Two dozen mobile operators announced a WACky idea at this year’s Mobile World Congress: their own collective app store. A single coherent mobile developers’ Nirvana. Chances of success: nil.
MWC 2010 is over now, so maybe the laughter has subsided. No, I think I can still hear it.
The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) is an attempt to create an environment where application developers can deliver their wares across a wide variety of mobile platforms. An extension of the Apple App Store perhaps? No. Apple have nothing to do with this. Well at least the other big device people are on board, right? No. You won’t find any RIM Blackberries here. Nor will you see any sign of Nokia. Google are [click title to read more…]
It’s an annoying bug in Windows 7. The folder tree to the left of the Explorer view (present in Windows Explorer, the Save dialog box and elsewhere) does not have a horizontal scroll bar. So if, like me, you have a well-organised and deep hierarchy of folders to be explored, you’ll often find that the deeper folders disappear. Sure, you can drag the vertical divider to expand the tree’s view, but that unnecessarily constrains the main view. The bug has been around for quite some time. I don’t hold out much hope of anyone fixing it any time soon.
Screenshot of a typical Save As dialog in Windows 7
2010 has arrived, and with it comes the unleashing of the iPhone on new mobile networks. End users will be happy, for a while, until they experience the knock-on effect of skyrocketing data traffic. Mobile networks are being swamped. Unlike the networks in places like Japan (where real 3G has been around for a while), many western mobile infrastructures are still working through their transition to 3G (or even 4G) and are trying to make do with solutions developed in the pre-iPhone era. Back in March of last year we saw reports of AT&T being sued because of the poor iPhone experience on their network. The innovative device led to an unanticipated massive growth in mobile data usage. More recently, [click title to read more…]
Created (mainly) by the BBC during the 1970s, after 40 years of service, Teletext (AKA Ceefax) will start shutting down from tomorrow, 16 December, as the UK continues its move to digital TV and Internet-based services. In Ireland, the Teletext service from the national broadcaster (RTE) will continue to be offered via the existing analogue TV service and via emulation over the digital service.
Teletext is a broadcast service, so it doesn’t matter if there is one, or one million people connected. There’s not impact on service quality. Unlike the Web, which can suffer when servers are simultaneously hammered by eager users.
The biggest threat to the service is not technical, it is commercial. In the UK and many other [click title to read more…]