Angus Thinks

Category: General

  • TV on 3G Mobiles

    According to this BBC Article there is a growing move towards tv programming on mobile phones. The key disadvantage is the amazingly high cost; one of the people interviewed paid $50 for 45 minutes. High pricing seems to be a problem as it so often is for mobile services.

    It does seem like a handy thing though. I suppose Three in the uk is doing something kind of similar, but in a much more limited way, with their streaming video services. It’s even possible that if the price was not unreasonable then I might even use the service myself. Although I would probably have to upgrade my phone to do so. I don’t think anyone is going to manage to offer streaming video on a nokia 6210 🙂

  • Cross Platform Applications

    With the announcement of Dashboard in Mac OS X 10.4 Apple, like many other companies, seems to have gone for a standards based approach. Dashboard is said to be based on HTML, CSS and javascript. A webpage in all but location. Microsoft tried something similar of course back with windows 98. You could display bits of webpages or activeX controls or java applets on the desktop. It didn’t prove all that popular then, but those pagelets were slow and clumsy. I very much imagine that dashboard is neither slow nor clumsy.

    More importantly though, dashboard objects have two interesting features. The first is that they use interpreted, not compiled, languages. The second is that they are essentially cross platform. I know that there doesn’t seem to be any particular other platform that can they can actually be moved to at the moment, but I feel fairly confident that before next year’s release of Mac OS X 10.4 someone will develop a suitable runtime for linux and quite likely windows as well.

    The dashboard concept seems to fall very much into the current fashion for application development. You write the interface in html, xml or something like it; then write the code in javascript or some kind of interpreted language. Then you provide libraries written in C or Java that provide the core functionality to the system. Mozilla’s XUL and Microsoft Avalon (windows xp next generation user interface) both use this approach. The Apple iTunes store also uses xml to describe the interface.

    It’s easy to see why this approach is popular. Building user interfaces from xml makes it much quicker to produce interesting results than having to change C++ code and rebuild. Multiple tools can be written to access the format and the result can be modified without rebuilding the main application. (Given modern build times always an advantage).

    One possibility is that dashboard may be something more than just a widget system. I have no inside knowledge whatsoever, but what if in future you could write whole applications using the dashboard system. What if you could create windows that were written in html/css/javascript and then tied to cocoa applications, much as we currently tie interface builder nib files to cocoa applications?

    Alternatively there is this mysterious business with Mozilla, Apple and Opera. The three have decided to work together to improve plugins, but what if they are actually considering a future application development and deployment system to compete against Microsoft’s .net? Combine the open .net implementations with something like dashboard and you have a cross platform development system that might offer developers a good incentive to develop for.

    I have no knowledge of the future though, so I guess I’ll have to wait and see

  • Definitions in spellchecker?

    There have been lots of articles today in newspapers because the Oxford English Dictionary publishers have claimed that people are confused and choosing words incorrectly. For example “pouring” instead of “poring”. The problem being that people are basing the word choice on the sound and thus homonyms (or homophones if you prefer) are confused. There are quite a lot of words that sound the same but different meaning, for example caret (a typographical mark and the blinking insertion point in a text editor) and carrot (vegetable).

    However I offer a simple solution: Have a brief definition of the word in the spell checker. Visual Studio already does this for programming languages so adding it to word processors is hardly difficult. The only issue really is likely to be disk space. If this is really a concern maybe some kind of online system? But I really don’t think it’s much of an issue given the current size of word processor installations anyway.

    It would allow writers to check whether the word that they selected had the correct meaning. Multiple meanings could also be listed, either in a list or with some kind of rotating display.

    Possibly it might even improve the quality of written english online? Of course it may be that there is a word processor that already does this. In which case the idea isn’t as original as I thought… but I would definitely like this feature in my word processor and even more so in system wide spell checking. 🙂

    [Edited: Because I suggested that Caret and Carrot were spelt the same.]

  • No Chopsticks?

    Despite being absolutely huge the Sainsbury’s at Cameron Toll in Edinburgh doesn’t sell Chopsticks. I even went so far as to ask! Not one chopstick to be found (although presumably I would need at least two to actually get anywhere with eating)

    I wonder that they don’t have a little stack of chopsticks next to the Chinese ready meal section. Buy meal, chopsticks and plate altogether.

    Perhaps it is no wonder that Sainsbury’s non-foods aren’t selling very well? I really liked the old layout more than the new layout. Especially the cookery section; I never seem to be able to find what I want now. The food section was improved though and I think it’s currently my favourite supermarket in absolute terms. In practice I probably shop most often at Safeway in Mordun because it is slightly closer than Sainsbury and it’s a downhill walk on the homeward journey (Sainsbury is uphill on the way back).

    I’m definitely curious to see how Morrisons is going to change it. The refurbishment date is thought to be in August.

    I wonder if Safeway sell chopsticks? I didn’t look last time I was there.

    I’ll probably go to one of the Chinese supermarkets as recommended by David to buy new chopsticks, or Edinburgh Bargain Stores which seems to sell almost everything (although probably not chopsticks)

  • Do I think enough?

    I’ve been wondering today if I actually think enough to call this weblog “Angus Thinks”?

    Is there a requirement to think a certain amount to be able claim that I do think and does the subject matter actually matter?

    I can see I’m going to have think about this a bit more…

  • Apple WWDC announcements

    Well by now everybody probably knows about this, but I thought to follow up my previous post.

    Apple launched the most amazingly large flat panel screens on Monday. The largest is a 30″ lcd panel.

    There was also a demonstration about Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) which is looking quite promising. It is promising to be a 64 bit operating system offering full contextual search facility and a new widget/desktop accessory thing with shades of Konfabulator.

    There was no indication of a new iMac at that presentation though. Which is odd given the story about the supply chain.

    Perhaps the following days will bring more rumors (false of course) which I can think about.

  • Added a few new links

    I just got finished adding a few new links. It’s getting to be this sort of six-degrees of weblog kind of thing. How can I get from here to any other page on the internet via only the links on this page? I don’t think that can be done from my blog yet but there are weblogs that it probably will work from.

    Yet the odd thing about weblogs is that they’re moving away from the main web at speed. The design and technology powering them is diverging quite rapidly. RSS seems to be the preferred way to read web logs and the styling is becoming quite unlike traditional web pages. Content is typically not even on a unique page.

  • Keypads disappearing from mobile phones?

    What purpose does the keypad actually serve on a mobile phone? Most people these days are not typing numbers on it. Numbers are usually stored in the address book. People type sms messages on it, but is that efficient? T9 predictive text input is ok but it really isn’t as efficient as a proper keyboard.

    I wonder if it’s faster or slower than graffiti like pen based input systems? Would a screen based keyboard be better? Maybe some kind of thumb-board?

    Mobile users have been carefully trained to type at speed on a very poor keyboard. Could they become used to a different and more efficient arrangement or are we permanently stuck with the legacy of the 12 key number pad?

  • Nokia 6600

    Dhruba posted a review of the Nokia 6600 a while back. He also let me borrow it for a few minutes to play a game on it and it is beautiful to use. Smart phones definitely seem to taking the place of the PDA.

    I definitely want one 🙂

  • Physical Media or just digital content

    I was thinking the other day about whether you actually need physical manifestation of media content. Does a movie gain something by being physically on a DVD rather than being stored digitially on a computer?

    There is definitely one advantage in actually storing the movie on some kind of physical object because you can pick it up and move it around, even take it to places where the network infrastructure doesn’t exist. The obvious disadvantage is that you do actually have to take it physically to wherever you actually want to watch it.

    It is also somewhat less impressive to give a gift of piece of paper representing a piece of content rather than an actual CD or DVD.

    So I was wondering if the answer might be in tokens. The token would represent the digital media and identify ownership but the content itself would be stored digitally on the network. It would solve some of the problems of trying to squeeze more and more content onto smaller disks although it certainly wouldn’t solve the disconnected problem.

    The token would be used to actually read the media, so there would be no problems with damaged content affecting the film. Tokens might be damaged but they could be replaced in that situation and since they would be simple anyway the survivability would probably be high. I carry around a collection of plastic cards everyday that are replaced about once every three years. That is somewhat more robust than video tape and probably better than DVDs too.

    I see the token as being a smart card like object of some kind and perhaps the tokens might even reusable.

    It’s a thought anyway…