Kutomo

N9

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 18:21:43 +0200

Nokia N9 is a gorgeous looking phone challenging even iPhone 4 in elegance. And the N9’s software (Meego Harmattan OS) is really designed to go along with the hardware.

I had also chance to play briefly with Lumia 800, the first Windows Phone 7 device from Nokia. It had essentially the same design as N9 but slightly smaller screen and no front facing camera.

WP7 OS was buttery smooth and there were no sign of software quirks which are sometimes an issue with Meego OS. However Lumia 800 does feel more like an another Windows Phone rather than something refreshingly new as N9.

I hope Nokia keeps providing support and bug fixes for N9 which seems to be even developing a small fan base. There are definitely people who are looking for something bit different in the world of Androids and Apples, and N9 is an attractive candidate.

Nokia N9: Human Interaction

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 21:47:00 +0300

Marko Ahtisaari’s speech about ‘Patterns of Human Interaction’ at Copenhagen Design Week from Nokia Danmark on Vimeo.

I encourage to watch at least the first 10-15 mins of the presentation (then the marketing speech takes over).

I agree on the thoughts of Marko Ahtisaari how touch screen mobile devices are still (on average) somewhat awkward to use. In my opinion closest cousin to N9’s UX is WebOS. Although doomed to walk in the shadow of Android and iOS, N9’s Meego Harmattan and WebOS are both representing the 2nd iteration of touch screen UX design. It is sad that the future of these OSes looks very murky.

"Why Windows 8 Is Fundamentally Flawed as a Response to the iPad"

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 13:20:27 +0300

John Gruber writes:

But I think it’s a fundamentally flawed idea for Microsoft to build their next-generation OS and interface on top of the existing Windows. The idea is that you get the new stuff right alongside Windows as we know it. Microsoft is obviously trying to learn from Apple, but they clearly don’t understand why the iPad runs iOS, and not Mac OS X.

Couldn’t agree more.

Windows 8

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 13:06:23 +0300

So instead of expanding Windows Phone 7 OS to also support tablets/slates, Microsoft slaps new GUI layer on top of bulky desktop Windows OS. I am not sure if this is a smart move…

Regardless the new GUI DOES look nice.

Markdown

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 17:30:27 +0300

I recently became a huge fan of Markdown. It’s “a text-to-HTML conversion tool” designed for web writers (and casual amateur bloggers :).

Tumbler blogging engine which I’m using for Kutomo has even native support for Markdown syntax.

I’ll try to post more about Markdown and related writing tools shortly but if you do web writing regularly, just try it. I think you gonna love it too.

Leaked iPhone Multi-Tasking UI

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 23:57:13 +0300

The above video has been circling in tech blogs lately and some are even praising how this should be “The Way” to do multi-tasking in iOS.

Nice (and very Mac-ish) concept but I doubt it’s usefulness.

Biggest issue with the UI in question is the difficulty to identify apps from their exposé type thumbnails. In iOS we’ve learned to recognize apps by their icon. When we download an app from AppStore the first thing we learn is the icon. When we launch the app from iOS home screen we search for the app’s icon.

iOS apps also tend to be mainly about the content. Many apps have no or very little recognizable UI chrome. Providing random (and tiny) thumbnail screenshot does not necessarily make it easy to identify the app.

Maybe there are better ways to do multi-tasking than the current iOS implementation, but this isn’t it.

This is why I don’t want to co-work with other people...

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 13:51:00 +0200

This is why I don’t want to co-work with other people while sharing the same computer… at least when I’m sober.

Today's iTunes Announcement

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 10:57:21 +0200

iTunes Cloud à la Spotify? Hopefully…

Huge letdown if the announcement is only related to a certain hippie band…

Why We Don't Love Flash

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 11:41:47 +0200

Via AppleInsider

iPad 2 Wish List

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 17:53:00 +0200

As a former owner of iPad I have couple of wishes for the next version:

Lighter weight. When reading books/comics for a longer time especially in a bed the weight can really become an issue with the current model. Come on, I can afford either iPad or a gym card, not both.
FaceTime! FaceTime!! FACETIME!!
Higher resolution display.

I am quite sure we will see 1 & 2 happening with the next version. Increasing the resolution however might be trickier than it sounds since iOS doesn’t seem to scale very easily. For example iPhone 4 has exactly 2x the resolution of previous model and this made scaling of the UI much more easier to accomplish. Similar jump in resolution is unfortunately not very likely in iPad’s case.

Hopefully all the mysteries will be revealed in early Spring.

PS. Yes, I am attempting to update this blog more often from now on.

Google Public DNS - Performance Comparison

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 01:13:51 +0200

Regardless of the obvious privacy issues, such as letting All Knowing Google to access a big chunk of information about my surfing habits, I still wanted to test out the performance of Google’s DNS service.

In this test I used DNS Performance Test tool provided by Silverwolf. It makes a number of DNS queries to a seemingly random list of domains using your OS’ default DNS settings. I ran the software until 1000 successful queries were made for each DNS provider.

DNS providers in this test were my Finnish ISP Sonera, OpenDNS and of course Google Public DNS.

And here are the results:

So Google Public DNS is indeed fast and even surprisingly fast when compared to OpenDNS.

Enable "Emoji" Icons On iPhone (No Cost, No Jailbreak)

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 13:25:00 +0200

Just wanted to share this nice little app I found yesterday from AppStore. App is free and it is called “Spell Number”. Here are the steps to enable emojis after you’ve installed the app:

Go to http://bit.ly/freeemoji and from the site grab the secret code which you need to type in the app. Current code (December 20th) is 91929394.59, but as it might change, confirm the code from the developer’s site.
Fire up the app. What app basically does is it converts a series of numbers to spelled text. Eg. 211 = two hundred and eleven. The simple interface offers only one input field for typing in the number. You are probably already guessing that this is where you type the secret code.
Once you have typed the code exit the app by pressing home button.
Go to iPhone Settings and General > International > Keyboards.
Select Japanese and toggle “Emoji” on.

After you’ve finished you can now switch to “Emoji” keyboard by pressing the globe icon in the bottom left of the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard. This works pretty much in any app that supports typing (SMS, Mail, Safari, IM…).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bestdamntech/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

How to Create ISO Image from CD/DVD Using OS X Terminal

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 14:58:46 +0300

Check which device name your DVD/CD drive has (use this name for the rest of the commands):
- “drutil status”
- Should be something like “/dev/disk2”
Unmount the drive:
- “diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2”
- There should be a message similar to: “Unmount of all volumes on disk2 was successful.”
Use dd to create the ISO image:
- “dd if=/dev/disk2 of=filename.iso bs=2048”
- Syntax is quite simple; if = input file, of = output file.
Building of ISO image might take around 10 minutes, depending of course of your CD/DVD size.

Creative Vado HD and iMovie '09

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 13:24:56 +0300

I just recently bought Creative Vado HD, a 720p pocket video camera. It has very impressive video quality in comparison to Kodak and Flip Mino HD but a one big gripe: video files recorded with Vado HD are not compatible with the latest iMovie ‘09.

Video files are AVI type and the most common solution I found from the great internets was to transcode the video for example to MOV. Transcoding is just such a time consuming process and also degrades the video quality so I looked for some other solution.

Bit more googling and I found this instruction which used ffmpeg command line utility: http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8976934#8976934. This works great, there is no need to transcode and no degradation in video quality. I just found one issue with the instructions. If I converted the original AVI in to MOV as in the example, video became very choppy and pixelated in iMovie. Instead I used following ffmpeg command to convert the AVI to MP4:

ffmpeg -i VID00106.AVI -vcodec copy -acodec libfaac out.mp4

This worked pretty much flawlessly. A 20min video was converted in couple of minutes and great video quality was maintained.

Some of you might ask, well how do I install ffmpeg? I found only one way to get the necessary codec support to ffmpeg: MacPorts. Here is a quick three-step-guide to get ffmpeg running:

Install latest Xcode, it is a free download from Apple: http://developer.apple.com/technology/xcode.html
Install MacPorts: http://www.macports.org/install.php
Install ffmpeg using MacPorts by running Terminal command:

sudo port install ffmpeg

That is it. Enjoy your camera and iMovie ‘09 :)

Spotify on iPhone

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:07:53 +0200

Spotify on iPhone

Windows Mobile 6.5

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 19:00:32 +0200

Windows Mobile 6.5

Symbian S60 SMS Exploit (Video)

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 18:54:55 +0200

Symbian S60 SMS Exploit (Video)

Invisible Shield and iPhone 3G

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 18:02:00 +0200

I like the idea of Invisible Shield. Thin layer of protection and no bulky cases. But as you can see from the photo above, the protection film has started to peel off. And as it peels of, it starts to collect dust, yuck… The main problem lies in the way Invisible Shield wraps around the bottom and top corners of the iPhone. It is almost impossible to get it stick perfectly and if there is even tiniest gap, dirt and pocket lint will start to collect, and the shield will start to peel off.

So today I went ahead and ordered new back skin from Best Skins Ever. Corners are cut bit more open than in Invisible Shield’s version but I assume it is way more easier to apply on the phone.

I’ll post comments when I get one.

iPhone 3G vs Nokia N97 Size Comparison

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 10:52:53 +0200

iPhone 3G vs Nokia N97 Size Comparison

Nokia N97 Touch-screen Smartphone

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 10:38:00 +0200

Nokia announced today company’s latest N-series phone N97. This bad boy is loaded with features:

It has 3.5-inch widescreen touch display, 5Mpx camera with Carl Zeiss Tessar lens, 16:9 video recording, LED flash, 3,5mm headphone jack, A-GPS, built-in compass, physical QWERTY keyboard, whopping 32GB of built-in memory and support for up to 16GB microSD cards. For communication N97 boasts HSDPA, Wi-Fi, USB 2.0 and stereo Bluetooth. N97 also has the latest S60 5th Edition OS. The sweetest part? Battery life: 37 hours of music and 4.5 hours of video.

I think they nailed it this time.

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