IT Director for a non-profit in Washington, DC. Man About Internet.
First, Eric Schmidt says this:
Whether you like ICS or not, and again I like it a great deal, you will want to develop for that platform, and perhaps even first. And then I see this:
Yeah, I'll get right on that whole developing for Android thing.
Richard Muscat, writing at Serious Simplicity:
My contention is that “Free” as described and used in many contemporary web-based businesses is a non-business model that is not only broken, but actively harmful to entrepreneurship. Free rarely works, and all the times that it doesn’t, it undermines entrepreneurial creativity, destroys market value, delivers an inferior user experience and pumps hot air into financial bubbles. I think this piece hits it out of the park. Why should you price your product as a pay-for-service or good? This article lays out all of the reasons and why free should never be your decision.
Tweetmarks is a web service for setting and getting the "last read" tweet for a given Twitter user. It can be used to "sync" the reading position between multiple Twitter clients and platforms. It was created by Riverfold Software. Also see this blog post introducing the service. All Twitter client application developers: PLEASE integrate this into your clients. As for why Twitter hasn't already implemented this themselves, Marco Arment writes: Unfortunately, I doubt that Twitter’s official Mac and iOS apps will. Twitter has decided, for whatever reason, not to do this to date. I heard a while back that this was because they want people to just read what’s there now, like a river of news, not to try to “keep up” with a potentially insurmountable timeline. They didn’t want to encourage features like this that would allow someone to know how far “behind” they are, because that could cause guilt and feelings of information overload, which could discourage usage. I believe they are wrong in this line of thinking. Moving from Tweetbot on my iPhone to Twitteriffic on my iPad to the Twitter app on my Mac feels like a broken experience. Having to re-read supposed "new" updated over again to figure out my place depending on where I am just feels wrong. Twitter is arrogant in trying to dictate how users should use their service rather than trying to accommodate the reality of how their users currently use Twitter. To quote Marco again: And as long as Twitter doesn’t have an API for it, widespread Tweetmarks support in apps is badly needed for anyone who uses multiple Twitter clients. So if you make a Twitter client, please add Tweetmarks support. Yes, please.
Motorola’s CEO blamed the open Android app store for performance issues on some phones. Of all the Motorola Android devices that are returned, 70 percent come back because applications affect performance, Sanjay Jha, CEO of Motorola Mobility, said during a webcast presentation at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Technology conference on Thursday. Unlike most other mobile app stores, the Android Market is totally open, meaning anyone can upload an application to the store. While Google removes applications that are found to be malicious, there is no mechanism for ensuring that applications perform efficiently. “For power consumption and CPU use, those apps are not tested. We’re beginning to understand the impact that has,” Jha said. You're just now beginning? Where the heck have you been for the past 2 years?
Christopher Mims, at technology review writes about developing for Android devices:
Developing for such a wide array of device screen sizes and aspect rations means that not only is it impossible to create pixel-perfect designs for Android interfaces, there isn’t even any guarantee that a given interface can be scaled to fit a particular screen. And in case you missed it, you should read this article that made the rounds a few days ago as well.