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UI Wars: Sony loves Symbian – grits teeth

Launching two new high-end phones this week, Sony Ericsson’s CEO, Katsumi Ihara, gave a pointed reminded to Symbian that its commitment had better not waver.

“There are two important factors for Sony Ericsson with the Symbian OS,” Ihara said, ComputerWire reports. “It should be open to anybody. Not perceived as proprietary to a single manufacturer. [It also depends on] UIQ being developed within Symbian. As long as those two conditions are met, Symbian will remain our open platform of choice.”

Back when Symbian couldn’t decide to be in or out of the UI business, but really thought it should be out, a buyer was discreetly sought for the Ronneby lab. Discussions to create a joint-venture with Motorola reached quite an advanced stage. But David Levin, Symbian’s second CEO, thought it would be in Symbian’s strategic interest to continue to offering UIQ; he decided instead to keep it, but give the lab some independence.

Ihara’s nudge is a reminder of how important this decision turned out to be. The disgruntled shareholders who assembled in London this week for Psion’s EGM base their opposition on the belief that Symbian is worth more as a vendor-neutral joint venture backed by the largest handset manufacturers. With Motorola having pulled out last year, the “neutral” proposition now very much depends on Sony Ericsson. It has a hit phone with the P900, and where there’s volume and an open platform, there should be developers.

Why can’t Sony Ericsson simply up its stake? Despite two illustrious parents, the company has been severely constricted for cash. In Ericsson’s case, it’s can’t pay; in Sony’s case, it’s won’t pay. The UIQ team gave Sony Ericsson more reasons to be cheerful at Cannes, announcing a one-handed UIQ user interface that will compete for developers with Series 60. But with resources tight, Sony Ericsson has a reason to be reluctant to pour money into a venture which will be perceived to be owned by Nokia. Why should it do the heavy lifting for the Finns? [The Register]

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Codecs Reviewed

Caught this last night as well…

I was actually surprised to see Quicktime get such a low rating comparably… have to spend more time with Divx. the few movies and torrents I have seen have been of excellent quality. I just can’t quite work out some of the encoding and conversion details on my own system to create content.

ExtremeTech has done a test of the main codecs available for PC based video compression. They compared Divx, WM9, QuickTime 6.5/Sorenson3, and QuickTime 6.5/MPEG-4. [U P R E Z]

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PDF Plugin

Not sure why I was initially reluctant to load this, but the PDF Plugin is a fantastic addition to browsers on OS X. I recall the Adobe version of a plugin on OS 9, which needed to load the full app in the background and really just display the file in the browser window….and yeah it worked, but it was rough. This is a really nice utility which allows you to zoom, rotate, save and print PDF links you come across in your daily browsing. Works great! Free for personal use…

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RSS+BitTorrent

We can only hope that other aggregators (and platforms) support enclosures so nicely…

Andrew: “I’ve finished an initial version of a RSS+BitTorrent integration tool for Radio Userland’s news aggregator. This is beta software.” [Scripting News]

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DEVONtechnologies offers DEVONnote

Just starting to give this a look… Seems very cool. You get an outline view of everything which is stored in a nice database for searchability. Wiki styles are present as is the webkit for an integrated browsing experience or live updating of pages you are tracking for a project or just for your notes.

UK Mac developer DEVONtechnologies Ltd. has released a new software application called DEVONnote. [MacCentral]

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Tips For Bloggers

Thanks Steven – have to deal with this in the am…

Help the Googlebot understand your web site. Useful article. I tweaked a couple things around here after reading it. Namely, I added a ‘description’ meta tag, and changed permalinks so the actual name of the entry, rather than just a pound sign, is the link.

Here’s a list of sites you can ping when you update your blog. It includes quite a few that aren’t in the default Movable Type list. [~stevenf]

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RSS Syndication Tools for the Palm OS

Nothing that I actually have not looked into, but a good summary in one place…

Are you a news junkie or looking to a mobile way to keep up with news from all over the web? Many sites use rss as a way to share headlines and content. PIC takes a look at some options for using rss with your mobile device. [PalmInfocenter]

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TypePad better watch its back

Squarespace looks pretty kick-ass…

University of Maryland student Anthony Casalena believes he is opening the realm once reserved for computer geeks to the entire world. After seeing the limitations of popular blogging tools and the complexity of common Web page publishing sites, Casalena single-handedly created Squarespace, an intelligent Internet content management system he believes is the next evolution of publishing on the World Wide Web — for everyone. Squarespace is a hosted web content management / micro content management solution….
[CMSWire]

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Another day – no progress from Six Apart

Yet another day goes by (though I guess by Six Apart time, the day does not end until after 11 pm EST.) without any real assistance from “tech support.” I struggle to even call it tech support since what little assistance I’ve received has been more guided self-help than anything. It’s quite frustrating when you send an email, get a response to continue the dialogue, only to find that the discussion then goes astray for hours if not days. I assumed wrongly that since my discussions with then (really just Ben) were taking place at such late hours that I might actually hear something over the weekend… no. Nothing after a quick message today, which was not helpful btw… and I suspect nothing real will come until late tonight if not tomorrow. What the hell is this crap? You either do or your don’t offer tech support. Half-assed contact is bullshit.

I like Moveable Type… and want to keep using it, but this is very frustrating and no way to continually treat a paying customer. I’m sure glad I paid to get premium support… not!

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Convert your blogrolling.com blogroll to an RSS list and vice-versa

I just updated my existing blogrolling sidebar by exporting from NetNewsWire into Blogrolling and seriously growing the list on the right sidebar. This now represents just about every site I track and read on a regular basis.

Blogrolling.com, recently bought out by Tucows, has added OPML import and export — that means that you can turn your RSS feed-list into your blogroll and vice-versa. [Boing Boing]

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Disappointed with Six Apart support…

So far.. much time has passed (2 days – feels like forever) with minimal progress. I received an email or three with some pointers, but no real assistance and have been in a quiet period waiting and waiting for some true guidance. These emails came well after normal hours… starting after 11pm EST.

I have learned that my issue does not appear to be a corruption issue, but rather a post that seems to have stuck around from a previous blog (I’ve messed with a few on this installation), though I have no idea what to do to resolve my issue….

In my mind, if you choose to offer customer/technical support, you need to do more than have the head of the company reply to messages when he can. I realize Six Apart is a smaller company, but get some tech support people, if you have some customers seeking help. It’s great to have such a priority level person working on my issue… but not when he can squeeze it in.