One Shot Design

“A team of security researchers has won $10,000 for hacking a MacBook Air in two minutes using an undisclosed Safari vulnerability,” Tom Krazit reports for CNET.

For more information, read the article Mac hacked in security contest via undisclosed Safari vulnerability published on Mac Daily News.com.

With the release of the iPhone, all the mobile phone makers received a huge slap in the face as far as UI design was concerned. Most of them designed their interfaces to transpose the desktop user experience to a wearable device, which is conceptually a big mistake. Who wants to be editing a spreadsheet on a 2.5 inch screen?

Since Apple has shown the way, Microsoft has decided to improve version 7 of Windows Mobile, or in other words: make it look more like the iPhone. Actually before the iPhone was released, Neonode had done some remarkable work on the interface. LG collaborated with Prada to produce a phone which was unveiled a couple of days before the iPhone. HTC also does some very good interface tweaking on top of Windows Mobile.

Depite being stylish, the iPhone comes with a lot of strings attached. It is tied to a single carrier and the Apple license is extremely restrictive. There are several projects to of open-source phones aiming at fostering the development of third-party application: Motorolla already has marketed a Linux phone, Qtopia has a working operating syste, Palm is working on a new OS based on Linux and OpenMoko is still in beta version. These are all different flavors of Linux that will definitely not be compatible.

This February, several manufacturers brought their prototypes running Google Android to the Barcelona fair. Google Inc. is putting their money where their mouth is, literally. I mean, they are forking out US$ 10,000,000.00 to attract potential third-party developers. Google already did a lot of work on its mail, calendar and map services, and these will likely be well integrated with the Android mobile phone platform. Rather than trying to imitate the iPhone, they will most certainly have a winner if the software allows good interaction with MS Windows, Apple OS X, GNU/Linux, PDA’s and mobile phones.

Tags: google android smartphone iphone apple linux

I am starting to grasp what the Web 3.0 could be like, or at least Web 2.5. After using Orkut (a Google spinoff) since its inception, I have started to use Facebook a couple of weeks ago. Hey, I like to think I’ve still got a social life, since I obviously don’t have endless evenings to waste in front of a computer.
The most fascinating aspect of Facebook, besides the obvious social networking, is the ability to use applications to connect it to other portals such as Googlemail, Flickr or Last.fm and to publish RSS feeds.

Facebook eventually becomes the place where one can gather all the information regarding contacts, taste and habits. It only lacks bundling with a blog, a chat protocol and -why not- a real mail service. There is however the possibility of going one step closer in that direction with the use of Flock, a free, open-source and cross-platform Web browser based on Mozilla Firefox, which has been developed with Web 2.0 in mind.

Flock features built-in extensions allowing it to connect to social, media sharing, blogging and bookmarks portals. As a matter of fact, I switched this blog from the Serendipity CMS to the more popular Wordpress in order to be able to create entries remotely from Flock. The browser automatically detects embedded media such as videos from youtube and the likes. Video and photo streams can be directly accessed without having to process any HTML.

Flock and Facebook both combined both prefigure what Web 3.0 might be like. Incidentally, all these service tend to be cross-platform: their content and appearance can be handled through a hots of devices ranging from mobile phone to smartphone to PDA to personal computer. This is the kind of universality Sir Tim Berners-Lee had in mind when he devised hypertext and the World Wide Web.