Apple iPhone 5 / 4S launching on 4th October 2011. It is supposed to have a bigger screen, a 8 megapixel camera, GSM + CDMA chipset in one, better faster gprs 21 Mbps. They are planning to launch it by 15th of October 2011. Fingers Crossed

The new retina display on the Apple iPhone 4

Retina display is also called Virtual retina display VRD. t is an “IPS” technology and is “better than OLED technology for smaller products like the iPhone.

A VRD unit consists of 4 modules; drive electronics to break down an incoming source image into an information stream, a light source made up of laser(s) or LED(s), a scanner bank made up of horizontal and vertical scanners, and a lens to expand the image that projects through the scanners. As in a television, the scanners rapidly oscillate left-to-right or down-to-up, selectively permitting colors through in precise configurations that produce a high-resolution 2mm x 2mm field of pixels. Then a lens acting as an expander boosts the size of the image to something like 18mm x 18mm, allowing for a larger and more natural image. The pixel field is then projected onto the eye, where the eye's lens focuses the image onto the retina. Aside from tapping into the optic nerve itself, there may be no more effective way to display an image.

The virtual retinal display is highly efficient with respect to power consumption, requiring far less power than the postage-stamp LCD screens used commonly in today's mobile devices. A VRD display uses about a microwatt of power. Since VRD displays project images directly onto the retina, they provide a sharp, clear image regardless of external lighting conditions. VRD displays require a fraction of the hardware of conventional display devices, allowing for lighter and more elegant mobile devices, in high demand for today's electronics market. VRD shows strong potential to replace LCD screens in cell phones, handheld computers, handheld gaming systems, and eventually even larger computers such as laptops.

VRD technology is being exclusively commercialized by the Seattle-based tech company MicroVision, Inc. Two products available so far include Nomad(tm), a head-mounted VRD system that displays a monochromatic overlay of relevant information to a task at hand, and Flic(tm), a laser bar code scanner. Nomad uses Windows CE and the 802.11b wireless protocol. As the components of VRD displays decrease in cost and the manufacturing processes used to create them improve, distribution of the product will surely expand to a very large market.

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-virtual-retinal-display.htm

GIS Dev Updates in India

GIS in India is proliferating at jet speed !! And not only GIS, but more products are taking birth with solutions built around it. Mostly in Local Search , classifieds, LBS and mapping solutions.

Recently rediff maps came into picture. It was a huge disappointment after looking at this beta product. It looks like they were in real hurry to push this product live without even thinking to correct their basics right. Its a crap, and we know it.

Giants in Indian mapping like google maps, yahoo maps, mapmyindia are steadily progressing at a slower pace. As such, no new innovations are visible, but they are not at all quiet. They are adding up the data on daily basis. Mostly, yahoo maps are pushing more detailed tiles for 2nd, 3rd tier cities of India. Google is more into launching their routing solutions for India. Looking at directions in India on google maps will be fun. Hopefully, the routing features will be similar as they provide on US maps.

Vidteq has come up with a brilliant product for Bangalore Junta. Showing videos of roads and traffic while searching a route is the best feature a user can demand for. Good luck ! Vidteq team :)

Today, google enabled Directions/Routing feature in India. This is not available through maps.google.com, rather its available on google.com/mapmaker

Chat without installing messenger using javascript based messenger

Inline chats are in, but what if u need more functionalities.

Have a look at http://izuz.net/
It has javascript based messengers for Google talk, Windows LIVE messenger, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AOL Messenger

You can be any where in the world, be it africa, china, russia, mongolia... chat easily.

http://izuz.net/

Google chrome... the brand new browser with brand new features

Google comes up with a new browser, Google chrome, to challege the Internet explorer which is the banner of Microsoft as far as the browsers are concerned.  It has been built using the Mozilla as the backbone, integrating Apple safari and apple webkit. Built on a multiprocess environment. having a seperate thread, seperate memory for each tab, which gets realeased when the tab is closed.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

Its fast. Built very intelligently, for instance the full screen mode is like default and u dont need the top bar always with the browser.

Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.

Crash control can control a tab crash, the browser need not be closed. 

People behind firewall can rejoice, incognito mode allows u to open sites that are behind firewall and for which there will be no trace.

so enjoy.

There are other basic features that are taken from IE and Firefox. 

http://www.google.com/chrome

Forest GIS free GIS software

Forestry GIS (fGIS™) is a compact but robust shapefile editing program, digitizer and GIS data query tool for Windows®. fGIS was designed for natural resource managers who are not GIS specialists. It's easy-to-use and simple to install. Many power users also like fGIS because they can run it on laptops or home computers without copyright issues, it produces data compatible with commercial GIS programs, and fGIS is free.

http://www.forestpal.com/fgis.html

You'll find that fGIS is relatively simple to use:

• Open and view geo-referenced raster images including digital orthophotos and topographic maps in MrSID®, ECW, BIL, ADF, JPG, TIFF, GeoTIFF, BMP, IMG, JPEG2000, PNG and SDTS file formats.

• Open and view vector data in ESRI® shapefile (SHP) and e00 files, AutoCAD DXF™, MapInfo® MIF, Microstation® DGN, DLG-O, TIGER2000/line, GML/XML, SDTS and TatukGIS SQL (ttkls) file formats. An advanced R-Tree index system allows easy viewing of large (100+ MB) data files.

• Create and edit point, line and area shapefile objects and their associated data attribute tables. fGIS also edits and writes MIF, DXF, DLG & GML vector layers.

• Buffer point, line or area objects at any designated radius or width.

• Generate Cruise Points. Select an area object and fill it with either a random or ordered grid.

• Design maps with pre-defined layer symbology (PDF preview 28KB), or use advanced layer properties to define your own.

• Copy and paste shapefile objects from one layer to another.

• Designate the direction and distance of the next leg of a line or polygon with the COGO-like Traverse Tool. Directions can be entered in decimal degrees or degrees-minutes-seconds (handy for plotting deeds or laying out a field data collection route).

• Split a polygon or line (including GPS tracks) into separate units by drawing a line with the Split Shapes Tool.

• Clip Shapefiles to the boundaries of a polygon layer.

• Merge multiple shapefiles into a new one.

• Customize map properties including line width and color, area fills, label fonts and positions, image transparency, thematic rendering of data and more.

• Measure areas and distances. fGIS reports distances and areas in English units (feet, miles and acres) and metric units. Area and perimeter measurement fields can be added to data tables and updated automatically.

• Display data at user-specified scales.

• View maps in 3D.

• Map live GPS positions from any connected GPS unit with NMEA output (beta).

• Extract geo-referenced images of selected portions of a screen display.

• Export part of a vector layer and save it as a new file.

• Manage large data sets organized in dBase tables with the "Load Library Layer" utility.

• Join dBase and Access tables to shapefile attribute tables.

• Create point shapefiles from comma delimited text files with x|y coordinates.

• Convert Geographic WGS84 coordinate shapefiles to and from worldwide UTM zones and Wisconsin Transverse Mercator.  (Use the MN DNR Garmin Tool for transferring shapefile waypoint and track data to and from GPS units.)

• Print the map with three flexible output options. The Simple Print command will add a map title, subtitle, footer and the scale to the page. The Send Map to Word command will send an image of the view at a user specified resolution and scale to Microsoft® Word. A third option through the Export Image tool will send the map to a technical illustration/page layout module called Diagram Designer. You can add headers, legends, annotations and non-spatial symbols from template palettes in the Diagram Designer module.

• Save WMF files for use in publishing programs.

• Georeference scanned images with fGIS and other available freeware.

• More specifications and instructions are here.

File format converter

Do you have any Office 2007 file which you desperately want to convert  to office 2003. Heres a tool using which you can convert Microsoft Office 2007 files to 2003 format. The extension changes from .docx to .doc for which you dont need to have office 2007

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/thankyou.aspx?familyId=cf196df0-70e5-4595-8a98-370278f40c57&displayLang=en

Enjoy !