Browsing a sharper web

My eyesight is a litte ‘wonky’, this effects me in two ways. I am sometimes light sensitive, and i struggle with reading from computer screens.

To combat this for the last few years i have been using the screen zooming feature built into OSX. Apart from making other developers feel quesy when pair programming at my machine its been trouble free.

When you use screen zoom you have to accept a few limitations. For a start normally when you screen zoom everything gets pixelated. This is something i have mostly just learnt to live with.

For most of my interactions with the computer i can also increase font sizes to cope. Recently however i have been using a couple of new techniques which have really helped with my online activities.

Safari Tap to Zoom.

When OSX Lion was announced i was quite excited about desktop Safari inheriting iOS style tap to zoom. I only have Lion installed on my little 11” MacBook Air. At first performance in safari was very poor. I ended up moving to chrome to try and compensate.

However, with succsessive updates; OSX Lion performance has improved. This has made tap to zoom and pinch to zoom far more usable.

Tap to zoom combines two things which i like in a zoom function. Accuracy and text sharpness.

The lack of accuracy is a big issue with whole page zooming. Resizing the whole page makes page navigation difficult and needing to zoom in and out on every page is slow and fiddly. Before now, simply loading the page then screen zooming has been alot more productive.

Text sharpness is a place where tap to zoom really wins over screen zooming. As safari redraws the content the text is pixel sharp and clear. If you compare the two the quality difference is astounding.

HiDPI Mode.

I have written about HiDPI mode before, this mode is useful on very large screens but does not work on my MacBook screen.

Effectively HiDPI is like Retina mode for iPhones and iPads except the screen does not have the doubled pixel count. The practical upshot is everything on the screen doubles in size but stays pin sharp.

Its pretty effective but far from perfect. In the Mountain Lion developer preview its pretty impressive but many apps still do not support it (I’m looking at you Chrome!).

I hope sharing this info helps someone, if you have any suggestions or questions feel free to get in touch via twitter

Published: 8 June 2012 Permalink

iOS6 wish list

As WWDC rolls around the rumours are starting to fly. One rumour which sounds pretty sure is that iOS6 will be announced. Apple have released new versions of their mobile OS yearly since its inception. Most of the obvious stuff (notifications, multitasking) has been done so we are now getting into the finer details.

This is my wish list for iOS6, it’s all the little services and functionality which I feel would make the platform stronger.

History Syncing

I use safari on my phone and my iPad. I use chrome on my laptop and on the shared desktop. Having to remember which device I read something on if I want to find it later is an exercise in frustration. I would go far as to say it’s a driver for me to consolidate devices but right now that’s not an option for me.

If I could sync all my history data between all my browsers that would solve the problem and allow me to pick up where I left off. If this was Safari exclusive it would tempt me back to using Safari on the desktop.

Better home screen icons

Windows Phone 7 has a very neat UI feature with active tiles. They are a little like icons but they provide snapshots of information. They are great for ‘at a glance’ information. Extending this to iOS would be pretty useful.

This is possible, the calendar applications icon displays the current date but it seems to be a special feature. Bringing the lightest touch of information to these icons can be really powerful. For example the current temperature on the weather app.

However as spring board currently stands I worry this may just make the space to busy and heavy. Tiles are much larger on windows phone and cramming to much information into a tiny icon may just become unusable.

iOS Based Time Capsule

Imagine being able to have apps which run on your home network. For example, a mini iTunes server, home automation or security etc. Its a longshot but would be pretty cool!

Apple TV external hard drive / NAS support.

SImilar to above being able to use the Apple TV to playback files from a NAS or USB hard drive would be very useful. Including functionality for iTunes to also be able to manage a library attached to an Apple TV would be even better!

So thats my wish list for iOS6. I’m sure most wont happens but its always exciting to have a stab at predicting such things. We will have to wait and see what Apple announces on Monday.

Published: 7 June 2012 Permalink

Performance, Browsing & Media on the Raspberry Pi.

The little raspberry pi is an impressive little box of tricks. I have had it for about a week now experimenting and playing.

One of first things i did once i got the box booting consistently was to install chromuim and do some surfing. Naturally i started out by checking my own webistes (jkg3.com and pluslion.com). Things looked pretty good and performance while not exactly snappy was usable.

I then pointed it at the pages i have been working on in work and all was pretty smooth. These pages are all pretty light. Performance was not fantastic but it was workable. While the Pi is not a fast web browser its quite usable. Its not as fast as a modern laptop, but for the cost the performance is pretty incredible.

The Pi does struggle with heavier pages, keeping with a BBC theme, the new homepage was far from smooth and the new responsive channel pages took minutes to load. I don’t use facebook so did not check how it performed, however as facebook has always been pretty static i would guess it’s performance there to be acceptable.

Lets take a quick step back, this device costs sub £20*. As far as i am aware that sets a whole new low price point for an acceptable web experience. It also challenges us web developers to think about performance without only considering it through a prism of ‘mobile’ and small screens.

Finally, the Pi is in very early stages. The software is pretty immature. There is work underway to port a faster OS (rasbian) and with it more up to date and better performing JS engines. Once this work is stable i will give it a test drive.

Media Performance

After experimenting with browser performance i thought i would give media playback a go. After a bit of reading i got omxplayer working. The video playback is offloaded to the GPU so the performance is very good with 1080p trailers playing back perfectly.

I’m going to try a higher bluray quality file and see how the Pi handles it.

Openelec XMBC.

In order to give the Pi a bit of a heftier media workout i have installed the openelex based XMBC client. First impressions are pretty good, Media playback and the UI are smooth and steady. It’s happily loading media over the network form the iMac.

It’s making me reconsider my media setup, currently we have an Apple TV connected to itunes running on an iMac. The Pi could feasibly act as both server and UI without to many compromises. If your in the markets for a little home server (for meda etc) the Pi seems like a great starting point.

The XMBC interface is pretty snappy, its not as fast as i have seen it on more powerful hardware but it is usable. I have installed a lighter Apple TV theme which performs better than the stock theme.

There are loads of rough edges but these will be worked out with time i am sure. I am hoping to investigate some different remotes too. Right now sharing the keyboard between two machines is proving to be a hassle.

My next steps will be to look at what options the Pi presents for building a small media system, where it also acts as the backup drive for other machines on the network.

Conclusion

Its early days for the Pi, it has lots of optimisation left but the signs are good that the Pi can be a viable home machine for users with small needs. Web browsing is a little slow but workable and should improve considerably as time goes on. Media playback is solid and with time i expect will become as smooth as any commercially available setup box is.

*well, eventully will cost sub £20, i am ignoring the cost of a keyboard and mouse for now. Cheating i know ;)

Published: 3 June 2012 | Categories: raspberry pi Permalink