I hope folks had an enjoyable holiday season and welcome to the new year.  This should be an event filled one as most astrologers will tell you.

First off I want to thank the comment which alerted me to the retrograde problem in Quick Jyotish.   I had made the mistake (which is not in Jyotish Tools) of storing the speed in minutes instead of seconds.  This was because the planetary position is stored in minutes.  The engine itself calculates the positions and speed in double precision.  Obviously if you use minutes for speed then retrograde for the slower planets will be off.

While I'm on that subject, don't feel shy about emailing me about bugs you might find.  In fact don't feel shy about emailing any astrology software company about bugs.  Most all of these companies  are very small or one person companies and don't have the resources extreme beta testing to find bugs.  Most programmers actually become blind to bugs even if it is occurring right in front of them.  Of course this also means that I occasionally get an email from someone where there is no bug but the user doesn't understand jyotish or maybe exactly how to use the program.

While I'm on the subject of comments to this blog a few of you may wonder why it takes so long for your comment to appear.  Well I have to moderate the blog comments or all kinds of junk would appear here.  I often have to clear the comment list of malicious junk that some people post here or even spam.   I've complained to GoDaddy that they need to improve the "capcha" function so it is a little more difficult for malicious users to take the time to enter a comment.  I also found another security hole with their system that has led to them updating the blog administration.

Comments here should be pretty much comments are the articles posted.  For a quicker response to bugs and problems you can email me at:
support@jyotishtools.com

I also continue to have inquiries about mobile phone versions of my software.  Seems that some folks are impressed with the Apple iPhone and would like to see my software on it.  Well, first off I don't own Mac so I can't develop software for it.  That raises the price of entry to iPhone development.  Note that other phone development kits run on Windows and some even Linux and are free.  Also since as I've mentioned above it would be pretty hard for me to release an iPhone app without there possibly being a bug or two and an update required.  Apple's store currently has no provisions for updates.  Also do you think that Apple's test engineers would even understand Jyotish at all to test such a program?

Other platforms such as Google's Android and even Sprint's mobile development program are much easier to create programs for as well as make the application (and updates)  available.  Someone mentioned the Samsung Instinct here which is their answer to the  iPhone.  I looked into Sprint's development kit, downloaded it and have some of Quick Jyotish implemented and running on their emulator.   Likewise much of that code will also work with Android.   So I hope to have something available in one or both sometime soon.  More complete apps (including an atlas, more features and using the "location" feature of mobile phones) are planned.  The "location" feature returns the phone's  longitude and latitude which as you can see would be very useful for doing prasna charts anywhere.

This last year I purchased an ASUS Eee-PC for travel use.  I found my Windows based laptops especially the Vista one too slow to boot up for practical use just to check email and browse the web when traveling.  The inexpensive Eee-PC running Linux was a good solution (ready to use in 30 seconds).  The screen however being 800x480 made Quick Jyotish a little difficult to use so I have made a version that works better for the 16x9 display of the screen with dashas on the right side of window.  Some of you may find it useful even for desktops.  So far I only have a Linux version available for download on Jyotish Tools.  Netbooks are becoming very popular with a number of companies getting into the action.