« May 2006 Entries »

Open Mobile

Good news today for those of us interested in the mobile web. Nokia opened the source of their S60 browser, which is currently the browser of choice for various Nokia phones.

The big pay-off here is that other companies are free to take this code and build their own browsers using Nokia’s code base. Consider this in context: currently there are dozens and dozens of different mobile browsers, across hundreds of phones. If you thought browser-testing on the desktop was bad, you obviously haven’t been paying attention to mobile.

With a high profile open-source mobile browser like S60, the potential now exists for other companies to base their own browsers on an S60 base, which would mean far greater consistency on the mobile web. That’s something worth getting behind, so here’s hoping the business case is there for these companies to do so. Something clearly needs to change for the mobile web to take off, and this could very well be it.

As an extra treat, S60 is based on Safari’s WebCore. Not that you’d ever be able to expect a completely consistent testing environment between the two — for obvious reasons — but as the technology gets more capable of keeping up with the desktop version, I wonder whether the overlap will enable developers to knock off most major bugs on the desktop in advance, before racking up the air time…

Comments Closed (21) | posted to Browsers, Technology

Raw

Let’s say you have a digital camera that shoots in Raw format. However, you’ve been using JPG files ever since you got it, due to a sense of familiarity, simply not having the time to figure out Raw, or because you don’t like the larger file sizes. Sound familiar?

That was me too, up until about a month ago. Then I started shooting Raw. And from now on, unless I need a lot of photos in a very short time, Raw it is. It’s not for everyone, and it’s not for every occasion, but it’s certainly the best default choice for me. And if you’re concerned with image quality, it could very well be for you too.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (82) | posted to Imagery, Photoshop