captsolo weblog

" ???? ?? ????????? ??? ???????? ????????. ??? ???????, ??? ??? ???????, ??? ? ?????.
???????????? ???? ??????? ? ???? ??????? ??? about:blank. ??????? ???? ??????, ?? ????? ? ????????.

?????? ? ???? ??? ????? ??? ???????????? ????? ? ? ????? ?????? ?? ???????! "

LG and Prada have officially announced the LG KE-850 (Chocolate) Prada Phone which some are calling an iPhone killer. It features a full touchscreen and a stylish design by Prada, and has already won the International Forum Design Product Design Award for 2007. It will hit the stores in 5 European countries at the end of February and in some parts of Asia before the end of March.

Its design and touchscreen interface may challenge iPhone, but there are some things that I will be missing - it may have a smaller screen resolution (not clear yet) and it does not have WiFi (that's a no-go). Still a very nice phone.

via Engadget.

In "How Steve Jobs blew his iPhone keynote" Mike Elgan claims that announcing iPhone in so many details 6 months before it gets to customers was a big mistake and lists 6 reasons for that.

1. Apple set expectations too high.

While the keynote and its echo throughout the media idealises the iPhone as doing every thing imaginable, actually the opposite is true:

« The iPhone, despite its many media-oriented virtues and its sweet design, will do far less than most existing smart phones. The problem Apple now faces because of Jobs' premature detail-oriented announcement is that of dashed expectations. When customers expect more and don't get it, they become dissatisfied.

What doesn't iPhone do? Unlike most smart phones, the iPhone doesn't have voice dialing, voice memos, 3G Internet access, Word or Excel support, one-handed operation or video recording. It can't be used as a laptop modem. The battery can't be replaced. It doesn't support removable storage. The calendar, task list and e-mail won't sync with Microsoft Outlook. ... »

Read more about this and other reasons in the article.

This confirms that Apple still has a fight to win and we can't yet tell how will it end. Whatever the result we as customers will win. And answers to questions (see "Steve Jobs keynote at Macworld 2007") about impact of the iPhone announcement on the mobile device market are even more interesting than the device itself.

I hope to see more [low-cost ] devices with WiFi, high resolution touch-screens and an open platform with many useful application. Something Palm or Linux based will do. Plus it needs to run Skype (which may rule out PalmOS) or another widely used VoIP service.

« The SeaMonkey project is a community effort to deliver production-quality releases of code derived from the application formerly known as "Mozilla Application Suite".

Our group of dedicated volunteers works to ensure that you can have "everything but the kitchen sink" — and have it stable enough for corporate use. »

Mozilla Suite, which continues its life as SeaMonkey, is a browser I really liked. Combined with an excellent Multizilla tabbed browsing extension it was a pleasure to use (and had a better tabbed browsing support than early Firefox versions).

Switched to Firefox because the development of Mozilla Suite was kinda stalled and all the recent extensions were coming out only for Firefox. But still there were some things that were easier or more friendly Mozilla Suite: type-ahead search (was broken in Firefox, you have to press Ctrl-F before searching, in SeaMonkey you just type), a Composer (HTML editor, just say "Edit this page" and see it in edit mode), ability to just type a word in the URL bar and search for it (hate to have to switch to a separate Search input field), etc.

Good to know it is back on track and after SeaMonkey 1.0 there comes SeaMonkey 1.1.

Read What's new in SeaMonkey 1.1.

Sure, there are many good things in Firefox too. It is very strong on marketing (and creating evangelists) and liked by people. And its extension system is much better, making the development of XUL extensions easier producing a large number of Firefox extensions. I hope that soon one will be able to easily develop extensions for both of these browsers with minimum browser-specific code. For now it looks like Firefox wins in this field and you need to spend some additional effort in order to get your Firefox extensions work with SeaMonkey.

Future of RDF in Mozilla projects?

As DanBri said during the ExpertFinder 2007 workshop presentation Mozilla were the first to make real production use of RDF. This might have had an impact on Mozilla application architecture (in terms of information integration, etc.) but it also means that they started to use RDF when it was very raw and lacked the clarity and tool support that it has now. This may be a reason why there are talks about Firefox developers considering replacing RDF with something else.

Therefore the question - what is the future of RDF in Mozilla, will they continue using it and what interesting things may grow out of it? DanBri also mentioned adding SPARQL to Mozilla as an interesting possibility. Hope he will elaborate on that.

See "How to replace microdrive with compactflash in LifeDrive" at wikia.com.

Via TamsPalm

What I like in LifeDrive is that finally Palm have a device that is not seriously limited in any regard - it has a decent screen resolution, a 4Gb hard drive, WiFi and a mike (which Palm T|X lacks).

It is nice to explore hardware hacking pages. But I need to get some new gadgets first (and find some time to play with them). What are the recent cool gadgets out there?

???? - ??? ????? ????????? ??????????????? ???????. ????? ??????????? ?????????????? ??????? ?? ?????? ??????, ????????? ???????? ????, ? ???????? ??????? ??????, ? ???? ??????????? ??????????-????? ??????. ??? ?????? ????? ??????????? ? ????????. ?????? ??? ??? ???????? ??????????-????? ??????, ?? ? ?????????? ????? ?????? ???????? ??? ??? ?? ???????????. ????? ?????????? ????????, ???????, ?????? ?? ????? ????? ?????????? ?????????? ????.

Eng: We can see the climate change with our own eyes these days.

While many places in Europe would normally get snow during winter and would have a white Christmas and New Year's Eve this year most of the Europe lacked any snow at all. Probably the same is true for other parts of the world.

Look below for a rough translation of the Russian text that this post begins with. It's funny, but very sad as well.

Winter is the time for a routine maintenance of the Matrix. In order to free up computing resources necessary for garbage collection they decrease the duration of daytime, strip trees of foliage and paint the sky in a unform gray color. All this helps to decrease the amount of computation required to render [the Matrix].

They used to cover everything with a layer of uniform white snow but with the recent increase in computing power that is no longer necessary. The rumor has it that after the next upgrade cycle there will not be any need for a dedicated winter at all.

... is taking place now. Follow a live coverage (transcript, photos) at MacRumors Live.

Update: Watch the video of Steve Jobs Macworld 2007 Keynote (QuickTime).

iPhone is here!

From the keynote speech:
9:42 am: 1984 - first mac; 2001 first ipod;

Today - introducing 3 revolutionary products:
9:42 am: 1st - widescreen ipod
9:42 am: 2nd - revolutionary mobile phone
9:42 am: 3rd - internet communicator
9:43 am: one device, not 3 separate

iPhone features Mac OS X, WiFi and GSM, a full web browser (Safari), a wide screen with MultiTouch interface (that's cool!) and 3 modes of work - an iPod, a phone, a communicator. Full sensor screen, use the best pointing device you have (your fingers), MultiTouch gestures, can "touch" your music.

Priced at $499 for a 4GB model, with 2 year service plan.

There is no question that this product will change the landscape of phones and mobile devices as we know it. The question is - how? What will happen to such products as Palm Treo or Nokia 770 Internet Tablet?

How will competition respond? One thing characteristic to Apple is that users will be tied into iTunes and its DRM therefore an interesting field to watch will be more open devices or development platforms that will inevitably turn up.

By the way - its not all cool and amazing. Many of things are already out there, in other devices. The really cool part is the "touch" interface, full screen size and the web browser / communicator part of it. But even then "nobody needs a stylus" part raises questions - entering text by tapping fingers on a virtual keyboard is slow and messy, using a stylus and Graffiti handwriting recognition is much faster.

Let's see what will happen. I want one of those anyway!

Apple Keynotes - Behind the Scenes

It is amazing to see Steve Jobs and Apple marketing and PR machine at work. Such a show does not happen in one day and there is an incredible amount work put into creating such a presentation (not to speak about the amount of work that goes into products themselves).

Read a first-person account of this process: The Guardian article "Behind the magic curtain"

Macworld Conference & Expo 2007 starts today at the Moscone Center in San Francisco and will run until January 12.

What new things will be presented there this year? Looking forward to find out more on the MacNN (Mac News Network) and elsewhere.

To make this event more fun participate in the "Steve Jobs Keynote Bingo": "Bingo templates are randomized out of a pool of 50 possible keynote events. When one event happens, press a button. If you get five buttons in a row, column or diagonally you scream: bIngqo!! (Because only a Klingon is prepared for what Steve has in store this year.)"

Check out our photos from Macworld 2006:

See also some photos from the MAKE and #joiito MacWorld 2006 Meetup.

P.S. Between the time I started to write this blog post and the time it was finished the current date in Latvia switched from January 8 to 9. Therefore, let's clarify - the conference starts on January 8, and the expo starts on January 9.

David Bowie celebrates his 60th birthday today. Congratulations!!!

He is one of the most dynamic musicians of the last (and this) century. I've always been amazed by his ability to change, adapt to new times and come up with new ideas. While he has made many appearances (e.g., playing the king of goblins in a cult movie "Labyrinth") one of my favorites parts is the action/quest game "Omikron: The Nomad Soul" which he composed a whole album for:

1999's "Hours" featured "What's Really Happening", the lyrics for which were written by Alex Grant, the winner of Bowie's "Cyber Song Contest" Internet competition.

That same year also found Bowie composing the soundtrack for a computer game called "Omikron: The Nomad Soul". David Bowie and his wife, Iman, made appearances as characters in the game.

Omikron remains one of the best computer games I've ever played.

You can find many more interesting facts about David Bowie on Wikipedia.

Some of my favorite songs by David Bowie:

• "Space Oddity" (1969)
• "Absolute Beginners" (1986)
• Album "Hours" (1999) a.k.a. the soundtrack for "Omikron: The Nomad Soul"

If you like Bowie's music, what are your favorites?