Technobabble

Safari on iOS 6 continues to improve on the HTML5 Test . With iOS 6 Beta 2, Safari scores 360/500. Major areas lacking are: Video subtitle support Drag and drop (probably intentional on the iPhone) Microdata WebGL 3D context Filesystem (again, probably intentional) IndexedDB Access to the webcam Web notifications Full screen support (not really applicable to an iPhone) For comparison, here's Safari on iOS 4 from over two years ago.

Mike Ash has a really good article on Objective-C Literals . Good to see that we can finally have some abbreviated syntax for boxing, and array and dictionary literals. The syntax makes it very much like JSON. Waiting for these changes to appear in Xcode.

If you are using a Mac with a small-ish SSD these days, there's a good chance that you are running low on disk space. A fair bit of an OS X install is multilingual files and if you are using just 1 or 2 languages, you could get rid of the language support files for all other languages. Enter Monolingual , a tool which cleans up all the languages that aren't of interest. On an OS X Lion install, that's worth at least a couple of GB. Monolingual can also remove files for architectures that aren't in use (e.g. getting rid of ARM and PowerPC files on an Intel Mac. Download Monolingual here .

MacWorld has a pretty decent review of the HP Touch Pad . Seems like a pretty decent entry by HP into the tabled market. However I wanted to highlight one piece from the review: The TouchPad’s specs are state of the art, right down to the dual-core Snapdragon processor that powers it. Yet at times I found the TouchPad puzzlingly sluggish. (I had the same complaint when I used the dual-core Motorola Xoom Android tablet , to be fair.) Sometimes I think one of the most important achievements of Apple’s iOS development team is completely overlooked by most reviewers: the fact that on iOS devices, when you move your finger, the on-screen objects under your finger move along with it. No lag, no judder of dropped frames, just a pure illusion that you’re physically manipulating an object. Almost every time I have tried a new Android phone or tablet—and when I tried the TouchPad—I am surprised to find that the interface just isn’t as responsive as Apple’s. This is something I have observed a...

I’ve been using Nuevasync for since late 2008 for syncing my Google Apps calendars to my iPhone. At the time, it was one of the few over-the-air syncing solutions for hooking up Google calendars (including Google Apps) to the iPhone. When Google came up with native Google Sync earlier this year, I evaluated it and found that Nuevasync was better . Since then, people have commented on my post about various improvements to Google Sync and it seemed like Google Sync was finally at the point where all my original issues had been fixed. So I had to try Google Sync again. The steps to move to Google Sync were straightforward: Backup the iPhone by syncing with iTunes. Since I use Google Apps, I had to enable syncing for my domain . Configure Google Sync on the iPhone per the instructions . I chose to delete all contacts and calendar data on the phone since my contacts were already being synced with Google Apps Contacts via iTunes. I use multiple calendars on my Google Apps Calendar a...

Recently the Arduino IDE installation refused to start on my Mac with the following exception: uncaught exception in main method: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /Users/arun/arduino-0015/Arduio15.app/Contents/Resources/java/librxtxSerial.jnilib: no suitable image found. Did find: /Users/arun/arduino-0015/Arduino15.app/Contents/Resources/java/librxtxSerial.jnilib: no matching architecture in universal wrapper Rather bizarre error and as far as I know, I hadn't mucked around with any settings. According to the Arduino forum it had something to with the Java version and suggested giving priority to Java 5 over Java 6. However this didn't work on my setup. Eventually I just downloaded the Java 6 compatible version of librxrxSerial.jnilib and replaced it in the package contents of the Arduino app. This fixed the problem.

Lenovo ThinkPad X300