Technology and Making

This is just a quick post, which I know will be of no interest to most of my regular readers, but I know this blog goes out to enough places to show up on a few people's Google searches.

I've recently moved my (sizeable) music library into Songbird, and in many ways it's made me very happy indeed - stylish, powerful and becoming quite efficient. But there are sizeable holes in the application that make using it a major pain in the arse.

One of these is support for a "Compilation" tag/checkbox, which will make Songbird group songs from albums containing multiple artists into their own category. Right now I have thousands of compilation album tracks, and my library is a mess to wade through, to the point where I frequently give up searching out of frustration or lack of time.

I know many others feel the same way, because there are hundreds of posts out there on the blogs, chatrooms and twitterverse complaining about the issue. Fortunately there is a way to get this issue addressed, but few people using it, in most cases I suspect just "not getting round to it" because it takes a few steps. So I'm going to make this really simple:

1. Go to Bug 5755: Group Compilations When Browsing.
2. If you don't have a Songbird Bugzilla account, sign up. It takes like 2 minutes. You can spare the time.
3. Click on "Vote for this bug"
4. Done.

Open source development is community-driven. Which means if you want something to get done, and you can't do it yourself, you have to show that the community wants it - through the excellent tools provided to you for that very purpose. It'll only take a handful of votes to show this is something our community of interested users really wants to see.

Huge kudos to the Songbird development team for developing what is already an excellent, and rapidly becoming one of the best, open source media players. Looking forward to what you do next (compilations please!)

Labels: bug 5755, compilation albums, compilation support, compilations, group compilations, grouping, Open source, songbird, various artists

Image via CrunchBase

Answer: No, it's bloody not.

Well, that was easy.

One of the most eagerly anticipated benefits of the Android 1.5 update, apart from the soft keyboard, was an improvement in battery life.

I got my over-the-air update last week, fully discharged and recharged my battery to make sure it was calibrated, and took a careful note of the time when I took it off charge, eagerly awaiting a nice long runtime from Cupcake's much-lauded efficiency improvements.

I kept my configuration exactly as before - GPS, 3G and Bluetooth off, and exactly the same screen timeout. The time to beat was roughly twenty-four hours, my usual average time between charges before the update.

Twenty hours later, my battery was dead.

This is just my experience, and there may be something specific in my configuration which makes the new improvements irrelevant. Prove me wrong, somebody, please! Leave your own experiences of post-Cupcake battery life in the comments.

Labels: Android, android 1.5, Battery, battery life, charge, cupcake, Google, lifetime, over-the-air, T-Mobile G1, update

Image via CrunchBase

So, the 1.5 update to Android downloaded to my T-Mobile G1 yesterday morning, and I've been playing around with it for a fair bit of the last 24 hours.

My first impressions: The tweaks to the interface are very nice. Everything feels a little more solid and easy to use, including the use of paler backgrounds in a lot of applications (the calendar in particular is a lot easier on the eyes).

The new rotation feature, where the display switches to landscape mode when you rotate the phone (instead of when you slide open the keyboard) looks smart. The fade over from one mode to the other is an obvious attempt to distinguish it from the iPhone's spin effect - it looks snappy, but can be a little slow.

The new windows animations (which you will have to turn on from Settings - they're not on by default) giving a slide from one screen to another - also very smart. They're shiny without being too distracting. The new dialogue boxes which pop up to the screen look good too.

I've only used the soft keyboard a couple of times, but I'm very impressed. It's very precise despite the small keys - I've yet to hit the wrong key - and pops up fast when it's needed. There are a few features which aren't immediately apparent, and are only explained in the System Tutorial which is hidden in Settings/About Phone: You can hold a letter key to get a popup menu of accented versions, and hold the number/letter switch key to bring up some additional options.

The new camera and video camera (camcorder) are just excellent - Google have somehow managed to significantly improve the focussing speed, images are definitely sharper and there are more features, and the interface for both looks very smart.

Video comes out looking very good for the compact size of the device. The previous option for video recording - Android7.org's unofficial video camera hack - suffered from a very high rate of battery drain. Hopefully this integrated solution will be more economical.

On the topic of battery drain, I have yet to determine how much better Cupcake's power economy is. I discharged it fully yesterday afternoon and charged it to 100% in the evening to start a full power test, but stupidly left it on the cable this morning for an hour or so while swapping some files around, so I've had to start again. I'll give a full figure on average battery lifetime when I have it.

Labels: Android, cupcake, Google, HTC Dream, iPhone, over-the-air, release, smartphone, T-Mobile G1, update

Yes, the 1.5 Android update finally downloaded to my G1 this morning. I'll post a full report once I've had time to try it out a little - battery life test commencing shortly.

Labels: Android, cupcake, G1, Google, over-the-air, update

Over on my Hubpages G1 article, loyal commenter Antient has confirmed that Cupcake downloaded to his phone this morning. Happy days! Looks like Talk Android weren't full of crap after all :)

Labels: Android, cupcake, G1, Google, over-the-air, update

Image via CrunchBase

About a month ago, off the back of a tip in yet another 10 Ways to Improve Your Traffic post, I installed the Zemanta plugin. The developers call it a "point and click enrichment" tool for blogs and email.

In practice, Zemanta is a set of toolbars which merge themselves into your composition page (in my case Blogger's "Create Post" page) as it loads, and give you access to various sources of information semantically relevent to your post (or email - but I'm going to stop mentioning the email because I don't use it. I'm sure it's useful to someone though).

Definitely the most fun is the image search, which presents a three-by-three grid of suggested images which can be embedded in your post with one click - they're selected from a variety of sources and are either fully free, available to use under the Creative Commons license or potentially covered by Fair Use.

This is a very useful resource for me - great for topping off my posts with an appropriate image where I don't have one of my own, without wading through pages of image searches and wrangling with licensing issues.

Below the image search is, to me, the heart of Zemanta - a scrolling list of relevent links. What I particularly like is that the links can be from major newspapers, top-dollars sites or relatively obscure blogs, as long as they're relevent. Clicking on one adds it to a "Related Articles by Zemanta" box at the bottom of your post.

This is a really useful tool, and I always try to include at least one of Zemanta's suggested links in my posts - and there generally is at least one that's directly relevent and good material. I like that it promotes connectivity between blogs with a minimum of effort, enhancing my content, letting me offer my readers more quality material and share some clicks with other writers who deserve the attention.

Zemanta also suggests links to embed in posts - often just a Wikipedia page, but also homepages of companies you've mentioned and other useful resources for when you want to make a quick reference without having to explain a whole chunk of background - and suggests tags too.



The plugin keeps updating and expanding all these resources as you type and it refines its categorisation of your post. On the whole it's pretty smart - I usually find a good header image, a relevent link or two, and at least a couple of my tags generally come from Zemanta.

Best of all, the Zemanta resource database is (so far) human-edited and open to all - based on the instructions on their website I wrote an email directly to their Community Manager (and what a strange, archaic thing that seemed, contacting a human being directly!) and got a very friendly and interested email back in a few days saying that my blogs had been added to their database, and wishing me all the best.

I can see that human-human relationship being very hard to maintain as Zemanta grows bigger and is besieged with spam, but for now it was a very nice welcome to the network.

And having my blogs on Zemanta has already brought me a little trickle of traffic - two of my Cloud Computing articles were linked in the footer of a recent post on a well-trafficked technology blog, and my foodblog post on Morels got linked, oddly enough, by an Iowa-based outdoorsman's blog!

Whether or not you ask to be added to the main database, you can easily add your own content feeds, Flickr, Facebook and other resources to your own Zemanta interface to easily crosslink your posts and share links.

There are still a few things missing from Zemanta which I'd find really useful - the main issue being that all my photos are in Picasa which is not yet supported, but on the whole this has become a seamless and very positive addition to my blogging tools. If you're a blogger, I'd highly recommend you give it a try - and the more people who join, the richer and more powerful the network gets. Good web technology in a nutshell.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Zemanta - For Fast, Efficient Blogging (toolsforjournalists.blogspot.com)
• Zemanta - Is Worth a Second Look (agingreluctantly.com)

Labels: Blog, blogging, crosslinking, Flickr, links, semantic, Web 2.0, Zemanta

Talk Android have passed on the message that Cupcake is rolling out to phones in the US and UK simultaneously, and the first users are getting their updates right now! Happy days. Report as soon as it arrives on my phone.