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Two finger scrolling on Windows 7/XP/Vista

30 Jan

The two finger page scrolling on the macbooks is really neat, I think it is a better implementation then using a part of the laptop track pad for scrolling the pages. The newer laptops now have that feature, but what if your laptop doesn’t have multi-touch trackpad ? Well Logitech has released a new free iphone app which lets you use your iphone/ipod as a multi-touch track pad with your laptop.

First you need to install it in your iphone/ipod.  Search for ‘Touch Mouse’  in the app store, install it. Then go to Logitech Touch Mouse Server Web site, and get the server software for what ever your OS is. It seems only Linux is not supported. Sad! . Install the server, then run the app on your iphone/ipod, it will detect your computer and hit connect.

So while this is very neat, not every one has a iphone/ipod ( I have a first generation ipod touch ). It would be really great if there was a similar app for the Symbian phones, Android, WebOS or Maemo phones.

To do that we need to understand the protocol used by the touch mouse server and the client. My investigation just came to the conclusion that its a UDP based protocol, the app also uses bonjour for service discovery. The UDP protocol is very cryptic and it seems this is not a easy task, it would be just great if Logitech can release some documents on this.

 
1 Comment

Posted in nokia, Qt, UI

 

The iPad SDK aka iPhone OS 3.2 SDK

28 Jan

The iphone 3.2 sdk does not support the iphones and ipod touches.

But there are new apis in the sdk, all of which are just for the ipad. There is an api to handle documents much like a desktop os. Some new kind of views etc. etc.

But this ipad is very iphnoeish down to the OS level. So i believe ra1ndrop would also work on it ????? it can be jailbroken and then we have multitasking on it. wohoo ? not really! official multitasking support would mean $$ opportunities.

They say its another gold rush, i am not sure. I would hope for one but do people have more 500$ to burn after they have already burned/are burning quite a huge sum on the iphone?

But any ways, any other mobile os (except windows mobile and blackberry) would be good on it. Symbian, Maemo, Android or WebOS.

 
No Comments

Posted in ipad

 

iPad, No Multitasking..

27 Jan

Disappointing.

Post Complete.

 
2 Comments

Posted in ipad

 

iPhone OS 4 SDK, the iPad Mania today.

27 Jan

So here we go again, another new product from Apple and the Internets will be getting crazy tonight. A humongous iphone will be great for web surfing on the sofa if nothing else.

But what I am excited about is the background processes in the new sdk (which they are yet to announce, hopefully). Finally we can have some useful applications. What I would want is a nokia step counter kind of software. I already have it on my Nokia E72 and it is so useful. I have my daily goal set to 10 km of walking.

So just waiting for the new sdk to be posted on to the web and weeks of endless night hacking ahead. Time to market is the key.

 
No Comments

Posted in apple, iphone, nokia

 

Nokia should enable third party developers to submit apps to ovi store.

11 Dec

Nokia should get its act in order if it seriously wants to compete with google & apple. One big thing that I dislike about Symbian and Maemo phones is the inability of independent developers to make money out of it. This is where apple has succeeded and might be one of the big reasons iphone has been so successful.

Take symbian, I can not even afford to get my applications signed for distribution[1], it adds up to 300 euros every year just for administration fees then further more money when you submit an application, and every times it is tested, which can easily cost you hundreds, this is just too much, sorry I am not buying.

For Maemo, well, there is no ovi store, yet! but what does it cost to install applications on the Nokia N900? so i did some searching and it seems[2] maemo uses the standard debian debs, and using debsign is enough and you don’t have to pay any one, much like android. So this would mean once the ovi store is launched for the N900, it could be a good option since Qt is now available for maemo as well. However the mentality of the average user of maemo will be that of a hacker and I am afraid they might not pay money unless the software is extremely good, in other words they are not idiots like most of the iphone users.

But since Symbian has the most install base Nokia should get more developers onboard by making it easier, it just costs too much right now.

The Maemo powered Nokia N900

The Maemo powered Nokia N900

http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/Complete_Guide_To_Symbian_Signed

http://wiki.maemo.org/Documentation/Maemo_5_Developer_Guide/Packaging%2C_Deploying_and_Distributing

 
No Comments

Posted in annoyances, nokia

 

Compiling Qt4.6 with OpenSSL Support on Windows with MingW

01 Dec

The Symbian port of Qt is a blessing, no more head banging. Work will be so much easier. The best thing about using Qt for Symbian development is that you dont need to use Carbide or the Emulator, you can use QtCreator to do most of your work. So I downloaded the 4.6 and before I can use it to continue my QFacebookConnect library, I need to compile it with OpenSSL support enabled. You have to do a lot of googling/binging to get that information. Well here is how you do it:

in the command prompt:
SET LIB=c:\openssl\lib\mingw;%LIB%
SET INCLUDE=c:\openssl\include;%INCLUDE%
SET PATH=c:\openssl;%PATH%

now go to the Qt source folder and execute the configure.exe like so:

configure.exe -openssl

and finally
mingw32-make

and here a nice demo of qt4.6 while it compiles for you.

 
1 Comment

Posted in nokia, programming, Qt

 

Nokia N900

29 Nov

Maemo seems to be getting good reviews all over, Nokia shows off SNES on N900, quickly thinks better of it — Engadget. But lets not forget Palm’s webOS also dazzled people and it is currently better that Maemo 5 in some aspects, but it has not gotten much traction, yet.

I am getting a N900 in a couple of days, but I am not planning to do any major development, if any at all for Maemo yet. That is because there is currently no easy way to sell your apps for Maemo i.e. there is no Ovi store for Maemo yet. But most importantly I just hate Gtk/Gnome/Hildon UI which Maemo5 is built upon. If I was to say I hate C it would be very close to truth. I think of C as a uncivilized savage beast (a beast, not a mouse).

Another thought I have about this n900 is how much they are promoting its multitasking capabilities, multitasking does have its benefits, but in small portable  devices, where speed and performance is very important, multitasking can create problems. So now I think iPhone’s approach is better, there is only so much you can do on a 600MHz processor. I think Apple will eventually introduce multitasking, but not like we have it in the existing smartphones. I believe at some point in the future the iphone os will allow ui-less apps to run in the background, but only one ui app at a time. I think they will have a approval process with conditions like how much resources etc an app uses.

 
1 Comment

Posted in nokia

 

Idiotti!

23 Nov

Just look at these bunch of hypocrites : A storm is brewing at Best Buy. They have killed so many species to extinction ( whale, dolphins, tuna, etc etc … ) and yet they have problems with Muslim festival of Eid Al-Adha. May be they should stop eating meat as it does not grow on trees, you have to kill an animal to get meat, and USA might be the biggest consumer of meat.

This is just racism/hatred against Muslims.

 
1 Comment

Posted in annoyances, annoying

 

Apple hits back at Verizon in new iPhone ads (video) — Engadget

23 Nov

I often think that Apple’s marketing team or may be the whole Apple company are a bunch of gay guys who are always looking at the mirror. I am saying this because I am so pissed at Apple, my macbook the piece of shit broke down last week, the audio doesn’t work any more and its also coming apart. My sub 500$ acer was longer lasting than that 1000$ piece of crap.

Now they come up with this stupid shit: Apple hits back at Verizon in new iPhone ads (video) — Engadget. WTF ? my 100$ phone has been able to do that since 2006, bunch of idiots.

 
No Comments

Posted in annoyances, annoying

 

porting Facebook Connect for iphone to Qt !

22 Nov

For a past couple of weeks I have been working on porting the facebook connect for iphone to Qt. Since Qt is going to make it big in next few years thanks to both Symbian 4 and Maemo 6 using it as their UI library, it makes a lot of sense to have a facebook  connect library for Qt, but since Facebook cares mostly about the platforms popular in the USA, which are iPhone and may be Android ( though there is no facebook connect for Android ) I took it upon myself to port this to Qt and learn objective-c and sharpen my Qt skills along the way.

the repository is hosted at http://gitorious.org/qfacebookconnect

Currently the project is in copy / paste / compile mode. But once I have all the files compiling I will optimize it for Qt. Please have a look and join if you are interested !

 
4 Comments

Posted in iphone, Qt

 
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