Month: June 2012

Android 4.0, a.k.a. “Ice Cream Sandwich”, is now on slightly more than 7% of the Android devices out there. Android 2.3.3 is still the dominant version out there, accounting for about two-thirds of all Android devices, and its share is actually growing.

While Ice Cream Sandwich’s growth represents a doubling of share since early April, MG “ParisLemon” Siegler astutely notes that it took 7 months to hit the 7% mark. He also notes that the Google I/O conference, where they’re expected to announce the next version is coming soon, and:

Google will announce the next version of their OS before 10% of their users are on the last version. Think about how insane that is for a second.

Compare this to the growth rate of iOS 5, which surpassed a 20% adoption rate in 5 days by Chitika’s measure.

Higher Hanging Fruit: iMore’s list of features that iOS 6 could borrow from other mobile OSs. An interesting think piece on some great ideas already in other mobile operating systems that Apple could borrow for iOS 6, which will probably be covered at the upcoming WWDC.

Why is Todd Bishop struggling with Windows 8? Todd Bishop says it feels like a forced mashup between desktop and tablet. ComputerWorld has also expressed the same sentiment.

Maintenance and upkeep in action!

Maintaining an app is critical to its overall success. This argument argues that maintaining and upkeeping your apps is as important as their launch.

Click image above to download my resume (107KB PDF).

My summer vacation continues nicely, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have an eye out for my next opportunity. I’ve spent a little time fielding calls from recruiters and other interested parties while still enjoying my time off, marvelling at junk food, hitting flea markets and going to the beach.

I’ve been getting requests for my resume, and when that happens, I say “my LinkedIn profile is my resume”. As a living document within LinkedIn’s web application, it’s always up-to-date, easily found either via Google or LinkedIn’s own search feature and accessible anywhere and on any device that can view web pages. LinkedIn profiles have a reputation of being more honest than a paper resume; as public documents, it’s much harder to lie, exaggerate or otherwise “fudge” since it’s all too easy for people to call you out.

There are those who still would prefer a regular-format resume from me, so I’ve created one, and you can download it here (107KB PDF). It’s in PDF format, so it should look good no matter whether you’re viewing it on a computer, tablet or mobile phone or printing it out. It has the same content as my LinkedIn profile; I simply copied the text from my LinkedIn profile and pasted it into a resume document and then formatted it a little.

If you’re either wondering if I’m the right guy for your company or if you’re just plain curious, feel free to take a look at my resume.

The article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

A most unfortunate headline. I found this via George Takei and CrackBerry.com. A source within RIM says these layoffs could happen as early as today.

Windows 8: An Android Killer? When I was a Windows Evangelist, I argued that Android should be the target, not the iPhone, because Android provided an opportunity to win over their users (who weren’t anywhere nearly as devoted to the brand as iPhone users were) as well as developers (since the development experience for Windows Phone was, in my opinion, far nicer than for Android). Stonewash’s Daniel Sharp is working with Windows 8 and has come to appreciate the Windows Phone developer experience, writing:

Working with Windows 8 is simple and enjoyable: we spend our time adding new features and improving performance. Working with Android is complicated and painful: we spend our time trying to make it work on the thousands of different variants, which is less than ideal and simplicity always wins.

LungoJS HTML5 Mobile Framework: its creators claim that it’s “the first Mobile Framework that uses the actual features of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.” I’ve given it only the most cursory of looks, but it seems interesting and I’ve bookmarked it for a closer look-see at a later time.

Chitika says that Apple has nearly two-thirds of mobile device usage in the U.S., ten times that of Samsung. Chitika is an advertising and analytics company, and their numbers come from metrics from sites on their network (details on their methodology are available here). You can see more of their numbers in their market share report for May 2012.

Here’s a PHP function that detects whether the visitor is on a mobile browser, and does so in 220 bytes. The function’s a one-liner, but it does a pretty good job of detecting mobile browsers. Better still, the article does a great job not just explaining how it works, but it also provides a number of great ways to use it.