After Shit Silicon Valley Says comes Shit Programmers Say. There’s a swear word at the end, so if you’re at an office that doesn’t tolerate salty language, make like the programmers in the video and switch to headphones!
I guess this is a lesson to people who make long-form ads with only music and no voice-over: someone’s going to take your ad and add their own, just like the YouTube user known as “Raboneable”, who did just that with the ad for Asus Eee Pad Transformer. Watch the video above and enjoy the lulz.
I’ve heard the back-and-forth debate about whether you should write your phone app as a native app or as a web app more times that I care to recall, but it’s never been done as well as Jason Alderman and Matthias Shapiro do it…rap battle style!
By the bye, if you’re building stuff for WPF, Silverlight or Windows Phone, you really should be reading Matthias’ blog, Designer Silverlight. I’ve already bookmarked it, and so should you!
And for the truly nerdcore, here are the lyrics:
Jason: You bought three coding books for reading on your Kindle, They never got read, the whole deal is a swindle, Pony annual fees for app sales, then they tax it, I’m telling you man, that app store is a racket! You are MUCH better off with HTML– The web page markup that I know you know well– The latest spec lets you store data on phones Even when offline, but the browser phones home! Your iPhone, Android, Palm, soon Blackberry: Local data storage! SQL! it’s no worry!
Matthias: Cross platform apps are a real seduction But you give up your form, and most of your function And your app, it hobbles in the passing lane Like a one-legged zombie but with far less brains Running your crap on the web, no performance Mine is greased lightning, you run like a tortoise You don’t understand the mental model users are adopting They don’t want to hit the web, they want one-stop shopping Here’s how you make an application fun Turn it on, do your thing, turn it off and you’re done
Jason: When the iPhone came out, sure the browser was slow, But the new smartphones? half a gigahertz or mo’ That’s faster than the box on which your mom does her taxes Pretty snappy–WinME!–, but now it’s like molasses In praxis? I already write scripts, it’s easy Better than compiling native code till my teeth bleed Time that I saved, I put in media queries, add UserAgent switch statement, stylesheets fear me! Custom chrome, each phone? Modus operandi. Willy Wonka’s schooled by my custom eye candy!
Matthias: Did that school teach usability cause I think you missed it With apps for devices the use is holistic Gotta look act like you belong, not draw their attention Like a steam punker crashing an Avatar convention Use is more than just Chrome and colors, look at navigation Modern users look for standard gestures, menus, animations, And what about the richness of movement & location Do you want to surf the web or record your whole vacation? When I tilt your web app, it’s just stuck in a groove With my purely native code I can bust a move.
Jason: But that’ll only improve–heck, web apps get location And if the case came where I needed acceleration I’d wrap my web app in the library Phonegap–
Matthias: Excuses, excuses, You’re giving mobile a bum rap Try adding 3D to your list of what apps do Or write a game that’s not scrabble, chess or sudoku And you know CSS competes with OpenGL Like a cub scout against 10 marines with a 50 cal Boom! 3D mushroom cloud filling the room Now go back your text adventure version of Doom
Jason: Sure games make money, but think of their use, They’re casual, waiting in line at Jamba Juice, You’re making the mistake of the hardcore PSP, When a simple DS meets the goal just as easily Heavy duty third-dimension graphics drain the life Of your battery, more than the scripts I’m paid to write. But, hey, if you want 3-D page flip transitions, Perspective transforms of element positions, Web apps can do that, CSS has you covered, To your Mel Gibson, C-S-S is Danny Glover! (I’m too old for this!)
Matthias: CSS animations, are you out of your gourd? That’s a terrible sin in the eyes of the web lord. Every time I bring up something hard You just dance around it, pulling out your library card Or some spec or framework only halfway done As if javascript and CSS are rainbows and fun Look, there’s only one way that this thing can go Build your web apps for free or jump into the cash flow Advertising won’t help you survive But just one little iFart can get you set for life No app store, no eyeballs, no business plan. Making just enough dough to pay the rent on your trash can I hate to play the role of Scrooge McDuck But without a good market you’re pretty much… well, you know
Jason: Trash can? Your app waits in limbo for a month, You’re stuck eating ramen, watching reruns of Monk. Your funk? Only lifted if the app store approves it And we both know the king of the process is ruthless! The truth is, even if it does get approved There’s a chance that your make-it-rich dream comes unglued When a bug in your app that slipped through the process Makes users hate it, they leave lots of comments, And you fix it real quick, test patches and submit it But it still takes a month, so your app gets attritted From all the top ten lists, losing all worth, It’s a digital coaster, like "Battlefield Earth"! My apps sell anywhere, and update on the fly. You can’t have your cake OR eat it, ’cause the cake is a lie.
You’ve heard the stories about people choosing terribly obvious passwords for their various computer accounts, such as “password” and “12345”, but what are the other ones? In his book, Perfect Passwords: Selection, Protection, Authentication, Mark Burnett compiled the most common easy-to-crack passwords, most of which are ordinary words or key sequences that are easy to type on a QWERTY keyboard. I’m amused by some of the pop culture-based passwords, such as “Rush2112”, “8675309” and the X-Files inspired “TrustNo1”.
Someone else — I don’t who who did it — decided to turn that list into the hand-lettered poster shown above. You can click it to see it at a larger size.
In addition to being a good list showing the sort of password you shouldn’t use, it’s also a great name generator. You could take two random items from the list to create new character names for a Metal Gear game (“Tomcat Eagle1” makes just about as much sense as “Solid Snake” or “Sniper Wolf”) or any three to come up with the name of your band or prison softball team (“Bigdick Magnum Juice”).
As I quipped in an earlier post, the name “Windows Phone 7 Series” is a bit long, and suggests that the people who do Microsoft’s branding get paid by the syllable. This is the sort of left-brain-lopsided mindset that has produced names like “Windows Server 2008 R2”.
How’d I miss this video? At TechDays Winnipeg, Dylan Smith of ANVIL Digital (and speaker in the “Fundamentals” track), showed me this it’s-funny-because-it’s-true video that’s been around since May that looks at the vexing expectations that clients have of vendors in IT and the creative industries: