Global Nerdy

The Verge have published their review of the Samsung Galaxy S III. Their score: 8.5 out of 10, with the good points being unequalled performance, excellent camera, functionally sound design and “Android tweaks have mostly been for the better” and the bad points being “aesthetically challenged”, TouchWiz takes getting used to, S Voice is no less of a gimmick than Siri and “Samsung has a history of failing to update phones on time”.

Neowin are reporting on Dell’s upcoming Windows 8 tablet, a 10.8″ device with an Intel Clover Trail Atom Dual Core processor, 2 gigs of RAM, SSD-based mass storage options with sized up to 128GB and two sizes of removable battery. My favourite comment to the article is the first one, which is pretty much what I thought when reading the article: “All for the price of $1,500” (Dell haven’t announced the price of the tablet yet, but it’s a good bet that given the problems that PC manufacturers now have competing with Apple on price and that it’s part of Dell’s Latitude — business — line, it’s going to be pricier than any iPad.)

Express versions of Visual Studio 11 will be for Metro and web apps only. If you want to write a command-line or old-school Windows desktop app, you’re going to have to shell out about $500 for Visual Studio Pro or qualify for one of the “Spark” programs for students, startups or other demographics to whom Microsoft is willing to give their IDEs for free.

Ars Technica says that this change is a bad one, particularly for those who are just getting started out programming because there will be no current tools with the ability to develop simple command-line “Hello World”-style apps. I disagree; it’s possible to build GUI-based versions of “Hello World” that are still simple to implement, and I’d even argue these days that it’s necessary, given that when people think of “apps” these days, they think of the things they see on phones, not on the command line. I can see why Microsoft is doing this — it’s to foster the development of more Metro apps as well as to get more people to think of Windows as a web platform too — but I also think it’ll drive more people to Ruby, Python, PHP and other languages where the IDE doesn’t rule all. I just don’t think it’s the complete disaster that Ars Technica and others make it out to be.

IDC’s report on the mobile market for 1Q 2012 says that both Android and iOS have increased their market shares at the expense of BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Phone and so on. Other interesting tidbits from the report:

• Android accounts for over half of all mobile phone shipments, and Samsung accounts for almost half of all Android phones.
• iOS is growing well year-over-year thanks to the 4S and new carriers taking up the iPhone.
• “2012 should be considered a ramp-up year for Nokia and Microsoft to boost volumes.” Once again, we are in your debt, Captain Obvious.
• BlackBerry lost what used to be an advantage: “Many companies now permit users to bring their own smartphones, allowing competitor operating systems to take away from BlackBerry’s market share.”

How one company found a niche business porting board games to mobile: Untether.tv’s Rob Woodbridge talks to Codito Development’s Chris Ewington about their Sage Board Games brand, which takes classic “Euro” board games like Puerto Rico and Tigris and Euphrates.

Free iBooks 2 ebook – Inspiring Apps. Described as “A business perspective on building mobile apps”, this book covers subjects that you’d best be familiar with before diving into the world of app development, including key terms, economic implications, technology options and strategic marketing tips. You’ll need an iPad with iBooks 2 to read this book.

Write better release notes. See the screenshot above? Those are not helpful release notes. This article discusses a few ideas on how to make them better.

The Great HTML5 Mobile Gaming Performance Comparison: Scirra, the small London startup behind the HTML5 game-making tool Construct 2, put 23 different browser/device combinations through their paces in a 2D space shooter game to see how well they perform. You should read their article in its entirety to get lots of useful info, but here are some highlights:

• Safari on iOS  is the best-performing mobile browser. “Safari on iOS is consistently good,” they write. “The best performing mobile browser by a clear margin, even when rendering to a high-resolution retina display.”
• On Android, the Chrome beta performs best. “Chrome for Android beta is the only actual browser that provides playable performance,” they write.
• IE on Windows Phone 7 and the Playbook’s browsers did poorly. IE for WP7 ran at one-third the speed of Safari on iOS. BlackBerry’s browser was by far the slowest, running at one-quarter the speed.
• PhoneGap slows things down. “PhoneGap unfortunately appears on the whole to be unsuitable for publishing HTML5 games.”

Apple’s still on top of mobile computing. For the first quarter of 2012, Apple shipped 13.6 million iPads and garnered a market share of 62.8%. The distant second place goes to Samsung, who shipped 1.6 million and have 7.5% share.

“What’s Next for Mobile Now That Adaptive Design Has Failed?” I include this not because it’s good but because it’s a crap article written by the CTO of CBS Interactive, whose stuff is pretty much shovelware. This guy is dead wrong on many points, including “Users are perfectly happy to swipe through an article that is split into several pages” and “Users are not perturbed at all to see a full page interstitial ad stuck into the mix while paging through content”. I am amazed that he could even write the article, given how far his head is stuck up his own ass.

As I wrote in yesterday’s “Summer Vacation” post, one of the perks at working at Shopify that there are no “B” players there, and there are certainly a helluva lot of bright developers in the house. One of them is Jesse Storimer, whose ebook Working with Unix Processes I covered on the Shopify Technology blog. As the book’s summary says, it’s about doing Unix systems programming, but using Ruby instead of C. Written in his spare time over three and a half months, weighing in at a svelte (for a tech book, anyway) 130 pages and priced at $27, it sold very well on his Shopify-powered shop. In fact, he moved about $18,000 worth in 4 months.

I was really pleased to see that Working with Unix Processes is now also available on the Pragmatic Bookshelf site, giving it even more much-deserved exposure. My congratulations to Jesse!

If you’ve wanted to learn about Unix system programming but found it too cumbersome, get your hands on Working with Unix Processes. You’ll learn how to tap the system and harness the expressive power (and the fun) of Ruby! You can get the book at these places:

• WorkingWithUnixProcesses.com: Jesse’s Shopify-powered shop. Not only can you buy the book for yourself, but for $99, you can get a team license, good for up to 20 people!
• Pragmatic Bookshelf: Lots of great books here; I’m glad to see Jesse’s is included among them!

 Jesse’s already hard at work on his next book. Can’t wait to see it!

As I mentioned in my previous post — the one where I announced that I was going on summer vacation — I’m using my new-found copious amounts of free time to finally get around to learning iOS development. While I do that, I’m going to document the journey here on Global Nerdy. 

I’m going to look at iOS development from two angles:

• The hard way: using good ol’ XCode and Objective-C, and
• The possibly-not-as-hard-way: using that newfangled RubyMotion.

If you’ve been meaning to learn how to write apps for the iPhone and iPad, watch this blog! I’m going to share whatever I learn here, and you might find it helpful.

The view from my seat when I made the big decision last Wednesday.

Being Shopify’s Platform Evangelist has been a great privilege that I’ve enjoyed for the past year. There are no “B” players at Shopify, which means that I’ve had the honour to represent the best and the brightest. Wherever I’ve gone on behalf of the company, the mere mention of the name “Shopify” has commanded respect, admiration, kudos and high-fives, and all the credit has to go to the Shopifolks for making the best damned system for setting up shop online. Computer science may say that software is made up of data structures and algorithms, but I know better: it’s made of people, and these people are the best. Naturally, so is the software they create.

That being said, I need to take a summer vacation. At the risk of repeating the “it’s not you, it’s me” cliche, I need a break. I haven’t had a proper vacation in years, and it hasn’t helped that the last eighteen months have been crazy ones for Yours Truly. I’ll just gloss over the sordid details and quickly summarize:

• Major life change
• Near-death experience
• The incident of which a certain software-producing multinational corporation headquartered in the Pacific Northwest does not speak, ever
• The non-date, my first as a newly-freed man that went horribly, tragically wrong (not screaming-in-the-fetal-position wrong, but pretty badly for a first time out in years)
• Signing a job offer with Shopify, leaving my old job, and starting the new one a week later
• Relocating to Ottawa for the summer, then re-relocating back to Toronto in September
• At one point, averaging a flight every couple of weeks as a participant in the 2011 BarCamp Tour, helping out with hackathons and speaking at South by Southwest, ConFoo and other events
• Relearning the Ruby programming language and the Rails framework
• Meeting a girl from far away, and the requisite travel involved

All told, I consider these good happenings, but I need to take some time to collect myself. A lot of stuff has happened, and I’ve been leaping from one big change to the next without a break. I’m in great danger of bringing my “B” game to everything I do, and I need to make sure that that doesn’t happen.

Hence the vacation. It wasn’t easy, but I resigned from Shopify last week. They’ve been incredibly supportive and helpful in ways that I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to repay. Even though I’m no longer with the company, I remain their supporter, advocate and friend. I may even open a Shopify shop very soon (and if you ever need help opening one, you can ask me).

Damn, we’re cute.

I’m going to go hang out with Anitra (that’s her in the picture above; she was my date for the Filipino Centre of Toronto’s President’s Gala) in Tampa for a couple of weeks starting next Saturday. She’ll have work during the day, during which I’ll hit the gym, work on my writing (the Global Nerdy blog’s been going like gangbusters as of late)…

My new reading material (feel free to suggest others!).

…finally get around to learning how to write software for iPads and iPhones by actually writing (or trying to write) software for my iPad and iPhone, and of course, swimming in the pool pictured below:

I’m the only person I’ve ever seen in this pool.

In late June and early July, I’m going with my family to visit the Philippines. I haven’t been back in a dozen years; when I was married, I’d made peace with the fact that I might not ever see it again. Now that I’ve got the opportunity, the time and 145,000 credit card travel points burning a hole in my pocket, I’m going.

Me and new friends, April 2000 – the last time I was in the Philippines. Please control yourselves, ladies; there’s plenty of me to go around.

After the Philippines, it’s back to Florida to be Anitra’s arm ornament for a wedding, plus a little downtime to get used to the Eastern time zone.

After that, more learning, more writing, more working out, and eventually either landing a new job or making one. If you’re looking for a rock and roll accordion-playing tech evangelist in the late summer or fall, check out my LinkedIn profile and drop me a line!

In the meantime, the Accordion Guy and Global Nerdy blogs will go on, and when I’m not off in Florida or the Philippines, I’ll be in Accordion City catching up with friends. Perhaps I’ll see you!

I’m looking forward to my summer vacation.

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

Apple rules the mobile roost at TechCrunch Disrupt NY. “Pretty much every product being showcased was either built for iOS, or had been launched on Apple’s App store after appearing on another operating system,” says this Forbes article, which also points out that the prevalent phones, tablets and computers were iPhones, iPads and and MacBooks.

If you’re thinking of trying out RubyMotion, the toolchain that lets you write iOS apps in Ruby, you’ll want to check out a couple of articles by Tim Bugai over at Collective Idea’s blog:

• 5 Awesome Things About RubyMotion: A quick list of some of the benefits that Tim’s enjoying by developing iOS apps with RubyMotion instead of XCode and Objective-C.
• Using RubyMotion with Parse.com: If your mobile app needs a back end, Parse.com is a quick and easy way to get one up and running in a hurry. This article features an example where you build a mobile chatroom app using RubyMotion and a back end providing push notifications with Parse.com.

Four Types of Mobile Apps. Chris Dixon says that if you’re trying to create or invest in a mobile app, it’s helpful to think of the four categories that apps typically fall into:

1. Time wasters: Apps used in short bursts, typically to make the time pass a little more quickly while you’re waiting or in transit.
2. Core utilities: The must-have apps that you use all the time, such as phone, contacts, texting, calendar and so on.
3. Episodic utilities: The apps that you don’t use all the time, but are incredibly handy during those times when you need them. Examples include Hipmunk when you’re trying to book a flight or OpenTable when you’re making restaurant reservations.
4. Notification-driven apps: Apps that notify you when certain events occur. Chris says that this is an emerging category of apps that he expects to grow as apps get smarter about when to notify and as battery life gets better.

Selecting a Mobile Implementation Strategy: This article presents two strategies for building mobile apps:

1. The “Laser” Strategy, in which you focus on a small set of features on a single platform and make the user experience highly polished and immersive.
2. The “Cover Your Bases” Strategy, in which you build a lower-fidelity app, but one that works across many mobile platforms.