Launchpad…gate?

 Apple, Ubuntu  7 Responses »
Oct 212010
 

So I’m sure I’m not the only person in the Ubuntu community who also owns an Apple product or 3. In turn, this means I’m probably not the only one who was interested to check out Apple’s conference yesterday, where they announced iLife ’11, new MacBook Air models and OS X 10.7 ‘Lion’.

Lion is where the interesting part lies, in that one of the new features is named ‘launchpad’ or ‘the launchpad’. Now what does this mean for Launchpad, the web application by Canonical? I don’t know…probably nothing. What I have seen is a lot of people commenting on what Canonical may or may not do.
Personally, I think that while Canonical do own the trademark to the name, it’s probably not worth going after until it becomes clear whether Apple are going to continue using ‘the launchpad’ or not as the name. Don’t get me wrong, it would give Canonical (and therefore Ubuntu) a lot of press, but I’m just not sure it would be worth it right now.

Either way, it should be interesting to see where it goes and what happens.

 Posted by at 10:42  Tagged with: , , , ,

iDroid

 Apple, Other  10 Responses »
Feb 082010
 

Before I start – no, this isn’t a Star Wars post :) Sorry!

I currently have an iPhone, and no, I’m not ashamed to admit it, though it is a little awkward that I can’t sync it with my desktop. I’m also not ashamed to admit that I love it, I really do. But as with a lot of things, I find the Apple design of the phone a little restrictive. Sure it’s polished, and it looks sleek and sexy (to some at least), but I just can’t help feeling that I’d prefer an Android phone.

I’ve been looking, albeit briefly, at what Android phones are available on the UK market. Out of the choices, I think I’d prefer a Nexus One, though as far as I’ve seen – they’re Vodafone exclusive, and I’m on an O2 contract, so it’s a no-go. I’d love to hear from some of you guys that have Android phones, and what phones they are, because I’m definitely in the market!

 Posted by at 22:04  Tagged with: , , , ,

Dropbox

 Apple, Internet, Other, Uni  21 Responses »
Apr 172009
 

From what I recall, quite a few people have heard of, or even use Dropbox.

Dropbox is similar to Apple’s iDisk, in the respect that it is an online backup/data storage facility. The only difference is, dropbox will give you 2GB of free storage, just for signing up. There’s also an option to pay either $9.99 per month, or $99 per year, which will upgrade your storage capacity to 50GB. For me personally, I don’t (yet) need any more than the 2GB, though I may consider looking into the 50GB option in future.

What I like most about Dropbox is that it’s cross platform. For me this is fantastic, because I run Ubuntu (9.04 64 bit if you’re interested) on my desktop, and my laptop is an aluminum Macbook. Now I had the problem of somehow remembering to put things in the Dropbox directory so that they would get synced to the server and thus between my 2 machines.

Solving that problem was a lot easier than I could’ve expected. No thanks to my friend Gabby, who told me what he had done on IRC. Using

ln -s

you can create soft links to the directories to/from the Dropbox directory, and any changes you make to that directory outside of the Dropbox directory, get automatically synced. Put simply, if I make any changes to something in ~/Documents, it automatically gets backed up/synced to Dropbox. Awesome!!

If you’re unsure of the syntax of

ln

, as it is a little confusing, it’s the following:

ln -s target link_name

And finally, if you want to join Dropbox because you haven’t already, following this link will (according to Dropbox) get you a little bit more space :)

Edit: I’ve just been informed (thanks Matteo!) that the referral links don’t seem to be giving extra space any more. This is likely because Dropbox limits the amount they give out. Please feel free to use the link at the end of the post if you want, but don’t feel obliged to if you do want to sign up. Join Dropbox

 Posted by at 23:17  Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,

Google Chrome

 Internet, Ubuntu  7 Responses »
Sep 042008
 

There’s been what I would describe as “mass press overload” on Google Chrome since it’s release a day or 2 ago (depending on time zones). So I thought I’d join in ;) And yes – I’m currently posting this from Chrome, running on Windows Vista.

Unfortunately, I can’t try it out on Ubuntu just yet, as there’s no Linux builds, and trying to build it from source won’t work, many have tried. People were hopeful that it would run in wine…No dice. So we’ll just have to wait. Until then, I can continue merging and moving threads about on the forums. Which have been literally inundated with threads regarding the browser, so there is now a “Google Chrome MegaThread” :p

I have to say, I actually quite like it…now that the EULA has been revised that is. And it renders very quickly (Yes – faster than Safari, which according to Apple is “the fastest, easiest-to-use web browser in the world” – perhaps they should rethink that statement?).

As this blog seems to be getting a lot of hits still concerning Acid3, I tried Google Chrome from the same acid test website. And it gets….78/100! I think that’s pretty respectable, though it fails the LinkTest (screenshot supplied below).

Anyway – more on this later, possibly when there’s major improvements or a Linux version :)

Update: I forgot to add the screenshot of the Acid test, here it is!

 

Acid3 Test Results

Acid3 Test Results

 Posted by at 15:03  Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
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