Re:Mobile apps and screen sizes, legit problem
on
Why PBS Won't Do Android
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Tiny screen? Tiny buttons. Tiny text.
Big screen? Big buttons. Big text.
That's a really stupid design concept.
Ideally, on touchscreen devices: - The right size for buttons is about the size of my finger (Which is fairly constant for most humans) - The right location for buttons is where my finger can reach it easily. (Again, fairly constant for most humans) - The right size for text is so it's readable. (That can be quite variable for many humans, and also depend on screen resolution and technology)
If I have a bigger screen, I want to display more information, rather than display the same amount of information in a bigger text. Also if the designer is really dumb and scale everything to full screen, then aspect ratio is messed up and the pictures look weird
Web sites are sometime hard to use on phones because it's hard to click on links, which are buttons the same size as text. My eyes have better definition than my finger. Phone apps that are not optimized for tablets are wasting the tablet potential. Running an phone app on a desktop machine is usually a terrible experience.
Apple didnt solve that problem any more than Android, they just have less of it. But they do have that same problem for iPad vs iPad mini. Some apps are harder to use on mini because buttons and texts were sized for the big ipads.
As for the origin of the name "patent troll" listen to This American LIfe's coverage on the topic. They talk to the guy that originally coined the term and the reason: fantasy trolls that live under bridges and bully you to pay money if you want to use the bridge. Unlike some users like to think, patent trolls are not named after the forum variety that is there just to bother and annoy.
It does not really matter what the origin of the term is. It's what it means now.
The differences between Android and iPhone are: (AFAIK)
- There are much less of these APIs on the iPhone than Android (eg: I dont think there is any API to access your email from an iPhone App, or make phone call or SMS without user confirmation)
- Android's user confirmation is at install, while iPhone's user confirmation is when the app try to use a particular API for the first time (eg: when it tries to use location) And the app can keep running even if the user denies it the right to use a specific service.
All in all, the iPhone security scheme is much more conservative, with the side effect that you cant do as many things in an iPhone app as you could in an Android App. For example, you could probably write an android app to could automatically navigate phone menus (eg: "For billing press 1" kind of things) while this is probably not possible for iPhone.
Apple is betting that their conservative approach will be more appealing for users if they dont have articles like this one coming out. Google is betting that their open approach will be more appealing to developers, but if more article like this come out, Android will become like windows security wise. It does not matter if it is true, or if it is a matter of user giving permissions, its all a matter of perception.
But you see, the whole point of having flash on phones was so that you could really get the "full" web, and that developers dont have to redo all their work.
Now, most of the flash content is not designed for touch input and phones screens, so you still cant really access that content on a phone in a meaningful way. (I tried to use the FIFA World Cup Matchcast flash app on a droid, not really usable). Developers will have to redesign their flash sites for phones anyway.
They might as well spend their time writing an apps, or an HTML5 site.
Some existing flash apps might work well enough on android tablets, but where are these now?
Given that Google, MSFT, Opera, Mozilla and Apple are all behind HTML5, if you were a developer, which way would you go? As an individual developer what skills are you more likely to want to develop at this point to differentiate yourself?
Now I'm just waiting for Netcraft to confirm that Flash is dying...
But they are not going to have to spend time and money trying to design a chip that will be able to be used in 10 different products.
See, from my own experience, SoC companies pack more features in their SoC so that they can fit in several products or markets. Apple will only worries about their own devices.
In short, Qualcomm is trying to please 5 or 6 different handsets manufacturers with their snapdragon, each with their own ideas and requests, and they will have to make compromise, while Apple can just focus on getting the exact chip they want for their products.
Prop 66 warning: This land is known to the State of California to move and cause destruction.
This warning has now to be on display for all real property in California.
Seriously, we should warn everybody living on earth that they should get out because they might be struck by an earthquake, a tsunami, a volcano eruption, a tornado,...
Of course it won't work, because it assumes it is sufficient to protect the playkey. It isn't[...]
Why not?
At some point some unencrypted content is going to be flowing in some memory for some video codec to decode... thats when you snatch it, and put it on bittorrent....
The only way to fight that now is to track content with individual watermarks and get the lawyers after the guys who are copying.... its going to end up being cat and mouse game to defeat the watermarks, but it would be a lot more scary for the copiers... you never know if you might have left some fingerprints when copying...
iPhone:
How can a company be prepared to invest into a platform that can change at any time, cutting you off and kicking you out, with no course of action but to whine on some no-name blog
Android:
How can a company be prepared to invest into a platform that is immature and whose app store is a wild west nightmare.
So basically they show that their car can learn by copying some known process in addition to their physics model.
Yet I'm curious to know how the car decide that they should use the learned process rather than their model. I mean, if they learned this parking maneuver on gravel, and tried that on slick pavement, anybody would probably fail. Can this car actually do better? I would be curious to see if the car can learn a maneuver in some given conditions and repeat it in slightly different conditions.
AT&T and T-mobile's higher end phones all inherently offer world wide coverage, plus you can always just drop a local sim into your GSM phone.
Ahem... most GSM phones are still sold locked to your carrier, so you cant really just "drop" your foreign SIM in them... especially the iPhone. Unlock was fairly easy on basic Nokia or Moto phones, not so easy or safe on iPhones and smartphones.
Also, most people dont travel internationally very frequently, so its not likely to be a big incentive for them. Those people who do travel frequently are likely to have an extra phone and plan where they do most of their travel, or if they are on verizon, they are likely to have a world phone that also has GSM, with an international plan paid by their company. Verizon also has (or used to have) loaner GSM phones for the occasional international traveller.
Also, with the price of international roaming being what it is, my GSM phone is "just in case" when I'm not in the US.
GSM is one of the reason I started with Cingular, having a GSM phone was a lifesaver, worth the expensive calls in a couple of situations, but I dont think its going to be a decisive factor for most people.
Also HDMI 1.4 does not have USB in, but has ethernet...
Less cables? maybe, eventually.... But by the time you get the latest all-in-one, you will have some new technology coming along that offers something extra that you will want... So you will end up with a mix of new tech cables and old tech cables anyway
Users dont buy Flash, they buy iPhones. Obviously most users dont care about iPhone being proprietary, and in the end, Apple will do anything to please the majority users enough so that they will buy more phones. That include keeping a tight control on the platform.
Users want to buy iPhones and Apps. They dont really care about how the way the apps were programmed, or if its open. They may care about the price and the quality.
Apple will occasionally switch their stance when they think its ultimately beneficial for them. For example, see how they want from only webapps to native apps. They saw how it would benefits the users, and allow them to sell more phones. They gave the users want they want.
For sure they will not make things easy for developers. Their strategy is please the users first, the developers will come. They will only encourage the developers if it eventually make it better for the user. Microsoft in the past and Android now have the other strategy: please the developers (Who said: "developers! developers! developers!"), they will create great apps and the users will come for the apps, not the phone.
At the start of the PC era, Microsoft picked the right strategy and won against the Apple. Things have changed, PC and Smartphone users are not just geeks anymore, so Apple strategy might work better now....
Time will tell.... But the DOJ might be the wild card here....
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Tiny screen? Tiny buttons. Tiny text.
Big screen? Big buttons. Big text.
That's a really stupid design concept.
Ideally, on touchscreen devices:
- The right size for buttons is about the size of my finger (Which is fairly constant for most humans)
- The right location for buttons is where my finger can reach it easily. (Again, fairly constant for most humans)
- The right size for text is so it's readable. (That can be quite variable for many humans, and also depend on screen resolution and technology)
If I have a bigger screen, I want to display more information, rather than display the same amount of information in a bigger text.
Also if the designer is really dumb and scale everything to full screen, then aspect ratio is messed up and the pictures look weird
Web sites are sometime hard to use on phones because it's hard to click on links, which are buttons the same size as text. My eyes have better definition than my finger. Phone apps that are not optimized for tablets are wasting the tablet potential.
Running an phone app on a desktop machine is usually a terrible experience.
Apple didnt solve that problem any more than Android, they just have less of it. But they do have that same problem for iPad vs iPad mini. Some apps are harder to use on mini because buttons and texts were sized for the big ipads.
Websites can usually achieve useful compromises.
As for the origin of the name "patent troll" listen to This American LIfe's coverage on the topic. They talk to the guy that originally coined the term and the reason: fantasy trolls that live under bridges and bully you to pay money if you want to use the bridge. Unlike some users like to think, patent trolls are not named after the forum variety that is there just to bother and annoy.
It does not really matter what the origin of the term is. It's what it means now.
Because it's magical. Try one some time. you don't have to be a Mac user.
Plus, you buy the first one, them the year after you get the new one, then your wife or your kids can use the older one.
Yes some people have that much money.
Oh and the battery can be recharged, many times, before it dies.
Authenticate based on "activities the user normally perform" ?
Aren't Google, Facebook and advertisers already tracking our every move ? And figuring out when people come back to visit a site ?
I'm sure you can identify people that way, but can it really be secure ?
Java is Dead. Netcraft confirms.
And Steve Jobs already knew it...
But come on, who didnt see this coming ?
The differences between Android and iPhone are: (AFAIK)
- There are much less of these APIs on the iPhone than Android (eg: I dont think there is any API to access your email from an iPhone App, or make phone call or SMS without user confirmation)
- Android's user confirmation is at install, while iPhone's user confirmation is when the app try to use a particular API for the first time (eg: when it tries to use location) And the app can keep running even if the user denies it the right to use a specific service.
All in all, the iPhone security scheme is much more conservative, with the side effect that you cant do as many things in an iPhone app as you could in an Android App. For example, you could probably write an android app to could automatically navigate phone menus (eg: "For billing press 1" kind of things) while this is probably not possible for iPhone.
Apple is betting that their conservative approach will be more appealing for users if they dont have articles like this one coming out. Google is betting that their open approach will be more appealing to developers, but if more article like this come out, Android will become like windows security wise. It does not matter if it is true, or if it is a matter of user giving permissions, its all a matter of perception.
But you see, the whole point of having flash on phones was so that you could really get the "full" web, and that developers dont have to redo all their work.
Now, most of the flash content is not designed for touch input and phones screens, so you still cant really access that content on a phone in a meaningful way. (I tried to use the FIFA World Cup Matchcast flash app on a droid, not really usable). Developers will have to redesign their flash sites for phones anyway.
They might as well spend their time writing an apps, or an HTML5 site.
Some existing flash apps might work well enough on android tablets, but where are these now?
Given that Google, MSFT, Opera, Mozilla and Apple are all behind HTML5, if you were a developer, which way would you go? As an individual developer what skills are you more likely to want to develop at this point to differentiate yourself?
Now I'm just waiting for Netcraft to confirm that Flash is dying...
The Queen of England
God save her from programmers!
The point of the story is that they release their driver source code, under the GPL.
So you dont care about binary compatibility, you just recompile the driver for every version of the kernel you need....
And you can fix the source code incompatibilities yourself if they ever happen and they dont keep up.
But they are not going to have to spend time and money trying to design a chip that will be able to be used in 10 different products.
See, from my own experience, SoC companies pack more features in their SoC so that they can fit in several products or markets. Apple will only worries about their own devices.
In short, Qualcomm is trying to please 5 or 6 different handsets manufacturers with their snapdragon, each with their own ideas and requests, and they will have to make compromise, while Apple can just focus on getting the exact chip they want for their products.
Prop 66 warning: This land is known to the State of California to move and cause destruction.
This warning has now to be on display for all real property in California.
Seriously, we should warn everybody living on earth that they should get out because they might be struck by an earthquake, a tsunami, a volcano eruption, a tornado,...
Of course it won't work, because it assumes it is sufficient to protect the playkey. It isn't[...]
Why not?
At some point some unencrypted content is going to be flowing in some memory for some video codec to decode... thats when you snatch it, and put it on bittorrent....
The only way to fight that now is to track content with individual watermarks and get the lawyers after the guys who are copying.... its going to end up being cat and mouse game to defeat the watermarks, but it would be a lot more scary for the copiers... you never know if you might have left some fingerprints when copying...
The exact same scheme was introduced last year... It had some other fancy name I think... Looks like its going nowhere....
I believe I can do VPN on iPhone through 3G.... why cant you ?
iPhone:
How can a company be prepared to invest into a platform that can change at any time, cutting you off and kicking you out, with no course of action but to whine on some no-name blog
Android:
How can a company be prepared to invest into a platform that is immature and whose app store is a wild west nightmare.
Well, choose your poison...
Just to confirm my thought:
78% of americans own a cell phone:
http://www.itfacts.biz/78-of-americans-own-cell-phones/11802
28% of american population own a passport
http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2003/01/31/how_many_america.php
(according to the 2008 GAO report)
So basically they show that their car can learn by copying some known process in addition to their physics model.
Yet I'm curious to know how the car decide that they should use the learned process rather than their model. I mean, if they learned this parking maneuver on gravel, and tried that on slick pavement, anybody would probably fail. Can this car actually do better? I would be curious to see if the car can learn a maneuver in some given conditions and repeat it in slightly different conditions.
What you see is Market Share.
The report is about Sales (of new phones).
Nobody claim that Android phones have more market share than iPhones (which have been selling for almost 3 years now)...
AT&T and T-mobile's higher end phones all inherently offer world wide coverage, plus you can always just drop a local sim into your GSM phone.
Ahem... most GSM phones are still sold locked to your carrier, so you cant really just "drop" your foreign SIM in them... especially the iPhone. Unlock was fairly easy on basic Nokia or Moto phones, not so easy or safe on iPhones and smartphones.
Also, most people dont travel internationally very frequently, so its not likely to be a big incentive for them. Those people who do travel frequently are likely to have an extra phone and plan where they do most of their travel, or if they are on verizon, they are likely to have a world phone that also has GSM, with an international plan paid by their company. Verizon also has (or used to have) loaner GSM phones for the occasional international traveller.
Also, with the price of international roaming being what it is, my GSM phone is "just in case" when I'm not in the US.
GSM is one of the reason I started with Cingular, having a GSM phone was a lifesaver, worth the expensive calls in a couple of situations, but I dont think its going to be a decisive factor for most people.
Thats called Light Peak, by Intel...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Peak
Also HDMI 1.4 does not have USB in, but has ethernet...
Less cables? maybe, eventually.... But by the time you get the latest all-in-one, you will have some new technology coming along that offers something extra that you will want... So you will end up with a mix of new tech cables and old tech cables anyway
While true, it may not matter.
Why ?
Users dont buy Flash, they buy iPhones. Obviously most users dont care about iPhone being proprietary, and in the end, Apple will do anything to please the majority users enough so that they will buy more phones. That include keeping a tight control on the platform.
Users want to buy iPhones and Apps. They dont really care about how the way the apps were programmed, or if its open. They may care about the price and the quality.
Apple will occasionally switch their stance when they think its ultimately beneficial for them. For example, see how they want from only webapps to native apps. They saw how it would benefits the users, and allow them to sell more phones. They gave the users want they want.
For sure they will not make things easy for developers. Their strategy is please the users first, the developers will come. They will only encourage the developers if it eventually make it better for the user.
Microsoft in the past and Android now have the other strategy: please the developers (Who said: "developers! developers! developers!"), they will create great apps and the users will come for the apps, not the phone.
At the start of the PC era, Microsoft picked the right strategy and won against the Apple. Things have changed, PC and Smartphone users are not just geeks anymore, so Apple strategy might work better now....
Time will tell.... But the DOJ might be the wild card here....
He obviously omitted "modern", "useful" or some such other word to qualify video codecs.
If MPEG-1 was any good for low bitrate HD, there would have been no need for people to switch to Theora or H.264...
Buy an iPad, bring it to work and tell them this is the only computer you use for reading your email.
Watch the reaction....
Then either they will have to supply you with their own approved device, or you can just forget about working from home...
No. The annoying thing was the title: "Fairly realistic figures".
Thats the whole point of ISO isnt it ? Having a process and be slave to it.