New celly

So the other day I decided to get myself an upgrade from my old Moto Milestone. I moved on up to the HTC Desire HD.

While there are other phones on the market in canada that are also very good, or even better (ergo, Moto Atrix), I'm not big on locked bootloaders. I am however, big on HTC Sense. I've only read all the great things about it.

Using my phone for only a few days, Sense is great. But I'm looking at the community seeing much room for improvement, since my carrier is historically bad for updates and there's a mostly stock 2.3.3 update floating around the community... So within a week, I switch my phone Eng S-Off and went ahead with the flashing, I couldn't be happier. It's amazing the amount of battery life improvements that google made, software side, between 2.2 and 2.3 simply amazing.

I chose a very stock rom to maintain HTC Sense and all the features in sense. I especially love Locations, where you can browse maps, offline. Which is amazing.

With this new knowlege, of flashing on HTC, I'm starting to take an interest in Android as a platform. I'm probably going to try to pick up some Java coding manuals, and get started on some apps. What I was hoping to ask, if I could, is if anyone wants to see an app that does not yet exist. The simpler the better. Has to be for Android. I'm looking for start-up projects to get me started learning the coding so that I can learn how, while producing something useful.

When posting please include your device, so I know what platforms I should expect to make the app work on.

I'll try to post again soon if I get some good ideas.

Internet Explorer Woes

As time rolls on, I sometimes get to wondering why people still use IE. It's simple enough I guess: buy a computer, use the internet. This happens to be Internet Explorer, and that's fine for most people.

Anyone I know, who seems to think they know anything about computers at all, is using Firefox. A good choice. I use Chrome as my primary browser of choice, and fall back on FF for anything that Chrome seems to choke on (not much). if that doesn't work, I'll fall back to IE8, just to see if it will work, and if that doesn't fix the problem the website is having, I usually chalk it up to webpage design and move on.

HOWEVER, IE has so many quirks and quarks.

Working in IT, it's plainly obvious that IE relies on jscript.dll for the javascript function calls. It's also plainly obvious that the Java runtime included with Windows/IE is terrible, at best. It's almost always replaced with Sun Microsystem's JRE. It's also plainly obvious that without Javascript, almost all flash will not function, since the calls made to make the Flash work, is largely JScript fueled.

There lies your three most problematic components of IE. Now, I'm sure FF isn't terribly better, but seems so, because not as many inexperienced users (who are getting viruses and messing up settings) are using it.

So, if JScript works, and Java works and Flash works, you usually have a good-enough browser for anyone.

Here's the problem. it seems, that 64-bit dll's and 32-bit applications don't mix well.
In Microsoft's "infinite wisdom", Internet Explorer 8, 32-bit and 64-bit, both use the same registry keys for normal operation, which streamlines settings. If IE8 32-bit gets setup for a proxy, then the 64-bit version will also use that same proxy.

The problem lies in the fact that once the 64-bit jscript.dll file takes over the registry key, you're basically FUBAR for getting javascript to run in 32-bit IE. While Javascript will run in the 64-bit IE, nothing else really works well, or at all.

Sure, there's a 64-bit workaround for Flash, and a 64-bit JRE from Sun, but installation is painful at best and nothing, besides those three things would ever work with the browser, probably for many years (possibly ever).

This has all become painfully obvious to me since I had a customer at work who has a copy of Windows 7, Home Premium, x64, with both 32 and 64 bit Internet Explorers, installed.

Personally, I havn't found a good solution for the customer. I was excited to give it a good try today when I saw the chat session (at the time, upwards of 30 hours connected), drop into the queue. I'll also be looking for them tomorrow and the next day, hoping to pick up their chat. (I may even give them a call back to try to resolve it).

I suspect reassigning the jscript.dll to the 32-bit version would fix the issues they're having... I would just need to make sure they won't accidentally drop into the 64 bit version.

Two questions remain for that: first, where the heck is the jscript.dll reference in the registry for IE? second, would the system even have the 32-bit jscript.dll installed?

I'm not sure of either, but I'm excited to try.