Nokia recently announced the last major Symbian phone. A replacement to my current phone, the Nokia N8. I love the camera, among other things, about the N8 and this Pureview 808 has a game changing 41Megapixels! It is a huge difference between the N8's 12 MP and the 808 Pureview's 41MP. All the fools have come out saying how it will probably be worse than a normal 5MP camera, and it's really down to processors and apertures. I know the higher the number of megapixels doesn't mean a better camera but surely the photos will be pretty damn good. The guys at Nokia are claiming poster sized pics will look great and that zooming in will be done after the photo has been taken so you take a pic and then just crop and edit after the fact to get the part of the pic you want. Obviously this will need to be done as each photo will take up about 10MB and sending a series of those will soon exceed file sizes and piss off people trying to save memory.
So my dilemma is this, should I get this for a great camera, even though the O/S will be pretty much the same as my N8 or do I just admire from afar and go with a Nokia Windows phone? I really want to like Windows Mobile and until Android does EVERY thing that I want it to do I think I will just have to stick with Nokia.
Friday, 2 March 2012
Thursday, 1 March 2012
The Longest Eyelashes in the World?
Took this pic of my boy. Everyone comments on his eyelashes so I thought I'd share them.
A Picnic in February
After the snow just a couple of weeks ago we have had some really nice warm weather. It was so warm the other day that we had a late breakfast in the garden the other day.
StormDriver
Been testing the StormDriver, a webpage overlay that shows you what other people in your circle have been browsing and recommending. Once you have logged in it shows you what others that you follow have been visiting and the pages they think are cool. Although a few thousand people were invited into the testing it seems like only a very few have been using the service on a regular basis. I really like the idea, it seems much more user friendly that Google+, and I have found some really cool sites. You can see how many others in your social circles have visited each site and what they think of it (whether it Rocks or Sucks).
After a few misgivings, which were all quickly answered by the StormDriver team, I found myself wanting to build up Cred points by visiting and recommending pages that I thought others with similar interests would like. It's not easy to browse the actual web though, it's more to visit sites that others you are following have visited. If you want to post a site then you need to use another browser window and cut and paste the URL rather than just search from StormDriver itself.
It is still in very early testing and the team have been very quick to respond to any suggestions and fix any bugs. It's still quite slow and really, at the moment, it's not making me want to use it. Like Google+ the more you use it the more you will get out of it and so until they open it up and make it a lot faster it's hard to see the point. Also if I want to go to the BBC homepage, for example, it will show me the homepage of a date a couple of months ago. Not a lot of help if I want to browse today's paper. Anyway, if things improve we'll see.
Just got news that I may be testing the new Nokia Lumia 800 for a while, so we'll see how that goes.
 | ||
| Screen shot of my StormDriver homepage |
It is still in very early testing and the team have been very quick to respond to any suggestions and fix any bugs. It's still quite slow and really, at the moment, it's not making me want to use it. Like Google+ the more you use it the more you will get out of it and so until they open it up and make it a lot faster it's hard to see the point. Also if I want to go to the BBC homepage, for example, it will show me the homepage of a date a couple of months ago. Not a lot of help if I want to browse today's paper. Anyway, if things improve we'll see.
Just got news that I may be testing the new Nokia Lumia 800 for a while, so we'll see how that goes.
Different Tack
Like many people out there I set up a Twitter account and then didn’t use it, leaving it to the celebs that have amusing conversations with each other and show how funny and clever they are in 140 characters or less. Then I saw a piece mentioning Different Tack in one of the gadget magazines a few months back. What struck me immediately was the cool looking interface based on a kind of multi level wheel or ‘Rose Diagram’ with a Smartie like button in the centre. The wheel is your control panel and provides an entirely new way to navigate through your Tweets.
I downloaded it straight away to play around with it and was instantly hooked. To find out more about Different Tack I contacted Kristian Lukander (@k_ride) from Fluid Interaction who told me:
“The idea is to provide people with a better tool for quickly indexing through their feeds. It’s based on our patented technology, the scaling rotary selector, which creates an interactive info-graphical presentation of any given content, challenging traditional menu and list based approaches.The endless list view other apps use has its problems with navigability and discoverability, and we’re trying to tackle these by designing for the human perceptual system.”
The science behind this approach to ‘human information processing’ goes back a long way and even includes dear old Florence Nightingale who in 1858 used a similar diagram to show the how many soldiers died in ‘the East’ and the major causes of those deaths over a 12 month period. Using an equation called Fitt’s Law and something called Rapid Serial Visual Presentation or RSVP, the Fluid guys worked out the best way to see large amounts of various data types with the smallest amount of eye movement in the shortest time. They also wanted to make it engaging and fun.
Different Tack is a sailing term and meaning turning 90 degrees and taking a completely new direction to make the most out of the wind while still heading for the same goal. The Fluid guys chose this name to show that theirs was a completely new approach to browsing. Digital touch screens afford a completely new way of interaction while most other Twitter clients are still using age-old desktop designs. So by challenging accepted norms they have created a new way to navigate existing routes to the same destination or a completely ‘Different Tack’.
So how does it work?
I’m not going to lie, it does take a little getting used to but if you use Twitter it is truly worth the effort. Once you input your Twitter name and password you get a short tutorial that gives you the basics that’s enough to get you going. Different Tack uses coloured wedges on a wheel to show what actions are possible from each Tweet you are looking at. Green is for your main timeline of Tweets from all those you follow, yellow can show Tweets from any twitter account you have selected, including your own and red is for tweets containing #Hashtag keywords. Blue is for actions such as write, reply, retweet, etc. The centre of the wheel is a nice shiny button and this too changes colour depending on where it will take you if you tap it.
If you get lost, give the centre a long press and you are taken to a shortcut wheel which has a home option. To read your tweets you scroll round slowly in an anticlockwise motion reading each tweet in turn starting with the most recent, so in effect you are winding back time. If you lift your thumb off the screen it will bring up a new wheel with all the options available for that particular tweet. In this way, you can read other tweets with the included hashtag or read tweets by those mentioned in the tweet. The colours of the wedges will change once you read them or take any action such as replying or retweeting. The more retweets a message gets the longer the blue section will be on the wedge and if you add a tweet to your favorites, by flicking it out, the original will stick out slightly further than the rest of the wedges on the wheel.
The text window will orient itself to however you hold the phone. The icons on the wedges will follow suit too. It all feels very organic and alive and everything seems to be moving, the wedges jostle each other until they have equalised the amount of space available and the centre button pulses as though it is alive. Every time I open use Different Tack I seem to find a new feature, such as holding your finger on a particular tweet will highlight all other tweets by the same person on that wheel. There are 30 tweets visible on the green wheel but lifting up on the last wedge will retrieve another 30.
For such a potentially huge App to be available to Symbian users first was no accident. Qt provided the team with a solid development framework that enabled them to publish much faster. Also, the team wanted to launch a ‘limited access’ beta version and the current market situation, with just a handful of Symbian^3 devices (currently the N8-00, E6-00, E7-00, C6-01, C7-00 and X7-00) meant that this was possible and was a great way to get real user feedback before going for different ecosystems. Another reason was the Nokia Calling All Innovators competition encouraging developers to create great new apps for Symbain^3 devices. Different Tack was the entry from the Fluid Interaction team, who are planning on introducing new features all the time. They are still working on Different Tack so there will probably be many more updates to come, such as Facebook and other social network compatibility. One thing I want to see is the ability to make use of the N8’s great camera, so that’s something I’ll be looking out for. If you have any suggestions you could send the team a Tweet, using Different Tack of course!
I downloaded it straight away to play around with it and was instantly hooked. To find out more about Different Tack I contacted Kristian Lukander (@k_ride) from Fluid Interaction who told me:
“The idea is to provide people with a better tool for quickly indexing through their feeds. It’s based on our patented technology, the scaling rotary selector, which creates an interactive info-graphical presentation of any given content, challenging traditional menu and list based approaches.The endless list view other apps use has its problems with navigability and discoverability, and we’re trying to tackle these by designing for the human perceptual system.”
The science behind this approach to ‘human information processing’ goes back a long way and even includes dear old Florence Nightingale who in 1858 used a similar diagram to show the how many soldiers died in ‘the East’ and the major causes of those deaths over a 12 month period. Using an equation called Fitt’s Law and something called Rapid Serial Visual Presentation or RSVP, the Fluid guys worked out the best way to see large amounts of various data types with the smallest amount of eye movement in the shortest time. They also wanted to make it engaging and fun.
Different Tack is a sailing term and meaning turning 90 degrees and taking a completely new direction to make the most out of the wind while still heading for the same goal. The Fluid guys chose this name to show that theirs was a completely new approach to browsing. Digital touch screens afford a completely new way of interaction while most other Twitter clients are still using age-old desktop designs. So by challenging accepted norms they have created a new way to navigate existing routes to the same destination or a completely ‘Different Tack’.
So how does it work?
I’m not going to lie, it does take a little getting used to but if you use Twitter it is truly worth the effort. Once you input your Twitter name and password you get a short tutorial that gives you the basics that’s enough to get you going. Different Tack uses coloured wedges on a wheel to show what actions are possible from each Tweet you are looking at. Green is for your main timeline of Tweets from all those you follow, yellow can show Tweets from any twitter account you have selected, including your own and red is for tweets containing #Hashtag keywords. Blue is for actions such as write, reply, retweet, etc. The centre of the wheel is a nice shiny button and this too changes colour depending on where it will take you if you tap it.
If you get lost, give the centre a long press and you are taken to a shortcut wheel which has a home option. To read your tweets you scroll round slowly in an anticlockwise motion reading each tweet in turn starting with the most recent, so in effect you are winding back time. If you lift your thumb off the screen it will bring up a new wheel with all the options available for that particular tweet. In this way, you can read other tweets with the included hashtag or read tweets by those mentioned in the tweet. The colours of the wedges will change once you read them or take any action such as replying or retweeting. The more retweets a message gets the longer the blue section will be on the wedge and if you add a tweet to your favorites, by flicking it out, the original will stick out slightly further than the rest of the wedges on the wheel.
The text window will orient itself to however you hold the phone. The icons on the wedges will follow suit too. It all feels very organic and alive and everything seems to be moving, the wedges jostle each other until they have equalised the amount of space available and the centre button pulses as though it is alive. Every time I open use Different Tack I seem to find a new feature, such as holding your finger on a particular tweet will highlight all other tweets by the same person on that wheel. There are 30 tweets visible on the green wheel but lifting up on the last wedge will retrieve another 30.For such a potentially huge App to be available to Symbian users first was no accident. Qt provided the team with a solid development framework that enabled them to publish much faster. Also, the team wanted to launch a ‘limited access’ beta version and the current market situation, with just a handful of Symbian^3 devices (currently the N8-00, E6-00, E7-00, C6-01, C7-00 and X7-00) meant that this was possible and was a great way to get real user feedback before going for different ecosystems. Another reason was the Nokia Calling All Innovators competition encouraging developers to create great new apps for Symbain^3 devices. Different Tack was the entry from the Fluid Interaction team, who are planning on introducing new features all the time. They are still working on Different Tack so there will probably be many more updates to come, such as Facebook and other social network compatibility. One thing I want to see is the ability to make use of the N8’s great camera, so that’s something I’ll be looking out for. If you have any suggestions you could send the team a Tweet, using Different Tack of course!
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