I was recently recommended Wikitude by a friend, so I downloaded it off the Android market place, and fired it up. It's a little slow to start, but it's something really special once it does.

It uses a combination of the inbuilt compass and GPS receiver to locate your position and facing, then it searches its content database for points of interest around you.

It's pretty cool seeing the technology convergence on a Google map type interface, but once you fire up the 'camera view' then it really comes alive. It overlays the same points of interest onto your camera viewer, giving you information about each as a pop up when clicked on.

Developers' site is here: http://www.mobilizy.com/en/wikitude-ein-reisefuhrer

It's a really impressive integration of technology into real life, which actually has a valid use. On the down side it takes a few seconds to load, and if your GPS setting is off then it's not that accurate, but that's not really a Wikitude issue.

With the continue rollout of IE 8 some issues rise to the top of pile in the way the browser interacts with users. I can see 'why' this next issue occurs, but it doesn't handle the user interaction very well at all.

One of the more significant changes is the way that IE handles security exceptions. The message to the user has been changed to be inversed. Usually a user will look for an 'ok' button, but in this instance 'ok' is the wrong answer (see screenshot).

This pop up happens when the site you are on is serving up non https content on an https URL, IE images and style links that are http://url/image.src rather than https://.

The only work around for this seems to be either having a user manually edit their IE settings, like this:

This isn't exactly reasonable though. The other fix is to change all your content to be https. This is potentially a huge code change depending on how your site works.

I was hoping to find an IE 8 compatibility setting to revert this back to the same handling method as IE 7, but that doesn't seem to exist. If anyone has any ideas feel free to comment!

FaceBook Sync for Android is a handy application that scans your facebook friends list, and matches any of their profiles with your contacts list. It will then download their profile picture and attach it to their contact. It is an automatic match using the contact name, as most other data from facebook cannot be queried against, so the names need to be match able.

This is the developer's site:

http://fbsync.plan99.net/

And this is the market barcode:

It relies on you having a well put together contacts list, and it will download duplicates if you have them in your contacts. A top app though!