photo: BGNES

Today Sofia was totally blocked by snow ! I was forced to use alternative transportation to get to work and I was 3 hours late. This was so, because I was unable to get my car out of the garage. When I was little I was always wondering why my parents hate the snow and the winter. I was asking myself: “How can they not love the pretty white snow ?”.

Well…when I grew up and started driving and going to work, I quickly realized why they hate it. Now I also hate it and I just want it to be over AT ONCE !

Please Spring, come as soon as possible !

Best regards to all the lecturers and all my colleagues. We have a lot work to do and I am looking forward to it !    

I just want to say that I grew up with his music and I am feeling awful. I am very, very sad and I feel like crying. This is and end of an era !

R.I.P. Michael, you ROCKED !

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHoDWc22B0

So the new iPhone was announced and everybody jumped 3 meters above the ground. Everybody are excited and fascinated. But is it worth it ?

To be honest I was little disappointed. As I wrote a few months ago, when I bought my iPhone I was really sceptic about it and it surprised me. Now that I love my iPhone, I was expecting that the new one will fix all of the bad things that new old one had and it will make it the ultimate device, but it didn’t.

Let’s go through the new features:

Up to 2x faster

Of course better speed is always a good direction a device could go into, but I really find it kinda useless. You don’t improve the one thing you are best at. It just doesn’t make sense. As I said in my previous post about iPhone, it is the fastest device I know. The Windows Mobile and Symbian ones, are just no match for the iPhone speed. And what did Apple think ? “We should make this device faster, just because we can, not because it is needed”. Good feature, but senseless.

Can record and edit Video

Nice feature, which was a MAJOR drawback in the old versions of iPhone, but this is not really device dependent. It is a feature represented by the new iPhone OS 3.0. So if you have an iPhone 3G, when you upgrade, you will have that feature. Great, but you can have it on the old one also.

3MP Camera

Compared to the old one (2MP) it is not such a breakthrough. 3MP cameras are WAY old now. The latest Nokia, SonyEricsson and Samsung phones have 8MP cameras. My opinion is that if they didn’t spend so much effort on the fastest processor, but instead they had put in at least 5MP camera, this would have been much better.

Voice Control

Great feature ! I have similar one on my current iPhone using third-party software (Vlingo) and it is just awesome ! I hope this is an OS feature, not device dependent, but I will know more when I install the upgrade tomorrow morning (this is the release date of iPhone OS 3.0 – 17.06.2009). I will write an article about the 3.0 OS also later on.

Built-in Compass

Another good feature. Not vital, but interesting. The main purpose of this one is to help you navigate by showing you exactly in which direction you are looking at. I have worked with a lot of different GPS systems, including Toyota Land Cruiser’s one, which has a built-in compass. YES, it is nice, but NO, as I said, it is not vital. More of a add-on than a needed feature.

Cut, Copy and Paste

FINALLY ! This is the MOST annoying feature that the old iPhone has. The lack of cut, copy and paste. It is normal that all of the users have been wining about that one. Absolutely vital future, but also not device depended. You can get it with OS 3.0

MMS Support

Another feature which was strangely missing from the old iPhones. But it is not a mystery. The lack of MMS support and Bluetooth transfer is a following of the WAR that Apple has been leading against Piracy. Little extreme, but understandable. This one is also coming with OS 3.0

Overall Search

The ability to search the whole content of an iPhone from one place. Nice feature, coming with OS 3.0.

Internet Connection Sharing

A feature which was present in all the other mobile phones since the past 10 years is finally coming to the iPhone. Not something that everybody will want or use, but it is nice to have. Because despite the fact that the iPhone is a great Internet communication device, it just cannot do it all. Not sure if it is OS or device dependent.

Voice Memos

Not something remarkable. Tons of free third party applications support that in the old iPhone.

Others

There are also some other minor updates which I won’t cover there. If you want to learn about them, just visit Apple’s website.

Conclusion

So keeping in mind all the new features, is it worth throwing away your old iPhone and buying the new one ? Well it is generally your choice. There is no right answer. I can give you much better opinion after I play around with OS 3.0 a little bit. If the new OS covers the new things nicely, then switching is really not necessary, but time will tell.

Kinda sad

I have a Windows XP desktop PC, to which the printer is connected and shared. My girlfriend’s PC is running Windows Vista and my Notebook is running Windows 7 (quite a diversity, I know). It turned out that I cannot install the printer on the Vista and 7. Every time I attended to, my spooler service crashed and that led to an error and abort of the installation. After a little bit of “Google research” I found out this great article by a guy named “inanis”. Here is the link.

I will also explain the steps that “inanis” gave:

• NOTE: Do this on the machine connected to the printer.
• Run gpedit.msc
• Go to “Local Computer Policies\Administrative Templates\Printers”
◦ Set the setting “Allow print spooler to accept client connections” to “Enabled”
• Go to “User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Control Panel\Printers\”
◦ Set the setting “Point and Print Restrictions” to “Disabled”
• Close the Group Policy Editor
• Go into the Printers and Faxes control panel, right click on the printer and hit properties.
• Click the “Ports” tab
• Uncheck “Enable Bidirectional Printing”
• Close the Printer panels/windows
• Run a command line, type in “gpupdate /force”, and hit enter

HTC Diamond – The Windows Mobile beauty

Great phone ! Incorporating the power of Windows Mobile at full. I have always been saying that Windows Mobile is the ultimate platform for mobile devices. The device is small enough, beautiful and stylish. The WM is fast enough and when you have such an open platform you can virtually do anything.

Pros

• -Open platform – direct access to the file system is possible
• -Tons of free software
• -.NET Compact Framework available, which makes writing of new software and communication with desktop software very easy
• -GPS software is very powerful

Cons

• -Quite heavy, many devices lack of performance with it
• -Still no universal place to get 3rd party software (soon will be fixed with the Microsoft Store)
• -Not quite convenient for inexperienced users.
• -Not all operations can be performed without stylus
• -Not a dedicated multimedia device

Apple iPhone 3G

I have had the iPhone for much less time than the Windows Mobile one, therefore I have much more experience with the WM. Nevertheles, I completely LOVE the iPhone. It is very uniquely awesome, but I cannot image having it, without having the WM also. Because, despite the power of the iPhone OS, it still has some nasty limitations which makes it stand just a few steps behind the WM business power.

Pros

• -Great sleak design with beautiful menus
• -Great OS performance
• -You don’t need a stylus at all
• -Great iTunes App Store
• -Also tons of free applications
• -Great multimedia device

Cons

• -The platform is ABSOLUTELY closed. No access to the file system, no installation of non-iTunes software. If you want to overcome this, you need to jailbreak it, which I personally don’t like
• -The usual iPhone cons – no MMS, no Video Recording, no Bluetooth transfer
• -No way of setting custom ringtones for free
• -Many of the applications which are actually needed are paid
• -Lack of GPS software besides Google Maps (which doesn’t still support nice turn-by-turn navigation)

Symbian – Nokia N85

Another great phone using the latest version of the non-Touch Symbian OS. I am saying non-Touch, because technically the latest version of Symbian OS for Nokia is the one being created for the Touch-Screen phones.

The nice thing about this phone is that it incorporates the business power of a smartphone and in the same time it is a great multimedia device.

Pros

• -Powerful smartphone features
• -Great video and audio
• -GPS working very nice
• -Working relatively fast
• -Great user experience in web browsing

Cons

• -Installation of unsigned applications is pain in the ass, almost impossible
• -Much slower than earlier versions of Symbian
• -Hard to find GPS software different than Nokia Maps, but not impossible

Conclusion

All of the three operation systems are great. It basically depends on what you expect to do with your phone. Different people have different needs. So my suggestions are as follows:

If you want great user experience and you want to do a lot of web browsing and social networking (Facebook, Twitter, Blogging) – You should choose the iPhone.

If you want powerful business device that is capable ot doing absolutely everything in terms of business applications, tech support and you are not SO much into multimedia – you should choose the Windows Mobile.

If you want to merge between the two worlds of multimedia (but not as great as the iPhone) and business (but not as powerful as the WM), but you are not so god damn picky – then the Symbian OS definitely your system !

And if you are tech-geek, like me, and you want it all, get them all three

Little intro

ResourceDictionary is a major class in the Silverlight platform, used to hold all the needed resources that you might create and use during your application lifecycle. This includes Custom Templates, Styles, Brushes, Images and many other very cool and useful stuff. This class is used by the runtime in order to choose and apply all these nice peaces you have put in. This brings to mind that this is one of the fundamental classes of the framework and therefore it is very well structured.

The dissapointment

This is where it gets messy. Having in mind that this is a ResourceDictionary you might think that it has all the great features that the standart Dictionary class reveals. Since it is being derived from IEnumerable interface, you might think that you can easily “foreach” that Dictionary and circle aroud your resources. Well you thought wrong ! This is how the GetEnumerator method used by the “foreach” looks like:

IEnumerable<...>.GetEnumerator()
{
throw new NotImplementedException();
}

So if you try to run this very simple code:

ControlTemplate tmp;
ResourceDictionary dict = new ResourceDictionary();
dict.Add("template1", new ControlTemplate());
dict.Add("template2", new Style());

foreach (object obj in dict)
{
if (obj is ControlTemplate)
tmp = obj as ControlTemplate;
}

you will get this nice thingy here:

The sad thing is that this was a behaviour in Silverlight 2 Final release and it is still present in Silverlight 3 Beta. I really hope this will be exposed in the Final release of Silverlight, because personally in my opinion this is quite useful in some complicated scenarios.

MergedDictionaries

This was a problem not being solved in Silverlight 2, but in the 3rd version it has been resolved, so I am not going to brag about it. Still I have been experiencing some difficulties in using them in the generic.xaml, but I am planning to write a separate article on that topic.

The conclusion

I want to say that this article of mine is not intended to mess around with the Silverlight guys from Microsoft. Silverlight is a great technology and I absolutely love it. I have been developing Silverlight applications for almost an year now and I tend to use it in every project I am involved in. I am pointing out those issues just to help the other Silverlight developers, who stumble upon those problems and can’t figure out why. I have spent days trying to fix some of the issues I am writing about and most of the time I spent on figuring out why it is happening. The more developers I can help by sharing my experience the better !