Just found a great driver app for the Android: “BlueInput” by Teksoft. It’s also available on the market, easiest found by the company name. It claims to support a multitude of bluetooth keyboards and mice. What’s best, it worked perfectly with my old Nokia SU-8W right out of the box. Finally, I don’t have fumble with those on-screen keys any more.
Archive for
February, 2011
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2011-02-17 10:21
2011-02-12 09:13
Yesterday it was announced that Nokia would partner with Microsoft for their new smart phones. Investors did not like the news, and sent Nokia’s stock down 14% on heavy trading. Slashdot did not like the news, with comments like “rest in peace“, and several “this was the last Nokia I’ll own“. The Register called it Losers Alliance.
Although Nokia says they will keep MeeGo around, it seems unlikely that it will top priority. Microlith’s comment describes the bleak future of open smart phones in the near future:
“The problem with Android, IMO, is that the entire ecosystem composing it and much of what surrounds it is entirely insular, and to no great benefit.
It shares no common libraries or interfaces with what you find in most Linux distributions. It uses a unique libc that no other distribution uses. It uses a file system layout that is not found anywhere else. Its GUI rendering subsystem is completely unique and incompatible with all others.
The end result is that changes to Android stay within the Android system and do not benefit open source projects outside of it. And projects outside of it require heavy rewrites to work, at all, on Android. Not to mention that Android has no real repository type system, so you’re left trading .apk files and latching on to the market, which is only available on the default builds of some devices and not at all on others.
Maemo was developed with that compatibility in mind, and is a large part of the reason I bought it. It was most of what the OpenMoko Freerunner tried to be, and MeeGo only improved the openness aspect of it. MeeGo allowed mobile devices to retain continuity with the rest of the open source ecosystem you find in most desktop Linux systems, thus changes and improvements to both ends benefits everyone. In addition, it removed the non-device-specific closed bits and created a platform independent of any one handset vendor.
Android leaves you a second (or more likely, third) class citizen in this effort, as the AOSP does not, last I checked, flow upstream into the Android core and the AOSP only receives the latest changes to Android after it’s been delivered to device manufacturers (see Honeycomb and Motorola.)
So this is very much a Microsoft victory against Open Source, if not Free Software, projects in the mobile space. And Android is not a way forward that is very fair to end users and non-corporate developers.”
2011-02-08 06:38
Inflation is never a good thing. Not in the money markets, but not in other numbers either, including software version numbers. It seems Chrome has started a number war, though. In trying to catch up to the same version number as IE, they’ve gone from 1 in the beginning of 2009, to 9 two years later. Looking at the Timeline from WikiMedia, the major version bobbles are so crammed they overlap. IE on the other hand, took 16 years to get to the same number, where IE6 was responsible for five of those years. Now it looks like Mozilla wants to be part of the number game with Firefox. Apparently, they’re planning four new major version releases this year.
Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Timeline_of_web_browsers.svg
At least they’re still on numbers, though. The legacy of crazy OS names which Microsoft might have started with XP is still dreadful. “Crusty Cupcake”, “Frozen Ginger Lion”, “Snappy Lizard”. Even if some of the schema follow alphabetical order, I still find it a lot easier to know which version comes next by simply looking at a +1 number. I guess I would not make it very far in the marketing department.