Spaced Out :: 06 2009

It was quite some time earlier in June that Microsoft made the release candidate of Windows 7 available for download. Yes its free (for a year anyway) for people to preview the technology. I normally quite like sampling the delights, but in this instance didn’t have a spare machine to dump it on to, so the 2.5Gb download sat languishing on my laptop. That was until I discovered that Win7 is starting to talk the talk when it comes to virtual machines. Yes there is the new XP mode (at a price!) which runs XP SP3 within Virtual PC, but Win7 can also handle virtual disks as well, creating them wherever you wish. And this offers the rather neat opportunity to start Win7 from a bootable DVD, start the install, create a virtual disk on your machine, install Win7 in to that disk and then automatically have a dual-boot option.

So my laptop still has XP installed on the main disk, but can now also boot in to Win7. First impressions are that it feels speedier than XP (let alone Vista!) and that the Aero interface is finally starting “to work”. Early days yet, but read the usual reviews to get some comparisons. In the meantime there really is no reason why you can’t trial it.

Perhaps somewhat quietly to European audiences, the Palm Pre was launched last Saturday in the US. Apparantly stocks have sold out and it has been largely well received, being described as the only likely rival to the iPhone. Clearly an awful long way to go and in depth reviews seem to praise webOS highly, with the Pre itself being a satisfactory starting point. A ROM image restorer has had the techniques in palpitations as the 200Mb file has allowed some disassembly to see whats going on. As ever, plenty of gossip over at Palm InfoCenter. However the biggest news has got to be the porting of Doom on to the Pre. A thoroughly worthwhile cause.

Minimap is a great extension for Firefox allowing access to a range of online mapping services through a sidebar. However it is much more than that; default view is the (broad) location of your IP address. You can drag and drop addresses on to the map to move to that area. Route planning is integrated, along with import/export of KML and support for many webservices (such as FireEagle, Flickr etc). Really takes web mapping to the next level of integration.

Intermap are finally moving in to the consumer arena with the release of Accuterra, an iPhone app that offers terrain data (and other info) for off-road users. This was noted by All Points last week and they point out that the app is not streamed, but downloaded to the users phone. You buy a single tile which is 200-400 Mb in size. Meaning of course when you are out of range, the app carries on working. It’ll be interesting to see how popular it proves.

Twitter, the micro-blogging website, has seen huge upsurge over the last year through it’s ease of use and adaptability to a variety of uses (see BakerTweet). However one area where it significantly lags behind is in location awareness. The usefulness of Twitter really came to the fore with #uksnow showing how crowd sourcing can produce some useful results (although not everyone agreed). There are plenty of examples of where this could be useful though (such as traffic congestion). But there is no location aspect to the Twitter API, replying on users to embed location information (postcode, town etc) All Points notes an article in Fortune detailing moves in this direction. It’s surprising given the popularity of both BrightKite and FireEagle. I guess there is more to come.