Evaluating Mobile OSes

My Windows Mobile 6 phone continues to perform erratically (rebooting itself now and then) although the battery life is now reasonable due to battery replacement.  So still wanting to replace it and then give my iPod Touch to my wife.  The article Mobile OS Showdown: Android, BlackBerry, iOS, and Windows Phone 7 provides several slants for comparing features of the mobile OSes.  Some criteria and considerations that sets the mobile OSes apart:

• Two-way sync with multiple Exchange-protocol (e.g. Google) calendars
• Customization, e.g. different virtual keyboard or home screen
• What security granularity and warnings when installing new app?
• SSL connection when connecting to retrieve email, calendar?
• Voice control of device and extent
• Turn-by-turn navigation 
• Important:  Does default browser support Flash?  HTML 5?
• How are email attachments handled?  Can choose application to open them?
• Open file system structure
• What formats can default media player handle?
• VoIP calling
• Multi-tasking for third-party apps? 
• OS-specific features:  WP7 Live Tiles and Android's Notification pane

The hardware of a particular mobile device is another story.

Some thoughts:

• Apps - is developing a WP7 app that integrates well with the OS so different compared to the other OSes that developers will avoid offering a WP7-version of their app?
• Office suite - how good is Android's native Google Docs app?  How well does it work offline? 
• iOS seems to marry data and application together, that is, data resides in one application and to access it, you have to use that application.  Another way of looking at it:  You can't choose which application to open a piece of data.  Generally this is not a problem which seems to be iOS's design philosophy

Informal and incomplete web browser comparison

Evaluations in progress:

	Pros	Cons
Internet Explorer (ver 8.0.7600 ...)	Flash media doesn't appear to crash browser	Slow to start up, slow when opening a new tab.  This is even more apparent on a computer with limited memory, as the OS will continuously page Option to restore previous session is hidden away under Tools > Reopen Last Browsing Session and sometimes this session isn't saved properly (e.g. when Windows restarts computer after installing updates)
Mozilla Firefox (ver 3.6.6)	Selenium IDE is exclusive to Firefox Delicious side-bar works great	Flash media can slow down or crash browser
Mozilla Firefox (ver 4 ...)	N/A	N/A
Opera (ver 11.01)	Like the way the "back button history" collapses to domains so that it is faster to retrace steps Like graphical smoothness of how browser works (like an Apple interface)	Some web sites don't render well and functionality is hurt on others (e.g. Google Docs spreadsheets)
Chrome (ver )	N/A	N/A
Internet Explorer (ver 9.0.8112 ...)	Didn't bother using further	Sometimes difficult (or impossible?) to restore last browsing session, that is, the open tabs and their loaded locations, after shutting down browser.  This is a show-stopper.

PowerShell and other essential Windows software for the geek

All are free or non-expiring trial versions:

• PowerShell - after using Linux terminal windows extensively (and even Putty for that matter), cmd.exe just won't do.  PowerShell is a good Windows alternative, rather than Cygwin and the like.  However, response is somewhat slow for typical commands you would type in a Command Prompt window.
• VirtualBox - compared to Virtual PC and using a Linux guest OS:  better performance (seems to respond faster), mouse pointer integration (mouse pointer can move to and from host OS seamlessly), able to install Ubuntu (with Virtual PC, because of strange display issues, could not install Ubuntu or Fedora but OpenSUSE works)
• WinMerge - text file comparison tool.  Also can find differences between directories
• Notepad++ - developer-level text editor
• PrimoPDF - print driver that enables creation of PDF files (rather than printing to hardcopy)
• Firefox Add-ons:
• Delicious Bookmarks
• Selenium IDE
• Firebug
• Some more Windows geek tools under my Delicious bookmarks
• More (short write-up to come): 
• FileZilla
• Putty
• FreeMind
• Git
• UMLet

Viewing DOCX files

Accurate rendering from best to worst:

1. MS Word (obviously)
2. MS Word Viewer (of small sample of .docx files I've tried, they look as rendered in Word itself)
3. Google Docs
4. Open Office (possible problems include bullet numbering incorrect, side bar layout messed up); don't trust the rendering as what you see can be misleading

Streaming to PS3

We purchased a PS3 more than a year ago.  Still don't know why--I think we thought if we had company over, they could play games on it.  But in 2010, we didn't have time for much "company"  :-|  So to turn a bad purchase into a better one, I lent it to my sister who made use of it.  Recently, got it back and trying to see how to play media saved on desktop computer onto the HDTV which has no network connection:  The key is a PS3 connected to our wireless network and a DLNA compliant Media Server.

At first tried Windows Media Player but problems getting option of "Turn on media streaming ... " on one computer running Windows 7 Ultimate.  Only get "Turn on media streaming with HomeGroup ... ".  This is what I want:

So rather than jumping through WMP hoops, tried using PS3 Media Server.  Very easy to install and set-up, but some gotchas:

• PS3 divides media into Photo, Music, Video, etc. so if you're looking for a video file while you're in the Photo branch, don't expect to find any!
• By default, PS3 Media Server shares all drives.  For security reasons, you probably want to limit this to specific folders
• PS3 seems to have a limit to the depth to which it can browse folders.  So if you have shared a really deep tree on your media server, PS3 may not be able to navigate to the media you want.   

Results of Video content streamed over our wireless network (in each test, same hardware running media server):

Frame width	Frame height	Frame rate (fps)	Data rate/Total bitrate (kbps)	Stuttering?
560	416	25	1444/1828	Yes
608	336	23	1012/1140	No
640	272	23	1188/1380	No
640	352	25	1117/1245	No
640	480	29	896/1024	Rarely
720	416	29	1061/1445	No
1280	528	23	1728/1997	Yes
1280	544	23	2274/2717	Yes

So far, the results seem to indicate that "Data rate/Total bitrate" is a large factor in whether stuttering of the video/audio occurs.

To eliminate stuttering, with a better network connection where no ethernet ports are available, I'm considering powerline networking (this is just one product in this category); not sure whether I'm willing to spring for that yet.

Convenient OCR solution

Back in the bad old days, each scanner you used came with some software to do Optical Character Recognition and it was a hassle to become familiar with each software, especially when you upgraded operating systems/changed computers and lost the install disks!  This article, Top 5 Free OCR Software Tools To Convert Images Into Text, talks about some other software, but I recently discovered that Google Docs does a good job of performing OCR.  Simply:

1. Scan document that you want to convert to text, rather than re-typing 
2. Upload scanned image to your Google Docs, making sure to check the option "Convert text from PDF or image files to Google Docs documents."
3. The converted image will retain the same name as your original image file, but it will be a Google word processor document with the image embedded at the beginning followed by the converted text.  Results are very acceptable although some massaging will be necessary.

Another benefit to using Google Docs rather than some of the free online OCR web sites out there is the security/privacy in case your document is sensitive (you just have to trust Google!).

iPod Touch observations - ongoing

• How to select more than a single word but not all?  Answer
• How to go to a particular page in a long PDF?
• PRO:  Battery recharges very fast, consumption is reasonable