I think I found a way home. And this last job, that’s how I get there.

Absolutely brilliant. Inception had my eyes and my mind working overtime. The whole idea of weaving a movie around dreams and alternate realities was fantastic, and Nolan delivered it well. My favourite scenes were the slo-mo ones as the van fell into the river. (Do you remember Joker in The Dark Knight when he had his head out of the car after his escape?)

As I stared at these scenes in awe, the puzzle pieces fit beautifully together in the background. Each water droplet floating between the dreamers during the fall was a puzzle piece that was waiting to fit into the bigger picture; and the time between the fall and the final totem scene was the genesis. Another one for my ‘golden box’!

I can comfortably say that Cocoa is one of the best UI platforms there is, owing to its standardized, beautiful and intuitive interface. Most Mac apps are built using this framework which makes them consistent. A clean and simple looking menu bar, for example, throughout all software is an almost welcome offering. I guess Windows sort of got it right till 98, after which a series of mishaps and unaccounted justifications led them to a not-so-friendly place in the world of User Experience. I’ve been a fan of Windows for 8 years, and it took me less than a week with OS X to wipe the past out.

Just to get even on all my Windows bashing in the last two years, I actually thought over instances where some of my favorite Mac apps don’t fare too well. Here’s a list, and I sincerely hope all you guys at Apple, Google, Ate Bits, Mozilla… hear these out and do something about it. After all, there’s always room for improvement!

Tweetie:
Tweetie is such an awesome app for managing my Twitter account. It even supports multiple accounts, conversations, image posting, URL shortening… just so many important features in a beautiful and crisp UI. Although there’s a very important function missing – Delete tweet. I don’t think I need to state why it’s necessary! Hope Tweetie 2 brings out this feature, and possibly a lot more.

Firefox:
What a fantastic browser – easily the best of them all (I should tell you that Safari is my one and only “Tumbler”/Chevy V8 Rig).. but it takes up too much memory. It’s insane. Guys at Mozilla seriously need to sort this out. Google’s Chrome is super fast with their process driven tabs, what’s happening here? The experience of browsing the web is lost with such a memory hog. Most of my RAM is consumed by Firefox when I have more than 5 tabs open. That just sucks.

Google:
Where on earth is Google Talk for Mac? Any plans, ever?!

Mac Finder:
Why isn’t there an option where I can save the window size/position? I know there are third party apps available (such as Afloat), but these are basics that shouldn’t be overlooked. And of course, ‘forgiveness forever’ control? Undo accidental copy/move? Mapping this intuitively?

iPhoto and iTunes:
Some serious work on the storage databases may help. They just eat up disk space like crazy. How about learning a thing or two from Picasa? Tagging in iTunes? Tune detection (like Face detection)?

Transmission:
A neat little client for torrents, although the process of verifying and building files after/during a download sucks, and even fails sometimes. I’ve lost GB’s of data during this process. How about a ‘state’ saving feature? It will kick ass!

There are more, but I guess I can live with them. I’m sure many of you feel that an app can do better when you’re actually using it. I encourage you to contribute to this list! If you have any app suggestions, ping me and I’ll feature in it in the next version of this post.

Well, I got lucky this time. I won a free pass to attend TEDx Chennai (an independently organized event bringing people together from primarily the walks of Technology, Entertainment & Design), and it turned out to be quite an eventful Sunday. Joseph (an organizer of the event) called me on Saturday evening to inform me that I had won a ticket to attend TEDx at the IIT Madras auditorium. Nothing like an otherwise ‘plan-less’ Sunday! I got up very early, which hasn’t happened for the past year or so, all ready to drive down and expect a totally inspiring set of talks.

Anil Srinivasan and Sikkil Gurucharan performed what I can call one of the best fusion pieces I’ve ever heard till date. Earlier this year, Anil performed at ‘Across the Universe’, a concert in Madras alongside Unnikrishnan and B S Purushotham, which was another fantastic performance – one which truly teleported (yes, music might be the only answer to my teleportation fetish at least in my life time!) people across dimensions. This was by far the best start I can think of for a TED event!

Romulus “the snake man” Whitaker, the founder of the Madras Snake Park, kick started the set of talks with his witty, funny and surprisingly-snake-loving instances of his life. Now I guess I’m not as scared of snakes as I was before – nothing like empathy toward anything and everything… probably something that can save the world!
Sharadha’s talk on Indian culture through films was inspiring, and made me question myself on whether it was worth watching my next Bollywood movie. As ‘politically incorrect’ as it was and as she had put it, we do need a set of fired up vigilantes to change things around here. The closest to Batman I could say!
Madhavan showed us what it took to stand out from the status quo; not by doing something entirely different, but doing something amazing with what he had already learnt. The impact of Agriculture in our nation was put through to people, some of whom didn’t know much about. A swarm of people surrounded him during the coffee break, and continued to rush out to catch him even as he was leaving after the event!
Vittal’s talk was hilarious and yet powerful. He showed us what corruption had grown into, inflicting politics, businesses and people. I felt his approach to tackle corruption by addressing the ‘money-problem’ or the flow of money in politics, a probable solution worth pondering and trying out even. Apparently ‘corruption’ is a hot topic today, especially in interviews. Getting a grassroot fix for this would be marvelous.
Krupa’s presentation on helping the underprivileged was touching, and Kavita’s life experiences and music evoked emotion.
It was at this point when I realized the TED India series of talks were slightly different from the rest. Most Indian entrepreneurs had a story to tell, which had the ability to evoke human emotion in a peculiar way. Something which captures the heart with not just awe of science or awe of technology, but with the awe of life. For me, the awe of life was very well articulated as the awe of Design! It did make a whole lot of sense. (Yet, we still have a long way to go to match TED standards – a lot more to learn.)
Reddy and Santhosh had good initiatives running on serving/helping people to build a better future. I could correlate a lot of it to creating sustainable lifestyles after understanding Sustainability at the WUD2009 event in Bangalore earlier this month. Jeeva and Bawa engaged the audience with their post lunch activity-packed talks – made me feel more human than anything else
The last talk was a bouncer. Something unexpected, yet fantastic. To be frank, it wasn’t a talk at all! It was the life of Satyabrata Dam, an ex-Indian Navy submariner with multiple roles and whacky ambitions. His perception of life is something breathtaking, and I could say I got most of today’s inspiration just by watching his slideshow: a series of jaw-dropping photos of mountains, caves, skies and beauty of mother nature. As he put it, “Mountains have all the answers, no matter what your question is”. The Himalayas has just taken the highest priority in my to-do list, after Amsterdam and places where celestial marvels happen by the minute.
Kiruba and his team put up a good show, and not to mention good food and good people. More at http://tedxchennai.com and #TEDxChennai (on Twitter).
Yet another productive TED India experience! (The earlier one was a few gigabytes of streaming video over the Indiatimes Live telecast of TED at Mysore). Looking forward to 10.10.10 – the next TEDx Chennai event.

Peace to all

I found this in Egg Factory, a good brunch place on St. Mark’s Road in Bangalore. The mug had a lovely handle, offering a comfortable grip. It is one of the simplest ergonomic marvels I’ve come across lately, and is available for sale at some of the kitchenware/cutlery stores on Commercial Street.

A long awaited review, I’ve been holding back this long just so that I could literally put this phone through everything and see how well it turns out. For all you impatient readers, the phone is an absolute marvel to sum it all up; go ahead and buy one (even though it’s a late verdict, I still have friends coming up to me and asking for an opinion).

Let me get the basics sorted out first. This review is primarily intended for the average Indian “geek”. Irrespective of whether you keep changing phones often, or intend to buy that long-awaited new model, I’m hoping you’d find this review useful and end up happy when you get one.

The first thing that sets this phone apart from its other contenders is the complete QWERTY keypad. Most phones with the whole keypad are pretty expensive when compared to this one. The keys are rock solid and have a neat tactile feel for small and long fingers (I learnt that it’s pretty good with fat fingers too!). If you feel that you’ve been using the normal keypad for over a gazillion years and fear the change, worry not as you should get used to it in a jiffy.

The body of the phone is robust with a metallic finish and a great paint job. The black one looks like it’s right out of KITT (that’s Knight Rider’s car for those of you who are wondering). I personally feel the phone’s a bit heavy, but considering it packs a lot of punch it’s absolutely worth the weight.

On the usage scene, it comes with Symbian OS Series-60 (3rd edition) software which is a mobile operating system. Unlike the earlier Symbian versions, this one is stable and doesn’t hang much (which means you’d get far less frustrated in waiting for your task to start as compared to, say, a Nokia 6600). I still cannot be too sure about the specific sub-version or model available as they vary in different locations around the world. Nevertheless, a software update should fix things if it still happens to act up.

The battery life is impressive and on an average lasts for about one and a half days (couple of hours of calls, a bunch of texts, half an hour of bluetooth transfers, an hour of music and few camera pictures using the flash).

The most important feature of the phone according to me is the Wi-Fi connectivity. Surfing the net is really fast using Opera Mini (a mobile web browser, can be downloaded for free). The inbuilt browser is good too, but you may find couple of websites messed up through that. GPS is an absolute jaw dropper, and Google Maps totally deserves a platinum. The app is fabulous, and a real life saver. If you often find yourself looking for places, streets or even directions, this one is a must have. Google Maps through Wi-Fi is a stunner, although you’d have to get used to using it through GPRS when you’re on the move (contact your service provider for the GPRS/Data facility). I found the app really helpful and it saved me a lot of money which I would’ve lost through long & conned auto rides in Bangalore!

Applications for the phone are available in abundance too. The basic functions such as Alarm, Notes, Organizer, Calendar and Radio ship with the phone, and more can be downloaded off the web. Gravity is an awesome Twitter application if you’re into micro-blogging, Fring and eBuddy for chatting through various services such as GTalk, Yahoo! and MSN and Google Apps with Gmail, Google Calendar, Picasa, Maps and YouTube for all your Google needs. Push email works great too, but doesn’t work with certain encrypted wireless networks. This could go on and on, but the most important apps for your basic social/travel needs are taken care of by Google!

The camera quality could do better, but a small trick could get you through that. Whenever you’re ready to click a picture, press the ‘T’ key to focus on the subject/object. This makes sure your pictures are always clear. Tweaking few photo settings such as white balance and exposure could even unearth that budding photographer in you!

Overall, it’s an amazing phone. Go ahead and get one! It’s worth the extra money. For more details, you can check out the GSM Arena website for specifications and user submitted reviews. If you have any other questions, drop a mail and I’ll be glad to help.

It has been over 2 months now in Bangalore.. time is moving pretty fast and there’s always an absolute routine to follow which kind of makes life pretty monotonous. This post is going to talk about what I feel about work life in Bangalore, the food and the people, but I’m guessing it’s too early to get a clear opinion on them. But I’m doing this anyway… so here goes! Office life as I would like to call it, irrespective of the field of work ultimately involves a computer and thus ends up in a cubicle or a desk. I was under the the impression that at least design would involve sitting in an open field or by the beach and sketching ideas, concepts, listening to music (and of course working on a laptop multi-tasking among several social networks )… either way it helps me differentiate between what I would like to do and what I need to do!

I started doing things I missed out on in the last 4 years. I started walking a lot, to work mostly… Suddenly feels like that there are more trees, more sun and a lot more to breathe in! I also started running, and this time plan to stick to it. I’ve completed 12 kilometers as of now (ran only twice) but I’m sure I’ll be writing about a higher count soon. On the food front, I’ve checked out Sri Krishna Kafe (personally give it 7/10 due to decent food, but mostly losing out on ambience), Gramin (7/10), Hungry Panda (6/10), Take 5 (6/10), Casa Piccola (7/10)  and MTR (10/10… yes, they have the best food I’ve had so far)… and of course a few more which I will write about later. I’ve met a lot of interesting people here, other interns at work, co-workers, their friends… the count keeps increasing! Good people to work with and hang out… guessing it will shape my social life here soon.

There are two songs I’ve been listening to like crazy offlate, one is Life in Technicolor ii by Coldplay and Friday by Goldspot. Saw them on TV long back, but wasn’t able to get them… and since my project involves listening to a LOT of music, I could call it work too …

More later. Peace to all!

Woohoo!

Apple finally managed to add more punch to its flagship browser. The beta release is out, and is pretty neat! I’m a Safari lover, even more than Firefox (love her too, in Windows…) or Chrome. The interface looks similar to that of Chrome, and I can feel the brushed metal unlike the plastic finish of Chrome. Browsing speeds are snappy (yes, that’s why it IS the fastest browser in the world) and the load time is impressive. Page rendering gets another hi-five! Waiting for all the add-ons like SafariBlock and Inquisitor to roll out updates, and of course, the final release of the browser itself!

Here are MY scores on comparison >>

Get Safari here.