order, with the one in the middle being the fulcrum on which you balance the other two.

And although freely admitting that enthusiasm for work and business has been somewhat diminished by the current state of economic downturn, I’m more than happy to believe it to be balanced by family stuff (which is fun, regardless of the added physical and psychlogical strain of having to mind a toddler).

It’s not as if you’re going to love your work 100% of the time, ever. Steve Jobs delivered a memorable and moving speech back in 2005 regarding this, but I am still in the process of connecting my personal set of dots and have adjusted to the usual ups and downs in morale and motivation by trying to think ahead years in advance.

All of the bad stuff will, eventually, go away. And I have plenty of good stuff going on right now.

Which means I now have around zero time for any kind of stuff that isn’t family-related, and if I have half an hour to spare at home, I’d much rather rest than read, peruse the news or fool around a bit with my personal projects. Work is, no matter how interesting, pretty much the last choice – I need my mental hygiene outside the office, and I need it bad.

As to flexibility and order, well… Flexibility these days is understood as being the number of different things you can juggle at any one time, and I boost mine through trying to maintain an almost obsessive degree of control over my time and environment – it’s not that I fret over wasting time or having things always neatly arranged (which I definitely don’t) – it’s just that things need to mean something to me.

I do order in a rather dynamic way, by systematically organizing and re-organizing stuff in whatever way makes the most sense for the stuff I have to do at the moment. And over the years, I’ve found that Mind maps are a great way to go about that in the broadest sense, with only two major shortcomings:

They are pretty much worthless if you have to collaborate with other folk. You can use them to brainstorm, summarize or present an initial idea, but most other folk won’t use them and:
They handle very poorly over time – after six months, you have to start all over because the problem space is completely different and the maps are crowded with irrelevant stuff that piled up inside.

Add to that people’s usual attention span (I’m atypical in that I can/need to keep track of stuff over years without much trouble), and you’ve got quite a few interesting problems in terms of Knowledge Management that I’d love to be able to fix (for real) without becoming one of those vacuous consultants that can’t find their way out of a paper bag.

But that’s not really the point – more of an interesting sideline I’d like to explore later, in another of those half hour slices.

This one’s up.

Technorati Tags: gtd, km, knowledge management, mind maps, mindset, parenting, personal, steve jobs, work, work-life balance

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Five Things Nokia Needs To Address To Beat The iPhone

Rui Carmo — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 09:14:40 GMT

Update: Fast forward a year and four months later, and even S60 fans are griping about lack of consistency. Competition is good – it makes you realize your favorite platform isn’t perfect. Still, the annoying thing for me is that although this piece is routinely linked to from Nokia sites, there hasn’t been much practical improvement in a year’s time (my phone of the year for 2008, the E71, still exhibits most of the same failings).

So, all that mulling about the Series 60 and the daily use of a new 3rd Edition model has finally driven me to write about Nokia and what I think they should do.

The interesting thing about this article is that I could just as well write mostly the same regarding SonyEricsson (with an extra twist due to their Walkman co-branded handsets), but never about Motorola (who clearly doesn’t hold a candle to either) or some of the others.

What can they do about the iPhone, then? Well, quite honestly, they most likely can’t beat the hype surrounding it. But they can improve what they have to a good degree, and maybe even (just maybe) come out in front again.

To the Mac zealots currently scampering around the surrounding underbrush preparing to call me a traitor for dissing the iPhone – I use a Mac because it’s the best UNIX environment on the planet, not because it’s from Apple. Read the About pages and stop sniping.

1. The Series 60 UI is Horrendously Complex

I’ve been known to rant about this in the past, but I don’t think mere words suffice anymore. And even if pictures are worth a thousand words, I just don’t think pictures are enough here too.

So I did a little usability exercise: I mapped out the menu tree from a current Series 60 3rd Edition phone, and came up with this mindmap:

Get the Flash Player to see this mindmap.

I also have a PDF version with the e-mail options partially expanded - the top-level Settings tree is so big I couldn't find a way to print it.

Bubbles are icons (either standalone applications or icons within applications). Forks are listings, input fields, you name it.

Notice that, although you can assign whatever you like to the six home screen icon shortcuts and to the two soft keys¹, things like the call log, creating a new message and finding the media you want are three to six clicks away from the home screen – and that’s assuming you know that using the number keys will open the corresponding icon.

Most people use the directional pad to navigate, which triples the average amount of clicks required to get anywhere.

It takes three clicks to get to the calculator (assuming you know where it is), and although upcoming calendar appointments can be displayed on the home screen (as a sort of implicit shortcut to the application), that’s also three clicks deep.

Those of you who wrote in saying that icons are movable to anyplace in the menu tree are right, and yet have missed the point – it is very difficult for the average user to find most phone functions, and things haven’t changed that much since 2005.

Even though the phones are now much faster, the main point is that you still have to jump through a number of hoops to accomplish even simple tasks in a Series 60 phone. Even sending an SMS is horrendously complex and requires a number of operations (getting to the message editor, moving down into the edit field, tapping it out, picking the person I want to send it to from my contacts, then picking the right number, etc…)

Now try to change your e-mail signature to read “Sent from my nPhone”. It’s almost impossible to find it on the first go (or even the second time around, unless you’re very familiar with Series 60 devices).

Too tricky, you say? Too application-specific? OK, look for Bluetooth settings. Or for a music track, or for the last call you missed (in case you dismissed the home screen alert). It’s all buried a number of levels deep.

And, for an encore, try to find one of the applications I installed myself. Go on.

Let’s compare that menu tree to the iPhone’s.

Oh wait, everything’s on the home screen (except settings), so there’s actually no point in drawing a menu tree for the iPhone.

Those of you who don’t get that the above paragraph is ironic need to re-read some of my older posts. My point here isn’t that the iPhone’s spartan range of choices is good (it is, in fact, rather limiting), it’s that Nokia needs to stop designing UIs with such a tremendous amount of clutter and redundancy (note that you can actually find some things in two different places in the mindmap above…)

A two-year-old can find the video they want to watch on it – there’s ample proof of that on YouTube, and until Nokia fundamentally rethinks their UI, they haven’t got a chance²

2. Feeling is Believeing

No, I’m not going to go on about touch screens. I don’t think a touch screen is a must to beat the iPhone (more on that below).

My first thought when I picked up the N95 wasn’t regarding the size (it’s humungous, causing a seriously embarassing bulge in any kind of pocket, as if you carried a pet tumor around) – I had used an N80 previously, so I was used to the Nokia brick-like form factor.

No, my first thought was “800 Euro for this cheap greenish plastic?”

The thing looked like it was made in China (in the dodgy sense, since some of them actually are these days), and, worse of all, felt like it too. And I’m not talking about pre-production samples (I handle plenty of those, and am used to unfinished plastics) – I was handling a commercial device.

As a counter-example, allow me to point out that the E61 quickly became a favorite for people hesitant between it and the Blackberry due to the magnesium alloy backplate.

You picked one up and it felt cool and solid, quite unlike the Blackberry’s usual plastics. Never mind if the keyboard input and the e-mail experience is inferior, people perceived the E61 as solid and long-lasting.

3. Design Needs To Be Clean, Not Crufty

As a sideline from casing materials, someone at Nokia needs to take a long, hard look at their product line and start shaving off the gratuitous coloring, festooned plastics and absolutely hideous UI color themes that they have been shipping.

I still don’t think it was a coincidence that they won awards for simple, straightforward phones (like the 8800, for starters) and not for their fashion line’s hideousness.

I would suggest tattooing the sentence “Less is more” on the tips of their designer’s fingers, were it not something that Catbert would go out and patent as a design guideline as soon as this post hits the net.

4. Symbian is (Sort Of) OK, Now Ship It In Decent Hardware

The biggest advantage I see Nokia as having is their OS. And I don’t mean that regarding their developer community, or the way in which you can just drop in pretty standard media formats via an USB cable³ and have them work – all of those are things that Apple can counter with a few fanatically devoted developers and firmware updates.

And yet, they cripple it beyond measure by shipping devices that are slow and/or have barely enough RAM to get by. The Series 60 platform is legendary for its “Out of memory” errors and sluggishness, none of which can be attributed to the OS – especially not when licensees like Samsung are actually shipping faster and more responsive devices than Nokia’s own.

Witness the slickness of the iPhone UI and the way Apple has turned the experience into one of perceived speed (or less attrition in getting to what you want, however you care to name it) only once, and all your expectations about how fast phones should do things are pumped up several notches⁴.

5. Point And Miss Browsing

And after having covered UI design, physical hardware, plastics, we finally come to the most obvious application of haptics on a mobile phone, and the keystone of Apple’s approach: Browsing.

Nokia has been using WebKit for a good while now, and the browser is just about every bit as good as a desktop browser when you understand the memory and interaction compromises involved in stuffing it into a phone with a keypad.

And yet, the thing is almost unusable on many of their devices due both to the way the cursor is “unsmartly” positioned atop links and to the invariably poor quality of Nokia directional pads/keys/rings (you name it, they tried it).

Now, I happen to believe that a touch screen is not essential for good interaction – in fact, it is a possible hindrance. For starters, I’m one of those people who carries their keys in the same pocket as my phone, and who likes to be able to use tactile feedback to text without looking at the keyboard or screen⁵.

Not to mention, of course, that it makes for more expensive devices. But my point is that it isn’t necessary for Nokia to go banging down Balda’s door just yet.

They can simply deliver better interaction and cursor control without adopting touch screens, and there is partial proof of that available today:

The Opera Mini 4 beta currently beats the proverbial waste out of WebKit on Series 60, not just due to its smart navigation features, but also due to my actually being able to position the cursor where I want (regardless of auto-snap to links and whatnot).

And besides moving the cursor more accurately, I can also scroll faster (much faster), and full-page previews are much easier to navigate.

Ironically, Nokia could have fixed this to a very large degree by adopting a Pearl-like trackball mechanism that actually let you move the browser cursor around in a more natural way.

After all, it isn’t as if they are entirely alien to the concept (remember the 7110 scroller?).

I suppose they will, eventually, go down the touch screen route (hopefully not with the N800 technology, OS or UI), but until then, they could do a lot of the smart moves they’ve been postponing so far.

—

¹ Assuming your handset isn’t operator branded, of course. ↩

² Granted, there aren’t many two-year-olds shelling out the price of a desktop computer for a phone, but you get the idea. ↩

³ And yet, although it has taken years for Nokia to ship standard USB ports in phones, they are still useless for charging. ↩

⁴ Yes, there are some pokey aspects to Safari and mail, but, on the whole, the thing feels like greased lightning when compared to just about any other phone. ↩

⁵ I’m also heavily myopic, which means I have gotten used to doing a lot of things by touch when I’m not wearing my glasses. ↩

Technorati Tags: about, apple, blackberry, bluetooth, competition, design, dilbert, e61, e71, handsets, haptics, hype, iphone, mac, mini, mobile, motorola, n80, n800, n95, nokia, opera, os, ram, safari, samsung, series 60, sms, sonyericsson, technology, ui, unix, usb, walkman, webkit, youtube

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iPhone 3G Press Coverage

Rui Carmo — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 09:06:44 GMT

This page is a semi-automated link dump from all the stuff I tracked while the 3G version of the device wasn’t made public, and then some. It doesn’t try to be complete or unbiased – it’s just a link dump.

Graphics & Generic Development Resources

Date	Link	Notes
Oct 1	A touch of Cocoa: inside the iPhone SDK	With the extinction of the NDA, things became a lot more interesting.
Sep 5	Ultimate iPhone Stencil	an OmniGraffle stencil for UI mockups
Aug 19	iPhone GUI PSD	A Photoshop file with UI assets
Jun 3	Yahoo Stencil Kits	Also includes some iPhone UI elements

News Coverage

Date	Link	Notes
Nov 28	Linux on the iPhone!	Jailbreaking wasn’t enough, apparently, so the next step is to spend years trying to deliver an alternate sub-par user experience to 0.01% of people.
Nov 12	Analysts: Apple and iPhone partners blowing it in India	More evidence of analysts who simply don’t know what they’re talking about – in a market as deeply segmented ias India and where phones and tariff plans are fundamentally different, the iPhone (or any other smartphone) simply can’t be sold in droves.
Nov 10	iPhone 3G Tops RAZR, Ending Moto’s Three-Year U.S. Reign	Again, this isn’t really news, considering the average suckiness of US phones.
	iPhone Best-Selling Phone in the U.S. for Q3 2008
	iPhone 3G (temporarily?) trounces RAZR as top consumer phone
Oct 30	Analysts: Apple ‘Top 10’ Cell Phone Vendor As iPhone Grabs 2% Of Market	Somewhat hyped – I’d have liked a better definition of what they consider to be the market.
Oct 24	Revised iPhone SDK NDA better late than never	The new NDA is not that different from the old one, but will help smooth ruffled feathers.
Oct 21	So iPhone reached 11.6 million unit sales in past 12 months	Somewhat opinionated and clueless (esp. regarding profitability), but worth reading.
Oct 21	Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results	Impressive.
Oct 13	iPhone 3G becomes second best-selling handset in the US	Not at all surprising, considering the average US phone is crap.
Oct 8	The Relevance of 10 M – awaiting the final numbers for the iPhone	The percentages are mostly right, but there is an understimation of how much the industry is being driven at the high end (and in carriers) to react to the iPhone.
Oct 8	iPhone wins heart and mind of British public, takes 4 awards	Funny thing about those British technology awards – they’re a public vote, and therefore largely a matter of perception, not experience.
Oct 1	Apple Drops Part of iPhone Developer NDA	Making a whole lot of people sigh in relief
Sep 17	Mixed data on smartphones sales makes iPhone a wildcard	Rather pointless, really. With all the different definitions of smartphone right now, nobody will ever be able to do any sort of precise stats, and everyone can claim a win.
Sep 10	Apple Gains Smartphone Market Share	A minute gain overall, but measurable (depending, of course, on what you define as a smartphone). Here’s a local copy of the AdMob and Wireless Week stats graphs:
Sep 1	Apple iPhone: 8 million and counting	Although I think that counting the 2G ones is cheating a bit. Still, it’s nothing compared to what Nokia sells (and is still much less than what they sell in new S60 models alone)
Aug 24	iPhone 3G antenna test	Which shows that there is no problem whatsoever
Aug 17	Apple trims push notification out of newest iPhone firmware beta	Makes sense – best to remove something that needs tweaking than to push out an update with problems
Aug 14	iPhone 3G Issues: The Plot Thickens	I wouldn’t call it so much of a plot – more a sort of unsubstantiated hysteria.
Aug 14	What’s Behind the iPhone 3G Glitches	Speculation reaches the mainstream, sustained by little more than anecdotal evidence.
Aug 11	Analyst: 3 million iPhones sold in first month	Hmm. Nice.
Aug 11	Is iPhone’s 3G Connection a Disappointment?	Sometimes I wonder why it’s taking the US four years to catch up with Europe in 3G.
Jul 17	Apple’s iPhone Configuration Utility Disappoints	An interesting take on the enterprise tools.
Jul 14	The Second Coming: Ars goes in-depth with the iPhone 3G	Up to their usual standards, and crammed with detailed shots.
	First Impressions of the iPhone 3G and iPhone 2.0	Short but informative.
	Apple Sells One Million iPhone 3Gs in First Weekend	Not bad.
	iPhone App Store Downloads Top 10 Million in First Weekend	Not bad.
	Apple: iPhone 3G Battery Life Beats the Competition, Apple’s Own Tests	This has got to be a joke – not one Nokia or SonyEricsson in the bunch.
Jul 13	iPhone 3G: Hands-on reviewer’s notebook	Some decent points here. the full review is also worth a read.
Jul 12	Apple iPhone 3G exposed	More details on chipsets and sourcing
Jul 11	iPhone 3G disassembly	Loads of hi-res PCB shots.
Jul 10	Apple releases iPhone Configuration Utilities for business	First decent mention of what profiles are, too.
Jul 9	For iPhone, the’New’ Is Relative	Pogue weighs in.
Jul 8	Apple’s new iPhone 3G: Still not perfect, but really close	An enthusiastic thumbs up, apparently.
	Walt Mossberg reviews the iPhone 3G, isn’t that impressed	Neither am I, really.
	Newer, Faster, Cheaper iPhone 3G	Back when “cheaper” was still thought of as actual price.
Jul 7	iPhone 3G prices and plans for 21 countries	Pretty nice summary table. The plans are almost completely outdated by now (Sep’08), but it’s interesting nevertheless.
Jul 4	iPhone Timeline	A great graphical timeline, a copy of which I saved locally:
Jul 1	Apple posts iPhone 3G Guided Tour	Yep. No changes.
Jul 1	The Real Price Of The iPhone: $599	Of course, $199 is with contract only.
Jun 29	Leaked iPhone prices in Spain, official in Norway and Sweden	Subsidizing seems to be paying off
Jun 26	Orange announces iPhone 3G pricing and plan details for France	To be available Jul 17
Jun 7	Apple ranked third among smartphone vendors	Discussion of Gartner figures for the quarter, compared to 2007.
Jun 4	The trend for form over function continues	almost a quarter (24%) of respondents upgraded to their iPhone having previously owned a Motorola RAZR Good grief.
May 29	NYTimes Speculates On the Next iPhone	The unwashed masses go wild
May 28	Analysts: Apple won’t sell 10 million iPhones in 2008	I expect more controversy on this throughout the whole year.
May 28	The Guessing Game Has Begun on the Next iPhone	Surprisingly contained
May 27	Even more ‘leaked’ 3G iPhone photos make it out	Blurry shots of a white plastic casing. People eat it up.
May 19	Analyst: Don’t Buy iPhone 2.0	Hard to believe someone would base an entire piece on a Rob Enderle quote these days, but still, here’s proof.
May 19	3G iPhone revealed in third-party case render?	Not really.
May 10	Newsflash! Firmware 2.0 hints suggest Apple might be working on a 3G iPhone	Shots of a prototype network preference pane.
May 9	Safari YouTube, .Mac push e-mail found in new iPhone SDK beta	Probably the first credible reference to .Mac mobile enhancements (although it could just be IMAP IDLE support).
May 8	O2 to customers: No more iPhone for you!	Purported shortages of 2G devices fuel the hype.
May 8	iPhone non-exclusivity in Italy – it’s all about prepaid	Not quite true, but an interesting rationalization nonetheless.
May 7	“More “leaked 3G iPhone shots hit the web	Some of these have nothing to do with the iPhone.
May 7	Apple and Orange in talks about multi-country iPhone rollout	pure speculation at this point (no press releases yet)
May 6	3G iPhone again rumored for summer US/Europe launch, AT&T preps	AT&T schedules their training sessions a month in advance, and the wrong message gets out.
May 6	Vodafone, Telecom Italia announce massive iPhone rollout	Reactions to the first press releases
May 1	Case manufacturers getting early 3G iPhone size specs?	People start going nuts and debating whether or not there’s a front facing camera based on the sensor holes
Apr 29	AT&T rumored to be considering subsidies on next-gen iPhone	First mention of $199 that I can find.
Apr 18	Vodafone will reportedly carry iPhone in India in September	First mention of Vodafone deal, during a lull.

Technorati Tags: .mac, complex table, david_pogue, europe, imap, iphone, linkdump, nda, nokia, omnigraffle, photoshop, press coverage, razr, s60, sonyericsson, timeline, ui, us

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The world in figures: Industries

Rui Carmo — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 23:49:12 GMT

The Economist’s graphical overview of the world in 2009. Well worth perusing.

Technorati Tags: economics, economist, infoviz, links, world

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Nokia E71

Rui Carmo — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 22:10:04 GMT

The E71 is Nokia’s revamped E61:

Notes

Good Points

Good screen (not much in terms of resolution, but readable)
Very good keyboard and build quality (feels solid, thanks to metal back)
Good battery (it is actually the same as the E90’s)
Built in Exchange support (installed from ROM)
So-so GPS and camera (3.2Mp with auto-focus)
HSDPA support
Fast, responsive UI

Bad Points

Utterly idiotic micro-USB port with fiddly rubberized cover
Camera auto-focus mode requires manual activation via the ‘T’ key (definitely a WTF? moment)
Funky UI themes and useless animations/fades
Fiddly predictive text input (useless if you’re a polyglot)
UI still wastes screen real estate, and fonts likewise (even selecting the smallest possible)

References

Date	Link	Notes
Nov 27	Nokia E71 Shortcuts	Keyboard shortcuts for various apps
Sep 3	The E71 Review	I have no idea why people keep bashing Nokia by making business phones that aren’t tailored to playing music
Jul 17	Nokia E71 smartphone	The Reg likes it about as much as I do
Jun 27th	Nokia E71 Live Photo Gallery	Shortish gallery. Mind the annoying interstitial ad when clicking through.
Jun 23rd	E71 – Tiny, Thin, Tempting	The “guru” is easily impressed, methinks.
Jun 20th	Nokia E71 Review	Shortish piece, small gallery.
Jun 17th	Nokia E71 – the Q & A	Unreasonable expectations, debunked
Jun 16th	Nokia E71	Decent review, loads of screenshots and photos.

Technorati Tags: business, e61, e90, eseries, exchange, gps, hsdpa, nokia, s60, ui, usb

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Blackberry 9500 (Storm)

Rui Carmo — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 22:17:02 GMT

Here are some public mentions in the media that I find noteworthy and developer resources for folk interested in the platform.

Date	Link	Notes
Nov 26	For New York Times BlackBerry Storm is a Dud	Om agrees.
Nov 26	No Keyboard? And You Call This a BlackBerry?	David Pogue holds back no punches and says what most other reviewers ought to have said.
Nov 25	Hanging out with the T-Mobile G1, iPhone 3G and the Blackberry Storm	In which most people would reach the conclusion that competition isn’t that straightforward
Nov 21	BlackBerry Storm – Review and Teardown	Interesting image gallery.
Nov 20	What’s a BlackBerry Without a Keyboard? – GigaOM	Apparently, a “Meh”.
	RIM‘s BlackBerry Storm: Awkward and Disappointing	Weird to read phone reviews on a PC site, but hey…
	RIM BlackBerry Storm	CNET rates it 3.5/5
	BlackBerry Storm Review	Loads of photographs, pretty much the same opinion: nice, but slow.
	New Blackberry missing magic touch	Another reviewer that hints that the Bold might be a better fit for demanding users.
	Looking for an iPhone Killer? Better Keep Looking	Choice quote: “If you [...] want a touchscreen phone and are willing to put up with an OS that moves like a tranquilized yak, then yes the Storm is for you.”
	Blackberry Storm, yes it can cut and paste	A bit more positive.
	BlackBerry’s Storm Presses Into the Touch-Phone Fray	Walt Mossberg weighs in, including a video and a nice comparison table with the iPhone and G1 (more).
	Verizon BlackBerry Storm review	Holding back no punches.
Nov 19	BlackBerry Storm review	Pretty honest review.
Nov 5	RIM Blackberry Storm unboxed	In which someone confuses “paltry” with “poultry”.
Oct 29	Why BlackBerry Storm Is An iPhone (and G-1) Killer	One day, I will go back and critique where this piece was right – and wrong.
Oct 15	Vodafone demonstration video shows you how to use the BlackBerry Storm	Nothing amazingly new, but still…
Oct 11	Blackberry Simulators	Click through and grab version 4.7 to get the 9500 simulator. Plenty of other developer resources available here.
Oct 8	RIM‘s Impressive Blackberry Storm	A short overview on BusinessWeek.
Oct 8	BlackBerry Storm bows, comes next month to Verizon and Vodafone	Plenty of hi-res device shots for presentations.
Oct 8	BlackBerry Storm 9500 hands-on	It really is fashionable to disassemble new phones – some inside shots here.

Technorati Tags: android, blackberry, david_pogue, iphone, om malik, touchscreen, verizon, vodafone, walt mossberg

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Pedro Moura Pinheiro's Portfolio

Rui Carmo — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 14:37:40 GMT

The kind of photography I’d love to be able to do, perma-linked from Pedro’s site.

Technorati Tags: links, photography, portfolio, portugal

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VisualHub

Rui Carmo — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 23:03:31 GMT

VisualHub was an intriguing video transcoding application that was probably the best Mac tool for easy transcoding of video (and also happened to support Xgrid).

Sadly, it was discontinued on the beginning of October 2008. Although an open-source version is under development, HandBrake became its closest replacement.

It supported the usual set of iPod, PSP Portable, DV, DVD, AVI, DivX, MP4, WMV, MPEG and Flash formats.

Converting video to the new PSP 3.30 480×272 native resolution (16:9 ratio):

These are notes for version 1.23 that have been obsoleted with 1.25, but may yet be of use later.

PSP / AVC / Go Nuts
In the advanced panel: set res to 480×272
In the ffmpeg options: ”-bf 1 -level 21”

Technorati Tags: avi, discontinued, divx, dv, dvd, flash, h.264, handbrake, ipod, mp4, mpeg, playstation, transcoding, video, wmv, xgrid

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HandBrake

Rui Carmo — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 23:00:59 GMT

HandBrake is a GPL multiplatform, multithreaded video encoder that supports MPEG4, H.264 and DivX (among other things). It used to include DVD ripping, but that is now removed by default (although it will re-use VideoLAN’s code if installed). It was originally available on the BeOS (and still uses the jam build system that was a favorite of many developers for that OS, but now has been ported over to Mac OS X, Windows and Linux).

Here’s an old screenshot:

Resources:

Date	Link	Notes
May’06	Mac Gems: HandBrake 0.9.0	a HOWTO and presets for common encoding tasks

Technorati Tags: beos, divx, dvd, gpl, h.264, jam, linux, mac os x, mpeg4, ripping, transcoding, video, videolan, windows

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Fedora 10 Released

Rui Carmo — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 17:53:55 GMT

Once it settles down and there are saner ways of getting wireless (and all the rest) working out of the box, I think it might be nice to try out on my Eee 901 for one thing alone – full disk encryption, a must on something that easy to lose/get stolen. Still, it’s most certainly early days yet. Around next Spring, I’d say…

Technorati Tags: eee pc, fedora, links, linux, musings, someday

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