If you are lucky enough to have one of the new smoking fast, beautiful Android phones from HTC the Incredible or the EVO 4G you have little to complain about… but… well… some of us just aren’t in love with that HTC Sense UI…
Is a more standard Android experience is what you want? Well it’s only a few settings away.
Below is the stock Sense UI home screen on my HTC EVO 4G (with a custom background only.) Let’s get rid of it!
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Press the Menu button. Continue reading |
It’s so humbling to see simple social networking tools like spy which I created on a whim be discovered and serve purposes on a level I never would have anticipated. I first saw this when people found and used spy during the crisis in Mumbai but just today I discovered…
It seems the almost 1000 members of When Volcanoes Erupt: A Survival Guide for Stranded Travelers on Facebook are sharing and using a link to spy for the hash tag #getmehome. If this tool helps just one person get where they need to safely I am more than ecstatic.
There is an interesting article I picked up today in Fast Company that quickly and succinctly cuts to the point of what these critical moves forward on the Web mean for the future. Counter intuitive to the folks very wrapped up in the “There’s an App for That” mindset comes this article Killer Apps: Why App Stores Are Not the Business Model for the 21st Century which brings to the forefront the fallacies that every company creating, and more over controlling, an App Store concept for their business will lead to a nirvana of beautiful, useful devices and software for our collective future.
In the age of the Web, developers can get their programs to end users without anyone intervening, so locked-down software sales will always be going against the grain.
…the App Store’s true rival isn’t a competing app marketplace. Rather, it’s the open, developer-friendly Web. When Apple rejected Google Latitude, the search company’s nearby-friend-mapping program, developers created a nearly identical version that works perfectly on the iPhone’s Web browser. Google looks to be doing something similar with Voice, another app that Apple barred from its store.
Too many times in the Apple App Store’s short life has controversy over gatekeeping cropped up, this generally isn’t when Johnny Developer wants to deploy his 1,000th copy of a flashlight app to the App Store but when truly disruptive, innovative ideas are hatched, for instance Google Voice, that disintermediate Apple or its carrier partners from something they currently completely control.
Continuing to increase what is possible on the web, like HTML5 and it’s related technologies are doing, ensure Apple or any other device or connectivity company will not define how technology effects our lives. Google Voice is a huge boon to how I use my phone and how people contact me from the transcription of messages to the transparent ringing of multiples lines… My Android phone let’s me choose this time and sanity saving work flow for myself, Apple says my phone will work the way they want it to and AT&T says the data they choose will flow over their pipes.
Apple’s app bonanza won’t end anytime soon…
Yes… I’m not crazy, things generally don’t just appear, get wildly popular and then disappear completely. The Apple App Store will serve iPhone users as long as the iPhone exists…
…but you’d be a fool to ignore the long-term trend in software — away from incompatible platforms and restrictive programming regimes, and toward write-once, run-anywhere code that works on a variety of devices, without interference from middlemen. As different kinds of mobile devices hit the market, from phones to tablet PCs to smartpens to e-book readers and beyond, developers will find that trend harder to ignore. They’ll need to create programs that can work not just on iPhones but on everything…
Fortunately, there’s an app for that: It’s called the Web.
‘Nuff said.
Posted from AppliedHTML5
Web Sockets are set to revolutionize the way the “real time web” works, today most websites use AJAX as a way to fake a real time dynamic experience… think a stream of Twitter tweets popping up relating to a current event. AJAX approaches that try to get to the “real time” end are similar to a kid riding in the back seat on a long driving vaction with their parents “Are we there yet?… Are we there now?… How about now?” constantly pinging their data sources asking if something changed. Web Sockets aim to change all that and simplify it for web users and developers across all web browsers and devices that contain them think Mobile devices, televisions, nearly anything with a screen in the future… you have to love open standards!
The Web Sockets API creates real time two way communications between a server and the end user allowing streaming of information back and forth just like a desktop application in real time without the waste of the current AJAX approach either checking too often when nothing has changed or potentially missing a new message between its checks the Web Socket will only transfer data when needed.
We are not quite there yet, Web Sockets will require support on the server side and the client side but in my view both are progressing nicely. Here is a run down of the early Web Socket server side tool kits I could find.
Python
Ruby
PHP
JavaScript
Erlang
Web Sockets are currently supported in the developer releases of Google Chrome and will soon be available in Mozilla FireFox.
There are many players in this space trying to make real time information to the browser possible some names you may have heard are Comet, Ajax Push, and Ajax long polling (as I discussed earlier). I found a great post for the more technical among us that helps you decipher the differences in these protocols for further reading on the topic.
HTML 5 Web Sockets vs. Comet and Ajax
Posted from AppliedHTML5
The adoption of HTML5 and its surrounding cast of powerful new features is going to be a huge boon to web users and points towards a very positive direction for the future of the web. From the smoother interfaces of canvas, local storage enabling offline modes for online email programs and the like seamlessly, online video free of dependencies like Flash, web sockets making the real time web a breeze without all the current AJAX workarounds, and so much more but I’ll save all of those for future posts….
Today I wanted to finish up and release an experiment using the HTML5 Geolocation feature (sticklers, click here), a feature allowing your web browser (with your permission of course) to share your location, enabling any current website to tailor itself right to where you are… a powerful feature for todays increasingly mobile web user.
Today this level of convenience, all the applications you use every day seamlessly knowing where you are, is unheard of for the user as well as the web developer outside of proprietary built “apps” on iPhone or Android you need to seek out and download. But little do most people know those web browsers in their pockets on those same devices can do this today, opening the playing field of a personal local experience up to the entire web… no downloads, no waiting, no device lock-in.
My experiment started with a simple need, in the summer I drive a Jeep to work with a soft top and I prefer to have it down as much as possible, I mean sun in Minnesota only happens for a short stint i need to suck it up. What I needed was a simple view of the current temperature, maybe a radar map to look for any rain on the map coming my direction, not a huge list. In the early summer I quickly built a one page HTML and JavaScript mashup using jQuery, HTML5 (or Google Gears as a fallback) and the Weather Underground API to build a web page that did just that, polished it up a bit (let’s call it a working prototype as of today) and hosted it on Google App Engine purely for worry free scalability to show it to you all.
Initially on load my experiment “Weather GEO” asks if I want to share my location, of course I select yes, Continue reading
In order to get my feet wet with Google’s Chrome OS (in it’s current developer build state, Chromium OS properly) and test a real world workflow with this “web only” device I figured I’d put together a blog post with some photos courtesy my new DSLR never leaving the Chrome “browser” now grown up to an OS… let’s go.
It wasn’t much of a chore to get Chromium OS up and running on my Asus Eee PC 1000HE netbook, I decided to go with @hexxeh‘s build and run it directly from an SD card rather than build Chromium OS from source on my Ubuntu box for simplicity’s sake. I only had one small hiccup moving Hexxeh’s image file to the SD card in Ubuntu which was cleared up by visiting his wiki, he has instructions for loading the USB/SD card from Mac and Windows too.
I booted from the SD card and in less than 10 seconds had a login box, wow… much quicker than my daily stand by Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Currently with most Chromium OS builds the first thing you need to do is Continue reading
Browser testing is critical to any web developer, designer… really any web professional. You need to know how your users or customers are seeing your work through the multitude of browsers and devices available to them, new ones become available every day.
About a year ago I wrote a post walking you through installing the Google Android SDK on your machine to use as a mobile web browser. This time I am doing it on Mac OS X but I might just make a Windows version too if I get a little time… let me know if you’d like to see that happen.
Let’s get started…
Below I embedded my first Wave “Hello World… I mean Wave!”… The first of many likely… let’s see what it looks like out in public… I know many of you probably can’t see it… This is a test!
UPDATE: I believe and claimed this as the first Google Wave embed in a blog outside of the Googleplex! My claim on Twitter.
For those not in Wave yet here was a screenshot from 4pm 6/3/09.
(click into post to see it) Continue reading
I was very excited to not just attend but be a part of Google I/O 2009, Google’s annual developer conference. A Best Buy contingent of Steve Bendt, Gary Koelling and myself as well as uber developers Curtis Thompson and Thomas Bombach made the trip and were part of the Developer Sandbox.
The keynotes (day 1, day 2) were both great heralding Google’s confidence in the web browser centric future (woo hoo!) powered by what is possible in HTML5, open communications and collaboration systems like the introduction Google Wave and the cloud based power plant that is Google App Engine… among so much more. The whole time they hit hard their belief that developers outside their company, like the ones in the room, are the only way all this becomes possible. They left us inspired for where the web is going and future open architectures we can share versus build ourselves allowing the user, be it the end user or developer, the portability they need… great to see that becoming a reality.
Best Buy was asked to come speak about App Engine and our point of view, that we have shared many times, that it projects a strong model for the future of web development that allows the creativity of a web developer to shine through and takes huge infrastructure and scalability best practices from Google and gives them to you on a sliver platter… no pagers to carry and drastically less system set-up and runtime headaches… growing into a true platform as a service not just boxes in the cloud. The Google crew shot a few videos of us, we’ll see what was smart enough to stay off the cutting room floor!
We talked to many in the Developer Sandbox, answering the question “Best Buy? Like you mean the retailer?” more times than I could count
but once we got through that relayed the message that we are out there, experimenting, trying, showing our company what is becoming possible on the web via new methods of getting things done, notably App Engine and open APIs like our own Best Buy Remix. It’s a great time to experiment even… no especially at a large company that can easily slow down as I’ve said here before…
Google App Engine and Open APIs clearly show where the web is going, the playing field is leveled… get out there and deploy those ideas you say you have scrawled on those napkins that you say are going to revolutionize the world, the tools you need to prove it are out there right now.
…these movements only further speed up rapid evolution on the web, jump in now with two feet because it’s not slowing down any time soon. Experimenting out in front is the key no matter your size.
-Ben
After a little searching I noticed neither posts about this issue nor a quick fix were top of the Google rankings… hoping to resolve that with this post and get all of us Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) users up on App Engine. UPDATE: This post is now first when searching for “App Engine Ubuntu Jaunty Problem” and even “App Engine Ubuntu Jaunty” in one day, nice!
Once you download the SDK as usual and run one of your apps on a default Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty install you will see errors galore, you see Ubuntu 9.04 ships Python 2.6 and App Engine is built on Python 2.5 and they are not friendly!
Here is how I got my environment running Continue reading
