Greener Desktop

It has long been a dream of mine and many others that one day the web experience on your mobile is exactly the same as on your desktop. Albeit on a smaller screen.

Imagine going to youtube and watching videos with the same experience as the full website or yahoo  mail  with all its ajaxy bling and instant messenger built right in.

In many ways we’re almost there and I have to say Apple and the iphone deserve some credit. The experience is good but its not all there yet. Try going to youtube and playing a video … Oops you can’t. But why is it that with my nokia, windows mobile etc smartphone and the built in browser or Skyfire I can? Because my browser has an important plugin – called flash. Ubiquitous on the desktop but strangely missing on the iphone.

Right about now I hear the  unified screams of the iphone fanboys yelling ‘but we have an app to do that!’ this is true but I am talking about convergence here. Parity. I as a developer doesn’t want to have to write a separate codebase for every mobile phone out there but because of the iphone’s  popularity and lack of a key feature. I have to.

Adobe just announced flash 10 will be coming to pretty much every smartphone out there bar one the iphone. Why? Not because Adobe doesn’t want to provide it. They have gone so far as to actually having written Flash for the iphone already, it’s Apple and their typical closed door approach.

Apple, please open up your platform. You’re slowing down the future. Remember when you used to accuse Microsoft of doing the same. Stop the hypocrisy.

Apple please send me an iPhone. I hate them and everything they stand for. That is why you need to send me one.

I’ve written many articles about what pisses me off about iPhones, iPhone users and all the features the iPhone is missing. I’d say I’m pretty much in the minority as far as bloggers who talk about the iphone so negatively.

With that being said I can see the positives behind the platform and especially the huge following it has generated in just a couple of years. I’ve even written about how Nokia, the mobile phone giant might find itself outsmarted by Apple and all the great marketing.

Apple – Imagine if you could convert me. I write so much about how I hate the iPhone and what it’s missing. If you could turn me around and bring me into the fold, that passion could be directed towards talking about how much I love the iPhone and even into positive debate about how it could be improved. If I could then, in turn convert just a few of my readers to your platform then that phone would have paid itself off in full, many times. Who knows, I might even end up buying a Mac.

During my trial I would give the iPhone exactly one week which is a long time to decide whether you like something or not. If in that time I miss all the wonderful features of my Nokia E71 too much then you will have failed to convert me. I will send it back. If I am converted and absolutely must have an iPhone with me at all times then I get to keep the phone. For free! Either way, I will write about my experience. If Apple fail to answer my call to give me an iPhone then I will continue to write about it in a objective way having not used one for long enough to forgive its shortcomings in favour of its advantages over other smart phones.

So Apple, please send me an iPhone so I can fall in love with it. It would be a great marketing move. I’ll blog and twitter about my conversion experience daily.

This week Apple released a teaser list of what new features we’ll see in the iPhone/iPod 3.0 firmware. While the list certainly looks impressive and I’m sure many of them will be invaluable for iPhone users the list is mainly functionality that should have been released in the initial firmware. There are still a lot missing many of them downright obvious (like video recording) others impossible without the release of new phone hardware (video calling, higher resolution camera, replaceable batteries).

So what I’ll present in this article is an abbreviated list of the most important updates along with commentary covering why they’re so crucial to the success of the phone and even questioning why they weren’t present in the the earlier revisions of the phone. I’ll then wrap up the article with some of the commentary I’ve heard  from various users about what’s still needed to bring the phone up to scratch. Only then can you iPhone users look down on us smart phone users.

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I’ve started to dabble with Python for S60 on my Nokia E71. There’s a good set of libraries called Nokia Computer Vision which cover using the camera, viewfinder, image processing and most importantly… motion estimation.

So far I have a basic proof of concept using the motion estimation library which, under good conditions will allow you to control the movement of a red square around your screen. The red square, of course, represents an exhibit.

The next stage will be rendering an image with opacity (and possibly animations) which will change as you move around. After that will be placing multiples at different latitude/longitudes. Lastly a GUI will be built on top and the virtual gallery complete.

Now to find some artists. Want to have a go at it?

If you know me then you know that I rant on a bit about Sculpture by the Sea. Even though I love it to death and think it does great things for Sydney’s cultural desert – it does have its issues. Issues like exclusionism and over corporatisation. Take this chap’s plight as an example.

People have asked me – “Why don’t you set up your own show then?”. Well, I’m too lazy. Ok no, I’m not motivated enough to jump through all the hoops it would require. Mainly around permissions to use sites and the logistics of promoting the event.

What if one could install a virtual exhibition in a public place?

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