Flickr update : liquid photo page layout

Flickr people once again outdid themselves.  An update to the design of the single photo page changes things to the better, much better.  Now you’ll the image filling almost entirely your screen, instead of a medium-sized thumbnail surrounded by all the navigational clutter.  Here is how it looks now.

And for those of you interested in the technical side of the story, there is a blog post explaining all the different challenges.  It might even be interesting for non-technical people to read, just to get an idea of how complex some seemingly simple things can be.

Weekly digest – 2012-05-20

We Shall Overcome

I caught myself singing something really weird today.  The words went like these:

We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome some day

I then realized that I have absolutely no idea what that is and where do I know it from.  Wikipedia to the rescue.  Apparently, these are the lyrics from the “We Shall Overcome” song.

“We Shall Overcome” is a protest song that became a key anthem of the African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968). The title and structure of the song are derived from an early gospel song, “I’ll Overcome Someday”, by African-American composer Charles Albert Tindley. The song was published in 1947 as “We Will Overcome” in the People’s Songs Bulletin

[…]

The song became associated with the Civil Rights movement from 1959, when Guy Carawan stepped in as song leader at Highlander, which was then focussed on non-violent civil rights activism. It quickly became the movement’s unofficial anthem. Seeger and other famous folksingers in the early 1960s, such as Joan Baez, sang the song at rallies, folk festivals, and concerts in the North and helped make it widely known. Since its rise to prominence, the song, and songs based on it, have been used in a variety of protests worldwide.

That is very helpful.  Yet it still doesn’t explain where I know it from.  I guess it might have been used as background music in a movie that I’ve seen or something like that.  Because I really doubt that it would resurface from my high school memories, when I learned tonnes of weird stuff.

Galaxy Nexus

I’ve been a happy owner of Motorola Defy for more than a year now.  It is a fantastic phone – small, well built, water resistant and powerful enough.  The only thing that bothered me about it was that Motorola stopped releasing Android updates for it and it was stack at pathetic 2.2 when the rest of the world was enjoying Android 4.0.

There was a way, of course.  People have been hacking phones for as long as … well, forever.  And there is a well established path of rooting Motorola Defy and upgrading it to the newest version of Android.  I’m not the hacking type (when it comes to phones at least), so I was delaying the upgrade for as long as possible.  But with the recent hype about Galaxy Nexus phone and how awesome Android 4 is, I couldn’t any longer.

I didn’t read much of the instructions, and I didn’t quite got how the process works.  Heck, I didn’t even verify the versions of all the firmware and kernel and apps that I’ve downloaded to install.  So obviously my attempt failed miserably.  I bricked the phone.  At first, it was responding to recovery boot option only, but there was nothing useful in there, so I formatted everything and pushed the original firmware.   Which was for a different phone or country or something else.  After that, the phone didn’t even respond to the power button anymore.  Dead.

I gave it to a friend, who is more experienced with these things, to see if he can revive it.  But in the meantime, I couldn’t stay without the phone, so I rushed to the shop and bought myself a … Galaxy Nexus.

The price for this phone varies from place to place.  If I had more time, I could have gotten it for about 350 EUR.  But since I was in a hurry, I was robbed off 600 EUR.  Yeah, that’s the way it works.  But I wanted it so much for so long that I didn’t really care.  I’ll care next time, I promise.

Before I go into any detail, let me just say this – Galaxy Nexus is everything I wanted from an Android phone and even more.  Now that I have it for almost two weeks, I can say that the positive feeling I had about it on the first day still lasts, and the more I have it, the more I can do with it and the more I like it.  Now, for the details.

First things first.  This phone actually has a Google logo on the back of it.  For a long time Google fan like myself, that by itself is worth the phone price.  It’s especially cool having that logo on the device that is so tightly integrated with all the awesomeness of Google services – Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Search, YouTube, Google Picasa, Google+, Google Maps, and so on.

Secondly, the thing that stands out immediately after unboxing the phone, it’s its form factor.  Compared to Motorola Defy, it’s huge!  It’s was almost awkward holding it, so big it was.  But, for that size, it was surprisingly thin and light.  I guess it’s made of plastic not glass and metal.  After using it for a day or two I totally got used to its size and it wasn’t awkward anymore.

Thirdly, the screen.  The moment the phone is turned on, you know that you gonna love it.  There is no way not to love it with that screen.  As mentioned before – it’s huge.  4.65 inch diagonal, 1280×720 pixel resolution, and the brightest and vividest colors that I’ve ever seen on a mobile device or tablet – an absolute pleasure.

Fourthly, the performance.  It’s super fast.  It’s super fast compared to Motorola Defy. It’s super fast compared to my laptop.  It’s just super fast.  It’s so fast that it needs some getting used to.  Every single phone I ever owned, was slow compared to this.  Browsing through address book, making phone calls, editing the calendar, checking email, surfing the web – all of it is flying.

Fifthly, the software.  I’ve been introduced to the variety of the software for Android for some time now.  But the tricky bit with Android Market is that it limits the apps based on the features your phone supports.  For example, if you are browsing the market with a device which runs Android 2.2, you won’t see any apps that require Android 2.3 or Android 4.  Same with some other features – large screen, WiFi connection, etc.  But with Nexus Galaxy you will pretty much see everything!  It looks like that it supports and runs every single app in the market.  And there are really awesome apps.

Now that I’ve praised and boasted about Galaxy Nexus, you probably want to know the downsides. Are there any?  Yes.  Everything has a downside.  Galaxy Nexus has two – one easily solvable, one not.

The easy one is the USB.  The one of the biggest differences between Galaxy Nexus and other devices is that it does not support an external SD card.  Internally, therefor, it keeps the operating system, applications and all files on the same media.  Which is dangerous to give access to non-technical people.  Things can get deleted or overwritten via USB.  So it doesn’t support USB mass storage protocol.  Instead, you need to access it via MTP, which requires additional software or drivers.  Which I didn’t want to bother with for my Fedora Linux.  The easier way is to install AirDroid application on the phone.  When you install and start it, your phone will provide a desktop-like web interface to all the features, using a WiFi connection.  With that, you can do pretty much everything – upload and download files, reorganize folders, browse through contacts, and even send SMS.

The other issue is with volume and power buttons.  They are on the same level, on opposite sides of the device, which makes it nearly impossible pressing just one of them using one hand.  The index finger presses on the volume button at the same time as the thumb on the power button.  Somehow, I keep switching the screen off every time I need to adjust the volume, and volume up every time I wanted to send it to sleep.   Not a biggy though.

So, would I recommend Galaxy Nexus?  Absolutely!  It is the best mobile device I’ve had my hands on.  It works well both as a phone and a small tablet – for games, web browsing, and reading.  It is super fast.  It lasts more than a day on the battery, even with heavy usage.  It’s not that expensive, if you are not in a hurry.  And it has a Google logo on its back.  It is brilliant.

P.S.: the friend to who I gave my bricked Motorola Defy managed to revive it.  And not only – he upgraded the Defy to Android 4.0 as well.  Now that I have my Galaxy Nexus, I’m not going back to Defy, but my wife will get a much needed phone upgrade for her 7-year old Samsung.  So all is well.

Weekly digest – 2012-05-13