We are all Ancient Egyptians now

Posted on August 8, 2010 by jjn1

This morning’s Observer column.

I’ve just discovered that the ancient Egyptians worshipped a beetle – a scarab. Quaint, isn’t it? I mean to say, we’ve come on such a lot since those primitive times.

But what’s this? A note from my Guardian colleague, Charlie Brooker, about something he calls the Jabscreen. “Several times over the last year,” he writes, “I’ve attended meetings that started with everyone present gently placing their Jabscreen face-down on the table, as though commencing a futuristic game of poker. It wasn’t rehearsed, wasn’t planned, it just happened; a spontaneous modern ceremony.” Charlie was struck by “the sight of a roomful of media types perched reverentially around their shiny twit machines… each time it happened, a vague discomfort would hang in the air until, in a desperate bid to break the tension, someone would mumble a sardonic comment about the sinister ubiquity of the Jabscreen, likening it to Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

Growing pains

Posted on July 25, 2010 by jjn1

This morning’s Observer column.

Over the past two months, Apple’s market capitalisation (ie its value as measured by the stock market) averaged out at $229.8bn.

The corresponding figure for Microsoft was $215.9bn. And yes, you read those numbers correctly: Apple is now worth significantly more than Microsoft, and the difference isn’t just a flash in the Wall Street pan.

This has implications for all of us who follow these things. The mainstream media, for example, need to discard the rose-tinted spectacles through which they have viewed Apple ever since Steve Jobs returned to the helm in 1997. Apple is no longer the Lucky Little Company That Could but a looming, secretive, manipulative corporate giant.

Recent developments suggest that Apple itself also needs to adjust to its new status as just another company…

Apropos the Microsoft comparison, Randall Stross has a useful piece in today’s NYT. Microsoft continues to be a formidable company, but from the viewpoint of investors it’s become more like GE or Big Oil (excepting BP, perhaps) — a good ‘banker’ stock for a part of one’s pension portfolio.

Google’s DIY App Tool

Posted on July 12, 2010 by jjn1

Google is bringing Android software development to the masses. According to the NYTimes,

The company will offer a software tool, starting Monday, that is intended to make it easy for people to write applications for its Android smartphones.

The free software, called Google App Inventor for Android, has been under development for a year. User testing has been done mainly in schools with groups that included sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergraduates who are not computer science majors.

The thinking behind the initiative, Google said, is that as cellphones increasingly become the computers that people rely on most, users should be able to make applications themselves.

“The goal is to enable people to become creators, not just consumers, in this mobile world,” said Harold Abelson, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is on sabbatical at Google and led the project.

The project is a further sign that Google is betting that its strategy of opening up its technology to all kinds of developers will eventually give it the upper hand in the smartphone software market.

The strategy looks on track. For one thing, Android phones are outselling iPhones. And the Android Apps market seems to be developing nicely, as this graph from Android Guys suggests:

Why Louis Grey turned In his iPhone and went for Android

Posted on July 11, 2010 by jjn1

Long, thoughtful post by Louis Gray.

For me, more than the over-used phrase of "open", the promise of true multitasking, and the platform's integration with Google Apps, was one word – "Choice". Choice of handsets. Choice of carriers. Choice of manufacturers. Second behind the word choice has to be "Momentum". I can see that Android has momentum in terms of improved quality, in terms of the number of devices sold and users, and yes, applications, which are growing in quantity, soon to be followed by quality. I really do believe that if Android does not already have a market share lead over Apple yet in this discussion, they soon will. It is inevitable. The growth in the number of handsets, carriers and users will drive more developers to the platform, and the holdouts who are not there will eventually make the move. And yes, third is "Cloud" – the idea that I don't need to be tied to my desktop computer to manage data on the phone, but instead, the phone is built to tap into data stored on the Web. Fourth is "Capability". The Android platform, as the Droid commercials offer, simply does more. The power of the mobile hotspot cannot be understated, and the iPhone is a zero there…

Worth reading in full.

Apple eyes the P2P micro-payment business

Posted on April 8, 2010 by jjn1

In the poor countries of the world, mobile phones have already become an integral part of the financial system. If this patent filing is anything to go by, Apple is thinking about using the iPhone as a platform for a peer-to-peer payment system. Smart idea.

Why the iPad and iPhone don’t support multi-tasking

Posted on April 6, 2010 by jjn1

Really useful explanation by Robert Love (an Android developer).

Apple says they do not support multitasking because it is a hamper to stability and a drain on battery life. That clearly isn’t true—the iPad has plenty of processing power and battery capacity. Rumor is that Apple is going to add multitasking in a future OS release. This rumor likely is true. Is Apple somehow going to make background applications not consume any battery? Of course not. These excuses are straw men.

The real reason that the iPad and iPhone do not allow third-party applications to multitask is likely more complex, more technical. Bear with me here. Both the iPad and iPhone, as mobile devices, have limited memory (256MB in the current incarnations) and no hard drive. No hard drive means no swap file. Limited memory and no swap imply that applications have a small, fixed amount of memory at their disposal. They don’t have the luxury of seemingly-infinite memory, as a modern system with swap has. Memory consumption is thus a critical system constraint. Like most systems, the iPad and iPhone deal with this by killing applications that use too much memory via a mechanism called the out of memory (OOM) killer. Unlike most systems, applications designed for the iPad and iPhone know how much memory they have at their disposal, and are designed to operate within those constraints. This is classic memory management in embedded programming. No swap, fixed memory, you deal.

What would happen if third-party applications could multitask? Some number of applications would be in the background. But each application was written presuming it had access to some fixed amount of memory. Thus, if the background applications consumed too much memory, the operating system would have to kill them. But the user would expect that he or she could switch back to an old application, and it would still be running where it was left. He or she certainly doesn’t expect applications to just die every time a new application is run, losing state and even data.

Simply put, the reason the iPad and iPhone do not support multitasking is because it is hard to allow multitasking in a system with no swap and a limited amount of memory. Apple could enable multitasking—indeed, there is no reason that the devices couldn’t support it right now, with a one or two line code change—but your applications would constantly be killed. That isn’t a very useful feature.

So how is Apple going to enable support for multitasking? Likely similar to how Android allows it…

He then goes on to outline how Android does it via its Bundles concept, which effectively enables apps to be stateless. A really informative post, and a good illustration of why the Web is wonderful.

My, my, MiFi

Posted on April 3, 2010 by jjn1

For over a year I’ve been using a 3G dongle to access the Net when on the move. My experience has been patchy, but one of the main irritations is having to hook the gizmo to a laptop using a USB cable. (Another grouse concerned the fact that the drivers for some Linux distros seemed erratic.)

So I’ve cancelled the network account for the dongle and bought this MiFi on a pay-as-you-use tariff instead. It’s a really neat gadget. It hooks up to the 3G network and then becomes a tiny WiFi hub which sits in your pocket but gives anyone around you a connection if you’re willing to let them have the password. This means, among other things, that my iPod Touch now has a serious mobile capability. And no more drivers to worry about: if your device does WiFi, then it can talk to this device. Why can’t everything be like this?

Full disclosure: it was the inimitable Michael Dales who gave me the idea.

Google discovers that phones are hard-ware

Posted on March 17, 2010 by jjn1

From Good Morning Silicon Valley:

This morning, analytics outfit Flurry, which gets a good handle on handset use through app stats, delivered its estimate of Nexus One sales in the phone’s first 74 days, and the news was not good. The 74-day milestone was used because that’s how long it took the first model of Apple’s iPhone to sell one million units. Flurry’s calculation of Nexus One sales over a similar stretch — 135,000 units. The sorry showing has nothing to do with overall enthusiasm for Google’s Android mobile OS; in its first 74 days, Motorola’s Droid sales hit 1.05 million units, a tad better than the original iPhone. Because of assorted market variables, the numbers aren’t directly comparable, but they do provide a general sense of things. And what the numbers would seem to be telling Google is that without the marketing muscle and consumer convenience that come with selling a phone through a major carrier, even a technically impressive piece of hardware is going to have a rough go of it. Google will have to hope things turn around once the Nexus One becomes available on the Verizon network this spring.

And, to add insult to injury, Google’s discovered that its application to trademark ‘Nexus’ has been rejected. Someone else got there first. Google will appeal. Lots of lucrative work for m’learned friends ahead.

Tim Bray: Now A No-Evil Zone

Posted on March 15, 2010 by jjn1

Tim Bray has jumped ship — from Oracle to Google. And he’s there to work on Android and compete with Apple.

The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.

I hate it.

I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom’s not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient.

The big thing about the Web isn’t the technology, it’s that it’s the first-ever platform without a vendor (credit for first pointing this out goes to Dave Winer). From that follows almost everything that matters, and it matters a lot now, to a huge number of people. It’s the only kind of platform I want to help build.

Apple apparently thinks you can have the benefits of the Internet while at the same time controlling what programs can be run and what parts of the stack can be accessed and what developers can say to each other.

I think they’re wrong and see this job as a chance to help prove it.

Hooray! Interesting times ahead. And he’s a photographer too.

Microsofties use iPhones at their own risk