reboot.org.uk

Sneak peak: visual voice email for Blackberry

Ray — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 13:19:51 +0000

This application will be available to UK and US Blackberry owners at the end of August. If you like the look of it you can find out all about the service here. But if you don’t like the look of it then I’d love to hear your thoughts for improvements. Registration is available through the application after you’ve installed it.

The video is of the trackball version running in an emulator. There will be another version for the Storm that has a UI more suitable for touchscreens/clickscreens… whatever RIM call them.

I almost forgot, the song in the video is Paralyzer by Finger Eleven and from their album Them vs. You vs. Me.

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The advantages of Blackberry

Ray — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 07:00:16 +0000

iPhone and Android have the better web browsers and better multimedia, but after using a Blackberry as my main phone for one month I’m already a convert.

Touchscreen keyboards are the hot air hand dryers that you find in public toilets.

Why? Aside from phoning people (no longer my top priority) I use my phone for emails and instant messaging and the occasional photo. Apple may consider the buttons on my Bold obsolete, but they help me type faster, more accurately and more comfortably. I really hope the Blackberry touchscreen line (aka the Storm) is only an alternative and that seems to be the case as the latest BB Tour is fitted with a keyboard. Touchscreen keyboards are the hot air hand dryers that you find in public toilets, great until you need to dry your hands with them every day. (Yes I’m also that person who takes extra toilet paper from the cubical to dry my hands)

Then there is the camera… The reason I use my phones camera is to quickly capture unexpected events, but the iPhone is so flippin sloooow. Its time from pocket to photo (TFPTP) is about 15 seconds, the Bold can do it in 3, and has a zoom so you don’t look like Mr Been extending and retracting your arm for focus.

And why cant the iPhone run background tasks? Android and Blackberry have managed it.

In short, the Blackberry is fantastic at all the things that would make me want to carry a phone around in my pocket and not so good at the things I can live without.

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How to resize an image on a BlackBerry

Ray — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 05:10:42 +0000

Coming from Android and iPhone I wasn’t expecting the need to do this. I found the documentation a little confusing and there were no quick answers on the web, so here it is.

I find Blackberry application development slightly annoying. I’m not talking about resizing images. RIM please give us an SDK that allows swapping code without a restart, and that will run on a Mac or Linux. It’s based on Java so why doesn’t it have the portability of Java?

public static EncodedImage resizeImage(EncodedImage image, int width, int height) { int scaleX = Fixed32.div(Fixed32.toFP(image.getWidth()), Fixed32.toFP(width)); int scaleY = Fixed32.div(Fixed32.toFP(image.getHeight()), Fixed32.toFP(height)); return image.scaleImage32(scaleX, scaleY); }

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Alaina, the fast and the furious

Ray — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:24:46 +0000

This was taken a few weeks ago, it’s amazing what a little practice can do.
The music is Tokyo Drift by the Teriyaki boyz… You cant beat that with a baseball bat!

Hackintosh beginner

Ray — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:10:42 +0000

Hackintosh is the term given a computer with Mac OS but not Mac hardware (aka osx86). This has been going on for years, but this weekend I was curious enough to try it for myself. I started with three questions.
1. What will I need?
2. How hard is it to do?
3. How good is it compared to an Apple Mac?

Hackintoshing can be daunting for a beginner as there are many ways to reach the goal and some digging is required to understand how they are different.

The answer to question one begins with hardware. I decided to go for components that have lots of feedback on the net. Here is my list:

Motherboard: Gigabyte G31M-ES2L Graphics card: ECS GeForce 9400 GT 512 MB Processor: Intel E5200 2.5Ghz 800mhz 2m cache Memory: Kingston 1G/800Mhz *2 Hard drive: Western Digital 320GB 7200rpm SATA II 16MB DVD drive: LG DVD 22X SATA (Dual layer) Wifi: ASUS WL-138G V2 PCI LAN Adapter Power supply: Corsair 450W Case: Cooler Master Centurian

Which hardware and software should I use?

I also used a USB Keyboard, a PS2 Keyboard and a USB mouse. The PS2 keyboard is only used when you need to get at the BIOS, this is because your USB drivers wont have loaded at this stage of the computers boot up. I used a standard Samsung monitor with a VGI connector and a USB keyboard because that is what Macs seem to prefer.

But how to make these choices? The starting point for any hackintosher should be the OSX86 wiki (known as the HCL). http://wiki.osx86project.org
They claim to be the undisputed leader in information regarding OS X on x86 hardware and Apple’s Intel transition.

Not all hardware is hackintosh compatible, check the HCL before you buy anything.

Next consider the OS media, two approaches exist, distributions or retail.

You may see the names iPC, iDeneb, iATKOS, Kalyway, Leo4All, Zephyroth, and probably others. These are all different distributions of a modified Mac OS DVD. If you take this route you only need to choose one, but which one? The installation notes in the HCL may tell you the distribution that was successfully used with your hardware. Usually these distributions are small enough to fit on a standard DVD (Mac OS requires dual layer) I don’t know what’s been sacrificed to make them smaller.

Unlike the others iATKOS allows you to run software updates direct from Apple without breaking your OS. For me that was the clincher. In simple terms it can do this because the custom drivers are kept separately to and given priority over Apples. iATKOS v7 10.5.7 is available as a torrent.

Another way is to use a retail version of MAC OS, and a very good guide exists with almost exactly the same hardware that I used above. http://an43.com/osx/

This uses the same dual layer DVD to install Apple hardware. Some people say this makes your installation legal unlike distributions because the Mac OS is not modified. In my opinion is this is nonsense, I modify things that I buy all the time so why should software be any different? With the retail method you can run updates without the fear of breaking your OS.

How good is it compared to an Apple Mac?

The installation of iATKOS was very easy, you will find the generic instructions here. http://iatkos.wikidot.com/instructions You will find the hardware specific instructions on the HCL. The HCL instructions for my motherboard were for another distribution (iPC) but I found they worked just as well on iATKOS. It got a bit trickier when I tried to setup my graphics card, this is where a quick search on the forums helped. Insanely Mac is one of the good ones http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=141072&st=0&p=999301&#entry999301

It’s been running about 72 hours without any problems. I’ve been browsing the web, playing DVDs and I’ve run the Apple software update. All in all I’m very pleased. I’ve even installed the iPhone SDK. If anyone reading is looking for a very cheap PC to develop iPhone applications on then this might be for you.

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Learning to drive at 17 (months)

Ray — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 11:50:37 +0000

Music: Stop (blue mix) by Ghost_k.

Alaina’s new puppy

Ray — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 10:32:02 +0000

Music: Blue flame sky by Barry Brusseau.

Mind the phonegap

Ray — Wed, 13 May 2009 15:10:56 +0000

The iPhone SDK requires objective C, Google uses Java. As a mobile developer do you really want to learn a new SDK and possibly programing language for every mobile OS on the market?

Well if you’re me then yes, absolutely, but I may be unusual in that respect. Enter PhoneGap…

A JavaScript API for all smart phones?

The idea is to create an open standard JavaScript API that can be used to access the built in functionality of smart phones. As a developer you can create a single web application that will work on the iPhone, Android or Blackberry, saving time and reducing the expertise needed.

So what sort of things can you do? Well you can use the accelerometer, geolocation, play sounds, record. It’s still early days but the possibilities are great.

I’m lucky that the goals are close enough to my employers that I can contribute and get paid. Lots of my changes have already been included for Android and I will no doubt be doing much more for iPhone and Blackberry over the coming months.

You can find it here: www.phonegap.com Check it out, it’s cool.

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