Homepages and startpages

Dear readers,

Long time no see, eh? (now I sound like a Canadian, to some of you...). I have very poor excuses for this long absence. But one of the true reasons is that I have started a weekly column on the Greek Liberal Monitor. Of course, that's a lot of energy spent that I can't spend on this blog. I know, that column is not that old, and I've been absent from here for a much longer time. But that's real (married) life for you, dear readers... Nevertheless, I hope you'll forgive me and indulge the following little rant.

I am a bit old school, IT wise, and I am told that's OK. But I have always appreciated a good start page for my browser homepage. I know that many true IT people think it's completely has been and that the default Chrome page (with its most used pages mosaic) is good enough. But bear with me a little: there are quite many cases when you want to monitor stuff in a simple way, even if that stuff is not used that often. These links would soon disappear from your history and thus from your standard Chrome starting page. Bookmarks are way too many in my case to play that role, as the desired links would be lost in the hundreds of them. What I need is a one click access to stuff I chose, regardless of how often I use it. For instance, my Youtube channel: I use it rarely, but I want to have access to it immediately. And no, just typing Youtube in my URL field is not good enough. First because it might bring the latest Youtube channel I watched instead of mine and second because it's longer than one click and I'm a lazy bummer.

So you see, I need a personalized homepage. Moreover, I want one which has some kind of visualisation of what's going on. I want to be able to see my Google calendar, if I have important appointment or things to do. I want to see my Twitter and Facebook feeds. And I want to see if I have new Gmail messages, and so on. These things are called Widgets in geek lingo. They are ugly and sometimes not super safe, from an IT point of view. But if you know more or less what you are doing, they are useful.

In the old times of the Internet, I had discovered iGoogle. That was exactly what I was looking for, especially since it integrated flawlessly with all the much famed "Google ecosystem". IGoogle was great, it had RSS feeds, integrated with Google News and Google Reader, Gmail, Youtube and so on. It was also quite accepting of third party feeds, pages and widgets and had all kind of nifty stuff from the weather to silly online games. Alas, good things never last. That's one of the rules of the universe: entropy and corporate greed usually put an end to all the best stuff. In this case, it was the much reviled killing of both iGoogle and Google Reader which ended my dream of a clean and useful homepage. I had to find a replacement for both. Reader was the easy one. After a couple of trials, I settled for Feedly and never looked back. At the time, people like Luke Maciak at Terminally Incoherent were complaining, rightfully, that it was too much of a closed system, with no OPML export or other backup feature. It had its issues as well. But I realized that the developers behind it were working fast to bring in much demanded features like this and I decided to stick to it. I was rewarded in my patience, as Feedly quickly became the best application out there for simple news feed access and sorting.

However, replacing iGoogle proved to be much more difficult. Obviously, other existing web applications had their own quirks and integrating Google ecosystem software in them proved uneven, at best. I tried many, before settling for Netvibes (a French application, produced initially for corporate users by Dassault Systèmes). Netvibes had it all for free, from RSS feeds to Google integration and various widgets for pretty much everything. To this date, it is probably the best replacement for iGoogle one can find... or nearly so. Because, unfortunately, somebody there had the genius idea, some weeks ago, to clean up the app/widget ecosystem of Netvibes. In that clean up, the good people at Dassault got rid of probably the most important app for me: the excellent Google Calendar visualisation widget. They replaced it by a home made widget. I thought: "ok, this is not a disaster, after all, who cares who makes the widget if it works"? Unfortunately, whichever poor random trainee was put in charge of this was clearly not up to the task. While the widget is visually well integrated with the rest of Netvibes (a flaw of of the previous one indeed), the programming behind is simply atrocious. For some silly rendering reason, the widget shows you all your appointments and calendar items for all the years for any given day. This obviously makes the widget nearly unusable. Since I am no corporate user and thus don't have access to personalized support, I decided that it was time to go graze greener pastures...

I had a look at several pretty good systems. Most of them I can heartily recommend. However, not all of them were suited to my needs. First was Symbaloo, which is a visually awesome bookmark system. As a homepage, it is great and it has some nice widgets that they call features, for some reason. But, for me, that didn't actually work too well. The system is beautiful but way too closed and without much user customization. The worst problem is that there are no configurable widgets. This was a big non-starter for me: I don't need just a bookmark system, I need a visualisation page. Also Symbaloo was not that great in regards with RSS feeds.

I also tried Startme and uStart. Both of them are excellent, Netvibes-like application. However, they didn't pass the test of being able to cater for all my needs. While Startme was good at integrating Google and Flickr stuff, its widgets are a bit clunky and can't be resized nor do they link to the main application easily. Conversely, uStart was natively playing nice with Facebook but the Google stuff was uglier or difficult to use. They had other features which were better as well, so I don't want to talk these down. They were just not ideally fitting my specific needs. Maybe they'll fit yours. After much trials and errors, I eventually settled for Protopage. At least for the moment. I learned that it was actually the very first of such web applications, before even iGoogle. It is in any case the only one which survived. It is not as easy to start with and set up as the others, by quite a margin. However, with a bit of tweaking, the end result is pretty great. Google integration is very good, adding RSS feeds is a breeze. Facebook and Flickr were a lot more complex to put in, but the result was worth the effort. The overall customization was nice as well: you can add a picture for the background, change colours and fonts or the number of columns of the main page. And you can pretty much resize the blocks to the pixel. So here it is, you can have a look at the result:

Tell me what you think!

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Graphic changes

This week, i have decided to work on my blog again. I am happy to see that Blogger added all kinds of new features. One of the most important for me is the possibility to add fixed pages to it (like with WordPress). This way, I don't need to maintain two different sites any more (the old fixed one and the blog). So from now on, you will be able to discover my photography work on display by clicking in the dedicated page. My poetry work is now also available on a fixed page. At the moment there is nothing really new (if you already knew my work, at least). But I will add up more stuff there soon.

I have also cleaned up the links and most of the surrounding "non core" stuff. So most links should now work and most of them still be relevant. It was badly needed, after so many of them have disappeared, been arrested or simply abandoned the public debate by becoming "invitation only" blogs (another word for the sad victory of repressive regimes on free press).

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Android Review

Dear readers,

As some of you might now, I got myself a new mobile phone while renewing my phone subscription. After long and careful consideration about which phone was on offer by my provider, as well as my own budget (which is as usual on the tight side), I decided to go for the much touted HTC G2 "Hero". The important thing about this phone is not just the specifications, but the operating system.

The HTC Hero makes full use of the latest version of Google's Android OS, dubbed Cupcake (a Linux related operating system for mobile and smart phones). It does so via its own HTC Sense interface which is basically an integration of Android to the HTC Hero. Before going any further in this review, let me state a couple of points first: I am a Google fan in many ways (although I don't like everything they do) and I enjoy gadgets of all types very much. All in all, I am extremely happy with the HTC acquisition and I plan to keep it for a good while. This said, I am also going to bitch a bit about what I don't like in both, so get ready.

First, let's have a look at the goodies (and there is a whole lot of them).

The phone is big, without being heavy (135 grams) or unhandy. It has a kind of bended shape at the bottom, which is not unpleasant and makes it feel like an actual phone, not just another IPhone copy. The screen is rectangular, with an 81 mm (3.2 inches) diagonal and a fairly standard 480 * 320 pixels resolution. The brightness is good and makes it easy to read even without the backlight option on, unless in bright sun light, of course. There is a mini-mouse ball for navigation, six buttons and no keyboard. Input is done via the touchscreen. The only plugs are a semi standard USB 2 and a headphone jack. A 5 Mega pixel video camera is included, as well as a slot for mini HD SD memory card (filled with a 2 Gigabytes one). I immediately replaced the SD card by an 8 G one, because I was planning to listen to music on this new toy. ;-)

All in all, I have used this phone for four days now, and it feels great. As a phone it is doing its job nicely, calling and receiving calls is going fine and the sound is crisp. Messaging is also quite handy and the OS shines already at this stage with its integrated way of guessing words for you as you type, but without imposing a solution on you (assuming you are typing in the language you indicated in the settings). I mention both of these because in these days of smart phones, people and especially salesmen tend to forget that a mobile is primarily this: a bloody telephone. As another side comment, I should also add that the battery life is really good. I was a bit afraid of this in the first place, but I was happily surprised. Despite using the phone intensively (including some of the most power intensive options I am going to mention later), the battery lasts easily a full work day and more. This means you can load your phone during night or in the morning, go to work with it and use it a lot, come back home, continue using it and only have to put it on the (USB type plug) loader at night again or the morning after. This is a major plus point, I think.

The applications and the OS are also a blast. The camera works fine and uses a second or two delay as default, which is handy in most situations where one might want to use a phone camera. The video is ok too, but this is not the most interesting use of the HTC Hero lenses in any way... The interface uses finger gliding/tapping or the mouse ball. Both work very well, although I have to say that my greasy fingers are not really helping on the touchscreen. Tapping to type is going well, as I already mentioned. The Android "desktop" functions pretty much as one virtual scrolling screen made of seven times the actual HTC screen. The central panel is linked to the home button and shows the WiFi switch, the Browser the Mail application, the Contact list, the SMS launcher and an analog watch per default. There are also three virtual buttons in the lower bar (the application list, the phone mode and the "add icon or widget" button). The higher bar is a status one, which can be expended, and proves highly useful to open incoming messages, alerts and other notifications directly.

Other panels show a couple of other icons and widgets (weather forecast for your location, web search, camera and music). I have to say something about the music listener application. The way it works is really the most user friendly you can imagine. To load music on the phone: just plug the HTC on a USB port on your PC (it will use this to reload too, by the way) and use copy paste from a PC window to the HTC window. Once the transfer has occurred, unplug the phone and voilà: the music is found, recognized, sorted by meta tags and ready to play. All basic options are there: play lists, shuffle, repeat and so on. The sound is excellent and the provided headphones are of decent quality. Volume can be changed via the phone side button reserved to this use. A remote on the headphones allows the following actions: play or stop/pause, forward and backward.

Of course, maybe the most interesting aspect of Android is the number of applications you can download from the "Market" to the phone and use almost immediately. Thanks to Google's open policy, these are mostly free (although many of them are not, ranging from 1 to 5 or 6 Euros, there is pretty much two free equivalent for each paying one). They cover all kinds of software and uses, from the obvious productivity applications to the silliest games or "social networking" fads.

Speaking about fashion, the latest and maybe most impressive type of application available on the Android market are the ones called "augmented reality". Some predict this will be the new step beyond Web 2.0. I honestly don't know, but it certainly looks cool. There are two major applications in this range (and only available on Android, as far as I know): Layar, a Dutch system, and Austrian made Wikitude. There used to be a Japanese one, but it seems to not have survived the recent credit crisis. What do they do? Well, they make use of the GPS receiver, the accelerometer and the video camera or the HTC Hero to actually display layers of web based information directly on the live video images of your surroundings displayed by the camera. The best comparison I have seen to described this is the images taken in the movie Terminator, when the spectator gets to peek from the Terminator point of view. They don't see only the video image of what the robot perceives, but also all kinds of (con)textual information about its targets and environment. Augmented reality applications do exactly that. Most use a simple search for geolocated elements on the web (such as Wikipedia locations, Google map searches and so on). But, as demonstrated by Layar, any provider of such layers can have its specific information displayed on their software platform (presumably via their own API).

Now let's have a look at the bad sides.

The first negative, although it is a minor thing, is the fact that the screen is only 3.2 inches, instead of the massive 3.5 showed by the IPhone. It might not be much, but it is visible and not irrelevant in terms of reading comfort. This said, it has a positive side as it is easier to hold than the Apple product, especially for someone like me with less than average size hands. Still in the usability issues, the volume button that I mentioned above is not so obvious to use and a bit poorly designed. But again, no big deal and more a matter of getting used to it.

There are more annoyances on the software side, unfortunately. Again, please remember that most of this if not all comes for free, so it is a bit like complaining about a present somebody made to you... But still, for the sake of software improvement, it needs to be said. First, and at least for my provider, Skype is not allowed to function with Voice over IP via the WiFi. I can understand the economic rational behind this, but it made me a sad panda. ;-)

The second and probably most annoying issue is the browser. It is full of bugs in my opinion. I know it is based on a much acclaimed system (which is also used on the IPhone), but still I hate it. Despite claims of the contrary in the settings, I can't have the home page stick at all. Cache refreshing happens when it wants (pretty much never), which makes AJAX software nearly unusable. I see that there are other browsers available on the Android Market, and I certainly intend to test them. At the moment and the way it is designed, the default one is sub par. Another bad thing with it is that the button you normally use to close an application (the left arrow) is also the "Go back" button in the browser. I haven't find a decent way of going around this. Frankly, this is poor design.

A thing I also found annoying in Android is that, despite the fact the software is a Google based product, Google applications are not supported that well. Of course, Gmail and Google Calendar are standard, as well as YouTube and Google Map (which makes great use of the GPS) and you can add easily Google Finance and a couple of others. But I find unfortunate that Google Reader has no dedicated application nor a widget and that there is no free application allowing to synchronize your Google To-Do List. I couldn't find anything to synchronize bookmarks either, but i haven't researched the issue in details either. I eventually settled for the free and excellent NewsRob application which integrates very well with Google Reader and I am using the pretty good Astrid app for the To-Do List (although it does not synchronize with Google To-Do list on iGoogle). And I know that I could use both these applications through the browser. But after what I said about the standard browser, I guess you will understand why I refuse to do so (and why it wouldn't work too well, considering the caching issues). Also, using the browser involves at least one or two extra clicks or taps and I think there is no best way to kill user friendliness.

Last but not least, Picasa is poorly supported. Although it is supposed to natively integrate with the Android Albums photo library, this is not easy to find out and even worse executed. I could not make it work at all, for some reason, and I ended up canceling the picture upload. Strangely enough, Facebook and Flickr uploads are also natively supported and work better... 8-\

Apart from these glitches and minor annoyances, I would conclude this (too) long review by saying that the HTC Hero with Android and HTC Sense is a great smart phone with a fantastic piece of software running on it. And I haven't tried all of it yet, by far... So I would highly recommend it. And for the budget conscious like me, I would even go as far as saying that it is superior to the Apple IPhone.