Today I photographed the Scottish Snowcross Championships at Cairngorm Mountain. This fast and dramatic sport gained mainstream popularity during the 2010 Winter Olympics. It features races with up to 4 skiers or snowboarders on a slalom course with jumps. Today’s championships were organised by the Aberdeen Snow Sports Club and sponsored by car manufacturer Saab who have a traditional relationship with snowsports events in the UK and Europe.

Having been passed back and forth between Vodafone and Carphone Warehouse for two days, both companies have now finally admitted that my Vodafone contract wasn’t set-up correctly and that’s why I still don’t have service on my HTC Desire. But I’m assured that it will go live by 4pm on Monday, and I’m inclined to believe them this time.

However I can already use the phone on WiFi and I absolutely love it. It was a bold leap to jump from the iPhone because it’s such a nice phone, and there was a very real chance that the Desire would be a disappointment. But it isn’t. Not even a little bit. Right now I can’t think of a single thing that I don’t like about it. Sure I can see that the Android operating system isn’t quite as ‘refined’ as the iPhone, and it certainly won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but at heart I’m a tinkerer and I like to have total control over my gadgets and the freedom to hack away and change them as I see fit. Android gives me that freedom.

For me, the Desire is better than the iPhone in every way.

Before I got the Desire I started writing a simple Android app that I tested on an emulator. This afternoon I finally got time to plug the Desire in to my laptop and it took all of 10 minutes to get it up and running for development. Getting the test app to run on the Desire was then a 2-second job.

And here it is. It ain’t much, but it’s a start. It’s a Facebook app by the way. There isn’t a really good Facebook app for Android so I’ll do what every good tinkerer does: I’ll make my own.

I’ve now had a proper play with Opera Mini on the iPhone and I don’t think it’s as good as anyone was expecting. Some of the problems are faults with Opera itself, other problems are presumably due to limitations of the iPhone. Overall it’s unlikely to pull people away from Safari.

Firstly, a correction. I said earlier that you can’t double-tap to zoom out after you’ve zoomed in. Actually you can do this, but it only works some of the time. In a way, the randomness is worse than if double-tapping didn’t work at all, because you’ll try it and sometimes it will work and sometimes it won’t, which is frustrating and makes Opera seem buggy and inconsistent.

Here are the major hurdles I’ve hit so far…

Zooming in is too limited. For example, I like the Very Demotivational blog which I usually read on my phone when I’m at a loose end for a few minutes. You need to be able to zoom in to read the captions, but with Opera this is as far as you can zoom:

Now that doesn’t look too bad in a screenshot, viewed on a computer screen, but when you’re looking at it on a 3.5-inch phone screen it’s difficult to read the smaller caption. For comparison, I usually keep up to date with Very Demotivational in an RSS reader, which can zoom in just fine:

Tabbed browsing is a big disappointment. I like the way that Opera shows thumbnails along the bottom of the screen, which you can show or hide with one click. But rather than showing them in a row that you can drag left and right, it shows them overlapped so you only see the edge of each thumbnail.

You can see in that screenshot that I had four pages loaded in tabs.  Earlier on though, also with four pages loaded, Opera decided to clear all pages to save memory:

Sometimes, in Safari, I like to set three or four pages loading in separate tabs, so that by the time I start the last one loading, the first one will have finished and I can start reading it. Try doing that in Opera though and it throws a fit, with all pages grinding to a halt. Push it too far and the whole app goes wobbly, resulting in you losing access to the control bar, and you need to quit the app. Even though you can see the bottom of the controls, you can’t do anything with them:

Other niggles:

• There’s no search history in the Google bar.
• No persistence between sessions. You close Opera, open it again, and all of your web pages have closed. Would be much better to keep them open like Safari does.
• No javascript. This is an Apple-imposed limitation, so not Opera’s fault, but still it does affect the usefulness of the browser so it must be mentioned. In theory, Opera gets around Apple’s rule by running the javascript on Opera’s own server and then streaming the result to the phone. In reality, the one bit of javascript that I tried to use — the "many more" link at the bottom of Slashdot’s front page — didn’t work.

It’s also worth noting the potential problem with Opera’s use of proxy servers. When you access a web page in Opera, the browser actually sends a request to an Opera server, which loads the page, converts it to a proprietary format, and sends it to the browser.

While testing Opera today there were times when pages took forever to load, even though I could switch to Safari and load them quickly. This, I’m guessing, is because lots of people have jumped on Opera today and the proxy servers are being hammered.

So imagine when there’s a major news story like 9/11 and everyone’s trying to get up-to-date info from online news sources. Opera’s servers won’t be able to cope

That, on its own, is a reason not to use Opera. It’s unrealistic for Opera to expect people to use their browser because ‘it works quite well most of the time’, knowing that they’ll have to switch back to a traditional browser when they really need it to work.

Sorry, but a missed opportunity here, Opera.

Today I was over at Crathie Kirk, the church where members of the royal family go when they’re in residence at Balmoral Castle. The agency Barcroft Media had booked the job because it was thought that Prince Charles’  wife Camilla Parker Bowles would make her first public appearance since breaking her leg. We were looking for a shot of her hobbling around on crutches.

Unfortunately she didn’t turn up. A disappointment for me, but an even bigger disappointment for the other agency togs who had travelled up especially from Glasgow and Edinburgh! What a waste of a day. We all had to settle for photos of Prince Charles who turned up on his own.

We thought it would still be worth putting the photos out to the papers in case they wanted to do a story about Camilla being stuck at Balmoral while Charles went out to church. So I got some scene-setting photos of the church and the crowd of onlookers:

This is the private side entrance that members of the royal family use:

Hope you like it. I upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress the other day so I wanted to install a new theme with all the modern features like widgets and a Twitter feed. I’ve also made the page wider so I can post larger images. I’ll probably change the masthead when I think of something better.

I’m going to start using Twitter more, especially when I’m out at jobs, and especially when they’re interesting jobs like police incidents and other breaking news stories. I figure, if I’m going to be a part of this whole "nu meeja" thing then I’d might as well do it properly. So either check the web site regularly to see the tweet feed on the right, or just follow my Twitter feed.