Siri
I made a comment last week that I probably wouldn’t buy an iPhone 4S because there was nothing really that interesting. I also went on to say that although Siri looked cool, it would probably sit in the corner of my iPhone screen gathering dust just like Facetime (a cool video messaging application that is Apple only and is a poor cousin to Skype, etc.). I couldn’t have been more wrong. Siri is amazing! Right now the blogosphere is strewn with examples of all the cool and fun questions / responses (interactions) you can do with Siri. However, in my opinion that isn’t the killer feature of Siri. I think that Siri’s ability to dictate at nearly 100% accuracy even with my poor prononciation is the most amazing part of this technology. ...
Best of iOS5
Just a quick preview for all you iPhone/iPad users out there. As an Apple developer I have access to the beta releases of iOS and for the past month I have been running iOS on my iPhone. I was also a user who had to resort to jailbreaking my device to enable all the features I thought were missing. The good news is that iOS5 includes new features that makes jailbreaking unnecessary. Here is a quick sampling of some of my favourite features: The Lock Screen The barren wasteland that was the old iOS lockscreen has been replaced with one that provides notification on the latest info flowing into the phone. Emails, Calls, Calendar Appointments… anything that used to put up a notification bubble will now post to the lockscreen. A quick swipe and you are...
Loving the PlayBook
I don’t do gadget reviews but since a lot of people have asked, here is my take on the PlayBook after using it for a couple of weeks. Put simply, the PlayBook is a really great piece of hardware, with a fabulous operating system (called QNX) that is let down by a lack of software. One thing RIM does very well is hardware and this shows with the PlayBook. Build quality is exceptional. The rubberized back makes the unit feel very solid. The only exception to the excellent build quality is the flimsy power button on the top of the device. Not only is it difficult to press but you feel like it is breaking every time it is used. How the power button passed user testing is beyond me! The size of the PlayBook (7 inches) is also just about perfect. Unlike...
BlackBerry PlayBook
I’m still waiting for my PlayBook. And while I am more than happy to be getting something for relatively nothing (a couple of hours of development time) I don’t understand RIM’s logic on delivery to developers. Modern smartphones and tablets live or die based on the applications available to end users. That being said, if you were RIM wouldn’t you want to ship development PlayBook devices to developers as early as possible? The latest I have heard from the BlackBerry forums is that they should ship this week, one full week after the consumer launch! There are many developers in my shoes with apps in BlackBerry AppWorld that have never been tested on a real device! I have read the early reviews and most of them were pretty hard...
PlayBook Development
Just a quick post about my recent experience developing an app for the upcoming BlackBerry PlayBook. I have definitely been spoiled developing mobile applications for other platforms. Once you spend some time in IDE’s such as MS Visual Studio and Apple XCode you realize the BlackBerry platform is not very developer friendly. On other platforms, when you want to build/debug/test your code you simply “Build (or Run) & Deploy” to the simulator and start testing. Not so with the PlayBook. Here is a snippet of the command line scripts I had to figure out to deploy an application to the simulator for testing: zip -r ApplicationName * bbwp/bbwp ApplicationName.zip -gcsk 123456 -gp12 123456 -buildId...
Barnes & Noble Nook Color
eReader or Android Tablet? How about both? I have now spent a couple of weeks with the Barnes & Noble Nook Color and after a bit of messing around I have decided it is one spectacular little device. Out of the box, the Nook Color (NC) is an enhanced eReader running on top of an Android 2.1 (Eclair) base OS. Without any form of hackery you get a great eReader, a basic set of games (sudoku, crosswords), a picture gallery, music and video playback (mp3, mp4 and Pandora) and a WebKit based browser for accessing the web. It is a solid and stable device that seems so close to being a full fledged Android based tablet. With a little time and patience on XDA a full out Android tablet it is… My current setup is a dual boot NC. The stock OS boots by...