Mozilla have pride themselves by being very innovative in their development efforts for their desktop browser.
Their latest offering for the mobile space on Android is the Fennec.
Download Fennec by visiting Firefox.com/m/alpha on your Android device or Nokia N900.
The overall experience have been refreshing but this is not a browser that you can use everyday yet as its an alpha release and is really rough on the edges.
What I like about it is that it has brought all that we liked about Firefox over to the Android
Firefox Sync synchronizes your Firefox history, bookmarks, passwords and tabs
between your desktop and mobile
Add-ons are available to customize the functionality and look of your Firefox
Personalized Start page lets you pick up where you left off on your desktop
Awesome Screen gets to know you and takes you to your favorite websites with minimal typing
Pinch-to-zoom (Android), double-tab, or use the volume rocker (Nokia N900) to zoom in and out
Tabbed browsing in thumbnail view lets you easily see and select the site you want
Location-Aware Browsing gives you content and info relevant to your location
Save to PDF, Find In Page, Forget Password, Send Page and Add Search Engine located in the Site Menu all help you manage your preferences and options for each site you’re on
Context Menu lets you Open in New Tab and Share by long tapping and holding a link or image
Spending on Gadgets seems to be the past-time of many men and boys.
I have dabble in my love for Gadgets for a long time since my secondary school days. Back then, money was really hard to come by and whenever I spend on such stuff, I feel a sense of guilt because although I am curious about how they work, spending on them means I will have to forgo something that matters to me.
After I started working, the budget constraints gets relaxed and while I can realistically buy an iPhone every month, it is ridiculous to do that.
1. Enjoying the process of researching/finding out about the Gadgets
I realize that the curiosity to identify how things work and the difference between each brands and trival details can be a form of experience that I grew to like. That is why I started a blog www.productiveorganizer.com to talk about mobile productivity and softwares in general.
I realize that much of the utility for a lot of people probably happens DURING the process of researching for it and gets reduced a lot after the anticipation, and the purchase have been carried out.
Knowing this, I controlled my urge to purchase much better and learn to maximize what increases my utility levels.
2. Assigning a budget per year for Tech Gadgets
Tech Gadgets should be treated as a hobby and as such, it would be best to assign a budget for it. Having a budget means it is likely that you are constraint to spend only this much on tech gadgets and when it runs out, you better not spend anymore.
So this would mean that I only have 40 * 12 = 480 bucks to spend on my gadget hobby.
3. Sell Old Gadgets to finance for new ones
A lot of my friends doesn’t do this because of attachment to the gadget or the reluctance to part with the gadget because of the huge depreciation in gadget value.
Gadgets drop in value pretty fast and the only way that your gadgets can still maintain or even be of higher value then purchase is if you are shrewd enough to import from overseas at a cheaper price and sell it locally.
To this all I can say is: If you leave it lying in your house, it is likely that
You will never look at it again
The value can never be higher than what it was worth n-months ago
You will eventually throw or give it away
So my rule of thumb is that if I deem that it has some sizable stored value, I will sell it away.
I bought my current iPod Touch 3G for SGD480 but essentially finance this by selling away my iPod Touch 2G for SGD230, which was bought at SGD330.
Another good friend of mine looks to spend quite a fair bit on his sound system. But turns out that he is pretty shrewd to import them from overseas and when he grew tired of them, the price he sold it was not far from his purchase price!
It pays to:
Know the value of what you are playing with. Certain high price gadgets hold value better than those cheapo gadgets.
Leverage on overseas opportunities.
Sell it off the moment you think its not working out for you. There is a cost to procrastination.
Great news today for me as I am an avid follower of Ars Technica, a technology commentary site.
As a user of google reader, I was somewhat disappointed that their news article was cut off and require you to go to their actual site. I read a lot of articles so this could really slow me down.
But these few days I notice that I am able to view more details on each of Ars Technica post.
In a certain sense, the iOS App Store, although overprotective and not always the best, creates a really good environment for
Developers to sell their product and gain revenue
Consumers to buy apps that are relevant to them
Easy for consumers to pay
Only apps that Apple Approves and of standard are listed
Google seem to realise that their Market concept is really not working well.
People would rather fight it out at iOS App Store than to be the leader in Android Market. A leader at Android Market earn far less than a small player in iOS App Store. That says a lot.
Piracy
Part of the reason why not as much developers engineer quality apps on the Android was probably due to not enough protection from piracy. There are many online forums where you can get paid apps (apk files) for FREE.
So what is the point of spending so much effort developing it only to see it ended up there?
Google overhaul their licensing concept to bring some form of Google DRM to the Market:
The service will allow application developers to implement a license status check in their apps – an app would query the licensing server and get back a response stating whether it had been purchased through the Market or not.
This simple and free service provides a secure mechanism to manage access to all Android Market paid applications targeting Android 1.5 or higher.
At run time, with the inclusion of a set of libraries provided by us, your application can query the Android Market licensing server to determine the license status of your users.
It returns information on whether your users are authorized to use the app based on stored sales records.
What if Google’s Server goes down or You are Offline? Will it still work?
Google is well aware of the problems that can occur when you don’t have a working connection or their servers are offline (which is unlikely but possible). This is why they will support both of these schemes:
To help you get started with a Policy, the LVL provides two fully complete Policy implementations that you can use without modification or adapt to your needs:
ServerManagedPolicy is a flexible Policy that uses settings provided by the licensing server to manage response caching and access to the application while the device is offline (such as when the user is on on an airplane). For most applications, the use of ServerManagedPolicy is highly recommended.
StrictPolicy is a restrictive Policy that does not cache any response data and allows the application access only when the server returns a licensed response.
Ok! So most of the productive apps no one will ever thought about using StrictPolicy. Can you imagine your To-Do List application or Notes application always have to be connected online?
It is likely you will use a combination of ServerManagedPolicy and StrictPolicy.
A Few More Bits
Here are some points to keep in mind as you implement licensing in your application:
Only paid applications published through Market can use the service.
An application can use the service only if the Android Market client is installed on its host device and the device is running Android 1.5 (API level 3) or higher.
To complete a license check, the licensing server must be accessible over the network. You can implement license caching behaviors to manage access when there is no network connectivity.
The security of your application’s licensing controls ultimately relies on the design of your implementation itself. The service provides the building blocks that let you securely check licensing, but the actual enforcement and handling of the license are factors in your control. By following the best practices in this document, you can help ensure that your implementation will be secure.
Adding licensing to an application does not affect the way the application functions when run on a device that does not offer Android Market.
Licensing is currently for paid apps only, since free apps are considered licensed for all users. If your application is already published as free, you won’t be able to upload a new version that uses licensing.
Ease of Purchase
iOS works successfully because as a user, I can not worry about payment first hand and enjoy using the App first. My cost will be factor into my credit card bill or in the case of iTunes Gift card, credits.
The Android market currently works on a charge per paid app install basis. Therefore, if we install a paid app, we will need to pay at the end of each single transaction using Google Checkout.
Google’s overhaul of this problem:
According to this new policy, the app install charges will be aggregated and sent along with the carrier bill for the month. A similar billing process has been present on the iPhone always. However, it is not carrier billing. The bill is added to your credit amount on a separate account and you are charged from there at the end of the month. The payment method offered on Android makes this optional. Therefore, if you are getting a paid app from the Market, you have the option of paying using Google Checkout out or using the carrier billing option. Apart from the iPhone, all T-Mobile customers have also been enjoying this billing style for a long time. In all probability, Google is trying to implement this as a standard payment method across all other networks.
I thought both options are not really good. Why not just match it to a Paypal account or a Credit Card account link to a Google Payment account?
If this is not done well, this will affect how developers are monetize and will affect developers’ willingness to develop for Android.
Case in point. This week, Zodttd, a developer who is known for developing game emulators on Apple devices released a Play Station 1 emu for Android, an exciting development for the community. As soon as the word got out that the app was in the market, there was a flood of about 6000 people who went to purchase and download the app. The only thing was, the Android Market would not let about 5,400 of the purchasers, this writer included, download the app at all. The Market would let you buy the app, then it would hang up permanently on the “authorizing” purchase dialog.
When this happened, Zodttd got flooded with pleading emails from customers begging for help, some polite, a lot angry and some simply wanting their money back. The problem for the dev was that he was in a virtual no-man’s land. On his end, he had received no money to refund, but his customers were holding receipts in their hands. He could not get help from Google right away, because there is no phone number to call for help. In fact, there is no support department for this at all! You can see the progression of the issue from start to finish through this post log at Google.
So, the perfect storm happened. A dev who had decided to enter the arena of Android development creates a pretty nice app for the community, tries to get it sold in the Market, and gets jammed by a glitch in the system that makes it look like he has received a bunch of money, but actually hasn’t. On top of that, he can get no immediate help to fix the problem, and is left to try to email Google as a whole rather than a support individual who could remedy the problem quickly.
Being one of the customers that was following the progress of this issue, I was dumbfounded by how long it took to get a resolution from Google, and as a result, how many sales the dev lost. It really put on display the glaring issues the Market has.
Google should be working to make the Android development environment and sales structure something that is a joy for devs to work with, not vice versa. Unless this happens, it is going to be a long, slow, uphill battle for the Market to gain serious steam, and to see the quality of apps that we are hoping for. Come on Google, it is time to throw some serious work into this area.
Security
Google prided itself that anyone can run their application on an Android Device. They never had the problem of rejecting apps.
Is this a good thing? Perhaps not. They are just waiting for the perfect storm. And probably this is it:
A mobile security firm called Lookout just released a report at the Black Hat security conference in Vegas (where else?) that says that they discovered a malware program that is sending the private information of several million Android users to a mysterious location in China…all in return for some My Little Pony wallpaper.
The app in question came from Jackeey Wallpaper, and it was uploaded to the Android Market, where users can download it and use it to decorate their phones that run the Google Android operating system. It includes branded wallpapers from My Little Pony and Star Wars, to name just a couple.
It collects your browsing history, text messages, your phone’s SIM card number, subscriber identification, and even your voicemail password. It sends the data to a web site, www.imnet.us. That site is evidently owned by someone in Shenzhen, China. The app has been downloaded anywhere from 1.1 million to 4.6 million times. The exact number isn’t known because the Android Market doesn’t offer precise data. The search through the data showed that Jackeey Wallpaper and another developer known as iceskysl@1sters! (which could possibly be the same developer, as they use similar code) were collecting personal data. The wallpaper app asks for “phone info,” but that isn’t necessarily a clear warning.
Roughly 47 percent of Android apps access some kind of third-party code, while 23 percent of iPhone apps do. The executives also found that many apps use third-party software programs to do things such as feed ads into an app. Often, developers unquestioningly use the software development kits of those third parties in their apps, even if they don’t know what they do.
Conclusion
My take on this is that Apple probably got it spot on. The problems that they might think will affect their customers have surely come to light at their competitor.
The case study of the difference in implementation of a Application Marketplace shows that being open and lax control isn’t really helpful in all situation.
Being Authoritative like Apple might not be really pleasing all round but they certainly provided a platform where they value add to their network much better than google
It would seem that Mozilla is really an organization who likes to push the browser to their limits.
They came up with the Awesome Bar concept which really make my life much easier and tried different variations in order to give us users a good user experience.
Mozilla’s head of user experience for its Labs unit, Aza Raskin, on Friday unveiled a new project called “Tab Candy” that promises to dramatically change the way users manage open browser tabs.
Tab Candy is not an extension, but a new feature that Raskin and team plan to build into a future version of the Firefox browser. In essence, it creates a desktop-like workspace for users to separate and organize open tabs into groups. When opened, these groups act like their own instance of the browser. So, say you had grouped together 5 of 50 open tabs, then opened that group through Tab Candy; you’d only see those 5 in your browser, and not the other 45.
Take a look at their concept. I think it has potential and when built in could really differentiate their browser:
A lot of people are barking at iPhone for not being open and are limited in what they can provide. But at the end of the day, they are doing a lot of things right for people other than the people who constantly complains about it.
Here is a nice article talking about how the iPhone and Smartphones can be used effectively to help the blind.
Smartphones can be pretty clueless when it comes to blind or visually impaired users.
For millions of consumers with normal vision, smartphones offer almost effortless conference calling, e-mailing and Internet browsing. They make it easy to find a gas station, a rental car or a recipe. Vast music libraries and video games are expected features for a device with a $200 to $600 price tag.
But for many in the blind and visually impaired community, the absence of physical buttons on most smartphones makes interactions with some devices virtually impossible.
Nowhere is the digital divide in the smartphone market more pronounced than between Apple and Google products.
Blind and visually impaired smartphone users offer near universal praise for the iPhone, whose 3GS has a built-in VoiceOver screen reader that enables all functions with a few taps, swipes or other gestures on the touch screen. On Google’s Android phone, blind users can’t e-mail or navigate the Internet.
Many consumers with visual impairments say they are being held back from equal participation in the digital revolution, denied tools their colleagues and competitors enjoy. Smartphones, they argue, are public accommodations, no different from building ramps or Braille on elevators.
“Our electronic, digital universe is changing so rapidly that these phones are as essential to our daily life as a curb cut would be,” said Brian Bashin, the CEO of the Lighthouse for the Blind in San Francisco, an advocacy organization for the blind and visually impaired. “We shouldn’t have to play catch up with expensive modifications when it all should have been there right out of the box.”
The Blackberry’s Oratio screen reader, for example, costs blind users an extra $450 on top of the price of the Research in Motion phone.
This month, a House subcommittee held a hearing on the Twenty-first Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act to direct the Federal Communications Commission to make Internet-enabled communications devices accessible to the more than 25 million adults in the United States with vision trouble.
The FCC currently requires telecommunications manufacturers and service providers to make their products accessible to people with disabilities. One FCC official said Google would likely not be liable under the current law because it is not the phone’s manufacturer.
Jenifer Simpson, a former FCC official who is now the senior director of government affairs at the American Association of People with Disabilities, is frustrated that more companies are creating communications products that the FCC doesn’t currently regulate.
The question she wants companies to ask is, “Can Grandma give you a phone call on the smartphone you want to buy her for Christmas?”
Joshua Miele, an associate scientist at the San Francisco-based Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute who designs educational tools for blind people like himself, says the iPhone is a new paradigm for the more than 1.3 million legally blind people in the United States.
“The most amazing thing about the iPhone is you go into the settings and you turn on the screen reader and you can use every part of your phone, every text-based application and you don’t have to pay anything extra,’’ he said.
VoiceOver, the iPhone’s built-in screen reader, is controlled though gestures instead of arrow keys or keyboard commands. It can be customized so that a visually impaired person can easily magnify a web page or flip to a white-on-black background.
The iPhone 4, unveiled this month, expands the roster of accessibility tools, including the ability to wirelessly connect to a device that displays Braille.
In contrast, Google’s TalkBack screen reader on its Android mobile operating system doesn’t do enough talking, many advocates for the blind say. Android works impressively for calling, listening to music, using global positioning system data and applications like Facebook, but it won’t help blind users dispatch an e-mail to their boss or scan a website while waiting at the airport.
When Android was released more than a year ago, the disability community was primed for more innovations. When a totally accessible smartphone failed to materialize this year, advocates for the blind castigated Google as a peddler of expectations. The Android 2.2, released a few weeks ago, didn’t substantially enhance the phone’s accessibility to blind and deaf users.
Disability groups have been encouraged by some recent victories. The National Federation of the Blind last year reached a settlement with Motorola after pressuring the leading manufacturer of cell phones to comply with Section 255 of the federal Telecommunications Act. The act requires telecommunications equipment manufacturers and service providers to make their products and services accessible to people with disabilities. The agreement commits the company to make the phone-related functions on its BREW line of phones useable for non-visual customers.
Advocates for the blind say Google has done extraordinary work in other areas, pointing to the Google Books Library Project.
Steve Jacobs, president of the IDEAL Group, Inc., which develops applications for the blind, said his customers are hopeful that Google’s Project Eyes-Free , which invites software developers to create accessible applications for the Android, will serve up exciting inventions soon.
“I believe Google will rise to that occasion,” Jacobs said.
T.V. Raman, a computer scientist and engineer at Google, agrees.
Raman, who lost his eyesight at age 14 from glaucoma, is revered by many people with disabilities for his pioneering work on Google’s search service that helped people with visual impairments navigate the web. But the gifted innovator, who solves Rubik’s Cubes in Braille for fun, has also been faulted by some for developing products only he could figure out how to use.
Raman defended Android in a recent interview as “still a young platform” and said that the accessibility problems in the browser and e-mail will be fixed.
“There are rough edges,’’ he said. “The best way to silence that criticism is to go and build it. I wanted this yesterday as well.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that there are expensive, third-party screen readers currently available for Google’s Android phones. Screen readers for Android phones are free, open source, and bundled on every phone. This version has been corrected.
How much files and folders can I store/synchronies/backup ?
As of now you can store up to 2GB of files
How much will this cost me?
It is FREE
What are the benefits?
Your files and folders are accessible across all your computers
In the future it might be accessible via iPhone,Android or WP7
In the event of a computer breakdown and is irrecoverable, your files are intact
Microsoft’s data server should have disaster recovery and redundancy, so the chances of you losing these files are low
How does it work?
1) Download Windows Live Essentials Beta from here.
2) Run the setup. You can install the rest of the stuff but make sure you check the sync.
3) Once its installed you will see a sync icon in your windows system tray. Alternatively, go to Windows Essentials > Windows Live Sync.
4) this is your Sync Dashboard. Here you will see I am setting it up on one computer.
5) First thing is to click on Sync a folder, to identify which folder to sync across all your computers and microsoft.
6) I don’t just make use of one sync service, but if you see here I have Evernote,Dropbox,SugarSync,Syncplicity and now LiveSync. Essentially, I have almost 8GB of data under sync.
7) Create a folder for syncing (you can call it whatever you want I call it Live Sync)
8)Then check to sync to SkyDrive synced storage
9) You are set up. Here is a shot of me synchronizing 3 files. Once I moved them into my windows folders, on the web page it will indicate that its syncing 3 files.
Here is a good diagram showing how the world spends their time online. Take a look at the activity and it shows that 60% of the time we are not doing productive things
In one small change, Google have enable us to share 1GB of files with anyone on the web. What this means is that you can Create a Word or Excel documents, either share it with your own friends, pass the links to friends or make available to the google web crawler and enable anyone to assess to it.
Now this is interesting news. Most folks who have used Dropbox have things favorable to say about Dropbox as a backup and computer files synchronizor
It would seem some one finally thought:”wouldn’t it be great to have dropbox functionality on a personal server?”
I fully will support this product but only if it designs well:
Small memory footprint
Syncs across at least 10 computers
Trustable sync and conflict resolution mechanizm
Dubbed SparkleShare, Bons is building his project using Mono, GTK+, and Git. Like Dropbox, SparkleShare sets up a local folder which is automatically kept in sync — though not in the cloud. Instead, you and your friends/coworkers set up connections to each other’s shares (or you can keep everything to yourself, of course). That’ll make SparkleShare an extremely interesting option for teams who need to collaborate via the ‘Net — and for users who want to keep files in sync without floating them in the cloud.
And since you’re hosting your own server, there’s no monthly fees to worry about — which is always a bonus.
A Linux release is the first item on the agenda, with OS X and Windows versions to follow. Bons is seeking contributors — if you’re interested in helping out, drop him a line on the SparkleShare web site!
The productive organizer is one who is in control of himself as well as his surroundings.He studies how others define their system and works to improve on it and in turn, educate others how to change their lives.
Here, we hope to bring you the necessary widgets to effectively organize how you work or play. Whether you are at work, on the move, or at home, we will find the right solution for you to get things done.
