Last night I saw the new X-Files Movie, I Want To Believe, and as a fan of the original series and movie, I had great expectations for this movie. In the normal series and the first movie, Mulder and Scully were assigned by the FBI to investigate the X-Files, or cases that couldn’t be explained by normal science. Which usually involved humans with special abilities, government cover-ups of paranormal activity, and extra-terrestrials. However this movie didn’t have anything do do with any of that, and the script seemed more politically driven, than to actually answer questions from the fans of the original series, it didn’t even seem to be a continuation of the original series.
Plus I think most of the critics just phone this one in with a score of 3.3/5.0, it deserved a 1.0/5.0 and that was probably being generous.
Lets just say I went to see X-Files: I Want To Believe, and I really wanted to believe that the produces would do the original series justice, but the movie left me wanting to leave.
I just downloaded Opera 9.5 Mobile for my Windows Mobile phone. And I have one thing to say. Wow! This brings a more standard compliant browser to your phone to replace the aging Pocket Internet Explorer. Opera 9.5 Mobile event beats the iPhone version of Safari in the ACID 2 and ACID 3 tests, so it is an amazing experience to finally get the full web, as it was intended, on my mobile device.
The features of Opera Mobile 9.5 will include the following:
Intuitive user interface
Tabbed browsing
Improved text wrap
Page overview, zooming and panning
Landscape mode
Save Web page for future offline access
Call phone number from Web page
Send link as SMS/MMS
Send image as SMS/MMS
Small Screen Rendering
Password manager
Web address input auto-completion
History and bookmarks
Copy text
Opera Widgets
The user mhalachev in the forums had the following to say about his first impression (and issues with the beta) of Opera Mobile 9.5:
- The default keyboard is altered when I start opera. (this one was quoted a lot of times, but it’s very important for be, because I use alternate IME with cyrillic text input)
- It is not necessary to pop-out the IME automatically every time, especially on devices with qwerty keyboard.
- When I double-tap to zoom-in outside of a paragraph, it always zooms to the top-left corner of the canvas and not to the point where i’ve tapped. I don’t know how you determine the exact size of the zoom-in area, but I’ve noticed that if the element is defined only with css properties (e.g. page header with backgroud-image) it zooms to the top-left.
- It would be nice if you implement the soft keys to do something (I’m running it on Kaiser, but most wm devices have softkeys too), like in Opera Mini, where I can access the menu via soft keys)
- It would be nice too if it’is possible to scroll and zoom with the d-pad, like in Opera Mini.
- The Kaiser has a Tab key on the sliding-out keyboard. (other devices have too) You may catch it and make Opera jump between page links, like a tab key on a “normal” PC.
- I liked the black theme on the first screenshots that you’ve posted in February. It will look good on the black htc theme. Think of making a theme, that takes it’s colors from the device’s theme.
- I have the Flash plug-in installed (Pocket IE displays flash), so I would like to see flash content in Opera. The kick-ass mobile browser will be that one, that displays flash content along with AJAX.
- Talking of AJAX, I would like to congratulate you for the support in Opera Mobile! It displays correctly various ajax-enabled sites, incl. the google reader for iphone etc. Various dom and dhtml gimmicks are rendered (almost) like on a desktop pc.
- I would also like to suggest once again to take some of the navigation and control options from Opera Mini (the softkeys and the d-pad), because they are very convenient while on the go, with one-hand operation.
So as you can see this is pretty typical beta software with the normal line up of things to do before the gamma release. But I definitely recommend checking it out. This is a video produced by Opera to demonstrate the features of this new release, in case you are not convinced yet.
The following are know issues with the current release, as noted by Opera:
ActiveX is disabled — Flash plugins and embedded video streaming do not work.
Custom IME’s (like HTC’s IME) will be buggy at best, not working at worst.
Not multilingual build — Only English is supported. Problems with other languages (and input methods) are not unexpected.
Installation on memory cards may cause problems.
Text wraps in overview mode.
Main testing has been done on English HTC devices (Touch Diamond, Touch Pro, Touch, Touch Dual, Touch Cruise, TyTN and Wizard) and Samsung i900.
We have got reports from some users that this build will disable the phones sounds/notifications.
When I was asked to review NDepend I didn’t want to do just another review. Because there are plenty of great reviews and I would just be adding to the noise. So I am going to use this time to give a personal story of how NDepend has helped me restructure some code I have been working on.
As you are probably aware I have been working on a start up, called IdeaPipe, we have been going full steam ahead since January 2008 to get IdeaPipe to the point where it is today. Going at that break neck speed for almost 6+ months has left some raw spots in the code, that I have been putting off. Because lets face it even though they are not optimal, they are returning the correct results. Just like a rough draft for a book it is better to get all the way through it and get a good picture of the entire story as a whole, and go back and rework the spots that were created inorder to advance the storeline. The same is true for software.
In large software projects you sometimes forget where these rough spots were and why you actually implimented something in a certain way. Luckily for us we have tools like NDepend that provide base metrics telling you were you need to focus your work.
One of the features that I loved the most in NDepend was this CQL (Code Query Lanauge) that allows you to run SQL like queries against your assemblies. So if you wanted to find all the private variables that didn’t follow the rule of starting with “_” that is as easy as running a SELECT query in the command window. The CQL is by far the coolest software feature that I have seen in a while.
Overall I give NDepend a thumbs up. I do have one request for the good folks at NDepend and that is to intigrate all the windows in to Visual Studio to provide a seemless experience for us developers.
I am happy to announce that iTunes 7.7 and Windows Vista x64 work well together. The Apple downloader even chooses the correct 64-bit version of iTunes through every browser that I have tried, so they obviously fixed something where you don’t need to download iTunes through the 64-bit version of IE. No word yet if the iPhone 2.0 or 1.0 will work with the 64-bit version of windows.
Whats New?
As far as I can see nothing is really new with the application. The only noticeable things is that the “Games” menu item has now been changed to “Applications”. So if you were expecting a huge jump forward in functionality you are going to be bummed. Most of the changes probably went to support their new Mobile Me platform, push applications, and the iPhone 2.0.
Download
You can download iTunes in the normal places, either through your updator or from their website. My recommendation is to wait to see, if you don’t need the new functionality.
The day I posted the article, Scott instant messaged me to say good job on the article. During the conversation he mentioned that I should compare the stats to Oprah.com as a base point for the other statistics. So naturally I thought this would be a good follow up article.
Usually to gauge the effectiveness of a relative score, like the percent of girls that visit your site, you need at least two points that fall on opposite ends of each other. These two points need to be based on similar vectors, in this case women, but are based on an outside source. Obviously Oprah is huge with women, so oprah.com is a natural choice for the high end, but I had trouble thinking of a super-nerdy site that would be suitable for the low end, but have enough traffic to give a good basis point. I finally settled on World Of Warcraft, worldofwarcraft.com, as my low end. Mostly because every time I think of WoW, I think of this South Park episode:
The results of this, non scientific, study was very disturbing. Mostly because about 3 out of 25 people who visit WoW on the internet is a female, which blows me away because I was expecting something like 1/50.
This means means the World of War craft beat out Jeff, Joel, and Scott, and Phil is slightly above the WoW site at about a 5% lead.
The numbers for Oprah was about what I expected, and probably align very closely to her TV numbers with about 85% of her viewers being female.
If anybody has a better website, than World of Warcraft, for me to compare these guys against please let me know.
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