vaburbia

It seems so long ago, the days of me printing out directions for destinations. Not to mention taking twice as long because they were not correct. Then came Google Maps and recently Street View. Now Microsoft is working on something that is more impressive than that. Here’s a presentation of this new “augmented-reality.”

It’s really cool, but really scary at the same time. It’s like your privacy is something of the past.

I totally sound like a fanboy now. As much as I wanted to defend webOS and how cool my Palm Pre is, I won’t be doing that much longer. From the peeks of the new Windows 7 Series, I’m definitely going to get a new phone at the end of this year. It’s been stated that the new Windows phones won’t be out until “the 2010 holiday season.” I wish that meant Cinqo de Mayo or Independence day.

Engadget is reporting that the rumored Zune phone is going to make it’s debut at this month’s Mobile World Congress.

Now I know what will probably replace my Palm Pre. The poor thing was recently dropped twice in one day. Now I don’t even want to look at it. I’ve been anxiously awaiting this news since I got my Zune HD. I originally got my 30GB for free. I probably wouldn’t have initially bought it but after using it, I found that I liked everything about the Zune except it’s form factor. It is quite the brick. Thanks to Bing Cashback, I upgraded to a 32GB Zune HD at the end of last year. It is way smaller and much more attractive. When people see it, they look quite confused since it doesn’t have a big white circle pad in the middle or white headphones. It’s probably not an iPhone killer but it’ll probably be dubbed that since every new phone gets that tag. Hopefully, it takes off better than the Nexus one seems to have.

I’ve seen it all now. CNN is covering the supposed drama with Jon & Kate. So FOX News gets crap all the time, but it’s ok for CNN to do a story on TV celebrities? Are they going to do stories on the Hills next? I thought CNN was a credible news source. This puts them on par with People or InTouch. It bothers me that everyone is so interested in what every celebrity is doing. I’ll admit I’m guilty of perusing The Superficial, but I wish I didn’t feel the need to.

Now with the advent of Facebook and Twitter, it’s even easier to find out what your friends and acquaintances are up to. I slowly migrated from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook, but I don’t think I’ll ever twit or tweet or whatever you call it. Now you can e-stalk your friends and they’re probably ok with it! Sometimes I read people’s status updates and wonder why they feel the need to brag. That’s what happens sometimes. I recently read about what some guy did for his girlfriend’s birthday. No thumbs up. Doing nice things for your girlfriend is great. Feeling the need to tell everyone how great you are is lame. Needless to say I chose not to see this braggart’s updates any further.

So you may have heard the news about Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs’ leave of absence for health reasons.

co-founder Steve Jobs announced yesterday that the illness he has downplayed for months even as it rendered him strikingly gaunt has turned out to be “more complex” and that he was taking a leave of absence from the company.

Steve Wozniak, Apple’s other co-founder, stated that Apple can go on without Jobs.

Wozniak also revealed that while Jobs is “very important” to Apple’s success and is “one careful mind that has a clear vision”, the tech company has “some incredible people that are followers of Steve himself and the Apple mentality”. Woziak said he felt these employees had learnt good techniques and could “carry on the culture of company while he [Jobs] is gone”.

My friend that works at Apple has sent me some prototype photos of a new Mac Powerbook that they’ve just started working on. He said they’ll be fine without their fearless leader.

Engadget goes over a few aspects of the Pre that the iPhone lacks:

Push notifications
Apple was showing off what (at the time) seemed to be some pretty great push functionality back in June of last year, but since then Android and now webOS make Apple’s implementation seem decidedly dated — not to mention the fact that Apple still hasn’t launched the promised functionality. Apple needs to make notifications universal (for whatever service and wherever you are in the OS), easy to act on and informative but at the same time unobtrusive, and they’ve got a long way to go on all fronts.

Developer freedom, transparency
Happily, Apple seems to be getting better at this as we speak, allowing a bunch of Safari-alternatives through today that would’ve been previously seen as a violation of its “no duplicate functionality” policy. We also just spotted a CoPilot GPS app running live on an iPhone, and it seems unlikely that a major developer would do all that work if Apple wasn’t going to let it through the App Store. Still, Apple needs to do a better of job of being up front with developers, and stop making silly restrictions on the release of truly useful apps.

Multitasking
Apple only needs to look as far as the Jailbreak community to see some great multitasking in action, but hopefully it’s going to take a look at what Palm is doing with its “cards” method of switching through apps — quite similar to Apple’s own tabs interface for Safari — and give the people what they want.

Synergy contacts
Oddly enough, the Pre wasn’t the first time we saw a device running this sort of contacts integration, 3’s INQ1, a sorta-dumbphone from the UK, showed off this Synergy-style integration of social networking, IM and regular contact info last year. This isn’t a new concept, and shouldn’t be difficult to accomplish with most modern mobile operating systems, but for some reason Palm was the first company to manage to do this right in a smartphone OS — we hope Apple catches on quick.

IM integration
For a company that touts its own iChat app as one of the cornerstones of the desktop experience, Apple’s been strangely reluctant to integrate IM into the iPhone, instead leaning on 3rd party developers to do it. The Pre shows that IM shouldn’t be an afterthought, it should be tightly integrated into contacts and text messaging.

Ease of development with web standards
Granted, Mobile OS X has been widely touted for its ease of development, but we’re surprised that Apple hasn’t at least duplicated its own Dashboard Widgets — which are just little self-contained WebKit-powered modules, with some similarities to webOS apps, minus the deeper OS integration. Is there room for a compromise here? The App Store isn’t lacking for apps, but an increase in developers never hurt anyone.

Spotlight-style functionality
Another feature that Apple could’ve easily ripped straight from its desktop experience, but Palm beat them to the punch. As the iPhone is saddled with more contacts, emails, bookmarks and apps, a universal search seems like a really easy solution to the problem of complexity. If nothing else, Apple needs to look at the number of steps it takes to perform certain important functions like making calls — a bit less of bouncing in and out of the home screen could really do the body good.

Speed
We haven’t seen a final version of the Pre in action yet, but what we did see seemed really wicked fast. And this isn’t just about who can render the most FPS or scroll through a webpage better, this is about vehemently fighting off the general lag that can creep into an increasingly bloated operating system. Apple claims it’s staving off multitasking to keep the OS responsive, we’re wondering why our SMS screen is still loading.

Keyboard, removable battery
This isn’t software, so it’s sort of out of the purview of what we’re talking about here, but we like like physical keyboards, and we like the fact that Palm gives us the option. Some of us also like Apple’s touchscreen keyboard, so we wouldn’t mind Palm coming out with another device that just does touchscreen, and perhaps another keyboard device for the landscape-oriented among us. Since Palm doesn’t have a paralyzing fear of buttons, pretty much anything is possible. Oh, and that removable battery is Just Good Sense.

I’m not an Apple sackrider but this is sweet!

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Firefox is pretty popular these days. If you don’t already use it now, you can find it here. I found these tweaks to make it even faster than it already is. Open your Firefox web browser and type [about:config] in the address bar. (NOTE: DON’T TYPE THE BRACKETS.)

Tweak #1:
In the Filter bar type [network.http.pipelining]. Then, double-click on this line under Preference Name in order to change the value from false to true.

Tweak #2:
In the Filter bar type [network.http.pipelining.maxrequests]. Then, double-click on this line under Preference Name and change the value from 4 to a higher number anywhere from 10 to 30. I set mine to 30.

Tweak #3:
In the Filter bar type [network.http.proxy.pipelining]. Then, double-click on this line under Preference Name in order to change the value from false to true.

Tweak #4:
In the Filter bar type [network.dns.disableIPv6]. Then, double-click on this line under Preference Name in order to change the value from false to true.

Tweak #5:
In the Filter bar type [plugin.expose_full_path]. Then, double-click on this line under Preference Name in order to change the value from false to true.

Tweak #6:
In the Filter bar type [network.protocol-handler.external.ms-help]. Now, you are going to create a new Preference Name with an Integer Value. To do this, right-click on this line under Preference Name and select New, then Integer. In the New Integer value box type in [nglayout.initialpaint.delay] and click OK. Then in the Enter Integer value box type [0] (that’s a zero) and click OK.

Tweak #7:
In the Filter bar again type [network.protocol-handler.external.ms-help]. Now, you are going to create another new Preference Name with an Integer Value. To do this, right-click on this line under Preference Name and select New, then Integer. In the New Integer value box type in [content.notify.backoffcount] and click OK. Then in the Enter Integer value box type [5] and click OK.

Tweak #8:
In the Filter bar again type [network.protocol-handler.external.ms-help]. Now, you are going to create another new Preference Name with an Integer Value. To do this, right-click on this line under Preference Name and select New, then Integer. In the New Integer value box type in [ui.submenuDelay] and click OK. Then in the Enter Integer value box type [0] (that’s a zero) and click OK.

Firefox should be noticeably faster now.

No, not the market tanking again. That’s old news. Big news if you haven’t heard! You can see the AP report here!

Check out the BIGGEST DRAWING IN THE WORLD. It’s a self portrait this guy did by shipping a package all over the world via DHL.