Android touchscreen prototype looks promising

According to latest pictures and demo video from Google IO keynote, Android is slowly developing into very nice, functional and promising mobile platform with good graphics capabilities and also touchscreen gesture controls — very similar to Apple‘s iPhone OS.

Check out the demo videos and pictures here (via Daring Fireball RSS). You can also check out videos & transcript of Android prototype Q&A session which took place immediately after the keynote – here.

— Regards, Milan

Welcome to Mars, Phoenix

I praise the day, when we won’t need probes to take pictures on Mars.

Meanwhile, let’s enjoy photos of NASAs Phoenix Lander probe, which sucessfully landed in the northern polar region of Mars yesterday @ 13:53:44 CEST. Click here for the gallery.

— Regards, Milan

Journey To The Center Of The Earth

I’ve read Jules Verne novel Journey To The Center Of The Earth more then a decade ago — before I was 15 years old. I still remember how fascinated I was with it and excited —every day coming back from school— to read new chapter or two. To hell with school and homework, I thought: I want to travel to the centre of earth when I grow up. Why ain’t I like Axel and why isn’t one of my relatives like Lidenbrock? That would be the coolest thing on the world!

And now a movie based on that novel is coming to cinemas to refresh my memories and reignite my excitement. Check it out @ Apple Trailers. I just hope that the movie will be as good as book — which is sadly not the case with majority of movies based on novels nowadays.

Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1: Mouse On

Mozilla fans will be happy to hear that Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is now available for download (via digg). Release notes —with quite a long list of improvements— are available here and you can download the browser here.

First impressions, after 15 minutes of surfing with it (on MacOS X Leopard):

• Faster than previous beta when loading up. As for browsing, Firefox completes SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in 3363.4 ms, comparing to Safari 3.1.1. 3614.6 ms. BUT I really haven’t noticed any big browsing speed improvement over previous beta.
• MacOS X background / foreground windows color scheme — RC 1 now follows it; when it’s in foreground it’s gray and when it’s in background it’s lighter.
• Text editing key bindings — Looks like they fixed them (or at least some of them). John Gruber complained about this; I’ve tested the up and down arrow function and it moves the insertion point now properly.
• MacOS X system dictionary still not supported.
• Tab quickmenu — On the right side of the tab-bar, there is now a button which lists all open tabs in an drop-down menu and takes you to the selected tab when clicked. It lists only tabs in current windows. To bad it doesn’t work cross-window — it would be a nice shortcut function for switching windows and tabs with one click.
• Acid 3 reports 70/100. Still long way to go.
• Search field — Now also in Downloads window. It’s not a function that I would use constantly, but sometimes it’s handy.

— Regards, Milan

Jordan and Egypt get the iPhone, but what about Slovenia?

Apple has significantly stepped up the roll-out of the iPhone, after signing a multi-continent deal with France Telecom, parent company of mobile operator Orange.

The deal brings the iPhone to countries including Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Slovakia, Jordan and Egypt. Orange will also start to sell the iPhone in its African territories later this year, France Telecom says.

The news comes after Apple announced a multi-country deal with rival operator Vodafone, which now sells the iPhone in Greece, India and Australia, among other countries.

More on Apple steps up iPhone roll out by PCpro.

Ok! But what about Slovenia?

Hmmm.. Not funny.