This post is dedicated to my first frustration as a beginner in Android: mainly, the lack of good  tutorials. Mind you, I am only a beginner in Android as a platform, while in Java I have a fair amount of experience. To my consternation, I have recently discovered that not even Google’s own tutorials are good material for beginning Android development. Take, for example, this tutorial, the second step in the Notepad tutorial by Google.  Take this code for example:

public boolean onCreateContextMenu(Menu menu, View v
        ContextMenuInfo menuInfo) {
    super.onCreateContextMenu(menu, v, menuInfo);
    menu.add(0, DELETE_ID, 0, R.string.menu_delete);
}

If I were a Google manager, I would definitely fire the guy who wrote the Notepad tutorial webpages.

                          

However, it is not rarely that one may need other options to filter the posts they want to export (such as by categories or tags). So what can you do then?

One trick would be to assign all the posts you want to export to a certain user (perhaps one created for this purpose) and then export those. However, this is a rather tedious method. Of course, someone with mySQL knowledge could dig into the database and quickly change the posts.

The way of this how-to is to alter the export scripts of Wordpress in order to add the option to filter by category. The fix can be downloaded here. To install it, simply unzip it and copy the files as appropriate inside the wp-admin folder. The zip contains one export.php which should overwrite the existing export.php in the wp-admin folder of your Wordpress installation and another export.php inside folder includes which should overwrite the correponding wp-admin/includes/export.php in your Wordpress installation.

This mod was tested under Wordpress 2.9.1 and 2.9.2 (current version at the time of this post). The files come without any warranty whatsoever. I am using them successfully myself but I cannot account for any circumstances which may cause them to misfire under your own environment so use at your own risk!

                          

First of all, let’s see what the Acer Liquid E is bragging with:

• Android 2.1: The Eclair is something we all have been expecting, but it seems a bit inefficient to release this with a “new” device, especially since there’s nothing really new there.
• Home screen: They claim this “new” feature supports 5 home screens allowing for more apps. Sorry Acer, but the A100 in its Asia (AAP) version does have 5 home screens, even with Android 1.6. Nothing new here.
• Quick Contacts Switching between address book and social networks? The usefulness of this is questionable but depending on how the user has its social network contacts organized if might be actually cool.
• Live wallpapers If this means that you can send any image from your browser or image viewer to the desktop wallpaper, it’s a great thing.
• A new keyboard layout The Android 1.6 keyboard is acceptable, the Android 2.1 keyboard is the God of touch screen keyboards. No merit for Acer though, it’s Google’s Eclair!
• Updated version of the Android browser Again, it’s the Eclair speaking here. Still no Adobe Flash support though and while all the other improvements (such as Geolocation) are nice, it’s not enticing enough!

However, these improvements don’t justify (in my opinion), launching a completely new smartphone since all the hardware is the same. Yes, we have the same underclocked Snapdragon, same amount of RAM, same camera, same battery, same everything except for the screen which was upgraded to 16 million colors. While the screen and the Android upgrade are ok and nice, it seems more like a useless and costly effort on behalf of Acer.

Let’s not forget, dear readers, that Sony-Ericsson has only days left until the launching of Xperia X10 which through battery life alone will wipe out any competition on the Android market at the present time. Moreover, in the next couple of months we hope to see Motorola’s Motoroi, another great contender, both which are sure to draw a fair share of the smartphone market to their respective producers and to make everyone else’s prices plummet.

So why a new device? It doesn’t bring any dealbreaking improvements, it will decrease the price for the A100 (surely) while having nothing really going on for itself. In my opinion, a software upgrade for the A100 would have been more than sufficient to bring back the Acer Liquid name into the game and smack Motorola and Google really hard. Seriously, with the A100 boasting Android 2.0 or 2.1, Acer would have no competition on the market at this exact moment in time and even with the upcoming Xperia X10 from Sony-Ericsson, the Liquid would still have price on its side.

Truly a shame, I say. What do you think?

                          

Instead, this site will focus more on technology, politics and web development, in an attempt to share more of my experience as a web developer and quiet observer of the world around.

Coming soon, I will have a short series of articles on Wordpress, object-oriented programming in PHP5 as well as reviews of some of the newer gadgets that I managed to lay my hands on.

So stay tuned and don’t forget to also check out my new fantasy blog, if you feel like taking a break from the real world!

                          

One of these questions is which phone is better among the three? I’ve been pondering this for a while and I still have no definitive answer. Frankly, after weeks of research, I am only close to taking Motorola Milestone out of the race. I know many people out there will suggest I take out the Acer … but I won’t.

Now let me explain.

First of all, I am mainly a home user. I turned to these phones for two reasons: one is that I got used to having a wi-fi device with me at all times, listen to music and use a few applications, games and so on. I used to have an iPod Touch (very good device) and a mobile phone. Now I’m tired of having two things in my pockets: I just want one. The other reason is that I’ve started to code for the Android platform and I’d like to actually have a device to work with.

Basically for me it’s important to have a good mobile phone, with wi-fi access, a load of applications to choose from, gps, good sound, 35mm jack for headphones, that is snappy and with decent battery.

So how do the contestants fare against my needs? Well, to start with the current underdog, Motorola Milestone (or the Droid, with Android 2.0), is a fair choice. It offers a great GPS application, multitouch screen (not sure what are the benefits in practice since while Android does support multitouch on version 2, there aren’t apps that work with it), 16 millions colors on the screen, decent sound, not to mention the much appreciated around the Internet QWERTY slide keyboard.

But there are reasons why the Milestone is not good for me. The processor runs at 500Mhz and it’s the slowest of the three. That means sooner or later it will lag behind in running applications. The battery isn’t brilliant (it’s better than Nexus but poorer than Liquid). It’s damn heavy (at 165 grams) and I don’t like heavy phones (even if they would make me coffee in the morning). The camera isn’t the best of the bunch (I have my own SLR but it would be nice to have a usable mobile camera). This Motorola product is clearly aimed at the business world.

The Google Nexus One (by HTC) has a lot running for it too. An AMOLED touchscreen with 16 million colors, great integration with many Google services,  supports wireless-n standard, has a great 1Ghz processor which runs on 512MB of RAM. Not to mention it looks great.

But the Nexus One has issues too. Its battery is the poorest of them all, beating only Apple’s iPhone (by 30 hours in the specs which translates to perhaps 2 extra hours of real-life battery). Also, it’s damn expensive and the high price is mostly due to the hype than actual quality. What good is a phone that you have to recharge every two days?

At last, Acer Liquid remains in doubt too. It has a nice design, large screen and great battery that comes close to my current phone (which lives nearly 7 days of average use without recharge). Also, its performance benchmarks beat the hell out of the Motorola Milestone Droid and the beating will become more severe once Acer will upgrade to Android 2.1 in March. Also it is quite light for its size (at 130 grams). Probably the best advantage is that it’s the cheapest of the bunch.

The fact that the Acer Liquid runs a 1Ghz processor underclocked at 768Mhz can’t be easily placed as an advantage  or downside. It is much snappier than Motorola’s Droid Milestone and it can probably be brought back to the 1Ghz speed (with the cost of battery life, of course). Compared to the Nexus One, it has only 256Mb of RAM (while the Nexus uses 512MB).

Acer Liquid’s downsides are the screen which only bears 256k colors (like a regular color phone nowadays), the fact that it packs Android 1.6 (although an upgrade was announced in March) is not thrilling and neither is the lack of a quality GPS application.

In the end, the question is whether to pick a moderate performance phone and a fair price (Acer Liquid) or to go for the better but more expensive Nexus One. Sure, there are many great things on the way (such as the Sony-Ericsson Xperia X10) but if we were to keep waiting for the best, we would wait forever. As for me, I’m waiting to see if I could catch a good deal on an Nexus. If I don’t then I’ll probably stick with the Acer Liquid.

                          

It’s been more than a week since I’ve had my new phone, the Acer Liquid. Like I mentioned in a previous post, I had been inclining towards Acer’s smartphone (the Acer Liquid) despite competition from Motorola Milestone and HTC’s Google Nexus. The choice was made mostly due to the more than reasonable pricing of the Acer Liquid as well as better battery life.

Since battery life and virtual keyboard responsiveness have been issues of debate among reviewers, I will draw a line from the start and say that Acer Liquid’s battery life is better than Nexus and the Milestone, but only in the Asia (AAP) version of the phone.Also, the AAP version of the firmware has a great virtual keyboard. The European and American versions of the phone (EMEA), have an atrocious battery life and a horrible responsiveness of the virtual keyboard.

Needless to say, my phone comes from Asia (from Honk Kong to be precise) and I consider it to be a great piece of technology that’s only limited by lack of some of my favorite applications (no Android version of Yahoo Messenger at the time of my review, for example).

To start with, battery life! The battery on Acer Liquid counts 1350 mAh and on an average use (meaning about an hour of phone calls, a few hours of wireless access, a few minutes of gaming, several hours of music, couple of photos taken, an hour of GPS navigation through 3G) lasts a little more than a day and a half. For comparison, a colleague’s Milestone doesn’t last a day with the same amount of use. I don’t have access to a Nexus, but since the theoretical declared standby is nearly half that of the Liquid, I would consider the Google Nexus unusable under these conditions.

Also, both the Android settings and the Acer settings offer you many ways to preserve battery life (forcing 2G connections only, disabling GPS, disabling data through the mobile network and forcing it only through wireless connections, disabling wi-fi notifications of new networks, disabling wi-fi entirely, etc) all of them very useful, especially when you’re traveling and you may not have access to a plug/computer for recharging.

For some tips, I would suggest you to limit the use of 3G networks unless you’re navigating with GPS (3G has faster position updates and increased precision). Also, you should keep an eye on what applications you install. For example, I had a very bad experience with Twidroid (the most popular Twitter client for Android) which although it offers  you and option to not load the application at boot time (and thus keep it running), that option does not switch off and the application always loads – and even though notifications may be off, the application will still consume battery life.

The ergonomy of the Acer Liquid is the one thing I would consider a downside. First of all, it’s made of plastic, with a plastic back that you have to pull in order to access the battery, the SIM card and the SD card. I’m pretty sure that a harder shock or pull could tear the back casing apart. Also a great downside is that for accessing either the SIM or the SD card, you must always take out the battery (not only the back cover).

Aside from this, the 3.5mm jack is situated on the “top” of the phone, suggesting it is meant to be carried like that. However, in standby the clock is displayed on the bottom of the phone which means that everytime you want to check your phone you have to extract it all the way from the carrying pouch Acer provides (while phone and sms are notified by a couple of flashing lights on top – would’ve been nice for Acer to have added a clock there too).

On a more positive note, the on/off/standby is ideally positioned 3/4 way up on the left side of the phone, falling right under your index finger (if holding it with your right hand) or thumb (if holding it with your left hand). The volume controls are positioned opposite the on/off/standby switch, on the right side, so also easily accessible.

The camera button is positioned 1/4 way up on the right side, completely unreachable if holding the phone normally, but ideally accessible if holding the phone tilted at 90 degrees (landscape) which is actually the way the camera was meant to be used, allowing much better stability and accuracy.

Aside from this, Acer has given up any other physical controls, allowing for a bigger screen without making the Liquid very bulky. Surely, the 135 grams weight is also due to the all-plastic built, but to be honest, if you take good care of the phone then it’s a fair trade-off.

When it comes to functionality, the Acer Liquid is damn snappy! It’s SnapDragon processor runs only at 768 Mhz but it’s much faster than the Motorola Milestone. Also, when held in landscape mode, the virtual keyboard unleashes its power, allowing for very fast typing.

Here, Acer has no merits – it’s all in Google’s Android since Acer did not change anything. All applications I tried ran without issues, without exceptions.

Acer Liquid is definitely the bang for the buck in the Android world at this time. Good hardware, good software, all at a fairly cheap price. Right now, you can get Acer Liquid in its Asia version at a price of about $400 (400 US dollars). The European version is a bit more expensive but as I mentioned before, it has various severe issues which make it not worth the price.

Truly, I would only give up my Acer Liquid in exchange for Motorola’s Motoroi or Sony Ericsson’s Xperia X10, both of which have not yet been launched.

                          

Windows ACID 3 results:

• Chrome 4.0.249:  100% (and fast!).First run took 0.40 to complete! Yet the next one needed and average of 1.01 seconds.
• Internet Explorer 8.0.76: 12% (fail, poorly). Couldn’t even tell, failed basic tests like Javascript functions.
• Firefox 3.6: 96% (almost!). First run needed 0.73 seconds while the rest took an average of 1.41 seconds.
• Safari 4.0.4: 100% (but slow, seems to pause at 69% and then continue, definitely not “the fastest browser” as Apple claims!). First attempt took 4.10 seconds while the rest needed 1.41 seconds.
• Opera 10.10: 100% (fairly ok, better than Safari but slower than Chrome). First run took 1.51 seconds to complete but strange subsequent runs needed and average of 2.10 seconds.

Mac OS X ACID 3 results:

• Chrome 4.0.249: 100% (very fast!). First test was completed in 3.51 seconds and the rest averaged 1.80 seconds
• Firefox 3.6: 94% (even less!). Firefox finished in 2.86 seconds on the first run and average of 1.51 seconds on the subsequent runs. 4 of the failures were related to SVG graphics and two to DOM functions.
• Safari 4.0.4: 100% (but slow, seems to pause at 69% just like on windows!). First run finished in 7.2 seconds while the rest ran in 3.23 seconds (all of them, identically).
• Opera 10.10: 100% (interestingly, much faster than on windows). First test finished in 4 seconds, while the rest ran erratically with an average of 3.7, but sometimes taking as much as 5.2 seconds (and as less as 2.4 seconds).

What can we learn from here? Firefox 3.6 and Chrome 4 are fighting for the title of the fastest and the best browser. Personally, I think Firefox’s fails in the ACID 3 test are irrelevant to your daily browsing. SVG graphics are not that common in your usual websites so I’m willing to skip that.

Lately I’ve started to prefer the spartan default installation of Chrome as well as the fact that Chrome is much easier on memory than Firefox.

On the other hand, I’m having a hard time considering Safari a contender. Safari is slow by itself (not talking of rendering web pages) as an application and it is also full of useless eye candy (which are not even that nice). Of course, it’s good that it holds up to its goals and deals great with web standards, however its claim to be the fastest browser is not supported by reality.

Opera? Opera is nice. I like Opera. But aside from this, there’s nothing to support Opera in either directions. It’s a good browser and … that’s that. It doesn’t shine neither in speed, nor in looks or features.

Internet Explorer? Well, IE8 has come a long way to becoming a real browser, the closest thing Microsoft has come to that goal. However, it’s blatant lack of standards support (especially on the Javascript side) is unbearable and one of the reasons why Internet Explorer keeps losing supporters.

I keep stressing on web standards compliance and perhaps in a future article I will note why I consider this to be of paramount importance.

                          

At that time, the Android phone not-so-smartly called Droid, allowed Motorola to save itself from the sinking boat of the mobile phone losers. Simultaneously, the former dominant Samsung was jumping in the touchscreen bandwagon while LG and Sony-Ericsson started an assault towards the mi-range.

On the platform level however, this are quite differently. Until the iPhone, Nokia was single-handedly (almost) holding up the Symbian flag. Sony-Ericsson wasn’t helping much, Siemens had sank and Samsung barely scratched the surface in using Symbian on its devices. As a platform, Symbian never gain too much popularity among developers.

Windows Mobile did however, but since the writing on the wall said “Microsoft”, the platform was available only to few.

Things changed when Apple released the iPhone SDK, on the Cocoa platform and since the environment works on Mac (which is based on Unix), soon people “convinced” it to work on other Linux-types. The “cool” factor of the first device (the iPhone) is still making the SDK float, despite the platform limitation issue. A much stronger deterrent in Apple’s case is the choice of language: Objective-C. Objective-C is a grandson of C but with the added difficulty of a totally counter-intuitive syntax, which makes the learning curve steep.

This was the scene when Android came in. Google made Android open from the very first moment which means a lot of device makers hopped on board, starting with Motorola and continuing with HTC, Samsung and Acer. Surely, Archos and LG didn’t wait long.

Android’s advantage lays in the numbers (for they are many) and in the ease of working with the platform. Android SDK uses the Java structure and syntax and comes in a lighter pack than the iPhone SDK. In addition, the Android SDK works on any development platform through its IDE of choice: Eclipse. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux alike.

Between the two, Android has the upper hand. The many producers, the Google name, availability, access and ease of use. These are all working to bury Apple. However, there are also cons. Android suffers from poor performance (requiring more system resources to run: if the iPhone OS did great with a 500 Mhz processor, Android’s minimum for a decent performance is 768Mhz) and lack of style.

Sliding into the underdog’s position, Apple strikes back with its only remaining weapons: innovation and style. Will these be enough to help the iPhone battle the Androids? It will be tough, because the iPhone was and still is a heavily overpriced device while the new Androids attack both the middle and the upper categories and I’m sure many of those who could not afford the iPhone will definitely enjoy grabbing a HTC, LG or Samsung with Android.

The number of Android applications grows everyday and since they are distributed by Google, they are more than a match for Apple’s Store. It is hard to bet on a winner since this confrontation opposes two the most innovative IT companies of all: Google and Apple, but I dare to wager on Google.

                          

Internet Explorer 6’s aging engine allowed Firefox and Opera to gain momentum while Windows Vista provided a kick for Apple OS X and Linux Ubuntu, the first one gaining 2% market share, jumping from 3% to 5% and well beyond.

Why do I say Microsoft’s campaign is poor? Simply because their way of getting the information distorted and against the very things users see when using the competition’s products. Let’s take the table presented by Microsoft and look through the competition:

1. Security: only IE8 gets a check for … what? Firefox and Chrome have behind them the Google search engine which scans sites and offers a huge database of “evil” sites. Chrome in particular has a great detection (sure, the version is now 4). From my experience IE8 allowed me to visit a phishing site, while Firefox warned me and Chrome downright didn’t let me go there.

2. Privacy: Sure IE8 allows for private browsing, but so does Firefox. Chrome can do that too, but both IE8 and Firefox have the option one click away while in Chrome it’s well hidden.

3. Ease of use: IE8 claims victory! Are you kidding me? The accelerators are the most annoying thing I’ve ever encountered, with the exception of Visual Search Suggestions. IE8 has come a long way, but it’s just in line with the others (if you disable those ‘features’).

4. Web Standards: IE8 isn’t better, not at all. How can IE8 claim to have invested heavily in CSS 2.1 support when it utterly fails the Acid3 test?? Seriously now, IE8 is the poorest, with 20%.

5. Developer Tools: First of all, Chrome also brings some to the game. Second, what IE8 has barely compares to what Firefox has. Throw in Firebug and IE8 has nothing.

6. Reliability: Chrome has both and it is outstanding. Each tab is a process. IE8 doesn’t have that isolation. Well, it tries to, as it can detect and close the offending tab itself, but that detection isn’t 100% accurate and does not apply when the core process fails, case in which there’s no isolation and no recovery. In Chrome all processes are independent and even when closing the initial process, the rest of the tabs remain. Firefox doesn’t have isolation, that’s true, but it has outstanding recovery. Here Chrome is the real winner.

7. Customizability: is this even a word?! First of all, how can you say that Internet Explorer 8 is customizable if it has everything right out of the box. And actually there’s a lot IE8 doesn’t have right out of the box, like an ebay tool for example. All it has are the annoying “accelerators”.

8. Manageability: what the hell are “enterprise tools” in a browser? And guidance to … what? For those unfamiliar with browsers there’s a very well written help section (especially for Chrome). Not to mention I have used IE8 for quite a while since I skipped on to Windows 7 and I haven’t see any of the “guidance” or “enterprise tools”.

9. Performance: it’s not a tie, not by a longshot. Sure, they’re right, the greatest limitation to browsing is your internet connection but there’s still a big difference once the page i ready to be rendered and rendering engines do make quite a difference. OK, it may not be relevant for 75% of the people (if it were, Microsoft would’ve been out of business a long time ago) but it’s there and it’s noticeable (see my browser speed tests – I didn’t devise the tests but I did run them and tried to keep some statistics). Of course, Microsoft does cover its weak points in the blanket of “irrelevance”.