The main differences with the previous (non-Aurora) versions: Firefox on Android doesn’t use XUL (the Mozilla cross platform UI toolkit) any more, but switched to native Android UI elements. This (and other less visible changes) results in faster startup time, lower memory usage and better overall performance. There’s Flash in it as well, but with ‘tap to play’ option so the impact, I’m happy to report, is pretty limited. And the start-page is pretty nifty, with “Top Sites”, “Tabs from last time” and “Tabs on other computers” on one nice screen.

I must admit I was slightly worried at first, as I couldn’t get Sync to work at all (“could not connect to server” and similar error messages), but after uninstalling Aurora, Firefox Mobile Beta can sync just fine. All in all Firefox Mobile is an even greater browser than it was before.

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Searching the web turned up this interesting thread on xda-developers, which had amongst others a fix for the adventurous, but also this eye-opening comment:

The messages in question are Read Receipts, Delivery Receipts and similar messages. Once there is one of those in your inbox, you’re stuck until you delete it. [...] A better solution which has worked for me is to create a folder for your receipts. Then, on your PC, create a rule to move the receipts to the folder on arrival. This will obviously also work when your PC is off, as the rules are stored and executed on the server. You will have to create a rule which processes emails on arrival, matches a series of strings in either subject or body of the message and moves them to the folder.

And that’s exactly what I did; mails sent only to me with “Declined:” or “Accepted:” or “Tentative:” or “Read:” or “Not read:” in the subject line are automatically moved into a “tmp” folder. Your mileage may vary (apparently there are other conditions under which the Android/ Samsung mail client has problems downloading items form Exchange), but based on my limited experience up until now, this workaround gets most problematic items in my Inbox out of the way. Now let’s hope Samsung fixes this blatant error (and that it isn’t in the ICS-version on that beautiful Samsung Galaxy S III)!

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Maar tijdens die GP van België liep het anders. Toen ik op zaterdag 8 mei 1982 terugkwam van een wandeling met m’n ouders en vrienden van de familie, hoorde ik op de radio dat Gilles Villeneuve zwaar gecrasht was tijdens de oefenritten. Een dom ongeluk, gevolg van een misverstand tussen 2 ervaren piloten. Het voorwiel van Villeneuve’s Ferrari raakte bij een inhaalmanoeuvre het achterwiel van Jochen Mass’s March, de Ferrari vloog daardoor de lucht in (het “ground effect” werd verbroken) en werd 100m ver gekatapulteerd, landde hard met de neus in de grond, maakte verschillende buitelingen waarbij Villeneuve z’n helm verloor en de wagen verder desintegreerde. De Canadees eindigde uiteindelijk met wat restte van de cockpit, zonder helm, in een vanghek en werd enkele uren later officieel dood verklaard.

Een held minder op de startgrid, maar teamgenoot Pironi leek enkele races later wel goed op weg om wereldkampioen te worden. Tot de GP van Duitsland, waar ook hij zwaar crashte. De Fransman overleefde de klap, maar zou nooit meer racen.

Gisteren reed zoon (en wereldkampioen F1 1997)  Jacques Villeneuve met de Ferrari T4 waarmee z’n vader in 1979 schitterde. Maar als het voor U hetzelfde is, kijk ik liever nog eens naar dit heroïsch duel dat Gilles in 1979 met René Arnoux uitvocht:

Salut Gilles!

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Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; 008/0.83; http://www.80legs.com/webcrawler.html) Gecko/2008032620

As changing robots.txt did not help immediately, more drastic measures were needed, so I added this tidbit to .htaccess to stop the fuckers:

SetEnvIfNoCase ^User-Agent$ .*(80legs) HTTP_SAFE_BADBOT
Deny from env=HTTP_SAFE_BADBOT

And now back to me just relaxing and having a bath!

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According to “wonderfully wise web” that problem is typically caused by a lack of a default browser in Windows 7, but given the fact that IE9 was the only browser installed, that did not make a lot of sense.

I was pretty confused, checking and re-applying settings while searching the web, but then I found a forum thread in which someone replied that the 64-bits version of IE9 just cannot be set as default browser, ever. Must be that Windows 7 does not really like 64-bits IE9? I did not find an easy way to switch to 32-bits IE9 and as the neighbor did not object, so I installed the most recent stable version of Firefox on his PC and set that as default browser and all was well. IE9 might not be a bad browser, but sometimes even Windows 7 wants you to install an alternative and who are we to disagree?

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1. About the upgrade:
   • I didn’t use KIES, the official Samsung upgrade utility as it claimed there was no upgrade.
   • Instead I downloaded the ICS image for the Netherlands from sammobile.com and followed the installation procedure as described on the forum there.
   • Samsung allows you to flash, no need to crack your bootloader, flash a new recovery image or anything similarly scary.
   • Flashing the official firmware does not overwrite data or apps, you don’t loose a thing.
   • After booting into the new firmware, your apps are first and foremost optimized for ICS.
   • Battery usage was very high after the upgrade, with the Email app (which connects to an Exchange server) using a lot of CPU. I rebooted and the problem went away.
2. What Ice Cream Samsung is like:
   • Battery life actually seems a bit better than with the Gingerbread-based firmware.
   • Ice Cream Sandwich seems slightly faster as well, more responsive.
   • ICS isn’t all that different, from a user interface point of view. Some small tweaks and usability improvements, but nothing major.
   • Face unlock (having Android unlock your phone after recognizing your face) is a nice gadget, but it’s of little use if you value security.
   • More interesting, from a security point of view, are “encrypt device” and “encrypt SD card”. Should give that a try.
   • The data usage app is really great, allowing you to monitor and manage data usage for the entire device and on a per-app basis. “Data Usage” is, as far as I’m concerned, one of the hidden treasures in ICS!
3. Tailoring ICS to my liking:
   • I’m not a fan of Samsung’s TouchWiz, which also features in their ICS implementation, so I don’t use it.
   • At first I installed Nova, an ICS-only launcher, but I wasn’t blown away, so I reverted to good old ADW.
   • I rooted the phone with CF-root to be able to install SetCPU.
   • SetCPU, which I had previously used on my HTC, seemed to work all right at first, but it sometimes put my phone into a deep sleep during phone calls or when idle, with nothing but a forced reboot to wake it up. I uninstalled SetCPU (and am still looking for a similar tool to save battery mainly).
   • I also installed AdFree Android, which adds known ad-domains to your hosts-file, having them point to localhost. Only for rooted phones, but it works like a charm. More privacy and better battery-life will be yours!

So I’m good, for now. But I’m sure I’ll be very tempted when Cyanogenmod 9 for the Galaxy SII comes out. Go TeamHacksung!

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Real users telling me it doesn’t work, asking for extra features or making proposals to make it better overall, that what I thrive on. The latest example; JavaScript namespaces. Not being a developer means that I know as much about coding patterns as I know about cows. I just hit the keyboard real hard and hope the browser understands what I throw at it. Until a good friend told me to use JavaScript namespaces, to avoid conflicts with other people’s JavaScript. And a week later someone wrote my software just didn’t work any more and I had to start digging and found a JavaScript conflict that was introduced with a new version of AddThis

And those are the moments one grows, as a developer; you start searching for information about scope, anonymous functions and namespaces. You try, it doesn’t work and you dig some deeper, until you stumble on a great question and answer on Stack Overflow with a link to a very detailed article about JavaScript coding patterns. So you go back into ‘vi’ and start changing the code once again and than all of a sudden you have a working version, which your Polish user confirms fixes the problem and you learned a lot while bugfixing.

So kudo’s to all you guys & girls for the great feedback, you rock! Here’s WP YouTube Lyte version 1.1.3 to thank you.

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Version 0.6.0, which I released last week, features a new “forced” option. This mode aims to provide better compatibility with JavaScript-optimizing plugins such as Autoptimize and W3 Total Cache by adding the relevant code only after those optimizers have done their job, using the output buffer. There will probably be a 0.6.1 today or tomorrow, to solve a small problem with mixed HTTP/HTTPS requests on the admin-page while in HTTPS. The output buffer sure is a powerful thing and for version 0.7.0, I’ll build on that to optionally filter the full HTML (with PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser) to stop unwanted requests for images, scripts or iFrames in there.

Do contact me if you found a bug, if you have questions or if you’d like specific feature to be added, I tend to rely heavily on user feedback to improve my plugins! And if you’re happy with how it works, drop by on the WP DoNotTrack-page on wordpress.org to rate it and/ or to confirm it works with your version of WordPress!

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Exactly how fast is WP YouTube Lyte nowadays? I fired up some webpagetest.org IE9-instances in the Amsterdam node to compare this WP YouTube Lyte powered post on my test-blog with an identical blogpost with default YouTube embedded video. These are the jury’s results for the fastest of 10 runs in both cases (click on the image to actually see the details):

The main figures to compare (normal YouTube embed vs WP YouTube Lyte):

• time till document complete: 1.612s vs 1.047s
• time till fully loaded: 4.358s vs 1.385s
• total number of requests: 13 vs 9
• combined size of requests: 446 KB vs 77 KB

So using WP YouTube Lyte instead of normal YouTube embeds results in less files to download, less data to transport, the page being ready for interaction quicker and having everything loaded a whole lot faster. These figures are for a single YouTube on a page, but the impact is all the more important if you have multiple video’s on one page (e.g. a category or tag-page for “music” or “videos”) off course.

The full comparison based on 10 tests on both pages:

So there you go. When in doubt, check these stats and then go install WP YouTube Lyte, because after all speed matters!

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But things break and in this particular case the screen of my trusty old Samsung Galaxy S2 went dark, literally. I brought the phone in for repairs and grabbed the only test-device left at work as a temporary replacement. It was a Samsung Omnia 7 with Windows Phone 7. Now look at this little droid-boy getting pushed out of his comfort zone!

I’ve been using it for 5 days now, so why not make a small list of what sucks and what’s great? Here goes:

What sucks:

• The browser. It’s not I can’t live without Firefox Mobile, but boy does Mobile IE7 suck.
• No Internet connection sharing (not over USB, not over Bluetooth, not over WiFi)
• The fact that the phone doesn’t present itself as a USB storage device when I connect it over USB with my Ubuntu netbook
• The lack of an SD card slot
• I can’t login with my Live ID (my ancient Hotmail address) on my phone (but it does work in Zune), which means I can’t install applications from the Marketplace (I’m asked to call support! Seriously?)
• The fact that after installing Zune on my work PC and then waiting until I got home because Zune doesn’t do proxies, I still wasn’t able to upgrade to Windows Phone 7.5 (which does have Internet connection sharing and a more decent browser)
• There’s no way to reliably fetch information from the Exchange servers at work. Every once in a while mail gets downloaded, but in general there’s error code 8501001D ruining my Exchange experience

What’s great? Just one bullet point actually;

• The UI!

Really, despite my grievances about how poorly the device integrates with the outside world, my general feeling about Windows Phone is positive, and that is because Metro really is that great! The screens are sober, with lots of space and a prominent place for content (text & typography). Applications scroll horizontally to display different views and it’s the typography that makes this pretty discoverable. The graphics effects and sound add to the great responsive “feel” of the UI. And tiles are a radical break form the icon-based approach that is typical of iOS (and Android, classic Mac OS, Windows 3.11 and …), you could compare them to widgets (as seen on Android), but without the anarchy and clutter.

So yeah, really, I ♥ Metro! I hope Google (Android), Mozilla (b2g) and Ubuntu (Unity) take clues from what is, in my view, a pretty radical break in graphical user interface design, because I would love the computing environments in my comfort zone to be more about content and less about chrome as well!

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