Technology Thoughts

It has long been a subject of an argument, essentially since the advent of the mobile web itself more than ten years ago: the anticipation of mobile web taking over the native mobile apps - repeating the success of desktop web on mobile devices - has been just that - the anticipation. The beauty of "write once, run everywhere" was once again challenged by the realities of computing power and user experience compromises, as it was back in 90s when Java was created with the same promise only to fail delivering on it. No matter which year is printed on the calendar, the verdict has always been the same: "mobile web apps are promising, but not quite there yet, but wait, they are just around the corner". At the same time, the times of one-man-show stunts making big $$ by developing mobile apps are over. The industry has increasingly professionalized and the need to support three major mobile platforms (iOS, Android, Windows) is heavily taxing native app deve...

Late March 2011 Motorola has finally begun to roll out Froyo for Milestone in Europe. Yesterday, it's been a week since I upgraded my Milestone from Eclair to Froyo , so here comes a list of first impressions: The Good Stuff (Pros) Move to SD is great stuff, I have been fighting with insufficient space on internal drive for most of the last six months. New breed of Google Apps including Gmail with Priority Inbox and Calendar with enhanced sync for multiple Google accounts represents a big productivity boost for me. Overall, many apps with Froyo-only features such as push-sync in RememberTheMilk or SHOUTcast radio support in WinAmp make the phone much more up-to-date. The switching back and forth between Flight Mode and normal mode is reliable in Froyo (this has been huge annoyance in Eclair ) I have not experienced a single spontaneous restart during the past week. The Flash support in the Browser also comes handy - no more websites with the annoying blue missing plu...

The Motorola Milestone picture, courtesy of Wikipedia . Most of the time, I stick to the hardware slide-out keyboard of the Motorola Milestone . Indeed, the presence of the hardware keyboard was one of the main reasons I chose this device over the other in the first place. However, there are occasions, when I just need to quickly reply to a text message or an email, often while on the go having only one hand available to operate the device. I use the stock Android soft-keyboard in these cases, but I remain unhappy with the perceived high number of typos and errors. Many times I start typing on the soft-keyboard and eventually frustrated with the typos I slide out the hardware keyboard, rotate the device to the landscape mode and finish the text on the hardware keyboard. The problem with this solution is, that switching takes time: applications need to react to the screen orientation change and redraw the user interface. Some apps are fast, but for some of them, this change takes one o...

The travel blog I started back in Spring 2008 was in fact a coincidence. I bought the Sony Ericsson P1i smartphone at the time and it came with a native Blogger client app. It was not about any serious blogging though: the app was limited to entering a title , choosing a photo , adding a description and hitting the Publish button. I started using the app on the road as I was carrying the P1i everywhere and as an Ariba consultant, I was traveling quite a lot to different places around Europe. I keep using the same schema since then to maintain what I would call a " travel log " - a stream of postcards from places I am vising. May be, one day in a distant future, over a cup of good coffee, I will be recalling my memories by scrolling through the travel blog and reminding myself of the past adventures. You know - these nostalgic moments. ;-) Coming back to today and to all the hot stuff happening around me, I realized I feel an urgent need to start a real blog to capture...