Global Nerdy

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.

I’ve written about StatCounter’s data that suggests that Chrome is now the number one browser in terms of share. I’ve also written about data from W3Counter and Clicky indicating that Chrome isn’t the number one browser yet, but should be in a matter of weeks or months at most.

What I haven’t written about until now is the site tracking web browser share whose data doesn’t agree with StatCounter, W3Counter and Clicky: Net Applications’ NetMarketShare. Here’s their desktop browser share trends graph, which says that IE’s market share is greater than 50% and, believe it or not, climbing slightly:

Click the graph to see the live version on NetMarketShare’s site.

According to an article in the IE Blog published in March (in response to reports of Chrome’s gaining on IE), NetMarketShare’s methods of measuring browser share differs from StatCounter’s, and presumably W3Counter’s and Clicky’s. Their methods, which involve not counting Chrome’s pre-rendered pages and using geoweighting, put IE at the top of the heap by a great margin, so naturally their stats are the ones that Microsoft highlights.

In case you saw the “.aspx” extension of NetMarketShare’s site and automatically wrote them off as practitioners of what I like to call “Microsophistry”, keep in mind that their stats paint a pretty sad picture for Microsoft’s mobile browser share. There, mobile IE is too small a player to be named:

Click the graph to see the live version on NetMarketShare’s site.

Yesterday’s article, Chrome is Now the Most-Used Browser, pointed out that according to StatCounter’s data, Chrome has edged out Internet Explorer as the most-used browser.  StatCounter gets these numbers from the sites that use their analytics widget (these sites include this blog, Global Nerdy and my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century), so while they provide an accurate picture of browser share for visitors to StatCounter-equipped sites, they might provide a skewed picture of browser share for the internet in general.

I decided to look at other sources that also track browser share and compare the trends they observe to StatCounter’s. Similar trends would be evidence that StatCounter’s numbers were a reasonable measure of browser share, while different trends would suggest that StatCounter’s numbers might need to be taken with a larger grain of salt.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many sites that publish browser share data. Aside from StatCounter, the only two other such sites that I’m aware of are W3Counter and Clicky.

Here’s W3Counter’s graph showing browser share over the past five years:

Click the graph to see the live version on W3Counter’s site.

Note the usage share trends for Internet Explorer (the blue line) and Chrome (the green line). Their slopes are pretty similar to the IE/Chrome lines in StatCounter’s graphs. The latest data on the graph is for April 2012, and if the trend continued, W3Counter just might report that Chrome has surpassed Internet Explorer when they publish their May statistics.

W3Counter’s graph has a feature that lets you see browser share at any given time by hovering the cursor over it at the time of your choosing. For April 2012, they report that IE has 28.9% of the market share, while Chrome is a mere three percent away at 25.9%:

Click the graph to see the live version on W3Counter’s site.

Clicky’s trends also show a declining IE share and a climbing Chrome share. The difference is that they’re reporting a larger lead for Internet Explorer:

Click the graph to see the live version on Clicky’s site.

If these trends continue, Clicky should be reporting Chrome as the top browser in a few months.

In case you hadn’t heard, Statcounter’s current live browser stats say that Chrome has just edged out Internet Explorer as the most-used browser. That news led me to search my backup drive for an image I’ve been saving in case this very situation arose:

Click the graph to see the live result.

According to StatCounter, the web analytics service used by both this blog and the Accordion Guy blog, Chrome has just edged past Internet Explorer in usage share. This is quite a change from a year ago, when Internet Explorer still held first place at about 45% and Chrome was a distant third with about 20% by StatCounter’s measurements.

What will the graph look like a year from now?

Update: I’ve posted an article showing browser usage share stats by W3Counter and Clicky. I’ve also written an article about NetMarketShare’s stats, which say that IE has a very comfortable lead and is even trending slightly upward. You might also find this comic amusing.

Oh, How Things Have Changed

I stumbled across this graphic, which illustrates the difference between the world of tech when I entered the job market (1995) and five years ago, when it well and truly changed:

Click the image to see it at full size.

WinRT Tablet Makers Can’t Compete with the iPad’s Price

Here’s something you’ll never see when WinRT (the official name for the flavour of Windows 8 that will run on ARM-powered devices) and the tablets it runs on come out:

The line for the New iPad at the Apple Store in Buffalo, March 2012.

ExtremeTech reports that two major factors are making it difficult for Taiwanese manufacturers to make tablets that would sell at prices comparable to or cheaper than Apple’s iPads:

• The cost of Windows 8 licenses. Digitimes reports that OEMs have to pay as much as $100 for each, but take that with a grain of salt; they’re a notoriously unreliable source of information. ExtremeTech says that Microsoft is likely charging half that amount or less, but even at $10 – $20 per licence, the other factors would still make it difficult to compete on price.
• The cost of iPad production. Apple have had the time to work out their design and production process as well as their supply chains to the point where it costs less to produce an iPad than any of its less beautifully-designed, lower-spec tablet rivals. ExtremeTech notes that this is equally true for the situation with the MacBook Air and non-Apple “ultrabooks”: you get better design and specs and price with Apple.

Let’s suppose that the WinRT tablet manufacturers decide to sell their wares at a razor-thin margin in order to compete on price. Apple could reduce its 100% markup, beat them at the price game and still make a tidy profit.

Even if the WinRT OEMs decided to use the “compete on price” gambit in the hopes that short-term pain will eventually lead to long-term gain, success will hinge on a variable completely out of their control: that the public will want WinRT at least as much as iOS, if not more. That’s a bit of a longshot.

Nielsen’s “State of the Appnation” Report

Some notable stats from their report:

• One in two US mobile subscribers had a smartphone now. This is up 10% from last year.
• The number of Android and iOS users combined has more than doubled since 2011, from 38 million to 84 million.
• Smartphone users today have more apps on their phones than last year. The 2011 average was 32, the 2012 average is 41.
• Smartphone users are spending more time using apps rather than the mobile web — about 10% more than last year.

2001: An iPhone Charging Station

Photo courtesy of “spoon”. Click to see the full-size version.

I rather like this iPhone charger made of Lego and inspired by the “Dawn of Man” sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey: