Category: Uncategorized

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.

Actual picture of Yours Truly taken with the “With Mitt” app.

The “With Mitt” app — an app created as a promotional tool for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign — contains the worst possible typo: in it, “America” is misspelled as “Amercia”. Let this be a lesson to all you mobile app developers trying to develop and deploy an app in a hurry: make sure you’ve got someone, preferably someone removed from the development process, to check the graphics and text of your apps!

Getting the contract to build the Romney app must’ve been a dream for the developers at first: relatively simple to program, heavily promoted as part of a presidential campaign and sure to be downloaded by many, many users. Now, I’m sure that’s a nightmare for them: an embarrassing gaffe, an angry customer and a tarnished rep for quality.

My recommendation would be for the developers to own up to it and perhaps even publish a “lessons learned” article. It’s far better to own the mistake than to have a potential client do due diligence and then discover that they were the people behind “the app that misspelled America for the Romney campaign”.

If you’re curious, go check my entry in the Accordion Guy blog, where I have a little fun with the app.

Designing for Mobile is a gallery of app user interfaces collected by an app designer from Xanadu, a mobile design and development shop, who documents interesting UI patterns that s/he comes across.

Way less wired in 2016: In Cisco’s most recent edition of its Visual Networking Index, they predict that wifi and cellular will account for 60% of all internet traffic by 2016. This is quite a contrast from last year, when wifi accounted for 40% of all ‘net traffic, will cellular making up about 2%.

The mismatch between the growth in mobile usage and making money from mobile (I’m trying to avoid using the word “monetization”), explained. Remember, there was once a mismatch between the growth in internet usage and making money from it, too.

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty recently paid a visit to Shopify, where he got a tour of the swanky (and large) new offices and chatted with the C-level Shopifolks. The video above is a quick summary of the visit, and there’s also a blog entry on the visit on the Premier’s blog.

Congrats, guys!