Month: February 2008

Android is coming along smoothly

Today is the last day of The Mobile World Congress which takes place in Barcelona.  Makers of everything mobile (as in phones, not as in real estates opposite) are showing off their stuff at this event.  Also, there are many announcements, news, and releases tied to the dates of the congress.

It seems like a good time to revisit the Android story.  Is it moving it all?  What’s happening there?  Will we see any of it any time soon?

It appears that the Android is moving along as planned.  There were a few pre-production prototypes at The Mobile World Congress, and people were pretty much impressed with them.

The biggest surprise of the demos was how well Android runs on slow devices.

In other news, Google released a new version of Android SDK.  This new version brought a few major changes and improvements, fixed many things that developers complained about.

The upgrade also takes to heart developer complaints about the software and includes several major but less visible upgrades: in addition to easier development of layouts, any app can now translate addresses to map coordinates and back. Audio formats such as MIDI and OGG are now also built-in, according to Google.

The same source suggests that we will indeed see some phones in the second half of 2008, as it was planned and announced last year.

Android’s upgrade brings the Linux-based platform much closer to production quality for its expected release, which should start with handsets in the second half of the year from companies such as HTC, Motorola, LG, and Samsung. Most of these devices are understood to focus heavily on Internet access and are expected to include some models with GPS and touchscreens.

A quick follow-up on rapid development

Yesterday I posted about some ultra-rapid development – a couple of days for a web application. Well, it turns out I didn’t do my homework, since two days is an ultra-slow development.  At least compared to 45 minutes for a killer web application.

If you could gather together some of the smartest Web developers and ask them to brainstorm a killer app for you, what would you ask them to build? Oh, and they will only have 45 minutes to do it.

“Wow!” is all I that I can say right now… Stay tuned for the actual development.

How often do you change your mobile vendor?

I was reading this post about Mobile World Congress over at Web Worker Daily.  This paragraph got me thinking:

At January’s Macworld show, Apple CEO Steve Jobs cited data from NPD showing that the iPhone already has 20 percent of the smartphone market after one year, and that Apple is selling 20,000 iPhones per day.

How often do you change your mobile?  And how often do you change your mobile phone vendor?  Are you a fan of one particular brand or do you like trying each and every one of them?

Mobile market is measured in billions of users.  And these users can be pretty dynamic about their devices and the choice of vendors.  Mobile phone is something very easily replaceable.  It’s not like a house, or a car, or even a laptop computer. The thought of how dynamic the market is boggles the mind.  One day you the king of the mountain, and the a couple of months later they don’t know your name. But then again you can get it back before the end of the year…

Follow-up on Yahoo and Microsoft

The other day I wrote a post about possible Yahoo acquisition by Microsoft. There have been some developments to the story. If you haven’t followed it elsewhere, here is a brief summary for you:

  • Microsoft decided to buy Yahoo (again)
  • Yahoo said “No” (again)
  • Microsoft insists in very aggressive ways

There are a couple of posts at Mashable (one and two) which tell how the story unfolds in more details.

What Microsoft does this time, is what they have always been doing. This time it’s just on a slighter bigger scale. And if you ever had any fantasies about how Microsoft cares about you as a customer or partner, take a closer look at what happens now. If they don’t give a flying fork about major players on the Web, who are creating an ecosystem, what do they care about you as an end user?

My extremism years are long over, but I still get to hear “Boycott Microsoft!” scream in my head once in a while. Whatever the case, I believe in natural balance and the equilibrium of all things. I think that Microsoft has been rocking the technology boat for far too long and that things are slowly turning to where they should be. It will take a few more years to make them more obvious to general public, but the trend is there.

In regard to this particular situation, there is a slight chance of Yahoo getting away from this acquisition through an alliance with Google. It’s not as good as if they could just be, but it’s by far better than if they get acquired by Microsoft.

Can rapid development become ultra-rapid development?

I have this side theory that increased speeds of development are parts of what defines a new era in technology (you can read more about my theory on eras of technology in “What Did You Change Your Mind About in 2007?“).

There were days, when to program a computer you actually had to build it first.  That was pretty slow, I guess.  Gates, bulbs, and semi-conductors do sound exotic, but something tells me it’s not as much fun as doing software.  I maybe wrong, but that’s what I think.  Firmware, assembler, and even C programming – these all I am only vaguely familiar with.  I joined technology full time when application development was on the rise (think: Visual Basic and Delphi).  Mostly that was commercial application development too.

A tiny bit later, Open Source era was kicking in.  One of the things that amazed many people at the time was how fast software development was happening.  People who haven’t even ever met in person were writing thousands upon thousands of lines of code, communicating over the Internet.  Their code was beautiful. It was fast.  And sometimes even documented.  And anyone could get it, use it, read it, and modify it.  That was really exciting.

The web came and stayed.  Did it bring increased speeds of development? It sure did.  Teams got smaller, often comprising of just two people – one developer and one designer – or even less.  Web sites were emerging every single day, not week or month.  And the whole development seemed so much simpler – all applications are client-server from now on, every computer has the client part already, strong preference of interpreted languages over compiled ones, etc.

Web development has its share of issues, but it makes development of complete applications in matters of days.  Don’t believe me?  Check out this article for example – “Building Web Apps Really Fast: Why Developers are Drawn to Weekend Code-a-thons”

What is it about a weekend that makes you want to create a web application from start to finish? Most people would probably think it insane to try cramming design, development, testing, and deployment of a web app into a single weekend, but a growing number of events are encouraging people to do just that.

Coming back to my side theory of increased development speeds in each era of technology, I wonder how that will stand for mobile computing.  It seems doubtful that development can get any faster than a couple of days.  So, maybe I am missing something in my theory, or maybe I haven’t defined it properly.

One suspicion that I have is about the absolute time measurement that I use now vs. relative time to deployment scale that could have been used instead.  Consider a couple of days for development of the web site today.  It can be done and it has been done.  But the web site has a rather limited scale (a maximum of a few million users) compared to a mobile devices market (a few billion users).  So, maybe the development of applications for mobile devices won’t become any faster.  Developers will still need a couple of days, or maybe even more.  But.  When they are done, they have the potential to hit a few billion users, not a few million.  Like this, it might work, and the theory might still stand true.

What do you think?