Marksy » Google

Find my Android

marksy — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 09:27:42 +0000

The other day I temporarily lost my phone and panicked. I woke up early in the morning, at 5am – thinking it was 5pm. Couldn’t find my phone. Thought I had missed meeting a friend that day. Then I realised it was morning, and that I should try use HTC Sense – locate phone service.

I’ve tried it before but never got it to work. And sure enough, it didn’t work this time.

Luckily I found my phone, was down the side of the couch.

However, I’ve just invested (61p) in a new app for Android Seekdroid. I downloaded it, signed up as a new user and it started working straight away. Located my phone down to a couple of meters.

This shows how polished Apple’s find iPhone service is much more polished than Android’s. Instead of “it just works”, Android should adopt “you have to make it work yourself”.

Advertising in OS’s

marksy — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 09:27:11 +0000

Would you or better yet, could you use an operating system that has adverts? Google are working on their web-based OS which would probably have the usual targeted adverts based on either surrounding content or user profile data.

Mac OS would never have adverts. They even expressed their dislike for adverts in the latest WWDC, saying they’d never include it in the iCloud storage system.

Windows however, have been using it for sometime in their IM software, MSN Messenger. But why do this?! Why would you have pulsing and distracting adverts – and a fucking splash screen full of adverts when you sign in? No other IM software I know of does this. In fact – no software I know of (excluding mobile applications) use adware.

Is this the future? Is this where we’re heading? Considering the current state of free apps on Android Marketplace and App Store mostly have adverts in them. Why shouldn’t free software on your OS contain adverts?

Why? Because it’s just not done. Don’t ever do this.

Speed up your page serving with ‘mod_pagespeed’

marksy — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 09:38:13 +0000

Google announced (a while ago) a module to Apache 2.2, ‘mod_pagespeed’ will automatically optimise webpages, serving up content faster to your consumers.

mod_pagespeed is an open-source Apache module that automatically optimizes web pages and resources on them. It does this by rewriting the resources using filters that implement web performance best practices. Webmasters and web developers can use mod_pagespeed to improve the performance of their web pages when serving content with the Apache HTTP Server.

http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/module.html

Google maps moves drops Flash

marksy — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 19:11:49 +0000

Why is this awesome? Because Google are dropping a locked in piece of software (which is bug ridden, and insecure, and has extremely poor performance on anything but Windows).

Just check out Google maps on iPhone Safari:

It supports dragging around to pan, and pinch to zoom. I guess it’s using canvas, html5 goodness.

Google having trouble with Safari 5 (malwaring?)

marksy — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 07:25:40 +0000

Recently I’ve been seeing some weird things happening with Safari & Google. Lately, gMaps is very slow and takes up a lot of process. Streetview is horrible in Safari 5. gAnalytics doesn’t display content correctly.

I’ve been using Chrome for each thing i think is dodgy and each time I’ve been correct.

Now I don’t think it’s to do with Webkit, i think it’s to do with the JS rendering system. Both Chrome and Safari use completely different JS renderers however share the same markup renderer.