Joel Housman

Front-end Web Developer, iOS Developer, Man About Internet

Posts from the “Technology” Category

At 92, A Bandit To Hollywood But a Hero To Soldiers

Posted on April 27th, 2012

Alan Schwarz, at The New York Times: “Big Hy” — his handle among many loyal customers — would almost certainly be cast as Hollywood Enemy No. 1 but for a few details. He is actually Hyman Strachman, a 92-year-old, 5-foot-5 World War II veteran trying to stay busy after the death of his wife. And he has sent every one of his copied DVDs, almost 4,000 boxes of them to date, free to American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Awesome.

Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out

Posted on April 10th, 2012

Paul Ford, at New York Magazine: Facebook, a company with a potential market cap worth five or six moon landings, is spending one of its many billions of dollars to buy Instagram, a tiny company dedicated to helping Thai beauty queens share photos of their fingernails. Many people have critical opinions on this subject, ranging from “this will ruin Instagram” to “$1 billion is too much.” And for many Instagram users it’s discomfiting to see a giant company they distrust purchase a tiny company they adore — like if Coldplay acquired Dirty Projectors, or a Gang of Four reunion was sponsored by Foxconn. Paul’s take on this is excellent.

How To Install Instagram On Your Android Phone In 23 Easy Steps

Posted on April 4th, 2012

Sarah Pavis, at Buzzfeed: Step 3. Try to download Instagram from the Google Play app. Find that it is compatible with anything at or above 2.2 (Froyo, 2 major releases behind current). If you have an older Android phone like the HTC Nexus One (not to be confused with the Samsung Galaxy Nexus or the HTC One) that has limited internal memory then odds are you many not have enough internal storage space available because the Instagram app is 16MB (which is large for an Android app). Comically sad.

Technology & Related Concepts That Need To Die

Posted on March 26th, 2012

Joel’s Technology Hit List Monday Morning Rant, 26 March, 2012 Skeumorphism in design Adobe Flash Adobe Air The concept of “write once, deploy everywhere” code (web standards being the exception, of course) QR codes Comic Sans and Marker Felt WPTouch WordPress plugin. Just don’t. Websites serving up a “get our app!” splash page to iOS users prior to serving the requested page Websites refusing to serve page requests and insisting you get their app Websites who serve up a mobile version, but when you switch to the “full version” it forwards you to the homepage Websites serving up mobile versions only to iPads Using Powerpoint to make documents that should have been made in Word/Pages/Plain Text. Using Powerpoint to send images as if it…

Mozilla: Firefox Needs H.264 Support To Survive Shift To Mobile

Posted on March 20th, 2012

Ryan Paul, at Ars Technica: One year later, Google still hasn’t followed through with that commitment. Mozilla says that it can no longer afford to wait for Google to do what it has promised. In his blog post, Eich explained that H.264 has become too deeply entrenched in the mobile space to be easily displaced and that browsers that don’t support it are jeopardizing their own future relevance. “H.264 is absolutely required right now to compete on mobile. I do not believe that we can reject H.264 content in Firefox on Android or in B2G and survive the shift to mobile,” he wrote. “Losing a battle is a bitter experience. I won’t sugar-coat this pill. But we must swallow it if we are to…

The iPad Reviews Are Out

Posted on March 15th, 2012

The embargo from Apple to the writers who had been given review units was lifted last night. At 9:00 pm last night, my Twitter feed was flooded by authors posting their reviews. I spent most of my evening reading a great many of them. I wanted to share the few that I thought were best. John Gruber: iPad (3) Jim Dalrymple: Review: iPad third generation Jason Snell: Review: The third-generation iPad MG Siegler: The New iPad Makes Apple’s Tablet Domination Clearer Than Ever Joshua Topolsky: iPad review (2012) The consensus: The retina display is a sight to see.

Idealism vs. Pragmatism: Mozilla Debates Supporting H.264 Video Playback

Posted on March 15th, 2012

Ryan Paul, at Ars Technica: Google’s major investment in advancing its unencumbered VP8 codec gave open Web advocates hope that H.264 could still be displaced, but it hasn’t happened. The lack of follow-through from Google on its promise to remove H.264 from Chrome has eroded faith in the search giant’s ability to popularize VP8. Gal says that it’s no longer feasible to wait for the open codec to gain additional traction. “Google pledged many things they didn’t follow through with and our users and our project are paying the price,” he wrote. “H.264 wont go away. Holding out just a little longer buys us exactly nothing.” John Gruber commented on this article in a post today: “Idealism vs. Pragmatism” is exactly what’s going on…

A Patent Lie: How Yahoo Weaponized My Work

Posted on March 14th, 2012

Andy Baio, writing for Wired: Yahoo’s lawsuit against Facebook is an insult to the talented engineers who filed patents with the understanding they wouldn’t be used for evil. Betraying that trust won’t be forgotten, but I doubt it matters anymore. Nobody I know wants to work for a company like that. I’m embarrassed by the patents I filed, but I’ve learned from my mistake. I’ll never file a software patent again, and I urge you to do the same. For years, Yahoo was mostly harmless. Management foibles and executive shuffles only hurt shareholders and employee morale. But in the last few years, the company’s incompetence has begun to hurt the rest of us. First, with the wholesale destruction of internet history, and now by…

The New iPad’s Greatest Feature: The Battery

Posted on March 11th, 2012

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, writing for ZDNet’s Hardware 2.0 blog: While Apple has undoubted put more power efficient technology into its next-generation iPad — for example, dropping the processor architecture down from 40nm to 28 nm would have resulted in quite a significant power saving — the more dramatic improvement has been the battery itself. Between the release of the iPad 2 last year and the announcement of the new iPad yesterday, Apple has nearly doubled the capacity of the battery, taking it from 25Wh to a massive 42Wh. Measured in milliamps this boosts the battery from 6944 mAh to a monstrous 11,666 mAh. Kingsley-Hughes covers much more in this article that I would like to quote here, but when I was trying to decide exactly…

Why The iPad Has And Will Continue To Dominate The Tablet Market

Posted on March 9th, 2012

Matthew Panzarino, writing for The Next Web: In a Neilsen survey from earlier this year it was shown that almost no respondents stopped using their smartphones after purchasing a tablet, while 3% completely stopped using their desktop computers and 32% reported that they were using their desktops much less. Consumers treat phones and tablets as separate entities, they look at them as different tools for different purposes. He goes on to discuss many other points, in a well written piece that does a very good job of laying it all out.