On the Nexus 7
Yesterday, Google announced the Nexus 7, their first hardware and software combination tablet.
In short, and in my opinion, they have created the reference platform for Android tablet development. Pair that with the Galaxy Nexus phone and you have the best Android pair since the iPhone/iPad duo, for development.
But until I need to develop for Android, I’m not going to buy one. I already have an iPad and an iPhone.
Someone is coming to eat you
Michael Lopp, for Rands in Repose, wrote Someone is Coming to Eat You, a brilliant article on success and competition, well worth reading.
Apple’s current biggest competitor is itself, and I think Steve Jobs learned this the hard way - from the sidelines. When he returned, one of his first hires was a gentlemen named Tim Cook, and while Tim Cook holds a degree in industrial engineering, he is not an engineer, a designer, or a poet. Tim Cook is an execution machine and he exists at Apple to enable them to pull off one thing - the iPod Mini moment.
Compete to maintain, Disrupt to succeed
There is a huge difference between competing in a market and disrupting a market. When competing, a company tries to make a similar product in a given market segment, then competes against incumbent products on price or features to gain share and hopefully profits. When disrupting, a company produces a whole new product (or a viable derivative) that creates or changes a market, then dominates share and profits in that segment.
Non-upgradable Smartphones
Today, Microsoft announced it’s new Windows 8 smartphone platform, and it looks quite good. But they also announced that their recently released Windows 7.x phones cannot be upgraded to Windows 8. Which means all those early Metro interface adopters who purchased the brilliant Nokia Lumia smartphones are screwed until their lock-ins expire in two years time.
It’s the same in the Android space, whether caused by manufacturers or carriers, they both seem to spend too much time blaming each other so in my book, they’re both responsible. If you buy a brand new Android phone from Samsung or HTC or Motorola today, chances are it’s still running Android 2.1 and will never be upgraded to the latest version 4. Oh, promises have been made, none kept.
Single-pay, Ad-pay or Both-pay?
Author’s note: This article makes no point, takes no stand and argues no single position. I wrote it to see if I could come to come conclusion on which of ‘user-pay’ vs ‘ad-pay’ vs ‘both-pay’ makes sense, and failed. But published it anyway to see if it spurs others smarter than me to explain and solve this conundrum.
It used to be in the old days when news was delivered to your home in paper form that the only way to get coupons or know about a sale at Macy’s was from the advertising in this newspaper. If you wanted to save money, or learn the price of products or see what’s new in fashion, you bought the paper. The value proposition was that the only way to access this information was to pay, and the information itself had value. Both the ads and the news had value, so we happily paid, knowing that the advertisers paid too.
Learn to Automate
It’s been almost six months since the Codecademy launched learn to code in 2012, headlined by Mayor Bloomberg. Lots of people pledged, lots signed up.
And I’ll be flabbergasted if any of them are still doing it.
I’m not going to go into why having everybody learn to code is a bad thing in detail, Jeff Attwood nails that in Please Don’t Learn to Code. Short version, it puts the method before the problem, programmers like to solve problems and create solutions, and the tool they mostly use is code. We need problems solved and solutions, not more code.
Markdown Metadata
As you all know, I write everything in Markdown, see my The Markdown Mindset. It would be nice, though, to also save metadata - information about the document - in the document, to make it searchable, but not to have it appear in the final output.
Turns out, MultiMarkdown (and other new Markdown processors) do support this. It’s easy.
Simply add the metadata to the top of a markdown file as follows:
Title: |
Subtitle: |
Project: |
Author: Hilton Lipschitz
Affiliation: Noverse LLC
Web: https://noverse.com
Date: June 18, 2012
Your first paragraph starts here
The metadata is just a set of key-value pairs, where the key is before the : and the value after. The keys can be anything you want them to be, although Fletcher Penney, creator of MultiMarkdown, has recommended some standard ones here. From what I can tell, adding your own makes no difference. So I do.
Unrepairable
Last week, Apple launched the new retina Macbook Pro. Which, of course, was immediately followed by a brouhaha (Definition: A noisy and overexcited critical response, display of interest, or trail of publicity.)
Kyle Wiens, who runs a web site called iFixit which creates videos for people who want to fix things, posted an article in Wired entitled The New MacBook Pro: Unfixable, Unhackable, Untenable claiming that the new laptop is unfixable by the general public, and that this is, of course, obviously “a very bad thing” and part of a trend that will destroy the tech industry as we know it.
The care and feeding of software engineers
Nicholas C. Zakas (@slicknet), writing in NCZOnline in The care and feeding of software engineers (or, why engineers are grumpy), writes:
And here’s the real crux of the problem: software engineers aren’t builders. Software engineers are creators. Building is what you do when you buy a piece of furniture from Ikea and get it home. The instructions are laid out and if you go step by step, you’ll get that comically small table you wanted. Creating is a different process, it’s birthing something without direction or instruction. It’s starting with a blank canvas and painting a masterpiece. Software engineers don’t get into coding because they want someone to tell them what to do, they get into it because they discovered they could create something useful. Every single software engineer fell in love with coding because she made a small, useful program early on and was hooked.
I love my lawyers
As an experienced indie running my own business, there are things I know I am good at, things I know I am passable at and things that I simply cannot do. And one thing I will not do is enter into an engagement without a good contract. And I cannot do contracts. So one of the first things I did when I set up Noverse was to find and engage the best lawyers I could find to take care of this for me.