Sandman

You're either in business or you're not

2012-05-08T10:05:00Z

Wake Up. Be Bold.

You're either in business or you're not.

Indeed, RIM. Indeed.

mLogic Thunderbolt to PCIe now shipping

2012-04-18T08:04:00Z

The mLink Chassis turns half-length PCI Express cards into external Thunderbolt-connected devices, but it comes at a serious price.

bit-tech.net

Announced back in september. It took a while, but now it's shipping. A bit pricey at $400, but for those that want HD capture cards, 10GbE network interfaces and things like that, it may be worth it.

Apple and Valve making game console?

2012-04-16T09:04:00Z

Apple CEO Tim Cook has been seen at the Valve head quarters, the makers of Steam, the hugely popular digital distribution store for games on PC and Mac.

ign.com

The rumors are wild about what this means. Are they going to bring Steam in a more complete form to iOS with more games? Not likely, iOS doesn't really suffer from lack of games.

The Mac does, however. Steam was released for the Mac a year ago and Valve committed to releasing most of their main titles for the Mac, but there are still a huge market out there that is totally absent on the Mac.

Another interesting possibility is for Apple and Valve working together to create a new game console. Now, that's real interesting! Rumors about Valve wanting to build a game console has been around for a while but they don't have the hardware guys to work with. Well, Apple are pretty good hardware guys, and imagine the Apple TV maturing into a full-on game console with a huge game library along with the other media it supports today.

But this may be a clash of titans in the end. Steam predates the App Store (and iPhone) by a long leap and is currently the single largest digital game distributor in the world - would they really work well with Apple, who isn't really known for letting an outsider run any part of their end user communication chain? Doubtful. So, if Apple would bring the hardware to the table, what does Valve bring - other than years and years of experience?

It's hard to see how this could work out to anything substantial. The vast majority of the Steam catalog runs on Windows only so isn't applicable to any Apple product, and the few that are would make a paltry game selection for an Apple initiative.

And if Apple TV 4 runs games like it runs movies and tv-shows, surely they would be distributed via the App Store, coded by developers using the same tools available for the iPhone/iPad. I can't see where Steam or Valve fits in there.

Video from Foxconn

2012-04-13T08:04:00Z

It's not quite as horrendous as some people make it seem like, is it? I've been saying it for a long time, western morals and high horses have no place here. These people are happy to get the work and the income, even if it appears paltry to us.

marketplace.org

And as they say, it's not merely a factory, it's a whole city.

Pebble, the watch that connects to your iPhone

2012-04-12T07:04:00Z

Not sure about this at all. It uses Bluetooth, but does an app need to be running on the iPhone? In the background? Also, the e-ink display seems to be of strangely low resolution. Most of the videos seems to be fluid mockups and the few shots of the actual display seems just downright bad. I wish the iPod nano did some of these things though.

mashable.com

U.S. Files antitrust lawsuit against Apple over E-book pricing

2012-04-11T17:04:00Z

We knew this was likely, from the threats a month ago, and now they've sued.

bloomberg.com

Apple Could Achieve a 4-Inch iPhone Display by Increasing Height Only

2012-04-11T11:04:00Z

Doubtful if this would be a wise choice by Apple. I don't think a lot of iPhone users are requesting a larger screen, nor choosing not to buy iPhone due to the screen being too small.

macrumors.com

RIM removing sideloading of Android apps

2012-04-10T10:04:00Z

Saunders said the reason was to prevent piracy, citing figures from an unknown source saying that over a quarter of Android apps are downloaded illegally, and calling Google Play a "chaotic cesspool."

theverge.com

Did the number of legit Android apps just drop by 25%?

Saunders claims that there are developers who refuse to work with RIM until sideloading support is removed.

It's not like RIM has enough devices in use for this to make any impact at all on Google Play or Android, but it's still interesting to see one handset maker citing Google App Policy as a reason for excluding it, rather than just a mere profit move.

While Apple Is Criticized for Foxconn, Other Companies Are Silent

2012-04-10T08:04:00Z

Apple isn't the only one using Foxconn services.

nytimes.com

In the last week I have asked Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, Microsoft and others about their reports on labor conditions. Most responded with a boilerplate public relations message. Some didn�t even respond.
The answer from Barnes & Noble, the maker of the Nook e-reader, was typical.
Mary Ellen Keating, a senior vice president, said only, �We don�t comment on our supply chain vendors.�
Lenovo e-mailed a general report on sustainability. Samsung, which sells more cellphones than Apple, gave no response.

It's odd that companies that usually are very vocal about their strengths against Apples products suddenly falls silent when asked about the very thing Apple has been very open about since 2006. Why can't Samsung release information about their supply chain labor conditions?

Amazon declined to comment specifically about worker conditions in the factories of its suppliers, which include Foxconn, but pointed to a section of its site that mentions audits by a third party, which are not made public.

We're looking into it, but it's a secret, so you can't know.

I've always said that it's silly for Apple to be held to a different standard than all these companies, yet still I would like to applaud their openness in this respect.

Apple Releases Update to Java for OS X

2012-04-04T07:04:00Z

Presumably to fix the security hole, although their info doesn't mention it specifically

macrumors.com

New Flashback Trojan Variant Doesn't Need A Password to Infect Your Mac

2012-04-03T13:04:00Z

Apple needs to fix this immediately.

gizmodo.com

It seems to require Java to be installed, which isn't installed with the system, but is easily installed (albeit prompted) when needed.

Foxconn Workers Express Concern Over Reduced Overtime

2012-04-03T07:04:00Z

Workers express dissatisfaction with western morals

macrumors.com

I tell you, a lot of us are unhappy with this. We think that 60 hours of overtime a month would be reasonable

Some people are never satisfied. But it goes to show that sometimes our western values don't always mix with eastern culture, and that morals isn't a worldwide concept.

Apple forced to give two years warranty for consumers in the European Union

2012-04-02T17:04:00Z

It's about time. It's odd how long they have managed to escape that.

yourdailymac.net

Apple Increases iAd Payout to Developers to 70%

2012-04-02T14:04:00Z

Good form!

macrumors.com

RIM's fourth quarter financial train wreck

2012-03-30T15:03:00Z

Looks like a winner

loopinsight.com

Android lock-in

2012-03-30T11:03:00Z

Jason Perlow, senior Technology Editor at ZDNet is now saying that he is sick of Android mainly because Google has failed to manage the ecosystem and that handset makers are unwilling to update older devices to newer OS versions.

This has been my main gripe with Android since the beginning. The user buys a device and is left in the dark just months after that. With Android 4 being on only 1.6% of all Android devices in the world and the vast vast majority running on Android 2, a OS release that is about two years old (2 years for 2.0 Froyo and a year and a half for 2.3 Gingerbread).

Android advocates usually crow about being locked in to Apples ecosystem with the App Store, and while that's true, sideloading on Android is not something the normal user ever does, and is about as complicated as jailbreaking an iPhone (which is not illegal) to do the same.

So you end up with a device that is supposedly more "open", which most people never take advantage of, and you find yourself locked in to the whim of your handset maker, who has more interest in selling you a new device rather than updating your old.

This is an image of my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. As you can see, it is still on march 30, 2012, running Android 3.2. Android 4.0 was released on October 19, 2011 - five months ago! Samsung keeps promising that it will be released, but never delivers.

And this just isn't right. It's lazy management from Google and a pain in the ass for the users. There is no Android feature set that users can talk about. Most are on Android 2 and have to get a new device in order to upgrade to the features that Google advertises, which most likely would run on most of these devices had it not been for the handset makers!

iOS is a whole other story. While Apple doesn't supply us with actual statistics, we can still make a good guess from looking at web statistics, and game4mob has done that and their numbers (while being sampled from a fairly low number) show that the latest version is used my the majority of iPhone users out there. Let's be pessimistic and skew this unfavorably and say that only one third of iPhone users are using the latest version.

But while that's interesting, the more interesting part of why so "few" are running iOS 5 is not that they can't, but more probably that they just haven't bothered. Most current iOS devices out there support the latest version and can easily be updated. Unlike the vast majority of Android devices. They can't be updated (easily, by the user) to the latest version because they are locked in to the Android messed up ecosystem of handset makers not making it their priority.

Media center roundup

2012-03-30T08:03:00Z

Microsoft have announced that their entertainment services overtakes gaming on Xbox live. In short - more people are using it for movies, music and other media more than for games. The metric seems to be time spent doing a particular task category rather than money spent on it, not that I know whether than would change anything.

Anyone who knows their Xbox history knows that tons of people hacked their original Xbox and installed the Xbox Media Center (or xbmc as it's called), which made it to a really good media center box with network support, huge support for pirated file formats and auto-downloading of cover art and movie information.

So, if we consider how much time people are spending on their Xbox these days outside of gaming, it's clear that the Xbox is more directly competing with the less popular AppleTV box from Apple. But if we leave hacking out of the equation, what media center is the best?

Comparison
�	Xbox 360	Playstation 3	AppleTV
Resolution	1080p	1080p	1080p
Noise	45dB	35dB	-
Pirate files
Gaming
Bluray
DVD
Remote Control
Media store
TV/Movie rentals
Streaming
Community
Price	$250	$250	$99

I've always liked the Xbox, best product Microsoft ever released. It does make too much noise, even though the slimmer model is quieter. The AppleTV, having no moving parts, makes no noise at all of course.

Some explanations. Playstations does have video services/media store, like Mubi, but they're so crappy so I won't mention them. Neither the Xbox or the Playstations comes with a remote control (and the game controller doesn't count here), which has to be bought seperately. The AppleTV remote isn't brilliant, but it is bundeled. And even though the add-on remotes for both PS3 and Xbox are better than Apples, the Apple Remote app for iPod/iPhone/iPad trumps them all.

And as noted, each device have their own strengths and weaknesses, were the price most certainly is AppleTV strongest, plus it undeniably has access to more content. The Xbox wins on community and versatility for sure. How I wish that AppleTV at least had some minor small games comparable to the Xbox live Arcade games at least.

If Apple wants to compete in this market, it's time to move AppleTV out of the hobby state. Bring the App Store to it would be my first advice, that way, you can get more content, and content-providers can easily put the content they want on it.

Microsoft Bans Employees From Using Apple Products As Work Machines

2012-03-22T12:03:00Z

Email sent to 46,000 Microsoft employees:

From: Alain Crozier Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2012 1:17 PM
Subject: Apple Purchases
Within SMSG we are putting in place a new policy that says that Apple products (Mac & iPad) should not be purchased with company funds.
In the US we will be turning off the Apple products from the Zones Catalog next week, which is the standard purchasing mechanism for these products.
Outside of the US ? we will work with your finance and procurement teams to send the right message and put the right processes in place.
The current purchase levels are low, however we recognize there will be a bit of transition work associated with this. Details of historical purchases in the US are provided in the attachment to help understand the changes that will be needed.Thank you for your support and leadership on this.
Alain Crozier CFO | WW Sales, Marketing & Services Group WW SMSG Finance

ZDnet

Now go back in time fifteen years. It's not impossible that Apple would have made a similar ban on Microsoft products for their employees - and the problem back then would have been that for whatever reason - some employees would have HAD to used Microsoft products. most likely because a specific piece of software was Windows-only.

The difference today and fifteen years back is not that Microsoft employees have to use iPads or iPhones for similar reasons. It's that they want to. A company that have to enforce bans to force their employees to use their products have some serious problems that can't be fixed with a ban.

Amiga mini

2012-03-02T00:03:00Z

Commodore USA recently released the Amiga mini, which basically has nothing to do with the Amiga we all knew and loved in the mid eighties. It has some impressive hardware in a small case and comes installed with a OS called "Commodore OS Vision", which is based on Debian and Linux Mint. It also comes with a Amiga emulator to run all your old games like Giana Sisters and Pinball Dreams.

What I find odd is the design, it sort of looks like something, but what? Oh yes, it's the original Mac mini! Only, it's over twice as big.

OSX Mountain Lion, iOS edition

2012-02-17T08:02:00Z

So OSX Mountain Lion doesn't really seem to contain much news in the area of desktop computing as far as can be seen. Just more features moving from iOS "back to the mac" as they put it with Lion.

Is the desktop OS era finally over. With the two prime OS vendors focusing on mobile operating system with the normal desktop being somewhat of an after thought.

I'm not sure I'd say this is bad, but it is with a nostalgic sigh I watch it happen. I remember the days when things like Expos� and Spotlight was introduced and you felt that this really is in the forefront of desktop OS progression. The kind of features that made executives of Microsoft send panic emails around asking how Apple had been able to do it so quickly and smoothly.

I kind of miss those days. OSX and Windows are at a stale mate and neither camp seem to be able to innovate anything at the moment. Because Mountain Lion really isn't innovative, they're just ripping off another OS. Sure, they actually made that OS as well.

And if "Launchpad" is any indication, there is a risk that the stolen features from iOS may just be a huge stupid mess on OSX.

To be clear though, I see nothing wrong with innovation in either OS (OSX/iOS) spilling over to the other, but I get the feeling that a lot of things on OSX is being altered to meet the smallest common denominator. We've seen this with iCal that had a UI makeover that made it less useful and more like the iPad version that itself has UI choices due to screen real estate issues that just aren't a problem on a Mac. The same happened to the Address Book application, that for reasons unknown now can only display two columns instead of the three it could prior to Lion (groups -> list -> contact), which makes it less useful on the Mac.

Looking at the screens of Mountain Lion, the same thing seems to be at play here. Apps like Reminders and Notes are being copy and pasted into the Mac almost identically as they appear on the iPad. But will these new apps be fully grown OSX citizens? Will they support AppleScript? Will they allow for Drag and Drop? These are the things that were natural for not only Apples applications but also a staple for Mac developers as a unit. You adhered to the common way to make applications using the foundation of the OS as a starting point.

It worries me when the OS that is the starting point for OSX applications is iOS, not because iOS is bad, but because OSX has a foundation tailor-made for the desktop.

The same goes with functions like the Mountain Lion notification center, which apparently will only allow verified applications to post notifications, whereas the current de facto standard notification center, Growl, is fully open for third party interaction.

Apple, don't forget the desktop user!

Macs and iCloud

2011-10-24T11:10:00Z

So, how stupid doesn't this seem to be? We've gone from having to connect your iOS device to iTunes and drag files that we want on the device to upload documents to icloud.com to get them on the device.
Basically, we've only eliminated the cable.

There is no syncing to and from the Mac. It syncs automatically between iOS devices over iCloud but not the Mac. There is no "sync this document with iCloud" option in the applications. You have to use
Safari to upload it to iCloud and then manually download it and replace the file on your Mac for the Mac to have the latest version.

Why am I doing this via a web browser? It should all be handled in the applications! There should be a "open from iCloud" that shows the current files in iCloud, and the should be a "Sync to iCloud" setting
for the document...

iOS 5

2011-10-13T13:10:00Z

The Bad

Newsstand really is just a wrapper for the magazine apps out there. I thought it would be a new unifying app framework (like iBooks). I also dislike how it looks different from the rest of the phone. It opens like a folder from an icon, but can hold more than twelve items, it has a built in "Store" button in this weird folder view. Why isn't it like iBooks? In fact, in iBooks we have "Books" and "PDFs", why not "Magazines" and then use the same store? The reason is, of course, that it's "just" a wrapper. It's just an alternate way to look at the same magazine apps.

Reminders will probably be better with Siri, but I like the entire geofence ideas. But apart from that, Reminders is a fairly limited todo list app. I use OmniFocus which is a true GTD app which syncs with my iPad and my Mac. How do I get to my Reminders on my Mac?

Twitter is on the bad list because it's only Twitter. Why not an open framework? Why couldn't app developers provide app credential plugins for the iPhone? So I download a Facebook plugin, a Tumblr plugin and whereever I can share something, all these services pop up. Windows Metro seems to do this correctly, and only Twitter is half-baked, even if it is the number one largest sharing service aside of Facebook.

The good

Airplay mirroring is fantastic. Mirror the entire iPad 2 screen to your TV via the ATV and you instantly have a Wii-class console with ten times as many games. I played Real Racing HD 2 which supports TV out - which led to 1080p of gaming goodness on my tv with the iPad as the controller in my hand.

The new notification center is awesome, and has great control over the details and settings for how each app can notify you, which is great. To decide what gets shown on the lock screen is golden! I know that Android has had this for a while, and it has been an area where it has been ahead. Not any more.

I haven't been able to test iMessage out much, but I bet it will replace WhatsApp on my phone. I just hope that iMessage is being brought to Lion soon enough, which would mean that regardless of what devide I'm on, I could communicate with all of my friends.

The camera app is a lot better for two reasons - lock screen access and volume button shutter. Easy, quick. Photo editing in iOS is severly limited, but being able to rotate and quickly fix small stuff is a nice addition.

The entire PC free, wireless sync and wireless update is amazingly good of course. Another catching up-feature, but still. The Safari additions like Reader and Reading List are small but welcome. It's odd that it took this long for Reader to come to iOS. The multi-touch gestures for iPad is also really nice to have at hand for us that have grown used to the gestures in Liion.

Who copied who?

2011-08-19T10:08:00Z

I think the recent lawsuit from Apple towards Samsung is just plain dumb. If you read the the claims, they are outlined where Apple claims that the Galaxy Tab is infringing on the Ipad for these reasons:

A square shape with rounded corners
A flat shiny surface
A metal frame is visible from the front
A screen is centered in the shiny surface
When turned on, colored icons are shown.

Wtf? You can't protect that! That's just plain dumb. Not only does it exactly describe this:

But there is more. I wonder if there was any company prior to the iPad... or the iPhone, that made a product that not only fits the above criteria - but also looks a lot like an iPad? Well, yes there is - and that company is called Samsung!

March 2006. Square with rounded corners, shiny surface, metal frame. Check check check. I'm sure it has colored icons somewhere when turned on (a claim that is dubious to say the least, since the Samsung galaxy tab runs honeycomb, which doesn't necessarily show colored icons when turned on - i.e. home screen)

Apple, you're being dumb. Stop it.

Lion: First impressions

2011-07-22T10:07:00Z

I've just installed OSX Lion and here are some of my first impressions

Which, of course, it did. Lion is really snappy

Dog Slow

Upon finishing installation, it does some thorough indexing which slows down the computer a lot. I certainly hope that when the indexing is done, it will be snappier.

Too Grey

The Finder has lost its color. No color icons in the sidebar, and it's all a grey mess, which I don't like at all. Same goes with all apps - icons in the toolbar are all grey stylized symbols lent from iOS. It's just boring.

Mission Control

It's pretty nice, and I like how they have incorporated all window management tasks into one view.

LaunchPad

This is a worthless piece of junk. You can't search like you can in iOS, and they have done away with all general UI for the Mac and totally replaced it with iOS style interaction, which sucks. So to re-arrange, you press and hold, and enter jiggle mode. You can't select more then one icon at a time, you can't drag-select or shift-select any icons. You can't create folders by cmd-shift-N, only by dragging one app over another. You can't even command-click an icon to reveal it in the finder. As I said, this is a worthless piece of shit.

Classic layout

I found that you can enable "classic layout" in mail, where you get the columns back. Nice!

Mail

I really don't like the new Mail. Again with the grey boring looks of it, but what I dislike the most is the three-pane view (when you display the folders). I don't want that. So I drag the divider to the far right, but then I have no columns, only a fairly stupid list view, which works fine in iOS, but not here.

Also, they've removed the Mail todos functionality. I can no longer make a selection in the text of a mail and make a todo out of it. That sucks.

iCal

It's made to look like a leather calendar. This is STUPID AS FUCK. Stop doing this, Apple! I don't want my software calendar to look like a real calendar. If I did, I'd fucking use a real calendar. iCal is also iOS-crippled with the calendar list being a pop-out from a button in the upper left corner. And it's fixed size! It doesn't actually show all my calendars even though screen space would permit it! This sucks! I want to see all my calendars all the time!

Scrolling

I changed back to normal scrolling immediately. That was a stupid idea.

Full screen

All Windows-joking aside, the full screen modes is nothing like full screen in windows. For better and worse. Accessing the dock seems flimsy, it seems I have to move the mouse to the bottom of the screen, and when it can't travel further down, pause, and then move it downwards again, the cursor stays in the same place, but this registers as a "double down" or something, which shows the dock. Unintutive and clumsy. Also, if I have 5 spaces, and have mail set to space 2. I always press cmd-alt-2 to go to my mail. Right, but when I set mail to full screen, it actually creates a new space in between 2 and 3, which as *NO KEYBOARD SHORTCUT* WTF? All I can do is cmd-TAB to it, or use the dock (double down!!)

Open dialogs

You can't drag a file to a open dialog to quickly select it anymore! What the hell?? This was one of the most useful function of OSX ever!

Safari

Seems like a nice update, quick as ever, broke some CSS for me on my CMS, will look into that. Reader List seems useful, probably more so with iOS 5.

In conclusion I think I can say that borrowing too much from iOS isn't necessarily a good thing. There are things about the Mac UI that we like, and there are things about the iOS UI that we like, they're not always interchangeable though.

Nokia is swiping

2011-06-22T09:06:00Z

It's no secret that Nokia has been hurt badly and haven't been able to keep up with the current smartphone market. They are now introducing the Nokia N9, and it's all about swiping. Basically, it has not a single hard button, all interaction is via the touch screen. I for one welcome this. I think the device is good looking and the UI looks awesome. It shows the same promise I feel that Windows Phone 7 has, meaning that they aren't copying another player straight off, they are trying to bring something new to the table.

Here is a hands-on video of the N9, and it looks pretty sweet. Not much information about technical aspects of the operating system or battery time. But apparently it's a 1Ghz single-core CPU, and it's super smooth.

Good work, Nokia. I hope this saves you!

iPad in your car

2011-06-21T11:06:00Z

I wonder which car manufacturer who will be the first to incorporate an iPad into the dashboard of a car. We know that car makers are keen to include iPod connectivity in their cars, and iPad seems like the next logical step. Sure, everything I'm about to write applies to any given iPhone or even iPod touch, but with the iPad, you get that nice big screen which is why I think this would be desirable.

Think about it and it's a pretty neat thing. The best thing for the car maker would be to make it an optional thing. You'd order your BMW or whatever brand it is and in the dash you have a 10 inch plate, ready for an iPad. Only, if you order it without it, you get an ordinary car stereo plate inserted into the space. It's exchangeable, so if you change your mind, it actually disconnects and you can then insert one of two iPad-optimized inserts. One for a more permanent fixture. I.e. it blends in that awesome 10 inch screen into the dash and it stays there. The other option is to have it easily removable. You can click in your own iPad into place, and take it with you if you please. With iOS 5 and data syncing via iCloud, I'd think this wouldn't be a necessary thing. All your music, photos and such sync to your "car iPad". And the more permanent solution would still allow for disconnect if you want to sync large movies to it for some reason.

As for how it would be used, that's where the sweet stuff comes into play. Using the 30-pin connector, you can have a button on the dash that launches the "BMW Dashboard app" which is a free download from the App store. Using that app, you can control most of everything in the car. Sure, some basic functionality would still be available via hard buttons and knobs on the dash, but the app would provide a much more intuitive way to set up the radio, stereo equalizer, suspension dampening, automatic distance to cars when in cruise control and god knows what. When you put the car in reverse, the app would launch and display the video from the rear video camera.

When not using the car app, you'd download your preferred GPS and have a 10 inch GPS screen on your dashboard, instead of using the manufacturers crappy GPS solutions, or an on-dash solution. The car would obviously tap right into the audio and you could listen to iPod, podcasts, Pandora, Last.fm, Spotify and whatnot on the road.

Using airplay, movies on your iPad would play on the two headrest screens for your kids, while your GPS runs on the iPad. You can even initiate Facetime calls from your car if you'd like.

Where do I order this car? :)

Microsoft has received five times more income from Android than from Windows Phone

2011-05-29T10:05:00Z

Microsoft gets $5 for every HTC phone running Android, according to Citi analyst Walter Pritchard, who released a big report on Microsoft this morning.
Microsoft is getting that money thanks to a patent settlement with HTC over intellectual property infringement.
Microsoft is suing other Android phone makers, and it�s looking for $7.50 to $12.50 per device, says Pritchard.
HTC Pays Microsoft $5 Per Android Phone, Says Citi.

Clever! If you can't make money on your own technology, use patents to make money from competitors technology!

www.asymco.com...

Flash on Xoom

2011-04-15T15:04:00Z

So, Neil McAllister have been trying out Flash for the Xoom tablet, and here are some impressions:

Streaming video is the most popular application for Flash today, so I tried that first. Ironically, I had a hard time finding demo cases. The Xoom ships with a video player that automatically launches when you view content from YouTube or Dailymotion, so you don't need Flash for those sites. On the other hand, Hulu wouldn't work even with Flash installed; all it would say was, "Unfortunately, this video is not available on your platform. We apologize for any inconvenience."

Wait, what? YouTube launches in a separate app? What's up with that? Wasn't the entire idea of Flash that you didn't need separate apps for these services?

On sites where I could view Flash video -- such as Comedy Central and MTV -- results were mixed. Playback quality was mostly good but a little choppy at times, and audio occasionally seemed slightly out of sync. Videos that looked sharp in full-screen mode seemed to degrade in picture quality when shrunk to smaller sizes. Worse, some of the Flash video players' controls were almost impossible to activate, given the tablet's touchscreen interface.

Well, all of this is highly unexpected.

As I continued my tests, it became clear that these initial problems weren't limited to streaming video. In general, the Flash Player for Android 3.0 does not do a good job of scaling bitmap images. This becomes especially clear when scaling bitmapped text, which becomes blocky and hard to read at small sizes.
The difficulties of navigating Flash UIs on a touchscreen device are increasingly troublesome, and unfortunately they're endemic to the Flash platform. Flash developers are even more likely than traditional Web developers to populate their UIs with rollovers, fancy animations, and aesthetically appealing yet nonstandard controls, none of which work well on a device with a small screen and no mouse

I'm quite certain that someone have raised these issues before, but I can't think of who that might be.

Scrolling the screen is a particularly egregious example. Android tablets don't use the traditional scroll bars of a mouse-based UI; instead, users swipe with their fingers to scroll. Flash apps don't seem to understand this concept. Once a Flash movie loads into part of the browser window, that part of the window no longer responds to swipes. If you need to scroll the window -- say, to make sure the Flash content is centered on the screen -- you have to carefully touch your finger on a portion of the page that corresponds to HTML, so the browser will know you're trying to scroll.

This won't be a problem of course, since the ones writing the browser will just adapt the code for the Flash plugin to correctly interprete... ooops. This is what happens when you allow for a third party to control the user experience on your device.

The worst part is the player's inconsistent behavior. This gets really frustrating when there's lots of HTML and Flash content mixed on a Web page. The UI turns into a tug-of-war between the browser and the Flash Player, where each touch produces varying effects, seemingly at random. Depending on where your finger happens to land -- and maybe on your timing -- one touch might be interpreted as a command for the browser and the next might activate controls in a Flash movie, while the next might do nothing. Adobe simply has not done enough to accommodate touch-based interfaces.

And remember, they haven't done enough to accomodate for touch interfaces *within the flash object* on top of not playing well with the touch interface where the object is embedded. It's like two layers of stupid for the price of one.

Needless to say, these deficiencies are compounded when you try to use Flash Player for real work. For my next assessment I wanted to see how the Xoom would handle complex Flash-based applications. I had the perfect torture test in mind: Adobe's own Acrobat.com [8], which features a Google Docs-like suite of office applications implemented in Flash. Unfortunately, on the Xoom I was greeted with the message, "Sorry, but Adobe Acrobat.com is not compatible with your browser at this time. Please upgrade to a supported browser." That should have been my first hint.

Great job, Adobe!

When I did track down some demo Adobe Flex applications that would load in the Android browser, my reaction was utter disappointment. Visually they were appealing enough, but they didn't do much to accommodate the tablet-sized screen, which meant I had to scroll around a lot (where possible). The UI controls were all nonstandard, and many assumed I had a mouse.

Much like most AppStore apps... Oh wait.

Worst of all was form input, a mainstay of any business application. When presented with a Flash-based form, I literally had to stab my finger at the Xoom's screen six or seven times before my touch would register as a click. Finally some random form field would be highlighted, irrespective of where my finger landed, and the onscreen keyboard would pop up. Woe betide me if the wrong field was highlighted, though, because Tab and Shift-Tab would both advance me forward through the form fields. There didn't seem to be any way to go back, and I dared not try to select another field by touch. In a nutshell, Flash-based forms are a total nonstarter on Android tablets. Forget about them.

Forms, something introduced to the web around 1994, are a non-starter for flash on the Xoom. Wow.

What about games? Even there, I didn't have much luck. One simple balloon-popping game rendered in my browser window, then inexplicably leaped up and to the left, leaving a white square where the Flash content was supposed to be

Again, much like how games from the AppStore behaves...

As far as I could tell, there was one thing and one thing only that the Flash Player for Android 3.0 accomplished successfully. On the stock Android browser, Flash content is invisible, so you don't notice Flash-based advertising. With the Flash Player installed, however, all those ads suddenly appear where once there were none

Score!!!

www.infoworld.com...

Why do apps from the same company look worse on Android than on iPhone?

2011-04-08T13:04:00Z

Since the apps of interest are from the same company, they should have the same user interface standard, even if the iPhone versions and the Android versions are developed by different people. But why do they look so different? Is it because iPhone developers are better at user interface design? Is it because the iPhone development environment is better than the Android�s? Is it because iPhone users care more about user interface? Or is it because Android itself implants the ignorance of beauty, usability and focus on details into the community at the first place?

Funny comparison of some screens from companies that have considerably nicer looking apps on iPhone than their Android counterparts.

android-gripes.tumblr.com...

Android 3.0 not open source, yet.

2011-03-27T13:03:00Z

Google says it will delay the distribution of its newest Android source code, dubbed Honeycomb, at least for the foreseeable future. The search giant says the software, which is tailored specifically for tablet computers that compete against Apple's iPad, is not yet ready to be altered by outside programmers and customized for other devices, such as phones.

Yeah, open source software is great!