Free and open source is how I like my applications. The latest Mac OS X only application PandoraBoy brings the joys of the popular streaming music site to your desktop. Its still a work in progress but is pretty slick and for all you lovers of desktop applications, this is definitely manna from heaven !

This shouldn’t be news to anyone but when Gartner says in a report that the Windows Ecosystem is collapsing, I’m sure a lot of us would be willing to give them a thought. Granted, companies like Gartner thrive on tall claims to drive up their business but even I wouldn’t agree more with them on this one.
While I certainly do not think that Windows is “collapsing” but a gradual decline in the number of windows users and developers cannot be ignored. From the world’s most used and loved operating system, …

The big daddy of Mac OS X IM clients, Adium, is adding facebook chat support to its already humongous list of protocol support. This was mentioned over at the Adium blog yesterday. No word on when the next release is going to be out, but till then, keep your eyes on the blog. Another reason for all you teeny bopper facebook fans to switch :-)

 
If you had any doubts about the potential of the iPhone as a gaming platform, you should put them to rest now. Raging Thunder is a new 3D game which uses the accelerometer to steer a car and uses openGL for the graphics. The graphics, btw, are pretty sleek and even though the games’s not perfect yet, we’re not complaining. Now, if only the car would stop steering so dramatically with the slightest movement of the iPhone, I would probably be able to complete some more laps. Nonetheless, I should …

Our journey to Leh was finally coming to an end and none of us were in the mood to go back to civilisation. I wish we could have stayed there for a couple of more months, if not days. We had to get petrol filled in the bikes and so there was no point getting up early and then wait for the gas station to open. We slept well, got up, got ready, tied up our bikes and went to get fuel filled. Pandey and Akhilesh were late as usual …

I’m back from my short trip to Bangkok, Thailand. We stayed at the Abloom serviced apartments and had a wonderful stay. I’ll be posting some tidbits from my trip over the next couple of days.  Hang on.

A trip to the highest motorable road in the world. This is what we had been riding the last 9 days for. Granted Pangong Tso was spectacular and offered a much better view, but you can’t take the brownie points away from a ride like todays.
Apjoo had taken permits for the Nubra valley for all of us and most of the group was actually planning to spend the night at hunder or diksit after crossing over Khardung La. I wasn’t too interested and wanted a rest day for myself. It had been …

Another excellent post by Sharninder on Ubuntu and why it isn’t ready for the masses yet.
“To put things into perspective, I am a fairly advanced Linux user, having started using Linux around 10 years back. I started with RedHat, moved on to Slackware, Redhat again, Fedora, Debian (stabl and sid) and finally Ubuntu. Since I don’t live on Mars, I still have had to use Windows occasionally. I started with Windows 3.0, moved to 3.1, NT, Windows 95, 98 (or whatever they called it), ME, 2000 and XP and probably …

Trolltech has announced the immediate availability of QT 4.4, the cross platform GUI toolkit available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and now Windows CE and Windows Mobile also. The exciting new features include Webkit based HTML rendering engine, the new Phonon multimedia framework and of course the ability to run on windows CE and Windows mobile. arstechnica has an in-depth article on the new release.

Sharninder has an interesting post going by the title of “iPhone SDK and the aftermath”. Sharninder analyses the release of the SDK and the developer communities response to it.
“Apple has decreed that all iPhone applications will be sold via the iTunes store and that the developers will not be able to host their applications themselves. Further, to post applications to the iTunes store, the developers have the pay a one time charge of $99 and if they do manage to sell any apps, they will have to give 30% of their …