Team Blog

We love it when we spot that Google have done one of their doodles to their logo! It means it's obviously a day that has piqued the interest of the team there at the Googleplex.

As creator and (zealous) keeper of the Astraware logos, for a long time I wouldn't let anyone alter it. But the logo we introduced last year was just crying out to get tweaked for special occasions. We did a skull & crossbones back on International Talk Like A Pirate Day, and we're doing it again for Halloween! Since we're dressing up for the occasion, I'm in my The Nightmare Before Christmas shirt and black nails for the day

An evil boss who looks like a werewolf, some vampires lurking in the shadows, a coven of witches cackling away, and a whole shambling team of zombies moaning "brains". Sounds like business as usual at the Astraware offices then! Except, today is Halloween and some of us are going a little further than usual in scaring the other occupants of the building!

Any excuse for some fun and cake, of course! Kirsten's getting the horror make-up kit out, and we're enjoying Kat's creepy cake and biscuits, and generally making sure that the office is going bump in the, errr, day...

Since the launch of the Palm Treo 650, I have admired the form factor and features that the Treo line of devices offers. Add to this the power and usability of Windows Mobile and I think Palm were on to a winner with their Treo 700w device, but with it being only for CMDA networks, us poor people in the UK don't have a network that supports it . So when Palm had announced their Treo 750v (and it being GSM) I took a look at the specs and knew that I had to have one .

I've been using the device for a week now and couldn't ask more from a converged device and suprisingly I haven't missed not having wifi on my PDA . Palm have done a great job where I think most other manufacturers lack and that is with supplying some great additions from the basic OS, their today screen plug-ins are really useful and I don't know how I used to track SMS messages without the Palm style threaded view.

The device CD is full of the normal things but also has a copy of a really addictive game that I've not come across before called Dynomite! that has been optimized for the Treo's 240x240 screen and looks and plays great .

Another day here at the Orange Partner Camp here in Cádiz and this morning I've attended a session about a subject very close to my heart.

I'm very interested in the latest multi-media entertainment systems and use a media server along with a specialist player for watching movies, viewing my digital pictures and listening to music around the house. In the past this has needed some pretty heavy magic to get it working and it's never been a smooth solution so I was very interested to see that ACCESS (formerly PalmSource) are working on products based on the Digital Living Network Alliance standards.

They are still working on various prototypes but they were demonstrating the idea of having each device be a server, controller and a renderer (viewer), depending on its capabilities. This means that any device that can act as a controller could select a server and renderer from the available list and then play/show any file. The best bit was that the devices used can range from a file server to a television to a mobile device letting you use your mobile phone to play files anywhere in the world or control what plays on your TV all from one program.

It's a long way off but I'm really looking forward to seeing this technology in release products and I'm sure it will make a great addition to my home cinema system.

We're at the Orange Partner Camp in Cádiz, Spain today through Wednesday! The Camp is a chance to find out about Orange (a major mobile carrier here in Europe) and its plans, and also to talk to sponsor companies and other developers and businesses in the space.

Over beer last night we saw a demo of some really neat search technology for Windows Mobile and Symbian: you can type anything into the Start/home screen using the number pad, and instantly any contacts, web links or other content that matches pops up in a list. It's very impressive and maybe we can get it into our Lifestyle section.

This morning I've been listening to Larry Berkin and the team from ACCESS (formally PalmSource) about the new ACCESS Linux Platform, the successor to Palm OS. It certainly sounds like they're progressing well and they're aiming to get the OS platform ready early next year and phones in the market sometime in 2007. ALP will be supporting existing Palm OS applications (we had a chance to test quite a few of our games on ALP earlier this year - they worked), Java applications and also native Linux development. Given that Motorola have also said that they're heading down the Linux route for many of their phones, Mobile Linux may well be the big thing in '07 and it's something we're taking really seriously.