Category: M@’s Picks

After trying to get Pocket IE (the Windows Mobile version of Internet Explorer) to behave nicely, and display web pages quickly and in a usable format I finally gave up. I switched to Opera Mobile. It’s not free, but with Firefox Mobile still a ways off the $25 is well spent. Some things that it does better than IE include:

  • Formatting pages better for the smaller screen
  • Handles multiple windows with ease
  • Quicker forward an back functions
  • Faster as-you-type URL auto completion
  • Quicker loading, rendering and scrolling of large pages
  • Option for reporting itself as a desktop browser in case you don’t want the mobile version

There’s a 30-day free trial, so you can try it out yourself before buying it.

A few weeks ago I finally parted with my Motorola E815 and moved up to a smartphone, a Motorola Q9c. I really didn’t want to get rid of the old phone. I had it hacked to my liking, getting back all the stuff that Verizon locks out, but battery and charging issues were starting to get to me.

Part of the reason I got the phone and data plan was because of the amount of traveling I do for work. Almost immediately I found out just how handy it is. Last week I was able to keep track of the baseball games from factory floors in Dallas and Milwaukee, and from the St. Louis airport. For this, I found Sportsline to work best.

I also use Google reader a lot to keep tabs on news, Digg and a handful of other RSS feeds that I follow. The integration between the full browser app and the mobile one is great. I can flip through my feeds at lunch, read the ones that I want to keep up on and star the remaining ones to look at later that day.

Google Maps has also been great. In addition to the directions it’s integrated to your contacts so you can get directions to any contact with an address in your phone book. Also, when looking up a business, the phone number is clickable and puts you right into a call. Finally, the traffic has also helped out, especially when I was in a Dallas and needed to know if I’d be able to make it to my flight.

For instant messenger, I found the free Slick to work best. It does it’s best to keep you connected, even after a call. The only gripe that I have is that I would like it to look at the phone’s profile (Loud, vibrate…) and adjust its alerts based on that.

I also picked up a Twitter client and I’m going to start using that. You can see my updates from that here. I’m currently looking into two different clients, and I don’t have a favorite yet.

I’ve made my web site mobile friendly. I didn’t do anything special for the blog, just added a Word Press plugin that puts a nice mobile theme in place when viewed from a mobile device. The photos section of the site, however, required a bit of work. I designed my own theme for Gallery2, and put together a few different ideas that I picked up from the support forum to get it to detect mobile devices and change the theme accordingly.

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an open source image editor that is comparable to Photoshop. By no means is it a drop in replacement. But a lot of the core functionality is there, including layers, filters, plugins, paths and channels. There is a bit of a learning curve, especially because the majority of tutorials on image editing are based on Photoshop. But with a lilttle legwork you can find the comparable features and create the same effects in GIMP without the price tag of Photoshop.

Media Coder is an open source video transcoding utility. It supports a large number of formats, and plenty of advanced options for tweaking all of the encoder settings. Fortunately, an extension that is included in the typical install makes it all very easy to use with various presets for small and large video outputs for various formats. It also has presets for various media players such as an Ipod.

I’ve have yet to find a format that it can’t work with, and have had great success creating videos for use on my 5th generation Ipod and my Motorola E815m.