{ Monthly Archives }
Grumble. I’m vaguely addicted to Puzzle Quest on my xbox. The expansion pack just came out, which adds neat features, but doesn’t display right on an SD TV (image flickers, isn’t quite lined up properly). There appears to be no good way to uninstall the expansion pack, short of figuring out how to hard reset the xbox …
So I want to write an application using maven, instead of my dumb set of ant and shell scripts.
So building via maven doesn’t put all the various bits and pieces of compiled code in the place where intellij idea wants them. I can cope with that, and use exec:java to run the application.
(as an aside, I really wish intellij had a simple run capability where it let’s me just execute a jar file)
However, calling System.exit() in my application, when run via the maven support in intellij shuts down all of intellij.
Sigh.
I don’t get raving, pissed off fanboys.
i.e., the guy who blogs “SCREW YOU APPLE” because they did not coming out with a shiny new ipod touch, while standing in a 3+ hour line for a new iphone.
There are a ton of very critical negative blogs about apple over the lack of iphone features (not about the roll out, those exist, and I grok then), all written by people who stood / are standing in line.
Are be pissed off or drink the kool-aide. I don’t grok people who do both, simultaneously.
So I’ve had an iphone since the first weekend. At this point, I’m pretty comfortable with my status as an apple fanboy.
That said, there is something pretty amazing about the iphone 2.0 software and platform.
The iphone 1.0 was a big deal, in that it was slick, well integrated, and very functional. The 2.0 software and the AppStore, however, changes the game dramatically. The device becomes integrated into the environment. It becomes the device that is your portal into everything else.
A few examples:
Apple Remote. Apple Remote shows you the very beginnings of what can be done. It controls your itunes. Pretty simple, but, when you look at the ecosystem, it becomes pretty amazing. For example, I have an apple express hooked up to my stereo, which I’ll use the airtunes functionality to play music from my desktop, controlling itunes via the remote desktop. My iphone now controls my house-wide music collection, the result is that I’ll now use my phone to control my stereo. I can see the cover art, my playlists, etc. I can put an airport express and a set of speakers in various rooms in my house and have a pretty nice central stereo.
OmniFocus. OmniFocus is a good TODO app. OmniFocus for iPhone is an awesome TODO app. It will sync with the desktop software, which is a bare minimum requirement. The iPhone application will discover the OmniFocus for the Desktop application to sync with via bon jour. No typing, no scanning, it just works.
Further, OmniFocus for the iPhone will let you take pictures and do voice notes for TODO items, which is nice.
However, the game changing piece is that you can assign items to be completed in only certain locations. The result is that if you bring up your TODO app in the supermarket, it will remind you of what you need to get at the supermarket.
The video games are nifty. I wish it had a decent wordpress client in the store, but I can get all those things on the palm or a blackberry. In a couple of years, I’ll be able to get the above on my blackberry or palm device, too.
There is a point where the landscape changes. I think this is one of those.
Amazon knows what books, CDs, and DVDs I buy.
iTunes knows what music I own.
Why can’t delicious library, amazon, itunes, and librarything all work together to make sure I only need to (a) record the stuff I buy from brick and motor stores, and (b) make use of all these tools and APIs so that I have a real consistent view of what I buy.
The cloud computing model is broken.
The result of the web / cloud model is that I am now just locked into a new type of application.
For example, if I want to keep track of all the people I know, I need to monitor twitter, livejournal, and facebook, at a minimum.
Similarly, I use at least four applications for notetaking (livescribe in most cases, evernote on my mac, onenote on my tablet, and mail on my blackberry). All these notes end up in the cloud, in one way or another, but there no way to access them in one place.
Ultimately, computing in the cloud has no meaning when we’re still locked into specific applications. I believe the next big thing is going to have to be about aggregation. My data where I want it. Aggregation of everyone’s data where I need it.
RSS was a first stab in this direction, but there has to be more. Maybe this effort is the data portability work being done by google, et al, but we’re clearly not there yet.
So Google’s android phone os is due out any quarter now, which will be free for all handset manufactures.
Google has a long history of releasing valuable platforms / applications / etc for free. I still can’t figure out their business case, beyond “everyone likes google!”
So nokia, responding to android, spent several million dollars to buy out of the symbian os, and has promised to open source it. For a company that depends on third party licenses, that’s going to be pretty expensive for their bottom line.
So there are at least two companies here who are racing to release their property for free so that they can claim to have a larger share the low to mid range cell phone market. All this new market share will be earned without actually banking any money, since they are depending on third parties to take their free software and put it on their devices.
What am I missing? Where as Microsoft vs Netscape made the browser free to the end user, and made the web ubiquitous, this race won’t do that, since you’ll still need to buy the handset and cell contract. It is unlikely that any given cell phone company will charge less because they don’t need to pay for the OS, either.
