Daily Bits

Touch Screens Are Becoming the Norm on Mobile Phones

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Without doubt it was the iPhone that explored and popularized new horizons with the multi-touch interface. In a trend that is going more mainstream, Nokia and Blackberry having announced their latest models in the touchscreen space. Then there are the devices from Samsung and of course the Google backed phone – T-mobile G1 in what could could well be a revolution in user interface technologies.

For a technology that came into being in the early 70s, Touch screens have taken quite some time to go mainstream. The concept brings with it a fresh outlook to interacting with computer applications. Mobile devices have also been gaining more processing power under the hood and with powerful devices no longer being the forte of business executives alone. Here, its significant that Apple took the mobile community by storm with the iPhone. While the device is known for its sleek looks and interface, it is the synchronization between software and hardware that makes the device tick.

Taking cue from Apple’s success mobile phone manufacturers have also begun making entries in the touch-screen enabled mobile space. Google’s Android, the much mentioned mobile device software stack will be supported by a number of hardware manufacturers ( part of the OHA – Open Handset Alliance) and with its first G1 device that supports both a slide out keyboard and a touch interface, the tone for touch-screen’s importance is set. Nokia also announced its 5800 XPressMusic handset which is the first touchscreen from the Finnish mobile giant. While Apple has its niche space, Nokia has the market share to really make a difference with a slew of devices offering touchscreen interfaces. Also, RIM has announced Storm, a touch screen based device that is targeted at going beyond the business users.

But this appears only a beginning to the application of touch screens. The technology could go on to replace the mouse and keyboards as we know them. Microsoft research had demoed the concept of platform computing, with multi-touch interfaces. Then there are is the patent filed for technology of dual touch interfaces.

While navigation and maps are applications that clearly benefit from touchscreens, the wait is on for the real killer application for mobile devices. What applications of touch screens have you found exceptional?

10 Financial Meltdowns of The Past

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You might be shocked with the latest events in Wall Street and around the world as well, but this is not the first time that we experience a financial crisis. Taking a look at what happened in the past can help us both to understand what caused the problems, and how people manage to solve them. For that purpose Neatorama published a really interesting post titled 10 American Financial Meltdowns in the Past Century.

Here is the quote from the first one, the Panic of 1907:

Background: At the time, the young US stock market was in a decline – it was off 25% since the beginning of the year and Wall Street was jittery over the tight money supply.

Trigger: Then along came Otto Heinze with his get-(even)-rich(er)-quick scheme. In October of 1907, Otto, along with his brother, a copper magnate named Augustus Heinze, and the ice king (yup, he sold ice – remember, this was before the age of household refrigerators) Charles W. Morse, aggressively bought shares of United Copper, thinking that they could corner the market on the stock. Their plan failed spectacularly, and immediately bankrupted the trust companies and banks that provided the financing.

Runs on banks immediately ensued as depositors pulled their money from banks that had dealings (or rumored to have dealings) with the trio. In a little less than two weeks in the Panic of 1907, a chain reaction had left 9 trust companies and banks bankrupt.

They also covered how each crisis was solved. Check out the post to read the complete list.

Mozilla to Launch Geo-tagging Project

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Mozilla labs is all set to include a new project called Geode that will make use of geographical information while browsing and make better use of geotagged information on the web. Geotagging is the process of adding geographic information to media ( such as longitude, latitude and altitude information to photos and videos ). This information could be utilized by services to fetch content specific to certain places.

The project would be useful for accessing location specific information on mobile devices – directions, places, street addresses. Though Mozilla does not have a big presence in the mobile browsing space. Various projects at mozilla labs have been developed to make the browsing experience much smoother and efficient. Perhaps when these set of projects mature Mozilla would be considering a major thrust in the mobile browsing space as well.

Details on the Geode project will be updated here soon.

Virtual Browsers

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Virtual browsers are one of the two technological twists that have come to the browsing world. The other being 3D Browsing. With increased focus on security over internet activities, the concept of virtual browser makes for a secure browsing environment that would ideally not take down your system due to some malicious activity with or without your knowledge. I use the word ideally here because virtual browsers are not exactly proofed from all known and unknown exploits.

Virtual browsers provide for more secure browsing by a process called Sandboxing. Sand-boxing is the creation of a safe execution environment on a host machine so that changes made from one process do not affect the functioning of the system. The processes running inside a sandbox have limited access to the system resources and importantly to the critical resources. Thus the host as such is as secure as the absence of flaws in the sand-boxing program itself.

Coming back to browsers, the main criteria to consider when choosing among various sand-boxed environments is the option of how much fine grained control you have on the data that is stored in the sandbox session and movable to the host machine. Recently, HP in association with Mozilla announced its virtual browser. Google Chrome also features a sand-boxed approach to its browser tabs – which means that each tab runs as a separate process and does not crash all other tabs in event of any failure. This technology has been a reason why Google acquired Greenborder, a maker of secure software.

Virtual browsers are a good choice to make your web browsing experience much safer.

Check if Your Gmail Account Has Been Hacked

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If you rely on Gmail as much as I do, you probably worry about someone hacking into it right? Well, among the advanced features on Google’s mailing service there is a cool little trick that you can use to monitor “foreign” activity on your accounts.

The tip is coming from Make Use Of, and it is really easy to use.

You basically just need to check the bottom of your Gmail account for the “Last activity…” message. There you will see when the last login was effectuated, and using which IP address. You can also click on “Details” to see a list of the last logins, their IP address, browser and so on. All you need to do, therefore, is to check if you are really the only person using your Gmail account!

The Human Clock

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If there was a “useless crap” category on the blog this post would probably go there…

Well it is useless but cool at the same time. Wouldn’t you like to see a clock where the numbers are created by humans entangled in different positions? Now you can, check it out.