Global Nerdy

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!

Facebook Tries, Tries Again on a Smartphone: The New York Times reports that several Facebook employees report (anonymously, of course) that Facebook plans to release its own smartphone next year. According to these people, they’ve hired former iPhone and iPad engineers, one of whom Mark Zuckerberg “peppered with questions” about the inner workings of smartphones.

If this smartphone actually comes into being next year, it’s more than likely that they’ll compete primarily against Android rather than Apple. It should be interesting to see what developing for the “Facephone” (or whatever it gets called) is like.

Mobile Devices Now Make Up About 20 Percent of U.S. Web Traffic. These results come from Chitika, an online advertising network, who say that tablet and mobile phone internet usage peak during the evening hours. They also say that iPads account for 95% of tablet-based traffic, while iPhones account for 72% of phone-based web traffic. Android account for 26% of phone-based web traffic, and Windows Phone web traffic is one-third the traffic from BlackBerry phones.

Designing (and converting) for multiple mobile densities: In this article, Teehan+Lax’s Travis Hines explains how to design mobile user interfaces in a world of differing screen tech, from non-retina MDPI to HDPI to Retina to XHDPI.

Mobile Online Shopping Holds The Real Opportunity In Mobile Payments. Bill Ready, CEO of Braintree, talks about mcommerce — mobile commerce — and its opportunities.

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!