Friday, April 8, 2011

Android on the Desktop?


Have you heard of Blue Stacks?


           I would probably say that you haven’t.


      Blue Stacks is an application that will enable you to run the Android OS on your desktop. This is the latest in the line of attempts to bring the mobile operating system to traditional PC’s. We have that trend where people are trying to bring the mobile OS to the desktop. The next release of OS X (Lion) promises to bring a lot of the features from iOS to the Mac OS.  

     Hewlett Packard is in development to release their mobile OS, the WebOS, which is used in their Pre line of mobile phones and which is used in their newest TouchPad to PC’s. The benefit of bringing mobile OS’s to the desktop is that mobile OS’s and their applications are so easy to use that smartphones and tablet’s have replaced traditional PC’s for a lot of user’s.


     Blue Stacks new software loads as a virtual OS, similar to Parallels for the Mac, or Vmware for the PC. You can have your Windows OS running and run the Blue Stacks application with the Android operating system simultaneously and can switch back and forth between the two seamlessly. What is so great about this is that it uses all of Windows utilities and drivers. For example if you have an instance of Android up and running and you need to print something, you can just hit print as you normally would. You may even have Android up and running and have Skype opened, it uses Windows’ to handle the audio and video as well. 


    The only drawback about using this PC application is that it doesn’t have any access to the Android Marketplace. However they do have access to the Amazon App Store. This software has NOT been made publicly available yet. Although it will be made and available to download at the end of May. I know that I am anticipating the release of this application. What do you as the reader think? Is it a good idea to run Android on your desktop or notebook? I would relly love to hear your feedback. As always, get out there and enjoy your day!


       


Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Mozilla’s Slow Add Ons

          I’ve been around the internet for quite a few years now. I was really glad to see that Mozilla finally has some intention of doing something about their slow add ons.

        I started using Firefox in late 2003. Their use of add ons and the ability to be able to customize your browser the way you want is what drew me away from the IE in the first place.
            I really didn’t care much for the IE then and I really don’t use it that much now either, only at work where OMG, we are still using the IE 6, sshh don’t tell no one.

       I truly enjoy Firefox, I think that it’s a great browser. Over time though it has become slow and bloated because of the add ons. I only use 3-4 myself. That was the reason that I decided to make the switch to Chrome. Although we Firefox 4, I do find myself using it more and more. I know that the developer’s of Firefox spend countless hours trying to tweak certain areas of Firefox to make it as fast as possible. I have to commend them for pointing out to the developers the slow add ons. Take a look below at some of the add ons that slow the performance of Firefox:



          
           This list is just the top 5 add ons that will slow the performance of Firefox. Just what is Mozilla doing to institute better performance from these add ons? It is performing automated performance testing on the top 100 add ons in it’s add ons gallery. They are reaching out to the developers of the add ons as well to get them to improve the performance of their add ons by supplying them with some developer tools to help them out. Mozilla realizes that the addition of third party  vendor software disrupts the end user experience. In the future Mozilla will release a build of Firefox without any third party add ons that will truly enhance the user experience. YES! What do you think of Firefox? I would really love to hear from you! Get out there and enjoy your day!  

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Bitnami


   Bitnami. Have you heard of Bitnami? You may be asking what is that? Well let me just say that Bitnami makes some of the best software installer’s out there. I know because I use Bitnami. You won’t have me endorsing software on here that I don’t know nothing about or that I don’t use. Bitnami is an open source project that produces open source installer’s or software packages for web applications and solution stacks as well as Virtual appliances that can be used in conjunction with virtual software such as Vmware.


        Bitnami is sponsored by Bitrock a company founded in 2003 in Spain by Daniel Lopez Ridruejo. Bitnami stacks can be installed on Windows, Linux, Mac OSX,  and Solaris. They have built stacks for popular applications such as Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla!, and MediaWiki. I don’t know about you, but have you ever wanted to try Wordpress? The Windows installer for Wordpress can be very difficult if you are just an average computer user. With the Bitnami installer though, anyone can install Wordpress and have it up and running in no time.


        In addition to the application itself, the stack comes with all of the other required software to run the application. For example like I mentioned about Wordpress, in order for that to be properly configured, you need MySQL database, Apache Web Server, and phpMyAdmin to properly configure the installer. With the Bitnami Stack though you simply download the file and install it like any other normal application, and their installer does the work for you. It’s as simple as that.         


        Using automated cloud computing management, Bitnami offers users automated application deployments of open source server apps from Amazon EC2 servers. Since 2009 they have also made available pre configured virtual appliances as well. Since February 2010 they have offered Bitnami Cloud Hosting, a service that allows deploying Bitnami stacks on the Amazon EC2 cloud, with automatic monitoring and backups. If you are interested head on over to their website and give their installers a try. They can be found here: www.bitnami.org/  They offer more than just the Wordpress stack. There is also the following software attacks pre configured for your enjoyment:
      Alfresco
     Apache Roller  Coppermine Photo Gallery DokuWiki  Drupal  Enano CMS  eZ Publish  JasperServer  Joomla  KnowledgeTree
         Liferay  Mantis Bug Tracker  MediaWiki  Moodle  Opina  phpBB
    Redmine  RubyStack  Subversion  SugarCRM  Trac  Tracks  WordPress

Head on over there and give them a try. I would love to hear of any comments or feedback that you may have. Once again and as always, get
out there and enjoy your day.


                                                            


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