Why Microsoft is Jealous of Apple
January 21, 2011
Microsoft has been struggling to find a new line of revenue that will ‘move the needle’ for more than a decade. Their stock price has gone down 8% relative to 10 years ago. As a comparison:
- AAPL (Apple): +3,701
- AMZN (Amazon) : +903%
- GM (General Motors): +8%
- PG (Proctor and Gamble): +87%
Photography
January 4, 2011
Photography has been a hobby of mine for the past few years. I decided to post some of my favorite shots on my website. You can view them here. The header image for the site was also created from one of these images.
Here are a few samples:
Smart phones: Open, Closed, and Fragmented
November 22, 2010
Android is Open, iOS is closed. Well, that is one way to look at it. Steve Jobs would prefer: Integrated vs. Fragmented. As we’ve learned from politics, (Estate Tax vs. Death Tax), how you name something can dramatically change people’s perceptions.
I don’t believe most of the facts in this discussion are in dispute. Apple and Google take a very different approach to their mobile operating systems.
Apple takes a very controlling closed/integrated approach. You can only publish an application on an iPhone if Apple approves it. The approval process can be opaque at times, though it is getting better. As Henry Ford said: “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black”; the iPhone comes in one color, one screen size, one form factor. Old devices are supported for a while with the latest OS, but users are certainly encouraged to run the latest OS, with a somewhat recent version of the hardware.
Android is a Success, but for Whom?
November 22, 2010
There is no arguing that the market share of devices built on the Open Source Android operating system is impressive. The Android platform, judged by adoption, is a success.
But who are the winners?
Google, who is spending the money to develop and market Android, obviously hopes to gain from their effort. While they do not sell Android, they support it to foster more traffic to Google and the web in general, which will, in theory, sell more ads. When asked about the ad revenue from Android, CEO Eric Schmidt said: “Trust me that revenue is large enough to pay for all of the Android activities and a whole bunch more." Google’s Jonathan Rosenberg estimated Google’s Android related revenue at $1b annually. However, this revenue is all indirect. Would Google be just as well off if the smart phone market were entirely iPhone devices defaulted to use Google and YouTube?
Fall at Rocky Mountain National Park
October 25, 2010
Last weekend I went to Rocky Mountain National Park to take in some of the fall colors. Here is what it looked like:
You can see more at my Flickr photostream.
Using Tycho to Build an OSGi Project
October 22, 2010
I recently migrated the build process for an application from a monolithic Eclipse Buckminster build to a Maven build using Tycho. Our source code was componentized and runs in an OSGi container, but our build was not, making it difficult to version each component individually.
Because all of our OSGi meta-data was already stored in the OSGi MANIFEST.MF files, we wanted a built process that would leverage that investment, while providing us the flexibility and functionality a generalized build tool provides. Maven and Tycho fit the bill.
Apple Deprecates Java, Escalates War on Flash
October 21, 2010
Apple made a few surprise moves yesterday. Engadget noticed that the new MacBook Air computers do not ship with a Flash Plug-in pre-installed. This is another escalation in the Apple vs. Flash battle that started with the iOS devices and is now creeping into the OS X computers. However, unlike iOS, you can still manually install the Flash Plug-in if you choose. In the end, this is an inconvenience, but nothing that can’t be resolved by a user in 5 minutes since Adobe develops the Flash Plug-in.
Forest Fires
September 7, 2010
Today while hiking near Estes Park, CO I saw smoke from two different forest fires. The larger fire was the Fourmile Canyon fire near Boulder that broke out this morning. It is not yet contained and the smoke can be seen throughout the Denver area.
The second fire was a smaller file near Lumpy Ridge in Estes Park. I believe there have been fires in this area already this year, and at this point this one is believed to be minor.
The Power of Simplicity
August 20, 2010
Small changes in functionality can make big impacts on usefulness, and therefore the value of tools and applications. This has always been true, but is more obvious on mobile devices where limited user input, network access, and screen size magnify the value of a good user experience (UX).
One example of this phenomenon is Wikipedia. On the iPhone, I can look up data on Wikipedia using Safari, or using one of the Wikipedia iPhone applications. At first glance, an iPhone Wikipedia application is absurd. After all, it simply uses the built in Safari to render public web pages to the user. The exact same pages can be viewed using the built in Safari browser, and you can add a bookmark directly to the Wikipedia page to your iPhone home screen. But one difference makes all the difference. That one difference is auto-completion. On the mobile site, Wikipedia does not provide for search auto-completion. You must type in a full search and execute it. If you searched correctly, you can then select the result and view the page. Using the application, you simply start typing, and then select the correct match of your partial search to view the page.
Is Scala Too Complex?
July 22, 2010
Is Scala too complex to become the ‘New Java’? This question has been debated before, and there are some good existing posts including:
- Is Scala really more complicated than Java? - Dick Wall (with discussion)
- Is Scala more complicated than Java? - Vassil Dichev I tend to mostly agree with their arguments that Scala is not inherently more complex, but instead is different and has complexity in different ways. The syntax is different, and you need to learn a few different rules, and some features like Traits (multi-inheritance) and implicit conversions can make tracking down how things work a bit more difficult. In the end though, I don’t believe Scala is itself more complex than Java.
But I want to take a different angle on this question. I believe that the use of Scala to build Domain Specific Languages illustrates how some of Scala’s features can be used to create code that can be complex to understand, but that may be OK.