gnegg: February 2010

Sticking to the iPhone

Recently, I got a chance to play around with a Nexus One phone and I was using it as my main phone with the intent to use it as my new main phone. I had enough of the lack of background apps and the closedness of the iPhone, so I thought, I should really go through with this.

Unfortunately though, this didn’t work out so well.

People who haven’t tried both devices would probably never understand this, but the Nexus One touch screen is really, really bad. The bit of squigglyness you see on the picture in the linked article seems like no big deal, but after one week of Nexus One and then going back to the iPhone, you can’t imagine how smooth it feels to use the iPhone again.

It’s like being in a very noisy environment and then stepping back into a quiet one.

Why did I try the iPhone again?

While I got Podcast listening to work correctly on the Android phone, I noticed that a lot of my commuting time is not just spent by listening to podcasts, but that some games (currently Doodle Jump and Plants vs. Zombies) play a huge role too and the supply of games on the Android plattform is really, really bad.

And don’t get me started on the keyboard: Neither the built-in one nor the one I had switched to even comes close to what the iPhone provides. I’m about 5 times as fast on the iPhone than on the Android. Worse: After switching to the Nexus One, I again began dreading having to write SMSes which usually spells death to any phone for me.

Speaking of keyboard: The built-in one is completely unusable for multilingual people: The text I write on a phone is about 50% english and 50% german. The Android keyboard doesn’t allow switching the language on the fly (while the english and german keyboards are quite alike, the keyboard language also determines the auto correction language), and it couples the keyboard language to the phone UI language.

This is really bad, as over the years I bacame so accustomed to english UIs that I frankly cannot work with german UIs any more – also because of the usually really bad translations. Eek.

So, let’s tally.

	iPhone	Android Device
Advantages	Working touch screen Smoother graphics and thus more fluent usage. Never crashes Apps I learned to depend on are available (Wemlin, Doodle Jump […]) No background noise in the headphones	Background-Applications (I wanted this for working IM as the notification based solutions on the iPhone never seemed to work) Built-in applications can be replaced at will Ability to buzz pictures (yeah. I know. Who needs this?) On-the-fly podcast download.
Disadvantages	Can’t replace internal apps by better ones Needs iTunes to download podcasts No background apps No buzzing of pictures (at least not if you want a location attached to your buzz)	Really bad touch screen (jumpy, inaccurate, sometimes losing calibration until I reboot it) Very mediocre applications available UI sometimes slow Very bad battery life (doesn’t make it through one day even when not heavily used) Crashes about once a day Did I already write “really bad touch screen” – I guess I did, but: “really bad touch screen” Sometimes really bad, sometimes just bad background noise in the headphones. According to HTC, this can be fixed by periodically turning off the phone and removing the battery(!). No audible support (I know I could probably remove the DRM, but why bother at the moment?)

While I thought I could live with the touch screen, the moment I turned on the iPhone again to play a round of “Plants vs. Zombies” that just came out for the i-Devices, I’ve seen how a touch screen is supposed to work and I could not bring myself around to going back, but I still wanted some of the one big iPhone disadvantage, which is lack of non-SMS-based messaging fixed for me, so here’s what I’ve done:

WhatsApp on the iPhone works really well as an SMS replacement (something I was after for a very long time)
meebo so far never disconnected me on the iPhone which is something all other iPhone IM clients have done for me – and even on the android, meebo tended to disconnect and not reconnect.

For me, that’s it. No more experiments. What ever I tried to get away from Apple’s dictate, it always failed. The N900 is a geeks heaven but doesn’t support my expensive in-ear iPhone headset and doesn’t provide any halfway interesting games. Android has a bad touchscreen, next to no battery life, is slow and crashy.

It’s really hard to admit for me as a geek and strong believer in freedom to use something I bought for whatever purpose I want to use it for, but Apple, even after two years, still rules the phone market in usability and hardware build quality.

Can’t wait to see what the next iteration of the iPhone will be, though they don’t have to change anything as long as their competition still thinks it’s ok to save $2 on each phone by using a crappy touchscreen and a crappy battery.

Sprite avatars in Gravatar

After the release of Google Buzz, my Google profile which I had for years finally became somewhat useful. Seeing that I really liked the avatar I’ve added to that profile, I decided, that Frog should henceforth be my official avatar.

This also meant that I wanted to add Frog to my Gravatar profile which, unfortunately proved to be… let’s say interesting.

The image resizer Gravatar provides on their site to fit the uploaded image to the sites need apparently was not designed for sprites as it tries to blow up sprites way out of proportion only to resize them back down. At first I though I could get away with cheating by uploading above picture with a huge margin added to it, but that only lead to a JavaScript error in their uploader.

In the end, this is what I have done:

Convert the picture into the TGA format
Scale it using hq3x (explanation of hq3x)
Convert it back to png and re-add transparency (hq3x had trouble with transparency in the TGA file)
Scale it to 128 pixels in height
paste it into a pre-prepared 128×128 canvas
upload that.

This is how my gravatar looks now, which feels quite acceptable to me:

The one in google’s profile was way easier to create: Paste the original image into a 64 by 64 canvas and let google do the resizing. It’s not as perfect as the hq3x algorithm, but that suffers by the downsizing to make frog fit 128 pixels in height anyways.

The other option would be to scale using hq2x and the paste that into a 128 by 128 canvas yielding this sharper, but smaller image:

But what ever I do, frog will still be resized by Gravatar (and thus destroyed), so I went with the image that contains more colored pixels at the expense of a bit of sharpness.

Google Buzz, Android and Google Apps Accounts

I was looking at the Google Android Maps Application that is now providing integrated Google Buzz support, showing buzzes directly on the map and allowing you to buzz (around where I live and work, there has been a tremendous uptake of Google Buzz which makes this really compelling).

However, there’s a little peculiarity about the Android maps application: If your main Google Account you configured (that’s the first one you configure) on the phone is a Google Apps account, Maps will use that for buzz-support (apparently, there’s already some kind of infrastructure for inter-company Buzzing in place). This means that you would only see buzzes from other people in your domain and, because there’s no official support for this out there, only if they are also using an Android phone.

“Mittelpraktisch” as I would say in German.

The obvious workaround is to configure your private gmail account to be your primary account (this is only possible by factory-resetting your device by the way), but this has some disadvantages, mainly the fact that the calendar on the Android phones only supports syncing with the primary account and as it happens, usually it’s the work-calendar (the Apps one) you want synchronized; not the private one (that lingers unused in my case).

To work around this issue, share your work calendar with your private Google account.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t do that as I’m posting this, because the default in the domain configuration is to not allow this. Thankfully, I’m that domain’s administrator, so I could change it (small company. remember.), but it seems to take a while to propagate into the calendar account.

I’ll post more as my investigation turns out more, though it is my gut feeling that this mess will solve itself as Google fixes their Maps application to not use that phantom corporate buzz account.

PHP 5.3 and friends on Karmic

I have been patient. For months I hoped that Ubuntu would sooner or later get PHP 5.3, a release I’m very much looking forward to, mainly because of the addition of anonymous inner functions to spell the death of create_function or even eval.

We didn’t get 5.3 for Karmic and who knows about Lucid even (it’s crazy that nearly one year after the release of 5.3, there is still debate on whether to include it in the next version of Ubuntu that will be the current LTS release for the next four years. This is IMHO quite the disservice against PHP 5.3 adoption).

Anyways: We are in the process of releasing a huge update to PopScan that is heavily focussed on getting rid of cruft, increasing speed all over the place and increasing overall code quality. Especially the last part could benefit from having 5.3 and seeing that at this point PopScan already runs well on 5.3, I really wanted to upgrade.

In comes Al-Ubuntu-be, a coworker of mine and his awesome Debian packaging skills: Where there are already a few PPAs out there that contain a 5.3 package, Albe went the extra step and added not only PHP 5.3 but quite many other packages we depend upon that might also be useful to my readers. Packages like APC, memcache, imagick and xdebug for development.

While we can make no guarantees that these packages will be maintained heavily, they will get some security update treatment (though highly likely by version bumping as opposed to backporting).

So. If you are on Karmic (and later Lucid if it won’t get 5.3) and want to run PHP 5.3 with APC and Memcache, head over to Albe’s PPA.

Also, I’d like to take the opportunity to thank Albe for his efforts: Having a PPA with real .deb packages as opposed to just my self-compiled mess I would have done gives us a much nicer way of updating existing installations to 5.3 and even a much nicer path back to the original packages once they come out. Thanks a lot.

Things I can’t do with an iPhone/iPad

have a VoIP call going on when a mobile call/SMS arrives
read Kindle ebooks (I can now, but knowing Apple’s stance on “competing functionality”, with the advent of iBook, how long do you think this will last?)
give it to our customers as another device to use with PopScan (It’s not down-lockable and there’s no way for centralized app deployment that doesn’t go over apple)
plug any peripheral that isn’t apple sanctioned
plug a peripheral and use it system-wide
play a SNES ROM (or any other console rom)
install Adblock (which especially hurts on the iPad)
consistenly use IM (background notifications don’t work consistently)

The iPhone provides me with many advantages and thus I can live with its inherent restrictions (which are completely arbitrary – there’s no technical reason for them), but I see no point to buy yet another locked-down device that does half of the stuff I’d want it to do and does it half-assed at that.

Also it’s a shame that Apple obviously doesn’t need any corporate customers (at least for a small company, I see no possibility).

I just hope, the open and usable Mac computer remains. I would not know what to go back to? Windows? Never. Linux? Sure. But on what hardware?