The Top 30 Android Apps And Games Of 2011 | TechCrunch

Nice selection from TechCrunch...

The Top 30 Android Apps And Games Of 2011 | TechCrunch: The best Android apps are thus the ones that can both push the technological envelope while also remaining accessible to the vast majority of users. This is no easy feat.

Not necessarily my view with every app, but a good starting point for all you new Android owners...

It definitely shows that in 2011 the Android ecosystem - while it did not fully catch up - narrowed that gap to iOS. And apps are increasingly becoming tablet ready or compatible as we go into 2012.

iPad Video App Freeze

Since I updated my iPad[1] to iOS 5, I frequently had the problem that the video app that comes with iOS is simply frozen, when you open it.

Even closing the app does not help.
A reboot of the iPad did not help either.

My idea was to somehow not start the video app, but launch a video directly, but for lack of a file manager on iOS, this is not easy.
Turns out it is... simply do a spotlight search for a known video name, wait for it to appear in the search results and tap on it there. Next best thing to a file manager :)

Voila, the video app should start and not freeze...
Works everytime for me know... a bit cumbersome, but still.

Hope that Apple will fix this.

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[1] first gen iPad, that is

Letters to Steve

Nice easy reading for the holidays...  a collection of Steve Job's email responses...
and no, it's not just a book full of "Nope" and "Yep"... :)

Maybe a little bit too close to the Steve Jobs Bio by Walter Isaacson which I finished only a couple of weeks ago.

Dropbox app for Android update

There's a new version of the Dropbox app for Android. Among several UI and usability improvements, the most important to me is that you can now upload text files from the share/send menu.

I was really craving for this, because quite often in order to get real-life logs of my own app, I'm using the Log Collector app to gather log files and send them to my PC. Dropbox did not support he upload then, so I was using gmail for this (not wanting to bother with Bluetooth and the likes).
Tried it just now with the 2.0 version of the Dropbox app and it really works like a charm. Click - and just some seconds later I have it in my local Dropbox folder on the PC...

So thanks, Dropbox team, for getting this fixed.

A simple HTML tag will crash 64-bit Windows 7 • The Register

WTF ?
A simple HTML tag will crash 64-bit Windows 7 • The Register:

An unpatched critical flaw in 64-bit Windows 7 leaves computers vulnerable to a full 'blue screen of death' system crash.
[...]

the simple HTML script, when opened in Apple's Safari web browser, quickly leads to the kernel triggering a page fault in an unmapped area of memory, which halts the machine at a blue screen of death.

What weird architecture is this, that allows a usermode application (browser) to crash the kernel?
And this is through Safara (not Internet Explorer, which I'd understand to be more closely tied to the kernel)

Strange, strange.

Dropbox auto-updates

I just happened to hover over my dropbox taskbar icon (well not I personally, my mouse pointer) I noticed that it said

Dropbox 1.2.49
All files up to date

I was pretty sure that last version I installed was 1.2.48 - see here.
So I googled for "dropbox auto update" and found the following:
Dropbox - How do I upgrade to the latest version of the Dropbox application 

So yes, it does auto-update... good. thanks.

More on the Firefox Sessionstore

After I cleaned the Firefox session store about 2 weeks ago by manually deleting the sessionstore.js file, I decided to watch its growth.
I did so by simply doing a copy of the sessionstore.js file with a task scheduled daily.

Here's the results

You can see that there is no constant (monotonic) growth. The sessionstore.js file grows a bit, then shrinks again, then grows a bit...
But it stays at about just under 1MB...

Should this change significantly, I'll report here again.

Google+ page

I'm testing a Google+ page for this blog... find it here and follow me, if you want.
Or try the badge to the right (--> somewhere over there, right beneath my book recommendations).
I mainly want to find out if and how Google+ (brand) pages work...

Of course I will post update there.

duuuh

Dear foursquare,
don't I give you my location with each check-in anyway??

Firefox Sessionstore

As I mentioned in my previous post  "Firefox 8 - Slow and Memory Hog?", I managed to get FF8 to behave "normal" again by manually resetting the session store.

In order to learn more about the session store I did some googling...and found several interesting parameters in the FF config.
Check here for a list.

One that might be of particular interest is that you can specify the interval for FF to save the sessions into the session store with browser.sessionstore.interval; the default (in FF8) is 15 seconds, which seems ok... not too frequent, but still enough to capture your sessions...
Might be fun to play around with his; e.g. move it down to sub-second level in order to totally ruin your PC performance :-)
or increase it to 1minute or more and see if it is still useable then, in terms of session-state captured...

Moving

No worries,  this is only about my home PC.

I finally moved off my 8.5 year old 1.2GHz [1] single core 1GB RAM Windows XP machine to 4core Windows 7.

Well it first had Vista on it, and hardly anything worked (try DB2 for a start), then I decided to go Windows 7 before I do most of the migration, so I won't have to re-do everything again.

I have to say, Win7 is really a nice product... especially compared to Vista, but after only a week, I started to prefer it over XP as well. And compatibility is great, all of those nice little tools I had on XP work fine here as well.

And finally I got some RAM and clock cycles to work with... Android development (esp the emulator) is a lot easier now... :)

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[1] or so, I don't even care enough to check this

Firefox 8 - Slow and Memory Hog?

I'm running Firefox 8 now since it came out last week.

Not only did I find it to be slow (compared for both, FF7 and Chrome), but also a real memory hog.
~800MB on my work laptop, with only 6 tabs open, and really not responsive at all.

FF7 and earlier never had more than 300-400 MB (roughly) on that machine - with the same tabs and apps open, and the same extensions installed. So this was odd.

Especially start-up was a catastrophe.

Then, yesterday, I got the slow-script warning for sessionstore.js.

Well that about just did it for me ...

I went to my profile directory[1], and found a sessionsstore.js with more than 3MB.
I renamed it, restarted FF... of course with none of the pinned app-tabs open, because I took the session store away... But that's what I wanted.

I manually re-established my pinned app tabs, and voila
FF8 now was back to using 250MB, and the sessionstore.js was around 200kB

So - fixed for now. I think I had the session store build up for more than 1 year now and never cleared it (and quite frankly, why should I). So maybe cleaning it once might really fix the problem, and FF8 is not such a memory hog after all - or maybe it will be back after a couple of months...

Let's see, how this progresses from here...

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[1]  can be found in %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

New Dropbox release

Awkwardly Dropbox (of all services) does not have a notification for a new release. Well, a new one is out - 1.2.48 for Windows. I guess, this is to support the new Dropbox for Teams. Anyway, since there is no notification, I took the task to tell y'all :) Download Dropbox

Thunderbird 8 and Lightning 1.0

So, 2 days ago Thunderbird 8 has been released.

The major changes are:

• more restrictive handling of extensions/add-ons, especially those that come from other apps... those will be disabled by default... Thunderbird Installer will guide you through this.

• keyboard short-cuts for the various search options have been changed.

While it has been Ctrl-F for both, the Find within the current message and the QuickFilter for the current folder, it is now

• Ctrl-F for Find (within the current message)
• Ctrl-Shift-K for the QuickFilteron on the folder
• and Ctrl-K is unchanged for the global (indexed) search.

Took me 2 days to get accustomed to the Ctrl-Shift-K.
Well, almost. Not entirely. But I'll manage.

Also I had to "manually" upgrade 3 add-ons that were not declared compatible with TB 8, because no-one cared to update their install.rdf in the XPI file... quite cumbersome... See my rant earlier this year.

Ah, yes, and Lightning finally made it to official release 1.0 ... after years of beta.

Save icons

Is there any reason - except for convention or tradition - that icons for the Save action are still a 3.5" diskette symbol?

Will today's kids actually understand this?
And when was the last time you saved anything to a "floppy" disk?

They joy of forgetting your Kindle at home

Yesterday I was on a business trip in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and wanted take my Kindle with me to continue reading the Jobs bio. However, in the hotel I noticed, that I forgot.

No problem... take the iPad, start the Kindle app, sync to the furthest point read... and continue reading.

And tonight, I'll sync again on my Kindle an continue where I left on the iPad yesterday.

Still, the reading experience is a lot better on the Kindle than on the iPad, but occasionally, when there's no Kindle around, it is sufficient.

Finally someone publishing calendar data

Baby steps, baby steps... both to proper publishing of calendar data and to open data in government/administration.

The municipality of Vienna publishes the calendar of public school holidays for this year as an iCalendar file... (here at
Schulferien in Wien im Schuljahr 2011/2012; German only).

For non-nerds they go so far as to explain what an ICS file is: "for integration with e.g. Microsoft Outlook, Ical or  Google Calendar".

Nice.
Let's hope this is not a one-time, static file for 2011/2011 only, but will become a stream of school holiday data...

Thanks, Martin, for the pointer.

Remember the Milk - new feature

When I moved to an Android device earlier this year, I decided to fully use Remember the Milk (RTM) as my task/todo management tool.

Mainly because
a) stock Android does not have any such tool
b) it is available on the Web (read: PC), on iOS (my iPad) and my Andoid mobile...
There are a lot of plug-ins and other integration methods into other tools as well, listed here.[1]

For the web browser there's a "quick add" bookmarklet that allows you to easily add a web-page to your task list as well.

I was missing exactly this feature for the mobile, so I asked in the support forum for this. Android has the architecture for this, the android.intent.action.SEND intent. All apps implementing/exposing this, will be listed in the "Share" or "Send to" option of the browser and other apps that support this.

Now the feature has been implemented in the latest release of RTM app for Android. And I only noticed because all of a suddent "Remember the milk" turned up in the "Share" menu of the browser.

So: Kudos to the Remember the Milk team for picking up my suggestion and implementing it. Excellent support.

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[1] There's also a Thunderbird/Lightning plug-in as well, but that does not really work with Lightning 1.0 and is no longer supported.

Public Parts - Finished

So I finally managed to finish Public Parts by Jeff Jarvis.

The book starts (and ends) with a couple of excellent observations and thoughts on privacy versus publicity... and also how those two concepts came to be.

Good read... but if you know Jeff Jarvis' blog and other statements already, this will not be news to you. Also he devoted too much space on essantially a re-cap of his earlier book What Would Google Do?

I still highly recommend both books.

Nokia did it again...

They still manage to surprise me. Just unsubscribed from one of their newsletters...

Guess what, it will only take them "up to 14 days before" the remove me from their mailing list.