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The introduction of native application in iPhone and iPod touch made me wonder. With such revolutionary breakthrough in game controlling, will this device finally redefines portable game market?

In pre-iPhone era, portable game market is led by two big names, Sony PSP and Nintendo DS. Both have high resolution graphic display, but that is. There is no revolutionary improvement for their control. Players still use the same buttons used in old portable game consoles. Judging from that, even that the devices also have WiFi connection, we can safely say that both consoles are created merely for gaming.

iPhone and iPod touch came through different road path. Both devices are created not for gaming. They have superb audio visual capability but as we can see before, there is no game available for the devices. People used the device as mobile phone or as music/video player.

Together with the new iPhone SDK introduced by Apple several months ago, people saw the new prospect of the device. No less than 43 games are introduced in the first day of the AppStore. Their revolutionary touch control and tilt sensors are just perfect for portable game device. Depends on the game, the whole body of the device can act as steering wheel, as tilting table, as music instrument etc.

In my opinion, this will somehow redefine the portable game market in the future. The only advantage that PSP and DS have right now is the fact that the game industry is in their hand. They have more games and the device itself is already associated directly with game.

For Apple to catch them, it needs to introduce more games (and quality ones) to the devices. Sega with its Super Monkey Ball is a great sign for the future of the device. But more games are needed before it can take significant portable game market.

So what do you think? Will Apple redefine portable game market?

This is so cool! You can add a translator to your Google Talk friend. It will automatically translate all your sentence to the language that you want. This is so useful to chat with other friend with different language or even just to translate some sentences that you don’t understand.

To do this you just have to add this email to your friends list: “[from language]2[to language]@bot.talk.google.com”, and the supported language pairs are: ar2en, bg2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, en2zh, es2en, fi2en, fr2de, fr2en, hi2en, hr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, uk2en, ur2en, zh2en. So for translating English to Arabic, just add en2ar@bot.talk.google.com and start chatting.

Great work Google Talk team!

EDIT: fixed the screen capture

As I post before, share is really becoming a really important nowadays. And this wave is also coming to the screen capture. One obvious application of it is of course to explain something nicely to other people.

Before, we are pretty pleased with the functionality provided by SnagIt Pro or Snapz Pro X. But now, they are considered as too hard for supporting sharing. Let’s review the step you need to take a screen capture and show it to friend using instant messaging application.

1. Capture the screen using screen capture application and save it
2. Annotate the image using image editor
3. Upload to online storage using file manager
4. Put the URL in the instant messaging

Wouldn’t it be nice if we can do all of those things in one workflow from one application? That’s the idea of Jing and Skitch. Both applications offer the same functionalities. You can do the capture, annotate the result, and upload it to an online storage in one flow. They both even provide the default online storage to be used for the purpose. Beside that, it also possible to upload the picture to a FTP, Flickr, or in case of Skitch, to .Mac.

So how they compare to each other? Here is the result of my observation:

Jing:

• Available now, you can try it or whatever purpose you like
• Available in both Windows and Mac (Unfortunately no Linux version)
• Still have some bugs in the application (unexpected quit etc)

Skitch:

• The annotation seems to be easier
• Available only in Mac
• Currently only available in closed beta

Overall, I think both applications are pretty wonderful. They are easy to use, the interface is elegant and doesn’t take a lot of time to master all the functionalities. Both applications also support video capture.

If there is no further innovations from both of them, the next question is how much money they ask from the user. Certainly, I really hope we can see a FREE tag…

For a long time, Germany inter city train connection was mainly operated by InterCity train. When Japan introduced Shinkansen and France produced TGV, some industrial companies were also planning to build new faster train for Germany. The proposal was approved with one condition… it should able to use old railways so that Germany didn’t have to put a lot of money to build new railway (which is the case for Shinkansen and TGV).

This approach is proofed to be very effective. Germany had already famous for its dense railways and using the approach, in a short time, the train became the most popular rapid mass transport between cities in Germany. In the same time, more and more better railways are build throughout Germany to achieve the velocity’s limit of train. Currently, its top speed can only be achieved on the line between Frankfurt-Cologne and Nuremberg-Munich, where it can run until 300 km/h.

Over the time, several types of the train has been developed. InterCityExpress is picked as the name and the model is named as ICE 1, ICE 2, and ICE 3. Several variations of the models are also developed afterward.

Most of the train has signal amplifier for mobile phone so people can still use their phone despite of the speed of the train. In the modern model, every two seats in ICE has access to the electrical power so its very convenient for businessmen or anybody that want to use laptop or charge battery. And recently, several ICEs are also equipped with WLAN courtesy of T-Mobile.

This train is also considered as very attractive for many train fans. This can be concluded from many fan pages about the train over the internet. Every information about the train can also be read in the fan pages. Two of the most interesting sites are http://www.ice-fanpage.de/ and http://www.railfaneurope.net/pix/de/electric/emu/ICE/pix.html.

Several months ago when I first tried Flock, I was pretty disappointed. The browser is buggy and even has bigger memory problem as Firefox. Not long after the installation, I uninstall it. And I never intended to try it one more time. Not even when it escaped the beta. A social browser just doesn’t get my attention.

This is somehow changed when I see the post in Techcrunch. According to the post:

Then came Flock 1.0. I’d never been a Flock fan before, always believing it to be nothing more than Firefox with plugins (Flock is based on the Firefox engine). Having watched the demo at TechCrunch 40 I downloaded the beta of Flock 1.0 and surfed away without incident. Some how the folks at Flock had tweaked the underlying Firefox engine to stop the memory issues.

So I give Flock another try. And yes, it seems to me that it is working better than Firefox. The previous post shows an image how much memory taken by Flock compared to Firefox.

Great work Flock team. Sadly I won’t still use your social features. I certainly will use Firefox more often if the solution can be implemented in Firefox, but I guess it will just be a dream since Firefox’s memory leak is a feature.