Category Archives: Links

Space Hotels & Day Trips to the Moon →

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Sir Richard Branson, outlined these plans and more for the future of his commercial space fleet. “Using small, purpose-built, two-man spaceships based at space hotels our guests will be able to take breathtaking day trips programmed to fly a couple of hundred feet above of the moon’s surface,” Branson said. “They will be able to take in with their own eyes awe-inspiring views of mountains, craters and vast dry seas below.”
– Flights of Fancy: Virgin Galactic Plans Space Hotels, Day Trips to the Moon: Scientific American

Sounds like an easy way to join the 250,000 mile high club. Seeing the moon up close would be pretty cool too.

The New M7 Chip – Used Throughout iOS 7 →

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M7 knows when you’re walking, running, or even driving. For example, Maps switches from driving to walking turn-by-turn navigation if, say, you park and continue on foot. Since M7 can tell when you’re in a moving vehicle, iPhone 5s won’t ask you to join Wi-Fi networks you pass by. And if your phone hasn’t moved for a while, like when you’re asleep, M7 reduces network pinging to spare your battery.

 

The new M7 coprocessor is like a sidekick to the A7 chip. It’s designed specifically to measure motion data from the accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass — a task that would normally fall to the A7 chip. But M7 is much more efficient at it. Now fitness apps that track physical activity can access that data from the M7 coprocessor without constantly engaging the A7 chip. So they require less battery power.

– Apple – iPhone 5s – Features

This one little chip offers some great little user experience touches throughout the core of iOS 7. It’s also definitely a toe in water for something more wearable…

George – Visitor for a Week

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George the Airedale

George the Airedale

For the last week we’ve had George staying in the house. He’s my Mother’s Airedale Terrier who’s spent his week in Brighton overwhelmed by seagulls, lots of new dogs and nice long walks along the seafront.

 

Upgrading from Android Cordova (PhoneGap) 2.1 to 2.2 Causes Black Screen or Flickering

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Recently whilst preparing the release of our TV Guide app, written in Cordova, we were experiencing lots of flickering / tiling as the page was scrolled and on some (HTC) devices the page would just turn black with the following error repeatedly output to the console:

D/TiledPage(28639): ERROR: We don't have enough tiles for this page! nbTilesHeight 0 nbTilesWidth 3

After stripping out and playing around with the usual CSS suspects (TranslateZ(0)), minimising the DOM and removing all images temporarily we were having no luck. So I reverted the entire web asset codebase back to the prior release, but built it against the latest Cordova Android project, and the issue still existed.

With that the case, there was only one possible cause, the upgrade from Cordova 2.1 to 2.2. It turns out the AndroidManifest.xml had been changed to enable hardware acceleration on the whole view. Simply open your AndroidManifest.xml and find this <application> node:

<application android:icon="@drawable/icon" android:label="@string/app_name"
android:hardwareAccelerated="true"
android:debuggable="true">

Remove the line:

android:hardwareAccelerated="true"

Clean and build. Your app should now perform as it did pre-Cordova 2.2. Hurray!