Sean Houlihane

I recently invested in a reasonably up-to-date mobile, the SE P990. It seemed to be a good choice, given that I feel no need to be buying any more microsoft software than I need to.

According to Lisa@CPS, it’s unlikely that apps like MagicProfiles will be possible on UIQ3, because of SE security paranoia. We’ve already seen that start-on-boot has been taken away from us, and CPS have to do some clever trickery to make Tweak Peaks give us something people have been demanding for many months.

Profiles being missing from the base platform makes me pretty mad. It’s one of the features I thought I was buying when I bought the phone. 9:00-5:30, I’m in the office. I don’t want my phone to ring. I don’t need 6 clicks every morning, and 5 every evening. Why take away a feature which is obviously valuable? Why again make it difficult for someone to write this functionality? All it achieves is more people having an incentive to crack the security.

Most of the included apps on the phone (not free, I paid good money for everything in the box) are fairly shocking anyway - conversion tool being the best example of how not to use a tabbed dialogue I’ve ever seen. Shortcuts for common actions are missing, and the ‘back’ button is rather unpredictable (RSS it’s up, web it’s ‘background’, others it’s ‘close’.

I’m starting to think my next mobile is going to be a real open platform, and I’ll be checking much harder to ensure it is open before I commit to owning it!

This walk was one of the most scenic I’ve done in France.

It would have been a simple, if tough, walk if it hadn’t been for the snow near the top. At the point where we left the track and started following a rough path through the grass, we were walking on a thin covering of wet snow - which put off the majority of the group. We were also walking in intermittent mist. Following the path took up into colder snow, and a more gentle slop to the final summit, across an impressive ridge with one face looking over the valley we had come up by, in bright autumn colours, and the other face snow covered and dissapearing into a cloud-filled valley.

Photos on Fotopic