Jesse Schmidt » tech

Android Home Screen Prototype

Jesse — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 19:32:35 +0000

Recently the touchscreen on my dumbphone took a dump and no longer registers touches… That being the case I have been looking at the new phones coming out within the next few months (preferably on Verizon) and have seen a few cool phones but I am still looking for something…. better. The guys over at LarvaLabs have developed a concept home screen for Android that looks clean and simple and pretty damn nice. Being a concept it obviously isn’t available on any shipping phones but it looks like it could be a good rival for HTC’s SenseUI which I think is absolutely awesome.

I have not really looked into Motorola’s MotoBlur UI for Android yet as I haven’t seen many previews on it. From what I have seen it looks pretty neat but also fairly cluttered. I will reserve final judgment until I see MotoBlur closer and see what hardware is coming for Verizon. Now I just need these phones to pop up on Verizon. The Touch Pro2 looks good but I really want a Hero-esque Android device. We will see… hopefully sooner rather than later!

IE8 List of Fail!

Jesse — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:23:43 +0000

So it turns out the most recent IE8 beta has a list of websites that do not use the new “Standards Mode” and instead fall back to the old rendering engine. The list of sites is quite amusing.

Mary Jo Foley posted what looks like the entire list of broken sites, but here are some of the more ridiculous sites that don’t display properly in IE8, and require it to render them old school style (aka not web standards compliant). Here are some of the more laughable ones.

microsoft.com
google.com
yahoo.com
cctv.com
msn.com.cn
live.com (a Microsoft site)
wikipedia.org
flickr.com
wordpress.com
adobe.com
facebook.com
apple.com

Apparently even their own site can not be rendered in “Standards Mode,” what a hoot!

IE8 Compatibility List @ Gizmodo

iPod 2.1 Software

Jesse — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:03:31 +0000

The iPod 2.1software update brought a bunch of new changes to the mix. One of these changes is the way applications update. Before they would update ad basically download a new copy and delete the old one and in the process it would totally throw off any application arrangement the you may have made. Thankfully that no longer happens! Applications also update much faster now than they did before which is awesome. Only one error I have currently encountered is a sync error that I have no idea what is causing it. Turning off photo syncing seemed to squash that bug. I’ll post more after I play with it for a while.

Blogging from my iPod

Jesse — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:07:20 +0000

This is a post written from the Wordpress iPod app. This is actually quite cool!

Wordpress 2.5

Jesse — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:32:54 +0000

Wordpress 2.5 was released just this weekend and includes a huge variety of features that I personally have been wanting to be included for quite some time now.

WYSIWYG Editor no longer messes with code.
Built-in gallery feature.
Multiple file upload with progress bars.
EXIF data reader.
Database optimization.
And more!

I am going to be upgrading to the new release here soon!

Making of Camera Lenses

Jesse — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 16:12:43 +0000

This is a very cool video about how camera lenses are made. I have always been fascinated with how things are made so I found this quite amazing. Enjoy!