Engadget’s Samsung Galaxy Tab Review

The Samsung Galaxy Tab gets a fairly good review. When I look at the price tag in the US, which is $600, I think they could learn from that over here in Europe. In the Netherlands for example the recommended retail price is €750, which is over a thousand dollars. That’s an outrageous difference in price.

Link : Engadget – Samsung Galaxy Tab review

Adobe Demos Flash-to-HTML5 Conversion Tool

The fact that Apple does not allow Flash on iOS devices is gradually becoming a problem for Adobe. Very slowly, sites are enhancing and updating their content to make it compatible with HTML5 so their rich content can be viewed on the Safari browser of the iPhones, iPods and iPads.

Creating HTML5 content is much harder currently than creating Flash content. Needless to say that engineer Rik Cabanier’s demo of a utility that converts a Flash file into an HTML5 webpage delivered him a huge round of applause at the Adobe MAX 2010 event.

Note that this is a tech demo, which does not promise implementation in the next version of Flash Designer. Anyway, we got an important glimpse of the direction Adobe is heading into.

Check out what engineer Rik Cabanier showed (just a tech demo, no promises, etc.) during MAX sneak peeks Tuesday night:

 

Are you surprised? Don’t be. As I’ve written many times, Adobe lives or dies by its ability to help customers solve real problems. That means putting pragmatism ahead of ideology.

Link : John Nack on Adobe – Adobe demos Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tool

OS X Tip: Prevent iTunes from Opening when Pressing Play/Pause Key

People that own a Mac and use Spotify must have noticed the same annoying behavior of iTunes as I did. When you press the Play/Pause key on your keyboard, not only will Spotify start/stop playback of your music, but iTunes will open and start playing music as well. I don’t know if Apple sees this as an intended feature of iTunes but what I do know is that it’s incredibly annoying to say the least.

After looking around for a while on the Internet for a solution I found a workaround that is very elegant and does not need any additional programs to be installed or any scripts to be run.

Continue reading OS X Tip: Prevent iTunes from Opening when Pressing Play/Pause Key

CD Review: Gungfly – Please Be Quiet

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you mister Rikard Sjöblom. People who prefer listening to progressive rock may recognize this name as the 28 year-old singer, guitar player, keyboardist and writer of the band Beardfish.

Now please, ladies and gentlemen, don’t be scared and walk away because I mentioned the words “progressive rock” and “Beardfish” in one sentence. Mister Sjöblom does not deserve that. At all. Certainly not if you took the time and opportunity to listen to the album “Please Be Quiet” that he released under the name Gungfly.

Musical phenomenon

Rikard Sjöblom is a musical phenomenon. He is a master on every instrument he touches. He played practically all the instruments on the album except for a few drum and bass parts on a couple of tracks. An absolute joy to listen to. Except for the standard instruments like guitars, keys, bass and drums, he even gets away with incorporating the accordion on a few tracks.

Continue reading CD Review: Gungfly – Please Be Quiet

Can Steve Jobs’ iPhone Walled Garden Model Stop Botnets?

On an iPhone, every app lives in its own “walled garden”. An app can only read and write files in its own document folder and cannot access the document folders of other apps or files of the core system.

Mathew J. Schwartz of InformationWeek has the opinion that this approach should be introduced in Windows as well to “gain an edge in the botnet war of attrition” as he says. And you know what? I think he is right.

If you have read the reports of Apple’s “Back to the Mac” event, you may have noticed that Apple is already heading in that direction. During the keynote, Steve Jobs introduced an app store for the Mac. I am curious if Microsoft will do the same in the future for their Windows OS.

Below the jump you will find a quote and a link to Mathew J. Schwartz complete story.

Continue reading Can Steve Jobs’ iPhone Walled Garden Model Stop Botnets?

iTunes Tip: Keyboard Shortcut for the Search Field

As long as I have been using iTunes on the Mac I have been looking for a keyboard shortcut that puts the cursor in the search field in the upper right corner of the iTunes window. There is absolutely no mention of this shortcut key in the help files or in the menus. Even the official keyboard shortcuts overview for iTunes on Apple’s website does not list it.

After googling for a solution numerous times, trying out lots of key combinations and asking questions on Twitter a couple of times I finally found the answer on a forum:

Command + Option + F

Terrific!

Update January 8th, 2011:
In the Windows version of iTunes, use

CTRL + ALT + F

(Kudos to Stefaan for mentioning this in the comments)

Android Ecosystem Statistics Overload

Impressive stats showing a huge number of Android phone types and OS versions used by Tweetdeck beta testers.

Link : Tweetdeck – Android Ecosystem Infoporn Overload

Update October 10th, 2011: Sadly the enormous amount of comments that could be found below the original post are lost in cyberspace after Tweetdeck moved their blog to Posterous. In the comments there was a very interesting debate going on between Android developers, lovers, haters, neutral observers and more, discussing the fragmentation of the Android platform. Some people did not see it as a problem, but others did. An interesting discussion that is unfortunately now lost forever…  🙁

A couple of the comments that I found interesting are still somewhere in the archives of my Gmail. Maybe I will put a couple of those comments in a new blog post so the discussion can continue. I would be interested in the opinions of people at this moment in time, nearly a year after Tweetdeck’s post.