The iPad display is so good that it shows, like no device before it, just how crummy most images on the web are.

For those that didn’t know already, let this serve as fair warning: mobile network operators that transcode (downgrade) images “to enhance the user experience” are going to look even more ridiculous on the resolutionary display of the new iPad. If an average website image looks crummy, just imagine how outrageously poor an image that’s been actively downsampled is going to look.

I find it deeply objectionable that we can pay for a service only to have that service actively downgraded – with no option to opt-out – all in the name of “improving the experience”. Network operators: it’s time to stop this mess. Ship the bits and stop being dicks.

See also Vodafone UK is abusing its position.

On installing cyanogenmod on the Samsung Galaxy S2 with a Mac.

The stock OEM+Telco Android experience is pretty awful, with loads of crapware. The best solution to running Android on a mobile device is to flash it with CyanogenMod.

If you have a Samsung Galaxy S2 and you’re on a Mac, the cyanogenmod wiki instructions are somewhat broken. Here’s what you have to do:

• Download CyanogenMod and Google Apps.
• Download ClockworkMod Recovery 4.0.1.4 – this is an alternate kernel image. Unarchive it.
• Download Heimdall suite 1.3.1 – this is a command-line flashing tool. Open the DMG as root to install it: sudo open heimdall-1.3.1-mac.dmg and once it’s installed but before rebooting, ensure the ownership is correct: sudo chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/heimdall.kext
• Plug a USB cable into your laptop.
• Turn off the Samsung Galaxy S2, and then boot it into download mode by holding Volume Down, Home, Power (note the wiki only says “Home and Volume Down”. When prompted, press Volume Up to confirm you want to do this.
• Plug the USB cable into your phone.
• Start the kernel upload: sudo heimdall flash -kernel zImage (note the wiki misses out the sudo; if you’re not root, the install will fail with “ERROR: Failed to receive response!”.
• Mount the phone as a USB drive, then copy update-cm-7.1.0-GalaxyS2-signed.zip and gapps-gb-20110828-signed.zip to the root directory. Eject the drive, and disconnect the USB.
• Hold down the Volume Up, Home and Power buttons to boot into ClockworkMod recovery. Alternatively, if you have the Android developer tools installed (and downloaded platforms through Eclipse), you can cd android-sdk-macosx/platform-tools && ./adb reboot recovery.
• As per the wiki, select Wipe data/factory reset, then Wipe cache partition.
• Select Install zip from sdcard, then Choose zip from sdcard, and select update-cm-7.1.0-GalaxyS2-signed.zip. Repeat for gapps-gb-20110828-signed.zip.
• The instructions say to select Go Back, but  depending on how you booted this option may not be available. Tapping the power button acts like a back button. Select Reboot system now.
• First time around, this didn’t work, so repeat from the point of booting into ClockworkMod recovery.

And that’s it … you should now be running the cyanogenmod version of Android. It’s closer to vanilla, but with quite a few refinements.

Back in November, Samsung held a Bada Developer Day to herald the launch of Bada 2.0. This followed on from the 2010 Samsung Bada developer day they held. During the event, Samsung provided Wave 3 devices to developers.

The Samsung Wave 3 is the latest flagship device for the Bada mobile operating system, the smartphone platform from Samsung. It’s an update of the predecessor Wave and Wave II.

I spent some time with the Wave II following the previous event; it was a competent low-end smartphone, notable for the relatively basic operating system packed into phenomenal Samsung hardware: an amazing screen, great industrial design, excellent camera and stupendous battery life.

The Wave S3 is a similar form factor, with the notable exception of the huge screen. It’s reasonably thin, with a brushed metal back, and in a change from the previous model the back panel slides to reveal the battery, rather than being a detachable panel.

During the Developer Day presentations we were told how Bada 2.0 is a significant step forward over Bada 1.0, and first impressions suggest it is a bit better. But it’s still lacking attention to detail, maturity and friendliness that marks other mobile platforms. Here’s a detailed breakdown.

~

On startup, the device asks you what type of SIM you have: O2 PostPay, O2 PrePay, Tesco. Does this make any sense to anyone, when we’re trained to think in terms of “pay monthly” or “pay as you go”?

You’re then asked to set the language – which is fortunate, since it’s defaulted to French. So I selected English. (There’s an option for “Automatic”, I’m curious to know what that does!) In fairness to Samsung, the devices we were given were not even on the market at the time, and were clearly intended for the French market (judging by the European power supply and the French text on the packaging).

I selected English, and then  was prompted to set my timezone. I clicked in the Search box, and despite saying I wanted English, I was shown a French AZERTY keyboard layout. Furthermore, as I typed the first few characters of “London”, the predictive text showed me options such as “l’on”, so the phone was clearly still thinking in French.

Another bug that shows up in the predictive text: if you type “l”, some text, delete some text, and type “ondon”, it treats it as two separate words (despite the lack of spacing or punctuation), and you end up with “lbidon” on screen.

Date and time: the date internationalisation is a little weird: 04/Nov./2011: have you ever seen Nov punctuated anywhere else?

The final step of setup is the request to sign up for a Samsung account. It’s a nice idea, but it would be better if WiFi is set up first. There’s no guarantee your operator data configuration texts will have arrived before. Indeed, when you go through the process it prompts you “Use packet data must be enabled to access data service. Change settings?” Why not say “you must use a mobile data connection” – what does packet data mean to the consumer? If you say no, you get a network error – why does it even try to talk to the network, and not just say “do this later”?

If you do enter the Samsung account setup, there’s a notorious problem from the previous Wave devices: text areas being obscured by the keyboard.

Once setup is complete, it boots into the home screen, but a dialog pops up right away telling you how to “Edit idle pages”. The problem is that without having used the device, this dialog means nothing. What are idle pages? What are icons?

The same thing happens if you go into the “Menu” section: a popup “Add idle shortcut”, and it feels like the descriptive text is truncated: “Drag and drop icon to the bottom tray to add shortcut to idle” …. to idle what? To idle screen? Do they mean “launcher” instead of idle screen, or menu bar?

The screen timeout is really aggressive: probably because it’s so big.

Wifi setup was straightforward, though the device was still showing an AZERTY keyboard. Clicking “FR” changes it to “EN”. The keyboard is good, haptic feedback is nice.

Within 24 hours of starting to use the device, I successfully crashed the Wave, causing it to reboot. I was closing apps in the task manager at the time.

One interesting feature: you can carry on using the device whilst in USB mode. But only the microSD, not internal storage. Unfortunately that means moving all my screenshots from internal to microSD before I can get them off the phone. In fairness, the move process was painless, and worked.

The Wave 3 has three hardware buttons on the front (aside from the volume rocker and the power switch). I have yet to figure out precisely why it has these three. The middle one acts as a power on, the others seem to be back or menu but don’t act consistently.

~

To illustrate the Wave3 experience, let’s take a look at some screenshots.

There are precisely two fonts to choose from on the Wave3. That’s twice as many as on the iPhone, but when the choice is between the Samsung font and a Comic Sans imitation, that’s about twice as many choices as you really want or need.

There is the option to get more fonts. The name and the description of the fonts would best be described as SUB_opt-imal. But it’s reassuring to see we now speak “Whole Europe language”.

Get used to waiting. Even on a fast wifi connection, I saw “Waiting” very frequently. My guess is this is a combination of Samsung’s servers all being based out of Korea, poor capacity planning, and poor attention to network performance. Either way, it’s a frustrating user experience.

It’s not nice that the network was not available, especially as I am on a wifi connection that’s working (so actually the problem is the resource is not available, the network is fine). What’s worse is the 0xff01 error number. Users don’t want to see that.

Some aspects of the Wave are really nice, for example downloading apps have a “ripple” effect as though water was being poured into a glass. It’s a neat, human touch and I wish the whole platform was as polished as this one detail.

There are occasional reminders that this is a feature phone, not a smart phone. For example, you cannot queue up mails for sending. If one mail is in the process of being sent, you have to wait for it to complete before you can send another.

The browser in the Wave3 is not bad (mostly because it’s on a huge screen), but it struggles to keep up sometimes. When scrolling, you will often see display glitches like this “checkerboarding”. In fairness to Samsung, many mobile platforms suffer from similar issues.

Cool, Samsung are giving away apps! What happens if I click on the banner? I get a prompt that says exactly the same thing as the banner. What happens if I click on OK? I get a details page that never loads. ARGH! SO FRUSTRATING!

Maybe there’s an update for the Samsung App Store app that will make the experience better. Yes, there is. Whilst downloading it I’m treated to some curious pictograms, including the iPhone 4 “you’re holding it wrong”, and the “high five app update!”. I wait patiently for my Samsung Apps cup to fill up, and then eagerly click on it to see the new hotness. And I’m greeted by the double whammy of the app failing to launch, and the grammatically disastrous “Cannot launch . Invalid application” error.

At least the app store upgrade fixed all the minor snags, right? Right? Well, the “network not available” error has been upgraded to 0xff03. And the app store now displays an animated ticker instead of “Waiting”. The promo banners (this time “app of the year”) still has a pop-up dialog saying exactly the same thing. It now leads to an empty list of promotional products, rather than the never-loading page we had with the free apps.

There’s a built-in task manager that lets you kill open apps. You’ll need to use it as some apps will hang, and others don’t like launching multiple times (see the next entry). Frustratingly, not all Bada apps behave well, so you get warned that “Unsaved data may be lost” if you click “End all applications”. You won’t be told which apps aren’t going to exit cleanly.

Occasionally the camera gets confused, and refuses to launch. For bonus points, when this happens it often doesn’t show up in the Task Manager. Reboot time!

~

I used the Wave3 for three months, including travel and conferences, to get an idea of how it works. At the end of that time, I could not be happier to get rid of the phone, as the inconsistencies in the UI and the frequent failures were driving me crazy.

There were some positives to the device:

• The screen is amazing.
• The keyboard with haptic feedback is pretty good.
• The camera is not bad at all for a feature phone.
• The ability to tether other devices to this phone is really useful, and does not require contract changes. I wish this worked as well on the iPhone.

The negatives:

• Broken and unpolished UI.
• Lack of apps.
• the phone hangs and crashes for no reason.

For this device, the negatives definitely outweighed the positives.

Samsung are clearly making progress, and they are tying Bada into a whole ecosystem of services (music, movies, home hub with TV, app stores). But Bada is a woefully unpolished platform, and lacks attention to detail. It’s simply not acceptable to push out software like this in a world where there are very slick and refined alternatives.

The CloudStore is apparently built upon Windows Azure, the cloud platform from Microsoft. It was built by Microsoft partner Solidsoft. The price tag? Free, according to Chris Chant, Program Director of Government G-Cloud, speaking on twitter earlier:

We should certainly welcome cost savings if an SME provides the government with a useful new web resource for free. But there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Consider:

• Is it entirely bespoke, or is it using existing components or an existing CMS?
• Is the government getting the source code for the application so that anyone can update and maintain it?
• Are they now locked in to license fees for the software, or is there a lengthy maintenance contract which will potentially cost the taxpayer far more than the initial website?
• What is the commercial value to Microsoft and Solidsoft that can be derived from prominent placement and links from a government website?

The last point is perhaps most apposite. How many other government websites carry commercial advertising? None that I could find, from a quick survey. And yet, there it is, bottom-right of every single page, animated logos proclaiming it is delivered by Solidsoft and powered by Azure:

~

For the conspiracy theorists, does the design of the catalogue feel vaguely familiar?

Isn’t it a little … I dunno … Windows 8?

~

I think it’s interesting that we’re seeing government service roll-outs measured in weeks rather than months (at least in delivery time – the government app store itself has been kicking around for a long time, and one report claimed it was trialled two years ago). I think greater transparency around suppliers is a positive move.

I think the government needs to take care not to ignore other equally important factors (such as avoiding lock-in and preventing free advertising) in their enthusiasm for delivery.

There’s a bunch of awesome BlackBerry developers at the hackathon, but I’m determined to work this out without them walking me through it. After all, developers don’t normally have the opportunity to ask directly for help. And this way I get to discover all the dark corners of the BlackBerry developer experience.

Again, Ripple comes as a non-native installer. This time, the installation goes into /Applications/Research in Motion/ – I would prefer to have everything in /Developer/SDKs/Research In Motion/ so everything is in one consistent place. Or, since Ripple is an emulator for more than just WebWorks, just leave it in /Applications but drop the “Research in Motion” folder. And tidy up the app so the resources are all inside the app bundle. Basically, follow Mac best practice.

Launching the Ripple emulator application the first time results in a prompt in the middle of the screen, asking what platform you want to emulate:

Selecting “WebWorks” results in a a huge emulator window with the device running off the bottom of the screen – this on my Macbook Pro running at 1680×1050. Are mobile screens really so big?

In discussion with some folks at the hackathon, it turns out the Windows version of Ripple has the option to scale the UI, but not in the Mac version.

I’ve got my packaged app from the previous exploration of creating a WebWorks app, but there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way to load it into the emulator.

Reading “Packaging your app with the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK” tells me about the different formats of files I discovered when creating my own app:

• .cod file for wireless distribution or distribution from a web page
• .alx file for distribution using BlackBerry Desktop Manager
• .jad file for distribution from a web page
• .cso file for application signing
• .csl file for application signing

Apparently there’s also a .bar file for a BlackBerry tablet. I can’t help but feel I’d like a single fat package for all eventualities.

There’s instructions on running your application on a smartphone simulator, but the simulator is a VM and does not appear to be the Ripple emulator.

Reading Packaging your app in Ripple, you can package from within the emulator. You have to click the tiny wrench icon in the top-right corner of the emulator window. This should be much more prominent if this is a common task.

Unfortunately, clicking on the wrench prompts me for lots of configuration: SDK path, Project Root, archive name … all as text fields, and not file/folder pickers. There’s also no support for tab-completion of paths in the fields, so you’ll have to enter them long-hand:

Given RIM only recently acquired Ripple, I’ll cut them some slack. But I’d like to see for example a wrapper script that launches Ripple with all the correct configurations for SDK, project, etc.

The settings for smartphones are on the packaging page.

I’m guessing that my settings should be:

• SDK Path: /Developer/SDKs/Research In Motion/BlackBerry WebWorks SDK 2.3.0.9
• Project Root: /Users/savs/Downloads/blackberry-WebWorks-Samples-0a5693e/UIExamples
• Archive Name: UIExamples
• Output Folder: /tmp/Ripple

Trying with these settings, I got the familiar config.xml not found error:

Tweaking the settings,

• SDK Path: /Developer/SDKs/Research In Motion/BlackBerry WebWorks SDK 2.3.0.9
• Project Root: /Users/savs/Downloads/blackberry-WebWorks-Samples-0a5693e/ProjectRoot
• Archive Name: UIExamples
• Output Folder: /tmp/Ripple

That worked:

I ended up with UIExamples.zip inside /tmp/Ripple, and an “OTAInstall” folder and a “StandardInstall” folder.

The OTAInstall folder contains UIExamples .cod files, split into ten separate packages:

Apparently this is for backwards-compatibility reasons, with only packages of ~60k or less being allowed for an OTA install. This means that, when you deploy to a phone, you get to watch 10 different packages being installed before your app is ready for testing. Ouch.

Now I’ve build the packages, it’s not clear how to actually use the built application. The “Package and Launch” menu option is greyed-out.

Looking at the settings screen again, at the bottom beside Simulator it says “No simulators found “.

During the hackathon, the network failed. This results in some fairly unhelpful problems with Ripple, where you’ll see a blank loading screen for a long time followed by an error message:

This all went away when the network came back.

Reading the docs suggests another way to view your app in Ripple is to stick it on a web server and point Ripple at that. If you’ve got a local server, the benefit is a much quicker development cycle, without having to go through the packaging process first. Indeed, this did work and allowed me to see my app:

The downside on a Mac is that you can’t easily symlink your content from the web root to your development location (at least, not without making a ton of parent directories more widely accessible). See Creating a symbolic link in Sites directory on StackOverflow for more details.

Anyway, success of sorts: I got my app packaged, and I got to view the development files via HTTP.

Next up: signing.

I figured the quickest way to get an app up and running would be to take the examples from BlackBerry.

Working from https://github.com/blackberry/WebWorks-Samples/tree/master/UIExamples I first did a git clone, but then reading the documentation I downloaded a zip of the UI examples instead.

The documentation talks about downloading a zip, unarchiving it, shuffling things around, and rearchiving it. The first problem I came across (on a Mac) doing this was Apple’s resource forks screwing up the zip:

Invalid application archive: resource name is not valid(__MACOSX/UIExamples/._bbmBubbles.htm

Next up, another packaging problem: despite following the documentation (or so I thought), I could not get bbwp to build my package:

Invalid application archive – failed to find config.xml

It turns out I was doing it wrong – the config.xml needs to be at the same level as the containing folder (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4433092/package-my-first-blackberry-widget-xml-file-not-found). A tweak to the layout and then:

zip -r UIExamples.zip UIExamples config.xml

That fixed the packaging problem (both with missing files and with Mac resource forks). The next error I got was “Spinner not found”:

There’s quite a few extra steps you need to go through to add the UI Spinner extension, which can be summed up as:

• download the SpinnerControl zip
• extract the zip
• create the /Developer/SDKs/Research In Motion/BlackBerry WebWorks SDK 2.3.0.9/ext/blackberry.ui.Spinner directory
• copy the library.xml file into that directory
• copy the blackberry-WebWorks-Community-APIs-4d7c20a/Smartphone/SpinnerControl/src/blackberry folder into the ext/blackberry.ui.Spinner directory.

Phew. The packaging will then work:

BlackBerry WebWorks application packaging complete

I think there’s some optimisation that could be done on this process. In general the WebWorks development seems to involve a lot of copying files here and there.

One thing that wasn’t clear was where the output package went. I was running

./bbwp /Users/savs/Downloads/blackberry-WebWorks-Samples-0a5693e/UIExamples.zip

… but although it declared success, I could find no output. So don’t do this. It turns out you need to add -o (picked up from Lukasz‘ excellent presentation on differences between Enyo and WebWorks):

./bbwp /Users/savs/Downloads/blackberry-WebWorks-Samples-0a5693e/UIExamples.zip -o /tmp/

This gives two folders, OTAInstall and StandardInstall, which contain a bunch of files with .cod, .jad, .cso, .csl, .alx extensions. No idea what these are – I guess I’ll find out as I continue to explore.

Now I’ve got a packaged app, what do I do now? Next up: time to try out the emulator.

~

Update: turns out I’m not quite right about the folder structure and location of config.xml – although it worked, when you deploy it on a phone it fails. Instead you have the config file at the same location as your resources, and do the zipping of the contents of the project, rather than the project folder:

zip -r UIExamples.zip *

And then package:

./bbwp /Users/savs/Downloads/blackberry-WebWorks-Samples-0a5693e/ProjectRoot/UIExamples/UIExamples.zip -o /tmp/bbwp/

… and it works on the phone as well.

So far I’ve downloaded Ripple (the emulator), the smartphone and tablet SDK. Initial reaction: it would be better if there was one download that comprised all three components. You don’t, for example, download a separate iPhone and iPad SDK, or Pre and Touchpad SDK. But bonus points for having Mac OS X installers at all – last time I looked at RIM/BlackBerry development, it was Windows-only. Unshackling from the Windows ecosystem is a good plan for any mobile platform.

On the corner of the WebWorks SDK download page you’ll note the ribbon “Fork me on GitHub”, which takes you to blackberry.github.com which includes for example BlackBerry WebWorks – I’m impressed. This looks like open development, with actual commits and merges taking place in public. So RIM should be recognised for doing this – it’s a step that so many mobile platforms have not yet made.

Another thought – since everything is branded BlackBerry, isn’t it time RIM renamed? Research In Motion is a cool name, RIM not so much, and everyone just says “BlackBerry” anyway.

Let’s dig in to the Smartphone SDK:

The installer is an app which is an installer. I always prefer Mac software to use the native Apple install app – the tooling to create these is extremely good, and a non-native InstallAnywhere installer just looks poor. It also helps prevent some of the unfortunate user experience errors that are present in RIM’s installer. Also, InstallAnywhere is just not pretty:

The first area for improvement I noticed was the Install location. The installer suggests it will be put in a root folder called ‘/Research in Motion‘ which would be just horrible. In reality, it sort-of does the right thing and installs to ‘/Developer/SDKs/Research In Motion/BlackBerry WebWorks SDK 2.3.0.9‘ if you accept the defaults. I don’t like version numbers in folder names – a workaround if they must have this would be to add a symlink ‘Current’ pointing to ’2.3.0.9′, which allows for less fragile scripting.

The SDK is 20mb, which is very light compared to others – but let’s not forget this is only for smartphones, and only for web apps.

During installation I got an overwrite error message, despite never having installed WebWorks before:

This is the kind of ugly hiccup you can mitigate by using a platform-native installer. I told it to overwrite, and the installation seemed to complete successfully:

There doesn’t seem to be any sort of GUI with this SDK – in fact I’d go so far as to say it’s less of an SDK and more of a packaging tool, allowing you to bundle your web apps into a format to drop on a phone.

Next up: my first-run experience of producing a sample app.

No IPO for Facebook: This could go either way. My bet is it will be very late 2012 or early 2013

They said:

Facebook unveils $5bn stock market flotation plans

Hrmph. Thanks Zuckerberg, you impatient hasty prediction-killer!

I couldn’t find any medical research that says one way or another whether it’s a good thing or not, though I did find one article which states “one of the recommended tips for reducing computer eye strain is to control the screen glare caused by both indoor and outdoor lighting” (Reduce eye fatigue by backlighting your monitor).

I thought I’d give it a try. Via hackaday I read about the awesome Ikea Dioder light strips; the white 4-piece strips are now £19.99, reduced from £40, which makes them a bit of a bargain. So I snapped some up on a recent trip to Ikea, and so far I’m impressed.

Here’s my laptop screen with and without the backlight. I stuck the backlight to the edge of the desk behind the laptop:

And here’s my monitor with the backlight:

And here’s the LED strips stuck on the back of the monitor:

The LEDs are low power. They don’t get warm, and come with fairly long cables. You can either run them serially or have them on individual spurs from the main plug.

So far I’m preferring them to normal halogen or tungsten desk lights. The light is whiter, which is somehow more pleasant. And my eyes definitely feel happier when I’m working at night.

Apple and Carrot Detox Speeder

• ¼ white cabbage
• 3-4 carrots
• 1 small apple
• 5cm root ginger, peeled

Super-charged Spring Cleaner

• 2 carrots
• 1 beetroot, peeled
• 5cm root ginger, peeled
• 1 apple
• 3 broccoli florets
• Juice of ½ lemon

Alternatively you can just chuck a handful of whatever sounds good into the juicer. This morning’s was an arbitrary amount of carrots and apple, with a chunk of ginger for extra kick.

Enjoy!