Manolis Perakakis geek Universe

Android multitouch support: Goolge is afraid of Apple? Give me a break!

2009-02-16T10:12:00.004+02:00

With Apple's multitouch recently filled patent and the upcoming patent war with Palm (for Pre's multitouch support) a number of sources speculate some kind of agreement between Google and Apple, for Google not including multitouch support in Android.

According to the Register Google is interested in keeping Apple happy for a number of reasons. This might only be half the truth for a number of reasons :

First, regardless of the multitouch hype I am not really convinced about it's value. Yes, it sounds cool to have support for zooming in/out and also supporting a couple more of multitouch gestures but hey, I can live without that. I consider for example copy-paste support much more important (not to mention running many apps in the background). Integration with Google Apps and a smooth overall user experience (keep it simple) is certainly most valuable to just supporting multitouch.
Secondly, both Android as an OS and the G1 device have hidden (not exposed to user) multitouch support according to this video. Google is certainly not afraid of Apple; they could expose the multitouch capability but they choose not to; they are too smart not to copy Apple's multitouch. They need to deferrentiate; they are not used to be the followers they are the pioneers. I am sure they will come up with a better and more valuable solution if this is one of their priorities right now (which I don't think so). There are a number of technologies waiting still for exploitation such as speech interfaces, eye/face tracking or 3D touchless gestures just to name a fiew. I am sure Google is carefully evaluating such technologies and it is just a matter of time to see them revolutionalize our mobile experience!

VirtualBox rocks!

2009-01-26T11:59:00.000+02:00

I started using Linux back in 1995, and soon abandoned Windows in favor of Linux, only occasionally dual-booting to Windows for the known reasons you can't avoid (PowerPoint)! Using Gentoo for the last 5 years I was feeling like trying more Linux distributions. Getting a larger storage space, I started installing OpenSuse, Sabayon, Kubuntu, etc. Soon it became a bit of headache until I found out about VirtualBox. VirtualBox is a virtual machine program allowing you to run a large number of guest OSes (Operating Systems) from your host OS.

I have since then kept only one main Linux distribution and run every other OS through VirtualBox.

There may be a lot of virtualization solutions now-days but hey, VirtualBox is free, easy to setup and use. It runs on both Linux, Windows and Leopard and allows for both Linux and Windows guest operating systems (not supporting Leopard guest is the only missing point). It also supports enhanced host OS integration through the so called guest applications!

It is also fast even for machines without hardware virtualization (VT-x/AMD-V) support, as long as you have enough memory to run any Guest OS (768 should be enough in most cases). I tested it on my old laptop (IBM R50e Pentium M 1.5 GHz - no hardware virtualization support) and I was impressed by it's speed!

Well done Sun!

Coolness factor: 5/5!

PDF genius

2009-01-26T11:12:00.000+02:00

I was Googling myself until I got a new result pointing on my PDF resume by this pdfgeni page.

Sure, you can pdf-search using Google alone, but this is really cool!

Pdfgeni not only allows you to search PDFs using their site, they also do offer a search plugin for both IE and Firefox. Additionally they offer a ton of links to various interesting free e-books in their page to enrich your collection!

Coolness factor: 4.5/5!

My geek blog ...

2009-01-25T18:33:00.000+02:00

From times to times I praise my hacker alter ego come back, so this blog will hopefully serve as a place to share my computer geek related thoughts, enjoy!!

Hello world!

2009-01-25T18:31:00.005+02:00

>>printf("Hello world!"); fflush(stdout);