Nokia S60 - mea culpa - in a round about way

Gizmodo has an article in which they paraphrase Kai Öistämö - "Nokia’s device top dog" - as follows:

"they don’t see the Symbian OS as the problem-just the interface"

This is almost a mea-culpa for Nokia - albeit with a certain amount of circumlocution.

The point being that Symbian controlled the operating system and Nokia controlled the Series 60 and Series 80 user interfaces that sit atop the OS.

VisionMobile points out that Series 60 had many more features at launch than the iPhone. Except that is, a next generation UI. Nokia now agrees that the bit of the stack they did not control is OK and the bit that they did control represents a problem.

N95: White Rectangle after Orientation Change

For some reason, after an orientation change, my N95 seems to draw the idle screen with the correct theme background, but this is clipped as if it were in landscape mode.

As you can see, not even the soft keys are drawn. At this point, other apps suffer also. I swicthed to Task Spy and here's what I saw:


Obviously TaskSpy thinks it is in landscape mode and has rendered its UI appropriately. When I did switch to landscape mode everything looks fine:

The thing is, changing handset orientation (to landscape and then back to portrait) seems to make the problem go away on the home screen but, interestingly, not for TaskSpy.

I'm on firmware V21.0.16 14-02-08 RM-159, Nokia N95 (13.01).

Update:

I am told that TaskSpy is not well behaved in landscape mode under any circumstances so those screenshots may be a blind alley.

Google Local - Why didn't this work?

Consider the two search terms:

1. http://local.google.com/m/search?site=local&q=Hertz%20Car%20Rental%20near%20neutral%20bay,%20australia
2. http://local.google.com/m/search?site=local&q=Hertz%20Car%20Rental%20near%20to%20Neutral%20Bay,%20Australia

Click on the links and you will see that:

• "Hertz Car Rental near neutral bay, australia" returns exactly what one would expect - Hertz locations near to Neutral Bay.
• "Your search - Hertz Car Rental near to Neutral Bay, Australia" - did not match any documents.
  

The difference is not caused by the capitalization of the place name but the "near" versus "near to".

So be careful what you search for, especially if, like us, you automatically generate search terms...

PowerPoint Mac 12.2.0 crashing opening PPTX?

Last week, my Microsoft Auto-Updater alerted me to the release of the Office for Mac 12.2.0 Service Pack. Since I upgraded, I have had constant crashes in PowerPoint when opening PPTX files.

After a week of puzzling, I opened a WMV video in Firefox 3.5.1 and the browser immediately crashed. As it happens, I have Flip4Mac Studio installed so I went to System Preferences to see if anything was amiss. The Flip4Mac preferences applet immediately exited.

To cut a long story short, I solved both my PowerPoint crash and my Firefox crash by re-installing Flip4Mac. It seems that the Office service pack updated (broke) the Flip4Mac install on my machine and this causes a crash in every app that uses WMV video.

Since I use a lot of embedded video in PowerPoint, the broken Flip4Mac install caused a crash every time.

The short answer: download and re-install Flip4Mac - problem solved.

Sports Tracker - Around the World in 700 Calories

Sports Tracker is great, but buggy. As you can see, apparently, I circumnavigated the globe in 1:30 mins, having traveled only 10.5km, burning 700 calories.



The west coast of Africa caused me a few problems so I fell off the pace, having just sprinted down from the North Pole.

Ovi Store - Sports Tracker - Ooops...

Recently, I had to reformat my N95. This entailed the tedious reinstall of all of my apps - a task that has been on-going for the last week or so as the need arose.

I went for a walk yesterday. As it happens one of my most used applications is Nokia Sports Tracker. I always use it to track where I have been. When it works, this app really is a gem.

Given that Ovi Store has just launched, I figured I would download the app whilst walking.

And here's what I got when I searched:


That Nokia cannot get its own award winning app on its own app store is a bit of a worry...