Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Blackberry y su último suspiro?

Nota: Publicado en mi espacio personal de Facebook el 4 de Junio de 2012.

//Blackberry y su último suspiro?
La mejor parte del capitalismo, es, a mi parecer, la competencia que hacen las compañías por ser la número uno, por mantenerse en los titulares, o simplemente para evitar ir a la quiebra. 

Uno de los mercados mas interesantes actualmente, es sin duda el de los móviles, o celulares, donde Apple con el iPhone, y otras como Google, HTC y Samsung con dispositivos And
roid han recientemente dominado el mercado, con otros como Microsoft y Nokia con sus Windows Phone intentando (y logrando) lanzar productos innovadores.

Uno de los mas negreados, incluso por mi, dentro de todo esto, ha sido RIM, creadores de los moribundos Blackberry. Y no ha sido un señalamiento errado, los mismos fanáticos de Blackberry saben que si no fuera por BBMessenger, sus teléfonos serían una porquería, ellos lo saben y RIM lo sabe.

Pero como ya lo he mencionado antes, y lo repito, pilas con BB, son los que destronaron a Windows Mobile de Microsoft, y quieren hacerlo nuevamente, pero ahora contra iOS y Android, con BB10. No se donde se ubica Palm en esta parte del pasado pero diría que era una competencia entre Windows Mobile y Palm? No consigo buena información al respecto, pero en fin, mi punto es que RIM llegó con BB y tomó el liderazgo del entorno empresarial de manera sin igual en este mercado.

No digo que vaya a ser nuevamente el líder porque están en una posición muy mala, no es lo mismo perder el entorno empresarial, que el empresarial, y el de los consumidores, por margenes abrumadores, y agregado a esto la confianza de tus seguidores. Todo esto gracias a sacar productos malos, y apresurados.

Por lo menos no se van a rendir sin pelear (la cuestión es que no se sabe si es tarde y se van a hundir con el barco?), lo que han mostrado hasta ahora de BB10, se ve muy interesante, innovador, y no se parece a nada de lo que hay ahora, pero el único caso de estudio reciente que tenemos de alguien que en el mercado actual lanzó un producto innovador en su último suspiro, es el de Palm, quienes dieron todo con el Pre y WebOS, y a pesar que era un excelente sistema, no logró mantener como relevante a Palm, pero nos dió sin lugar a dudas un producto que obligó a otros, entre otras cosas, a mejorar sus sitemas de notificaciones.

Luego de ver lo que traen, ya se entiende por qué no se han retirado y vendido o lanzando BBM para iOS/Android, todavía les queda un cartucho.

/*
En un tema paralelo, si están pensando comprar un Blackberry en este momento, esperen a Octubre por los nuevos aparatos, o esperen que bajen de precio para esa misma fecha, de resto, este es un mal momento para comprar un BB. Preferible sobrevivir con un vergatario un tiempito.
*/

Algo es para mi muy importante en esto, particularmente en el mercado de los celulares, a diferencia de computadoras de escritorio, es que la gente cambia mucho mas activamente de celular, que de computadora. Y desde hace años el que está de moda, reina, sea el StarTAC, el v3, iPhone, o Blackberry, así sea mas difícil de usar, la gente migra. No digo que vaya a ser el caso, pero estoy seguro que RIM está apuntando a eso, y al parecer, al fin con un buen producto. A la final, ganamos los consumidores con mejores productos, cortesía del capitalismo salvaje.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

iOS 6 must have features

I wrote this article some time ago, but I decided it was time to come back to it, as there's still some time before Apple announces the next iOS.


I'll just jump right into the most needed features. As I mentioned before, Apple either implements most of this stuff or iOS will look dated.



Notification Center Widgets*
This is a must have, let developers do stuff for the notifications center, and let the users select what they want to have in there, a quick way to access brightness, favorite apps, and wifi settings (check out the concept video) is very necessary.


A must have in the Notification Center is a quick way to turn the flash light on and off. *

















Fullscreen Safari*
This has been a feature for the jailbreak community that's been available for quite some time now, include it on iOS for crying out loud, pixels are way too important on the iPhone screen.






























I don't care for the menu they use on the Cydia version, but at least you get full screen, until the iPhone doesn't come in 4.0" display, this is neccesary.


Sharing. Make iOS social.**
Share to anywhere, Facebook, Google+, whatever, allow developers to work this out. Twitter is a great start, but people share content in many sites now, and it's what I believe makes the Internet what it is. This could be a widget also, just merge it with everything, specially Safari.





















Custom Ringtones and SMS tones*
For crying out loud, let me choose whatever song I want for whoever I want. It's just beyond annoying that 90% of people have the same ringtones, not to mention SMS tones.



Status Bar Icons*
Having a notification screen and a popup are OK, but icons are also needed IMO. There's a chance it will look crowded, but since many just want notifications because of text messages, facebook, twitter and stuff, I think status bar icons would work well.



















WebOS made it look great, even with many icons, they just show a "+", so it doesn't look crowded at all.

Other things
  • Allow me to take action on notifications from the notifications center, stuff like reply to messages.**
  • Contacts Photos*: show pictures on the contacts list, both phone and contacts app. At the very least, show pictures in the favorite contacts tab.
  • Add option to kill ALL apps running*.
  • Brightness on FastApp switcher*: There's volume there, why can't I have brightness there too? There IS enough room.
  • Any orientation homescreen. It's kind of stupid to app switch when in landscape mode on the iPhone.*
  • True/Improved Multi Tasking, I hate that when I turn off my screen, usually the app dies with it, let it finish what it's doing. They need to either extend the multi task stuff*
  • Bluetooth mouse connectivity: it would be great to use, when in "laptop mode" a mouse, and a keyboard, the bluetooth keyboard functionality is available, but you can only use a mouse if you jailbreak your device (not that there's anything wrong with that), and this really should be a native iOS feature. A Magic Mouse would actually work perfectly with the iPad.*
* Already available with jailbreak
** Kind of available with jailbreak, but only for BiteSMS in case of messages and not so much for social sharing as I think it should be.

Ok so that's my thoughts on what the next release should have, I'm positive some will agree with me, and I'm more than certain Apple will keep on "taking" ideas from the jailbreak community, but my point is that they should do it faster, releasing drops of features might not be the best way to go on the mobile market, which has, for many years, moved by trends.

My original post about this was a tweet that I decided to expand a little :)


Update: I can't believe this didn't cross my mind. An improved Keyboard!

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Internet de ABA lento? Es hora de que CANTV responda!

El servicio de ABA de CANTV ha llegado a nuevos niveles de ineficiencia, con la escusa de que "la línea hacer ruído", "el problema se resolverá en 48 horas", de que "tu zona está experimentando problemas actualmente", y que ellos "no se hacen responsables por páginas que no sean del gobierno", cargan mareado al público usuario, cuando la verdadera razón es simple: han saturado sus sistemas y no han invertido en prepararse adecuadamente con una plataforma que cubra las espectativas de los venezolanos.

Qué propongo?
Quitarles la careta, que acepten que el problema son ELLOS y no NOSOTROS. Hasta cuando echarle la culpa a los deḿas? A los usuarios que pagamos por un servicio que cada vez está peor y que no parece que va a mejorar en los próximos meses.

Cómo lo haremos?
El problema es en Internet, así que en Internet tenemos que atacar. Usen todas sus herramientas en las redes sociales, hasta que los principales medios de comunicación hagan que la noticia llegue a todos los venezolanos.

En Twitter usar los tags #CANTV y #ABA y añadir sus respectivos comentarios.

Además de esto, comuníquense al 0800CANTV00 y hagan reclamos, si les preguntan página que están intentando accesar digan cantv.net, si les preguntan cuántas máquinas tienen pegadas a la red, digan una! El problema no está en sus casas o trabajos señores, el problema está en la burocracia y la falta de inversión a causa de un gobierno inepto en todo lo que hace.

@davidmoron

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

iOS 6 must have features

Ok iOS 5 isn't even out yet, but there are already lacking features that are making iOS look dated by now.

When the iPhone came out it was indeed 4 years ahead of any other phones, but that's not the case anymore, with Windows Phone 7 and Android doing great stuff, Apple's iOS is looking like it's lagging. In some things it's still ahead, specially in third party support, but on others, not so much.

Ok so what features are a must for the next big release? Now, keep in mind that this is my personal opinion and I'm pretty sure some of you (I'm looking at you fan boys) won't think this is stuff that's needed until almighty Apple says so.

Notification Center Widgets***
This is a must have, let developers do stuff for the notifications center, and let the users select what they want to have in there, a quick way to access brightness, favorite apps, and wifi settings (check out the concept video) is very necessary.

















Fullscreen Safari*
This has been a feature for the jailbreak community that's been available for quite some time now, include it on iOS for crying out loud, pixels are way too important on the iPhone screen.
































Sharing. Make iOS social.**
Share to anywhere, Facebook, Google+, whatever, allow developers to work this out. Twitter is a great start, but people share content in many sites now, and it's what I believe makes the Internet what it is. This could be a widget also, just merge it with everything, specially Safari.





















Custom Ringtones and SMS tones*
By the time I'm writing this, iOS 5 beta 3 just came out, and this feature seems to have been included, but since Apple didn't make a huge deal out of this, I won't believe it until I see it on the final release. It's annoying that pretty so many people have Marimba and Tri-Tone as their default tones, and I'm guessing it's because pretty much every other included iOS tone sucks.



Status Bar Icons*
Having a notification screen and a popup are OK, but icons are also needed IMO. There's a chance it will look crowded, but since many just want notifications because of text messages, facebook, twitter and stuff, I think status bar icons would work well.




















Other things
  • Allow me to take action on notifications from the notifications center, stuff like reply to messages, look at what Google+ is doing, this is great, and it doesn't interrupt what I'm doing.**
  • Contacts Photos*: show pictures on the contacts list, both phone and contacts app. At the very least, show pictures in the favorite contacts tab.
  • Add option to kill ALL apps running*, I know they don't take as much resources as they do on say a Blackberry device or Windows, but you can tell they are taking some resources, let me close them all at once, and also let me choose which ones never to kill if I so choose, for instance, kill everything but even if I do, always leave Whatsapp running.
  • Brightness on FastApp switcher*: There's volume there, why can't I have brightness there too? There IS enough room.
  • Any orientation homescreen. It's kind of stupid to app switch when in landscape mode on the iPhone.*
* Already available with jailbreak
** Kind of available with jailbreak, but only for BiteSMS in case of messages and not so much for social sharing as I think it should be.
*** Looks like this is coming for the jailbreak community, but I haven't tested it myself.

Ok so that's my thoughts on what the next release should have, I'm positive some will agree with me, and I'm more than certain Apple will keep on "taking" ideas from the jailbreak community, but my point is that they should do it faster, releasing drops of features might not be the best way to go on the mobile market, which has, for many years, moved by trends.

I'm telling you Windows Phone Mango and the Galaxy II are the first things that make me think iOS could actually fall unless they keep the magic going, which iOS 5 isn't doing, not with features like "custom ringtones" which any 10-year old phone already has. Either Apple cuts the crap and lets users do whatever they want with their hardware, or they won't dominate the market forever, which I'm pretty sure is what they want.

My original post about this was a tweet that I decided to expand a little :)

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Convert String to Date in PHP and format it

For this particular case, this is the best solution I've found... I'm getting this from the database on my result set:
2010-08-11 16:00:00.000

First you have to convert it using strtotime(), then using date() you can format it however you want
You can go to the link below for more info on the date function
http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

You end up getting something like this
date('Y-m-d',strtotime($variable))

where $variable looks something like this '0000-00-00 00:00:00'...

It should work for pretty much any string which is formatted that way, so if you have something like 2010-10-10 with no time, it will default it to 12AM, and 1969 if you don't have the date but just the time... Play around with it, it's kinda tricky :)

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Blackra1n with all DLLs

Blackra1n with missing DLLs
ASL.dll
CoreFoundation.dll
icudt36.dll
icuin36.dll
icuuc36.dll
RstrtMgr.dll
zlib1.dll

http://www.mediafire.com/?ikn2g66wrdlxtzr

I use SpiritJB now though, but in case someone needs this :)

Tuesday, May 04, 2010

Error calling external object function today

Power Builder error fix
Either install Office, or get MSCAL.OCX and register it (regsvr32 mscal.ocx)

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1036498&page=33
http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en/Offtopic/thread/b582cfda-5be2-448d-a085-b1237c14b2b9