The latest news related to RIM is that the company has lost another big government contract. The Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agency has stated that they are switching all of their devices over to iPhone. This news comes less then a month after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has laid out plans to phase out RIM devices. This is a worrying trend, as Blackberry has always been the top choice by governments. Blackberry devices have the best security on the market, however security alone does not seem to be enough to keep all of the government agencies happy.

Since taking over as CEO, Thorsten Heines has yet to accomplish anything publicly noticeable. RIM continues it’s decline and news like this can only weaken the public perception of the company. After taking the healm, Heines announced that he felt the company needed to focus more on it’s marketing efforts. While that is true, the company should also be focusing on public relations. If the customers perceive the product as inferior and useless, then no amount of marketing is going to make them want to buy it. RIM needs to show the public that their devices are worth using and provide the functionality that customers want.

The good news for RIM is that they are making some positive advances, however it feels more like catching up to the competitors rather then leading the pack. RIM recently released an update to their Playbook Operating System which will allow independent access to applications rather than requiring a blackberry to tether with. The new update will also allow Android applications to run on the Playbook. This is definitely a step in the right direction, and will help increase potential for the Playbook as the Android Market Place currently has a large selection of applications to be downloaded. Until more developers create software for Blackberry’s and Playbook’s; Android compatibility is a great alternative.

Before the end of the year, RIM should be releasing the new QNX based Operating System for new Blackberry devices. The OS release has currently been delayed twice already, meaning that the completed release should be tested and bug free. The new Operating System might be able to attract developer attention and could be the beginning of change needed for RIM. As long as RIM meets the deadline this time around, the release should be a success. However, if they miss the deadline for a third time; it might just be enough to force die hard fans to start switching.

Research In Motion’s next Quarterly Shareholder Meeting will be held on March 29th and already analysts are forecasting that the company sales will be lower then previously planned. Hopefully, no more companies jump on the bandwagon of ditching RIM. The company still creates great products and has the potential to make a come back. Whether or not Thorsten Heines was the best choice for CEO is yet to be seen. Lets hope that it was and that he is able to save the company.

This is by far the best mobile phone I have used to date. It runs off of the google android OS and is full of features. It supports exchange email accounts and also has vpn functionality. I am still learning all the features so I will post more as I learn.

Are you looking for a good photoshop program for free?  There is always GIMP, however today I am talking about Sumo Paint.  Sumo Paint is an amazing web based photoshop style image editor.  It is very easy to use and comes with a nice selection of preloaded brushes, gradients, and patterns.  There are a number of tools and features available for free as well, which make Sumo Paint a very good image editor regardless of price.  You do not require an account to use Sumo Paint however, it is a good idea to register an account since it is free and allows you to save your work to the Sumo Paint servers.  If you have a Sumo Paint account and save your images to Sumo Paint, you can choose to set the image to private, or public.  A new service being offered by Sumo Paint is printed posters, canvases, mugs, etc of user based work.  As the artist, you receive a percentage of the sales from your work.

What is nice about Sumo Paint is that it runs within your web browser.  This means you can run it on any Operating System as long as you have an up to date web browser.

As you can see from the screen shot above, you can make some quality work with Sumo Paint.  For a free, web based tool I am extremely impressed with Sumo Paint and strongly recommend giving it a try.

Rsizr is a great online tool for editing and resizing your images.  The coolest feature is the shrinking of an image.  It uses an algorithm to determine the most significant attributes to an image and then begins shrinking the image by removing parts which are not needed to keep the quality of the image. You can see some examples below.

Before

After

The second image has been shrunken, however the mountains in the picture have remained the same size.  As you can see, rsizr has removed a lot of the clouds size to reduce the size of the image, while keeping it looking nice.  Also, it has kept the text in the top left corner preserved which is a difficulty usually when resizing.  Watch the video below to see how you can instruct rsizr what parts of an image you want to keep and what parts are safe to remove.  With the preserve and remove tool, you can do some great image manipulation to totally remove things from images without the image looking weird.

Here is a quote from rsizrs site on how they explain the service.

rsizr is a Flash application that lets you resize JPG, PNG, and GIF images on your computer. With rsizr, in addition to normal image rescaling and cropping, you can also resize images using a new image resizing algorithm called seam carving (a method of image retargeting) that tries to keep intact areas in your image that are richer in detail.

Mockingbird is a web based tool for creating a website mock up, otherwise known as wireframe diagram.  Wireframes allow you to quickly design the the functionality and layout of a website.  Wireframes do not contain any colour or style elements as they are really just for getting a general layout and is done early on in the planning stages of a website.  Creating wireframes allows designers to figure out what a client wants the site to look like layout wise and then they go into the further design elements.  I created a quick wireframe design using mockingbird which took about 10 minutes to complete.

The toolbar gives you a lot of control with your design layout.  The alignment tool is very useful for getting everything lined up and saves you a lot of time resizing and moving the parts manually.

The widget sidebar contains a lot of design elements for a site wireframe mock up.  Way too many to list, so I am sure you will be able to find whatever you need.  The pages sidebar allows you to create seperate mock up designs for different pages on a site.  Once complete, you can save your wireframe mock up or export it to png or pdf format.  Saving and exporting your mock up will require you to register for an account.  And in case you are wondering, Mockingbird is free to use.

Now go try mockingbird for yourself, and create some awesome websites.  If you create a design and would like to share it, please leave a comment.

If you havn’t heard of Grooveshark before, I apologize for not posting this sooner.  Grooveshark is a free online music player which has an interface similar to napster or limewire however the music doesn’t actually get saved to your computer; instead you stream it. By creating a free account, you can create play lists and set songs as favourites so that you can easily retrieve them.  By allowing you to save all your playlists and favourite songs, it is almost as if you have downloaded the songs since you can listen to them at any time; the only down side is you must be online… but these days, who isn’t online?

There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of songs available on Grooveshark and the amount continues to grow each day.    The best part about Grooveshark is that it is totally free; the catch is that there is an ad on the right side of the page but it is not a big deal.  If you really don’t like the ads, then you can get a premium account which gives you a lot more features.  One big advantage of premium membership is that you can download the Grooveshark Adobe Air program.

A really cool feature with Grooveshark is known as Grooveshark radio and it will automatically place songs in your playlist based on what it will think you like by the other songs in your play list.  The idea is similar to pandora or box.fm if you are familiar with those.

If you’re looking for a program like Visio to create diagrams with, then check out Gliffy.  Gliffy is web based so it runs within your web browser meaning you can use it on any Operating System.  You can use Gliffy to make flowcharts, building floorpplans, network topologies, user interfaces, and more.

Here is a quick network topology that I created using Gliffy.  The shape library contains a good amount of shapes to work with and allows you to do network topologies and server rack diagrams.  This is actually how I found Gliffy, as I was looking for something to make a quick network topology with so that I could present an idea.

You can use Gliffy for free, but are limited to 5 documents.  However, for just $5 a month you can create unlimited documents.

Do you work on multiple computers (work, school, home, etc…)?  If you are like me, then you probably have either a USB thumb drive with a lot of space, or better yet a mini-external hard drive.  Either way, both are only good as long as you have them with you.  This is where an online file storage service comes in handy.  I have tried a couple of different online file storage providers and have found Dropbox to be my favourite.  You can manage all your files through a web interface, however you can also install a client on your computer which creates a Dropbox folder.  Anything you put into the Dropbox folder gets uploaded to the Dropbox server.  Also, if you are at a library or some place and you login to the website and upload a file, your Dropbox folder on your computer will automatically be synchronized and the file will be in your folder when you get home.

There is no exception to the file types that you can store so basically you could backup your entire computer if you paid for enough space.  Dropbox can be used for a variety of applications, including: backup, transfer files between computers not on the same LAN, share specific files with friends and colleagues, etc…  From the website, you can view your recent events and see what has been updated recently.

You can get a free account, but the capacity is only 2GB.  The rates for the paid plans is pretty good compared to other online file storage providers.  The 2GB plan is just the right amount of space to try out the service and get a good feel for it.  Then once you find yourself using it all the time, you can upgrade your free account to a paid account with more space.

Click here to try out Dropbox with a free 2GB account.

The search on Twitter makes it very easy to find photos.  Because Twitter profiles are rarely set to private and since most people use the same common image hosting sites, many images that people tweet can quickly be found.  Twitpicwall.com takes and automatically grabs all the photos in real time and posts them to the site.  Within minutes, you will have a lot of photos to sort through.  New images come in every second, however you can pause at any time by pressing ‘s’.

So, the moral of the story is; If you use Twitter and don’t want random people to see your photos, set your account to private.

If you want your computer to continue performing well over time, you will need to maintain it like any other piece of equipment. A lot of these tasks can be set to run automatically, which if set properly; will keep your computer running fast without interfering with you. If you leave your computer running all the time, then a good time for these maintenance tasks would be while you are sleeping. Otherwise, you can use a power management program called Edison by Verdiem to turn on your computer while you are sleeping so that your maintenance tasks can be run.

Edison can then turn off your computer for you once the updates are completed. Depending on the size of your hard drive, the maintenance window will vary, so check the completion logs if you want accurate times for the maintenance window. Otherwise, you can ball park 3-4 hours should be enough time for a 1TB drive or smaller (depends on how much of drive is in use).

Here are some tools which you should run routinely.

• CCleaner
• AusLogics Disk Defrag
• AusLogics Register Cleaner
• AusLogics Duplicate File Finder