Some more Pandora news, dated 27th January 2010.

Quote from EvilDragon:

We’ve learnt something. Chinese English and English is definately not the same.

Good thing a friend of Fatih does speak Chinese. For the company, he’s now our official represantative. As he could speak with them in their native language, a lot of things cleared up.

When they were talking about “soon”, it didn’t mean what we did understand as “soon”. “Soon” did mean “as soon as we’re finished.”. Regardless, how long that will take. So each time they said us “We’ll soon have pictures”, we assumed they will follow the next few days – which didn’t happen.

Another thing we found out is when they said “We’re finished and will do some testing injections”, they didn’t mean they were finished with ALL our changes, but they finished ONE thing on the to-do-list and did a test injection to see if that was fine. That’s why we got some shipping dates which never happened – and with us wondering why they didn’t tell us. They sent us emails with stuff like “We fixed it all and will do the next samples on Friday”. We then thought, okay, the next samples will ship on Friday. However, as we now do know, it meant they finished another step on those days and made an internal testing injection to find out if everything is okay. It wouldn’t have made sense to ship us those half-finished cases (it would just have cost a lot of money). And that’s the reason why they didn’t tell us that they didn’t ship… they never planned to ship it 😉

It’s really interesting what can happen if business partners do speak completely different languages as native language.

So much for the background “What happened”. Now onto the more interesting stuff: What WILL happen?

One thing we did understand correctly was that their goal is to have the mass-produced cased finished and shipped until the chinese new year!

We now do know that they did finish the last tweaks on the case mould, the silkscreen and the keyboard mould (which still had one mis-aligned letter). And with finished, I do mean REALLY finished. Not just another step, but all steps. This does mean they’ll ship the final samples within the next days. They are VERY positive they are perfect, so as soon as they shipped out everything, they prepare the mass production. So as soon as we get the samples and approve it, mass production will start. As they can produce 1000 cases a day and we need 4000 for the first batch, this can happen within four days. That should work out just before the chinese new year!

I know it does sound a lot like stuff you already heard before – but this time, we were talking with them in their native language, so I assume it will be much more accurate than anything before!

http://www.open-pandora.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=153

Pandora News, dated 25th January 2010.

Quote from EvilDragon:

Nope, we’re not playing Lemmings, but I guess a lot of you wanted to know what happened to those cases.

Well, we too wanted to know – the last status update we had was that they were shipping on January 15th and therefore we assumed the cases should have arrived last week.
Unfortunately, Fatih had business to do in Dubai… and he is the only one the Chinese actually do talk to (except for if they encounter any problems, then they also send a mail to Michael. But they didn’t do that).

So we didn’t know until he returned a few days ago that the cases hadn’t been shipped yet, they were still working and tweaking as they really wanted to make sure this will be the last case they need to send to us before we start the mass production.

We’re still trying to find out the complete story of what happened and why there was another delay. A friend of Fatih (who can speak chinese) will help us here, as communication with them isn’t easy, and there might even have been some misunderstandings, etc.

Whoever does think that that company is a small, cheap company that only tries to rip us off:

Nope, that’s definately not true. Fatih has been working with them since years. Also, they created some other parts for the Pandora which have been finished long ago and didn’t make any problems. It just seems the case was much more complex than they had thought.

Some of their other customers are Sanyo and Toyota and they have been established 1998, so one thing we know: They are reliable… but (as it is the case with many chinese companies): They do need some time to finish it off.

So, rest assured, the cases aren’t screwed, we just don’t know yet when exactly they will arrive. We have been promised they will ship enough mass produced cases before the chinese new year. I leave it to you whether you want to believe it or not – I just will pray it will be true.

So much for the cae situation. I hope you can now understand why we chose that company. Believe us, it’s a pretty annoying feeling having everything setup for mass assembly and then wait in anticipation for the cases.

Oh, I have one more information that will probably make second batchers happy: We already ordered the parts for the second batch to decrease the waiting time.

Finally, some small OS informations:
* We got a new WiFi driver, thanks to Palm 🙂 We’ll need to test it out more, but it should work better than the one we have.
* pmenu is finally working fine in the image, so we have an almost completely working image (for a first release) ready.
* We also did a quick try with the Ubuntu netbook-launcher-efl.
It compiled and worked nicely. Only the icons were missing, but that’s because it uses the Human icons from Ubuntu which we haven’t installed yet. The nice thing about it is that it does support finger scrolling. It might not make it into the first release, but I doubt it will take long until it will be included into an update. I personally prefer XFCE4 and pmenu though 🙂

http://www.open-pandora.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=152

Spot the difference between two similar looking pictures.

Thanks to http://www.nintendomax.com/viewtopic.php?t=11245&f=19 for the news.

http://nds.scenebeta.com/noticia/pejnidi-diaforon

The gameboard consists of a screen of differently-colored balls arranged in a matrix. There are five different colors: red, blue, green, yellow and purple. The player then clicks on any two similarly colored balls to eliminate them from the matrix, earning an appropriate amount of points in the process. The more balls eliminated at once, the higher the points added to the player’s score.

Thanks to http://www.nintendomax.com/viewtopic.php?t=11252&f=19 for the news.

http://nds.scenebeta.com/noticia/ball-buster

Thor ported Bullet Physics to the Wiz.

Release notes:

28/01/10: Bullet physics test on GP2XWIZ, Bullet Physics test: MENU to quit, SELECT to throw a ball, R to reset the scene

http://thor.pdroms.de/

XTask is a task manager for Windows Mobile PDA phone. It does, not only the most wanted job of cleaning system RAM by closing unused tasks, but with many more features. For example, it can correct the overlay problem of the WM6.5.x buttom bar for any programs such as Resco Explorer, also automaticlly set button-X to Close instead of minimizing a window.

Features:

* Rotate screen orientation.
* Automatic fix the buttom tool bar overlay in WM6.5.x.
* Automatic change X-botton to close.
* Automatic terminate ActiveSync.
* manage files with XTask.
* Access the control panel items.
* Place icon, or show freeRAM on the title bar.
* Hold the XTask icon and drag on the screen to perform quick function.
* fully customisable XTask function items, program tools bar for fix under WM6.5.x, icon position on the title bar, etc.
* Create shotcut buttons in start menu for Restart, Toggle Wifi or bluetooth, screen-off, etc.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=606162

camro updated his application SchedHandler, previously known as MailHandler. The program is based upon ImapPusher.

Features:

.) Scheduler for:
Scanning for:
-> network connection scanner (check the connection and if not valid reconnect again)
-> anti power suspend (sending power heartbeat every X-seconds, and so not going to suspend mode)
-> imap idle scanning for new emails
-> wheel time scanning (after X-seconds execute…)
–> + extra option for
—- checking if File Exist
—- checking if File Not Exist
—- checking if Application Running
—- checking if Application Not Running
Timeplans when Scanning events are valid
Execution if Scanning is valid:
-> Polling Emails (Pocket Outlook Mailboxes)
-> Kill Tasks
-> Play Sounds (all windows media supported files)
-> Switch Radio, GPRS, Wlan, Bluetooth via ON/OFF/Toggle
additional:
it supports:
+ multiple email profiles
+ multiple email FOLDERS
+ multiple scheduler profiles
+ multiple time plans
+ checking email via “Imap Idle” and/or via “Polling”
+ imap(143) and imaps(993) ssl
+ Polling in free defined time interval
+ Multiple Time Scheduling for:
+> switching on/off/toogle (RADIO, GPRS WLAN, BLUETOOTH)

Changes:

+ better handling and stop checking socket, if connection is not up.
+ add another methd to hadle the NETWORK connection (if broken, if broken activesync if broken wlan, etc.. + more debug option)
+ add 5 LEVELs reset /close/restart , which will be handled automatically
+ Testing -> is now DevSwitcher
(now all systems are included) BT switcher have to find out which one is the best or how to handle both methods, so i added extra log option , to see, which one is working.
+ add Bluetooth Alternative ON/OFF/Toggle to execute plan.
+ add polling error checking -> now it would 5-times poll, if an error happens on send/receive EMAIL on Pocket outlook

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=586991

Pineapple Apocalypse RPG is a 2D turn based RPG with overly pixelated retro style graphics. You play as a robot and there are apparently mutated pineapples along with other enemies that you can encounter. There is no real plot or NPCs or story progression though just an open world to wander around in well fighting and level grinding.

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Pineapple_Apocalypse_RPG

WiiColEm is a port of the ColEm ColecoVision emulator v2.5.2 developed by Marat Fayzullin.

Quote:

Features:
Support for driving, roller, and super action controllers
Tilt-based (Wiimote) driving support
Cartridge database w/ recommended controller settings and keypad descriptions for most commercial cartridges
Per-cartridge button mappings
On-screen keypad display
High cartridge compatibility (see below)

The following additions/modifications were made to the core emulation code:
“The Heist” now works correctly (memory initialization bug).
Added support for Opcode RAM expansion.
Added support for “Lord of the Dungeon” (original 32k or trimmed 24k).
Mode 2 masking now works correctly (supports Daniel Bienvenu games).
Mode 0 and Mode 3 now work correctly (“Cabbage Patch Kids Picture Show” and “Smurf: Paint ‘n Play Workshop” now work correctly).
Fixed graphic corruption that would occur when switching between games (VRAM and related state were not being reset correctly).
Fixed save/load state bug where the emulator would incorrectly report that the save was invalid (memory was not being cleared correctly).
Fixed issue where noise channel wasn’t starting when it should (Matt Patrol).

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/WiiColEm

Num Fight is a puzzle game where you must compete against the computer or another player to clear the board while scoring maximum points. You do so by strategically collecting green boxes to add to your score, and by forcing your opponent to take red boxes thus reducing their score.

http://appshopper.com/games/num-fight-l