mandazi

It’s looking good so far. I see they mimic’ed Mac’s “icon finder thingy” (forgot what’s the proper term) on the left. It loads faster.

So far so good.

So I signed up to get an invite to use the Google App Inventor for Android and was excited to see an email welcoming me to it. I started reading the beginner’s guide and setting up my environment. Since Java is the language used to write Android apps, I installed Eclipse. Google has an add-on for Eclipse called the Android Development Tools or ADT plugin. I attempted to install this, but got this error:

An error occurred while installing the items   session context was:(profile=PlatformProfile, phase=org.eclipse.equinox.internal.provisional.p2.engine.phases.Install, operand=null –> [R]org.eclipse.cvs 1.0.400.v201002111343, action=org.eclipse.equinox.internal.p2.touchpoint.eclipse.actions.InstallBundleAction).   The artifact file for osgi.bundle,org.eclipse.cvs,1.0.400.v201002111343 was not found.

After googling, I found out that installing Eclipse via the Ubuntu Software Center doesn’t fully install all the necessary files for Eclipse.  Installing it with the Synaptic Package Manager installs everything needed.  So I un-installed Eclipse via the Ubuntu Software Center and installed “eclipse” along with the rest of the required packages using the Synaptic Package Manager.  By the way, when you select “eclipse” package it asks you if you want to install the other required packages.  Make sure you do, or else it will not work.

I’ll be posting more about developing for the Android in the coming weeks.  Can’t wait to build my first app!

I recently got the HP dm4-1060us laptop since my old laptop (which was my wife’s old laptop) died after close to 6 years of use. I used it only for web dev work so I didn’t really need a fast machine. As soon as I got my laptop I installed Ubuntu 10.04 and got it running smoothly out of the box surprisingly. Only minor issue is the mouse trackpad being buggy, but I use a USB mouse most of the time anyway. I kept Windows 7 to try it out and after using it for about 2 weeks now I’m impressed. It’s not as bad as I expected it to be.  I’ve never used Vista and when I used it for a few moments on someone else, I dreaded it.  It was slow even on a brand new PC that was just booted up.  Windows XP SP 2 was the standard OS that I have been using on all my machines since it was released.  My gaming desktop PC is still currently using.

So what impresses me about Windows 7?  The speed for one.  It is fast.  I loaded IE, FF and Chrome all at the same time and opened multiple tabs of various sites and tried to recreate a common crash scenario I usually almost always experience while working on XP.  It didn’t crash.  It started to lag but nothing crashed.  This wasn’t a good test, since I didn’t have Dreamweaver or Photoshop open but it was still better than I expected.

Microsoft definitely took some UI layout styles from Apple’s Mac OS X.  I wouldn’t be surprised if they even looked at Ubuntu.  Browsing the computer is very user friendly and simple.

All in all, it’s not that bad at all.

A while ago, I attempted to start using Ubuntu, but failed to install it on an old gateway laptop that didn’t have any linux drivers for audio, visual and wifi devices. Or at least I couldn’t find any online for the laptop. Due to the failure in getting it to work, I stopped my Ubuntu journey. I wasn’t ready for it. Skip forward a year later and I found myself installing Ubuntu 10.04 on my newer HP laptop. Installation was a breeze and everything worked out of the box except for some issues with double fingers on the touchpad and the right/left click ares on it. I was impressed. Wifi, bluetooth, sound, video, and pretty much everything worked instantly with Ubuntu.

As soon as I started to use it for a few hours, I noticed they took a some of their UI from Apple’s OS X and Windows. It’s the best from both OSs combined into one. Workspaces is cool. I’ve never experienced that working on Windows. I find that very useful when multitasking. I also like the way alt-tab works when switching from one item to another.

The best part of it all is developing with Ubuntu, which is the main reason I switched. I was having a hard time dealing with Windows and developing with Ruby on Rails. On Ubuntu it was extremely fast for obvious reasons. I haven’t tried developing in PHP or Java yet, but will soon.