Pictured from left to right: iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.
There are times when only Japan can come up with the right visual metaphor.
Found via Ray Higdon.
Don’t get me wrong, having technical skill is valuable. But as a reader of this blog, you may be aware that sometimes, we focus on tech skills almost exclusively, to the detriment of other ones, including people skills. Even the name we give them — soft skills — shows the low regard in which we hold them, despite the fact that time and again, they often make the difference between success and failure. There’s a reason why the phrase “unrecognized genius” is a cliche.
As techies, we’re often reading books to improve our abilities. Why not, instead of picking up one that will improve your grasp of a programming language, framework, or operating system, pick up a book on soft skills? John Sonmez’ book, Soft Skills: The Software Developer’s Life Manual, is a book that aims to teach those valuable people and life management skills in a way that appeals to software developers and other techies. It’s broken down into the following sections:
- Career: “Few software developers actively manage their careers,” Sonmez writes, “but the most successful developers don’t arrive at success by chance.” He starts off the book with a section that covers how to actively guide your career, the kinds of opportunities you might want to pursue, and how to navigate all the tricky passages you’ll encounter, whether it’s company politics, working for yourself or someone else, working on-site or remotely, the value of people skills, and the importance of not getting religious about technology.
- Marketing Yourself: As a developer turned marketer, I know the bad reputation that marketing has. When a developer says “So-so moved to marketing”, it’s usually said with the same tone of voice as “So-so died…horribly and painfully.” But we often forget that marketing gets people’s attention, drives them to take action, and when done properly and ethically, offers people real value and keeps them coming back for more. You can’t succeed in any aspect of business — or even life — if you don’t market yourself.
- Learning: In a field like ours — remember, the definition of “computable” isn’t even a century old yet — things are constantly changing, and as a result, we have to keep learning. Sonmez explains how to “keep your saw sharp”.
- Productivity: I’ve seen a lot of geeks whose productivity comes in great spikes followed by doldrums of getting nothing of consequence done. The technology we work with comes with powerful distractions, from social media to cat videos to videogames, and it’s all too easy to while away the time. This section has some great advice on how to get down and get to work, how to be accountable, and if necessary, how to deal with burnout.
- Financial: Since a techie career often pays pretty well, it’s surprising to outsiders how uninteresting money is to many of us. However, to quote a much-loved geeky literary work, with great compensation comes great financial responsibility. Sonmez covers money management, retirement plans, the stock market, real estate and other matters that you’d do well to consider. He includes some additional information about finances and stocks in the appendices.
- Fitness: A mind can’t stay sound in an unsound body, and this is something that Sonmez can write about with some authority, as he’s been into fitness since his teen years and entered his first bodybuilding competition when he was 18. He explains why and how you can hack your health, and even threw in some additional diet and nutritional information in the appendices.
- Spirit: Before you start backing away, what Sonmez means by “spirit” is that inner force or motivation that can either put you on the path to success or send you careening into the chasm of failure. This section covers facing life with the right attitude, coping with both success and failure, and even managing love and relationships. (And yes, he couldn’t resist throwing in a “forever alone” graphic into the “love and relationships” chapter.)
Don’t let the fact that the book has over 70 chapters worry you. As Sonmez points out in this Java Code Geeks interview, he broke the book into many small chapters so that it would be easier to read to the end of whatever chapter you were currently on, no matter how pressed you were for time. “I really wanted to make the book the kind of book that you enjoyed reading; a book that you could just pick up and read whatever parts happened to be relevant to you at the time.”
I wish I had this book when I was starting out on my career, but even at this stage of the game (20 years in, if you must know), there’s stuff in it that I found in Soft Skills that made me go, “Hey, I think I’ll try that.” If you’ve been thinking about picking up a new book to sharpen your saw, try a non-technical one — Soft Skills: The Software Developer’s Life Manual — for a change. You might find it paying off in more ways than you’d expect.
Bonus! Today only — Wednesday, June 10, 2015 — Soft Skills is available in ebook form for 50% off with the promo code dotd061015, which knows its price down to a mere US$13.99.
Chetan Sharma’s Q1 state of the mobile market report
You can always count on consultant Chetan Sharma to provide insights about the mobile industry that are more than just valuable; they’re quite interesting as well! In his latest report, titled US Mobile Market Update Q1 2015, he reports on the growth of cellular data consumption. It took 20 years for American mobile users to reach the point where the average cellular data consumption rate was 1 gigabyte a month, but less than 4 quarters for the average to become 2 gigabytes a month. At the end of the first quarter of 2015, the average is 2.5 gigabytes a month. In Q1 2015, the average mobile user consumed as much cellular data in 75 hours as the average mobile user in 2007 would’ve used in a year.
Click the graph to see it at full size.
Sharma has been paying attention to the growth in mobile data usage. In his mobile market update from the same time last year, he observed that mobile carriers had reached the point where more of their ARPU (average revenue per user) was coming from data than from voice, and that they’ve adjusted their business models accordingly. That’s why we’ve seen a reversal over the past few years; in the pre-iPhone era, voice calls were limited and data wasn’t, and nowadays the opposite is true for a lot of plans. In US Mobile Market Update Q1 2015, Sharma has this to say about mobile data:
- Mobile data contributes to 62% of mobile carriers’ overall revenues.
- US carriers made more than $100 billion from mobile data last year, and they’re like to hit $132 billion this year.
- The two biggest mobile carriers, AT&T and Verizon, accounted for 70% of mobile data services revenue and 68% of subscribers in Q1 2015.
- In 2015, Verizon will become the first carrier to generate more than $50 billion from mobile data.
Other interesting news items that appear in Sharma’s report:
- Smartphone penetration in the U.S. is now at 76%, and they represented 95% of mobile phones sold in Q1 2015. Non-smartphones (sometimes kindly referred to as “feature phones” and less kindly as “dumbphones”) are now an endangered species.
- Connected devices — non-phone, non-tablet devices that use cellular networking — accounted for just more than half of net-new added mobile accounts in Q4 2014, and they’ll make up the majority of new mobile accounts in general. The lion’s share of connected devices in that time period were cars, which made up 68% of the new additions.
- People want even more mobile data: half of AT&T’s postpaid subscribers have data plans that provide at least 10 gigabytes a month.
- Mobile data growth contributes to the revenue of more than just carriers. 70% of Facebook’s quarterly revenues come from mobile, as does 89% of Twitter’s advertising revenue. Outside the world of web businesses, Starbucks, Sears, and Hertz are also generating significant revenue from mobile.
- T-Mobile’s “Uncarrier” strategy is paying off. In Q1 2015, they had more than 40% of all the net-new subscribers. With less than 300,000 subscribers separating T-Mobile and the next-largest competitor, Sprint, we should see them take the #3 slot in the “Big Four” sometime this year. Sharma calls this “more or less just a symbolic event with the transfer of bragging rights”, but if there’s someone who can get mileage out of such a symbolic event, it’s T-Mobile CEO John Legere.
We could go on about Sharma’s report, but we think it’s far better to show it to you instead. We’ve included his slides below:
The most important new feature in iOS 9
If you missed the livestream of the opening keynote at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference earlier this week, you can watch Apple’s recording, which runs about 2 hours and 24 minutes to find out about what’s new in iOS 9.
Or you could watch The Verge’s summary, which takes the highlights of the keynote and shrinks them to a more digestible 12 minutes:
Or you can take it from us and watch this video, which shows you what we think is the most important (and likely to be underappreciated) new feature in iOS 9:
For all these years, despite not having the limitations of physical keyboards, the iOS virtual keyboard letters have never changed to reflect the current case of the letters. A keyboard that shows upper-case letters when the shift key is engaged and lower-case letter when it isn’t has been a feature on Android and Windows Phone devices for some time now, and at long last, iPhones and iPads will have one as well. Consider how much time you’ve wasted wondering if shift lock was on and making upper-/lower-case corrections on your iOS devices, then multiply that hundreds of millions of users. This feature may be the one that creates the biggest gain in productivity — far more than Apple Music will, anyway.
Smartphones take over a Sports Illustrated cover
The cover of the June 15, 2015 issue of Sports Illustrated is supposed to be about the race horse American Pharoah winning the Triple Crown at the Belmont Stakes, but given that a sea of smartphones takes up the foreground, we think it’s also about how much mobile devices are a part of our lives now. Huffington Post sports takes a dimmer view of this, saying that the photo “epitomizes everything wrong with modern society”. We disagree; smartphones as we know them haven’t even been around a decade, and we’re still figuring out what’s possible with them.
Upon taking a closer look at the photo, we may have found something wrong: not with society, but with usability. Take a look at our zoomed-in view:
It shows someone who’s using their camera app, but will never be able to capture this historic moment because right then, the phone decided that it was time to show one of those notifications that won’t let you do anything until you dismiss it. Come on, mobile phone operating system vendors — make it so that our phones can give us notices and still not get in the way while we’re in the middle of something!
Once again, it’s time for WWDC 2015, the 2015 edition of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, where software developers who write applications for iOS and Mac OS get together in San Francisco to find out what’s coming up for Apple’s platforms. While the conference itself runs for the entire week and is aimed generally at programmers, it kicks off with a very layperson-friendly, attention-grabbing keynote.
Stability and bug fixes…get it?
If you’ve been using iOS 7 and 8 after having used iOS 6, you may have some concerns about the upcoming version. With each successive release, the operating system appears to have become a little less reliable, a little more buggy, a little less performant. It could be because Apple no longer has a raging perfectionist like Steve Jobs at the helm, but it could also be that a feature race is a natural outcome of the fact that the smartphone war is down to two superpowers. There will be some new features announced, but don’t expect something mind-blowing along the lines of a Steve Jobs-esque “one more thing…” announcement. Personally, I don’t mind that the both iOS and Android are slowing down and cleaning up what’s already been implemented instead of rushing forward to create the next new thing, and I think that many users feel the same.
How to watch the WWDC 2015 keynote livestream
Want to see the livestream video of the WWDC keynote? You’ll need to watch it on an Apple platform:
- On Apple desktop computers and laptops: You’ll need to run OS X 10.8.5 or later, and you can view it only on the Safari browser (Steve Jobs may no longer be with us, but his control-freakery lives on.). If you’ve got those, go here to see the livestream.
- On Apple phones and tablets: You’ll need an iOS device running iOS 6 or later, and if you do, go here to see the livestream.
- On the Apple TV set-top box: There’ll be a dedicated channel for the livestream, and I’m sure if you turn it on, you’ll be told how to get to it.
Where to catch the WWDC 2015 keynote liveblogs
A number of sites will have their reporters in the WWDC keynote audience, liveblogging it as it happens. Unlike the video livestream, you’ll be able to catch these on any computing platform that supports web browsing:
- Ars Technica’s liveblog
- Computerworld’s liveblog
- Forbes’ liveblog
- Gizmodo’s liveblog
- Houston Chronicle’s liveblog
- IGN’s liveblog
- iMore’s liveblog
- iPhone Hacks’ liveblog
- Mercury News’ liveblog
- TechCrunch’s liveblog
- TechnoBuffalo’s liveblog
- TheNextWeb’s liveblog
- The Verge’s liveblog
- Wired’s liveblog
Found via Catsmob. Click the photo to see it at full size.
I’m sure at least one of these is being used as a GPS.
Found via AcidCow. Click the photo to see the source.
T-Mobile and Dish Networks are discussing a merger
The Wall Street Journal reports that T-Mobile is in talks to merge with Dish Network, a deal in which T-Mobile CEO John Legere would be the CEO of the newly-combined organization. This move would offer the following benefits to each participant:
- T-Mobile would gain Dish Network’s billions of dollars of largely unused wireless licenses, giving it the ability to expand the capacity of its network.
- Dish Network would gain a solid broadband internet service, giving them access to the “second screen”, which broadcasters are relying on increasingly as their audience moves to the internet.
T-Mobile’s “Uncarrier” strategy, which has included data giveaways, price cuts, rollover offers, and the occasional CEO antics, has helped them grow their customer base at record rates, but they still remain the smallest of the “Big Four” mobile carriers. Dish Network’s wireless licenses, which were bought mostly as a gamble without any real plan for using them, would give T-Mobile the ability to expand their coverage and lure more customers away from its competitors.
In 2013, both Dish Network and T-Mobile’s parent company, the Japanese telecom Softbank, attempted to join with Sprint. This merger between the two one-time rivals mirrors the AT&T/DirecTV and the Charter Communications/Time Warner Cable deals, a fact that wasn’t lost on Ina Fried when she wrote “a deal between Dish and T-Mobile is akin to two people who hook up because they are the last ones left in the bar at closing time.”
If the deal goes through, T-Mobile could be well-positioned to take the number 3 slot from Sprint. Keep in mind that this isn’t a done deal, and it’s being made between two rather mercurial CEOs.
For more on the merger, see:
- The Wall Street Journal: Dish Network in Merger Talks With T-Mobile US
- re/code: A T-Mobile-Dish Deal Could be The Ultimate Marriage of Convenience
- TIME: T-Mobile and Dish Network Are Nearing a Merger, According to Reports
Losing the Signal: Interesting reading on the rise and fall of BlackBerry
In 2015, it’s all too easy to dismiss BlackBerry (or RIM, as they were originally named) as merely a casualty of the smartphone revolution, but to do so is to forget that they started that revolution in the first place. Before the iPhone and Android, there was the BlackBerry, the product brought to life by co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis, the electronics tinkerer who foresaw the possibilities that would come from merging computing and wireless technologies, and Jim Balsillie, the businessman with grand ambitions to become a figure like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. It was the BlackBerry that tore email away from the desktop and put it in our pockets, got North American businesspeople hooked on text messaging, and introduced us to the habit of continually staring at a glowing screen in our palms.
Losing the Signal is a newly-released book written by Canadian reporters Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff that does far more than tell the story that most of us know about BlackBerry — their fall from being the must-have smartphone after the iPhone’s announcement and release in 2007. It tells the story of RIM’s early days and the challenges they overcame, from the limits of the technology and cellular networks of the time to how other companies tried to stifle them by withholding payments for orders. More importantly, it tells the stories of two very different co-CEOs, and of their partnership, both as friends and in business.
According to co-author Sean Silcoff, it took dozens of hours of personal interviews with Balsillie and Lazaridis at their homes to get them to “open up”; on one particular day, he followed a six-hour session with Balsillie by another five with Lazaridis. Their efforts paid off; Losing the Signal is a fascinating book that’s hard to put down; I’ve been getting my readings in during lunch, at the gym, and any time I can sneak in during the day. If you’re looking for a summer read that’s both substantive and fascinating, I highly recommend picking up Losing the Signal.
For more on Losing the Signal, see:
- Amazon.com: Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry
- The Globe and Mail: Losing the Signal: How BlackBerry’s bid to one-up the iPhone failed
- New York Times’ Bits: Behind the Downfall at BlackBerry
Coming soon: the next versions of Android and iOS
Summer is coming, and along with the warm weather and sunshine (well, we’re hoping they’re coming) are previews of the upcoming versions of Apple’s and Google’s mobile operating systems. Both OS vendors hold conferences for software developers around the beginning of summer; Google recently concluded their Google I/O conference, and Apple’s WWDC (Worldwide Developer Conference) will start on June 8th. These conferences are where both companies show sneak previews of their upcoming mobile OSs.
Android M made its first public appearance at Google I/O. According to Sundar Pincai, Google’s senior VP of products, this upcoming version of Android features a “back to basics” approach. While continuing with the visual aesthetic that premiered with Android L (better known as “Lollipop”), this upcoming version’s focus is more on usability and stability rather than flashy new features. Among the additions that you’ll find in Android M when it comes out (presumably later this year) are:
- An easier and better way for you to grant permissions to apps to access certain sensitive phone features such as your Contacts list, camera, microphone, and current location,
- an improved web experience with support for automatic sign-in, saved passwords, autofill, and other things we’ve grown accustomed to with our desktop browsers,
- support for fingerprint scanners, not just to unlock your phone, but also to make in-person and online purchases,
- mobile payments through Android Pay, Google’s answer to Apple Pay,
- better power management for improved battery life, and
- automatic backup of data for apps whose supporting data is 25 megabytes (that’s some pictures, but a lot of text) or smaller
We expect that iOS 9 will be announced at WWDC, as is their habit. Those of you who’ve been less than pleased with the problems that came with the upgrade from iOS 7 to iOS 8 will be happy to hear that a large part of the iOS 9 development effort is supposed to be about making the operating system more stable, optimized and reliable. As with Android, the upcoming version of iOS is less about adding flashy new features to draw in new customers and more about making the existing ones better in order to make their current user base happy. As with Android M, we expect that iOS 9 will see general release later this year.
For more on the upcoming versions of Android and iOS, see:
- Android Pit: Android M has arrived: here’s what you need to know
- MacWorld: Podcast: Unpacking Google I/O and making WWDC predictions and How to watch WWDC 2015 keynote livestream, and the Apple announcements to expect: Apple TV, Macs, Beats Music, iOS 9, OS X 10.11
- Ars Technica: iOS, OS X, music, Swift, and more: What you should know before WWDC next week