A bit of technology

I would like to give a link to a post on OSNews called Review: Seven Days in Haiku. The name says it all! Enjoy the reading (:

Just downloaded the thing and put it in my Sony Ericsson k530i. Well, it works the same way as Opera Mini does - web page is refactored and compressed on a remote proxy, result is sent to small (200k) J2ME client on your phone. This behaviour saves user's traffic and speeds everything up. And this is what Bolt developers talk about when they market their browser as 20-25% being faster then competition. It is worth mentioning, that Bolt is NOT faster then Opera Mini in any way - they work just the same with slight statistical differencies.

What I did like:

• competiton - it is always good!
  
• video playback support;
  
• a lot of quality/traffic options;
  
• alternative fonts;
  
• rendering quality - well, the sites I tried to visit rendered pretty well.
  

But it also has some cons, which make Bolt quite unusable, at least for me in day-to-day scenario. The biggest Bolt problem is its user interface. I did not find "Forward" shortcut, most of actions are done from context menu, but it is a bit cluttered and GUI looks ugly. Also the browser is quite unstable, just like Opera Mini 1.0 was back in the days - it hangs sometimes, becomes unresponsive in other times and so on. Overall experience is choppy. Actually it looks more like a beta (:

So my opinion is that Bolt is a great toy for geeks, but it is too early for it to being installed on a broad user base. Bitstream, continue the work! You have some problematic areas, but if fixed you will have a great product in your portfolio and many users wil be happy!

At last! They've implemented themes/skins support! Now everyone should make a party (: But on a serious side of the release are addition of HTML5 video tag, performance improvements and other technical improvements. Enjoy!

Just noticed that SourceForge changed their design. Very unusual, very unnatural for SF and since I just noticed it I can not tell if it is good or bad. But at least it looks much better then previous one and has proper menu and navigation. Last one was epic fail, the one before was great. So when they changed last time it was a big dissapointment for me. Hope new design will be great!

Yesterday was a party at FreeDOS camp because this project hit 15 year margin. It is very mature now (: Here's the official announcement and here's an article at OSNews on the matter. Congratulations!