September 2009 – Page 2 – Vinko’s Thoughts On…

September 10, 2009

Review: Hong Kong Weather on iPhone

HK Weather - Logo I had always praised the talents of Hong Kong iPhone development community. The iPhone application, Hong Kong Weather, from Conceptable is no exception.

You may say, don’t we already have enough weather application for the iPhone. Just going to the Weather section in the iTunes App Store you will find 20 pages of applications in the section. Plus what’s wrong with the default Weather application that came with the iPhone OS? Nothing really, if you live in North America.

The information in the default Weather application comes from Yahoo.com and is not that accurate when dealing with cities outside of North America. The advantage of the default Weather application is its ability to set up weather information for multiple cities, which is great for the frequent travelers. But for those who do not travel as much and live in Hong Kong for an extended period, the default Weather application is fairly basic and borderline useless.

Continue reading “Review: Hong Kong Weather on iPhone”

September 10, 2009

Review: Hong Kong Weather on iPhone

HK Weather - Logo I had always praised the talents of Hong Kong iPhone development community. The iPhone application, Hong Kong Weather, from Conceptable is no exception.
You may say, don’t we already have enough weather application for the iPhone. Just going to the Weather section in the iTunes App Store you will find 20 pages of applications in the section. Plus what’s wrong with the default Weather application that came with the iPhone OS? Nothing really, if you live in North America.

Continue reading “Review: Hong Kong Weather on iPhone”

September 9, 2009

Review: iPhonics on iPhone

I don’t normally review educational software, especially those on the iPhone platform. I think it is mainly due to the demographics who use the devices on this platform.

I made an exception and took a look at the iPhone application, iPhonics, which teaches English phonetics. iPhonics - Home Screen

This application takes the approach of addressing a young audience for a fairly complex subject, the learning of English pronunciation. The entire application accomplish this by treating the lessons as games.The student chooses either to learn By Letter or By Game.

At first glance the games are a bit difficult to figure out without going through the extensive Tutorial section within the game. These tutorials are in English, so student are expected to be able to read English although may not be able to pronounce or comprehend English audio.

Each time an item is clicked on within the application, both a visual and audio feedback results. Fortunately, for the more experienced students the latter can be turned off in the Options screen within the application.

Continue reading “Review: iPhonics on iPhone”

September 9, 2009

iPhones on Two Different 3G Networks Compared

Smartone-Vodafone logo Today a reader, Stephen C., sent me a video of a test he and his friend conducted (“un-scientifically) with two iPhone 3GS’s connected to two different 3G networks on two (3 HK and Smartone-Vodafone) of six mobile carriers in Hong Kong.

The result are a bit surprising, especially for customers of Smartone-Vodafone. The video had been sent to Smartone-Vodafone Customer Service and hopefully we will receive an official respond.

Continue reading “iPhones on Two Different 3G Networks Compared”

September 8, 2009

RSSCloud in Your WordPress Blog

If you have a blog you will agree that RSS is one of the most important piece of technology to help disseminate your blog content through out the Interweb.

Unfortunately this RSS (protocol) is a pull technology where subscriber to the feed must poll the source of the RSS feed for new content. Often this polling iteration is every 15 minutes or so. In the current realtime world of Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook timelines, this method of requesting information seems old and out-dated. This is why one of the pioneer for RSS, Dave Winer, came up with rssCloud, a new element that was added to the RSS protocol in January 2001 as part of RSS 0.92 and later in RSS 2.0.

With rssCloud the newsfeed readers will no longer have to poll the source of the feed for content periodically. Instead as soon as new content is available from the source it is pushed (sent) to all subscribers of the feed. This lends to more timely conversation on the content and serves our realtime web much better.

Prior to Automattic’s adoption of rssCloud the only reader that recognize the <cloud> element was Winer’s River2 RSS reader, this created a chicken-and-egg problem where RSS reader developers were not eager to add the rssCloud feature to their reader and site owners did not bother with adding the element into their RSS feed.

WordPress.com supports for rssCloud had basically eliminated this stalemate, and gave the developers of RSS readers a potential of 7.5 million blogs with support for this feature. Now it will be up the the developers of RSS readers to make their move to get the momentum flowing.

Fortunately, Joseph Scott was kind enough to help with this drive, he released a WordPress plugin to help self-hosted WordPress blogs add the rssCloud support to their own feeds.

Also on the RSS reader front, the cool up and coming web service, LazyFeed is announcing support for rssCloud.

I suggest all WordPress blog owners; no matter self-hosted or one residing on WordPress.com, enable this features, so we can add to the excitement and trend of this realtime web evolution.

September 6, 2009

Movie Review: The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009)

Poster

My Rating:

This afternoon I saw the movie The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 at AMC Theater, Pacific Place, Admiralty, Hong Kong. Another one of the movies from my Must See Movies list.

Denzel Washington gave a great performance. This time he played a more humble character compared to the roles in has past movies like: Deja Vu, The Bone Collector, Crimson Tide, etc. On the other hand John Travolta played the bad guy character we come to love and expect, as he had done so well in Face Off and Broken Arrow. I always use the measurements of whether the actor made me hate the antagonist character to judge whether the performance was good.

Continue reading “Movie Review: The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009)”

September 5, 2009

Snow Leopard After a Week

Now that I have been running OS 10.6 (aka. Snow Leopard) on my 2006 MacBook Pro for a week. I can offer my opinions of the latest OS X.

Twitter followers had heard me complain that my MacBook Pro was very slow with certain apps, including those that others had raved about for being improved and much speedier.

If you read my post, Snow Leopard Now Installed, you will know that I spent some time examining all the Extensions, Input Managers and Plug-ins, to ensure compatibility with OS 10.6 before I upgrading my MBP. So I don’t believe the application slowness was due to the incompatibilities of Extensions, Input Managers or Plug-ins.

Continue reading “Snow Leopard After a Week”

September 1, 2009

Review: Strokes on iPhone

If you are a golfer and you own an iPhone or iPod Touch, then Bickbot‘s application, Strokes, is for you. It is a simple application that does what it’s designed for perfectly.

The Home screen is split into two sections. The top section shows the number of strokes for a given hole. The bottom section is where the user specify the par of the current hole, increment the stroke count for the current hole and to skip to the next or go back a hole.

One user-centric improvement in the latest version (1.5) is that pars of holes are not reset unless the user changes them manually one hole at a time. This is great for users who plays the same course over and over again. It would be nice if there is an option to save the pars and name it (ie. Golf course name) before overriding them.

Continue reading “Review: Strokes on iPhone”