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  Telescope

  Shared by gerrymoth
  Now where did I put my N800?

  / 4 votes - 295 downloads
  Updated 2010-07-15 12:20 UTC - Stable Quality
  Free & Open Source license

  

  Graphical task switcher with live windows previews like in Maemo 5. Fast and lightweight.

  

  Authors Ilya Skriblovsky, Dmitriy Chirva

  Links

  • Homepage

  
  

  ~1 year on
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• 

  Predators

  Shared by gerrymoth
  If Spill like it it must be good :) Can't wait to see it

  Maverick filmmaker Robert Rodriguez tackles producing duties for a revamp of the Predator film series with this 20th Century Fox/Troublemaker Studios production focusing on a human survival adventure set on the Predator's home planet. Kontroll's Nimród Antal directs from a script by Alex Litvak and Michael Finch, with Adrien Brody heading up an int...

  ~1 year on
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• 

  Sepp Blatter dubbed 'Bellend' by SA gov website

  Shared by gerrymoth
  LOL Thanks I needed a good laugh today :)

  Copywriter to get red card for bio foul-up?

  Sharp-eyed Fifa watchers have spotted that either Sepp Blatter has an unusual middle name, or someone in the South African government was relying on Wikipedia when knocking up the presidential website.…

  ~1 year on
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• 

  Lightning fast browsing on Android phones Opera spreads the love to Android mobile phone users. Opera Mini 5.1 is now available for phones built on the Android platform, offering better browsing performance and improved user experience.

  ~1 year on
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• 

  Mobile Tech Addicts Podcast 79: The Giff of the Gaff

  

  This week Gareth, Matt, James and Andy have a very special guest, Mike Fairman, the CEO of Giffgaff. In a lengthy  interview Mike answers listener questions along with being grilled by a panel of Mobile Morons (not including Andy.)

  Direct Download

  iTunes

  Download the iPhone App

  RSS Feed

  Regulars: Gareth, Matt, James and Andy.
  Special Guest: Mike Fairman

   

  Show Notes

  Chat with Mike Fairman, CEO of Giffgaff

  iPhone 4 review is complete and will be published soon. Matt has a problem!

  SE X10 Mini Pro unboxing

  Motorola Charm appears

  LG puts out 1.6 Android device!!!!!! GOSH!

  BlackBerry 6 official video

  Webkit browser on BlackBerry

  BlackBerry Storm 3 Specs Leaked

  Bargain corner:

  Alcatel OT708

  Samsung Tocco Ultra
  Nokia X3 on PAYG Tesco direct for less than £80

  Tesco iPhone4

  Nokia N900

  Giffgaff goodie bags

  Giffgaff questions:

  Gareth intro: "We’re joined by Mike Fairman CEO of GiffGaff, you may have heard us talk about GiffGaff quite a bit here on MTA and Tracyandmatt.co.uk – indeed like myself I think that both Matt and Andy are GiffGaff customers!?"   any more G?"

  • In a nutshell, what makes GiffGaff different to any other network offering?
  • What is your back ground? Are you a previous employee of one of the networks? If so,

     a)what was your position there?
     b)Why did you decide to set up giffgaff?

  • How can GiffGaff offer better value than 02? But still running on the same 02 network: why choose O2 as the carrier?
    Is Giffgaff an O2 sponsored venture or are you completely independent?

           a)if Independent, why choose O2 as the carrier?
           b)can you switch to another network or are you under contract for so many years?
           c) why would a network carrier allow you to use their network if they know you are going to offer a much better product than they do?
    (to demonstrate my point,  I see Virgin as a different model to TMobile, not better, just tailored to a different customer base. GiffGaff trounces O2 in every department which ever way you look at it ‘unless’ you want a contract subsidised handset – are they are probably one of the worst out there for that anyway? oh, and the reason I’m with o2 PAYG is to simply get the cheaper home broadband! Rarely use the sim!)
                If O2 venture:
            a)Why undercut themselves and generally make a much better network model rather than do it at O2?
    (at such cheap and competitive pricing, is GiffGaff sustainable? What number or subscribers to you have and whats the break even number? so far I have received more in payouts than I have paid out in topups for very little effort. Is this sustainable? )

  • When will international roaming be activated
  • Does giffgaff have throttled data? I get 2.2mb on Vodafone and only 0.5mb on giffgaff.

  • My iphone 4 says i’m on the O2 network. My Dell Streak used to say Giffgaff….. Although I have nothing against O2 is this something Giffgaff can change?
  • Will you allow tethering in the future?
  • Why can’t I buy more than one goody bag in a month? I needed to use my phone for an emergency the other day and used up all my minutes. Now i have to wait 2 weeks before my new goody bag starts. This means my Mum will not get hear weekly call! :O)
  • Visual voicemail for iphone. Will giff gaff support it?
  • Will Giffgaff introduce a £20.00 or £25.00 goodybag for more minutes? £15.00 to £35 is quite a jump.
  • Will you allow me to buy 12 months worth of goodybags at 1/2 price? Why not?
  • I had an idea that you could design a giffgaff wallpaper for your fans to use on their phones. This is a freebie idea to take back with you.

  • Oh, and congratulations to being the only network to actually look up the definition of the word ‘unlimited’.

  • Do Giff Gaff have any plans to support BlackBerry in the future, bearing in mind that O2 do not support PAYG BB Services? – James
  • there was an announcement that 02 and vodafone would be sharing cell towers, at the moment I can use vodafone but get no o2 signal at home which means no giffgaff, does he know anything about when it may happen?

       * MINI SIM CARDS for Ipad/iphones (ANDY)

       * SUPPORT TURTLE (ANDY)

  What phone do you use?

  ---

  Hi Guys,

  Feedback for you: Brilliant podcast, always makes me laugh, and sometimes informative!

  A question also if I may? Since getting my iPhone4 I have noticed that my data usage has shot up. On the 3gs I don’t think I used 500 meg in 6 months but with the 4 I hit over 800mb in a week! This is with no real difference in usage patterns as far as I can tell. The O2 tech support said it was because the cellular usage figure includes WiFi but I find that hard to believe. As of today, having reset the stats, it has recorded 190k downloaded on cellular data, but has not been outside of my home WiFi coverage! Have any of you noticed this? On the plus side, O2 say they cant see any huge data use, but I’m worried I will get a huge bill in a months time.

  David.

  PS. Andy, the Pre is still fine. Mainly an alarm clock but it gets an occasional outing as a phone and would still be my next choice after the iPhone.

  ---

  I am having some trouble since apple released upgrade 4 for iphone 3gs.  I use to be able to go to my address book for location to set an appointment and now only some of my contact will work the way they use to and some the map vibrates and it will not transfer all data to location. Any ideas on what I can do? I have applied all resent updates from the itunes website.

  Chuck 

  Limerick time

   

  Gareth Myles – twitter.com/klonricket
  Andy Lee – twitter.com/weirdshanghai
  James Richardson – twitter.com/jpr7373
  Matt and Tracy (and James) Davis -     twitter.com/tracyandmatt

  Twitter @mtaddicts

  Email : mobiletechaddicts@gmail.com

  Many thanks to The Stetz for the music
  

  Subscribe in iTunes to our weekly podcast

  RSS Feed for our weekly podcast

  Download the iPhone App

  Technorati Tags: Mobile Tech Addicts,mobiletechaddicts,windows mobile,Windows Phone 7,android,iphone,palm,HTC,samsung,motorola,nokia,symbian,iPad,Dell,O2,Orange,Vodafone,3UK,T-Mobile,iPhone4,giffgaff

      

  

  ~1 year on
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• 

  Follow-Up: Astro File Manager Goes Pro, Removes Ads

  

  Yesterday we published a piece regarding Astro File Manager’s now-mandatory ads. Earlier today, the developer of Astro (Metago) released Astro File Manager Pro. It comes in at $2.99, and its  only “Pro” feature at the moment is that it removes ads from the application.

   

  Some users may feel this is a cheap-shot. I disagree. Metago has taken the high ground in regard to the paid apps philosophy, here’s how. The ad-supported version of Astro has all the features of Astro Pro, and is in no way limited in its functionality. To say that...

  

  
  

  

  ~1 year on
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• 

  8 Great Apps Every Rooted Android User Should Know About

  

  Ok, I’ve Rooted, So Now What?

  Aside from allowing the installation of popular ROMs developed by the Android community, rooting your phone also comes with the benefit of being able to install apps that require root permissions.

  Finding such apps can be a hassle, so we’ve done some of the leg work for you and come up with a detailed rundown of our top 8 root-only applications.

  Titanium Backup

  Cost: Free (Full Version: $3.99)

  

  The thought of losing all the apps on your Android device likely evokes a slight sinking sensation in your...

  

  
  

  

  ~1 year on
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• 

  [Announce] FreOffice 0.2-8 - KOffice based Document Editor released !!!!

  FreOffice, KOffice based Office viewer now comes with editing capabilities for Word and Presentation files. And will be extended to spreadsheet soon. Word & Presentation files can be created from scratch as well.
  
  Thanks to Ajay, Pratik, Sunpreet and Arjun for making this possible.
  
  You can download FreOffice 0.2-8 from extras-devel repository. We would like to hear your valuable suggestions and feedback.
  
  If you find any bugs :), Please raise it in KDE bugzilla.
  
  Look forward for more exciting features in FreOffice.

  • Slide preview/nagigation mode
  • Online document integration
  • Slide transition with accelerometer
  • Collaborative editing
  • Highlighting tool to the presentation

  ~1 year on
  gerrymoth's shared items in Google Reader
• 

  TweetDeck: Two Infinity And Beyond

  Sunday 4th July 2010 was TweetDeck's 2nd Birthday which means this is a great opportunity to highlight what we've achieved over the over the past 12 months and what's in store for the next.

  Over the past 12 months we have:

  • attracted over $3.5m in funding from some of the most respected investors in the world 
  • grown the company from 1 to 15 superb people with offices in both London and New York...and a small outbuilding in western France
  • won the Shorty Award for Best Application and .Net Award for Best API use
  • worked with Warner Bros, EMI, Black Eyed Peas, Huffington Post, Zeit Online and Channel 4 to release special edition TweetDecks 
  • moved from the desktop to iPhone, iPad and soon Android and mobile web
  • been involved in a number of fascinating and strategic discussions with household-name companies which have been...both fascinating and strategic
  • become a de-facto tool for various journalists in establishments such as Sky News and the Guardian

  Some numbers:

  • desktop TweetDeck has been downloaded over 15 million times
  • iPhone TweetDeck has been downloaded over 2.5 million times
  • our servers are syncing over 7 million twitter search columns, adding 25,000 per day
  • 30,000 images are uploaded each day from TweetDecks
  • approximately 4 million tweets, status updates and buzz's are sent out every day via TweetDeck
  • far and away the most popular desktop client for twitter, and if measuring in outbound tweets we are 5 times bigger than our closest competitor
  • general usage of TweetDeck indicates our userbase is super-engaged, extremely active and, in many cases, highly influential

  So what's next?

  That's a fairly big question.

  We believe the future holds even more fast-moving streams of socially relevant information. Our mission is to help our users manage and harness these information flows. To that end, we are moving towards being truly multi-stream, re-building our clients from the ground-up with multi-stream functionality ingrained rather than simply bolting on new disconnected networks.

  Our Android TweetDeck is a great example of our belief that "true multi-stream", the intersection of social networks, can be infinitely greater than the sum of its parts - or to put it another way TweetDeck should be more about what your friends are saying rather than the networks they are using to say it.

  The other major trend is the maturation of the real-time ecosystem into a business. Consistent monetization is necessary for companies in the space, from big to small, and we are committed to working with our integrated networks to make sure that the user experience remains paramount as revenue streams are introduced.  

  One thing is certain - our third year is going to be incredibly interesting.

  Permalink | Leave a comment  »

  ~1 year on
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• 

  Astro File Manager: Now with Forced Ads!

  

  Before I start I’d like to make on thing clear – I think ASTRO File Manager is a superb file management application and I have nothing against their developers or the app itself!

  If you’ve used an Android phone, you probably know what Astro File Manager is. Briefly, it’s a file management application that lets you organise, edit, and manage the files on your SD Card. Not only that, but it also comes bundled with extra features such as application backups, task manager, SD Card Usage monitor. Overall, it’s a great application all-around.

  Up until now this application...

  

  
  

  

  ~1 year on
  gerrymoth's shared items in Google Reader
• 

  BBC iPlayer on Android update

  I've been following the comments on my recent post about BBC iPlayer on mobile on Android 2.2 phones with interest and want to address some of the points raised.

  First, it's worth reflecting on what we are trying to achieve with the BBC iPlayer on mobile service. The BBC Online Service Licence, issued in May 2010, describes iPlayer's objectives as:

  "BBC iPlayer should enable licence fee payers to access BBC programming quickly, easily and in a high quality format. In doing so, it should aim to be regarded as a high quality BBC service by its users and so contribute to their approval of the BBC.

  BBC iPlayer should aim to maintain the BBC's overall reach and consumption levels, as usage of the BBC's linear services is replaced over time by on-demand consumption. In doing so, it should contribute in the long term to the BBC's ambition to provide services that are of value to all licence fee payers. It should aim at least to maintain consumption of BBC content by younger adults (those aged 16-34)....

  ...In fulfilling its other aims and objectives, BBC iPlayer should aim to contribute to the growth in the usage of rich media in broadband households. Within a reasonable timescale, it should aim to make the seven-day catch-up offering available on a platform-neutral basis, or at the least to be available on all major platforms subject to value for money considerations and as technology allows."

  Given these overall objectives, BBC iPlayer on mobile is tasked with maximising reach on mobile platforms while delivering a high quality BBC service in a cost-effective way.

  The big question, and it's a question being pondered by other content providers right across the industry, is: how do we scale services across multiple mobile platforms in a cost and resource efficient way?

  The mobile landscape is very fragmented with a host of operating systems and a proliferation of screen sizes, resolutions, video codecs and web browsers. Developing for each platform soon becomes very expensive. Maintaining and supporting each variant requires more and more resource as each operating system releases new firmware versions and upgrades.

  Rolling out new BBC iPlayer features across all mobile platforms would also be increasingly expensive as would the associated testing and support effort. As new phones and new operating systems enter the market, we would be obliged to support the new ones as well as the old ones adding to our support overheads.

  To get an idea of the range of mobile platforms and the potential complexity of development see, for example, this Wikipedia article about mobile application development.

  Given these development challenges, our approach has been to build a scalable website that works in the phone's web browser and can be easily tweaked to achieve that high quality experience on a range of internet enabled mobile devices.

  The BBC iPlayer on mobile website is modular with a series of components that can be easily switched on or off depending on the phone's capabilities. The practical upshot of this is that if there's a feature which your phone can't handle, you won't even see it (rather than having something that's there even if it won't work for you).

  The advantages of a web solution for BBC iPlayer on mobile is we can leverage the BBC's existing web technologies and software development skills while minimising the number of iPlayer variants and special builds we have to support. We just have to build and maintain a single website.

  Our web approach also means that new features, like those rolled out with the recent Version 3 release, only need to be built once, rather than for each variant or operating system. We also benefit from infrastructure efficiencies by using existing servers, development environments and encoding and delivery systems. For more on the infrastructure behind BBC iPlayer see Marina Kalkanis's blog post.

  We could have enabled the BBC iPlayer on mobile website on all video enabled phones without any restrictions or exceptions. This would have maximized our reach, but would have resulted in a very poor quality experience on many phones as video playback capabilities and web browser rendering vary across devices. Some users would have had a good experience while others suffered a sub-optimal service with features not working and poor video playback quality.

  To maintain the consistently high quality service demanded by our service licence we have had to test the BBC iPlayer on mobile website on a device-by-device basis to make sure that everything works and we deliver the best possible user experience.

  So, how do we prioritise which phones we test and enable BBC iPlayer on?

  We look at the reach potential of a device to understand how many licence fee payers we can make the service available to through that phone. We also evaluate the resource and maintenance costs of enabling a high quality iPlayer experience on that device. In addition we assess whether we can apply technology solutions we already have to new devices with minimum effort, an example of this would be BBC iPlayer streaming on iPad as the tech needed is very similar to that which enables us to stream iPlayer on iPhones. This is driven by our overall objective of maximizing reach on mobile platforms while delivering a high quality BBC service in a cost-effective way.

  We have limited resources on BBC iPlayer on mobile and therefore have to carefully prioritise development work to maximise reach and value. So, if, for example, I have 15 units of work I need to do on mobile iPlayer (support, maintenance, new features, new handsets etc) but only 5 units of effort available, I've got to focus on the high volume phones to get the service out to as many people as possible.

  I hope that gives an overview of what the BBC is trying to achieve with BBC iPlayer on mobile and outlines the approach we have adopted.

  I'd now like to turn to some of the specific questions raised in the comments on my previous blog post.

  Tiggs questioned why the BBC took down the beebPlayer which worked on older Android devices and did not rely on Flash, and why we have replaced it with something that only works on newer devices and requires Flash.

  The BBC's syndication policy, which governs how the BBC makes its services available through other parties, clearly outlines the criteria for using BBC content. BeebPlayer was not a licensed distributor of BBC content online or on mobile. The BBC routinely looks for unauthorised usage of our brand and our content across all platforms and when we encounter it we work to resolve the issue. If on investigation we find that a company's service proposition does not adhere to our standard licence terms and conditions, we will take steps to remedy the issue.

  Why has the BBC replaced beebPlayer with something that only works on newer devices and requires Flash?

  Using Adobe Flash 10.1 streaming on mobile delivers significant infrastructure efficiencies for the BBC, as we use our existing video and audio encoding plant to create the streams. We don't need to install any new kit or set up any new servers. We just use what we already have to offer a higher quality BBC iPlayer on mobile experience.

  Enabling Flash on Android 2.2 devices also means that all current and new devices that support Android 2.2 can get BBC iPlayer. These devices all use the same standard Flash player which means we can offer a consistently high quality playback across all of them. Previously we had to review and test BBC iPlayer on a device-by-device basis to ensure the right high quality experience. Now we can offer BBC iPlayer on mobile to a whole group of devices at once, which is clearly much more efficient.

  Chris questioned why the BBC has chosen Flash over a more open and accessible standard.

  Adobe Flash reaches an estimated 95% of PCs which means the BBC can use Flash streaming technologies to reach audiences on the internet right across the UK with a consistent video playback experience.

  As soon as Flash streaming came to mobile, through Adobe's Flash 10.1 player on Android 2.2 devices, it made sense to make the most of our existing Flash infrastructure to bring that consistent playback experience to mobile as well.

  Why haven't we enabled BBC iPlayer on mobile on any other Android phones apart from Android version 2.2?

  BBC iPlayer on mobile's reach objectives mean we have had to prioritise other devices that offer the BBC wider reach over current Android phones.

  The best way to bring BBC iPlayer to earlier versions of Android (which don't support Flash), is to develop an app. This would provide a single scalable version that could be offered to all Android phones.

  The BBC Trust is conducting a review of the BBC's plans to develop smartphone apps. The BBC will therefore not be launching any Android apps or apps for any other smartphone in the UK pending the outcome of the BBC Trust review.

  David Madden is Executive Product Manager for BBC iPlayer on Mobile.

  ~1 year on
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