My review

About 2 weeks ago I bought a new laptop. It cost me a bit but not so much.
My older notebook was really old and heavy and its battery last less than 10 minutes when not plugged in. The last problem was related to the personal bad behavior to have the laptop always on the battery charge mode.
At the end I decided to buy a new, more portable and more powerful one.
My 'new baby' is an Aspire Timeline X 4820TG. I googled, as usual, a lot about this product before buying it. Some reviews and some forums. One of the main problem is that I didn't find so much results for my query. At the beginning I thought it wasn't a good news. But when I first turned it on I was totally surprised. The laptop is really light (even with the battery on) and it really last a lot.
I've not used it yet for work purpose just entertainment and videogames but I think that those stuff could also be considered as benchmarks. I really loved the way it automatically switch from a graphics driver to another one by simply pressing a button or whether the power cable is plugged in or not.
The only 'problem' I noticed is the twitch the display perform when jumping between the ATI graphic card and the Intel one. But I really don't mind about it because the difference is massive.
When the ATI card is on everything goes really good. Videos flow like streams and streaming run like Bolt.
Videogames as well totally changes, they are really smooth and fluent.
The display is a 14.1" LED and it could be very bright.
One of the oddest thing is the USB port placement. Well, it's odd only to me probably because I think they are too close to the user, I really preferred to be further (totally personal impression).
The battery has a strange but useful shape because when you put the laptop on a desk/table/couch/leg it will be just a bit raised up so that it won't start burn your legs when the CPU goes really high and it will also remain very fresh because the air could easily flow under the fan.
If I should vote for it I would say an 8.5.
That's why it's not perfect but I really love it.

Volcano's mind

It's been a while I wrote my last post.

I left one of the most beautiful cities in the world more than 7 days ago and I came back to my city where a lot of people were really waiting for me (my girlfriend, my family but also my boss).
Last Monday I went to the office and I started with a brand new project.
New project means a lot of new stuff to develop and think about.
I think it's quite good for me, I really need to start working on something completely new, I also need to start thinking on new ideas and new jQuery plugins and optimization.
So, my last week were really busy. A lot of stuff to do and a lot of friends and people to meet.

Fortunately (well, in some way unfortunately) last night I couldn't sleep very well. My mind started thinking on new projects (also personal one).
The work project was related to a GPS-system for bikers. For 'bikers' I mean people riding bycicle. I think could be really good to track and map people's route with additional data (such as traffic condition or streets' work). This project is strictly related to my next personal project, that means fixing my father's old bike and begin going to work with 2-wheels instead of 4 (that is for sure better for the environment and for my body).

I was thinking on some good idea. A sort of social app to share bike's route into the city and to receive suggestions from other bikers about a different route or a better one.

GPS is still in my mind but I think I'm going to find the right way to create something useful.

Bye bye London

Three months have already passed. Three months ago I started my temporary English experience here. I was so excited, everything seemed so new and shiny. These months were full of work, but I mostly enjoyed the people and the colleagues I met here. I found some new great connections. These guys are really fabulous, the quick beers together were awesome and the City is wonderful. For sure I'll be back one day to meet again these wonderful people and these amazing places. Right now I'm on the train that will carry me to the airport. I'm really sad to let everything and everybody I found here. Thank you, again, guys for everything happened in these months. See you soon, I'll promise!

Update: just arrived in Milan..back to my country.

The tweeting spam

I used Twitter for more than a year, and I'm still using it.
I have to say it's not my favourite social web service. A lot of people is following me and I follow a lot of people too but I think the main problem is the kind of discussion people talk about I don't really like. In these days I'm reading a lot of web magazine talking about tweets' power to raise revolutions (see Egypt or Spain for example) but I only read of these. None of the people I'm following really talked about this stuff. Probably it's mostly my fault because I'm not following the right people but at the same time I noticed that a lot of websites are spamming their tweets talking about their latest news. Another awful idea is the retweet use they are going through for any kind of sale offers or gifts as well just to gather more people to the website. Sometime, not so often, I read my timeline and it's totally full of crap. Offers and sales and news' retweets. So I was just wondering if I was totally wrong thinking of Twitter as some kind of brief real-time news aggregator or this wonderful service is probably used in the wrong way!
(Thank you G to asking me yesterday night if I am going to write something new on my blog. I really appreciate the question!)

Gordon Ramsay's TV shows

I think everybody know who Gordon Ramsay is.
Just to be brief, he is a famous, and rich as well, British chef who also made some TV shows such as "Hell's Kitchen" or the "F Word" (where 'F' means 'Food' in this case).

In the last weeks, the British television started to broadcast a new show called "Gordon's Great Escape". The show wants to be a journey around the world based on food culture different from the British/European one.
I think the show is quite interesting because let people understand what the other side of the world (in the last episodes they're talking about Asian food culture).
What really impressed me was the announcement just before the show begin (also) saying: 'This show could contain images not suited for everybody'.
For example, in the last episode the famous chef went to Vietnam and decided to try the real Vietnamese food so it began eating a snake from A to Z (as he defined). That meant start drinking the snake's heart until eating the snake's bone.

I have to admit that some images were really hard to see just because we're not used to see people eating those kind of animals or eating them in those ways.
What I really couldn't understand is that, in the last days in my morning newspaper, I read of a lot of people very angry about this TV program because of the images transmitted and mostly about the cruelty 'applied' to the snake.
Am I wrong saying that nobody forced you to watch that show?
It's like watching an horror movie and then complaining about the amount of blood shown.

The announcer at the beginning just said the images shown could be really 'hard', so it's up to you the decision whether to watch it or not.

So, please, people complaining about a TV show that don't fit your tastes at first learn how to change channel.

My personal Love symphony

I don't want to be to classified as another romantic Italian, but what I really sometimes ask myself is: what is love?
Love is something you feel really inside and really deep in your hearth. Love is something that burns into your soul. Love is made of chemical and electrical inputs coming out of your brain.
All these answers could be completely right, but what I think is more important is that you cannot decide if some of these are better than other. It all depends on your point of view. Some people could also say that love doesn't exist at all. Well, they are totally wrong. Everybody fall in love at least once in a lifetime. Love is not only for somebody but also for something.
But love is always a long journey to the top of the highest mountains. Sometimes goes up and sometimes down, and this totally depends on the people involved.
I can say I am very lucky to have found, more than 4 years ago, a girl who is still loving me also considering my strange ideas, my strange behaviour as well. Lucky because sometime we fought about stupid things (like any lovers do) but we always found the right way to make a step forward. Love is also fighting with your girlfriend for something that you think is really important just to understand that sometime it was really stupid. Love is been loved because sometimes people are really stupid.

I'm a creative

Considering myself as a creative never stopped me from trying to create, not only in the digital world, whatever could come in my mind.
2 years ago I designed a lamp completely made of wood, except from the bulb for sure, as a birthday gift. The idea came in my mind one night when I couldn't fall asleep.
Often happens that I could not sleep because my brain decide to work out on the strangest things.
That night I dreamed of that lamp and the morning after I went buying some wood to cut and sharpen as I imagined the night before. After a week of really hard work the idea came to life and it was awful.
It was good considering that it was my first hand-made job ever starting, not even, from scratch. It was crap because it was too fragile to firmly stand without even broke up.
After that I stopped thinking on real works and started thinking more on digital works.
Some of mine digital works requested me too much time that I couldn't even bear, so it wasn't possible to complete them.
After a year, my mind came out again with a wood-made lamp. That time I thought more between the pure idea and the real works. I designed it, I talked with somebody with more engineering skills that me (my father) and then, after only 4 hours of works, my lamp was completed. It could stand still and it's not as fragile as the first one!
Right now, my creation is in my girlfriend's bedroom and I really love to see that it's still there.
In the meanwhile I had a lot of ideas, some of them inspired from the world surrounding me. One day, for sure, I will try to make a sun-powered helicopter just to really understand how hard it could be to create something that could win the gravity force but mostly just because I want to understand how an engine could be made.
Before the helicopter experiment, what I really love to do is filming some sort of movie. Well, not an entire 90 minutes one, something very short. Probably something based upon good stories I read in Stephen King's novels book.
I don't want to be the next Spielberg or Tarantino (it's not my work, at all or probably bot yet) but I just want to try the feelings and the sensation of creating something that could create the same emotion in somebody else.
I'm not just a creative, I'm quite curious. Curious about everything!

Small and cheap

When you develop something regarding web, usually, you don't have to think too much about going out of memory. You mostly rely a lot on server machines that are quite good and powerful. It's totally different when you work on mobile application. Android, for example, could allow you to have, about, 3 MB as total memory allocation.
I recently discovered that my first app ever published was quite hungry of memory. Doing some specific operations consequently could cause memory leaks. I wasn't used to think about memory consumption so I really dig deeper into my code and really googled a lot and suddenly found out what were my real issues.
In the last days I learnt a lot of new improved techniques for achieving my goal and right now I'm very happy to announce that a newer and totally 'cheaper' version of my app will be released soon.
I really hope that some of you could enjoy it.

Older and newer projects

Last days I talked a lot about my new ideas. I mostly talked about them.
A colleague of mine also told me that the 'train alarm' one could be a bit useless, but it was funny to know that some colleagues read my posts!
When you start thinking on something new, could happen you lose focus on what you previously did. That's why today I decided to update a bit my first (and the only one published) project. I decided to improve it, because I know there is still a lot of stuff to learn and I think it could really be a sandbox for optimization and best-practices as well.
One of the first improvement were the UI. I removed the ugly gray background to the picture and then I added some nice mirror-reflected image effect. This, in some way unfortunately, mean that my application is crashing more often because of memory leaks. I'm sure the problem was already there but I needed to discover it. I tried to release a newer and better version but I suddenly noticed that I still have a lot of stuff.
Good for me, I really love to learn brand new techniques and I really love to learn Android programming.  

Squares and rectangles

While having a beer (well actually they are two) and waiting for colleagues to reach me at piccadilly circus I started playing a game I just downloaded from the Android market. It is a free game that reminds me a lot of classical old games such as Arkanoid. Probably I won't even be born when those games reach the market but I played them when I was a kid with my brothers' Commodore64. I remember of them because they were so simple and in some way beautiful that you couldn't forget them. I have to say that the actual games are so real they seem movies, but classical 8-bit games where awesome because with only your brain work you could made them, in some way, possible. During 80's, and early 90's as well, imagination was the keyword.
I was wondering why nobody is trying to reproduce this imagination's world. You know, there are plenty of games out there that seem "old" but they allow you to move too much on the screen, there are a lot of graphical effects, things moving around. The classical videogames, right now, could be easy to 'copy', in some ways, because even a poor designer like me could draw it. Love the idea of squares and rectangles moving around (always loved and forever will love).
I really have to study more Android graphical libraries.

Thank-you Facebook

I don't really like Facebook because of its totally intrusive way of gathering data from every people, digging deeper in people details. But, as a techie first and a web user then I'm really fascinated about all this great lines of code behind these blue pages and I like the way it could make simple connecting people and friends in the same exact easiest way.
A lot of companies use Facebook to advertise their products or to make money in general.
In the last days I started using a web service called Twitterfeed. This project reads an RSS feed (usually a blog one) and updates your Twitter or Facebook accounts (these are the major services) with your latest posts.
Twitterfeed also gives you some statistics about your posts' link (simply the number of clicks) but what's great is that it's letting me know that some of my Facebook connections are reading (I really hope) my posts.
So, thank-you Facebook but especially thank-you guys!

How fast a train can go?

This morning I had to wake up at 4 am because I had to go to the airport because my girlfriend was going back to Turin. While on the gatwick express to London Victoria I fell asleep because I was bloody tired. When I woke up everybody around me where standing because the train arrived at the station. Suddenly I started thinking about something useful for that scenario.
Imagine how many people in the morning took the train to go to work. For sure lots of them would love to sleep a bit on the route especially if they are far enough. At the end, almost every devices could understand what's about their right position. The range could be a bit wide or really small. Google maps knows the right position of a station. So, the equation is really simple: when the user drive directly into the interested station range the device starts ringing. The main problem is the battery saving factor. The app should consider the train average speed (I think it could be calculated to be not too much neither too poor) and estimate the time between point A and point B and start requesting data every X minutes. Simple indeed but really effective.

Lot of ideas in my mind

In the last few weeks my brain is constantly flashing my mind with new ideas.
All of them regarding new (mobile) projects but they're not only utilities, some of them are games.
I had this great idea (I won't dig deeper on the features) about a mobile game.
Not a game full of light flashing around the screen, great 3D effects or huge animation.
This is not yet the right time, my mobile skills are not great enough and my graphical skills are really poor.
At the end, I want to try something different from what market could give users.
I want to give users something that let their brains squeezing about real problem but in a funny way.
If some of you knows Godville could understand what I'm trying to explain.
Godville is a simple game (without any useless graphics) with a great concept.
It could be explained like a casual game with few interactions as well.
What I'm thinking about in these days is something similar: a game where you don't need at all graphical elements (just the really necessary) but with a lot of possible choice.
Imagine a simulation game (Sim City could be the most known) where is needed a lot of interactions and decisions to proceed and where there aren't good or bad decisions.
I'm still thinking on every possible features but at the end what I really want to achieve is something that could be played totally offline (online mode will only be useful to send requests to other players and to get game and randonmess updates) and whether you're playing it or not, it will automatically proceed further.
I know would be a long way before this idea could come to life, but I don't want to be in a hurry.

Boring app VS great app

What distinguishes a boring app from a great app?
Maybe the graphical look and feel or, more probably, the content presented?
Apps Market are full of apps, some good and some really bad but some of these latest are really bad not for the user experience, but mostly for what they are giving to the users.
There are a lot of apps related to big sites such as Wired or CNN but what some of these apps are totally missing is the app look and feel.
If I download an app related to a site I want a look and feel totally different than what I could browse with my device. If I'm looking at a news list I want something more than what I would get from the website: more features, better experience. If you cannot provide it with an app, I think will be better to create a mobile version of your site, for sure will be cheaper!
If I download an app related to a site that is not only a news site, I want deeper interaction, not only a list of news and the choice to read the entire article. If I'm looking for such simple interaction I'll grab the site RSS feed and I'll add it to my (native) 'News' app.
Apps market is still growing and there is a lot of stuff to learn, but I really hope I won't be the only one studying more! 

School is getting very old

Yesterday I was reading about a blog post talking about the complete lack of educational apps on the Android Market.
This is totally true.
Apps Market (Android and iOs) are very big, they contain a lot of apps&games but I'm almost sure they're still expanding. They haven't reach yet their maximum capacity, there's still a lot of spaces  where to grow up.

As a good example, educational apps are really poor. There aren't good apps out there to help students digging deeper into historical wars and conquests, evolutionary timelines and so on.
At the end these data are totally public and it doesn't seem so hard to gather them in a simple and at the same time useful workflow.
Students, since the younger ages, collect data everyday with their brand new smartphones. If it could be possible to let them also collecting useful data (related to their school subjects) could lead to a very important step forward for the next generations.
People and technology are walking onwards, sometime school seem to walk backwards.

How could they earn money?

Some hours ago I was thinking about the hundreds of free apps that Android Market offers.
Lots of them have advertising popping out from the layout.
But there are still a lot of them that don't even have a single adv link into the app.
So, I was wondering how could they really earn money from their work. Okay, probably lots of them are not looking for money in this exact moment, but only for popularity.
It's totally right thinking that popularity will lead them to a lot of money, but in the meanwhile what is happening?
Do they probably own a websites where displaying advertising is more money-efficient than adding in-app advertising?
Yeah, probably. Probably I will use the same concept in my app for some reasons as well:

1. I don't like advertising at all into mobile-app and I think they could slow down my app performance
2. In-app advertising let you earn money (poor money usually) only when user click on it and I know that most of my friends and colleagues would never click on an advertising even if it could seems really interesting
3. Advertising needs data connection and use it as well. This isn't so good, especially when you don't want to download more data than you need

Another important point is that advertisement needs space. When I work on a website or some web project I don't mind too much at the space. In the last years monitor are getting bigger and space is no more a problem. Right now, design principles start considering layout from a size of about 800 pixels (and sometimes even more). 

But when you have to think about mobile apps, the available space starts from 200px (very small indeed).

I have to find better way (and less time-expensive) way to earn money with mobile apps.

Do you know any of them?

Hiccup data connection

Lots of mobile application and websites as well (but I'm going to talk about the first category only) don't focus on hiccup data connection.
When I talk about hiccup data connection I mean every situation where people could connect only in some spot (such as home/office/public WI-FI) and then turn off connections to save battery life and, also, phone credit as well.
When you're living in your country you don't mind at all about this situation because usually you could access the network without too much additional cost, but when you're abroad you don't want to connect to 3G or HSDPA network because it would cost you a lot of money and the amount of data available (as MB limit) is really poor.
That is the reason why I'm totally thinking on scenario where people usually haven't data connection.
I'm studying a lot of mobile apps similar to the one I'm going to develop in the near future, but all of them are based on the idea of being connected anytime and anywhere.
Managing this scenario means more data to be saved for "offline" usage, but as a user I really prefer to have my mobile loaded of data that get erased when not used anymore than spending a lot of money to retrieve the same data over and over again.

Should improved technology always mean harder learning curves?

Probably I'm not the first, but I won't be the last for sure, wondering why something that could seem so easy to technology guys should be impossible to understand (or unreachable in some way) to all the other people. We could say that after a pair of years, thanks to the first iPhone, the multitouch feature has become something that doesn't need explanation anymore.
I think that a bit of training or tutorial on new concept is totally okay, but overthinking is not the right approach to a new technology. Let's imagine augmented reality. Not all people really know what is or what could be. Not everybody really seems interested, probably because they haven't been trained in the right way or, even worse, because it seems them to harder to understand, unreachable.
To be successful, everything should be layered and accessible on different level of knowledge.

Layered information

Augmented reality could also rely on multiple information layers. A place, or something marked to contains additional info, should allow people to choose the depth of knowledge requested. For example, a tourist would like to know historical (but basic) information about a monument, while an architect would like to know who built this monument and some other technical detail and so on. Multiple layered details based on layered kind of people and knowledge.

GPS, such an hard work

Last days I started working on my last project (temporarily named 'Guidr').
I started reading a lot of documentation on cell towers positioning, GPS positioning and a ton of other really interesting stuff.
At the end I started writing some lines of code and I suddenly realized that would be a really hard work.
Not for the positioning itself (well, it's not so easy anyway) but for location updates.
It seems Android would automatically decide when the position needs to be refreshed and sometimes (especially when debugging on my personal device) the refresh process didn't seem to work.
This is only the first step of the projects when I will have correct data, right updates process and timing, poor battery usage and better performance I should start focusing on something totally different (such as UI, in-app search, distance calculation, augmented reality data).