The Significance of a USB host

For the last 2 years, I've been saying to anyone willing to listen that the future of computing is a incredibly powerful phone that you cradle when you get home or at work, etc. This cradle has a mouse, a keyboard, a large screen and a good sound system.

Android enthusiasts seem to have taken another step to making this vision a reality. Notice in the video that he launches X-Window with a desktop environment from his phone that isn't the Android shell.

That being said, the Nexus One, as powerful as it may be, still isn't the all powerful phone I've been describing for the last 2 years, that phone still doesn't exists.

HTML5 Update

Yes, we know about some of the good stuff in html5 already but a lot of new specs have been added to the html5 family in the last year that will try to make the following available to web applications, i.e.,

• TTS
• Speech Recognition
• Recording
• Microphone Access
• Camera Access
• WebGL
• Positional Audio, still very early, don't know if will be based on OpenAL, OpenSL ES or something else
• File & Device API
• and more...

Android can be Dumb Too

Here's something you would expect if you were coding on the BlackBerry platform but this is most definitely on Android. Android doesn't implement roaming itself.

What? Yes, it's true. If you enable roaming in global system settings, it doesn't actually stick unless each and every single application you use honors the flag. Furthermore, if you don't implement it, Google states that it's the application developer's problem if your users complain about very large data bills.

So to implement it in every application, you need to check ConnectivityManager to see if you're allowed to use the network, e.g.,

final ConnectivityManager cm = (ConnectivityManager) getSystemService(Context.CONNECTIVITY_SERVICE);

// TODO check the connection to see if it's allowed

You also need to check for the CONNECTIVITY_ACTION intent in case this changes later on. Honestly, this should just be blocked by the system. They're afraid someone won't be able to get to emergency services. It should just support an emergency level flag for network connections instead of getting all developers to implement this in their apps.

iPhone dev on Windows

As of VirtualBox 3.2.2 it is now possible to do iPhone dev on your Windows box. VirtualBox 3.2.0 introduced support for OS X as a guest OS, however there was a bug that broke iPhone/iPod Touch usb support on Windows hosts, this has been fixed in the 3.2.2 release.

So without further ado, here are the (amazingly simple) instruction for installing OS X 10.6.3 as a guest OS in VirtualBox on Windows.

1) Create a new virtual machine, the guest OS is Mac OS and for the version I used Mac OSX Server, not server 64-bit (I haven't tried 64-bit yet), disable EFI.
2) Download EmpireEfi and choose the BootCD.iso as your CD image.
3) Edit the VM's xml file and add the following to the section:

<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal2/SmcDeviceKey" value="ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)AppleComputerInc"/>

4) Boot from the CD and follow the EmpireEfi instructions. You can install OS X using a retail DVD.
5) Unlike VirtualBox 3.2.0, the built-in EFI bios will not boot OS X, so keep using the EmpireEfi boot cd.