Kristo Vaher

Where did volume go?

With Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone released to many positive reviews, it is clear that Android 4.0 is the best version of the operating system released yet. But questionable decisions by Samsung and the release of untested phone that is broken on majority 2G networks has compromised the image of Google and Android in general.

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Galaxy Nexus

I’ve been a user of an Android phone, HTC Desire, for sixteen months. I bought it with a contract and as a way to step into the smartphone world, first as a user and potentially later on as a developer. I love my HTC Desire, but HTC has proven to be a company that thinks about bells and whistles first and foremost, making me consider a change. I was originally thinking about waiting until sequel to Galaxy S2 is released next year, but now have decided to buy the phone Google developed in cooperation with Samsung, the Galaxy Nexus (available for pre-order at Amazon).
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Waher-style Theme

If you are using Windows and use Notepad++ as one of your main source-code editors and happen to be a web developer then you might just love this.  I originally developed this for personal use for I was unhappy with other themes or found them a little inconsistent across different web development languages. By now I have used this theme in Notepad++ for more than a year now.

Thanks to this being shared in reddit, Twitter and Facebook, it has been downloaded more than ten thousand times in one day.

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WebViewApp

I have only recently become curious about developing for Android phones. As a web developer the most important thing for me was to provide a way to bridge the gap between web applications and native applications.

Free and open source WebViewApp application is a simple base setup for developing Android applications that communicate with web services. WebViewApp is released as open source and developers can use this base application to build their own fully functional web applications in Android.

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Google+

Google+ is a social networking service by Google that has been in development for a few years and was launched about a week ago. While still in invite-only testing phase, the interest in joining the site has been massive and the service quickly gathered over a million users. Feedback from early adopters has been very positive, despite Google+ not really inventing a wheel here. Best achievement of Google+ is that it takes what is already there and improves on it while also closing one of the most relevant gaps between the four more notable social networking services of the last five years: Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and LinkedIn. This post will point out the features that are relevant to Google+.

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About Face 3

Alan Cooper’s, Robert Reimann’s and David Cronin’s third edition of About Face, book about the essentials of interaction design, was released in 2007 (first edition was released in 1995) and is considered one of the must-read books for UI/UX designers. Alan Cooper spearheaded the books and is known for pioneering the use of personas as practical interaction design.

This summary of selected chapters applies to the third edition of the book and may not apply to earlier editions. Summary is written for the course Interface and Interaction Design, taken in Tallinn University as part of masters studies.

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Introduction

The somewhat controversial book by world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow was published in September 2010 and is the latest popular-science book spearheaded by Hawking. Having read his previous works, I took the opportunity to read and review this latest book as part of the Tallinn University course ’21st Century concepts in information and meaning’ by Jaan Teng.
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Following is a cross-referenced review and discussion on Ubiquitous Computing (edited by Eduard Babkin) chapter #11 Case Study: The Condition of Ubiquitous Computing Application in Indonesia. It is written for Tallinn University course Experimental Input and Output.

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This essay is written as part of International Media and Knowledge Environments studies for the course Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. Essay looks at various methods how ontologies can improve typical database structures and why, taking into account both basic websites and complicated infosystem solutions.

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Hierarchy of a tree

The following is a final essay written for Emanuele Bardone’s course Philosophy of Cognition and mainly focuses on comparing Computational Theory of Mind with Distributed Cognition theory.

When it comes to cognition and how mind works, or both how and why we tick the way we do as I like to call it, there are two known theories that are more known and are subject of many debates: Computational Theory of Mind and Distributed Cognition Theory. Both of these theories are essential parts of modern cognitive sciences – studies of the process of thought – and how we make decisions in the environment that we exist in.

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