May 2010 Archives

In news that's certain to please my Nexus One-owning younger brother, you can finally download the first public beta of Flash Player 10.1 from the Android Market. The caveats are that you must be running Android OS 2.2 (a.k.a. "Froyo") and have an ARM-8 or better CPU, which currently limits you to one of the Nexus One, Motorola Droid, HTC Incredible and Sprint EVO (this, according to PCMag).

If you haven't heard of "Froyo", well it's the next generation of the Android OS. Thanks to the improved Dalvik virtual machine (VM) core and its brand-new support for "just in time" (JIT) compilation, Froyo has been clocked by the good folks at Android Police at 450% faster than its predecessor, Android 2.1 (a.k.a. "Éclair").

(Interestingly enough, "Éclair" isn't just a delicious pastry, it's also the French word for lightning... which now seems like a misnomer. But I digress.)

There are a whole lot of other improvements baked into Froyo, including support for WiFi tethering and the ability to save apps to a miniSD card. Not bad for an OS named after a sweet, delicious frozen dessert.

According to techie-buzz.com, Froyo is available "over-the-air" to Nexus One owners right now and will be coming to Motorola Droid owners in the very near future. Over at the Android developers' blog, Xavier Durochet has just posted the details of what's included in Froyo, some links to new developer tools and the official Android 2.2 "trailer" video. Very cool stuff.

Now you may or may not know this, but 4Point (my employer) is a Google Enterprise partner. In our case, that means that we're authorized to resell and service Google search appliances. I just have to figure out some angle whereby it also entitles me to get my hands on some of this slightly more mobile Google kit.

I'm open to suggestions ;)

You know those good ideas you have but put off trying, saying "I'll get to that later"? Well, Windows has long allowed an HTML file to be used as a desktop background and I've been hoping to experiment with this for a few years now. I finally got around to trying it out yesterday and can say that thanks to that thing of beauty we call the "iFrame", I was able to embed any site I cared to, including Flash apps, as my Windows background. It worked so well that I pushed the idea a little further and made a Javascript-driven HTML page that anyone can download and easily use to experiment with this little-known trick.

The trick to it all is pretty low-tech and leverages Javascript, a cookie (to save user preferences) and an iFrame. When the HTML page is done loading, I call a Javascript function that injects an iFrame into an empty DIV that fills the screen.

The resulting (run-time) HTML looks a little like this: