I’m interested (here) with what Windows 8 and the Metro UI, first seen on Windows Phone 7, means in the tablet space. Or as its more accurately known, the iPad space. What really interests me here is the idea that it might be a year until we see a Windows 8 tablet, assuming this is correct, it would appear to be a catastrophic case for Microsoft, surely the tablet wars will be over in a year?

Well, perhaps that might play to Microsoft.

Right now there isn’t much of a tablet war. We have Apple’s iPad dominant and nothing looking remotely likely to get close, much less topple it. It’s a great device and it has created the market from the previous failed attempts by Microsoft, among others. The there is Android, Googles smartphone OS hacked for tablets. The first generation of devices has been poor and they are approaching end of life, the first signs of the second generation are appearing and maybe Android will get a second chance. HP killed the Touchpad and, well everyone knows what happened with that. Blackberry launched an expensive toy and cant be considered a contender in my opinion, perhaps their second generation will make up for the first. And lastly we have Amazon, rumoured to be about to enter the game, but with a small, cheaper than iPad, based on old Android, low spec device. I don’t really think Amazon is entering the same game as everyone else, maybe with a competitive device but this 7″ shopping tablet isn’t it.

Then there is Microsoft. Metro, the UI, looks very good, it brings something new to the party, but as has already been pointed out Windows Phone 7 brought Metro to our attention and that hasn’t exactly changed Microsoft’s fortunes in the smartphone space, why would it do so in the tablet space? My thought is Microsoft isn’t looking for it to revolutionise anything. Imagine in 12 months, Windows 8 tablets launch, with a decent spread of apps, using the same basic OS that’s been around for some time on the desktop, laptop and server, slowly replacing the Windows 7 (Vista, XP, etc) systems in use by 100′s of millions. The tablet space, probably still lead by Apple, has settled down, its not a war of innovation anymore, its an established market, moving along the adoption curve. There may have been a few casualties, maybe even a new contender. But when Windows 8 tablets launch across a range of manufacturers the sheer choice of devices, all bearing a familiar badge, sporting a look and feel that has had months to become familiar, may be a very compelling idea in the mind of the Early and Late Majority.

There are clear signs that Apple is trying to converge its iOS and OSX operating systems, Microsoft is doing the same thing. Google is working with Intel, Microsoft is working with ARM. In 12 months there is going to be a lot less that divides tablets than there is today.

If you can’t get into and win the war, make sure you are around to win the peace.

“Twitter defines an “active user” as one who follows at least 30 people and has at least 10 people who follow him. A source with access to Twitter’s API who was quoted by Business Insider in April says that there were only 21 million people or accounts on Twitter that met the “active user” criteria.”

This is interesting and until I read it I had never considered the quality value of user metrics, just their quantative value. If this is true, and I have to say I suspect it might be, then Google+ can (and should) go for the jugular and change the game. In my opinion the Google+ UI and hence UX, while good, is lacking some simple but vital features. Right now the ‘stream’, the main feed of everyone you have circled in some way, is too noisy and circles currently don’t provide quite enough flexibility to tailor your default stream. But this is trivial to resolve for Google and many people have already commented on the 2 or 3 options to fix it, I’m sure Google will.

Another point raised in the previously mentioned article is that a lot of posts are nothing more than a teaser or snippet that then links to a fuller blog post. In fact Tweetdeck a very popular client for twitter and recently acquired by twitter, provides a tweet extender. But Google can beat this simply, it could allow you to post a full blog, direct into your stream. If Google allows for a simple two level posting mechanic, something like a summary, length restricted but including media and then a fuller extended post, hidden by default but with a clickable extend button on the post then it has in stream bloging taken care of.

twitters greatest asset in its early days, long before I wanted to use it, was its open and available API, this allowed them to build twitter and anyone to build add-ons and clients. But now twitter is much bigger, and not so open to others delivering the features it thinks (rightly or wrongly) it should be delivering. Once Google+ delivers its API we will see some of the current social media clients (Seesmic, Hootsuite, etc) including Google+, at this point its going to become apparent that twitter itself lacks in many areas compared to Google+ and it might just be a matter of time.

That time may also be a lot shorter than people think (myself included), this comparative graph of Google+ growth v’s twitter v’s Facebook, while not being a fair direct comparison, shows how rapidly Google+ has taken off (and its still invite based) and may give some indications to how volatile the social media user base is.

Let me start by saying that right now my music is not in the cloud and although I’ve had a play with both Google Music and Amazons Locker I do not use them yet (as they are not officially available in this country yet) and Apple has yet to launch its iCloud service.

There have been a number of ‘cloud’ music services making news to some degree in the last few months, including; Amazon, Google and Apple. I’ve been doing a little thinking about these services and there are a few things I’m more curious about.

Let’s start with Apple and its iTunes in the Cloud (iCloud), my understanding of this is that it’s a great offering, all your iTunes tunes in the cloud to download and play anywhere, well anywhere so longs as it’s on an Apple product of course. Interesting thing number 1, your iTunes purchases don’t count against your iCloud limit, that’s a great sell, you’ve got 20gigs of iTunes music and you can have it all in your iCloud for nothing! But the thing that has raised most interest though is iTunes Match. For your annual fee you can get all your non iTunes music into the cloud, but without all that tedious faffing about uploading it, Apple will match your music against their library and give you a nice new 256bit AAC of your dodgy old mp3. My final point here is price, Apple, once king of charging its loving little fans silly money is continuing its iPad tactic (which you have to say is winning) of beating the competition (such as it is) on price. My music collection is vast, if I were to put half of it into Amazons locker it would cost me a fortune ($200), Apple seems to be saying it will cost me $25!

Now, Amazon. This is basically a locker service. I buy space for my music, upload it and can then play it anywhere. Well in theory I can. It’s much the same with Google Music, though I don’t think anyone knows pricing yet. Here is problem nunmber one, have you ever tried to upload a lot of data from a domestic broadband connection? You’re going to find out what it means to have a different upload and download speed and boy is it going to hurt when you are trying to upload that big music collection. It could take days if not weeks. In my opinion it’s not going to happen, you just won’t do it, do you know why? Because you already have the music, it’s on your PC, it’s on your phone. The Amazon and Google music products require me and you to upload our music and that’s a painfully slow process. Apple has the winning hand here and its not as though you needed to be a genious to figure it out.

I should state at this point that it could be better than it seems if these services use some form of de-duplication. But I don’t know if they do or will. In principle if they did then once I’ve uploaded ‘Linkin Parks – A Thousand Suns’ you shouldn’t have to. That’s a greatly simplified explanation but the point is we both don’t need to upload the same thing, so if all of my music was already uploaded by several other users, all I would need to do is have my music matched up and get access to the common tunes. Oh, wait a second, we have heard that before, that’s what Apple is doing, but its licensed to do it using its own music library.

Cost and convenience, seemingly two points to Apple.

My final point is the cost of listening to the music I’ve already paid for. Let’s assume I’ve got all the music I’m interested in on the service of my choice. I now want to play it back. Play it anywhere, that’s the idea, right? How much of your 3G data plan do you think is going to be chewed up listening to a few hours of music a week? It’s not Apple or Google or Amazon who will be charging you, it’s your mobile operator. I don’t yet know how well any of these services will cache music already played, in other words, if I play an album today do I need to have it stream all over again tomorrow. Paying my mobile phone operator to stream an album once sounds painful enough, paying every time I listen to an album sounds ridiculous. Don’t forget, I already own this music. I paid for it once. Obviously this is less of an issue at when I’m hooked up to Wi-Fi somewhere, but consider how long public access Wi-Fi , a technology already creaking under the strains of today’s content to be delivered, will remain free or usable. Sit down in Starbucks, hook up to Wi-Fi, pick up your email, check in on Foursquare and stream your music to listen to and watch it all fall down as everyone else does the same thing. So in reality, what I need to be able to do is grab the music from the cloud onto my device so I can listen to it without lining my operators pockets. We will assume their network data is up to the job, but we both know thats a big issue.

So what is the alternative? Well it’s what you already have. Your device of choice has an ever increasing amount of available storage and more is available (unless its Apple) at an ever decreasing cost. My cell phone has about 100 albums on it right now, that’s a lot of music to listen to. I’m just not sure I need, or want, it in the cloud.

I’ve been playing around with Google+ for a few days and I am impressed and disapointed in equal measure. So far Googles latest attempt at creating a social networking platform is, without doubt, their best effort yet. It includes some new features and adds some polish to some established ones.

Right now its STILL in invite only phase, it really needs to be out of this in the next few days. Already people I know using it all agree, the biggest missing feature is their friends. What use a social networkng site with no one to be social with? What else is missing? Well a lot of things but the two they need a solid answer to very quickly are Facebook and twitter.

Everyone uses Facebook, not everyone is going to be using Google+, not even if they give away £10 with every sign up. They need a mechanism to ease people over from Facebook to Google+ and the obvious way is to allow Google+ to post into Facebook. The same is true of twitter, but thats a different party.

So why is there no tickbox in Google+ to ‘Post to Facebook’? Either Google couldnt or wouldnt, I dont buy the idea that they didnt. Its an intersting issue. Facebook are unlikely to allow any kind of posting that potentially takes away their traffic or their users. This is going to set Google+ and Facebook against each other. Facebook is established, feature rich (relatively), has an open API for developers and 750 million users. Google+ has… Circles?

So thats a knockout and a win for Facebook then, not quite in my opinion. Facebook has been on the wrong end of privacy issues time and time again and its always won because there was no alternative. Google+ is shiny and new, though I have yet to figure out why this could ever translate into a meaningful selling point, we are not talking about cars!

Ok, so what about twitter. Neither Facebook nor Google+ allow direct native posting to twitter, though there are plenty of Social Media applications that get around this, though now yet for Google+ (damn, not having that API is already a problem, isnt it!). twitter is not a competitor to Facebook or to Google+ in my opinion, they are overlapping and complimnetary. twitter is more public, its the open room big conversation. Facebook is the closed party of friends and like minded individuals. What is Google+? Well it has potential to be both, I’m minded to consider that Google and twitter could really forge a strong realtionship here.

Google+ needs to create Circles, its feature to group friends, that can be your twitter friends and your Facebook friends. I think the winning play is to play every game, social media is people, not systems. When there are no options 3rd parties fill the gaps. But if Google relies on 3rd parties, when they can eventually get hold of an API, to build features needed for Google+ survival they may find them writing for the platform that suported them first.

I think this landscape feel over crowded but I think it has room for the life and soul of the party to make an appearance. Mobile is going to be the decisive factor. So thats game set and match to Google then, after all they have Android for phones and tablets (yes, the tables are a joke, but that will change) and they launched a truly killer Google+ Android app. Game over? No.

Not by a long way. Apple has got the Google+ app to approve, I’m sure it will approve it in the next few days and I’m sure it will be great. The Facebook app sucks, on all platforms. The twitter app is fine everywhere, though nothing special. But Apple has a possible game changer about to appear.

Its widely rumoured that when Apple launches the iPhone5 later this year, with the public release of iOS5, it will alos launch a new, lower price, iPhone. Imagine an iPhone that can eat into the phone market on price, who will want to buy anything else? An iPhone that is as cool as an iPhone5, can do every thing an iPhone5 can do, but is cut down in some ways. Apple may just be about to blow up the smartpjhone market again in the same way, with the same tactic, it used on the tablet market. Make an Apple product everyone will want and make it a aprice no one can compete with.

So who wants to put money on which platform is going to have the best Faecbook and twitter apps in a few months?

Interesting, isnt it?

For years the Linux desktop has been dogged with the simple fact thats its UI and hence UX is, charitably, not as slick as OSx or Windows, but more accurately its a pig. Given enough time and knowledge it can be much better than either of them, the problem is the popular desktop environment is not populated with Linux hackers, so those brave enough to try it see its looks crap and go back to something they know.

I’ve generally thought that between KDE and Gnome, plus a handful of also rans and slightly more specialized offerings the Linux desktop is a complete failure. Sure choice is king and being able to do what you want id fantastic, but not at the expense of being able to use the thing to get a job done. Gnome is usable, just. KDE recently isn’t even that. Both are amazing when you spend time getting them just right. But who has that sort of time? and in an environment of any size who wants that sort of maintenance headache?

Then comes the apps, tools, widgets, thingies and whatsits. The essential collection of things you actually need to use to get something done. Try finding a comprehensive set of anything that adopts any thing approaching common ground to either the desktop manager or anything else, its not a pretty picture most of the time, literally. This all severely hurts, it hurts the Linux desktop and it hurts adoption because it hurts productivity, it doesn’t help that it looks like something thrown together in a kiddies art class either.

Ubuntu has popularized the Linux desktop, growing its reach hugely and despite my misgivings about its somewhat slapdash approach to releases it proves to be ‘The Linux Desktop’.

So, one might think that Ubuntu could lead the charge and sort out the desktop UI/UX in fact I was beginning to think it might happen until the slippage of Gnome Shell and the emergence of Ubuntu Unity in its netbook remix. Unity is another desktop manger, its not Gnome, its not KDE, its Unity. Quite frankly it sucks, Ive been putting up with it on my netbook for a while and as its a device I use when I have to rather than when I want to its not such a big deal, probably more so as the application I use on it is a terminal 99% of the time.

So I was quite surprised to read that 11.04 will use Unity and not Gnome. I would have been comforted to read that Ubuntu was going to be working very close with Gnome to sort out the desktop, but that seems to not be the case. There have been a few blogs today about what this means for Gnome, well quite simply it doesn’t mean anything much. Ubuntu has barely contributed anything to Gnome, Gnome will live on and prosper based on it being largely contributed to by Red Hat et al. For sure not being the default in Ubuntu is going to hurt, but Gnome is’nt going to suffer much. Ubuntu might though…

I don’t know how many desktops use Ubuntu right now, but how many of them are going to be using it after the upgrade to 11.04 and the switch to Unity? Lets consider Unity is new, right now its not pretty, its slow, buggy and in my opinion not ready for release. But they have got time, not much though.  I wonder how many people will stick with Ubuntu when the UI changes, its going to have to be something of an amazingly successful upgrade isn’t it? Any problems could have people reaching for any of the other popular Linux distro’s and the familiar Gnome desktop.

I think its an interesting move, for sure its vital they get the news out now and start to wade through the reaction to it. Right now I think Unity for me will be on my desktop for as long as it takes to switch to Gnome and if that isn’t less than 10 minutes the switch will be to to Fedora, Debian or any one of a dozen other perfectly viable desktop Linux distributions. Unity needs some very positive media in the next month and some well led promotion, making it work well might be a good first step too.

My final thought, for now, is why didn’t Ubuntu try to adopt the Google ChromeOS type of browser based desktop, isn’t Unity actually about anything but?

All my hosting servers run Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Plesk as the hosting control panel so I set about looking up something a little more informative than Zends pathetic notes on installation. This is where I started to come a little unstuck and found myself going backwards and forwards between different sets of installations instructions and a segmentation fault problem. Now typically when I get to this point I remember that Atomic Rocket Turtle has usually not only been there and done that, they also have a installation for it and a simple yum repo waiting, as always they did. I wont detail this method as its easy to find and anyone who should be doing it will know what to do and where to look.

After installing Zend Optimizer via Atomics repo I then looked at what it had actually done, to reverse engineer the install if you like, this I hoped would leave me with a simple way to install the required module without having to add the Atomic repos to servers that are under full patch management.

So  here are my simple notes.

These are based on using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (or equivalent CentOS 5), PHP 5.1 (the standard PHP build for this distro) and Plesk 8.6. If you are using anything different you’ll need to adjust things in what I hope is a fairly obvious manner.

Firstly download the right Zend Optimizer package. Upload it to your server (Zend unhelpfully do not provide a direct download link) and unpack the tar ball.

Now find the right version for your version of PHP in the ‘data’ folder, for PHP 5.1 it’s in ’5_1_x_comp’ inside will be a ‘ZendOptimizer.so’ this is the PHP module you will need to install, rename it to ’ZendOptimizer-5.1.so’ then we will know which PHP version it’s for (Zend if you are reading this please try to follow some simple accepted standards with your naming).

In this environment PHP loads modules from ‘/usr/lib/php’ create a sub folder called ‘zend’ and copy the module into it.

Now create a file called ‘zend.ini’ in ‘/etc/php.d’ the file needs to contain the instruction to load the module ‘zend_extension=/usr/lib/php/zend/ZendOptimizer-5.1.so’.

Check things are ok with ‘php -v’ at the command line, if all is well you’ll get

PHP 5.1.6 (cli) (built: Mar 31 2010 02:44:37)
Copyright (c) 1997-2006 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.1.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2006 Zend Technologies
with Zend Optimizer v3.3.3, Copyright (c) 1998-2007, by Zend Technologies

Now restart Apache and check the Zend Optimizer module is loaded with a simple phpinfo() script and make sure that your PHP scripts and so on are all still working.

You should have now successfully installed Zend Optimizer.

winmo, as it has become known has been around for years and has been a truly
awful operating system in its exposed form, its true value has been when
used on embedded systems which have hidden it from view and review.

With the arrival of iphone, android and even when compared to nokia symbian
or even blackberry its the outright loser by a long way. So it was quite a
surprise when HTC launched the HD2 and hobbled it out of the gate.

The HD2 hardware is leading edge and the screen is still one of the largest
on any smartphone. Which makes it even more bizarre to see the disappointing
Windows boot screen when you power it on.

To be fair to HTC they did an amazing job layering a very bespoke front end
on to of the awful Windows UI, Sense was lipstick on the pig. It was very
good lipstick but it was still a pig underneath.

As HTC continued to launch new phones, mostly running android the inevitable
calls for an upgrade from winmo to android started to be heard, HTC actually
said they could do it, then cruelly didn’t!

Rumors started to spread of a band of developers working on porting android to
the HD2, XDA soon had posts with devs making progress and soon after there
were videos showing work in progress android running on HD2 hardware.

I was watching carefully, but I use my phone everyday and couldn’t afford for it to
be sacrificed to a partially working android or worse a complete bricking.

Then in the last few days it looked like they had cracked it, android was
working. I downloaded the latest version, upgraded the phones radio and
carefully followed the simple instructions.

There it was, android. I did a lot of testing then started to select the
applications I would need. Everything was working, I decided to trial it for
reliability and stability for a week.

Here we are on day three and I can’t see what could happen now to make me
want to go back to winmo.

It feels like I have a new phone, probably the phone the HD2 should have
always been.

Hats off to the devs at XDA.

There are a few weather applications and tools I’ve come across that I have found useful to have on my phone, a HTC HD2. The HD2 runs Windows Mobile, regarded by many as one of weakest mobile operating systems available, thats not something I would argue with but its not completely useless (lets be honest Microsoft never do a complete job of anything!).

I’ve little doubt that the iPhone and Android are covered with many more and likely better applications but this is for those of us with Windows Mobile.

I’ve mostly been looking at applications rather than web sites which have a mobile version, but there are a few of those here too.

So what is there for those of us with more than a passing interest in the weather or an obsession with needing as much technology as possible to tell us its raining when simply accepting we are getting wet is not enough.

1. HTC Sense Weather

The HD2 (thank God) layers HTC Sense (Touch Flo 3D in a former life) over the awful Windows Mobile 6.5 UI, without this there would be no point really. One of the ‘built in’ applications is HTC Weather. This is quite a nice graphical tool and adds much needed eye candy to the home screen as well as offering its own application screen. You can add multiple cities as well as have it automatically report on your current location, however, the current location can be troublesome as it relies on Cell Towers for its location fix and not the inbuilt GPS, perhaps someone at HTC can offer some explanation of why?

A 5 day (today and next 4 days) forecast is the basic offering and the graphics are well made, smooth and do impress, something WinMo based phones need to do in the company of their iPhone and Android counterparts.

2. GPS Enabled Weather

This was a real find in my opinion, you can find it on their web site. The application gives you rain radar images and can take its location fix from either GPS or cell towers, GPS obviously provides a more accurate fix and avoids the ‘reception’ issues that the standard HTC Sense Weather can sometimes suffer. This is not so much weather eye candy as it is good solid weather information in the form of radar maps which you can even run an animated loop. You can set your location manually and you can touch the map to update the location too.

Two nice features are the ability to set the map zoom level (no pinch to zoom though, why not?) and a feature that allows you to call a URL with parameters passed from the application, such as your GPS coordinates. This would be ideal to call the Weather Underground mobile pages for deeper weather info on your location. Again, something I will be playing with in a spare moment.

3. iCumulus

Not so much an application as a mobile version of my weather web site created using Cumulus from SandaySoft and iCumulus from David Jamieson, written for the iPhone it seems to work fine within the Opera browser on the HD2.

I think the scripting and CSS needs some anti Safari or more Opera friendly tweaking though, something I hope to get around to soon.

As iCumulus requires a data feed supplied by your own personal weather station and web site its not something you can use unless you either have your own or access to such a site in your location

4. Touch Weather

This is very nice eye candy and solidly built, available from their web site. It allows you to select from different weather services and report on multiple locations. The basic version (free) does not have the 5 day forecast, for that you need to buy the pro version ( $5).

The default page is lacking any real detail, just the eye candy animations and the temperature. A panel appears at the bottom, when touched for, with further detail. Scrolling up and down steps you through the time period forecasts for that day, scrolling left and right takes you forward and backward through the 5 days of forecasts. A 5 day forecast summary panel is available from the detail panel too.

Its all very nice and there is a lot of customisation possible, from changing backgrounds to defining the levels of opacity used by the animations.

5. Weather4Me

The light weight Weather4me, offers decent 5 day forecasting with tabs so you can switch between Current, Today and 5 Day view. The AccuWeather tab opens an embedded browser page on the AccuWeather site for your selected location, this gives you more options with the forecast data, right down to hourly forecasts. There are also satellite images with animations.

The nice thing about being graphically light is that it will run well on other, less powerful, windows mobile phones.

The downside is that it looks less appealing next to some of the others, however, accurate data is always going to be worth more than pretty pictures.

6. Weather Underground

i.wund.com, although written for the iPhone, provides  a lot of the great data from Weather Underground in a mobile digestible format. Current conditions, forecasts and maps are all available.

The really nice thing with i.wund.com is that you not only have the choice of weather reports from all the usual sources you can also drill down to your own personal weather station, if you run one, providing you supply a data feed to Weather Underground

10.04 is an evolution but one in an evolutionary process that has visibly slowed down recently.That’s not to say there has not been a lot of work going on or that 10.04 is not impressive, there has and it is. When I say visibly I do mean visibly. Yes its a prettier place to live but, for example, its not got the next generation of Gnome. For that we will wait, hopefully for the next version of Ubuntu, however I do wonder how many who have opted for this latest LTS will not upgrade until the next LTS?

So, what was the install like? Well, it was pretty painless. The Operating System installed quickly, booted with no trouble (and booted fast but don’t believe the hype, its not that fast!). Sound, graphics, media cards all played nicely out of the box. It only took a short while to replace the now, quite frankly, hopeless FireFox with Opera, install the other usual suspects of my daily desktop life and be operational. I’ve always preferred a simple dock to desktop shortcuts or quick launch icons so I installed (as usual) Avant Window Navigator (0.4.0) and replaced the lower panel. I have to say AWN has improved, it feels a little more together than it used to and its not like it was bad before.

My only gripe with the new look and feel is that on a multi desktop system the close, min, max buttons are missing a menu drop down to send the window to another desktop. A right click on the title bar takes care of it but this is something that needs to be covered in the next release when, hopefully, we will see the reason why controls are on the left (ala Mac) and not the right (ala Windows), that space thats opened up on the right is going to have purpose soon we are told.

Media playback is sadly still not there out of the box, licensing and re-distribution can be blamed for this I think. Happily its not difficult to quickly have your MP3′s and DVD’s spinning away. I had one issue with Handbrake, but this was resolved by using the latest snapshot and should be resolved now that 10.04 is on general release. GIMP had to be pulled out of the repo’s as its not part of the standard install, no big deal really but silly in my opinion

BBC iPlayer, Tweetdeck, Filezilla, Dropbox and Skype all worked fine. I installed Sunbird, a screenlet I use to provide weather updates from Weather Underground and my own weather station and that was more or less that, desktop done.

Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop

The story was barely any different installing the Netbook Remix onto my EeePC901, though the desktop is, of course, the UNR standard.

Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook

One of the new features in 10.04 is better integration between the desktop and the various social networking offerings, twitter and facebook really. This takes the form of two tools, yes two, why use one when you can make everyone do everything twice? Emapthy (which replaced Pidgin as the standard IM client back in 9) handles chat and Gwibber takes care of social broadcasting to twitter and facebook.

I have to say its good to have the ability to have a single chat client, Empathy, to work with Yahoo, MSN and Facebook but it does not handle Skype – I’m not blaming anyone but this is really a huge shortcoming now for me. Skype remains outside but has become almost ubiquitous for voice and IM communication. Not having integration into a single messaging client is something that needs to be addressed. Always preferring the open route I would prefer to see Empathy (or other) include at the very least Skype IM if not voice, however, I wonder why Skype has not built the IM ability for the other popular clients?

The ‘broadcast’ client, gwibber (come on guys, time to pay someone to come up with better names) is pretty weak and not without its problems. but it works in a pretty neatly integrated fashion and lets be fair and say that with some TLC it will do the job, but it needs some love pretty soon. No one who uses facebook or twitter much already will bother with it, they will install tweetdeck or whatever. But it might help tempt newer users into the social media and networking club. Its  quick to get something out in a hurry but links, pictures, etc, forget it!

Its pretty ironic to think, again as with all things in computing tech, that we have advanced so far only to be no further forward in real terms. In much the same way that cloud was my old mainframe, the latest fancy Excel spreadsheet fails to better my old Lotus 1-2-3, now the new gwibber and empathy and skype still need as many clients as MSN, Yahoo and AIM did before. Anyway, enough of that….

There is a lot more, people are raving about the Ubuntu One Music store, sorry but I cant think of anything less exciting. I dont use iTunes and I cant see me using this. I would like to see a native Spotify client though.

I mentioned above that I installed Dropbox, Ubuntu One has been around for a while but to be quite honest it still feels unreliable, slow and badly made. However the killer is its not got a Windows client (or anything else for that matter) so its useless for me and I suspect many many others. It does however, if you can use it, allow you to synch ANY folder not just a single specified one like Dropbox. Thats a very nice feature.

Performance wise I would say its too close to call. My desktop is nothing special, its getting on and doesn’t have a spec to die for. 9 was fine, 10 doesn’t feel faster in any tangible way but it does feel a little more together and it does boot that little bit faster too. On my netbook, again not the latest hardware, I would say its the same story. In short it all runs fine and I suspect on more modern tin its going to be a real delight. The bottom line here is that I can continue to take advantage of new features, better looking desktops, without having to shell out on new hardware. Thats a big plus with linux and Ubuntu.

There is no question 10.04 is a good operating system, if you already use Ubuntu its a no brainer upgrade. I usually find problems in a week of use and I’ve not had anything so far. Its been stable and reliable and everything works as it would.

Upgrade now, you wont regret it (however if you do don’t come crying to me!)

My biggest issue is instrumentation or gauges, Ive tried various offerings the most successful being the free gauges offered by Bindows but even these have left a lot to be desired, wide browser compatibility being top of a list of niggles.

So I decided, while I continue my search for the tools to build my own site, to apply a lot of the other tricks, tips and technology to my Cumulus based site from SandaySoft?

My weather station, a WS2350, is connected to an old server here in my office and via the excellent Cumulus software from Steve at  SandaySoft keeps the Redwood web site up to date.

So what are the key differences between the standard Cumulus web page and the Redwood site?

The old multi page standard site has been replaced by a single main page incorporating some of the data found on the old additional pages and driven by AJAX based dynamic updates based on a live data feed from the weather station. You can find details of the AJAX scripts on the Cumulus forum pages, implementing it was very simple.

The page has been reformatted a little with some minor tweaks to the CSS and the addition of a banner image (a picture of Redwood Lake, of course).

I have also implemented a data log to drive some graphs. The graphs are based on JPGraph package using the logging and data generation scripts by TNET Services, these are really good and very simple to get working. However they dont seem to deal with data gaps as I would like, I would prefer to see time on the graphs with no data rather than the period omitted. I’ve been looking at Open Flash Chart but have not really had the free time to define scripts to feed data in the JSON format required.

The navigation bar has been changed to allow me to include some great external content from Weather Underground and from Meteorologica, the standard Cumulus instrumentation gauges have been retained but I’m no fan of Silverlight and at best they are troublesome, which is a shame as I think Steve from SandaySoft has actually done a great job in building them.

One thing I always disliked about the standard Cumulus web site was the Moon phase graphic, so I’ve replaced it with some new images.

Overall I’m fairly pleased with the results, I think there is still a lot that could be done (time permitting of course). I would like to implement a better forecast, currently I’m using the simple (Zambretti based) forecast produced by Cumulus, the WS2350 doesn’t produce anything better itself as some weather stations do.

I think a forecast graphic and, if I can work out the scripting, a ‘current’ conditions graphic are next on the TO-DO list.

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