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Google Awards Android Dev Prizes, Introduces App Store
An anonymous reader writes "A group of Canadian engineering students was one of 10 teams to win a $275,000 prize from internet search giant Google Inc. Their program, Ecorio, gives users the ability to reduce their environmental footprint with tools that provide transit options for trips, invest in carbon reduction projects, and share their tips with other users. Other winners included a taxi location app, a price comparison app, and a settings manager than changes your settings based on your location."
Google has also started talking about their plans for Android Market, which is similar to the App store used for the iPhone. Ars Technica's coverage points out a blog post by Google's Eric Chu which notes that early handsets running Android will have a beta version of Android Market enabled.
First app? Duke Nuken Forever!
Hey, it's not like we've seen Android either...
and all that creativity, and they couldn't find "Slap a big enough tax on carbon, and move on to the next problem." I think they're putting the metaphorical cart before the metaphorical horse.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Google doesn't have any decent artist for gui and usability.
I guess that their Google store will sucks.
TFA talks a lot about the cathedral vs bazaar model, which I find to be sort of funny. Android supports downloading applications (.apk files) from wherever you want, although it's intended that the market be the primary place you get them. In this sense it's every bit as open as a Linux distribution.
But wait. A typical Linux distribution doesn't actually support you adding other repositories or downloading packages from the web. Sure it might be technically possible, but you're going to encounter a lot of glitches, and if you ask the distro about that they'll just shrug and say it's your own fault for not using the official repositories.
In fact, given that the Android Market is planned to support for-pay software as well as free-beer software, that makes it technically more open than a typical Linux distro, in which the only reliable way of getting your software to end users is to get the distributors to do it for you, and they usually insist on particular kinds of licensing. Doing it yourself is a good way to find yourself in distro-compatibility hell.
(disclaimer: am a googler, but have no more info than the average slashdotter does on this)
Their program, Ecorio, gives users the ability to reduce their environmental footprint with tools that provide transit options for trips, invest in carbon reduction projects, and share their tips with other users.
I invented a diesel engine that runs 24 hours a day, 7 days per week and plays an airhorn reminding people to turn out their lights when not in use. I'm now seriously considering throwing out my current cell phone so I can buy an Android-enabled phone so I can run Ecorio and find out how I can be more environmentally responsible.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Oh yeah, Google will be quick on that one. There is no way The Goog is going to watch Apple's App Store make a million dollars a day and rake in a cool BILLION dollars in revenue next year and not respond.
;)
As a marketing consultant, I can appreciate how easy the App Store relieves people of their burdensome credit. Just fire up the App Store on the iPhone, select one of the thousands of apps, and press the BUY button. Voila, your pre-authorized credit card is charged with a sale. And you get emailed an invoice from Apple a few days later. I've done it myself, with purchases of up to $20 in fact. Steve must know how media starved and spend-easy us iPhone users are
The New Book That Could Pay You Back -100 Times Over: www.Economtricks.com
Where can I download the Google powered brain implant?
Android software would be much more available if it were served to machines from Debian (or Ubuntu) style APT repositories, rather than Apple style "App Stores". Not just because free software is basically more popular and available than $pay software. But also because anyone can set up an APT repo, and anyone can point their machine at it. The machines ship with a list of tested/approved repos, but the machine's admins can easily add/delete from that list. They can even make their own local repo, or one shared among a user group or developer group, or a website of fanboys.
These repos make SW deployment trivial, even with complex interdependencies (though with some exceptions when the repos and packages are managed badly). Simple, reliable SW management is perhaps Debian-style OS'es best feature, and even more important on something like a mobile "phone", that's supposed to be super-simple for even the lightest weight users to master without thinking too hard.
Since Android is supposed to be a major OSS platform, I hope it quickly gets a F/OSS repo system that all its users can easily use if they want. Because that would kill the "all-proprietary only" SW model that phones now support.
--
make install -not war
Man, I was really excited for an android market - how shocked I was when it was just a software store. My android still needs gyroscopes
Or will they allow c++ apps (ok, so I want to port www.ifrisbeegolf.com ) ; )
Am I really the only one getting sick and tired of this goody-goody save-the-planet doublethink bollocks? It seems everywhere you turn, someone is jumping on the bandwagon, ignoring the obvious problems the "approved solutions" pose, usually to end up sitting on the side of said wagon with palm outstretched to remove more and more money from us, not to mention frowning, for example, that we're not using CFLs instead of tungsten filament lamps.
Heads up: CFLs do NOT last longer in a typical TFL environment like a kitchen or bathroom where they're switched on and off a lot, they cost more in both energy and material to produce and are rather difficult to dispose of when they go titsup, all for a saving of 75% of the *lighting* energy consumption in your home, which equates to a mere fraction of what you use in total and is unlikely to offset the amount of CO2 emitted to produce the thing in the first place. Like everything else to do with this greenrush, it's a con and a deliberate blinkered view of the technology involved. The fact that the Goog are involved is icing on the cake.
Fine, cover your roof in photovoltaic cells. Just let me know a) if you make ROI in 25 years time when the fuckers need replacing, b) if you offset the amount of carbon emitted to make those panels *including* that used to extract/process the raw materials used and c) what we in the Northern latitudes are supposed to do when some cunt in Sunnyvale tells us, in the most annoying self-righteous manner possible, that we should be using PV. Don't say micro-generation using wind: Anything other than a terribly inefficient Savonius Rotor is useless in the turbulence around built-up areas and, if you haven't noticed, more people now live in urban areas than rural. Of course, if you could get a few green campaigners standing in front of your turbine, the hot air alone would generate megawatts...
Nuclear is a nice, carbon neutral source, but they're against this as well. Want to tell me how many people have died due to well-designed, not modified for military extraction of plutonium compromising the core containment, reactors? Now tell me how many Chinese people are going to die when these PV cells get replaced and the poor bastards have to reclaim the precious (and highly toxic) materials in the old ones.
You want tips on going green? Here's a tip: Wait until these idiots know their arse from their elbow. Until such time, ignore them as they're just contributing to global warming by dint of the amount of shit they emit. Methane is a far worse greenhouse gas than CO2, you know. So is water vapour, although back in the days when we had particulates in the atmosphere, due to the fact that we've been burning shit for eons, the resultant cloud cover raised the planetary albedo, the one factor absolutely proven beyond doubt to make a difference to GMST. Remember WWII? The amount of crap that was burned and the particulate count back then was far beyond anything we have in recent times, yet what were the winters of '46 and '47 like?
Oh shit! Carbon bad, particulates bad! Stop burning coal and diesel! Slam filters on EVERYTHING! Oh FUCK! Now we've got another feedback loop that was worse than the one we thought we'd seen due to CO2. Pissup. Brewery. Couldn't run one.
It'll be interesting to see how this competition for the mobile market shapes up between Apple and Google. Obviously Apple has a much larger vested interest in the mobile market, but ANY competition is generally good for the consumer.
I wonder they create a special Ubuntu edition for Android.
Here I thought they were gonna start a robotics-component market. What's this "handheld phone" business?
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
that sells androids, or leases them for housework and menial tasks such as xenomorph elimination, offworld mining and/or colonization, or act as overlords (with whip and monocle to match) for some particular breed of basement dweller, my lawyers would have to meet with Google's about other names that Google could come up with, to name their application.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
The creation of a new meme is a beautiful thing...
In B.C., our fascism is green.
Now we just need a decent phone to run them on.
Since Google SMS does not offer an easy way to give feedback on their product pages they will hear my gripes here. In the past ~3 weeks I have noticed changes in their SMS search results -- FOR THE M-U-C-H WORSE!
Google SMS
==========
* [lowes in 11219] -> Google SMS had formerly understood a search request *within* a specific neighborhood in NYC. It spat out appropriate guesses like: If you meant Lowe's near Brooklyn NY here are results 1, 2 and 3 over two SMS messages. It was fuzzy and accurate. It worked beautifully.
Note that I use zip codes in searches as it is easier to type a 5 digit zip code to specify a FOCUSED location instead of a long and less focused section by neighborhood name. To wit, 11219 vs Borough Park vs Brooklyn NY. See?
However, the results recently are awful, non fuzzy-logic, with 1 or 2 results instead of the previous version's of 3 per search. Oh, and google now adds a lot of useless self adverting for their product in the guise of tips. It's the coup the grace.
So. Recently a friend asked me from her mobile while on the road where the local Lowe's was in Brooklyn. I know how to get there but I needed an address to give her to enter into her GPS -- GPS databases are so lacking so frequently that I rely heavily on Google SMS to get the latest locations for businesses. So I sent Google SMS [lowes in 11219].
** That used to tell Google SMS: search in zip 11219, or in Brooklyn NY, or in NYC, or in NYC Metropolitan including New Jersey. It didn't work however. In essence I wasted time, text money, finger calories, battery life, grief, and a good deal of patience and good will that Google will not be seeing anytime soon.
I sent half a dozen permutations of my search to get a valid result other than "check your spelling", for I know Google had the result. It had given them to me in the past.
I got a valid result when I thought, wtf! do they not understand zip codes anymore, and typed [lowes in brooklyn ny]. That worked!
Google Maps
===========
WTF have you done to it?
* Clicking on each driving direction used to bring a popup-GIF of the maneuver. No longer. We get huge Street View Flash photos instead! No. NO. NO!
* One could rearrange destinations by dragging them around on the left pane. No longer! NO!
* One could collapse LONG directions by clicking on a plus (+) previously. No longer. NO! BTW, Google does not tell the user when it makes assumptions about the destinations. To wit, I entered [10038 to fair view nj] and I had to scroll all the way to the bottom of long instructions to see that Maps had substituted something like Fair Avenue in Connecticut. WTF? I meant "fairview nj" apparently, I discovered after much mucking about. NO!
* After splining via-points by hand one could right-click and "remove this point (spline)". No longer! It magnifies instead! Nooo.
* I wont reiterate my other previous gripes about Maps.
* Oh, I hate that you have complicated the from/to entry box interface! Simplicity! Not complexity.
* Ah fuggit. Add calculate tolls, scenic routes options!
* Ah fuggit. Add calculate tolls, scenic routes options!!
* Ah fuggit. Add calculate tolls, scenic routes options!!!
Seriously, you guys have driven me to use Mapquest more and more.