Global Nerdy

Click the photo above to register for the event.

Brad Feld, managing director at Foundry Group, cofounder of TechStars, investor, entrepreneur and author of so many books with colons in the title:

• Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup,
• Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist,
• Brad Feld’s Burning Entrepreneur: How to Launch, Fund and Set Your Startup on Fire!
• and the just-published Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

is appearing in Toronto on Tuesday, October 30th at 6:00 p.m. in the Toronto Reference Library at an event being put together by the find folks at StartupNorth and with the help of a lot of sponsors.

The evening will feature cocktails, networking and a discussion on how to make Toronto a better place for startups. There’s a $25 registration fee for this event, which includes a copy of Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City in either dead-tree or DRM’d PDF format (the Canadian list price for the hardcover edition is $30, so it’s a pretty good deal).

William Mougayar recently wrote a review of Startup Communities in the Startup North blog, in which he explains Feld’s “Boulder Thesis”, which he describes as “a fresh framework that is based on pragmatism and lower barriers of entry” and “all about on-the-ground reality as a lever to making things happen.” Feld prefers real get-stuff-done events such as “hackathons, New Tech Meetups, Open Coffee Clubs, Startup Weekends, and accelerators” over more-fluff-than-stuff ones like “entrepreneurial award events, periodic cocktail parties, monthly networking events, panel discussions, and open houses”, arguing that they “go deeper into the entrepreneurial stack”.

Want to attend this event? Register now!

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

TechCrunch, one of the most-read techie news sites, is holding a series of meetups far from their home base in Silicon Valley, and the first stop on their northern tour is Toronto on Monday, November 5th (which also happens to be my birthday). They’re on a mission to find new startups up here, so if you’re “a founder, a college kid, an investor, or a dreamer,” you’re going to want to be at this meetup.

The Toronto venue is the Steam Whistle Brewing Company (255 Bremner, across the street from the CN Tower, Rogers Centre and Metro Toronto Convention Centre South Building), and the event will run from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m..

There are two levels of admission for the TechCrunch Toronto Meetup:

• It’s FREE if you’d just like to attend, mingle and watch local startups do their presentations.
• If you’d like to demo your startup that evening, $1,500 will put you onstage.

This event has the potential to sell out soon, so if you want to go, I suggest that you register now. See you there!

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

iOS Simulator Tips and Tricks

If you build iOS apps, you spend a fair bit of time in the simulator. Here’s a set of tips to get the most out of it:

1. Use custom coordinates to simulate being in a specific location or in a moving vehicle.
2. Slow down animations so that you can polish them.
3. Apply colours to views to it’s easier to check your layouts.
4. Simulate hardware and software events, including simulating a hardware keyboard and the “TV Out” option.
5. Add photos to the simulator.

A Guide to the iOS SDK for Web Designers

If you’re a designer and not a developer, building iOS UIs with Xcode can seem pretty daunting. The Smashing Magazine article, A Guide to the iOS SDK for Web Designers, is a designer-focused overview of Xcode, covering the preparation of graphics for Xcode, importing them into Xcode, building user interfaces and evening doing a little coding.

The Pew Research Center’s Survey of Smartphone and Tablet Users

A Pew Research Center survey of about 10,000 adults conducted online from June to August 2012, reports that:

• 22% of U.S. adults own a tablet, double that from the previous year
• 44% of U.S. adults have smartphones, up from 35% in May 2011
• 52% of tablet owners said they own an iPad, down from 81% a year ago
• 48% of tablet owners said they own an Android device; half of them were Kindle Fires

Pictures of People Scanning QR Codes

And finally, an amusing little Tumblr showing how people use them (at least in North America, anyway): Pictures of People Scanning QR Codes.

What will the 2019 picture look like?

Dare “Carnage4Life” Obasanjo pointed to some food for thought from an old entry in Jason Kottke’s blog, dated February 27, 2000 — which was after the iMac and iBook, but before the really big hits:

• a year before OS X (March 2001),
• a year and a half before the iPod (October 2001),
• 7 years before the iPhone (June 2007), and
• a full ten years before the iPad (April 2010)

Here’s the key excerpt:

And that brings us to Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft is perhaps the largest target of this sort of “boycott”, organized or otherwise. People hate Microsoft. Companies hate Microsoft. It’s the company you love to hate. Apple, on the other hand, is one of the most beloved companies in the world. People love Apple.

But what if Apple were Microsoft? What if Apple had won the battle of the PC and was the largest company in the world? People would hate them. Why? Because they would be using the same tactics as Microsoft to stay ahead and keep every bit of that advantage in anyway that they could. Apple is the way it is because they are the underdog.

I’ll even argue that life would be worse under Apple’s rein. Apple controls the OS *and* the hardware: if we were under Apple’s boot instead of Microsoft’s, we’d be paying too much for hardware as well as the software.

It’s been over a dozen years since Kottke wrote that article, and his “What if?” has effectively come true. Apple is “the largest company in the world” if you go by its market cap — according to Forbes, it’s now “The Most Valuable Company in History”. Android may have the larger market share, but when it comes to the platform that people line up for, makes the news, is considered to be the reference platform, has the developer love and makes them the most money, it’s iOS.

Here’s the question, which I’ll leave up to you to answer: now that we’re “under Apple’s rein”, is life worse, as Kottke speculated it would be? 

I’ve seen the old trick where you super-glue a loonie (that’s a Canadian one-dollar coin) to the sidewalk and watch people try to pick it up. This takes it to a whole new level.

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

50 Android Hacks

Today’s “Deal of the Day” — a regular offering from Manning Publications where they make one of their books available for far less that it would normally go for — is for 50 Android Hacks. Here’s the publisher’s description:

“In this compact and infinitely useful book, Android expert Carlos Sessa delivers 50 little gems like you’d learn from the old guy in the next cube or the geniuses on StackOverflow.”

50 Android Hacks is an “early access” book, which means that it’s still a work in progress. Buying it now means that you can download the current version and all updates including the final book.

The ebook normally sells for US$27.99, but with the access code dotd1005cc, you can get it for US$15.00 today only.

As an added bonus, you can use the same dotd1005cc code to get  Android in Practice and Android in Action, Third Edition at 46% off.

Links

• 50 Android Hacks
• Android in Practice
• Android in Action, Third Edition
• MEAP (Manning Early Access Program) FAQ

Android Apps Accessibility

Here’s the video of the Google I/O 2012 presentation Making Android Apps Accessible, which covers the platform accessibility APIs introduced in Android 4.0 (a.k.a. Ice Cream Sandwich) and features such as “touch exploration, speech synthesis, multiplatform support through use of a DPAD, magnification for low vision, braille, and more.”

There’s also a recent Grokking Android article, Take These Steps to Make Your Android App Accessible, which is also worth reading.

Links

• Making Android Apps Accessible presentation video from Google I/O
• Google I/O
• Take These Steps to Make Your Android App Accessible
• Grokking Android

Consuming Azure Mobile Services from Android

In yesterday’s Mobile Developer News Roundup, I linked to a series of MSDN articles on using Azure as a back end for your iOS apps. There’s a similar series for Android titled Consuming Azure Mobile Services from Android.

Links

• Consuming Azure Mobile Services from Android, Part 1
• Consuming Azure Mobile Services from Android, Part 2
• Consuming Azure Mobile Services from Android, Part 3
• Consuming Azure Mobile Services from Android, Part 4 
• Source code
• Windows Azure 90-day free trial

Throne of JS Presentation – “Mobile Webdev: The Horror”

Throne of JS was a conference on JavaScript and JavaScript frameworks put together by Toronto-based development shop Unspace, the instigators behind the renowned RubyFringe and FutureRuby conferences. The organizers brought together some of the bright minds behind a number of JavaScript frameworks and tools, including Nick Small and Harry Brundage of Shopify (who were there to talk about Batman.js) and Adobe’s John Bender, who works full-time on jQuery Mobile.

InfoQ were at Throne of JS and captured John’s presentation, Mobile Webdev: The Horror, in which he talks about some of the difficulties that you’ll encounter when building web-based apps for mobile devices. Whether you’re a web developer who’s starting to build apps for mobile devices or one who’s been at it for years, you’ll find it a useful and entertaining overview of the current mobile landscape.

Links

• Mobile Webdev: The Horror
• John Bender’s site
• Throne of JS
• jQuery Mobile

Consuming Azure Mobile Services from iOS

MS can produce some pretty interesting tech,
but wow, do they also produce some really butt-ugly diagrams.

If you’re thinking about using Microsoft’s Azure cloud system as the back end for your iOS app, you’ll want to check out this five-part article series.

Links

• Consuming Azure Mobile Services from iOS, Part 1
• Consuming Azure Mobile Services from iOS, Part 2
• Consuming Azure Mobile Services from iOS, Part 3
• Consuming Azure Mobile Services from iOS, Part 4
• Consuming Azure Mobile Services from iOS, Part 5
• MobileServicesClient source code
• Windows Azure 90-day free trial

Windows 8 / Windows Phone 8 Events Later This Month

This is the month that Microsoft unleashes their new, unified-look operating systems!

On Thursday, October 25th, they will hold a launch event for Windows 8, starting with a Surface launch at midnight, followed by a daytime event from 10 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.. There’s still no word on how much Surface tablets will cost — these are the ARM-based Windows RT ones; the Intel based Surface Pros come out in 2013 — nor has anyone had a chance to review them, but they’re expect to retail somewhere in the $300 to $800 range. I suppose we’ll find out in a few weeks!

On the following Monday, October 29th, they’ll hold a launch event for Windows Phone 8, the mobile OS so secret that even developers had to partake in a lottery to get their hands on the SDK and sign an NDA if they won. As with Windows 8, we’ll finally see what Microsoft have been keeping under wraps all this time.

Links

• Windows 8 Launch Event
• Windows Phone 8 Launch Event