Table 2: IDC’s Smartphone OS Market Share Predictions (March 2011)
Operating System
Predicted 2011
Market Share
Predicted 2015
Market Share
Android
39.5%
45.4%
BlackBerry
14.9%
13.7%
iOS
15.7%
15.3%
Symbian
20.9%
0.2%
Windows Phone 7 and
Windows Mobile
5.5%
20.9%
Others
3.5%
4.6%
Their predicted numbers for Windows Phone have remained the same; it’s just that they’ve been rolled back one year from 2015 to 2016. Their 2012 predictions give Android and iOS greater market shares than in the 2011 predictions and cut their numbers for BlackBerry’s market share in half.
Iconoclast Labs pits PhoneGap against RubyMotion! They came up with an idea for a “magic 8-ball on steroids” app that provides its user with conversation starters and makes use of features such as databases, networking and so on. Then they implemented it twice; once with PhoneGap, once with RubyMotion. The winner? Well, it depends.
Ah, Windows Phone, the platform I used to evangelize. I really should see about getting my Samsung Focus replaced (Anthony Bartolo, can you help a brother out?).
There’s news aplenty for Windows Phone and WinRT developers:
Telerik’s RadControls for Windows 8: It looks as though control-maker Telerik is first to the gate again for controls for a new OS. They’ll be premiering them at TechEd ’12 in Orlando, which takes place June 11th through 14th.
The 256MB device difference that isn’t documented: The 7.1.1 update lets you detect devices with only 256MB RAM, and they support graphics at a maximum of 16 bits per pixel, while devices with more RAM support 32.
Four ways to make money with Windows Phone: Listed in order of likelihood of success, starting with the most likely, it’s get paid to build apps for other people, build apps that let you monetize another service, build a targeted app and promote it appropriately and get lucky.
LinkedIn has a lot of ‘splainin’ to do. LinkedIn has been breached and 6.5 million hashed and encrypted LinkedIn user passwords have been posted to a site with requests for help in cracking them.
If you have a LinkedIn account and haven’t done so already, go to LinkedIn and change your password now.
In the past two years, the explosion in web technologies and apps has created a new profession: It’s called Developer Evangelism, and it’s seriously awesome.
The “seriously awesome” part is correct. The “two years” part is waaaay off. The title “developer evangelist” has been around since the 1980s when people at Apple first started using it. It was coined by Apple’s Mike Murray, the title was first held by Mike Boich and it was popularized by Guy Kawasaki. Since then, other people have taken up the title, most notably Robert Scoble, who was a tech evangelist at Microsoft in the early 2000s (Microsoft created a whole division in 2001 called Developer & Platform Evangelism, for which I worked from late 2008 through early 2011).
The Evangelists
Christian Heilmann, developer evangelist at Mozilla.
In fact, I’m a developer evangelist who’ll soon be looking for his next gig. I’m on summer vacation at the moment, getting a much-needed vacation time in, but at the same time, I’m also learning a little iOS development. If you’d like to read more about what I think of my line of work, take a look at these articles:
And if you want to hear how I got into developer evangelism, watch this video of my presentation at CUSEC2009:
I may be taking it (relatively) easy right now, but I’m keeping my eyes open. If you’re looking for the world’s only rock-and-roll accordion-playing tech evangelist, check out my resume or LinkedIn profile, then drop me a line!
How do top Android developers QA test their apps? There are so many different Android phones out there, many with different specs, screen resolutions and OS versions (see the pie chart above, showing the distribution of Android phones for users of Red Robot Labs’ apps) that’s it’s practically impossible to test your app on every device.
In this TechCrunch article, Kim-Mai Cutler talks to some Android developers — Red Robot Labs, Pocket Gems, Storm8 and Animoca — about how they deal. The first three use some variation on the 80/20 rule, testing on about 30 or 40 devices that are representative of the Android devices used by their target markets, while Animoca test on hundreds because much of their user base is in Asia, where there’s a plethora of cheap Android-based but not necessarily Android-certified mobile devices.
The article includes a slideshow and video from Pocket Gems’ Jeff DeCew and Arjun Dayal about how they deal with developing for such a wide array of Android devices, and I’ve included them below.
The seven deadly sins, as explained in the blog Indexed. Click the image to see the original.
Kitchen sink: trying to cram too much into your design.
Inconsistency: inconsistency of design, that is, which includes deviating unnecessarily from the OS’ UI guidelines.
Overdesigning: “extra visual flourishes, meaningless elements, and the shouldn’t-we-have-something-there images”.
Lack of speed: remember, this is a device that favours saving power over raw processing capability.
Verbiage: brevity is the soul of apps.
Non-standard interaction: unless there’s a really good reason for it, this is not a good idea.
Help and FAQ-itis: “Adding a Help is a white flag in the usability war: you’ve surrendered, you can’t win, and you give up”.
The Walmart Garden Smartphone. Jean-Louis Gassée sets up an interesting fiction that Walmart’s Silicon Valley-based Walmart Labs is creating an Android-based smartphone for Walmart in order to make Walmart “the Walmart of smartphones”. He says that the idea is ridiculous for a number of reasons, and for the same reasons, so are the rumours about Facebook making their own phone.
It’s an interesting thought experiment and a good argument, but I still think that it doesn’t completely invalidate the Facebook phone rumours. Walmart isn’t a an online platform while Facebook is, and that makes a pairing with a device specifically designed to access online platforms a more sensible idea.
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.
