Monday, January 25, 2010

Try Piped TechCrunch Feed: More TC, Less MG

I am a big TechCrunch fan and I read it pretty much every day.  It is one of the best ways to stay in touch with the world of Tech and the Internet.  In general, its posts are well-written, informative and seemingly unbiased.  That is, with the notorious exception of MG Siegler.  His posts, besides being boringly formulaic, give the sense that he majored in Apple Fanboyism at college with a minor in Google studies.

So, I decided to take action and go back to reading TechCrunch as it was before MG came on board.

One of my favorite sites is Yahoo! Pipes. It lets you remix the web in as sense as you want it.  I went there with a simple goal: More TC, less MG.

Thanks to Pipes, I now have made a TechCrunch feed that filters out all posts written by MG Siegler.

Here is the link.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/spanishgringo/techcrunch_no_mg_siegler

Just add it to Google Reader (or your reader of choice) and enjoy!

Friday, January 22, 2010

Evernote Widget for S60 Updated

I have updated the Evernote widget for S60v5 that I wrote back in Sept with some minor improvements.
  • Updated jQuery version to 1.4 with jQueryUI 1.8b
  • Cleaned up the code a bit to make it a little faster (not much more improvement will come until Nokia updates the browser engine... (it is so old that webkit-border-radius is not even suported by WRT)
  • The Nokia soft keys only appear at launch and in Portrait mode. This way when viewing a note from Evernote you can use a lot more real estate on the screen.
Enjoy.

Get the code/links from the original post:
Evernote for S60v5

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

5800 FW Available with limited Kinetic Scrolling

Nokia just made a new firmware available for the Nokia 5800 XM.  A lot of the existing users have been waiting for this for a long long time.  Nokia has taken a lot of flack, justified in my opinion, for dragging their feet to fix a lot of the things missing/broken in their first mainstream touch device.  Apple and Android are eating Nokia's lunch in smart phones because they have been more innovative and faster at bringing meaningful updates to market.

I sure hope that Nokia starts changing its ways, although I do have to say that I am overall quite pleased with the phone.

Firmware 40 brings a few things to the phone so far that I have seen:

  1. Kinetic Scrolling (move around the page by flicking your finger) in many of the apps although it is sorely lacking the the normal device menus 
  2. New Home screen similar to the 5530 with a music player widget, 4 shortcuts and a contact carousel
  3. Better input option to allow one preferred method for portrait and other for landscape
  4. Camera seems a bit quicker to me
  5. Hopefully many many bug fixes (alarm bug, downloaded videos from feeds, corrupted podcast database, etc...)
Not included and disappointing:
  1. Updated webkit browser (still stuck at webkit 413 whereas Chrome uses 532.8). This will be needed to greatly improve the somtimes shoddy WRT experience.
  2. True Kinetic Scrolling in the device (eg, menus, better implemented in browser)
  3. More flexible input options for portrait and landscape (why can't  I choose mini querty for portrait and full querty for landscape?)
  4. More shortcuts in Homescreen
  5. Landscape Homescreen