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Blog iPhone Mobile News Web development

Blackberry enters the Tablet race

Blackberry announced their Tablet today:

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/09/27/research-in-motions-7-inch-playbook-tablet-to-target-business-users/

Of course, it connects seamlessly to all the BlackBerry web services, has a webkit browser, multitasking, etc. Not sure what the connectivity is, rumor had it as something that tethered to a Blackberry handset rather than having its own cell radio. Definitely aimed at Enterprise market. No pricing announced yet,

More info on Engadget.com, including some pics from the RIM conference.

The demo video is fairly interesting, they appear to have cribbed a lot of UI concepts from Palm’s WebOS. All in all, it looks like a good offering; if you look at it as sort of an accessory to one’s Blackberry, it could get a lot of traction amongst Enterprise customers, even if the Blackberry app store doesn’t expand dramatically.

As a comparison, here’s the 7 inch Galaxy Tab:

This Official Samsung Galaxy Tab Video Demo Is A Nine Minute, Must-Watch Snooze Fest

They have borrowed liberally from iOS user inferface concepts, and the device does appear to be very responsive. What they don’t talk about is the price. Of course, there are a lot of questions about app availability as well, most Android Market apps will need rewriting to use the unique screen size, and it’s not clear it will have Android Market.

This video of a prototype HP Windows 7 tablet does not bode well for Microsoft at all:

Hp Slate review

Based on how sluggish the UI is, how many buttons the device requires to support Windows (a Ctrl-Alt-Del key? Really?), and the obvious lack of touch integration in the OS ( you have to press a button to make the keyboard appear for text input) this device is too little, too late.

Personally, I don’t think the 7 inch devices will prove to be a big hit. You are talking about a device that’s bigger than a phone, but smaller than a paperback book. While it can support the split-view type interfaces we’re seeing on the iPad and in Sencha, they’re still kind of small for displaying a lot of information. The larger screen of the iPad is just a lot more real estate for displaying information, and given the limitations of the touchscreen input resolution, gives you a fairly precise pointing mechanism at a low price point.

I don’t buy the rumors that Apple is going to introduce a 7 inch iPad, their decisions for the size and form factor for the first-gen device were not arbitrary. At its current size, the iPad’s screen is small enough to be a portable device (think replacement for a clipboard), but large enough to display lots of information and allow for very immersive UI interactivity.

Prcing is going to be an issue for all of these. With the current benchmark being $499 for the entry level iPad, there just isn’t a lot of room for price competition, especially since analysts believe that Apple could drop the price by $100 or more and still turn a profit. Right now, the phone-call-enabled European version of the Galaxy Tab is said to be priced at 700 or 800 Euros, or 679 British pounds. With contract, this is going to be lower, but who wants to commit to a multiyear contract for a device that is more of an accessory than a primary device like a laptop?

Hope that HP unveils their WebOS tablet soon, I assume it will hit much closer to the mark than the Slate, which appears to have been cancelled for a very good reason.

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Blog iPhone Mobile News

Android ‘openness’ more like ‘Open your wallet, please’

Insightful piece about Android’s “openness.” The promise of Android as an alternative to Apple’s approach is severely diluted by the same device manufacturers and carriers that were holding the smartphone market back in the first place.

It’s important to remember that Android was never conceived solely as a consumer phone OS, it’s an OS for mobile device OEMs to use in building their devices. As such, the device manufacturers have ample motivation to bolt custom user interfaces and features onto the core OS, since everyone starts with the same core Android OS. For their part, the carriers are back to their old tricks of disabling the features they’d prefer to monetize, and promoting their own app stores. Only Verizon allows Skype on Android, for example. AT&T only lets you use the Android Market for apps, no side-loading or alternate sources.

Mind you, in the days when the carriers had total control of the app market, fewer than 3 percent of phone users ever bought games, personalization content, or apps for their phones. In contrast, over 30% of iPhone users buy apps for their phones. By detaching app purchases from the phone bill and providing superior merchandising for apps, Apple was able to develop a real marketplace for mobile software. The old ‘carrier deck’ was a terrible place for discoverability, was tightly controlled by people who were very tone deaf to the brands offering apps and games, and the pricing model ensured that anyone purchasing apps would get a nasty surprise when their phone bill arrived.

App restrictions aren’t the only place where the carriers are flexing their newfound muscle in the Android world. You are also at the mercy of the carrier to see whether your Android 1.5 phone will be upgradable to 2.2; if the carrier decides they’d rather upsell you to their newer phones and a new contract (with stingier data allocations), you are out of luck.

The real revolution of the iPhone was to do an end run around the chokehold that carriers had on the functionality of a phone. It was unheard of to have a phone that was completely disconnected from the carrier deck for on-handset purchasing. Apps that used the Internet seemed expressly designed to ding you with additional data charges, and things like VOIP were strictly off limits. It was also nearly unheard-of to be able to easily update the phone firmware and receive new device functionality on an older phone. The latest crop of Android phones is selling ‘openness,’ but the real goal is to put the genie back into the bottle, and more of your money into the carriers’ pockets.

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Blog iOS development iPhone Mobile News

Mystery “magic trackpad” could signal something big

Apple has gotten a Bluetooth trackpad approved by the FCC. So, what would you possibly do with this? You don’t need it for one of their laptops, they already have a trackpad. Potentially you could use it with an iMac or Mac Pro, but why bother with Bluetooth?

I’m picturing this as a remote for an iOS-based Apple TV, or an HD version of the iPod Touch that has a TV cable. Either combination would let you run iOS apps on a TV and control them from your couch.

All the rumors about a new AppleTV with limited storage based on iOS sound more and more like an iPod Touch with an AppleTV app. It actually makes some sense — you could buy or rent the movies you want, put them on this device, and actually take your movies over to a friend’s house to watch on their TV by plugging in an adapter cable. A 16GB iPod Touch could hold 4 or 5 feature films in about a third the space of a Blu-Ray movie box, and of course the chips are out there for higher capacity. Even better, the WiFi connection could let you serve streamed content as well, like the tons of podcasts and YouTube already available, or cloud-based iTunes video. It’s not a stretch to think of an iPod Touch HD that could play full 1080p over HDMI.

This Apple TV app could just run on an iPod, iPad, or iPhone, too. You just bring the remote and the adapter cable for your friend’s TV, and it’s Movie Night.

Now all Apple needs to do is get content owners to get real about TV and movie pricing on iTunes, and they could have a real business instead of a hobby. The technology for these and even cooler services is not the challenge, it’s getting content owners to agree to reasonable terms for the selling of content that is still often available for free on broadcast TV, or can be rented for $1 from RedBox.

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Blog Mobile News

Mobile links for 15 February, 2010

Video comparing graphic performance on Google Nexus vs. iPhone 3Gs. This video shows a scene with about 11,000 polygons running on both phones. The higher resolution of the Nexus screen ends up seriously compromising graphics performance. More pixels, more work, and the Nexus doesn’t have the hardware power to compensate, hence about 1/2 the frame rate of the iPhone.

The big news for today, of course is the announcement of Windows Phone Series 7. Microsoft has re-designed their phone OS from the ground up, and the result is a very clean-looking interface which departs from most of the other mobile OS offerings. Engadget has some demo video. Games on this device will interface with Xbox live, which is a big departure, and the whole interface seems to share a lot of DNA with the Zune, with that mimimalist typography. The demos are on a touchscreen device with 3 buttons (home, back, and search), powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor.

Many questions arise about the platform, such as whether it supports a wide range of handset hardware, how apps work on it, development details, etc., and whether Microsoft is planning to get into the handset hardware business like Google has with the Nexus, essentially competing with its OEM customers. Also, what support is there for the wide range of Windows CE and other handheld devices currently used in industry for POP, inventory management, etc. ? Still, this product introduction shows that Microsoft is determined to stay in the game.

On the iPhone front, Macworld saw the introduction of some new platforms for quickly generating applications, including Yapper, a WYSIWYG editor that garnered Best of Show. Yapper lets you build an app around RSS feeds with no coding, and supports iPhone, Android, and iPad, with content caching, location capabilities, push notification support, and support for monetization and analytics. Very promising approach. Others include iSites, and appOmator, as well as TapLynx, which has been around for a while.

The iPad is definitely stimulating new developer interest, according to Flurry Analytics. This article includes a graph comparing new starts of iPhone apps against Android projects.

Disney’s CEO, Bob Iger, is excited about the iPad.

When the heck are WWDC 2010 tickets going on sale? Last year sold out in record time, and the current drought of technical information on the iPad suggests that this year is going to be a mad rush. Articles like this suggest that Apple has booked the Moscone Center from June 28-July2, but there has been no word from Apple since this leak, and they may well need a bigger venue this time around.

This timeframe would place the keynote exactly 3 years from the release of the original iPhone, which has some people speculating that Apple will drop the exclusive with AT&T, but the introduction of some groundbreaking new data plans for the iPad suggests that Apple is likely to be extending the deal.

Android is still looming over the horizon. A report from Comscore shows that Android market share has about doubled in the last quarter, at the expense of Palm, Windows Mobile, and to a lesser extent, Blackberry. iPhone share is still growing, but the introduction of multiple new Android handsets is building momentum for Google. Developers, however, are not seeing a bonanza from the Android market, some are scaling back their development. Gameloft in particular says they are getting 400 times the revenue from iPhone that they are from Android. Gameloft’s revenue from iPhone games was about $24.5 million for 2009, and accounted for 22% of the company’s total revenue in the last quarter. Developers are generally complaining that price points on Android are lower, and that Google is not promoting its store nearly as well. Discoverability of Android apps is considerably weaker than for iPhone apps, as Android’s marketplace is generally only directly accessible over the handset. Android has not spawned a large ecosystem of third-party app and game review sites, and doesn’t have a desktop equivalent to iTunes, which provides most of the merchandising and visibility for iPhone apps. Even though Android is very likely to overtake Palm in the next quarter, Google’s inability to generate excitement around its app store will keep developers from committing to the platform.

Gartner issued a report last month that attributed 99.4% of mobile app sales in 2009 to the iPhone. Their methodology may or may not be sound, but if true this is a dramatic shift away from the old model of app and game sales through the carrier. The market for mobile apps is likely to reach nearly $7 billion this year. Garner is predicting that Apple’s share of this revenue may be about $4.5 billion, 70 percent of which will be going to developers.

Consumer Reports announced Friday that iPhone users consume 5 times the data of Blackberry users, and nearly twice that of other smartphones. This disparity explains why iPhones are bringing AT&T’s networks to their knees, but it also suggests that ease-of-use is very important to getting people to actually use their data services.

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Blog Web Design Web development

Theming WordPress – work in progress

Still working on theming the site and installing the plug-ins I want.

I ended up selecting the theme Constructor for now, which looks relatively nice out of the box.  The theme supports several different layouts, and lets you customize a lot of things.

StockConstructorSkin StockConstructorSkin2

Here’s the same theme with a few minor adjustments, mostly different background images and font tweaks:

MyConstructorSkin1 MyConstructorSkin2

I’d spent a bunch of time scratching my head over how I might do something similar to the legos/crane motif. Finally, I found something I could isolate and put into the theme, and just went with a simple photocollage for the header file. I played with a few backgrounds, and decided to go with a bright, fairly neutral glass texture. With a couple hours of Photoshop, now the page looks more like my old one.

And, just for giggles, here’s what my test version of the site looks like with the default WordPress theme.  It’s quite boring, and requires you to shove everything off to the left side.

Boring. The only thing you can change visually is the color of that blue bar at top, you can't even just drop in your own header graphic.
Boring. The only thing you can change visually is the color of that blue bar at top, you can't even just drop in your own header graphic.

I will say that I am struggling a bit with the flow of the content inside these posts, things really fall apart if you have more than one small graphic, it seems. Perhaps I’m not doing this the easy way, I did see that wordpress has a built-in gallery function for putting a bunch of graphics in a post, but they didn’t look so good to me. Suppose my next step is to RTFM before I blame the theme or WordPress. I also think that my articles are already proving to be too long for the front page, I should use excerpts, but not sure if the theme supports that. At the very least, I may need to override some more things in the style sheet.

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Blog Esoterica

(from the vaults) Tofu: A Rebuttal

(Okay, I’ve been a total blog slug, too. I’m doing some housekeeping, and found this piece I did for the Los Angeles People Connection , in early 2002 back when they ran articles from members. This was partly in response to an activity they were launching called “the year of fitness”. I had to get my 2 cents in, and proposed some a counter-movement called ‘The Year Of Sloth,’ which included monthly activities such as drinking, eating, and probably more drinking and eating, if I recall. )

In our never-ending stuggle to bring balance to the debate over healthful choices, we at Sloth Central couldn’t let the pro-tofu activities at LAPC go unanswered. After all, who else will dare speak the truth about the White Menace?

We’ll skip the inevitable references to Soylent Green, and Charlton Heston’s plaintive cry to the masses. We know that Tofu isn’t people. People have a stringy texture and sweet flavor, even without soy sauce. Um, or so I’ve heard.

No, the truth is much more simple. Actually, it’s my mantra:

Tofu Is Not Food.

There, I’ve said it. Someone has to, or we’ll wake up some morning to find Burger King serving this stuff. (And lest you think me alarmist, recall that Burger King is now serving veggie burgers…)

I have to hand it to the Health Food Cartel. They have managed a marketing feat I could never dream of, resisting such slogans as "Tofu: the other white cheesy secretion," and "There’s always room for Bean Curd", and turning a flavorless wiggly substance into a health food sensation. A versatile one, too — pump it full of sugar and freeze it, it’s ice cream. Liquify it, it’s soy milk. Bread it and deep fry it, it’s Syntho-Chicken.

In its ambition to be the world’s superfood, tofu instead marries the good intentions of such dubious ‘natural’ staples as granola and sheets of seaweed with the worst excesses of overprocessed foodstuffs such as Space Food Sticks and Tang.

Think I’m overreaching here? Compare and contrast tofu with actual food items:

Food is generally made from animals or vegetables. Tofu is harvested in precise blocks from vast quarries deep in the earth, using the most modern of mining equipment. That makes it a mineral, and thus not food.

Depending on how it is served or processed, Tofu can place a claim for just about any of the food groups: dairy, meat, vegetable, grain, legume, ice cream. Clearly, this is wrong; it can’t be all of these things, therefore it must not be any of them.

Food is usually graded with letters or adjectives like ‘choice,’ or ‘select.’ Tofu is classified as ‘silky’, or ‘firm’. These adjectives are better used to describe fabrics and breast implants, neither of which are considered edible.

Tofu doesn’t taste like anything unless you cook it with something else. In fact, its ability to absorb the flavors and odors of the food around it leave it most resembling cheap ’60s Tupperware imitations, or Arm and Hammer Baking Soda, neither of which are food themselves.

Tofu is fermented. That makes it more like beer than food, and we’ve all been told by our health-nut friends that beer isn’t food. They can’t have it both ways.

Food represents primal struggle: man vs. beast, man vs. weeds, man vs. pickle jar. Most things we eat put up some kind of fight. Tofu is more passive-aggressive, daring us with its impassive texture and hermetically-sealed packaging. Even Jello puts up more of a fight (unless you’re talking about those pre-made ‘Jello for Dummies’ modules), and Jello isn’t even remotely close to food.

So, there you have it, The Emperor’s White Flavorless Silky Firm Foodlike Substance exposed for all to see. It’s not food, it’s Tofu. It’s the product of evil manipulation of innocent soybeans, and you don’t have to eat it.