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This is a great book with a lot of useful information on how to create powerful presentations for different situations and audiences.  I like the fact that it show examples from simple presentations and illustrations to those for complex stories.  Some of the case studies are particular useful for me because they remind me of some presentations I have created over the years, and now I have realized how wrong they were.  There are also details in the book about color matching, 3D object creations, visual effects, and diagram creations.  I read the book twice and still getting new ideas from the book.  This book is certainly a must for professionals.

The only thing missing, I think, is a quick presentation slide in the book to show people that PowerPoint is not meant for documents.

The Android Developers Blog post

• http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/04/android-15-is-here.html

Android 1.5 Platform Highlights

(http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-1.5-highlights.html)

User Interface Refinements

• System-wide:
  • Refinement of all core UI elements
  • Animated window transitions (off by default)
  • Accelerometer-based application rotations
• UI polish for:
  • In-call experience
  • Contacts, Call log, and Favorites
  • SMS & MMS
  • Browser
  • Gmail
  • Calendar
  • Email
  • Camera & Gallery
  • Application management

Performance Improvements

• Faster Camera start-up and image capture
• Much faster acquisition of GPS location (powered by SUPL AGPS)
• Smoother page scrolling in Browser
• Speedier GMail conversation list scrolling

New Features

• On-screen soft keyboard
  • Works in both portrait and landscape orientation
  • Support for user installation of 3rd party keyboards
  • User dictionary for custom words
• Home screen
  • Widgets
    • Bundled home screen widgets include: analog clock, calendar, music player, picture frame, and search
  • Live folders
• Camera & Gallery
  • Video recording
  • Video playback (MPEG-4 & 3GP formats)
• Bluetooth
  • Stereo Bluetooth support (A2DP and AVCRP profiles)
  • Auto-pairing
  • Improved handsfree experience
• Browser
  • Updated with latest Webkit browser & Squirrelfish Javascript engines
  • Copy ‘n paste in browser
  • Search within a page
  • User-selectable text-encoding
  • UI changes include:
    • Unified Go and Search box
    • Tabbed bookmarks/history/most-visited screen
• Contacts
  • Shows user picture for Favorites
  • Specific date/time stamp for events in call log
  • One-touch access to a contact card from call log event
• System
  • New Linux kernel (version 2.6.27)
  • SD card filesystem auto-checking and repair
  • SIM Application Toolkit 1.0
• Google applications (not available in the Android 1.5 System Image that is included in the Android SDK)
  • View Google Talk friends’ status in Contacts, SMS, MMS, GMail, and Email applications
  • Batch actions such as archive, delete, and label on Gmail messages
  • Upload videos to Youtube
  • Upload photos on Picasa

Android 1.5 Version Notes

(http://developer.android.com/sdk/RELEASENOTES.html)

This SDK release includes many new features for developers. Highlights of the changes include:

• Multiple versions of the Android platform are included (Android 1.1, Android 1.5). The tools are updated to let you deploy your application on any platform in the SDK, which helps you ensure forward-compitility and, if applicable, backward-compatibility.
• Introduces Android Virtual Devices — (AVD) configurations of options that you run in the emulator to better model actual devices. Each AVD gets its own dedicated storage area, making it much easier to work with multiple emulators that are running concurrently.
• Support for SDK add-ons, which extend the Android SDK to give you access to one or more external Android libraries and/or a customized (but compliant) system image that can run in the emulator.
• The new Eclipse ADT plugin (version 0.9.x) offers new Wizards to let you create projects targetted for specific Android configurations, generate XML resources (such as layouts, animations, and menus), generate alternate layouts, and export and sign your application for publishing.
• Improved JUnit support in ADT
• Easier profiling of performance
• Easier management of localized applications. You can now include or exclude locale resources when building your APK from a single Android project.
• A new tool called “android” replaces the activitycreator script.

Android Dev Phone Update

(http://www.htc.com/www/support/android/adp.html)

Instructions of how to update the Android Dev phone is available above.  In short, on a Windows machine:

1. Download the Radio and Image files from the above link
2. Download the Android 1.5 SDK and put it in the path (e.g. C:\Program Files\android-sdk-windows-1.5_r1\tools)
3. Open a command line console in Windows
4. Run: adb devices – and make sure your device is hooked up to the Windows box
5. Run: adb push <radio-image-package>.zip /sdcard/update.zip
6. Run: adb shell sync
7. Reboot the device into recovery mode by holding down the HOME key during reboot. When the device enters recovery mode, it displays a “!” icon.
8. With the recovery console displayed, open the sliding keyboard and hold down the ALT+l key combination to enable log output in the recovery console.
9. Next, hold down the ALT+s key combination to install the update. An “installing update” icon and progress bar (or a similar status message) are displayed.  When the progress bar completes, the installation is finished.
10. Press the HOME-BACK key combination to write the radio image, update the firmware, and automatically reboot. Note that if you do not use HOME-BACK at this point, the device will not load the updated radio image. After writing the radio image, the device shows a “updating firmware” icon for a few seconds and then automatically reboots in normal mode
11. Reboot and enter fastboot mode – power up the device (or reboot it) while holding down the BACK key. Hold the BACK key down until the bootloader screen is visible and shows “FASTBOOT”
12. Run: fastboot erase cache
13. Run: fastboot update <imagepackage>.zip
14. (Optional) Run: fastboot reboot

That’s it!  Fast and easy!

My Feedback

• I like the general UI update they did in this release.  The new SMS, Browser, GMail, and Calendar interface looks a lot nicer. Unfortunately Power Manager, the previously free version no long work under 1.5.
• When I try to uninstall the Power Manager (otherwise I’ll keep getting error messages), it was spinning, so I have to force a reboot or two to get that fixed.  In GMail, it now allows selecting multiple e-mails with options: Archive, Labels, and Delete, which is pretty nice.  However, when I click to get the context menu of an e-mail, the 3rd option down is “Mute”.  I am not entirely sure what it is for.  May be a bug?
• When I launch the Maps, it asks me to join “Latitude” to share location with my friends.
• The IM icon now say “Google Talk” which is probably more appropriate I guess.  It also have a “switch chat” options under the main menu.
• Mashable also have a new post on – Google Android Now Supports Video Uploads to YouTube – personally I don’t use the camera on the phone, but this could be useful for folks who videoblog.

Mindmap

Mindmapping is probably one of the best ways to write down notes and thoughts.  It allows one to become a freeform thinker and easier to brain dump or brainstorm.

Tool options: Mindjet MindManager, MindMeister

Personally, I like using MindManager.  With mindmapping, I can always draft out exactly what I want to say when creating a new powerpoint presentation or document.  Make sure the flow will work, then I will covert the map into the document shells, all from the software.

Documents

Everyone knows that Google offers a list apps for document creating and collaboration.

But Zoho is another option.  They do provide some additional features under the Business Apps category.  For personal productivity, it is worth a try.  Features like Zoho Meeting seems promising when collaborating with a friend.

Task List

Nowadays, keeping a good task list is very important.  Especially using a task list service which provide mobile access.  Remember The Milk is probably one of the better task list services I seen.  I like the fact that I can tag a task and add notes in addition to the summary / title.  More details with the task itself, the easier to pick it up later on.  It has happened before that, write down a note and 5 minutes later, forget what it was by only reading the summary line.

In addition, I can pull the same task list to Google Calendar, BlackBerry, iPhone, Gmail Gadget, or Android phones.

A Good Notebook

Like I said before, mindmap is great for brain storming.  But sometimes it is hard to write down notes from other people using mindmap.  So keeping a good notebook, either physical or electronic, is good for productivity.  For the last couple years, I have been using Google Notebook heavily to Open Source or personal POC projects.  However, Google has stopped development on Google Notebook.  I use it for many things like keeping bookmarks and write down a few private thoughts and rating on them.  Zoho Notebook is an alternative for online users.  But sometimes when I am in a meeting or at a coffee shop, I may not have online access.  So Microsoft OneNote has become my choice to keep track of information.

If you like to keep using physical notebooks, I strongly recommend those with hard covers.  I lost my notes once when someone tip over a cup of hot coffee.  Hard covers give you a little bit of advantage when that happen to you. 

A Good Browser

Whichever browser you prefer Firefox, Chrome, IE, or Safari, make sure you get familiar the shortcuts.  Also try addons like FireGestures.

Ergonomic and Last Thought

Good keyboard, good mouse, good size monitor and a good chair are the key to success!!!  All important!

Personally I always use multiple computers to help multi-tasking to make sure I am always on top of things.  For this last topic, my recommendation is to get a laptop or netbook on the side.  When you are playing games or writing a list of documents, you can do a quick search on the net or to send a quick IM to a friend/coworker asking a quick question, you don’t have to close the documents.  Not to mention the fact that, you can easily get infected by computer virus when surfing on the net.  Having a throw-away computer on the side for these type of activities help avoiding problems and troubles if it so happen got infected by some new computer virus.  (e.g. losing work and restoring files from backups, etc.)

Having multiple screens works well too, but not all work laptop comes with good video card to handle multiple large screens.  A single laptop screen is not exactly the best setting for multi-taskers. 

• Pidgin – a nice all-in-one IM application supports popular networks, such as AIM, Google Talk, IRC, MSN, ICQ, Yahoo!, etc.
• KeePass Password Safe – easy to use password manager.  You can put it on a USB key without installation.
• Filezilla – This is probably the most stable FTP client I’ve ever use.
• VLC media player – cross-platform media player for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X.  It plays everything, no need to get separate codec updates ever again.
• ClamWin – Open source GPL virus scanner, its pretty darn good IMHO.  It gets the job done and not using a lot of RAM or CPU when scanning.
• TweetDeck – Allow you to twit on your computer, and it supports Mac OS X and Windows.  Its based on Adobe AIR.
• Browsers: Firefox, Chrome, Picasa, GIMP, etc. – no need for introduction eh?
• ZScreen – open-source screen capture program, which allows you to capture region/window/full-screen screenshots.

Updated: Forgot to mention about PortableApps, a useful way to carry some good tools around and get access whenever you can using a USB key.