Boydo's Tech Talk

Seems like a slightly crowded field these days for mobile OS market share. Up front we have Android and iOS while BlackBerry OS and Symbian are slowly being sucked into a black hole. Meanwhile, Windows Phone is carving out a small niche for itself prior to Windows 8 hitting the scene as WebOS is stuck in a vacuum.

It’s a harsh environment and betting the farm on a mobile OS can take a company under.

So why would Mozilla think of a mobile OS when it could be argued that they have lost control of their own browser?

That remains unclear at the moment but perhaps with their Google partnership for search engine revenues on the default homepage under doubt beyond the current contract. With Google having its own browser and mobile OS and Microsoft with its own browser, mobile OS and search engine it leaves slim pickings for search engine revenues if the two major players don’t want to play ball. Early diversification may help mitigate against this risk but only if there will be monetary gain which is not yet known.

Will B2G be a winner? Time will tell…

Here’s something to keep in mind when using Internet Explorer on Windows XP, Vista and 7.

For a while now, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome have possessed auto-update capabilities (Firefox being more explicit about it while Chrome silently updates itself in the background and applies the changes when it is restarted with nary a peep). Well, as of Internet Explorer 10, Microsoft will be adding functionality similar to the Chrome implementation whereby updates to Internet Explorer will be silent and seamless for those who have opted in for automatic updates through Windows Update.

For us in Australia, we’ve already been subjected to this approach to updates since January effectively making us guinea pigs. That said, I’ve yet to hear any major complaints that have stemmed from automatic updates for those opted in.

These days, it’s becoming less and less favourable for systems to suffer from “update fatigue” allowing them to become progressively more vulnerable to attack. Automatic updates are a great way to handle this particularly for systems where updates are chronically ignored.

Google are rolling out some updates to Google Maps allowing you to see 3D buildings, 45 degree imagery and other visual enhancements to the viewing experience dubbed “WebGL”.

Experience MapsGL

Usually, this is just a matter of clicking the “Try it now button when offered to enabled it in Google Maps and but in some instances you’ll encounter the following error:

We detected that your computer does not meet the system performance requirements for MapsGL.

This can be a bit annoying particularly when you are running a computer with modern hardware but there is a solution.

In Chrome type in “about:flags” in the address bar and you’ll need to click “Enable” underneath the line item for “Override software rendering list”. You’ll then need to click on the “Relaunch Now” button at the bottom of the screen. Once restarted, simply get back to Google Maps and you should find that after you click “Try it now”.

You should then be able to view 3D buildings in the “Google Earth” view like the one below:

Burj Khalifa, Dubai - Google Maps

If this doesn’t work for you then you might need to try disabling extensions one by one to see if any are preventing WebGL from working. Otherwise, you can also try updating your video card drivers which has reportedly worked for some people facing this particular issue.

Browsers these days are blessed with the ability to have many webpages open across a number of tabs and mobile devices are no different. However, in the case of iOS devices you’re not going to be able to open perhaps the twenty or thirty tabs you might do on your desktop or laptop computer.

Furthermore, web browsing may not necessarily be a linear activity. While you are browsing you might find something you might want to read but you don’t want to deviate from your current line of browsing just yet. On a regular computer you can just open up a link in a new tab and get around to it but on a mobile device you may be limited to how many tabs you can open (usually around nine tabs before they dropped in favour of newer content).

So how do you workaround this limitation on iOS?

Well, if you have iOS 5 on your device there is a new feature in Safari called the “Reading List”. Think of it as a temporary list of bookmarks you can create while you are browsing and then read through later on. It saves you having to juggle precious tabs and remember where you saw something you might have wanted to read but couldn’t (or didn’t want to) accomodate at the time.

All you need to do to add an item to the “Reading List” in Safari is hold your finger on top of a link until the menu comes up and choose “Add to Reading List” from the options. It should then jump up to the bookmarks button. To browse your Reading List just tap on the bookmarks button and then the “Reading List” item. You can then toggle between your unread items and all items that have been added to the list. If you want to delete something from the list, just swipe your finger across the item (left to right or right to left) and tap the delete button that appears.

Enjoy a more streamlined and decluttered mobile browsing experience!

For a lot of people using Windows the Twitter client of choice is TweetDeck however it can be a problem to get running if you are unable to install Adobe Air on the computer (which is often the case in corporate or enterprise environments). Otherwise, if you are staunchly against installing Adobe Air on your computer you might find this alternative more ideal.

What you can do is instead go to http://web.tweetdeck.com where you will need to login with your TweetDeck account but if you don’t have an account you can create one on the page. Once signed up, you can then start linking your Twitter and Facebook accounts to your TweetDeck account so all of the updates appear in the one place. Otherwise, if you already have an account, your saved configuration will be used.

The only problem with using the TweetDeck web client is that it only works under Google Chrome or Safari with Firefox and Internet Explorer users left out in the cold. Typically, businesses may not allow Chrome or Safari to be installed as Internet Explorer offer far more flexibility in the way it can be locked down and restricted through system policies. Furthermore, the pace at which Chrome is updated often outstrips the ability of the IT department to undertake proper compatibility testing before allowing updates to be deployed to company assets.

However, for the rest of us at home, the TweetDeck web client is perhaps a good way to keep track of Facebook and Twitter updates on your Windows machines if you want to reduce the range of software installed on the,

Here’s something that I encountered this week when attempting to update my installation of Firefox (again, the updates seem incredibly frequent now). I repeatedly encountered the following error when trying to load Firefox after the upgrade:

Your computer must be rebooted to complete a previous upgrade of Firefox. Do you want to reboot now?

Even after several reboots the error would not budge which put me at a bit of a stalemate until I worked out what I needed to do.

You don’t need to uninstall Firefox but simply delete its application folder and reinstall from scratch. Make sure you download the latest version of the full installation first then complete the following (on Windows):

• Navigate to “C:\Program Files” (on 32-bit systems) or “C:\Program Files (x86)” on 64-bit systems,
• Delete the “Mozilla Firefox” folder,
• Accept any administrative prompts that may appear,
• Reinstall Firefox.

You should then be back up and running with your Firefox configuration intact (as that data lives in “C:\Users” which has been left untouched).

Here’s a quick tip tonight.

With services like “Find my iPhone” on the iOS platform and similar services available on Windows Phone and some Android phones it’s interesting to see this proliferate to other “non-cellular” devices such as the humble digital camera. These days, more cameras are now building in GPS functionality such as the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FT3 that I am mucking around with at the moment. Recording GPS coordinates is nice but useless if you have lost your camera and you don’t know which photos have been captured by it and uploaded to the web.

Enter stolencamerafinder.

All you need to do visit this website and either enter in the serial number of your camera or, more conveniently, drag and drop an unedited photo taken by the camera (which only works in Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox) then do a search. The site will then check the serial number against its database of images it has indexed to match the serial number. If there’s a hit you’ll get a result but if not then you might need to wait a while and try again.

This service was used to reunite an owner with his expensive Canon EOS 5D Mark II which had been lost for three years – quite amazing. That said, you shouldn’t rely on this service to help track down your missing camera though, your mileage may vary from anywhere between finding your camera and not finding it at all.

Hi folks, just wanted to give you an update on where I am at with testing the early alpha port of Ice Cream Sandwich (or ICS as it is now being abbreviated) to the Samsung Galaxy S.

Initially, I was testing Galnet MIUI as I believed that was a proper implementation of ICS but it was actually the MIUI  fully customised ROM containing the ICS kernel (everything else appeared to be the same as mainstream MIUI). So I ended up turfing that and going with a port being tracked on XDA Developers here.

At the time of writing I have just flashed the Alpha 6 build of the ICS port and it is certainly much better than Alpha 4 that I had tried a day or two ago. A truckload of work has gone into it already to make it usable but there are a few things still to fix up including Bluetooth, GPS, camera and video recording. As such, I probably wouldn’t recommend it for regular use on your main phone just yet but if you have a secondary backup/test phone then knock yourself out. I have encountered a few reboots and screen glitches (things to be expected from stable builds).

Anyway, the interface has had more polish and shine applied over and beyond what we have seen in the 2.0 releases (Eclair, Froyo & Gingerbread) with some similarities with what has been seen in Honeycomb on the Android tablets (such as the screen unlock mechanism and screen transitions). The interface is still quite fluid even on an older device like the Samsung Galaxy S with its single core CPU. You can now also take screenshots by holding down the volume down button and power buttons simultaneously which will come in handy.

Speaking of screenshots, here are some to tide you over:

About Phone

Phone Dialer

Mobile Browser (Not Chrome Though)

Google Talk

Google Plus

Home Screen

Storage Utilisation

In the meantime, Samsung hasn’t formally announced a release for the aging Samsung Galaxy S but there does appear to be a release on the cards for the Samsung Galaxy S 2. We’ll see how that pans out but of course the developer community is pulling together to make it happen unofficially.

Here’s another quick tip for the security conscious people out there.

Windows 7 supports a security protocol called TLS (Transport Layer Security) which superseded SSL as the security protocol of choice. Specifically, Windows 7 supports up to TLS 1.1 but the support for this version is disabled by default which forces compatibility back down to TLS 1.0.

Unfortunately, TLS 1.0 is susceptible to an attack by BEAST (Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS) which basically allows acookie (the thing that proves your identity to a website after you have logged in) to be decrypted allowing bad guys to be able to login as someone else without the need for a username and password.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser simply uses the abilities of the underlying Windows operating system in its ability to support a suite of encryption protocols including the older SSL protocols and the most recent TLS protocols. If you’re using Windows 7 you can easily enable TLS 1.1 and avoid this BEAST vulnerability by visiting this link at Microsoft Support and clicking on the “Fix it” link under the “Fix it solution for TLS 1.1 on Internet Explorer” section (just make sure you use the “Enable” version. This basically automates the required setting updates without you having the go through the registry or local policies to enable it.

It’s a quick and easy method to improve your browser security. Stay tuned for updates for the other browsers over the coming weeks.

Here’s a quick tip tonight.

If you use Google Chrome, you can reopen a tab that you closed (on purpose or accidentally) by right clicking on a tab up the top of the browser window and selecting “Reopen closed tab”. Chrome will then open the last tab that was closed hopefully getting you back to where you were previously.

Too easy!