Amsterdam, 1st of September

I am glad that all school and college time passed for me and 1st September does not look like a nightmare anymore. More over, after week of rains and winds, the sun is finally back and the weather is just perfect, so this weekend promises to be interesting. Finishing our morning coffee and leaving to Nijmegen city, which is a bit more that one hour train journey to see few shops my wife is interesting in and just to have some nice time. Closer to the night, when we are back, I hope to go out for some ribs and beers with friends in Amsterdam. We are also taking our camera with us today, so I bet I will be uploading some nice pics afterwards, but Anyway, while camera uploads coming later, Instagram is still with us, so stay connected :-)

What I really like in Amsterdam, is that there are a lot of nice views to take pictures of. Colors are very intense here, and scenes are just amazing.

Wife blog

Finally my wife decided to drop LJ and got herself a WP blog here. As it always happens she will be spending time getting used to it and I bet there will be few changes in design, plugins and structure here and there, but as the more time passes, the more stable and shaped it will be. We’ve moved all here LJ entries and comments to the blog in order not to loose those nice memories and I really hope that new content will be coming shortly.

Please feel free to add it to your favorite RSS reader or just check it directly from time to time ;-)

 

Few more site enchansements

Few more things changed on my blog:

  • removed old and obsolete plugins, replacing them with something newer and better where possible
  • added Social Login plugin to allow users to leave comments with their credentials from Facebook, Google and so on
  • improved comments
  • added buttons to share posts in different networks (again social stuff)
  • changed contact form
  • added light interface for mobile users
  • fixed theme to support menus
  • removed WP Flickr Gallery and replaced photos link to point directly to Flickr
  • some other minor rearrangements

If you see something weird or feel like something is missing – let me know.

Amsterdam, Raining

After a week of shiny weather it finally rains. After living in Cyprus for a while it is a bit strange to see rainy weather for more than a day. From one side it is nice: cool weather, no sun, lot’s of water around, the sound of rain hitting windows and so on. From the other side it puts the mood a bit down, which is weird. Pitty that the rainy weather hit us on weekend, but I hope it will normalize and on the next weekend we will go out somewhere with our camera to take pictures of nice places in Amsterdam and surroundings.

SwiftKey 3 Keyboard

I rarely (read “never”) dedicate single post for single small thing, but this time I feel like I should do so.

Few weeks ago a friend of mine, in a conversation about Android apps, especially most essential ones like launchers, keyboards and so on, told me he is using SwiftKey 3 Keyboard and that it is really good, though you need to pay something like 3 euro for it. That time I replied that I am kinda satisfied with default keyboard in Jelly Beans and don’t see any point of changing it.

Few days ago I saw a port of Droider.ru about the same piece of software and when to read the complete review. It turned out to be so good that I went out to Google Play and downloaded the one-month-free-trial version. After install it asked me few questions on my way of typing, languages I use as well offered to give it access to my SMS/Gmail/Facebook to learn my way of communicating. Access was granted and in few minutes I was informed that things are fine now and ready to be used.

First thing I noticed is a design. Much better looking keyboard where I could easily touch any key as well as do long-tap for secondary symbols – nice. One day of normal phone use with mostly Foursquare, Instagram and Evernote where I was posting things and writing comments show me all the advantages. Not only SwiftKey 3 keyboard did well with predicting the word I am trying to type, but after pressing space (finishing the word) it was very good on a prediction for coming one. For instance, writing something like “Morning coffee” is done by typing “Mor”, selecting “Morning” as prediction, typing “c” and selecting “coffee”. Or typing “This is a nice keyboard” is done by typing “Thi”, selecting “This” as prediction, selecting “a”, selecting “is”, typing “ni” and selecting “nice”, typing “keyb” and selecting “keyboard”.

I found the layout of keys, the prediction of the text and all other features very useful and paid the small amount for such a useful thing. I don’t normally recommend things unless I really feel like I should (which is a rare case), but this time I do recommend everyone who didn’t try this nice software to go and check the trial version.

One more thing to note is that SwiftKey 3 Keyboard supports multiple languages with the same nice text prediction (at least English and Russian are fine).