René Rebe

Joke from the IDF: Intel to open Intel Atom (Moblin) App store. Any they really expect apps to be submitted and sold in quantities over there?

According to my this mornings newspaper, even Vodafone is about to open their own App store.

I really wonder how so many companies (Google, RIM, Palm, Nokia, …) manage to copy Apple that badly. Do they really expect to gain more than a single digit percentage of that market and sell thru this kind of channel?

Companies: If you have not noticed, Apple’s App store is successful only because they have a single, compatible platform that even sold well.

Where are the Intel Atom Moblin devices? And where is the single, compatible and coherent platform Nokia and Vodafone want to target?

I wonder where all those zillion app stores will be in a year. My bet: All lonely, forgotten, buried under dust like an old ghost town – until the power is finally switched of at their dedicated servers, …

Side anecdote: I recently even tried out some Intel Moblin Beta: On non-Intel graphic chips it run in software rendering mode slower than an i386 run Windows 3.11, and on three different Intel GMA systems I had around the shipped Intel X.org driver crashed and froze the whole machine. Funnily at that time no GMA500 driver was supplied either, so that Sony Vaio P run even in the slowest software blitting mode I ever saw!

That where golden times when we developers had to target Windows, Linux and Mac. Nowadays it’s one app store per device and vendor :-(

I guess no-one would expect the first non-Linux kernel support added to the T2 SDE to be Win32 (32 bit Windows), or in our case more precisely MinGW. But that’s how the first bits of non-Linux, alternative kernel support finally found it’s way into the T2 SVN tree. As of T2 r34090 one should be able to get Windows .exe files cross-compiled, and out of T2.

This is just the beginning, basic and preliminary support glue. Of course all of this is new, and will get a little more advanced with other BSD, et al. kernels to be added to T2. Time and contributions will tell.

Of course you can engage ExactCODE for professional software development and support, and this new Win32 bits, as usual.

I don’t get it:

Snow Leopard
The world’s most advanced operating system. Finely tuned.

Finely tuned? Nothing more. Do they mean up to now Mac OS X was just slow, sluggish and they finally just finely (or otherwise where forced to, e.g. by customer complains) tuned it?

This sounds way too much like Microsoft Windows ads: Windows 7 – (Vista) finely tuned!

Are they sure they contracted the right PR company?

You want to convert an PDF into bitmap graphics? Or bitmap images into a PDF? Split a multi-page file in per-page files or vice versa? Have the text in existing, archived bitmap images recognized (OCRed)?

Since version 2.7 ExactScan Pro comes with support to not only process image data from an actual scanner, it can now also load common bitmap file formats and PDFs and process the data as it it came from a scanner!

This means all the various image processing filter options, enhancements as well as the OCR are available for batch processing of existing files. Just setup your workflow in the Preferences, choose the profile you want to use and select File -> Open File…

The possibilities are endless.

PS: File input processing is a dedicated feature of the Professional version.

Update: Now with 16 bit channel support!

I updated my ExactImage-based QuickLook plugin to also correctly display certain flavors of color mapped PCX files, enjoy: 1.6 update with improved PCX support. As usual: If you have another image format you like to preview on the Mac just let me know!

some-mac user$ svn ci some-file.M
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: system(’vi svn-commit.tmp’) returned 256

I hate it, how I hate this. It just happened two times in a row, unbelievable! How the heck could Apple’s engineers think one can work with such kind of bugs in the system and/or tools?!?

So, iTunes 8.2.1 comes with:

iTunes 8.2.1 provides a number of important bug fixes and addresses an issue with verification of Apple devices

such as not “accidently” syncing to a Palm’s Pre. Palm’s former Apple engineers might have implemented the Apple file “upload” protocol in all fine details (as can be derived from open source iPod access libraries anyway), but there is one simple show-stopper that Apple probably added in this update that Palm can not circumvent easily:

if (idVendor != 0×05ac) return false; // (Apple Inc.)

Palm can not just change their USB Vendor (and/or Product ID), …

For the Bodum glass article I was bitten by the iPhone’s photo application’s “email photo” functionally, which scales the photo by 50%, from 1600×1200 to 800×600. Of course far from ideal when you want to mail it to your server account for publishing.

Just in this minute I spotted a nice tip on the Daring Fireball, how to get the full-res version into your email: cut’n paste it! (Note: cut’n paste is a new feature of the iPhone OS, available since OS 3.0 and up, …) Now, that cut and paste is finally available on the iPhone, probably something one better get used to :-)

For some time it always confused, annoyed me that pasted text on Mac OS X always kept the format. For example when text from the web or email is pasted vise versa or elsewhere, e.g. a text editor or word processor. After having some non-matching mess on the screen I usually used “Format -> Make Plain Text” (in Apple Mail) to get rid of all the arbitrary formating mix.

To my surprise I just found out yesterday (on some other news site - I forgot which, now in retrospect it was listed on some this week), it’s actually possible to insert without format: “Edit -> Paste and Match Style” is the innocent menu item that does it! Combined with the really hard, next to impossible to press key binding: “Option + Shift + Apple + v”!!! A combination where even as trained Emacs user my fingers get rather twisted, …

I never gave this specific menu item much attention, because it’s only available in some programs dealing with formated, attributed text and probably because for me the textual description (Paste and Match Style) did nor really ring a bell to actually stand for Without Format or Style.

Anyway, good to know it’s there. No wonder why some news and blog sites explained this week how to make it the default “Paste”, namely via the “Preference -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts” settings.

So after 9 years (jpeglib v6b was released 27-Mar-1998) finally a new jpeglib release sees the light of day. v7 comes with the lossless crop patch merged, as well as artithmetic coding (which I thought was patented by IBM, though maybe that patent finally expired?) as well as more DCT scaling (N/8, 8/N) with all N in [1..16] (formerly since v5 from 24-Sep-94 only N in [1,4,8] where supported).