Rendering engine recursion!

After months of teasing, Opera finally released a beta of version 10 for Symbian, available here or at m.opera.com/next

It’s all fine and dandy, it’s basically Opera Mini 5 beta, with Opera Turbo and all their fast magic, only faster because it’s a native app. I know some people that swear by Opera Mini, and this release would only make them happier. I personally don’t like it that much, but it’s good for browsing pages too heavy that would make the webkit browser crash due to RAM.

But protip, Opera: fix the virtual keyboard. I don’t want to learn the layout of yet another keyboard that’s only used on your app, specially one that can’t even copy paste. You’re not dealing with java restrictions on text inputs here, get to adapting the build in keyboards right.

Also, I saw this yesterday morning, what took me so long to post about it? I was waiting until I had the Maemo meetup post ready, so I could screenshot it and have the recursion picture. Awesomeness~

The Knife is awesome btw

Finally! Only took Nokia about an year to release the APIs needed by the Mobbler team to enable scrobbling on S60v5 amirite? 0.07 is still not out for the public, but I am participating in the beta test. Haven’t found any bugs yet, so it’ll probably be out soon!

Update: Hey it’s out, go get it on google code.

I’ll be honest, I’m not a big fan of the Ovi Store. I was really hyped for it and it kinda let me down, from the server errors and links breaking constantly, to the lack of content that’s available elsewhere (Nokia support sites or even the old Download! app (Quickoffice, Adobe Reader and Zip Manager, for example.) They even use push SMSs for the send to mobile link, they should use QR Codes. I’m a sucker for QR Codes. (And they’ve been pushing QR Codes since forever)

That said, if there is one gem in the Ovi Store, it’s Offscreen. I’ve been keeping an eye on them ever since I learned that the developer that made that neat timer app I mentioned last April was on the Ovi Store. Lots of good looking little apps, games and even ebooks (The first Sherlock Holmes one is free, go get it!). I just noticed I had never featured an application by them, so I’m picking my favorite for this post, Converter Touch.

First thing you see, on launch, the app is just plain good looking. You get everything you need to control the app right on launch, no submenus or steps. It supports all units (except currency) the built in converter does, and switching units is awesome.

You select what you want to convert by tapping and dragging the first bar with icons, which rolls around with fast and perfectly fluid animation. Once you picked what you want, you can tap the the units next to the numbers to pick the to and from units (which shows up in a very good looking pane). Then just input your value. As a bonus treat, it remembers what units you picked last time when you launch it again.

Only things I could suggest is ‘ and ” keys to lenghts and times in ff’ii” and hh’mm”ss notation. Also the ability to select which of the numbers is the to and from (or a flip units button to the left, changing ºC for ºF and ºF for ºC in the screenshot above, for example.) My last concern with it is Offscreen’s insistence of putting the quit and about buttons on the top, instead of on the bottom of the screen, like every other app for S60 ever. :P

Good looking and efficient, the cherry on the top is that it’s free! Go download it, and show some appreciation for Offscreen and get something paid from their Ovi Store selection too. And if you’re a developer that want your apps to look as good and fluid, take a look at their Origo IDE. I’m no developer, but from the results I assume it’s quality stuff.

Yesterday, Alie Tan posted about a new version of ActiveFile (v1.43 RC1) on his website. Among new things there are bugfixes for 5th edition, meaning it works properly with the double tapping system. If you tried the last version you know what bug I’m talking about. Good riddance Y-Browser, only one file browser installed now.

Update: Apparently this version fixes the “bug” that prevented it from quitting during a backup, breaking the method I posted about here before. Installed a old V1.42 sis over the V1.43, which brought that feature back, and apparently kept the double tap conformity and the SMS Backuper. So no idea if those were there all along on V1.42 (I doubt I could have missed that, but it’s a possibility) or mixing both versions caused some funkyness.

But people don’t realize that this app is competing not with the internal browser (which btw, setting google as your homepage is cheating), it’s rival is Nokia’s own Search app, and it completely kicks its ass. See the videos below for comparison. I also measured the time between the first keystroke to when ebay starts loading in the browser.

Nokia Search app, 53 seconds

Google Search app, 13 seconds (and just because I missed the link when clicking in the browser =P)

And just for fun

Browser Bookmark, 24 seconds

You can take your own conclusions, my personal choice is the google bookmark, since it’s moderately fast and it doesn’t have a ugly shortcut like the Google app.

For me, if the google app had a standard standby plugin (which Nokia really need to open the api for) it would be a killer app.If only because it opens and connects the browser in the background, while you’re typing. So when you’re searching for big things, it takes off a HUGE part of the loading process.

And this again shows what a joke Nokia Search is. They should tear apart the device search and the web search, to make the web part faster. (But I still love the device search feature).

EDIT: To demonstrate why the pre-loading of the browser in the Google app is awesome, here’s two videos with a larger search string:

Rumors with Google Search, 18 seconds

Rumors with Browser, 31 seconds

The difference is that when you open the browser it stops to connect, the “Connecting via internets” dialog you see. In the Google app it connects on the background, definitely speeding up the process.