Short answer: Yes. In a few more words: It’s not an iPhone killer as many out there labeled it to be but it can easily keep up with it. I wasn’t quite sure which one to get, the iPhone or the Palm Prē, till the last moment but I finally decided to take the risk and give the Prē the benefit of the doubt. The Prē can’t keep up with the iPhone in every single aspect, there just are a few things where Palm just had no chance of overcoming the two year head start the iPhone has, the biggest aspect for sure being the App store. But the Prē more than compensates for this shortcomings by throwing in a number of creative ideas and features even the iPhone with all its apps has nothing to come up against with, like Synergy or MULTI TASKING. Ever tried to listen to web radio on the iPhone while downloading a large PDF in your browser and looking up a number of addresses just received via email in the Google Maps app, switching back and forth between the latter two?! Well, go ahead. Try! The bottom line is, the Prē doesn’t have everything the iPhone has but it surely doesn’t fall in the category of all those phones desperately trying to imitate the iPhone as closely as possible, failing miserably on the way there. It comes with its own set of unique and stylish features that allow things that aren’t even possible on the iPhone and over time, I’m sure, it will catch up further. Besides, most of those things the Prē brings along right out of the box are quite polished and reliable making it a real pleasure to use. Continue Reading
Palm Prē: Really that good? *UPDATE*
Working like a pro… with Google SketchUp?! Maybe!
Few weeks ago I stumbled upon these posts here and here, mentioning Google SketchUp as a design tool for home improvement, etc. This reminded me of one of my own articles that’s been in the drafts pipeline for quite a while now and which I had almost forgotten about. So here we go, finally:
Almost two years ago when I was about to move in into a new apartment, I was on the look for some 3D home design tool. Now, there’s plenty of those tools on the market, developed by smaller software companies producing software off the assembly line, i.e. flooding the market with half-baked mass-productions at a ridiculous price point. So I didn’t really consider buying one of those things. Then again, professional CAD software at an even higher (though justified) price point as e.g. various products offered by Autodesk would have been a bit of an overkill for the task at hand, which is why I finally ended up using Google SketchUp. Continue Reading
Data Distribution Controller for UAV
I’ve just added a new page for a university project that I’ve recently finished. It’s a project aimed to design a hardware device that can manage the distribution of data among various subsystems of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). All information on the project including the official project documentation and the slides of a talk given on this subject are available on the project page.
In this post, I’d only like to share the final result. More precisely, I’m showing two videos of the actual hardware piece rendered by a software called Eagle3D (or more precisely rendered by POV-Ray based on the script generated by Eagle3D). The result is just amazing. See for yourself!
How to force MSI files to install on non-supported OS
Since I’m currently running Windows 7 Beta on my computer, I’ve ran into this issue quite a few times. You download some program you’ve been using on Windows Vista before, and once you try to install it, you’re being told “The operating system is not supported. Installation will be aborted.”
For many 3rd party installer systems, using Microsoft’s compatibility wizard will solve the problem. Just tell the wizard that the program requires special permission and ran on older OS version (e.g. Vista) and it should install fine. Unfortunately, this usually doesn’t work for Microsoft Installer packages (*.msi files). Here’s a short tutorial on how to still force those packages to install (taking the Samsung LightScribe software as an example): Continue Reading
Still in shock!
I probably shouldn’t have given Microsoft that much credit in yesterday’s post. What I’ve just learned nearly gave me a heart attack. Microsoft is canceling Flight Simulator. This may not be very tragic news from a general user’s point of view and doesn’t really change anything I wrote about Microsoft’s change yesterday, but from a very personal view this is probably the worst thing Microsoft could ever do. Microsoft Flight Simulator is probably the best simulation game out there and unfortunately it’s not like there’s many replacements I could go to now. So I’m really sad to here that this Flight Simulator X DVD box I bought more than two years ago is probably the last one I’ll have ever bought.
It’s been a while…
![logo3[1]](http://www.juergentreml.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/logo311.png "logo3[1]"){kind=logo}
since I wrote my last blog post here. The date of my last post tells me, that it’s been almost exactly six months. Quite some time! That’s why I’d like to clarify a few things to hopefully prevent some of the emails I get asking about THE STATE OF FSXGET.
I’ve been quite busy writing my master thesis over the last months. That’s basically why neither my blog nor the FSXGET project did receive much attention. Since the other developers on FSXGET are currently inactive, too, the application didn’t receive any updates at all. But YES, I’m definitely planning on continuing and updating the tool. I’m still facing my final exams, so don’t expect any news on the project before the middle of the year, but rest assured the project isn’t dead.
By the way: I’d be happy to have some people taking part in the job, helping to push forward the project. So if you’re interested and have some programming skills, don’t hesitate to mention that! 