Archive for category Mobile
Touch and Go at the 3GSM World Congress 2005
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on February 16, 2005
The planned touch and go in Cannes to attend the 3GSM World Congress 2005 went all right except for the choice of plan B for the return trip.
I traveled there, had a walk on the seaside of Cannes, entered the 3GSM in its last day, had a quick but well pre-planned look around the booths, had the chance to meet with some people of the mobile business as well as unexpectedly finding a well known italian guy ;), I took some pics of the new mobile devices, then walk back to the train station to search for some place to rest in Ventimiglia, instead of Rapallo, as I initially planned.
Next year in Barcelona then, as the 3GSM next logo clearly states.
Now I’ve got all the weekend to take care of the e-mails I got following the release of the new version of EcPc.
Have a bit of patience if you’re waiting for a reply, ok? 🙂
Euro Coins Pocket Collector 1.4 RELEASED!
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on February 16, 2005
Here we are, at last! 🙂
After exactly 1 year and 1 month since the last release 1.3 I published version 1.4 of Euro coins Pocket collector.
It may seem a very long time, but a genuine passion never fades away although it may goes through up and downs during the course of life.
I’ve updated most of the content of the website, so please have a look around after you downloaded the latest version, read about the updates, then have a look at the FAQ, especially users of the previous versions, the wishlist and finally post your feedback in the new forum.
I’m leaving for the 3GSM World Congress 2005 in Cannes in a few hours, but once I’ll be back I’m going to write a series of tutorials to properly explain the most advanced features of Ecpc such as the Compare&Swap mode.
Hope you’ll appreciate the new version, now embracing a fair Shareware licensing model, as well as the new icon and the banner below made by my friend graphics artist! 😉
Netcafé interview subtitled, Creative Commons and Firefox
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on January 28, 2005
This is another thing I had to do since a long time of which I underestimated the importance, at least from a marketing point of view: I mean adding subtitles to the Netcafé TV interview. 🙂
Technically they’re captions, since I added them using Windows Media Encoder 9 tools. For the occasion I even re-encoded the videos at a higher quality.
I had the chance to show it to some friends on the Pocket PC, but the occasional visitor may easily miss it because he has to browse the site to find it and once found he can’t understand the language if it doesn’t know italian. That explains the work on the english subtitles and that hint to the visitor in a hurry at the top of the page. 😉
While transcribing the interview I liked in particular the questions at the end of the last part of the interview, when Gabriele asked me about the prices and the diffusion of PDAs with a bit of skepticism. Well, we are the country of mobile phones after all, as he often says, and we still have much difficulty to understand the true potential of PDAs not only as personal organizers but also as mini computers, at least compared to other countries. That may change quickly as PDAs with phone capabilities and new Smartphones will start to spread out.
I think my last answers will hold some true even for the next Christmases, who knows?
You may also notice on the left column of this page I adopted the Creative Commons license model for the contents of the website and the link to Firefox, the only browser I’m using.
I even ordered a custom CC shirt from Ken Mickles at GiantRobotPrinting.com. I’ll take a picture of it once it’ll be here.
Watch the videos and stay tuned for more news about Ecpc. 8)
Update: we’re almost there, Ecpc 1.4 will be released in a few days. In the meantime you can read my latest articles about the Loox 720 and the Microsoft Genuine Advantage anti-piracy program published here on the local daily newspaper La Provincia.
How does the Loox look?
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on January 25, 2005
It’s just a word joke, but now that a Fujitsu Siemens Pocket Loox 720 is in my hands I can give an answer to that question: the Look rocks, definitely! 🙂
It was a while I was examining the latest VGA Pocket PC models for the next purchase and when I read about the Loox 720 and its exceptional overall features in various reviews I decided that was the one I had to get although the wallet wouldn’t have agreed as much as the will.
“What a display!” has been the recurring first exclamation when I showed it to friends last week, but from the best VGA LCD on the market to the loudspeaker positioned on the front side there are a lot of killer features inside this limousine among current PDAs.
I got it from Clove Technology, and they were kind to check for any dead pixels on the LCD before shipping it. The italian version should be available in february from Trilogy, although I really hope to see more stuff and accessories for the Loox from this new italian shop soon enough.
In fact the first thing I’m going to add is a screen protector to safeguard such a punch in the eyes! 😉
Then a nice case, and then who knows, surely any useful software optimized for VGA. I’ll write more about the Loox, but the first impression I got is that VGA is the future. I purchased my first Pocket PC to be able to increase productivity, being able to read documents away from the PC, so now with 4x times the resolution of a QVGA Pocket PC you can imagine my joy in reading docs on the Loox! 
Of course I’ve already installed the useful GAPI speed up driver hack by Picard and SE_VGA which is invaluable when using PIE to browse the Internet.
I’ve already did some experiments with the VGA Emulator in the past months, but the impact of seeing such an amount of pixels on a real 3.6-inch LCD is a completely different thing.
I’ve no more excuses to not work on a VGA version of Ecpc. Actually Ecpc, as any other software designed for a QVGA display, does look too much blocky due to pixel doubling routines. Adding detail is a lot more fun, easier and in the end rewarding than removing it to adapt the interface of Ecpc to the smaller Smartphone display, for example. 😉
The Incredible Tide
This is the original title of the book by Alexander Key which inspired the japanese anime of my childhood, Future Boy Conan (Mirai Shounen Konan) by Hayao Miyazaki.
Finding that book and purchasing the DVDs of the anime was on my to do list since a very long time. Then suddenly on december 26th a real incredible tide stroke South East Asia, a world tragedy I think will remain impressed in our memory like a few others. The reference to the anime came immediately to my mind, since the tide which changed the world of Conan impressed me a lot when I was a child.
Well, now watching those terrible videos as well as the astonishing satellite images of the areas involved by the real tsunami made me feel breathless and almost as without the earth under my feet, although I watched it from a warm home.
It will take time to fully understand the real proportions of this tragedy, but by finally being able to read the book by Alexander Key I’d like to close with a quote by Hayao Miyazaki, which sums up the meaning of the book and gives a hint of hope to the people involved in the tragedy, both those who faced the tide in first person and those who watched it from a safe distance and are now willing to help:
“What fascinated me about the book was its main meaning: at the fall of any ‘great civilization’ some ‘primitives’ always take the lead, not to be intended in negative terms, but as people with a great vital strength, full of vitality and willing to rebuild a new world. It’s their vital pulse which captured me.”
I think you’ll agree these are wise and current words. I’ll write again about this event in one of the next updates.
Update: speaking about satellites, on December 23rd the local daily newspaper La Provincia published my full page article about GPS and TomTom Go.
BatteryLife Activator Test
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on December 21, 2004
When I first read about the BatteryLife Activator I got immediately curious, although I admit I was pretty skeptic about its real capabilities until I read positive comments on some german websites. This mysterious black foil appeared to keep its promises of increasing the charge of a common lithium ion battery by up to 30%, which was pretty amazing actually.
But it wasn’t enough for me and I asked for a sample to make some tests. The guys at BatteryLife sent me the samples and then I’ve been able to use them on the batteries of my Axim X3 and of my Motorola MPx200. On the Axim I run the Spb Benchmark with the option “Max backlight, standard using” several times and if I got 3:05 hours without the Activator, once I applied it on the battery I got results up to about 3:35, which is exactly the increment the Activator promised to provide.
On the MPx200 I did a different test by playing the default video sample at full volume with the Media Player and I got the same percentage increase from about 4:00 to 4:35 hours until the device went off automatically. I’m very satisfied of this product and I hope it will be commercialized and promoted even in Italy. I also wrote an article about it for the local daily newspaper La Provincia, which you can find it here in PDF format.
The advantages of the Activator extend beyond increasing the standby and the talk times by even shortening the battery charging time up to 40%, something I’m glad to confirm, and providing a longer lifetime for the battery itself. Very interesting improvements especially considering a street price of only 9.90 Euro per foil.
Now that I’m fully back to my development schedule with the new workstation, I really hope to make old and new Ecpc users a nice Christmas present with the release of version 1.4.
The next update will be the one they’re waiting for! 😉
Hardware Upgrade and EmEditor
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on December 8, 2004
If used heavily, sooner or later a PC turns into a snail, and I don’t mean the nice gastropod featured in the game Snails by PDA Mill, which I installed on my Pocket PC and Smartphone thanks the special offer reserved to Pocket PC Thoughts subscribers.
That’s to say I’m in the middle of a complete hardware upgrade. In the building of the new workstation I took particular care of two aspects: a fast mass storage subsystem, the real bottleneck of modern PCs, by installing two Barracudas in RAID-0 mode, and a quality Chieftec case providing a good internal ventilation and most importantly silence through the use of quiet fans. 8)
The next step has been the installation of the Windows XP Pro operative system and the software I daily use, each one with its customizations, a procedure that’s time consuming if done properly.
This time however it has been easier thanks to Raxco’s FirstDefense ISR and PerfectDisk, the first one useful for testing drivers and applications without messing with the main snapshot and the second one to keep the Barracudas defragmented. 🙂
And speaking about useful tools to improve productivity, I’m happy since I’ve finally found a text editor with great general features and full Unicode support, EmEditor, useful to edit the language files of Ecpc. Even better is the fact that it’s free for academic and technical use, which includes shareware authors. Thanks to Yutaka Emura of Emurasoft for his policy and as you can read in the Ecpc Wishlist page now I recommend his software to translators. 😉
Update: since at Raxco they’re happy that PerfectDisk v7.0 just won the 2005 Redmond Magazine’s Readers Choice Award for the “Best Disk Defragmentation Tool” they’re offering a 25% discount off their products with the promo code REDMOND25 that they invited me to share. 😉
Coming Full Circle at the Mobile Fun Forum 2004
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on November 26, 2004
On Wednesday 24 November I attended to the Wireless Forum Fall event and in particular I followed the Mobile Fun Forum 2004 conference.
The last year Ecpc won the Cellulari.it Special Award at the first edition of the Mobile Fun Awards and my friends from Impressionware did a big applause when I went on the stage to get the prize. This time they won the Best Gameplay Award for their Java game Metal Racers: Quad Bikes and I had the pleasure to congratulate with them, so I can say that the circle closed perfectly! 🙂
This year the event took place at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Milan. The expo area was much bigger and the event was divided into four main forums: the WLAN Business, the Mobile Office, the Mobile Fun and the Spam Forum.
I followed some interesting presentations during the morning in the Mobile Fun Forum area and I had the chance to meet some old friends such as Pietro of Bryo, Tiziano of Cellulari.it, Fabio of Wireless Gaming and the always kind Marco of Wireless. It’s good to know that wireless technologies are getting even more attention in our country, although mobile gaming and PDA sectors are not certainly at the pace of other countries.
If you’re curious to know if I passed the selections of the Premio Palinsesto Italia contest, well, the answer is no, as they communicated me a few days ago.
Since in any contest part of the fun is in participating, I asked them if the participants will have the chance to show their projects during the two days of the event, set to take place on December 10th and 11th in Bologna, but they told me this was not in program for the first edition of the contest and that they won’t even manage to publish all the submitted projects on the website too soon.
Although I’m curious to know more about the selected finalist projects I doubt I’ll attend to the prize-giving as I was going to, I’ve too much things to do to for the release of Ecpc version 1.4. 😉
Bill Gates at the Microsoft Technical Conference 2004
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on November 22, 2004
On Thursday 18 November I’ve been in Milan to attend to the Microsoft Technical Conference, held at the Assago Forum.
3008 people were present at the event, mostly developers and Technet or Msdn subscribers. The day quickly passed away among the presentations by Microsoft staff divided in four main areas.
Of particular interest have been the application installation and deployment issues discussed by the always brilliant and friendly Fabio Santini, although a bit unlucky with his demos ;), and a preview of the features of Visual Studio 2005 by Gabriele Castellani-Donald Duck voice, as a friend funnily pointed out.
Then Bill Gates performed the final speech in the crowded auditorium. It was the first time I saw him in person and I must say that it has been fascinating hearing about his visions of the incoming future and his intentions on focusing on well-made software to provide a challenging experience to the common non technical user.
After the speech he answered to three questions from as many MVPs and then he disappeared just as he came in. Here are some pictures of the event, sorry for the low quality of the digital camera I used.
Now some news about the incoming version of Ecpc: there’s still some testing to do, but judging from the increase of traffic towards the website it seems this release is getting some attention and that’s a positive sign considering the important switch to the Shareware distribution model I already announced.
This additional time will be well spent since I’ll probably also include the full spanish translation! 🙂
Ecpc version 1.4 Announced!
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on November 10, 2004
I’m ready with the announcement of the long awaited version 1.4 of Ecpc.
It’s currently in betatesting and I won’t release it until the transfer to the new hosting provider TotalChoice Hosting will be completed, but you can get a preview of the new features and changes in the Updates page.
To celebrate the announcement I’ve added a bonus section in the Download page where you can find a little present: a free Euro coins related Pocket PC theme made by McDeb.
Download it, it’s available even for WM2003 SE with QVGA and VGA support.
Another funny addition to the site are the seven deadly sins of e-mail I added to the contacts page, something everyone should keep in mind when dealing with e-mail, me included of course. 😉
It may take up to a week for the hosting transfer to complete, so enjoy the Euro coins theme and prepare for the re-launch of Ecpc! 8)