Alan Turing

It is 100th birthday of Alan Turing, famously known for the the Turing Machine and the one who has been highly influential in the development of Computer Science and modern computer architectures.

To know more about the work and person see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
Also the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), gives the Turing Award for the most significant contribution to Computer Science that push the boundaries of innovation, and is considered the Nobel of Computer Science. Visit http://amturing.acm.org/ for more information and the people who are given this prestigious Award.

Google celebrates this day with a cool doodle :)

Apps I use on my Nokia Lumia

Once in a while a device comes in that you just love, and makes you feel special. Nokia Lumia 800, for me, has been just that. It is simply the most beautiful piece of electronic craft made. And it has been about five months that I have been using this device. So, this is probably good time to give you an idea of the apps that I use on my Lumia device on day-to-day basis.

OS Apps

Now usually one would forget about these ‘Apps’, but these are actually the apps we use most on daily basis. The phone app, the contacts app (people’s hub), the calendar app, the e-mail app (linked mail-box) and browser app (IE 9) are the ones that I use the most. And I would safely guess that this is the case with most. Naturally, using these apps built into the OS is the first hand experience that you would get of any platform. And I must say that the experience here is absolutely premium, perfect and pleasing.

The second set of OS apps, that I use less regularly are: music hub (Zune and others), picture hub (camera app and others) and of-course the office hub (more on this later in the post). I am very much pleased with the design of music hub, but at the same time miss some important things: An equalizer and ability to create on-device playlists. The camera is good, but the app asks for more usability: the controls are simply not easily accessible. I would, in fact, call out on camera app and make it standout as an outlier in the whole of the Metrofied design world of Windows Phone. It needs a serious re-design.

Productivity

I love OneNote. And I use it extensively. To have it exclusively available in Office Hub was one of the prime reasons for me to choose Windows Phone 7 over other platforms. Though OneNote is quite well done in its mobile version, there are some of the things I miss : save web clip, insert video clip; stuff that I need to get my work done. I do use other Apps: Word and PowerPoint, Evernote, Adobe reader, kindle reader and the amazing offline Dictionary.com app, PC Remote Pro and SSH Client Pro, handyscan. Apart from these I also regularly use Skype, the Weather app and the World time app all of which are well designed and very useful for me. Intermittently, I use the Sports tracker to see how much of my walking/cycling skills have improved  

Development

Not much to say here except to say that I just love the concept of TouchDevelop. There is nothing on other platforms that brings back the joy of programming the way TouchDevelop does. And that too, you just need your smartphone for your perfect program. Although, I would entirely leave it to you, if you actually want to take up coding. Although, if you ever want to give it a try, TouchDevelop will be a no barrier fun programming experience. To see the ‘scripps’ (script apps, the term I just coined ) I have written visit: https://www.touchdevelop.com/wblh

Photography

As I said before, I simply don't like the inbuilt camera interface. There is a lot to be improved here. Hopefully Nokia can do something about it. In the meantime though, there are some excellent photo editing apps that I regularly use: Nokia Creative studio, Thumba photo editor, InstaCam and PhotoFunia. I also regularly use Flickr to upload my photos.

Video

The inbuilt cam-coder is good enough. What is missing however is a good in device movie editor like Windows moviemaker. This is very much desired if we are to be able to post edited videos on social media. Without this, strangely, the so-called social features of Windows Phone are incomplete.

Games

Before I got my Nokia Lumia, I hardly used to play games. But this Windows Phone hooked me to many games. And, no, Angry Birds is not one of them (though I have it installed on my phone anyways). The games I love most are: Wordament, Shuffle Party, Breeze and occasionally Chess4All and Packman 7. The Xbox integration seems also to be well done, although I personally don't use one.

Social

For Twitter and Facebook, I simply use the People’s Hub. With groups and contact live tiles, this is simply what I need to stay connected on these social networks. There are official apps for Twitter and Facebook, but I simply do not feel the need for them, at least for now. I also use Foursquare and LinkedIn app which are far superior in design and usability when compared to other platforms.

The Special Nokia Apps

I regularly use Nokia Maps and Nokia Transport. Nokia Drive is also used occasionally. All these apps are exceptionally useful and are simply not available on other platforms; for that matter even WP7 phones from other manufactures. This was also one of the reasons I chose to get a Lumia device when switching over to WP7.

Music and Instruments

I love to hear instrumentals and especially Indian classical. Zune, with music got from flipkart does the job for me. I occasionally use the inbuilt radio app, the TuneIn Radio (for BBC), SoundHound and PrimeTube (for Youtube). I also love fiddling around with instruments so I use PianoPhone 7, Honey Guitar, Drum Kit and Synth Free. Hopefully, one day, I can create something interesting like this:

Metro : Track created using free Windows Phone apps

Local Apps

These are apps that are probably of relevance to only Indian users. I regularly use Zomato (the design is just too buttery and the operation smooth) and occasionally Flipkart, ebay India and IndianRail app.

Misc.

Some of the apps that I don’t regularly use but are quite handy and sometimes just fun: Flashligh X, SkyDrive (I use office hub integration), Google search app, Microsoft Academic Search, Face Swap and Face Mask, Fantasia Painter Free, Function Plotter and Jack of Tools.

Endnote:

1) A lot of people crib about windows phone not having enough apps. After using Nokia Lumia for about five months, I can surely say that windows phone is not short of quality apps that you will *actually use*.

2) Two things I miss is official Google Maps and GTalk app. While there are alternative third party apps, they are not exactly of great quality. While Nokia maps can be any day be substituted for Google Maps, GTalk integration to People’s Hub would be great.

3) All icons used here are owned by respective owners of the apps and are reproduced here for information purpose only.

Why a Nokia Asha priced above 5K INR makes no sense?

Along with the flagship Lumia devices, Nokia had released a set of Asha devices dubbed as the Internet device for the next billion. While the Lumia devices have a very clear consumer target, the Asha promise sounds good, if the price factor is kept. That simply dosen't appear to be the case with any of the Asha 3xx series. All of these are priced above 5K and at these prices you can easily buy a fully featured Android Smartphone with much better set of features. Where Asha 3xx series scores is the build quality, the camera and probably battery life. But Nokia has squarely failed to understand that it is also the ecosystem that matters. And, in places like India, people are increasingly wanting smartphone features (not smartphone like) on devices close to 5K mark.

S40 is a pretty dated OS, with virtually no exiting thirdpary application for the platform (sorry, but I don't consider a dumbed down version of Angry Birds as an important application). Moreover, it lacks any sensor or GPS support. At the same price point as Asha 3xx series you could easily get a fully loaded Samsung Galaxy Y with Android 2.3.x (hopefully 4.x is also on the way for this device). Feature and usability wise the later device simply beats the Asha 3xx series. I have hard time figuring out just what Nokia is upto here with these 'smarterphone' device. To me, it merely appears to be a marketing gimmick that is going to fail to impress majority of budget minded Indian customers.

While I would happily recommend an Asha 2xx device, if you are even considering getting a Asha 3xx, I would strongly recommend a Samsung Galaxy Y. Heck, you could even think of buying a new Micromax Funbook paired with a very basic Nokia 101 phone for actually making calls.

Travelling only with the Nokia Lumia

I do love to experiment with new gadgets, but I only buy the once that I use primarily to get my work done. So when I got the Lumia, my purpose was to replace my phone, laptop, camera and to some extent the Asus T91 while travelling. Basically I just wanted to have one descent device that has all the functionalities that I need to get my work done.

Office on the go
So I recently travelled to IITK to attend a conference. My first ever software engineering conference. And I enjoyed it, and met quite a few interesting people out there :)
Usually when I go to conferences, I carry my Asus T91 MT along with me. But this time around I wanted to deliberately travel light. So the only device I took with me was the Nokia Lumia 800. On my tablet I usually use OneNote to take down notes and occasionally record interesting talks. This has always worked out great for me. And with a battery life of about 6 hours for the tablet, the thing easily lasts for a day of the conference without any charging cycle.
The Lumia comes with Windows Phone 7.5, whose Office hub did a great job of replacing my tablet for the trip. There is one major difference however: on my tablet I almost never used the on-screen keyboard to take notes, I have always preferred using the pen stylus to actually write down stuff with OneNote. On the Lumia I have to use the on-screen keyboard to key in the notes, the keyboard and the predictive text is pretty good at this job though. So basically all went well for the note taking part. The same was true for the camera. I never missed my DSLR. That, it is another matter that I didn't actually go for any outings. The only photography I did was some at conference and a few more while wandering in the beautiful IITK campus.

Irctc disaster
For the onward journey we could only manage to book a sleeper class ticket. And I had no clue what we were landing ourselves into: people with overloaded luggage, people without tickets, a commercial break after every minute (believe me this was even worse than watching a movie on prime time), and the most spectacular event of one Babloo-bahia jumping of running train and the rest of the family also wanting to execute the superman's act :)
That was more than enough motivation for me and my friend to get a tatkal ticket in AC compartment for the return journey. Believing that Irctc (the railways unit that handles online reservation) has a great mobile site (http://irctc.co.in/mobile), I started the booking process. The Lumia has a nice browser and is fairly easy to use and get the work done. But somewhere in between the reservation process the site decides to totally give up, showing me same screen again and again. At this point I had to call it a day, call up a friend on campus and rush to his room with a loaned cycle from another friend (thanks apr :) ). But by the time I restarted my reservation, all the seats were gone ! And I eventually ended up booking on the next train, but using a Windows laptop.

Email and stuff
This is just cheese. All my accounts (work and personal) just works out of box. The best part is of course the people hub with the goodies of social integration. And with IE9 just about the whole Internet (sans the flash and silverlight crap) is at your finger tips.

Programming?
Yes I enjoy the fact that I can write for the phone on the move using TouchDevelop (https://www.touchdevelop.com/wblh)

Battery life
This is one issue which has been sour spot for many Nokia Lumia users. However, this was never the case of problem with me, even then the good guys at Nokia care replaced my initial unit. I got fairly good battery life on roaming with mobile data (EDGE) switched on. Typically the charge lasted for about 24 hrs, with occasional use of the GPS for sports tracker (went cycling in morning around the IITK campus). I guess, with the latest updates to the firmware, Nokia has addressed most of the issues with battery life.

Note: This post was entirely written on Nokia Lumia using the IE9 browser and the standard blogger interface. Slight editing was then done on my desktop.

MeTA Studio online update : portable workspaces

A new online update to MeTA Studio is now available for download. The current version is 2.0.04032012.


Use (Help -> Check for updates) to get the updates. If you are not able to use the online update, manually download and extract: http://metastudio.googlecode.com/files/metaupdate.zip in the meta/bin directory.

Major changes:

  - New tracker glyph (now these are dotted lines and are more differentiable from the bond lines)

  - Workspaces are now easily portable. You can easily copy the workspace directory across machines. For existing workspaces, simply edit .mws file to remove reference to any absolute paths. If you need any help in this regard please file an issue at: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/issues/list and I will revert back.

Have a nice week ahead :)

Some fun with TouchDevelop and MeTA Studio: scan molecules ;)

Ok so I had some more fun with TouchDevelop. This time a bit serious one ;)

I have been writing a script on my Nokia Lumia using TouchDevelop that allows one to scan a molecule drawing (either using a camera or pre-stored image) and then obtain approximate 2D coordinates with some basic on-device editing. The coordinates can then be emailed to yourself (or ur friends). So now, this script is kind of usable, at least for simple molecule drawings. The script (called omr, fancy optical molecule recognition :) ) can be accessed from: https://www.touchdevelop.com/wdlx. Of course you will need a WP7 device to use this script.

The coordinates obtained can be directly imported in MeTA Studio by using the widget available here: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/source/browse/trunk/metastudio/widgets/showMoleculeCoord.bsh
Once in MeTA Studio, you know what all can be done :)

[Disclaimer: The script is purely non-commercial, and comes with no support what-so-ever ;)]

Have fun!

Photoshoping gone wrong ;)

I am not a photoshop expert. Well, neither I have used it! But just using and knowing photoshop is not good enough to fool around. You must know what you are actually mocking. So this image on spotify website caught my attention: http://www.spotify.com/int/mobile/overview/

Clearly the creator missed the fact that the Nokia phone shown is actually a Windows phone and not running Symbian! Fun to notice that :)

Fun with 3D anaglyphs : TouchDevelop and MeTA Studio

I just enjoy writing stuff in TouchDevelop using my Nokia Lumia. So this time I wanted to write an app that generates on-device anaglyphs using two images (left and right channel photos). To use this script (3DCAM) head straight to : https://www.touchdevelop.com/gxtp on your Windows Phone.



The resolution of final images from the above script is not that high though. So if you want to make anaglyphs from the images taken from your DSLR, you would like to try a script I hacked together for MeTA Studio (available at: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/source/browse/trunk/metastudio/apps/3danaglyph/anaglyph.bsh?spec=svn544&r=544)
A few tips while taking 3d photos:

• steady hands! or else use a tripod
• images whose background doesn’t change gives more depth feeling
• if the background is changing the images might not give the ‘real world’ feel
• subjects of interest must also be stationary
• the closer the object, the more displacement you will need for taking the left and right channel images

To see some of my initial trials head to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tovganesh/sets/72157629179484577/

You will need red-cyan glasses to view these images. To make your own red-cyan glasses, the following youtube video will server as a good starting point (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIEn9z0oBE8):

Have a nice week ahead!