After a recommendation off the crave podcast I downloaded dolphin browser from the Android market late las night with high hopes that it would replace the standard browser.
Now don’t get me wrong, the Android browser works as it should but the way HTC have skinned it for sense means that the browser is full screen so you don’t see the status bar at the top. Now you’re probably thinking no big deal but it means that as you’re browsing you don’t know when the signal drops out or slows down, which it seems to do regularly on T-Mobile. Anyway on the the dolphin browser.
Needless to say the browser is not full screen so you always know how fast you are connected at. Dolphin also brings gestures so push a button at the bottom of the screen and a window pops up and you can draw on. For example draw an m and you add the page to your bookmarks and there are lots of other shortcuts that you can customize gestures for however I have yet to find out how to add gestures to specific bookmarks but if they add that it would be awesome.

Flash also works pretty well having sat in maths today and listened to a couple of billy Joel pieces (that I hadn’t heard for a while) off youtube.

Overall it is a well built application with an extensive feature set and settings list and a pleasure to use, much better than the standard android browser.

Just thought i would post my thoughts on the social network ban one week after it was implemented on the college computers
The computer room I am seems fairly busy with more people doing work rather than just sitting in front of Facebook yet it also seems that people are spending more time on websites that aren’t blocked.
That said, opposition to the ban seems to be calming down but we will have to see what is discussed at the next meeting.
That’s all for now, I’m cooking up another post which will hopefully be on by some time tomorrow

We have had a new kitchen fitted this week and the fire has also been installed here are the pics

Over October half term I went to london with the family and here are the best pics that I took while there

UPDATE

Now that I have uploaded the photos, you can see all of them here, I think this one has to be my favorite

As you can see, I have a new theme. I have spent a bit of time making it and obviously it is now ready to show the world

I have also been to london and took a few pictures. Here are my favorites so far…

It seems that while I have been swanning around in london on my holidays, google has announced and released the Eclair (2.0) SDK for android. But in doing so I feel that it is quite a headache. Now heres the problem

The hero has Sense built on the cupcake release of android (1.5), now Donut is out (1.6) but htc is not releasing a donut release and as such is skipping to eclair (2.0). Now I wanted to try my hand at developing my own android app but I am left with a dilema. I can write a cupcake version of the app now but then have to rewrite it again very soon when eclair comes out which is unknown how long htc will take to port senseUI to eclair with htc stating that it could be quite a while cos Eclair is a major release of the OS. Or I could write an Eclair version of the app but have no way of testing the app to see whether it works or not cos my phone does not have eclair running. Nor the fact that if it does work I won’t be able to run my own application which is the whole point in writing my own.

And so while android is all very well and a beautiful system to use, google does some strange things to screw up development and I am beginning to see the benefits of only having one handset a la Apple.

Last night, Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP appeared on question time. Now before I proceed I must stress that I in any way DO NOT support the BNP. They are a racist fascist bunch of lunatics.
But I do think the BBC were right to allow mr Griffin to appear on question time and here is why.
Question time is an impartial programme and it cannot go choosing who it shows. If this country has democratically elected a fascist then so be it but in order to protect the impartial of the nature of the programme then the BNP must have the right to appear on the show, the same as if an extreme left wing party were electected.
Now that is my stance. The programme has been aired and what is done is done. Now stop arguing.

I was 18 a week ago and decided that I wanted a phone for my birthday. I started off by trying to decide between an iPhone or a palm pre and then after following a few people on Twitter found the HTC hero and I have to say the phone is beautiful. It arrived last Tuesday and I have had a week to play with it and here are my impressions of it.
Even though t-mobile market it as the G2 touch it is the HTC hero. Running android it makes it probably the strongest competitor to the iPhone. HTC have also tweaked android slightly so it also runs the sense UI which means that it has multi-touch on a gorgeous 3.2 inch capacitive touch screen
The market gives access to many apps and because there is no gate keeper like Apple testing every single application it means the is a lot more scope of what apps are allowed to do. For example I have a brilliant sms app called handscent which makes sending mass sms a lot easier.
Background apps also mean that other things can be running and left to control the phone. Power manager can be left running to monitor battery levels and when it is depleted to a certain level, it then changes the settings of the phone to conserve battery.
I do have a few niggles with it though. First of all is it asking which network you would like to connect to. Now I have a t-mobile sin in the phone so I am not going to want to connect to the O2 network, if I try it just says “can’t register on network” so stop asking me whenever the signal drops out. Then sometimes when the list comes up t-mobile isn’t there and so it doesn’t get a signal. Then if let’s say the list comes up when you are inside and can’t get a signal you can’t manually force it to connect. And finally, although its good you can run background apps, it is probably over eager to leave them running in the background. When the camera is not on the screen then there is no point running it in the background and so without taskiller the phone would slow up and be unusable. Other than them three there are a few things that I would change. A stronger vibrate would be nice so you can actually feel it along with a way to make the clicked in the keyboard louder and the same with notification sounds but phone and sms rings are loud enough
Other than that it is a brilliant phone and would recommend it to anyone. Well worth the gadget of the year award by stuff magazine.

A new game emerged onto the internet this week. www.monopolycitystreets.com/game.html is where it is at and it combines monopoly with google maps. Just about any map in google maps is purchaseable and once purchase the owner can then build properties on it increasing it’s rent. Now this is where chance cards come in. Once you complete an action (buy a street/build a house) you get a chance card and these can either be fines, rewards, hazards or bonus cards. Fines and rewards are pretty self explanatory, you get money or get it taken away from you. Hazard cards come in two flavours, either buldozers or building hazards. If you get a buldozer card you can knock down any building on the map (ie. the world) and then that street doesn’t earn as much rent. Building hazards, once built on a street then stop that street from getting rent. Bonus cards allow you to build properties on your streets that stop other players building hazard cards on which ever street you play it. It is a brilliant game and quite addictive and competative especially if your friends are on it as well. But it has had quite a few teething problems.

And so this is directed to Hasbro/Google, here is how I would fix it. The game is up and running and many people have good streets. there is a split those who got the streets they wanted don’t want to reset it and those that didn’t do want it reset. So don’t reset it for a month. Keep it as an open beta, get more hardware in place to cope with the demand and test the hardware. Iron out all the bugs especially the login. Force people through a proper sign up page needing an email address that make it easier to recover a password, not the flash thing onscreen. (Recapcha is good though, keep that.) Then in a months time once all the bugs are out, close the beta, reset the servers. TELL EVERYONE WHEN IT WILL OPEN AGAIN, make sure it is on a saturday so people aren’t trapped in work. And also schedule a time that finds the most people online from austrailia to west coast america. Probably around 3-4 GMT.

But overall, a good game and keep up the good work.

after many people asking me “what did you do to your arm chris?” i’ll attempt to answer that question here, albeit slowly typing one handed, (i already miss touch typing).

tuesday evening i was playing out on the street with the kids and i was pushing nathan down the street in something similar to one of these.

and now it gets a bit more complicated so i may as well use a diagram.

i was pushing nathan in that cart like thing above. having given nathan one final push and let go i was heading towards the pavement in the direction of the arrow. only i didn’t know jack was on his bike and coming up behind me. we both collided and i remember his front wheel hitting my leg but then i blacked out and woke up 15ft further down the road with no idea how i got there are which part of my body hit the ground first.

Thats all for now. i’ll add updates when i ask kids on the street what happened.