Yes, yes. No posts for a while. This is because I’m in the process of buying a house. Do you have any idea how time consuming that is for a single bloke? On the plus side I’ve gone well beyond my original aim to just purchase a property this year and have extended it to learning all about rising damp. *sob*
In other news, I have been growing my hair in the hope that it will soon become sentient and can do my job. Or write blog posts. Either will do.
I wrote a few paragraphs about the Nexus 7 in response to a post on the internal messageaboard at work and so have reproduced this below. Before mine arrives I’ll write up a bit more about why I’m parking my PlayBook in favour of the Nexus.
I got hands on with one of these last week (they kindly brought some along to I/O Extended) and thought I’d share my impressions. TL;DR: I liked it and have pre-ordered.
Physically it’s a very nice device. Since I got my hands on a PlayBook I’ve started to appreciate the 7″ form factor. It’s a good size for use while commuting (easier when standing in a cramped tube). If you’ve got a PlayBook then the Nexus is slightly smaller (same screen size, but no need for the touch sensitive bezel) and about the same thickness. It is, however, considerably lighter. No amount of holding this is going to wear out your wrist. The device is very port light – headphones, micro-USB and four gold points which I’m told are for some sort of Nexus dock thingy. The back of the device grips well so it should be hard to accidentally drop. Sound quality from the speaker was surprisingly good with the test videos I watched. The screen is beautiful, but did seem to have problems rendering blacks without being washed out. This may have been because the brightness settings were all ramped up, but I didn’t get a chance to play with this. A quick side-by-side with a Galaxy Nexus did make it seem a little too light though. One thing that was the source of much debate amongst those present was the lack of a rear facing camera, but most people carry a smartphone that’ll take this role and the consensus was that trying to take photos with a tablet makes you look foolish (no offence intended … but come on).
Onto the software. Jelly Bean is jolly impressive. I was particularly loving the new expandable notifications. It was hard to really test the effectiveness of the new “cards” while just playing at a table in Campus but I think they’ve got potential, especially once they open them up to developers. Context driven layouts seem to be on the increase at the moment with projects like Chameleon so this feature will likely get more and more focus. I can confirm that the interface is indeed smooth as butter (excuse me while I giggle for a few minutes – I just can’t take Project Butter seriously). The vsync / triple buffering combo seems to work well. The various Google apps have also had a bit of a polish, although at time of testing it seems we’re still out of luck in the UK if you want to use Google Music or the new magazines. I’d hope these will come in with time given the whole Play Store emphasis in the keynote seemed like a massive shot across the bows of Amazon and if Google can get out of the US faster than the book people they’ll have a win.
[In response to those pointing out lack of 3G] I have started thinking more and more about the non-connectedness of the device. I’m leaning towards the conclusion that it’s purely my desire to have allthetoys™ that makes me think it needs to have its own 3G connection. I’ve berated the PlayBook in the past for not having 3G, but the difference between that and the Nexus 7 is that I’ve found most Google made apps (and many of the third party ones) to be very offline tolerant, whereas the PlayBook just seems to give up on being useful if it’s not online. I already regularly use gMail and gReader on my DHD when I’m underground, happy in the knowledge that it’ll sync and catch up once I’m back in a connected world. Google do seem to be acknowledging this use case more and more (I believe the offline Google docs editing & syncing was covered in the I/O day 2 keynote). I think, much like the PlayBook with BB Bridge, the pitch here is that this couples with your smartphone so you can tether through that. I find that to be a bit of a cop out as that’s just adding more drain to my phone battery to have the hotspot enabled, but I’m going to try to look past this. I think this device’ll work just fine with wifi as and when I can get it – time will tell.
Other Thoughts:
- Very glad that Google haven’t done a string replace of $ to £
- Any claims about battery life from Google still need to be validated in action with some standard services running in the background
- For all of you who were wondering, I can confirm that Blinkendroid does work on the Nexus 7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8b7JL1bBqU
Google I/O 2012 starts tomorrow and I’ve taken some time off to attend the I/O Extended event organised by the London GTUG. Foolishly I have made plans for my mornings so I think it’s going to be a couple of heavily caffeinated days to make it through!
I’m honestly not sure what to expect from the keynote. Obviously there are rumours flying around and many “leaks” of the Nexus tablet, but I haven’t yet seen anything that’s going to make me go “yeah, I didn’t see that coming and that looks pretty cool”. Last year that slot was filled by the Android @ Home section so I live in hope that we’re still going to see something I haven’t already heard rumblings about. Or lots of details on Project Glass. Yep, I’ll happily settle for that!
Anyhow, beyond the keynote there are lots of interesting sessions. Might have to try to stream some on the night bus journey home to catch up on the many many clashes!
Yesterday I turned thirty years of age. Feels a hell of a lot like 29 to be honest. Looking back at my twenties, I’m reasonably happy with my achievements. Graduated from Oxford, wandered my way up Kilimanjaro and started a promising career in the City. Not too shabby, but I can’t help but feel I could’ve done more with the last decade. Unfortunately I’m both lazy and easily distracted by new projects, so this year I’ve decided to set myself some goals to try to reach by this time next year. I’m going to see how much I can work tech into each of these to help achieve my goals. So, to the list:
On my way home this evening I read about the Battery Health app for giving information about my MacBook battery. Sounded like a handy thing to have so I fired up the App Store when I got home and tried to install it. I say “tried” as no sooner had I entered my Apple ID password as I was faced with this window.
Security Info Window
“Bloody hell”, thought I, “more stupid question/answer pairs to remember. Well at least they haven’t …. oh no.” Yes, not only have Apple gone in for the security question theatre but they’ve also gone and implemented a fixed set of questions rather than allowing them to be personalised. Beyond that they’ve gone for the “trendy” approach of asking non-standard questions. No “what’s your mother’s maiden name” type questions here. No, it has to be about your favourite teacher, car, and other such guff. I’ve copied the options you’re allowed to select from below.
The Fixed Security Questions
Well, this is just bloody brilliant. Possibly these questions do mean something to you and you can always pick the same answer from your mind, in which case these could be secured more easily than any password by using some social engineering or looking at Facebook. If, on the other hand, the questions mean nothing to you (and, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s amazing how many idiots implement lists of questions that don’t apply universally) then you’re either going to get stuck every time you have to answer them or you’ll end up writing them down somewhere. How very very secure. Maybe you think I’m being a bit over the top in accusing Apple of providing a useless set of questions, so let me ask a simple question. Given that one fifth of the available questions depend on car ownership, how many people in the world have never owner a car? Now, as an alternative, how many people don’t know their mother’s maiden name? While the standard questions one finds in these types of forms have no benefits (or indeed detriments) in terms of security level, at least they do tend to cover a wider range of people. Better yet, why not offer completely customisable options? Oh yes, because it’s Apple and Apple knows best.
Unfortunately Apple’s technical support have not been particularly helpful so far, only suggesting I raise a ticket for iTunes feedback. Well, that doesn’t exactly help me install new software on my Mac or update (say to improve security) existing apps. Oh well, once again I realise why I absolutely loathe Apple as a software maker. Love their hardware, hate their systems, hate their policies.
For a good explanation of where this sort of authentication came from and why it’s utterly daft, head over to The Daily WTF to read about Wish-It-Was Two-Factor authentication.
Another gap in posting, but a productive one. In January I was investigating some cross platform Lua based frameworks (Moai and Gideros) but between a skiing holiday and recovering from injuries sustained while on a skiing holiday I didn’t get beyond a few proof of concepts. Both are worth a look, and I’ll probably return to them in the future, but my investigations were derailed by this post on the Inside Blackberry Developer’s Blog.
So, with PlayBook OS 2.0 comes (limited) Android support and RIM were offering PlayBooks to developers who submitted apps within a timeframe. Hard to resist really (and it’ll be interesting to see how this pays off). As I have no willpower I went ahead and signed up, hoping to easily repackage Flip! for the PlayBook. I ran into immediate problems as (among other things) native code in Android apps is not yet supported, but this provided me with an opportunity to pick up one of my other to-do list items and learn to use cocos2d-x along with relearning C++ so I could re-build Flip! using the BB Native SDK. I’ve now completed this and just had the app approved on the App World! I eagerly await my new shiny shiny and will tell all about it when it arrives.
I’ll get a post up this weekend about the process of signing up for PlayBook development and my first impressions.
I set myself a couple of goals over Christmas to get some Android development done and migrate this blog onto a new host. So, how did I do? The answer is: better than I expected. Migration done, some code written up (no new release though as I want to put a bit more in).
I’ve also set up a new blog that I’ll be writing about once it’s ready for public consumption. This blog is for a friend of mine who is running from John o’Groats to Lands End this year to raise money for the Royal British Legion (a charity for those who are serving and have served). That’s over 30 marathons in a row! This chap is insane, but insane with a big heart.
Anyhow, am currently in a taxi to the airport as am of skiing for a week so will provide an update on my return.
I’m currently in the process of migrating hosts to the wonderful people at Arvixe. I’ve been very impressed with their pre-sales and initial tech support so far so let’s hope it continues! Right, back to sorting out my e-mail ….
Q4 of 2011 has been somewhat hectic for me and so I’ve put no time into any Android development. Little drabs of time are getting thrown into forums & comments here and there, but nothing productive. I’ve also totally screwed the images on this site so am in the process of sorting that out. As there’s a three day weekend coming up (and allowing for a massive 1st January hangover), I’m going to dedicate a few hours on Saturday and Monday to:
- Updating Flip! with some feedback received over at the Making Money With Android forums
- Getting some code written up for some of my parked ideas
- Sorting out this blog
I’d give myself a 75% chance of actually getting round to this!
At the moment I’m playing around with some different frameworks for game development, but I’m almost certain that (for Android anyway) I’ll keep returning to libgdx. Love the way it’s designed and the ability to easily throw my game into a desktop version for quick testing is the major strength.
The 0.9.2 update has made me even more likely to stay with libgdx after reading this:
Fancy schmancy AssetManager. I haven’t talked about it yet on here but will do so sometime next week, telling you how to use it. It’s incredibly powerful and allows for asynchronous loading of assets. See
AssetManagerTest for a taste of what it is capable of.
Now I can ditch the crappy one I wrote for Flip! …