Jambo!

No, not the African hit-song from the 80's (WARNING: Highly contagious).

Jambo is a "social app" for discovering, er, other users of Jambo who might be on nearby WiFi access points.

Actually, they have a LinkedIn plug-in, which makes it quite a useful business networking tool.

Vodafone's £15bn loss

Vodafone post the biggest loss in UK history.

What I really like about this story is the feeble attempt to compensate by announcing 400 redundancies. Unless this includes the board of directors, it is unlikely to make much of a dent.

And if the job cuts fail to calm the stockholder's nerves, Arun Sarin's comforting words might help: "Vodafone has met or exceeded expectations". With expectations that low, I can't see how he is ever disappointed.

IE7 Page Zooming is rubbish

IE7 Beta 2 has introduced a new feature called Page Zooming.

This zooms everything on the page canvas equally, images included. Unfortunately their implementation leaves alot to be desired, and I contest that, as is, it is unusable.

The main problem is that zoom events do not change the pages client width and height, therefore the page gets no chance to resize itself to the new viewport and spills out of the frame (introducing that pariah of GUI design, the horizontal scroll bar) or shrinks into the frame leaving an ugly gap. Oh, and the images look awful as well!

What I would have prefered is to adopt the same functionality as Firefox. Only fonts resize (as in IE6), and their size cannot be fixed by the page designer. Also, fonts can grow indefinately - essential for high resolution monitors. Yes, this does not apply to text in graphics, but that is an accesibilty faux-pas anyway. CSS in all the browsers is more than rich enough to make any text effect you could desire from real text.

I tend to dislike any website design that doesn't support liquid flow. Yes, it is harder, yes it means more work, but it is the best way to support multiple platforms.

Incidentally, in IE6 and Firefox, holding the CTRL key and moving the scroll wheel back and forth will resize the text (great feature). IE7 have replaced this with their horrid Page Zoom. Luckily they have moved the text-size shortcut to CTRL + SHIFT instead - without that they might have lost me forever to Firefox :-)

Browser safe opacity

Mandarin Design has a great article on how to make the opacity filter really work. It is even easier now Firefox support the CSS opacity tag natively.

Vendors argue WiMax, WiFi, HSDPA

Established telcos and WiFi up-starts (sorry, start-ups) clashed over the future of wireless broadband at The Wireless Event in London.

All they could really agree on was that the "real money" will be in value-added services, which, unless they are proposing a walled-garden connection model, will not be provided by them. Perhaps the panel session should have been titled "Are we in the right business?" ;-)

Ironically the conference wireless network was experiencing "technical difficulties" during the panel session. It is not reported whether there was any teasing from the telco representatives.

Orignally reported on Computer Business Review.

Ant Nest Casts

Beautiful casts of ant's nests made with plaster.

Originally posted on BoingBoing.

Window Clippings

Window Clippings 1.1 is a neat little screen capture tool by Kenny Kerr. I tend to rely on the old Alt + PrtScn for screen grabs, but this little tool has some advantages over that method.

One nice feature new to 1.1 is the ability to clear the background images from Vista captures (the new Aero interface allows for "frosted glass" transparency):

Dirty




Clean

MapCruncher for Virtual Earth

MapCruncher is a research project from Microsoft that allows you to layer your own raster images on top of Microsoft's Local Live.

Zooming in and out of the demos locked my browser up for minutes at a time, but it looks very promising.

Where is Mobile WiMAX Today?

A very good comment about the state of WiMax from WiMax.com.

It lists two good differentiators for WiMax over its more traditional cellular competitors: intrinsic support for IP, and the use of the OFDMA air interface.

It also suggests that the momentum for WiMax rollouts will come from the bottom up, rather from large scale deployment by the big telcos. Not sure if I agree with that one - if the technology is suitable it will be used - but it makes a good point that many wireless startups fail waiting for that big telco contact.

Field Of View

Field of View have a nicely executed viewer for panoramic photos.

You can also view your own picures. Seb Przd does just that with some of his Flikr images.

Google Calculator

Google Calculator and Google Conversion offer the easiest way I know of finding out things like what is 30 miles in kilometers?

No need to go to a special page; just type your query straight into Google, and out pops the answer. For instance, what is 27 euros in pounds?

It will even tell you the square root of -4, or confirm the wonderful relationship between the fundamental constants e^(i pi)+1.

Google Maps Mobile

Google Maps Mobile is now available. It runs as a J2ME Midlet, and works fine on my SPV C500.

Simply navigate your mobile device here, and choose the "High spec phone" option (or something similar). It won't display the satellite images though; it claims my phone will not display JPEGs. Perhaps the Java machine on my phone won't, but my phone certainly can.

No way to add push-pins, which seems like a strange omission. First thing I always do is push-pin my house so I can do directions.