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• Nexus One

  19 mars 2010, par Mans — Uncategorized

  I have had a Nexus One for about a week (thanks Google), and naturally I have an opinion or two about it.
  

  Hardware

  With the front side dominated by a touch-screen and a lone, round button, the Nexus One appearance is similar to that of most contemporary smartphones. The reverse sports a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, a Google logo, and a smaller HTC logo. Power button, volume control, and headphone and micro-USB sockets are found along the edges. It is with appreciation I note the lack of a front-facing camera ; the silly idea of video calls is finally put to rest.

  Powering up the phone (I’m beginning to question the applicability of that word), I am immediately enamoured with the display. At 800×480 pixels, the AMOLED display is crystal-clear and easily viewable even in bright light. In a darker environment, the display automatically dims. The display does have one quirk in that the subpixel pattern doesn’t actually have a full RGB triplet for each pixel. The close-up photo below shows the pattern seen when displaying a solid white colour.

  

  The result of this is that fine vertical lines, particularly red or blue ones, look a bit jagged. Most of the time this is not much of a problem, and I find it an acceptable compromise for the higher effective resolution it provides.

  Basic interaction

  The Android system is by now familiar, and the Nexus offers no surprises in basic usage. All the usual applications come pre-installed : browser, email, calendar, contacts, maps, and even voice calls. Many of the applications integrate with a Google account, which is nice. Calendar entries, map placemarks, etc. are automatically shared between desktop and mobile. Gone is the need for the bug-ridden custom synchronisation software with which mobile phones of the past were plagued.

  Launching applications is mostly speedy, and recently used apps are kept loaded as long as memory needs allow. Although this garbage-collection-style of application management, where you are never quite sure whether an app is still running, takes a few moments of acclimatisation, it works reasonably well in day to day use. Most of the applications are well-behaved and save their data before terminating.

  Email

  Two email applications are included out of the box : one generic and one Gmail-only. As I do not use Gmail, I cannot comment on this application. The generic email client supports IMAP, but is rather limited in functionality. Fortunately, a much-enhanced version, K-9, is available for download. The main feature I find lacking here is threaded message view.

  The features, or lack thereof, in the email applications is not, however, of huge importance, as composing email, or any longer piece of text, is something one rather avoids on a system like this. The on-screen keyboard, while falling among the better of its kind, is still slow to use. Lack of tactile feedback means accidentally tapping the wrong key is easily done, and entering numbers or punctuation is an outright chore.

  Browser

  Whatever the Nexus lacks in email abilities, it makes up for with the browser. Surfing the web on a phone has never been this pleasant. Page rendering is quick, and zooming is fast and simple. Even pages not designed for mobile viewing are easy to read with smart reformatting almost entirely eliminating the sideways scrolling which hampered many a mobile browser of old.

  Calls and messaging

  Being a phone, the Nexus One is obviously able to make and receive calls, and it does so with ease. Entering a number or locating a stored contact are both straight-forward operations. During a call, audio is clear and of adequate loudness, although I have yet to use the phone in really noisy surroundings.

  The other traditional task of a mobile phone, messaging, is also well-supported. There isn’t really much to say about this.

  Multimedia

  Having a bit of an interest in most things multimedia, I obviously tested the capabilities of the Nexus by throwing some assorted samples at it, revealing ample space for improvement. With video limited to H.264 and MPEG4, and the only supported audio codecs being AAC, MP3, Vorbis, and AMR, there are many files which will not play.

  To make matters worse, only selected combinations of audio and video will play together. Several video files I tested played without sound, yet when presented with the very same audio data alone, it was correctly decoded. As for container formats, it appears restricted to MP4/MOV, and Ogg (for Vorbis). AVI files are recognised as media files, but I was unable to find an AVI file which would play.

  With a device clearly capable of so much more, the poor multimedia support is nothing short of embarrassing.

  The Market

  Much of the hype surrounding Android revolves around the Market, Google’s virtual marketplace for app authors to sell or give away their creations. The thousands of available applications are broadly categorised, and a search function is available.

  The categorised lists are divided into free and paid sections, while search results, disappointingly, are not. To aid the decision, ratings and comments are displayed alongside the summary and screenshots of each application. Overall, the process of finding and installing an application is mostly painless. While it could certainly be improved, it could also have been much worse.

  The applications themselves are, as hinted above, beyond numerous. Sadly, quality does not quite match up to quantity. The vast majority of the apps are pointless, though occasionally mildly amusing, gimmicks of no practical value. The really good ones, and they do exist, are very hard to find unless one knows precisely what to look for.

  Battery

  Packing great performance into a pocket-size device comes with a price in battery life. The battery in the Nexus lasts considerably shorter time than that in my older, less feature-packed Nokia phone. To some extent this is probably a result of me actually using it a lot more, yet the end result is the same : more frequent recharging. I should probably get used to the idea of recharging the phone every other night.

  Verdict

  The Nexus One is a capable hardware platform running an OS with plenty of potential. The applications are still somewhat lacking (or very hard to find), although the basic features work reasonably well. Hopefully future Android updates will see more and better core applications integrated, and I imagine that over time, I will find third-party apps to solve my problems in a way I like. I am not putting this phone on the shelf just yet.

• Salty Game Music

  31 mai 2011, par Multimedia Mike — General

  Have you heard of Google’s Native Client (NaCl) project ? Probably not. Basically, it allows native code modules to run inside a browser (where ‘browser’ is defined pretty narrowly as ‘Google Chrome’ in this case). Programs are sandboxed so they aren’t a security menace (or so the whitepapers claim) but are allowed to access a variety of APIs including video and audio. The latter API is significant because sound tends to be forgotten in all the hullabaloo surrounding non-Flash web technologies. At any rate, enjoy NaCl while you can because I suspect it won’t be around much longer.

  After my recent work upgrading some old music synthesis programs to user more modern audio APIs, I got the idea to try porting the same code to run under NaCl in Chrome (first Nosefart, then Game Music Emu/GME). In this exercise, I met with very limited success. This blog post documents some of the pitfalls in my excursion.

  
  
  

  Infrastructure
  People who know me know that I’m rather partial — to put it gently — to straight-up C vs. C++. The NaCl SDK is heavily skewed towards C++. However, it does provide a Python tool called init_project.py which can create the skeleton of a project and can do so in C with the '-c' option :

  ./init_project.py -c -n saltynosefart
  

  This generates something that can be built using a simple ‘make’. When I added Nosefart’s C files, I learned that the project Makefile has places for project-necessary CFLAGS but does not honor them. The problem is that the generated Makefile includes a broader system Makefile that overrides the CFLAGS in the project Makefile. Going into the system Makefile and changing "CFLAGS =" -> "CFLAGS +=" solves this problem.

  Still, maybe I’m the first person to attempt building something in Native Client so I’m the first person to notice this ?

  Basic Playback
  At least the process to create an audio-enabled NaCl app is well-documented. Too bad it doesn’t seem to compile as advertised. According to my notes on the matter, I filled in PPP_InitializeModule() with the appropriate boilerplate as outlined in the docs but got a linker error concerning get_browser_interface().

  Plan B : C++
  Obviously, the straight C stuff is very much a second-class citizen in this NaCl setup. Fortunately, there is already that fully functional tone generator example program in the limited samples suite. Plan B is to copy that project and edit it until it accepts Nosefart/GME audio instead of a sine wave.

  The build system assumes all C++ files should have .cc extensions. I have to make some fixes so that it will accept .cpp files (either that, or rename all .cpp to .cc, but that’s not very clean).

  Making Noise
  You’ll be happy to know that I did successfully swap out the tone generator for either Nosefart or GME. Nosefart has a slightly fickle API that requires revving the emulator frame by frame and generating a certain number of audio samples. GME’s API is much easier to work with in this situation — just tell it how many samples it needs to generate and give it a pointer to a buffer. I played NES and SNES music play through this ad-hoc browser plugin, and I’m confident all the other supported formats would have worked if I went through the bother of converting the music data files into C headers to be included in the NaCl executable binaries (dynamically loading data via the network promised to be a far more challenging prospect reserved for phase 3 of the project).

  Portable ?
  I wouldn’t say so. I developed it on Linux and things ran fine there. I tried to run the same binaries on the Windows version of Chrome to no avail. It looks like it wasn’t even loading the .nexe files (NaCl executables).

  Thinking About The (Lack Of A) Future
  As I was working on this project, I noticed that the online NaCl documentation materialized explicit banners warning that my NaCl binaries compiled for Chrome 11 won’t work for Chrome 12 and that I need to code to the newly-released 0.3 SDK version. Not a fuzzy feeling. I also don’t feel good that I’m working from examples using bleeding edge APIs that feature deprecation as part of their naming convention, e.g., pp::deprecated::ScriptableObject().

  Ever-changing API + minimal API documentation + API that only works in one browser brand + requiring end user to explicitly enable feature = … well, that’s why I didn’t bother to release any showcase pertaining to this little experiment. Would have been neat, but I strongly suspect that this is yet another one of those APIs that Google decides to deprecate soon.

  See Also :

  • I eventually got a second wind and made this work using the C interface.

• Matomo maker InnoCraft named 2023 Hi-Tech Awards finalist

  20 avril 2023, par Erin — Press Releases

  WELLINGTON, N.Z., April 20, 2023 – InnoCraft, the makers of world-leading open-source web analytics platform Matomo, has been named an ASX Hi-Tech Emerging Company of the Year finalist in the 2023 Hi-Tech Awards. 



  Matomo founder Matthieu Aubry says, “At Matomo, we believe in empowering individuals and organizations to make informed decisions about their digital presence. By providing an open-source website analytics platform, we have created a more transparent and trustworthy digital ecosystem. We are proud to be recognised as a finalist for the Hi-Tech Awards, and we will continue to work towards a more open and ethical digital landscape, and grow the business in New Zealand and worldwide.”



  About Matomo

  Matomo, launched in 2007 as an open-source, privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative, is trusted by over 1.5 million websites in 220 countries and has been translated in over 50 languages. Matomo tracks and analyses online visits and traffic to give users a deeper understanding of their website visitors to drive conversions and revenue ; while keeping businesses compliant with privacy laws worldwide, such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

  Aubry says Matomo is performing extremely well internationally as consumers and organizations look for privacy-focused analytics solutions, with several European countries already ruling the use of Google Analytics illegal due to data transfers to the US. In addition, Matomo’s user increase was recognized earlier this year with W3Tech’s award for the best web analytics software in its Web Technologies of the Year 2022 – with previous winners including Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel.



  A record number of companies entered the 2023 Hi-Tech Awards, with entries coming in from across the country and from all areas of the Hi-Tech sector. This depth is reflected in the line-up of finalists this year, according to David Downs, Chair of the Hi-Tech Trust, who says the standard of entries continue to grow every year.

”

  The hi-tech sector continues to flourish and it’s fantastic to see the success that so many of our companies enjoy on the international stage. This sector continues to prove its resilience and is at the forefront of our export economy in turbulent times,” says Downs.



  The Hi-Tech Awards Gala Dinner will take place on Friday, the 23rd of June, in Christchurch. 


   

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