It may be a little presumptuous to say the Magic Trackpad will revolutionise desktop pointing devices. But in truth, for all non-gaming activity on a computer, gestures* on trackpads make for a far superior experience because they don’t ‘get in the way’. Plus, I always seem to experience mechanical failures with mice, especially with scroll balls that die after four months with the older Apple Mighty Mouse. I guess a trackpad would cure my blight, if my current Microsoft Arc mouse decides to drop dead.

And now, we shall await the computer desk with a touch keyboard and trackpad built on the desk surface itself.

*Dear Apple, please build-in a native gesture for middle clicks in OS X sometime soon.

Things have been quiet around here for a couple of days because I have been extremely preoccupied with my newly upgraded HTC Hero. Here are some random notes from the days that followed.

Trigger the O.T.A update.
Early last week when I got a notification on the phone that a Firmware Over-The-Air (FOTA) upgrade was available. I was on a train with flaky and fluctuating download speeds so I cancelled it. When I got back home, I realised I could not trigger the update on-demand. D’oh! After some Googling, I discovered a way — set the phone’s date to next year and the update gets triggered.

Protip: Don’t forget to set your phone’s clock back to the present time.

Cupcake to Éclair.
The jump from Android 1.5 (Cupcake) to 2.1 (Éclair) was smooth. (Of course, I could have updated long ago if I found the time and focus to root the phone, but I digress…) The biggest disappointment with the firmware upgrade was that the pretty awesome Slidescreen home screen was not able to pull in my calendar updates.

Android home screen and launcher replacements.
Until Larva Labs issues an update, I thought I’d have a go at the other free home screen replacement apps on the market that would work on my stock phone.

• Home++ has a neat ‘Power Strip’ at the bottom and was snappy to use overall. The Power Strip has an all white colour theme, except for the battery charge indicator which was in some default green on my phone. Not very pretty.
• SweeterHome2 was touted as being very customisable but it was painful to learn to to do so. There was no single ‘killer’ feature that made me gawp and want to use it. Maybe I just didn’t get it or didn’t have the patience so I uninstalled it after one reboot.
• HelixLauncher2 and Zeam were both faster than I expected. I immediately liked HelixLauncher2 a lot but it made my battery very hot. You could drag and drop apps to the application launcher to uninstall them which is very neat. But the battery heat was about 38°C most of the time and I literally could not handle it. It’s still on my app list and when there’s an update, I’ll give it a spin again. Zeam felt equally fast and lets you have up to 9(!) home screens. Zeam’s application launcher was on the bottom right, but that’s just a matter of getting used to. Both HelixLauncher2 and Zeam let you ‘pin’ four applications alongside the application launcher (i.e dock) — a very handy feature indeed.
• The ADW Launcher has an insane number of options to tweak the interface and, despite the animations, it is pretty fast. This was the last launcher app that I tried and felt most comfortable with. It lets you pin two apps to the ‘dock’ which felt like the right number. It also can launch programs when you swipe up or down. I spent an inordinate amount of time playing with the insane number of options and it’s hard to believe this program was built and is being maintained almost entirely by one man for free.

There are 32 countries in Asia, not one.
Seriously, Google needs to hurry the fuck up and allow more countries access to the paid apps on the Android Market. In Asia, I believe only Japan has access to paid apps. There are some sparkling gems out there within the realm of the free apps space, some of which are ad-supported but most of the better quality stuff is not free. There are a fair number of apps I would gladly fork money out for, but until Google gets it’s payment issues sorted out, the pro developers will avoid Android.

A great gallery of prisoners’ escape tools. Just a pity that the photographer’s site looks a bit freaky for my liking.

If the world comes to a flaming, burning end and I become a fucking hipster who totes around a magical and revolutionary iPad, I would probably get this beautifully re-purposed and thoughtfully re-crafted Classic Macintosh stand to go with it.

Meanwhile, before the world ends, I’m hoping to build my own tablet computer.

A stunning instruction video for a stunning product.

A whopping 12.1 megapixels, high-definition video recording and a large 2.7″ LCD display are among the biggest-selling features of the new Pentax Optio H90 point-and-shoot camera.

The feature I like best is the orange colour.

Now, you can be like Ace McLoud, thanks to the Martin Aircraft Company.

[Via newslite.tv]

When someone says “fax it to me,” I always feel like I’m being punk’d. A fax machine is nothing more than a printer, scanner and an obsolete analog mode that work together to waste time, money, paper and electricity.

›› Computerworld’s 10 technologies to kill in 2010

In celebration of SpongeBob’s 10 years of existence (What? He’s been around that long?), the guys at Nooka are coming up with a series of commemorative timepieces, starting with the first piece, the yellow as hell SpongeBob Spongelevator.

I am quite a fan of Nooka’s watch line though I don’t think I’ll be queuing up for this one. And thankfully, The Daughter is not old enough just yet to make me buy stuff.

[Via Josh Spear]

That’s a nice looking retro-styled camcorder from Sanyo, isn’t it?

The Stealth MacBook Pro is a limited edition modded MacBook Pro with a smooth, matte black paint job that can be yours for US$6,000. Or you could buy about 3 MacBooks over the next 6 years for the same money and not worry about faster CPUs.

Just saying’, you know.

That’s right, folks… Denon’s AK-DL1 is an ultra premium Denon Link cable that costs almost half a grand. The killer feature probably is the ’signal directional markings’ for ‘optimum signal transfer’, seeing as how the audio/data signals need little arrows to know which way to go. Wow, That’s Fabulous!

The A List Apart Survey results are out. Last year, the results were published as a PDF, which was a bit of an anti-climax from a standardista perspective. But this year, they’ve got it all out in bread-and-butter HTML and CSS, the highlight of which has to be Eric A. Meyer’s mind-numbingly beautiful, yet accessible, CSS work for the graphs. Plain insanity, if you ask me, but it’s top-drawer production-grade code.