While I have not been as active as I’d wish on Pandoralive in the past few months, it’s very clear we have had another blissful year for the Pandora. Who could have imagined one year ago that we would be running some of the stuff we are now using ? Here’s a quick review of the top releases in 2015.
Nobody really talks about the Pandora as a pretty good Manga reader, so I thought I’d give you some perspective on why the Pandora is well adapted to this kind of usage. Well, size-wise, it’s always great to have a whole bunch of stuff to read in the palm of your hands. But that’s not the only reason why the Pandora is good at it.
Pale Moon is a Belgian Beer. But it’s also a fork of Mozilla’s Firefox, aiming at providing a better user experience, refusing to move to the Australis UI interface change that Firefox recently went through (the one that sucked bad). On top of that, it’s surprisingly lightweight (interestingly, it was not a design goal of the project, more of a “collateral damage” if I may say) and what you need to know is that it runs great on the Pandora.
It has been a while since I last updated the Recommended Software Page for the Pandora. If you are not aware what it’s all about, well it’s a list of software that I consider to be of high quality for the platform. A sort of curated list, so that you can refer to it as a newcomer or in case you have been away for a while and want to check if you did not miss anything important.
Compo4All, better known as C4A in the Pandora community, started a little more than a year ago when Skeezix released it to the public. It was first used in combination with MAME, to extract high scores from a couple of selected games, and share them on online leaderboards automatically. Since then, the number of supported games has grown dramatically, and not just MAME games.
Slack is yet another tool to make it easier for people to collaborate remotely, without using Email. Hey, there are literally tons of startups out there that aim at replacing Email, and Slack is the latest one I have tried. The good thing about Slack is that it runs on all devices, with an app (for example for your smartphones) or in your browser. On top of that, it’s designed to be used even in a small window, making it a joy to use it on Pandora as well.
I’m pretty sure the Open Pandora crowd has heard about what DNS are. Domain Name Servers. When you put an address like www.pandoralive.info in your browser bar, your browser will connect to the DNS servers to resolve the name and find the IP address attached to it. Now, do you know what DNS servers you are currently using on your machines, and your Pandora ? Mmm. Do you ?
Even if you have a 1Ghz model you probably know that the usual desktop Gmail interface is fully usable on the Pandora, while a little bit slow at times. On Rebirth or CC models it tends to be even more sluggish. But there’s better ways to enjoy a nearly full Gmail experience on your Pandora with other versions you may not be aware of…
MPS is a new tool I have discovered a couple of weeks ago, that one can use to stream (and download) Music from online sources (apparently coming from Pleer.com) similar to what you can do with Grooveshark already. The difference is that MPS is a command line tool, and therefore you don’t need to load a heavy browser in memory to actually start playing music with your Pandora. And just for that, it’s a great solution. Plus, it’s extremely simple to use, even if you hate the command line. But it can also do a whole lot more.
PtitSeb has been hard at work on a few exciting ports and he is releasing today XBMC for Pandora in a new fresh build. I was lamenting over the lack of proper video player front end a few weeks back, and now that XMBC is here my life is almost complete.