Follow me on Twitter

©2012 MKBlog. All Rights Reserved.

• Tweet

No related posts.

A week ago, I got a new mobile phone, the windows phone 7 primarily for testing out the user interface, and some programming.  The device I got was the HTC HD 7 from SingTel which costed me around 890$, 2$ higher than the iPhone 4 16GB. In this blog post I’ll review the HTC hardware comparing it with competing phones like the Samsung Omnia as well as the software it runs, Windows Phone OS comparing it to iOS and Android.

While this is not a programming or a tutorial kind of post, I will probably be publishing another blog post on how to migrate your iPhone apps to Windows Phone 7 soonish based on my own experience on migrating my app, iCash SG. iCash SG for Windows Phone 7 can be downloaded from MarketPlace here. Now over to the review.

In Singapore, several phones were available on the launch day. HTC HD 7, Samsung Omnia and the LG Optimus 7 from SingTel, HTC 7 Mozart from Starhub and HTC 7 Trophy from M1. Of all these, two phones attracted me namely the HD7 and Omnia. Both are equally good phones and I would mainly compare between these two in this review.

Two other phones which might be of interest are the HTC 7 Surround and HTC 7 Pro, which has a slide out keyboard. However, neither of them are available in Singapore as on the time of writing.

Technical specifications

HTC knows how to make great hardware. Of all the devices I saw on the roadshow demo, HTC attracted me the most. I didn’t opt for the Samsung Omnia primarily because of the AMOLED display. While AMOLED is great for indoor viewing, and has a very high contrast ratio, it just fades out completely in bright sun. I have experienced this with my old Nexus One. On the roadshow, the Samsung’s screen was ridiculously nicer and brighter than HTCs, but I believe it was because of the indoor lighting. Not sure how it would look on bright light. While websites like Engadget claims Samsung’s Super AMOLED is better, I didn’t want to take chances. Moreover, the Samsung also comes with only 8GB memory (non-expandable)  while the HTC which comes with 16GB memory. Third reason I opted for HTC was for it’s larger, gorgeous 4.3″ screen. The Samsung comes with a 4.0″ screen. The HTC’s 4.3″ screen easily comes close to the Retina display of the iPhone 4.

Battery life

The HTC comes with a 1230 mAh battery which is pretty lame, while the Samsung comes with a 1500 mAh battery, which I think should last for a whole day given the smaller and AMOLED screen. The battery life of my HTC HD 7 is very poor. On an average day, listening to music, checking and replying to a couple of emails, tweets, the HD 7 lasts about 4 hrs which means you have to charge it twice a day. Too bad for a smart phone. While I haven’t tried out the Samsung, from the specs, I think it’s battery life would be far much better.

Weight

The HTC is a tad heavier (24 gms more) than the Samsung. But because of the ergonomic design, it actually feels lighter than the Omnia.

Internet Tethering

While I haven’t personally tried, Samsung seems to support tethering out of the box. HTC as on date, doesn’t. If Internet tethering is important to you, you would be better off with the Omnia.

Hardware Buttons

The Samsung’s “Home” button or the Windows Button is a real clickable button where as the HTC’s button is a touch button. Check out the pictures on the official site here and here. Since these smartphones (iPhone included) have very few buttons, frequent use (or abuse) render them useless soon. My older iPhone 3G’s home button stopped working properly in less than a year. The Samsung’s hardware button also feels the same like the iPhone’s while the HTC’s touch button is similar to the Nexus One’s touch button. It feels good to touch, and doesn’t malfunction within the lifetime of the device.

Since Microsoft has set a very high standard on the hardware specifications for Windows phone, you don’t have to worry about processor or performance. Any device you pick will be equally good. Just ensure that you have a pretty large screen since the typefaces are really large and looks ugly on smaller screens (even if it runs the same resolution)

Software

In this section of the review, I’ll compare the Windows Phone Software with iOS and Android, You will find me comparing it often with iOS since I’ve been using a iPhone for well over 3 years.
Windows Phone Metro UI (as it’s called) places a very high emphasis on typeface. Throughout the user interface, the typography is simply gorgeous and stands out. After all, Microsoft are the pioneers of ClearType and innovated other typeface related patents.  The Segoe WP set of fonts are far better than Helvetica Series used on iPhone. Microsoft has been using the Segoe series on nearly all of their products and marketing materials. Zegoe as it’s called on Zune and Segoe UI on Windows 7 (Desktop) also fall under the same family.

HTC Sense UI

On Windows Phone 7, the HTC Sense UI lives as a separate app. Microsoft doesn’t allow device manufacturers to customize the UI or bundle crApps. Any of the crApps bundled with the device can be removed/uninstalled with a single tap. Same goes to crApps installed by your carriers. This is quite in contrast to Android where device manufacturers have pretty much freedom to do whatever they want including replacing Google Search with Bing Search. So whenever you get a Windows Phone, you can be pretty much sure that the UI is consistent like the iPhone.

On the HTC’s bundled software, one important App that stands out is the Sound Enhancer. It’s a audio processing app which applies SRS WOW and Dolby Mobile effects to your audio. I’ll focus more on this in the sound quality section later in this post.

The Concept of Hubs over Apps

Windows Phone 7 places emphasis on information over Apps. Information starts flowing right from the lock screen. You can see the next calendar appointment, number of unread emails, messages or missed calls right on the lock screen.

Lock Screen of Windows Phone 7 showing a missed call, an unread email, an unread SMS and an upcoming event

Throughout the OS, information is presented in a beautiful typography (as seen above) with slick animations. Windows Phone is all about information at your finger tips than apps. Rather than copying Apple, Microsoft has completely redone the UI unlike Android.

Hubs

The first time you sync your Google Contacts and/or Facebook Contacts to your phone, you will realize that 90% of the “people” related tasks you do can be done from that single app (hub).
Want to call a person, open the People hub. Want to message him? Same app. Want to write on his wall? No not the Facebook app, you can use the same People hub to write on his wall. I can’t wait to see other apps integrating themselves into the People hub, however, as on date, the SDK doesn’t allow integration with People hub. When Microsoft allows that, you will be able to mention a tweet to that person, see his online instant messaging status or do whatever kind of communication with that person all right from your hub.

The people hub also shows a list of recently contacted people which more or less acts as my “favorite” users although there is no explicit “Favorites” section like the iPhone.
While the hub integrates Facebook statuses, twitter seems to be missing. Moreover, you cannot see the emails or SMS messages you exchanged with that person from the People hub.

Phone

The phone keypad dialer is not as good as the iPhone. On iPhone when you dial a person’s number, if that number exists in your Contacts, you can see his name displayed. I find this feature missing on Windows Phone 7. Moreover the recent callers list is kinda buggy at this stage. Even if the number is present in my contact list, Windows Phone 7 doesn’t automatically show the person’s name. Instead I see a list of numbers, which is not very friendly.

SMS/MMS

The SMS feature is quite similar to the one found on iPhone. Except that there is one additional feature, found on most feature phones but missing on the iPhone, which is requesting a delivery receipt from the carrier. One glaring omission is the drafts feature. While iPhone doesn’t have an explicit drafts feature, every conversation thread can save one message content. This is something that’s missing on Windows Phone 7.

SMS Option that allows you to optionally receive a delivery receipt for every sent message

Mail

While Windows Phone doesn’t support threaded emails, emailing on this device is still as good as the iPhone or even better. There is no unified inbox and every email account appears as a separate tile. While for some it might be annoying, I prefer it this way. Another great feature of Windows Phone 7 is that, the Mail tile shows “real unread count”. If you are like me flagging emails by keeping them unread, Windows Phone is for you. The tile shows the number of emails that are fresh rather than the raw count of the number of emails that you have marked unread. A very neat feature.

Calendar

Windows Phone 7 shows your next calendar event right on the lock screen. While some feature phones from Sony Ericsson had this feature for a long time, none of the smart phones have this till date. Without even unlocking the device, you can see what’s the next event! However, Windows Phone 7 will only sync your primary calendars in your accounts. Don’t expect your subscribed holiday calendars or any other private calendars you have subscribed to to appear on the device. More info on a Microsoft knowledge base here

Pictures hub

Apps can integrate into the Pictures hub and can be set automatically upload your photos as and when you take. Windows Phone 7 supports Facebook sync and Upload to Skydrive out of the box. While there is a feature to “automatically” upload all photos to Windows live SkyDrive, I couldn’t get that to work well. While apps can integrate into pictures hub, they can only offer to edit those photos. A tighter Flickr integration would have been better.

Auto upload pictures to SkyDrive

Music and Videos Hub vs iPod

The Music and Videos Hub is the central place for all your music and videos. There are no separate radio app or separate lyrics app. All of them are integrated within the hub. There is a lyrics app available from marketplace called Lyrics from MusixMatch. When you play a song, this app brings in lyrics and other informational content from the Internet right within the Music hub. Neat. While Apple iPhone is all about downloading different apps for different functionalities, Windows Phone is all about tighter integration of apps so that as a consumer what you get is information right into the hubs you are familiar with.

Audio quality

The HTC devices comes with a built in audio enhancer software which applies SRS/WOW and Dolby Mobile effects to your audio. As such, the sound quality of Windows Phone 7 on HTC HD 7 is far better than the iPhone. Given that Windows Phone 7 syncs with your iTunes library even on your Mac there is no reason why you should not use it. I’m already using HD 7 as my primary iPod device right now.

Internet Explorer vs Mobile Safari

I don’t think this even deserves a comparison. IE is not a great browser as usual on the mobile space. It still uses the same old Trident rendering engine which is no where near WebKit. For the sake of comparison, the browser scores 5/100 in ACID3 tests while the iPhone browser scores 100/100. The browser also shows empty long scrolling pages when opening a URL and I have no freaking idea why. Microsoft has a long way to go on this.
On a side note, it doesn’t support HTML5 as well. A quick run on html5test.com showed that the browser scored 12/300 points. For Singapore users this means, GoThere.sg will not automatically detect your current location when you open their web app (and a whole lot others)

Bing vs Google Maps

Again a no brainer. Bing maps said there are only two Starbucks in the whole of Singapore. Not sure about US, but in Singapore, bing maps is pretty useless. I would probably expect the GoThere.sg team to release a app for this platform. As mentioned previously, even their webapp isn’t supported fully by IE since it doesn’t support HTML5.

Bing Search vs Google Search

As a common user Bing Search is pretty good, no don’t get me wrong. I’m serious. Bing Search is pretty good for casual users. However, for techies like me whose majority of searches would end up in a Stackoverflow page or a developer forum page, Bing performs quite badly. Since on a mobile device no one is going to search for a developer related thing, I think Bing just cuts the mark. For the so called “power users”, there is a native Google Search app available free of cost from the Market Place. However, the phones’ built in search button cannot be over-ridden by Google or any other app.

MarketPlace vs AppStore

Two things that sets MarketPlace apart from AppStore are, Windows marketplace allows you to “try” an app before you buy. (Of course the developer should allow trials). This is something that’s purported to be introduced in iOS 5, but not sure if it will make it through. Similarly Windows MarketPlace shows app prices in local currency for Singapore. Microsoft considers Singapore to be a “bigger” market unlike Apple.
However a 0.99$ app is still shows as 1.59$ though 1USD is around 1.3 SGD at the time of writing.

Game Center vs XBox LIVE

When it comes to Social games, Microsoft already has a pre-eminent position compared to Apple. While Apple has more games on their platform as on date, It will not take much time for game publishers to port their apps to Windows Phones. Easy to use Visual Studio and easier migration path for XBox games will help the platform mature easily. However for at least two years, I believe iPhone will still rule the world in this respect.

Windows Live vs MobileMe

Find my Phone on the web

Windows Live is free. You get 25GB of SkyDrive space, free remote wipe, remote lock, free push email, calendar and photo library. While I haven’t personally used MobileMe, Windows Live seems to provide nearly everything MobileMe offers for free. I tried remote locking and locating the device from windowsphone.live.com and it worked perfectly. It even warned you not to keep simple passwords when you try to lock your screen.

Apple should actually make MobileMe free and may be charge for iDisk.

What I like on Windows Phone 7

Hubs. Tighter integration like people hub, Music and Videos hub makes Windows Phone a breeze to use. When more and more apps integrate themselves into these hubs, it will be better experience than the iPhone. More information at your fingertips right from the lock screen. If you primarily use your phone for email/messaging and getting in touch with people, like most blackberry users, Windows Phone is for you. It will save you from that really moments! Even the lock screen is full of information like the number of unread emails, missed calls or messages. Windows Phone is more information centric than any other smartphones I’ve ever seen like iPhone or Android.
The HTC devices’ audio quality is far ahead of iPhone esp with the built in SRS/WOW and Dolby Mobile enhancers. The music player also syncs with iTunes and you can bring all your iTunes playlists into your Windows Phone. Software for syncing is available for both Mac and PC.
The online services provided at windowsphone.live.com is better than the competing platforms like iOS or Android.

What I dislike on Windows Phone 7

As on date, third party apps cannot integrate into people hub. So there will not be a twitter app that adds Twitter status to your People hub. Similarly third party apps like Flickr cannot integrate into the pictures hub. (Only editors can integrate, You can edit a picture using a editor right from the Pictures hub but not upload it) So you again have to depend on a standalone Flickr app to upload pictures to flickr. As on date, the only the hub that supports full integration for third party services is the Music hub. But I believe Microsoft would open up the SDKs once the platform starts picking up.

Most apps don’t update live tiles as on date. Twitter’s own native app doesn’t do any push notification or live tile update. The market place is still young and there is still a lot more to grow.

Multiple Calendars from the same service cannot be synced with Windows Phone. May be a software update later can fix this issue.

Hardware still limited to Samsung, HTC and LG. Motorola, Sony Ericsson and Dell might join the party soon.

What’s missing in comparison to iOS

Multitasking is a huge thing especially after using iOS4. Currently on Windows Phone, apps don’t even resume from where it was left off. It’s still like iOS 3.0 ish. Same goes to copy paste. You can’t copy a link from a tweet and message it to your friend or vice versa.

Apps availability. If you are a IM junkie, stay away from Windows Phone. You don’t have any IM apps right now. No not even Microsoft’s own Windows Live Messenger.

While the platform supports push notifications, very few apps support it. There is a weather app called WeatherBug that shows the current weather on the tile. But the built in HTC’s weather app doesn’t, unfortunately.

A minor thing, inability to take screenshots on Windows Phone is kinda pain, esp if you are a developer. Reproducing your customer feedback/complaints will now be difficult without this simple feature. To a common user, it might not be a serious omission though.

Inferior maps and browser. Hopefully with the upcoming January 2011 update for Windows Phone 7, the browser will take a new shape based on IE 9 code base, alleviating one problem. For Singapore users’ when GoThere.sg implements their mapping app, you will never need to open Bing again.

Final Verdict

As on date, there is no doubt that the iPhone 4 wins hands down. However, Windows Phones are a real competition to most Android devices out there. 70% of Android users are from United States. Are they really Android users or chose Android for Verizon? Microsoft has a huge market here. Windows Phones have a slick UI which is far ahead of Android. Surely when users see the phone, they would probably choose a Windows Phone over Android. As Windows Phone shows up some competition to iOS, Apple will also be forced to introduce features like Lock screen information (Information at a glance), Widgets on Home screen (Live tiles), free MobileMe there by leading to better products for consumers like us. All in all Windows Phone is all set to be the next successful platform and there is no reason why developers like us shouldn’t jump into it. My next post will precisely be targeting developers on how to port your apps from iPhone to Windows Phone 7 comparing the similarities in UI and which the equivalent Windows Phone 7 UI/Interaction pattern for a given iPhone UI.

Stay tuned.

Mugunth

Follow me on Twitter

©2012 MKBlog. All Rights Reserved.

• Tweet

Related posts:

1. Comparison: Bootup time of iPhone4 vs Windows Phone 7 (HTC HD7) I made a quick video showing how fast the Windows...

The following photo was taken using my hi-res super macro camera, Canon S5 IS.

A quick comparison in the displays of iPad, iPhone 4 and Nexus One. The iPhone 4 display is clearly superior.

You can download a higher resolution version of this image by right clicking the above image and clicking “Save link as…” Be forewarned, most low end computers can’t even open that image (as on the date of writing this). The image is fairly large at 10000X3000 pixels at 300PPI. It’s about 35MB to download.

If you zoom the image, you will notice that even at this high resolution, the pixels of iPhone 4 are not visible.

–

Mugunth

Follow me on Twitter

©2012 MKBlog. All Rights Reserved.

• Tweet

Related posts:

1. Comparison: Bootup time of iPhone4 vs Windows Phone 7 (HTC HD7) I made a quick video showing how fast the Windows...

Anti-DRM fans might quip, but iPhone Developers love this digital signatures and provisioning as it reduces piracy dramatically. But all these aren’t free. Provisioning comes with a cost, especially when you write a iPhone app and want to share it with your friends/clients for beta testing. Apple has an excellent documentation on how to do an AdHoc build. Yet still, most users stumble upon especially when they have to make a build and send it to their testers/clients who are on Windows I’m not going to rewrite the entire AdHoc provisioning process here. This post is exclusively for iPhone developers whose testers/clients are Windows users who would like to provision the beta versions onto their iPhones using iTunes on Windows.

As usual, you prepare a AdHoc build and zip the .app bundle, attach it to the email along with the mobile provisioning profile and send it to your customer. On macs, things are pretty straight forward. On Windows, however, your customers are prone to fall into these common pitfalls which might cause a troublesome nightmare for you.

First Pitfall:
Extracting the .zip file you sent using Windows Explorer’s built in Compression Engine.

I repeat. DON’T DON’T DON’T extract the zip file using the Windows’ explorer’s built in “Extract Here” command. The default compression engine bundled with Windows messes up the CRCs by adding temporary files into the .app bundle. Ask your testers to use a better de-compression tool like 7-Zip, WinZip or WinRar.

Second Pitfall:
Opening the .app folder out of “curiosity” to “see” what’s inside.

Never double-click and “open” the extracted .app “folder” (On windows the .app bundle appears as a folder) . Windows is a sh**. I agree. It automatically creates a “Thumbs.db/Desktop.ini/folder.htt” (some created by Virus, some by Windows) file whenever you access a folder and that again changes the CRC of the bundle. Just drag the .app “folder” immediately after extracting into iTunes. Also drag the provisioning profile into iTunes and sync the app.

If you think your users’ might not follow all these steps, you can send them the .IPA file instead of the compressed .app bundle. This .IPA file can be generated on your mac by dragging the .app bundle into iTunes. When you drag the .app bundle into your iTunes library, it internally creates a .IPA file. This IPA file can be located in Finder from iTunes. Just Cmd click your app on iTunes and click “Show in Finder”. Send this .IPA file (and the mobile provisioning file) to your testers.

Hope that clears the air around AdHoc provisioning on Windows.

–
Mugunth

Follow me on Twitter

©2012 MKBlog. All Rights Reserved.

• Tweet

Related posts:

1. Comparison: Bootup time of iPhone4 vs Windows Phone 7 (HTC HD7) I made a quick video showing how fast the Windows...

Like most of you, I too downloaded the 3.2 beta and was playing around with some iPad stuff. Today when iPhone OS 3.1.3 is released, without second thought, I immediately updated my iPhone. My iPhone being a development device, I understood that I can no longer use the current XCode installation to run apps on device. When I launched XCode, the Organizer reported,

“The version of iPhone OS on “ABC’s iPhone” does not match any of the versions of iPhone OS supported for development with this installation of the iPhone SDK”

So does that mean, you should re-install the SDK? Just like me, you will probably have confusions like,

Will installing it corrupt or overwrite your 3.2 beta?

Should I re-install 3.2 beta again?

I too had these. Fortunately, I decided to hack things myself and got the 3.1.3 working without downloading the entire SDK. This is how I did. Type the following command into your terminal.


ln -s /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport/3.1.2\ \(7D11\) /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport/3.1.3


Now quit and restart XCode. Voila! you have effectively “fooled” XCode! and you have saved countless hours which you can effectively use on programming another cool app!

Note that this hack will work *any* minor OS updates. However, if you are using a feature specific to the new version you will probably find yourself in trouble. In other words, don’t try to apply the same technique when 3.2 or 4.0 launches.

–
Mugunth

Follow me on Twitter

©2012 MKBlog. All Rights Reserved.

• Tweet

No related posts.

With the outburst of Twitter and microblogging services, many companies who want to make some quick money started services that include, URL shortening like tinyurl, bit.ly, tr.im and others or image sharing services like TwitPic, yFrog and so on. However, due to lack of a proper business model, some of these sites are struggling to meet their bandwidth costs. Because most of these services are just a week long PHP programming work, it’s easy for other companies to enter the URL shortening bandwagon. As such it’s difficult for companies to really make a business model out of this.

Recently, Twitter’s switch from tinyurl to bit.ly as it’s default shortening service infuriated companies like tr.im as they announced that they will probably be shutting down their service, though they reverted their decision later. When such companies go out of business, what will happen to your URLs? Dead and gone for good? So why not host our own URL shortening services? How difficult is it to write our own URL shortening service? Turns out that a few couple of PHP files, and a MySQL database and a mod-rewrite enabled Apache server is all what you need for hosting your own URL shortening service. Writing those PHP code is not for the those who are not conversant with PHP (including me). For people like us, two smart guys, Lester Chan and Ozh Richard at yourls.org have written a custom URL shortener that you can use it for free on your blog. In this post, I will briefly explain how to host your own custom URL shortener using YOURLS. Later we will also look at how to host your own “TwitPic” service.

Steps for hosting a custom URL Shortener

Hosting your own custom URL shortener with YOURLS is a 3hr work. Yeah, believe me, these people have made most part of the work required. In fact, it took me more time to write this post than host YOURLS. I’ve explained it in four easy steps below.

Step 1

Purchase a short and sweet domain. I recently purchased a domain mk.sg and it costed me a paltry 30$ (45 SGD) from Vooju. You can explore possible domains using domainr, a nice tool that automatically checks for available domains from the letters you choose. Though this step is not mandatory, it’s good to have a short domain name given that domain names are this cheap.

Step 2

Download the latest copy of yourls from their website. Create a MySql database in your server and fill in the details of your MySQL database in the config file as explained in the config section Upload your files to the root of the server.
For example, I host my primary domain mugunthkumar.com and mk.sg in the same hosting account. mk.sg actually points to a folder inside my public_html folder. FTP these files into that folder and point your browser to http://YOUR-SHORT-DOMAIN.COM/admin. Click install. Done!

The configuration file provides options like whether it’s a private URL shortener or public, the usernames and passwords allowed for accessing the service and a whole lot. Believe me, it’s as feature-rich as bit.ly. You can track who clicked your links, from which location they clicked and a variety of other tracking features. However, it doesn’t allow users to “preview” the short links. Not a deal-breaker though.

If your installation is going to be private like mine, you can access the service from http://YOUR-SHORT-DOMAIN.COM/yourls-api.php You can rename yourls-api.php to something else as well. If you specify the installation as private in the config file, you have to provide a user name and password for accessing this API like below.
http://YOUR-SHORT-DOMAIN.COM/yourls-api.php?action=shorturl&username=test&password=test&format=simple&&url=%@
If you want your URL shortener to be used by everyone, set it appropriately in the config file and you can ignore the username and password parameter from this API.

Step 3

Install the YOURLS word press plugin that automatically links your posts, creates a short URL and tweets it. Any post or page you publish is now automatically tweeted by this plugin.

Step 4

Now, how good is a URL shortener if your favorite twitter client doesn’t support it? Fortunately with the release of Twitter 2, my favourite twitter client, you can use a custom URL shortener as described in developer.atebits.com. Open Tweetie 2, Go to Settings, URL Shorterning -> Custom, type the entry below.
http://YOUR-SHORT-DOMAIN.COM/yourls-api.php?action=shorturl&username=test&password=test&format=simple&&url=%@
Hopefully, other twitter clients will follow the crowd shortly. And I believe, if most twitter clients support custom URL shortening, the market share for bit.ly and others might go down.

With this, you can get your own custom URL shortening service up and running within, say, 3 hrs.
Next, we will look at how to host our own “TwitPic” service.

Steps for hosting a custom “TwitPic”

Hosting your own “TwitPic” is even easier. Thanks to the WordPress plugin Twitter2Press, that completely automates everything! Below are the detailed steps for hosting your own “TwitPic”.

Step 1

Create a subdomain or directory and install wordpress into it. Note that yourls and wordpress cannot co-exist in the same directory as both handle URLs differently. So install it into a subdomain and make that subdomain as short as possible. Mine is b.mk.sg.

Step 2

Install the Twitter2Press plugin and open the settings page. Choose YOURLS and specify the API username and password. This is the same username password that you provided in the config file while setting up YOURLS. Choose a page for the image gallery. This is the page that shows the images you tweeted (much like twitpic or yFrog’s home page). It can either be your home page or a dedicated page, say Image Gallery or something.

Step 3

Twitter2Press has an API that is supported by Tweetie 2 and hopefully other twitter clients will follow. For tweetie to work with your Image Service, you need to provide the API endpoint. If your Image Gallery Page is “gallery”, the endpoint is
http://YOUR-SHORT-DOMAIN.COM/gallery/index.php
All parameters are posted to this service by Tweetie 2. If you don’t have a dedicated Image Gallery Page, omit the gallery from the API endpoint.

That’s it. Now even if tr.im shuts down or twitpic eats all your files, you are safe. Your data lies in your server. Go, start yours now!

–

Mugunth

Follow me on Twitter

©2012 MKBlog. All Rights Reserved.

• Tweet

No related posts.

A 404 Error page usually informs visitors that something they were looking for is not found. I wanted to create a useful 404 error page for my blog and site. If it is only for a blog, I would have done with a multitude of plugins available for WordPress like smart 404, AskApache’s Google 404. A quick search for “404″ in wordpress extension site will reveal atleast 6 pages of extensions.
But much to my bad luck, they didn’t fit my “requirements” properly. I needed a redirection page that would show related search results straight on the page itself.

[ad#AdBrite-Post]

Google’s creating useful 404 pages didn’t work out either as it offered only to show me a text box with keywords pre-populated. I wanted something similar, but with the results of the search in the 404 error page itself, just like the AskApache’s Google 404 plugin. The smart 404 plugin didn’t work for me and many others as well after 2.7.1 upgrade. The askapache needed some .htaccess tweaking which is handled very poorly by godaddy’s Windows hosting. So I decided to write one myself and the result is what you can see here

The first thing I did was to change godaddy’s default error behaviour to redirect to a custom error page titled 404.html just under my root. After about one hour or so, my site got updated and all the 404 behaviours were directed to my page.

[ad#AdBrite-Post]

There are two ways (atleast that which is handled by my 404) in which one would come to your site. One is by typing the URL wrongly or from a old outdated bookmark. Or from one of your old blog redirection. In my case, my old blog was at blogger.com and I’ve set it up to redirect to my new domain. However, because I changed my permalink settings to avoid showing the classic year/month in the URL, all my redirection from blogspot.com were hitting 404′s… If smart 404 worked as promised, i would have been happier. But unfortunately, even after the release of 2.8.3 (at the time of writing this), the plugin didn’t work. So the first thing I did was to extract keywords from the referrer url, document.referrer. In case the document.referrer is empty, it means the user has typed a wrong url in the address bar or followed a old bookmark. In that case I extract keywords from document.location.href, which is the wrongly entered url. I strip of everything except the post name which by far has the most keywords related to the URL and pass it to Google AJAX Search API.

Based on inputs from various other sources including my favourite Jakob Nielsen’s suggestions, I decided that my 404 should look like a real *error* page rather than a blog post. It should possibly have a sitemap if it’s a website or links to popular posts in case of a blog. It should take your users to important places in your website as in my 404 page offers links to my homepage and blog. Above all, it should have a search box where user could search for what he was looking for without hitting the browser back button.

My version of 404 error page looks like this.

404 Error page @ mugunthkumar.com

It uses plain html and javascript. It’s not a server scripted file like PHP of ASPX. You can go ahead and copy the file (Cmd click -> View Page Source) from my error page and use it in your own site. I would be glad if you could attribute me by linking to this post or blog, though it’s purely optional and I leave it to you.

Follow me on Twitter

©2012 MKBlog. All Rights Reserved.

• Tweet

No related posts.

You must be knowing that Youtube, displays a subtle warning when users visit it from IE6 browser. Though everyone knows that IE6 is the most crappy browser on planet Earth, corporates are still hesistant to migrate to other Microsoft browsers or from other Vendors like Mozilla/Google/Apple.

To make more and more people aware of the security risks involved with IE, a whole lot of campaign started on Twitter, including  adding a Twibbon to support a cause, “IE 6 must die”

You as a wordpress self-hosted user can also help the cause, by installing this plugin.

http://www.incerteza.org/blog/projetos/shockingly-big-ie6-warning/

Thanks to incerteza.org

PS: I have added it to this blog. Try visiting it from IE6. You will see somthing like this.

Warn IE6 users about it's pathetic security holes...

The plugin can also be configured to crash your visitor’s browser if they visit from IE6!!! Super cool!!!

incerteza.org rocks..! Doom to IE6…

–
Mugunth

Follow me on Twitter

©2012 MKBlog. All Rights Reserved.

• Tweet

No related posts.

Bluetooth receivers come in various forms and shapes… They “claim” that they support A2DP and AVRCP. So do mobile phones. But not all models of receivers “play nice” with all phones.
In fact, if you read the “fine prints” in the user manual, you might even encounter something like this…

This product *may* work. We don't guarantee anything...!

[ad#AdBrite-Post]

So,that doesn’t mean this product didn’t work as expected, but before buying any bluetooth device, try it out first. If none of your friends have the device to test it for, buy it from IT Show or Electronics Fair where they usually have a couple of products to test compatibility. Usually the shop from where you bought will NOT give you a refund if your mobile doesn’t work with the receiver…

Now that doesn’t mean that this device doesn’t work with iPhone. It works fine though I have some complaints. Before buying this device I got a Philips SHB7100 as it had previous and next track buttons separate from volume control button.I should have done a basic search on the Internet. The third link was someone complaining that this thing doesn’t work with iPhone 3.0 software update. Pretty unfortunate. I sold it out at hardwarezone.sg and got this iTech Clip Music 801.

iTech Clip Music near a 20 cent (SGD) coin

Though it looked a bit bulky, the build quality was good unlike the Philips SHB7100 and it was very lightweight. (15 gms) After opening I paired it with my iPhone 3G. Pairing was a breeze, and quick. iPhone recognized the device as a headset and seamlessly switched the music through the device. The iPod screen will look like this if your pairing is successful.

The volume control will be replaced by “Clip Music 801″ and the blue tooth icon.

Oh No!!! the volume control is gone!! was my first reaction.

I tried increasing the volume through the hardware button. No luck. Seems like the device volume controls are the only way to increase/decrease the volume. With the iPhone 3.0 software, the previous/next controls  also didn’t work though it worked with the Mac.Apple might soon release a bug fix.

Coming to the audio quality, it was good though there was some compression artifacts. The sound had clear mids, deep bass but the trebles and highs was slightly missing, which is noticable even if you are NOT an audiophile. However, it can be easily adjusted by choosing a different eq setting. I usually use “Bass booster” on my iPhone. Changing it to “Classical” did the job. No wonder, Apple chose Wifi for their AirTunes rather than bluetooth. The volume was pretty loud, as if the earphones are directly plugged into the iPhone.

Phone voice quality was awesome. The microphone picked up even the lightest sound (though not the background sound). However, while listening to music, when you get an incoming call, the music doesn’t “fade out”. All of a sudden you will hear the ringing tone. The tone is not your ring tone but a different tone played by the headset. When the call ends, the music doesn’t start automatically. You have to manually press the “Play” button.

Quite cumbersome, but still manageable.

Similarly, when you remove your headphones from the headset, it doesn’t pause the music like how it happens on the iPhone. However, when you insert the headphones into the iPhone, music is automatically routed through the plugged in headphones. When you remove it, music is streamed through the device. Nice little feature.

[ad#AdBrite-Post]

As with many other devices, the music DID skip or “miss a beat” because of bluetooth streaming but it was not very obvious. I had a very nasty problem with my old Philips SHB7100 paired with my mac. Now is it very obvious? It depends. If your iPhone is not “busy” doing other things, the audio is smooth. When you are downloading an email attachment, you might get some stutters. Browsing the Internet on WIFI causes the audio to stutter a LOT. LOT means a LOT! Like, as in twice every 5 seconds. Once the page is rendered fully, it resumes normally. Note that browsing on 3G doesn’t cause issues. I think it’s because the bluetooth and WIFI are actually present within the same chip.

All these artifacts are only when you pair it with the iPhone. When I paired it with my mac, there wasn’t any stutter. I could be in the same room, or nearby rooms so long as the distance is less than 5m. But the compression artifacts, were still obvious. Voice calling were working even at far distances though and was clear without skips. This headset even has a “cool” feature called distance alert that will ring a tone when you move away from your mobile phone. So you won’t miss your phone at the restaurant table

However voice calling through Skype or Fring didn’t work via bluetooth. The “call connnect” and “call disconnect” tones are routed through bluetooth but calls aren’t. Pretty bad Apple. Pretty bad. On the Mac also, I could see the same behaviour. Skype calls weren’t routed through bluetooth though the ring tones were. Not sure who is the culprit. Games were however not affected.  Sound is routed through bluetooth in this case. I think it’s because the “headset” profile is not accessible to other applications but the “headphones” profile is.

To wind it up, I should say that this headset is good. A 3.5 star rating. However, The technology still has to mature. Compression artifacts are still noticable and A2DP is definitely not for the audiophiles. But for casual music listeners, and specially gamers, cutting the cord is more important that those slight sound artifacts. Playing a game with your iPhone accelerometer without the earphone cords hanging around is really a boon.

Follow me on Twitter

©2012 MKBlog. All Rights Reserved.

• Tweet

No related posts.

How to make your UITableView scroll fast?

The iPhone’s GPU struggles to render blended views. Here, Tweetie’s Loren Brichter explains how Tweetie’s UITableView scrolls smoothly on iPhone.

He uses a custom drawn UITableViewCell that “pre-renders” the whole thing…

The blog entry is here…

http://blog.atebits.com/2008/12/fast-scrolling-in-tweetie-with-uitableview/

If it’s slow, try it’s google cache version…
I’m not sure if this is the one used by Twitterrific also. Twitterrific acknowledges Loren Brichter on their About page for ABTableViewCell.

Nice tip… Thanks… Loren Brichter. You can follow him on twitter at @atebits.

For more such tips, you can follow me on twitter at @mugunthkumar

–
Mugunth

Follow me on Twitter

©2012 MKBlog. All Rights Reserved.

• Tweet

No related posts.