Monthly Archives: December 2015

MobileViews Podcast 142: Enterprise mobility discussion with Don Sorcinelli

In this podcast Jon Westfall and I (Todd Ogasawara) welcome our old friend and enterprise mobility expert Don Sorcinelli.

– Wolfram Open Cloud. Try Wolfram Language for free in your browser.
– I thought I lost my Moto 360 while walking to work. Big sigh. But, no! Turns out the Android Wear “last seen” feature doesn’t work.
– Google says the requirement of a steering wheel, pedals, and a licensed driver slows down driverless vehicle development – Skynet.
– Project Fi lets you add specific LTE Android & iOS tablets without any extra fee. You just pay for the data used
– Enterprise mobility discussion with Don
– Each year companies do a few “Evil” things (MS & OneDrive this year, Apple not providing 3rd party faceplates for the Apple Watch, Google Fi destroying Google Voice accounts). What are our predictions for “Evil” 2016?

MobileViews Podcast 141: MobileViews Podcast 141: Open Live Writer, Pixel C conspiracy theory, OneDrive mea culpa, & more

In this podcast, Jon Westfall and I (Todd Ogasawara) discuss:

– Microsoft released its old Live Writer blogging tool as an Open Source project: Open Live Writer. Also Todd’s blog entry about this

– Interesting conspiracy theory about Google’s new Pixel C tablet on ars technica: The Pixel C was probably never supposed to run Android

– Microsoft OneDrive mea culpa. Ref: ZDNet

– Amazon Prime premium subscriptions to services like Showtime and Starz.

– Apple released iOS 9.2. Ref: My ExtremeTech article

– Ask Jon about his iPad Pro experience so far (Got much more useful after the Keyboard came in!)

– Jon wiped / re-installed his iPhone (buggy app installs, buggy bluetooth stack).

TIP
The Amazon Echo will pair to an OS/X Mac but not a PC running Windows 10 over Bluetooth. This is not surprising. In the past I found I could not pair BT headsets with Windows PCs either. Todd’s blog entry about this

TIL: Amazon Echo’s Bluetooth can pair with Apple OS/X computers but not Microsoft Windows 10 PCs

echo_osx_bt_20151213

Amazon tells us that is Echo intelligent speaker can pair with mobile devices? But, I wondered what about desktop PCs and notebooks? It turns out that it pairs and works fine with Macs running Apple’s OS/X (I tested it with the current El Capitan release). However, Microsoft’s Windows 10 Bluetooth stack couldn’t even detect the Echo let alone pair with it.

So, if you have a Windows PC and want to use the Echo as a wireless speaker, you are out of luck. However, if you run OS/X on a Mac, it works fine.

Testing 1 2 3: Open Live Writer (formerly Microsoft Live Writer)

openlivewriter_20151212

 

Microsoft moved its old Live Writer blogging tool to an MIT Open Source license. The application itself was always free. And, now the source code is available as well. The project provides an installer for Windows. So, you don’t need to compile the code to run it on Windows. I haven’t used Live Writer in years (it was part of the old Windows Live Toolkit package). I’m looking forward to taking a deeper look at it (I’m using it now to create this blog entry) to see if it can perform the relatively simply needs I have for blog writing. You can learn more about the project here:

http://openlivewriter.org/

MobileViews Podcast 140: Google-ly news plus Jon’s rants

– Google Fi LEGO charging stand
– Google Cardboard app for Android
– Updated Google Camera app. Good low-light HDR+ setting added. UI completely changed.
– Google best apps of 2015
– Verizon will turn on Wi-Fi Calling for Galaxy S 6 and Edge 6 Monday, but iOS users must wait until “early next year”.
– Jon’s not giving out his Google Voice number anymore… no faith in the service.
– 2015 first year of single digit smartphone growth. Ref: IDC
– Get 5-7 year olds programming with PBS Kids ScratchJr on a tablet | ExtremeTech