Older blog entries for softkid (starting at number 287)

Flickr's Android App versus flickroid

Last week flickr announced that they were releasing an application for Android devices.

I use two devices a Tablet from Asus and a phone from Samsung. So I went to both devices and decided to install the app and see what it had to offer. I also wanted to compare it to the tools I was using on these devices to access flickr.com (a web browser and flickroid). Unfortunately the official apps is only available on phone devices and not on tablets.

So let's try to define my needs when I'm using a mobile device like a tablet or a phone and access flickr :

1. Be able to post, tag and file pictures in my sets and groups


2. Read/reply to comments made on pictures


3. See my stats

And the importance is in that order, exactly in that order. I really can wait to be front of a computer to see my stats. I prefer to use my computer to reply to comments, see other's pictures, fav pictures and comments on pictures (and I use a bunch of extensions to make those experience better at least on my desktop).

Flickroid

is more a small utility that plug itself into Android and adds flickr share buttons proposed and used by other apps. Exporting photos to flickr with it is a nice experience. You can tag, file the pictures into your sets or even create sets. It works nicely over wifi and 2g/3g. When upload fails you can retry the uploads and all the metadata that you added on the initial upload try are kept.
Flickroid has two flows that I can list :

• It's painfull to upload more than one image at a time which is what Roland does


• It remembers your tags from one photo to the other and editing tags on the phone or tablet isn't the best experience.

For all my other needs, I will use the browser (except for organizr which doesn't support tap events)

Flickr's official application

Let's me do plenty more things, like read comments easily consume my friends images. I can consume way more with it - comments are made easy.
Pros:

• Favoring is easy too.


• The UI is nice and really made to have the full flickr on the small screen.


• The application let's me use the camera from my device and upload it ( I can even add some filters to have nice effects on the pictures).


• When the image is geotagged and you are willing to share that, tags based on the location are automatically added.

Cons:

• 
  
• I can't add my pictures to sets


• Without wifi uploading fails - this might be fixed by the new version that got published today.


• Failed uploads are not easily re-try-able - you need to re-enter all the metadata - if it's available in the application - I didn't find where it was.


• Consuming photos is easier on tablets with bigger screen than phone and the app isn't present on the tablet android market.

So overall I like both for different usage. In an ideal world I would use flickroid on my phone to create content. And I would use the official flickr application on my tablet to comment and interact with my photographic social graph. For now I use my phone more than my tablet so I will stick with flickroid.

Syndicated 2011-10-03 08:33:26 (Updated 2011-10-03 09:23:42) from Ludovic's weblog

Finding firefox for Android slow ?

Then I've got good news for you, using a nightly build will make anything you do on your mobile faster. To install it just read the instructions at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android#Download_Nightly. The speed difference is very, very noticeable - worth installing.

Syndicated 2011-09-27 07:50:22 (Updated 2011-09-27 07:54:09) from Ludovic's weblog

Small skype trick

I use skype to chat a lot. What i like about them is that they are persistent. If I'm not online, I won't miss any messages. I also like the fact that I have command line style utilities. And on top of that group chat are very practical.

I use skype out of a habit I caught at my previous job, where most of the communication was done via skype chats - so most of my recently active network is available on skype. Once in a while skype chats don't get through because skype's infrastructure thinks you are not online or that your correspondent is offline. This is annoying because once in a while you are online and miss messages.

To make sure that your message will get through is to call ! this will force skype's infrastructure to figure out if the person you are chatting with is online or offline as voice can't really be buffered or delayed, while messages can. So just pressing the call button will push your messages through.

Syndicated 2011-08-12 14:05:18 (Updated 2011-08-12 14:21:07) from Ludovic's weblog

BrowserID support for Movabletype ?

I'm looking for a movabletype plugin that would let me implement BrowserID on this blog. I've googled, I've twitted, and I've searched the movable type plugin directory but didn't find anything. Anybody interested in creating such a beast, to my knowledge the skills required are :

• some perl
• reading the BrowserID documentation
• the movabletype documentation

Bonus point if it supports earlier releases of Movabletype.

Syndicated 2011-07-19 11:08:05 (Updated 2011-07-19 11:16:20) from Ludovic's weblog

We need help from our users to figure out our topcrash for Thunderbird 5

We (the Thunderbird team) released Thunderbird 5.0 about a week ago. It's currently being offered to 10% of our users as an update from 3.1.11. When we release new versions we try to monitor early upgrader feedback in bugzilla, in getsatisfaction and on a crash stat reporting page. Our current top crasher is related to Lightning and Windows.

None of the developers can currently reproduce the bug, so we are counting on our users to help us debug the issue so we can fix it.

• Are you using Windows?


• Are you using Lightning?


• Did you upgrade to Thunderbird 5.0 and Lightning 1.0b4?


• Did you crash after that update?

If the answer to all these question is yes - maybe you can help us fix this issue. You'll need to locate your CrashID as explained on our knowledge base article. And look it up on the crash-stats page.

If the signature is cal::UTC() you can help us - if not we'll get to fixing your bug later.
What we need to know is:

• What were you doing when you crashed?


• Do you use tasks?


• What kind of calendar (or calendars) do you connect to?


• Do you have a calendar tab open in Thunderbird?


• Do you have a lot of events that are created in a different time zone?

Let us know those settings, by either living a comment here, or on bug 603416

• Finally, and most importantly, do you crash often due to this issue?

If the answer to that last question is yes, try to follow the instructions at https://developer.mozilla.org/en/how_to_get_a_stacktrace_with_windbg to get a more complete stack trace or leave a comment in the bug and we will ask you to do a few things and that should let us fix the crash.

Syndicated 2011-07-07 16:00:52 (Updated 2011-07-07 16:11:06) from Ludovic's weblog

Google + wish list

I've been using google+ for a few days and I really like it, I'd be ready to switch from Fb if :

• My google plus stream was at a easy to remember url (remove the uid and make it my name)


• I could easily set a default circle to broadcast to (mine would probably be +public)


• I could more easily share content from other sites (ie like FriendFeed use to work).


• Birthday notifications

Syndicated 2011-07-05 07:11:43 (Updated 2011-07-04 12:36:23) from Ludovic's weblog

My flickr wishlist

I've been a very happy flickr customer over the course of the last 4/5 years. But it seems flickr is slowing down on innovation and getting useful new features or deals out. So I'm going to publicly post what I would like flickr to bring me over the course of the coming months.

• Support for large image - ie those of us shooting panorama.


• Better cameraphone support , my Galaxy-S (I) is still not recognized after 6 month usage.


• Better maps - some of the map data is very old and should get refreshed.


• Sharing to google +


• Pushing machine tags and have more partner sites use them (here I'm thinking about tripadvisor).

Syndicated 2011-07-04 06:59:42 (Updated 2011-07-04 07:08:36) from Ludovic's weblog

landfill.bugzilla.org

A few times a day I end up getting bugmail from bugzilla.mozilla.org by someone trying and testing features of bugzilla (like the security one). People don't realize that every time a bug is open a good number of emails are going to be send to groups of people (the number of people in the group will depend on the bug, the place it's filled in bugzilla etc ...). And each of those people will loose a few seconds for each email. In the end it's a lot of time that could be used to fix issues, and make the product better.
We do understand that people want to try and test the bugzilla product - and we are offering a non production database , just designed for people who want to test features in bugzilla. That instance of bugzilla is available at http://landfill.bugzilla.org - please use it to do any testing you want.

Syndicated 2011-06-24 11:28:14 (Updated 2011-06-24 11:37:50) from Ludovic's weblog

Needed : contacts in the Italian administration doing IT

The product I work on as an issue when dealing with certain mime types, in particular with application/pkcs7-mime. It seems the Italian state, is sending a lot of encrypted and signed emails using the S/mime standard. These emails are unusable in Thunderbird - our mime library copes on it's content. Meaning that Thunderbird is not really usable for many of our Italian users, because they can't deal with electronic paper work coming from their Administration. Italian is our 5th biggest used language, so we tried to fix this issue in order to make sure Thunderbird would work for our Italian users. Before committing the fix our S/Mime expert had doubts on the fact that the fix did the right thing.
So here we go committing the fix , asking and getting feedback - unfortunately after a week or so we've figured out that we regressed, and some things that used to work don't work anymore. So those regressions with the doubts our S/Mime expert has made us - we backed the patch out.
We would still love to have a solution for our users. as fixing the client and receiving end seems difficult, we would like to find out what software is sending those malformed message. Once we know that - we could probably contact them and help them fix the issue.

I'm posting this in order to reach out to someone who knows someone that works as an IT staff for the Italian administration - so we can figure out what software they use and let the administration that something is wrong with it. You can leave a comment in the bug, or if you want things to stay private send me an email.

Update
I've been told that they use Openpec , I would love to get confirmation of that information.

Syndicated 2011-05-24 11:45:25 (Updated 2011-11-10 11:56:41) from Ludovic's weblog

Where to find build ID in miramar and the upcoming Thunderbird 3.3

As some of you might have noticed we are following Firefox's new about box design. Our new about box looks like :

When reporting bugs it's nice to post the build id in the bug. A build id is a unique identifier that let the people know exactly which version of Thunderbird you are running. The build id looks like Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; rv:5.0a2) Gecko/20110516 Thunderbird/3.3a4pre. This used to be in the about dialog. Now it's in the help menu in the Troubleshooting information page. And it looks like :

Syndicated 2011-05-19 08:19:26 (Updated 2011-05-17 08:37:47) from Ludovic's weblog