A link from the folks who make the OpenSignalMaps app for Android has been making the rounds in the last couple of days. In the article, they reveal that they have been analyzing the Android devices that have been using their app and have counted 3,997 different Android variants of model, brand, Android version, and screen size. You can imagine the headache that causes for application testers and for mobile Web developers.
I see a number of reasons for this plethora of Android variants:
I just read a great article by Josh Clark critiquing Jacob Nielsen’s stance on mobile Web sites. The idea is that a large number of people use their phone as their primary way of accessing the Web. By dumbing down the mobile site, removing content, and making it hard to find that content on the full site, we are making their lives harder, not easier. He also made a strong point about how the same content viewed on different devices should have the same URL, and I think I’m coming over to agree with that point of view.
I love this letter from Eric Raymond to Chris Dodd, CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America. It sums up nicely the way I feel about how lobbyists and legislators are attempting to trample on citizens’ rights through dubious claims and ill-advised legislation. Between draconian punishments for copyright infringers, the attempt to enforce DRM through “trusted computing”, and the attempt to snoop on citizens’ communications without warrants, the ideals upon which not just the Internet but our IT industry as a whole were created are being trampled. Please don’t let them win.
Google recently made available Swiffy, a tool for converting Flash content to run in a browser without the Flash Player plug-in. The goal is to make Flash content available on modern browsers without a plug-in. Adobe has a very similar tool called Wallaby.
Does that sound good? Well, in theory yes, but pretty much all the chatter I’ve heard so far about this tool omits some critical details:
This is a short(ish) story of an epic battle between a team of web application developers and IE 7. We were developing a pretty large IE-only application that used a few Flex-based components to provide data visualization capabilities. We were making good progress until well into the testing cycle, when one of the testers came back with a report of IE crashing on a regular basis while using the Flex components. Uh-oh.
I took a closer look at the issue and initially was not able to replicate the issue. The tester sent me some screenshots showing more details of the crash, including a screenshot showing memory usage. System memory was high, but not outrageous. Still, I suspected a memory leak.
It appears that the long time battle between XHTML2 and HTML5 has come to a conclusion, and HTML5 has won. Actually, HTML5 has been ahead for some time, but the w3c finally officially announced the ending of XHTML2 standards development. For a good introduction to the issue, take a look at Wired’s overview of the announcement.
Adobe today introduced a new tool called Thermo. I recommend that you take a look at their demo.
From what I see, Thermo is a tool that helps to integrate the visual design process in more tightly with creating Flash/Flex-based Rich Internet Applications. If you take a look at the demo, you will see how it can import artwork and use that as a template for creating a Flex-based application. From what I see of this application, this is really what the visual design feature of Flex Builder really should have been, and this also looks to be very suitable for quick semi-functional prototypes. The workflow looks like it will work well as well: Visual designers can use Thermo to start off the application, then Web developers can work with the same project in Flex Builder to add in the structure, additional functionality, and server integration.
I just ran across a couple of interesting articles about keyboard vs mouse input:
http://hci-matters.com/blog/?p=8 and the followup:
http://hci-matters.com/blog/?p=9
The idea is that we should really be using more of the keyboard to be productive, but only for tasks which can be qualified as discrete, such as managing documents, launching applications, and working with text. I definitely agree with the premise. We have long had keyboard shortcuts, part of the problem is how to associate the shortcut with an action: there are so many, memorizing them is impossible. As an aside, f-keys are the absolute worst way to implement shortcuts as there is no mnemonic to help with the association, and no consistency save the F1 key for help (why not just label it “help”).
I have finally gotten around to playing with AS3, and I decided to pick the Sound object as one to play with. In the end, I ended up creating a simple music playback “component” that uses a whole number of AS3 features. I am including the example here along with the source. Enjoy! Note: error handling is not yet very robust, but it still shows numerous aspects of AS3 in use. Requires Flash Player 9.
Grrrr… WordPress is munging the object and embed tags. The example can be seen here for the moment.
I was recently working on a search algorithm for a Flash piece I am working on, and the way the algorithm worked involved doing separate searches for each keyword from an index that I had created, recording the number of occurrences for each keyword, then finding out which elements were common between each of the keywords. I came up with an algorithm to do this operation linearly, that is it only has to do one pass through the data which means that it scales well for large data sets. The gist is that if you have three sets of data, then any data element needs to appear three times in the search for it to be common across the data sets. As such, all that is needed is a tally kept of how many times each data element appears and anything that has a tally of three is part of the intersection of the data sets.
Note: this only works if there are no duplicated elements in each data set, which fortunately is not too hard a condition to impose.
Here is some code representing the algorithm:
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