Vasanth Dharmaraj's Blogs

E71 App: Slick

Vasanth Dharmaraj — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:44:30 GMT

Till now I have been using Fring for Instant Messaging from my phones. It is nice in the fact that it supports all popular IM protocols. But I am not a big fan of its GUI. I was looking for something new. Slick seemed to get a lot of mentioned. I checked it out. The GUI is slick! It supports GTalk, Yahoo Messenger, MSN, AIM and Jabber. No Skype or Twitter like Fring but good enough. I will be using this for sometime.

But just one problem. I do not chat a lot...

Finally I got a TV

Vasanth Dharmaraj — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 18:17:52 GMT

I got a Samsung LN32A450 32-Inch 720p LCD HDTV from Amazon. It is a really nice TV with a lot of connectivity options. Now I have my Mac Mini, Xbox 360 and Wii connected to it.

It is only 720p but at 32 inch I do not think 1080p provides any real advantage. To control the Mac Mini I got a Logitech diNovo Mini keyboard. The keyboard is really cool. Very compact and not at all embracing to have on the coffee table. Now I have a lot of viewing options on my TV. I have to say HD shows in Hulu.com is excellent.

Finally I got to play the Wii my brother gifted me for my birthday. Wii is a lot of fun. Me and Christina keep playing Wii Tennis and Bowling.

E71 App: Twibble

Vasanth Dharmaraj — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:41:39 GMT

On any internet connected device these days you need an twitter client. I was looking one for my E71. Everyone seems to point to Twibble. This works great on the phone. I had this on my E61 too. But after using Twitterrfic on the iPod Touch, I have to ask why does all the apps look prettier on the iPod Touch? Does the Apple SDK provide an easy way to build pretty apps? Why can not S60 developers make apps pretty? Ah! Questions...

E71 App: YouTube J2ME Edition

Vasanth Dharmaraj — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 19:17:38 GMT

The iPhone and iPod Touch have a nice YouTube app. I wanted to see if there is a similar app for the Nokia E71. There are a few, of course, EmTube, Mobitubia and the official YouTube client. I could not get to EmTube site. Mobitubia seems too flashy. So I installed the official version. Looks and works great. The video plays fine on E71. Cool.

2D bar code, Nokia E71 and Firefox

Vasanth Dharmaraj — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 16:39:20 GMT

My Nokia E71 has a 2D barcode reader in it. it uses the built in camera to scan and interpret the barcodes. I was wondering what it would be useful for. Nokia has a barcode generation site which lets you encode URL, text or business card information and generate a barcode. One can use the site to generate barcodes and display on the site. The above barcode was generated using this site and contains the URL for this blog. Probably not very useful. But where I think this would be useful is for mobile download sites.

Lets say I am at a mobile themes download site and quickly want to download a theme. If the site provides such a barcode for downloading the app, I can point the camera to it, get the URL on my phone and download the theme. This could also be used in print magazines, newspapers and bilboards for URLs or contact informations.

At the moment not a lot of sites provide this barcode. But as always there is some enterprising Firefox developer around to develop an extension. Checkout Mobile Barcoder. This extension generates 2D barcodes (called QR Codes) of the URL of the current page being viewed. You can then use a mobile phone to read the URL from the screen to save you typing the long URL using the phone keypad. Cool.

The phones I have owned...

Vasanth Dharmaraj — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:34:19 GMT

I just got my new phone the Nokia E71. My friends generally have the idea that I buy a lot of phones. I was thinking of all the phones I have owned so far. Here is a list:

Nokia 6100 - Gift from my Brother
Nokia 8120 - Gift from my Dad
Panasonic GD87
Orange C500
Sony Ericsson W810i
Nokia E61
Cingular 8525
Nokia E71 - Gift from my Wife

I got my first phone in August, 1999. That is 8 phones in 9 years. Hmmm... I don't think that is a lot of phones. Anyway half the phones I had have been a Nokia. I have had a couple of Windows Mobile phones. A super dumb clamshell phone (GD87). A music phone. Three phones with QWERTY keyboards...

Apparently Apple can not keep products secret anymore!

Vasanth Dharmaraj — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:21:32 GMT

First I got to say that yesterdays Apple event was disappointing.

As with all the Apple events there was a lot of speculation and rumors about what is going to be revealed by Steve Jobs. Most of the time they are wrong. But not this time. Check out the key announcements in yesterdays event and how accurate the rumors were:

New iPod Nano - Kevin Rose had a picture of it here.
iPod Touch - Here is a dimensional drawing of it revealing the volume control buttons.
iTunes 8.0 - Again Kevin has the details here including the Genius bar...
iPod Classic - Nobody bothered I guess as it was not an upgrade but a downgrade from 160GB to 120GB.

Probably the only thing the rumors missed were the internal speakers in the new iPod Touch.

I think the iPod Classic and the iPod Nano are nearing the limits of what Apple wants to do with them.

My new phone: Nokia E71

Vasanth Dharmaraj — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:04:04 GMT

My wife gifted me with a Nokia E71 for my birthday. :-) Thanks Teena.

Above is a size comparison of E71 with my other gadgets: Nokia E61, Cingular 8525, iPod Touch and Nokia N810. It is the smallest. You have to hold it to feel how small it is. It has a very solid feel to it. It has got it all: US 3.5G, GPS, Bluetooth, QWERTY keyboard and is smaller than an iPhone!

The keyboard is great to type on even though it is smaller than the E61's. I setup my Exchange account in this and all my contacts were in it almost instantly. I love Exchange Email. Now I am looking for cool apps to put in it. Let me know if there are any cool apps I should try...

There has to be a better feed reader!

Vasanth Dharmaraj — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:07:58 GMT

I was offline last weekend having a nice time at Niagara falls. When I come back what do I see? Hundreds of post about Chrome. I can understand it is a cool new thing end everyone wants to talk about it. But the feed reader should provide a easy way to mark all such related posts read. I should be able to search for all unread posts with some keywords and mark them read. Another thing I want is to mark all items older than 3 days read. Seems like the development of Google Reader has stopped. Got to look for a new cool feed reader and blog about it... ;-)

Whats in my Firefox?

Vasanth Dharmaraj — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:03:11 GMT

Yesterday I checked out the IE8 beta. It has got a lot of nice improvements like their take of AwesomeBar, the new tab page and the colored tabs. But here is why IE8 will not be my default browser:

Adblock Plus 0.7.5.5
Adsense Notifier 0.9.8
ColorZilla 2.0
Ctrl-Tab 0.19.1
Download Statusbar 0.9.6.3
DownThemAll! 1.0.3
FireGestures 1.1.3.1
Google Redesigned 0.1
Grab and Drag 2.7.4
IE Tab 1.5.20080823
MeasureIt 0.3.8
MR Tech Toolkit (formerly Local Install) 6.0.1
NoScript 1.7.9
QuickDrag 1.0.5
Read it Later 0.9821
Tab Mix Plus 0.3.7pre.080721
Todoist.com Sidebar 1.1
Ubiquity 0.1
Web Developer 1.1.6

This is the list of extensions in my Firefox. :-)

Eclipse Plugin: Wicked Shell

Vasanth Dharmaraj — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:34:18 GMT

A lot of Java development involves an IDE and a Shell window or two. The Shell is Command Prompt (cmd.exe) in my case as I develop on Windows. This cool Eclipse plugin reduces one window in my task bar: Wicked Shell. It just puts the OS's default shell, bash for Linux and cmd.exe for Windows, in Eclipse as a view. You can have multiple shells open. It provides look and feel customizations, command history and code completion...

Pretty cool. Check it out...

Eclipse Tip: Java Editor Breadcrumb Navigation Bar

Vasanth Dharmaraj — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 19:57:50 GMT

One new feature of Eclipse 3.4 is the Java editor's Breadcrumb Navigation Bar. This can be enabled with the keyboard shortcut Alt+Shift+B or using a tool bar button. Like the name suggests it provides a breadcrumb path for the current element in the editor. This is kind of like the location bar in Windows Explorer in Vista. You can navigate to other elements in the same level. ex. the highest level shows all the elements of the class. Or you can right click on the path element to perform any action using the context menu. ex. quickly copy the fully qualified name.