| The Blackberry Playbook is still relevant for a small segment of tablet owners. It was the only tablet Blackberry ever released and even though its getting long in the tooth, people still swear by it. One of the most common tasks any longtime user will have done is sideloading their own apps. When you use 3rd party tools like DDPB or the Chrome plugin some apps don’t work and you get errors. The most common ones is -9 and -12, but does that even mean? Blackberry ceased to support the Playbook with firmware updates and does not maintain their app store anymore. This puts the tablet owners in a position of having to convert the the files themselves and manually load them on their device. The process is easy with the online tools we downloaded, that allow anyone to take an APK file and convert to a Blackberry friendly BAR file. The most common error code users see when installing apps is Error code -12. This means that the app was designed for a higher version of Android and will not work on the Playbook. The Playbook only has Android 2.3 emulator, so anything that is not backwards compatible will fail to install. Error code -9 means that specific libraries are not available and are required. This can be due to the app needing an external Data file (OBB) and the emulator does not install them in the right place. In other occasions it may require Google Services. If you are new to converting apps or sideloading in your own apps not only for the Playbook, but ANY Blackberry 10 enabled device, see what all of the fuss is about. Understanding the -9 and -12 Playbook Errors is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Friday, October 31, 2014
Understanding the -9 and -12 Playbook Errors
Yahoo Launches DIY Digital Magazine
| Yahoo has been totally revising the way they show digital content on some of their biggest properties. They have adopted a unified magazine layout to Travel, Movies, Health and Food which makes it seem fresh and modern. Yahoo DIY is the latest magazine to launch and will appeal to enthusiasts looking for ideas for their next project. Yahoo DIY will initially focus on news items, slideshows, listicles, and original videos. They will evaluate how each one of these segments performs and make editorial changes as needed. This is uncharted terrority for Yahoo, so they brought in Katie Brown who used to do a television show on Create TV. The DIY videos will probably require the most work. The company is currently planning three series: "Daily Made" shows off solutions for common household problems, "Home Made" provides crafters with how-to tips, and "Katie Made" offers a sneak peek inside the Editor-in-Chief's own quirky DIY projects. It remains to be seen if Yahoo can make this concept work, as DIY enthusiasts are fairly loyal to their forum communities and platforms. Likely, the search engine giant is looking for novel concepts to see what sticks and eventually kill off the low performers. Yahoo Launches DIY Digital Magazine is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Wacom to release Digital Comic Anthology
| Wacom is employed by serious art creators in the comic and gaming industry, everyday thousands of artists are penciling, inking, coloring, lettering or simply cleaning up traditionally illustrated scanned artwork. In order to broaden their customer base and really show what their technology can do for digital comics, Wacom is partnering with a ton of great artists to release a 32 page digital anthology. Pressure/Sensitivity is the name of the new comic and it will feature original, creator-owned short stories by Meredith Gran (Octopus Pie, Marceline and the Scream Queens), Ming Doyle (The Kitchen, Mara), Giannis Milonogiannis (Old City Blues, Prophet, All-New Ultimates) and one more still-to-be announced. All of the interior comics goodness comes wrapped in a cover by artist Ulises Farinas (Gamma, Judge Dredd: Mega City Two) and colorist Ryan Hill (Terrible Lizard, Stumptown). The comic anthology will be available in early 2015 and Wacom is going to be teasing its community with behind the scenes looks at the creation process. Wacom to release Digital Comic Anthology is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Halloween reads
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*Some titles may have limited regional or platform availability. If you would like more suggestions, the Collection Development Team is available to help create recommended lists. Email collectionteam@overdrive.com for more information today! Michelle Ross is a Collection Development Analyst with OverDrive.  |
Halloween!
| There’s a lot of spooky Pi shenanigans going on this Halloween. Here at Pi Towers, our very own Rachel Rayns is trialling the first run of the Raspberry Pi Digital Creatives Bronze award we plan to be running formally from 2015. (More of that in a later post.) Amy and Dan Mather are acting as our guinea pigs for this trial; and here are the (orange, approximately spherical) fruits of their first day’s labour. I’ll be prodding the Mather kids for a write-up on how to rotoscope your own face onto a pumpkin soon. A little further from home, at one of my favourite places in the UK, the team at the Lost Gardens of Heligan have made a slightly-too-successful Halloween project. People walking past this installation trigger a motion sensor, which makes a speaker up in the tree hoot in a Halloween fashion. “Slightly-too-successful” in this instance means that at twilight, visitors walking past triggered the audio: and real, female tawny owls responded to it, and were attracted to the tree. Which is great for owl-spotters, but a bit unfair on the owls. So the Heligan team swapped out the audio for the blood-curdling howls of a wolf (not native to Cornwall), and all was well again. You can read more about the project over at our friend Phil Atkin’s blog. Further afield, Cabe Atwell in the USA has a haunted porch. (Careful watching this one if you have small children in the room – it’s a bit unsettling.) There’s a lot of how-to detail in Cabe’s video, and a full write-up over at element14. Back in the UK, Halloween’s being used as a teaching tool by TeCoEd. Here’s a how-to video, and you’ll find everything you need to make one yourself next year at TeCoEd’s website. You’ll find plenty more projects from previous years under the Halloween tag. Have you made something spooky with a Pi this year? Let us know in the comments! |
Nintendo Brings Classic Secret of Mana Game to Android
| Japan first enjoyed Secret of Mana back in 1993, at a time when this real-time, top-down view battle system was truly unique and innovative. Add to that the ring command menu system that the game introduced: allowing players to user items, change weapons and perform all of their requisite actions without the need to switch screens. With thanks to the developers at Square Enix, Android games can experience some of the same joy we felt at our Nintendo consoles all those years ago. Don’t be fooled, this title is ported but not really upgraded (aside from accommodating 360-degree movement and a touch-screen interface, unless you decide to employ peripheral controllers). The graphics are still delightfully old-school, which is a style that is very hip and popular these days. The story behind the game focuses on the mystical power of Mana, encouraging you to befriend the eight elementals who wield all of nature’s forces. Nostalgia doesn’t come cheap, so the $9 price-tag won’t scare many would-be Secret of Mana gamers who remember console gaming from way back when. Nintendo Brings Classic Secret of Mana Game to Android is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Dip in Customer Satisfaction Causes Apple To Lose Tablet Market Share
| A report released by J.D Power and IDC, indicates that Apple is starting to lose tablet market share again (despite remaining at the top of the list of those device manufacturers). The survey also showed that Apple has slipped into the number two slot for customer satisfaction, right behind Amazon (and their line of inexpensive Fire tablets). Of course, if the survey is to be believed, there is no satisfying these consumers. On one hand they state that Apple isn’t innovating fast enough, but then they say that even with upgraded iPads launched this fall, users are upgrading more slowly. It is my opinion that Apple doesn’t really care whether people are upgrading their old iPads… not really, anyway. Sure they want users to have iPads (and other iOS devices), and sure they want those users to keep them reasonably current (so they can run the latest operating system version), but hardware isn’t where they make there money. It isn’t where any of these manufacturers make their money. Profit is realized within the app ecosystem –with Apple taking a sizeable portion of the monies charged for apps and their now-famed in-app purchases. Add to this the fact that market share does not equate to profit share. It’s easy to take a huge number of inexpensive tablets and drop them in the laps of consumers who wouldn’t be Apple customers anyway. That isn’t a loss for Apple. With the new iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3 shipping and the 2014 holiday season just getting started, the results from the next quarter could tell us a little more than these numbers do –which tablets are being wrapped and put under our trees? Which app store sees the most traffic in the early part of the new year?
Dip in Customer Satisfaction Causes Apple To Lose Tablet Market Share is a post from: Good e-Reader |
