Archive for August, 2008

Moonfruit flash

August 14, 2008

Moonfruit seems to be a way to build websites entirely from Flash.

It’s a good thing Google now indexes Flash!

But how good is Google’s Flash indexer, really?

BBC Olympics mobile site

August 8, 2008

I thought I’d see if watching video on my mobile phone via the BBC Olympics mobile site worked. Predictably, it didn’t work at all.

I was using the following technology stack:

  • HTC Touch Diamond
  • Windows Mobile 6.1
  • Opera Mini 9.5 (build 1184)
  • Windows Media Player 10, Version 10.3 Build 19591

The error was:

Server or data time out; tap play to reconnect.

HTC Touch Diamond, personal review

August 6, 2008

I got a new mobile phone: the HTC Touch Diamond.

The good
  • It comes in a nice black diamond shaped box. So shiny!
  • The handset is very slim and light. Its case is great.
  • The Teeter game using the accelerometer is so much fun!
  • The camera images look really good, and it has auto-focus.
  • Google maps with GPS… Wow! I could use up my 500Mb allowance in no time playing with this.
  • Using Wifi & GPRS to browse websites is awesome, and it’s really easy to save pages for offline viewing.
  • Hidden magnetic stylus that I didn’t even realise was there.
  • It’s small and light enough
The bad
  • The “TouchFLO 3D” menu is very slightly more jerky than I’d want it to be.
  • The speakers are very tinny and too quiet, even on  loudest volume setting is pretty quiet.
  • View emails and texts through the TouchFLO menu takes too many steps (there may be a shortcut I’m not aware of, but I have not been provided with a user manual, even after asking Orange for one).
  • Shell32.exe crashed already. Within one day of using it! Didn’t actually have any bad effect though.
  • HTCAlbum.exe also crashed. Again, no noticable effect.
  • mbutton.exe crashed too. Okay that’s 3rd party, but it never, ever crashed on my SPV M3100.
  • manila.exe crashed. [update: I complained to Orange about this and was told “Windows isn’t even stable on the desktop. We can’t investigate isolated crashes”.
  • The on-screen keyboard irritatingly pops up and obscures forms and emails so you can’t read what you’re typing. The M3100 also had this problem, but then its on-screen keyboard was a lot smaller.
  • I’m really feeling the lack of a hardware keyboard. It takes a lot more concentration to type.
  • When on a phonecall, the screen switches itself off after 5 seconds of inactivity. I suppose this is a feature, but I wish I knew how to disable it.