Elephantsquared.

Great news for all Android addicts out there! A few hours ago, Xavier Ducrohet, Android SDK Tech Lead, announced Android 2.0 (aka Eclair) support in the SDK! The Android 2.0 platform includes some new User Features like multiple accounts support (including Exchange accounts), a better virtual keyboard and some Browser and Camera enhancements. You can find more details about all the new features that reside inside Android 2.0 here along with a few details about the new Platform Technologies such as a new Media Framework and a vast series of new Framework APIs.

I’ve finally made up my mind to upgrade to Snow Leopard. It has been a day or so since I did a clean install of the new Mac OS X. Well, the truth is nothing looks different from the previous version (10.5) until the moment you start to interact with this version of Mac OS X. The first thing that you may notice is the missing icon of your hard drive. Snow Leopard clearly urges users to change their cluttering-workspace behaviors towards a fewer-(if none)-icons desktop environment. Other than that, there are numerous other refinements you can find out about here. After a day of usage these are my likes and dislikes about the new Mac OS X aka Snow Leopard.

Likes:

• The secondary tap/click on the Dock icons pops up an nicely transparent menu that looks just perfect.
• Snow Leopard supports three- and four-finger gestures for all mac notebooks with Multi-Touch trackpads.
• In case you did have a Mac notebook with Multi-Touch trackpad you might have heard of MultiClutch. MultiClutch allows you to assign custom keyboard shortcuts in a given app to a given gesture. I personally used MultiClutch mostly for swiping back and forward inside Firefox. Well, Snow Leopard seems to be able to handle these swipes without any other third party application.
• Do you like the Grid View of the Stacks? Now you ‘ll love it! With its native folders support you will be able to open folders in a stack to see all the files inside and quickly return to previous folders.
• I can’t count the times I wanted to look up the date and had to switch to Dashboard or look at the Calendar icon in my hiding-on Dock. The date can now appear alongside the time in the menu bar which is definitely a time saver.
• When I first heard of the new borderless quicktime I knew it would be awesome. At first it may look strange to you but you ‘ll get used to it shortly.
• What a relief. Since I first saw this on the iPhone I wanted it so badly. Address Book now syncs with Google! Hurray!
• “Ok, we are in the Trash now. I need to take this accidentally deleted file back to where it came from. Wait a minute.. Where on earth did it came from?” Has this ever happened to you? No problem. The “Put Back” option inside the Trash gives you the option to retrieve that deleted file and put it back, even if you don’t recall where back is.
• Another cool feature in the new Mac OS X resides inside the Dock preferences. It is a check box that allows you to minimize windows into the application icon rather than to the special section of the Dock. It comes in very handy and you can you can either fire up Exposé or click and hold on any icon in the Dock, to see that both are displaying minimized windows a little bit smaller.
• Are you a Windows user? If yes, don’t worry, no one is perfect. The new Mac OS X enables you to access the files on your Mac OS X partition from Windows. It supports read-only access for security reasons.
• Finally, TextEdit’s automatic spelling correction rocks! If you are a regular TextEdit user you ‘ll love it.

However there are a couple things I don’t like about the new Mac OS X.

Dislikes:

• Firstly, I could not help but notice this awkward, you might say, transition from space to space. I don’t know if you are using Spaces at all (although I think you should) but you will definitely notice this clumsy effect. It lasts for milliseconds but hell yeah it is noticeable. I don’t recall this happening in Leopard. Has anyone else noticed this?
• Last but not least, when Apple introduced Multi-Touch trackpads I noticed that people (including myself) kept pinching (opening and closing) by accident and that caused zooming in and out icons in Finder windows (which was undeniably one of the worst things you could do with your Multi-Touch trackpad). Soon, a software update was released fixing this “bug”. Now, why on earth did this came back with Snow Leopard?

Yesterday, while I was reading the news I came across two very interesting ones. Two OS kernels have switched and decided to show the world their interiors, and thus make knowledge available to every one (aka their released license has switched to an open source one ).

The first one was HTC’s kernel of the Hero device, which can be downloaded from HTC’s Developer Center. But the second one I find more interesting, it is Symbian’s kernel that was released, nine months ahaid of scedule, under the Eclipse Public License (EPL).

It looks like that no one wants to stay away from time’s trend, which hopefully will be de facto in the near feature, open source! Who’s coming next?

I got my Brizzly invitation last night. When you first activate your account you will be asked to link your Twitter account. After that you can explore every aspect of this new service. In short you may say Brizzly is Twitter enhanced. It has everything Twitter has like Search, Trends and Saved Searches and extends by including a few more amazing features that make Brizzly stand out, like:

• inline display of video, images, and maps
• trending topics with context
• multiple account support
• photo upload
• groups
• muting
• drafts

Apart from that, Brizzly’s user interface is also as simple as Twitter’s giving you the option to choose between Standard (which looks like almost exactly like Twitter’s UI) and Wide view. There are also a few other minor things that you may be familiar with such as typing ‘j’ and ‘k’ to scroll tweets up and down.

Warning: After joining Brizzly, there is a chance you may never have to login via twitter.com again. :P

Here is an introduction to Brizzly, the new social media reader from Thing Labs. Enjoy!

Well, well, well… Peter Westwood announced the next version of WordPress. No, its not the much desired 2.9 version. It’s the 2.85 version aka The Hardening Release, that includes a few fixes (mainly for security) like:

• A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
• Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
• Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
• Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

Peter also gave some piece of advice to all those who think their WordPress site has been compromised by an exploit, to check the WordPress Exploit Scanner. A WordPress plugin that searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious. It also examines your list of active plugins for unusual filenames.

Go ahead, give it a try. Upgrade to WordPress 2.8.5 and try out the WordPress Exploit Scanner if you are suspicious about your WordPress installation.

We knew it was coming. OpenBSD 4.6 is now available with lots of new features. Except for the several improved hardware support and other improvements, this release includes a few worth-mentioning improvements concerning the pf (Packet Filter), a default system’s software aka one of the most advanced firewall software.

• Enabled pf by default in the rc.conf.
• Removed pf scrub rules, and only do one kind of packet reassembly. Rulesets with scrub rules need to be modified because of this.
• Regular rules can now have per-rule scrub options.
• Added new “match” keyword which only applies rule options but does not change the current pass/block state.
• Make all pf operations transactional to improve atomicity of reloads.
• Stricter pf checking for ICMP and ICMPv6 packets.
• Various improvements to pfsync to lower sync traffic bandwidth and optionally allow active-active firewall setups.
• Fix pf scrub max-mss for IPv6 traffic.

You can find more details about all the new features shipping with this release here.

Last but not least, as Jeremy S. Anderson said:

There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don’t believe this to be a coincidence.

I got my Measy account a couple of days ago and I have to say it is pretty much useful. Measy is an online service that helps you find the perfect gadget the fun way! For the time being Measy can search for Digital Cameras, DSLRs, HDTVs and Netbooks. Other than that, you can find your gadget by exploring or by taking a quiz.

The by exploring way at first reminds you of an all-time-classic online shop with the huge lists and the never-ending pages, but if you look closer you will see a few other views, that will surprise you a bit, that you can switch to anytime. Apart from the classic line-by-line view, there is the side-by-side view, where you will be able to see fewer items per page side-by-side but able to compare more specific details of each group of products per page. I bet you will be amazed by the amount and the clarification of the specific details you can see there. There is also the detailed view where you can see a product per page with full product details.

The by taking a quiz way is much more fun way to find exactly what you are looking for. Starting with a scroll bar that you can move left or right depending on the amount of money your budget equals to and moving on to answer a few other highly clarifying questions about your product search (like How important is size? and How important is customer service and warranty?) you will definitely come up with a product that matches perfectly to what you have been looking for.

There are also a few other things that make Measy different from other online shops. Exploring by yourself is the best way to find them!

Measy is still in private beta and invitation only but you can sign up for an invitation here.

There has been some very interesting activity at hacks.mozilla.org lately. As Christopher Blizzard said in the according blog post “One new feature that we’re including as part of Firefox 3.6 is support for web pages to access machine orientation information if it’s available. As you can see from the demo you can use it to figure out if the machine is moving and what direction it’s facing.”

Just sit back and watch. This new device API will blow your mind. :)

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