The carriers and device makers are showing themselves to be real bozos by selling different devices with different Android versions and with manufacturer- and carrier-specific UIs. For example, Dell has said it so highly customized the Android UI that it's unclear when or if it can let users update to the current Android 2.2 version. That's the kind of forking lunacy that so often undermines open source efforts.

Would you plunk down your cash for an iPhone running iOS 3.0 or, for that matter, a PC running Windows 98? How about a Dell-only version of Windows specific to a certain PC model? Of course not. But the open Google mobile platform lets anyone ship a phone with whatever version of Android suits it.

The end result is that the typical user has no idea what he or she is actually buying. That's tough enough for the consumer, but it's even harder for IT departments that are considering whether to support Android smartphones when there's so much uncertainty over the configuration of different Android models, even those bought from the same carrier.

If the iPhone ends up on other US carriers (Verizon), this mayhem in the Android universe is going to be Google's undoing. Either Google takes control over their own ecosystem or it becomes relegated to "by nerds for nerds."

A lesson for any app developer:

If someone comes to you requesting an application, there are some things you need to watch out for, else a great opportunity becomes a real nightmare.

Follow the link above for the lessons learned.

While "union only" parking rules are the exact sort of thing that has many Americans rolling their eyes at the UAW, Wayne State University labor professor David Reynolds suggests that the current economic recession actually makes the public a bit more sympathetic to the UAW's situation, adding "there seems to be a better understanding of buying products and supporting companies that benefit local communities.

Bull.

Just because you're nonunion, it doesn't mean you're not American or a member of your community.

Unfortunately, most phone users don’t have the patience for bugs that hardcore geeks like myself do. Sometime this week, either Verizon or I will get an angry call from my mom when she tries watching a Flash video that locks up the screen or plays a Flash game that won’t respond because it expects a mouse clicks rather than finger taps. Both of us will probably advise her to disable the plug-in so we won’t get called again and she won’t see Flash again.

If Adobe can’t make its mobile plug-in work effectively with all Flash content, it needs to at least warn users and give them the option to cancel before it downloads and attempts to play a game or video that isn’t compatible with Flash Player 10.1 for phones. Popping up a cryptic message that says “this video isn’t optimized for mobile” after it starts buffering is not acceptable.

More importantly, Adobe needs to have a better answer to whether or not Flash  is still relevant in a world where other technologies have rapidly started displacing it.  Based on my early experience with Flash Player 10.1 for mobile, it could soon join the floppy drive in the tech graveyard, something else Steve Jobs helped kill.

People just need to let this technology die and admit, as hard as it may be for them, that Jobs was right.

"Computer slang is developing pretty fast in Ukraine," she said.

The Mac and Linux communities even have their own word for people who prefer Microsoft Windows - віндузятники (vinduzyatnyky literally means "Windowers" but the "nyky" ending makes it derogatory).

"There are some original words with an unmistakably Ukrainian flavour," said Ms Pyrkalo.

The dreaded force-quit process of pressing 'Control, Alt, Delete' is known as Дуля (dulya).

"A dulya is an old-fashioned Ukrainian gesture using two fingers and a thumb - something similar to giving a finger in Anglo-Saxon cultures," she said.

"And you need three fingers to press the buttons. So it's like telling somebody (a computer in this case) to get lost."

That is ... beautiful.

*snif*

‘Eye of the Tiger’ Remix, Played Entirely Using iPad Apps

We need reprints of that memo about the iPad being for consumption, not creation.

★ Monday, 16 August 2010

The creatives will create while the über-geeks will continue to hate.

Here’s the rub – Sun only included the Classpath Exception for the core Java platform – it’s not included in the mobile edition. So Sun brilliantly appeared to be playing open source benefactor while at the same time keeping control of the mobile side of the equation (i.e. the rights to the gold mine).

Google, realizing what Sun had done, developed an end run strategy to Sun’s move, which resulted in Dalvik. Davlik is a virtual machine, similar to the VMs in Java or .Net. Google developed it from scratch (most likely with the team of Java engineers it hired in mid last decade). Google made Davlik open source skirting Sun’s GPL license (which doesn’t include the Classpath Exception for mobile). Because of Davlik, Google doesn’t have to ship Java Virtual Machine with Android yet its Android developers can still use the core Java integrated development environment (IDE). Google gets to have its cake (leveraging the Java community) and eat it too (by shipping its own VM with Android thus skirting Sun’s licensing terms).

The problem with Google and the legion of "Google Can Do No Evil" fan base is the attitude that if you impose x rules or restrictions on developers, you're "stifling innovation." The problem with the argument is that it doesn't and that sense of entitlement just nets you a big fat, well warranted lawsuit from Oracle.

Watching this and reading "Tapworthy," something became quite clear to me (beside the really rough zooming and screen redraws on the Windows device): Microsoft doesn't understand the significance of 44px. They're squeezing standard Windows controls and UI elements onto a touch device without consideration of the size of those controls. The average human finger needs a UI element to be at least 44px, roughly, in order to provide consistent and dependable response to taps. That Outlook ribbon and the taskbar don't appear to give that much room to the finger.

The visual clutter in the Windows apps on that device also showed that they were not designed for a device with the size and human-device interaction of a touch tablet. This is what makes or breaks a device.