Chrome OS: The Google's New Venture

Hello, World!

Yesterday, Google has pulled off the curtain over it's new invention: Chrome OS. And, before anyone there asks, yes! "OS" stands for Operating System (why would anyone put any doubt on Google). Plus, we are not talking about an operating system runing into a browser (WebOS or WebTop) as you could find in G.ho.st or DesktopTwo.

Google is building a full-fledged operating system designed to provide instant access to the internet. The main objective is get from shutdown to ready-for-browsing in a few seconds. And it will be available for free and open source! It will target most on netbooks, where it may let Microsoft eating dust, but may also run on desktops.

Guess its not the end of Microsoft's reign, but it's a step in this direction.

Read the full anouncement on Google's Blog.

UPDATE: Plenty of netbook OEMs had adhere to the new OS. According to telecoms.com, "The web giant said that Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba had all signed up to get involved in the Chrome OS either on a hardware or software level."

New iPhone Patents Submited by Apple

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Apple has submit three new patents for iPhone software features that promise to automate, through configurations or by observing gadget usage, tasks sending "happy birthday" messages based and even like setting up silent mode when phone gets inside a movie theater. The patents also say that the ones trying to call you may get a message informing where you are or that would be better send a text message, instead of calling.

Guess I saw a application with similar features at last Google Android Developer Challenge, ain't I?

Anyway, you may check out more info at Gizmodo's article.

UPDATE: There are also other patents that stand for RFID support, Haptic (tactile feedback) on the Touch Screen, fingerprint identification and more. Checkout @ iLounge.

May I Use Your Charger, Please?

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Alright! Who out there has never get your phone out of batery and had trouble finding a charger? Don't worry! Your problems are now over! European Union get his mind on a simply, yet obvious, idea: a common charger plug pattern! Yes! The same charger may charge a Motorola, Nokia and even Apple assets! Its just like imagining Sonic and the Mario Brothers on the same game... Oh! That's already happened too? Whatever...

The major handset manufacturers just signed up into a Memorandum of Understanding defining that Micro USB will, for now at least, be the default plug for chargers.

Now you may be thinking: "Right, but I'm not in EU grounds...". Now, think twice! They sell the same phone all over the globe, and the changer input plug is all about hardware, which hits on design, so it will be non-sense to build an phone model with the universal plug only for EU. What I mean is that the whole world will get the benefit as a bonus! EU's point!

The first phones covered by this agreement are expected to come out in 2010.

Check out the telecoms.com full note on this major industry move here.

Android: Overall and Predictions

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Well. its been a while I'm following what is, in my opinion, the most

interesting happening in the mobile phone arena: the previously rumored as Google Phone, and later officially named Android. The way Google entered on the mobile world was something of unexpected, and, at the same time, filled users, OEMs, carriers and, specially, developers with plenty of expectations.

Some out there might be asking themselves where I've been when Steve Jobs did his wonderful keynote announcing to every corner of the world he’s new engineering achievement: the iPhone. I would like to clarify that it is a great and innovative phone, but in my view, nothing more than that. Remember that, once, upon a time, Motorola RAZR was a great and innovative product...On the other hand, Android has something of renewing to the whole mobile industry. Its is free. It is open. It is completely customizable. And for us, developers, it builds up a entirely new paradigm for developing applications. Application developers or not, many of you might had saw the videos of the first Android SDK, which packages an emulation of what we would see later on a cell phone.

As new SDK releases follows we could preview what later became the first Android phone to hit the market. Many had noticed that the phone has exactly the same software you found on the emulator. Some might say it even looks like the emulator. What I'm trying to say is that was the system as the Open Handset Alliance has made it (Duh!). The HTC engineers had only changed hardware drivers and vuala, there it is! Other OEMs are certainly tweaking their phones so we might expect plentiful of mobile phones for all flavors and tastes to be launched this year (check what Google CEO said @ Telecoms.com).

Yes, Google has rally built something... a really powerful platform... it is even about to show up into the crescent netbook market. What!? Yes, the netbook market. Android has setup fear into dominating Windows XP. Asus, HP, Dell, Acer and recently MSI (checkout @ Engadget) had been spotted attempting to build netbooks over Android. And the latest announced OS update – version 1.5, also known as Cupcake - gives us a hint that this netbook story is becoming serous as it states to support "x86" processor architecture (used by Intel and AMD mobile processors).

Alright so we've made it through here and here it is Cupcake. Cupcake adds lot of news on the platform but if you keep in mind that Android it is being evolved into a community, many of his new features may point clues to what OEMs are planning for they forthcoming mobile devices. I could bet that one of the coming Android phones is an iPhone-like touchscreen phone without a physic QWERTY keypad, as the Cupcake supports virtual keyboard. It’s pretty acceptable that, at least another one of them is a music phone, due to the added AD2P support... (see a full list of changes @ Android.com; see how to emulate the new environment @ Nullwire.com).

The new mobile phone era brings application stores out of the carriers hood - thanks to Apple, I must agree - and just a few clicks away from our fingers, also enabled us to developing innovative applications beyond what we could even imagine. Accelerometer and GPS are now familiar and in the near future will become usual as mp3 players and cameras. Android had moved through it all and added application cooperativeness into the game. Enabled developers to replace untouchable features like phonebook, home screen or even calling applications in the way you just expect from Windows to use a music player, web browser or mailing application as default for all your requests.

Plus, I just could not believe how easy it is to deploy and test applications at Android. And debug it on device! It’s just great! Once you have installed the phone drivers, just plug the phone on the computer; go to Eclipse and press run/debug! That’s all! The application starts running on the phone in a few seconds! Marvelous! For sure, there are new times coming for the mobile devices arena.

Soft Keypad

Orientation Switching

Design Patterns: The Ultimate Reference Site

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As you might have noticed, is quite a while since I did my last post. This crisis times are really tough and even my "posts pruduction" had slown down. That was a joke. Good one, uh? Nevermind. Today I'm here to speak about software design patterns. In fact, I will not precisely speak on them but only point a nice site a friend of mine told me about and which I've been using as reference since then: Source Making Design Patters. This site is really amazing when it comes to this topic! There you may find rapid and straightforward answers to take down your most scareful doubts, or even learn it all to get a nice background on the subject. What the hell are you still doing here? Go for it now!