Android Ice Cream Sandwich finally has integrated credit card purchases!

Posted on December 11, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Finally Google has come to it's senses about their Android Market app quality.

It took a while of sms, freemium and ad based Android Apps, but now apparently the new version of google’s ~~iOS ripoff~~ original operating system has credit card information built in the way Apple does it. That allows the users to purchase the Apps more efficiently, which in turn can lead to better apps for the platform, which right now is treated by developers as a side dish to iOS. Do you think this move will improve app quality in the market?

WebOS will go open source. Will it influence phone makers to switch from lawsuit troubled Android?

Posted on December 10, 2011 by IdeaMonster

HP has just announced, that their palm inheritance - the Web OS, which ran on the discontinued HP TouchPad disaster (and post-Palm phones), will go Open Source!

This means that it’ll eventually be available to phone makers the same way Android is today. And with all those legal battles, Carrier IQ’s, viruses, malware, piracy and whatnot it might not be a bad choice for the likes of HTC (or even Samsung) to quit the Android platform once and for all.
Web OS is actually a well designed, intuitive and original piece of software, unlike Android, so it’ll push the market forward instead of just being a poor (but popular) copy of iOS. The repeating story of windows poorly copying Mac OS comes to mind here, doesn’t it?

If it all goes through, making mobile apps and games will be harder than ever, with way too many platforms for indie developers to successfully develop for. But in any case this is good news, because I much prefer Web OS over Android, and would like to see the platform grow. Exciting times with Windows Phone 7 gaining market share we might have a re-shuffle of the mobile system ranks soon.

Browser version of Windows Phone interface for iOS and Android

Posted on December 3, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Microsoft is generally considered a non-creative, "suit philosophy" company. Sometimes though, it takes a step away from that and creates something cool. Bing, xbox, some recent ads and most notably the Windows Phone interface. The latter you can now preview on your iPhone or Android device inside the browser. Sure it’s not a full experience, and reminds us a bit of the Web iPad demo, but it’s a clever way to show how the interface is innovative and cool to use. Good job microsoft. To test it open this url on your phone:
http://aka.ms/wpdemo

Haha! Adobe is abandoning mobile flash. Steve Jobs told you so!

Posted on November 13, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Adobe Flash on the iOS platform was a hot topic for quite a while. Many handset makers (like samsung or htc) even put the ability to play flash content inside their ads, to differentiate their phones from in their opinion a crippled product like the iPhone. They omitted from these ads the facts about battery and procesor usage when flash is on. Who cares if you can use it for 10 minutes, but you can use flash. Yay! The truth is that even Adobe finally realized, that web wants to be more efficient and less processor heavy – not only for mobile devices. They released their own HTML5 authoring tools, and now in the next step – they’re abandoning the development of flash for mobile platforms completely. That means that in a few years flash in the mobile space will be even more non-existant than it is now. Good!

Funny to see their whining though – saying that it was Apple who killed mobile flash. Well Apple also killed the diskette, and nobody’s complaining about that now. The same fate will meet flash soon enough.

Also don’t get me wrong. I love Adobe Flash app. It’s the best creative vector-drawing editor ever. The tools are perfect for drawing (far easier to use and more fun than illustrator’s). But flash is much better for animation and cartoons, than websites. HTML5 is the future and we’re all ready for it!

iPhone Cameras compared

Posted on November 11, 2011 by IdeaMonster

The author of the Camera+ iOS App has compared the cameras from all of the iPhone iterations and the progress is stunning. The latest addition – the 4S can easily battle some popular compact cameras and it’s only a phone! With the tech world progressing as fast as it does now we’re going to see some amazing things in the near future! Go to the Camera+ page to see more pictures.

http://campl.us/iPhone-Camera-Comparison

iPhone 3G on 4.2.1 too slow? We got an easy solution!

Posted on November 1, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Recently headspark got a couple of older iPhones for app testing purposes and among them was the famous 3G model,with 4.2.1 firmware. What struck us was that the system was running so slow, it was barely useable at times. Getting into the messages app would take a lot of time, dialing was sluggish, and the overall performance far from perfect. So what’s the plan to fix that? Many people think that the best way is to downgrade it to 3.1.3 or 3.0 firmware and then it’ll work. Sure it had less features, but at least it worked well, right?

Well sure, you can do that, but if you jailbreak or unlock it might not be the best idea. And even if you don’t, why skipping on all the new features that came with 4.0 ?

Luckily there IS a way of simply turning off the two main reasons your iPhone 3G runs so slow: Multitasking and Wallpaper under the icons. Multitasking is obvious – for a device with less RAM it’s probably not the best idea, right? But why the wallpaper? Surely the device can handle displaying a small image without a huge memory loss? Yeah, it probably would, but when you have a wallpaper enabled (the one behind the icons), the icons generate a real-time shadow effect on that wallpaper and the app names so they’re readable on any kind of wallpaper. And that shadow is taking our processing power that could be used elsewhere. So here’s how to fix those two things:

Here’s what to do

1. First go and download iPhone Explorer app. It’s a simple tool that you can use to get to your iPhone’s filesystem.

2. Open the app and connect your iPhone. It should recognize it and display two (or more) folders.

3. Go to root\System\Library\CoreServices\SpringBoard.app\ and look for N82AP.plist file

4. Copy the file N82AP.plist to your desktop and edit it with a text editor. You’re looking for two lines to alter:

<key>homescreen-wallpaper</key>
<true/>

and

<key>multitasking</key>
<true/>

Change “true” to “false” in both cases, save the file and copy it back to the folder. Click on replace, restart your iphone and feel the difference!

non-Adobe HTML 5 animation tools – Purple vs Hype

Posted on October 20, 2011 by IdeaMonster

We can’t complain for the lack of tools to create rich HTML5 animated content. Even Adobe finally decided that flash is better for other things (like creating cartoons) than web site animations and transitions. Their “Edge” is actually a sign that they gave in to Steve Jobs’ and realized there IS a market for non-flash web animation after all. So it was the iPhone that changed the way we look at the web and influenced the new standards. Good.

We covered Hype a while ago, and now it seems that there’s another tool to create rich HTML5 content and now Mac App Store is promoting “Purple” – another pro tool for HTML5 animation. It seems that the interface is a little bit more refined visually than in Hype. Think – Pixelmator – with all those dark windows and panels it looks quite nice. As far as the performance goes though, I checked out the Purple gallery on my 2011 Macbook Air (core i5) and it performed pretty slow. Hype is much better in that regard, but Purple was just introduced so I hope they’ll work on performance in future releases. Aside from that it seems that as far as functionality goes both Apps are pretty similar, so it doesn’t really matter which one you buy, but Purple is now half the price (introductory) of Hype, so if you buy it now it will be a bargain at 15 Eur.

You can download Hype for 30 Eur here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hype/id436931759?mt=12
And Purple is available here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/purple/id433132196?mt=12

Tablet aspect ratios, 16:9 vs 4:3

Posted on May 11, 2011 by IdeaMonster

So people teased the iPad for being 4:3, assuming that a 16:9 panoramic tablet would be that much better. Well below is a video that shows a comparison between an iPad and a widescreen tablet running windows 7. It’s quite clear that 4:3 is the winner here.

WordPress index.html vs index.php struggle

Posted on April 20, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Usually when we make wordpress websites we don’t really want people to see the website in the making – so we create an index.html splash page with “under construction” or something of that sort and then we go back to tweaking index.php

Well for a while now (since wordpress 2.7) that’s not really possible because if you access www.mydomain.com it’ll in fact show the splash page, but when you go to www.mydomain.com/index.php it’ll also redirect itself to that splash index.html file.
All the other wordpress pages and permalinks work, but without the main page it’s kinda hard to edit now isn’t it?

I was searching for an answer for a LONG time and it turns out there is one.
http://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/9203 – here it is. If it’s all black magic to you or you’re just lazy (who isn’t?) I’ll simply tell you what to do :

Go to wp-includes folder on your server, find the canonical.php file and then find a line that goes something like that:

$redirect['path'] = preg_replace('|/index.php/*?$|', '/', $redirect['path']);

and replace it with

$redirect['path'] = preg_replace('|/index.php/$|', '/', $redirect['path']);

It’s just removing two characters but the result is a working splash page and a working index.php

Ain’t it just great?

Garageband for iPad

Posted on March 13, 2011 by IdeaMonster

I was so excited for GB that as soon as it hit the app store, I got my hands on it and I can only say : Whoa!
But it’s not the fact that it’s such a great app by itself that is appealing. This is a complete package – many instruments, many ways to tweak and multitrack recording. That all combined (though limited) can mean only one thing. Someone will make an even better app in the near future because apparently tablets are our future. They already accept MIDI and some USB sound cards, so the next logical step instead of bringing a laptop along for gigs is taking a tablet + a smaller, usb powered audio interface. Touch interfaces can bring many instruments in one, additional drums, kaoss pads, synths. This could be a good addition for both DJ’s and electronic musicians.

Oh and those smart instruments – they suck. Sorry. Those chords sound nice, but lifeless. There’s no beauty in ultra-perfection. Skip these and play the real things :) Even if lousy.

Oh and “sampler” here is actually useful. You can record your own soundbanks and play that live. Awesome’o 2000! :)

Tablets are coming

Posted on February 13, 2011 by IdeaMonster

As predicted there are a few nice tablets out there with the recent announcments of Motorola Xoom and HP TouchPad joining the already successful iPad. These look and work well and will surely add to the revolution. So is it time to start rebuilding our user experiences on the web yet? Well we can start by using more and more HTML5 / jQuery options. And maybe take a different approach to content. Exciting times to be in the center of the new computing revolution. And I hope to see many great web designs for tablets soon.

A blink of the future

Posted on February 1, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Remember all the sci-fi movies in which people are talking to holographic clerks and whatnot? Well it slowly starts today, which basically means that if someone has a cool idea for a movie, sooner or later it will make it to mass production. Sure they’re pretty flat today, not really 3d, and they won’t tell you that you’re their only hope, but still it’s a change towards more machines in our daily lives. And what if they rebel ? :)

Funny Blackberry and Apple spoof

Posted on January 21, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Watch this video, it’s actually a funny take on the technology wars. Something else for a change.

The future is now ;)

Posted on January 19, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Take a look at the video above and you’ll see that Microsoft’s Kinect is the best thing that came out in 2010. Sure I love the iPad, but still this is far more revolutionary and due to easy hacking people use it for more than punching virtual characters in the face with their own hands.

In fact there are more and more examples on how it can bring the futuristic interfaces from some movies and tv shows to reality. And it’s gonna happen sooner than later. This is kinect controlling a 3d projection.

an iPad simulator in CSS and JS

Posted on January 12, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Whoa, that’s a pretty cool example of what web-apps are capable of. Sure this is actually pretty pointless, but proving it can be done, it opens a window for more advanced web applications of the future. Check it out here:
http://alexw.me/ipad/

Word Lens

Posted on December 18, 2010 by IdeaMonster

Augmented reality at it’s best. A translation tool that translates what we see, on the fly. This is the future kids! Word Lens currently only has a demo in the app store, that only reverses a text it sees but it’s still impressive. The demo is free, and I’m sure to pay them any price for the final app.