Posts in the Tech category

I have read a lot about different tablet form factors since the iPad was first announced. Yes, Apple got the iPad almost certainly spot on. The iPad 2 that has been just as, if not more, successfull.

Samsung, as well as HTC, Motorola and almost every other tablet manufacturer has tried to release a variety of tablet sizes to help match Apples incredible output and sales. Hoping that demand catches up with devices on offer, rather than trying to fullfill demand. A dangerous game to play in what I would class as a, admittedly large, niche market.

Habit

Unfortunately, it seems that, especially in Samsung's case, releasing a number of different sizes has become a habit of what might be seen as their core business. The humble TV.

For decades now, television manufacturers have released any number of sets with almost identical features (if not identical), just in different sizes. Walk into any electrical or department store and you now see walls of the things. Gone are the CRT offerings, but now you have plasma, LCD and LED. 22, 32, 36, 42, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 55, 58, 59, 60 inch and beyond in terms of diagonal screen size. This is one crowded market space.

Just take a look at Samsung's current D range sets which come in 4, 5, 6, 7 & 8 series configurations, each a slight step above each other, then the different types of technology powering within each series. The range is further widened with the multitude of screen sizes available. On their website, you have the choice of 148 televisions. 148. An insane number of devices to have on offer.

If this is your common approach to selling your devices, it is probably a natural step to take into new spaces. Their mobile and tablet offerings don't offer as many choices, but compared to Apple's solitary device, it looks like a lot.

Apple were not always the experts at just giving users one choice, take the iBook (5 different colour options) as an example. Or the iPod Mini (5 colour options) or iPod Nano (4th and 5th generations had 9 colour options). Admittedly, colour options are less serious than different screen resolutions, but then their iMac and MacBook ranges also give a multitude of options... the difference? Configurability. Whether that's space, screen size, RAM or the type of input devices, Apple makes their devices either personal or configurable. One thing their iPad competitiors do is give too much choice.

I have multiple Twitter accounts, generally one for each of my projects. Although I want people to find those accounts organically, sometimes you can increase your Twitter accounts worth by following more people, who, in turn, follow you back.

It's a bit of a hack, or probably better described as playing the game, but not something I would do with my personal account. Spreading news of my brand/projects is important though, so I am willing to just follow larger numbers of people. If any real followers want to really interact with those accounts, they're likely (guaranteed?) to @ the releavant account in their message.

There is another case, where you might want to follow all, or most, of the accounts that a friend follows. Whichever case you're interested in, below is a script you can run in your browser and it will click follow for every account it finds.

javascript:$('.follow-button').each(function() { $(this).click(); });

This could be adapted to work on Facebook or any other social network. Google+'s use of circles, rather than lists, makes this harder to implement, but maybe that could be turned into an extension?

To make the process even easier, just drag this link to the bookmark bar in a modern browser, then all you have to do is click on the bookmark to follow everyone you can see.

For three days this March, I attended the QCon conference in London. It was my first QCon and something that turned out to be quite an interesting few days.

Hosted in the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, the conference was hosted as a way of reaching out to programmers, or software engineers, and promoting a range of products, services and work processes.

There were 15 tracks all together and it was great to have the luxury to mix and match.

Day 1 featured an interesting iOS/Android track.

There was the unforunate site of people promoting their companies and services through their talks, most noteably Adobe, but generally, the speakers were dishing out their experiences and messages in interesting and positive ways.

Further to that, I'd even say that some people were actually chatting shit. The track on REST wasn't bad but towards the end, it was a load of bullshit, hacks and just general nonsense.

Representatives from both Twitter and Facebook both made appearances, Facebook had more than one, giving great talks. The biggest plus I took away from QCon was knowing that established services like Twitter and Facebook face problems with scaling, caching and availability almost as much as your average web developer with a dream of being the next big thing.

They both showed they knew how to handle it, but for me, Twitter's scalability seems far more sensible than Facebook.

Frasier Spears gave an inspiring talk on his experiences of tooling children at the school he works at with iPad. They now have a 1:1 ratio of iPads to kids and from the talk he gave, you would expect the iPad to be an actual educational tool. For me that made Apple's journey over the last 20 years come around full circle. Apple's were once the dreadedcomputer in the corner that no one understood, but under Steve Job's guidance they've now become the 'computer' that everyone wants a piece of.

Mike Lee also gave an inspirational talk, titled How to Make Apps That Don't Suck. Great title and the presentation lived up to the title. As a developer that's been around and done so much, he's now using his time to promote better end products. Why develop an app and then release update after update to give your users when you want, when you could just give them what they want in the first place. Not a luxury that everyone has, but something we should all aim for.

Day three saw the HTML5 track and the promotion of Single Page Web Apps. Great idea, but not the easiest to execute. Well, that's not strictly true anymore thanks to things like HTML5 and the History API. Neither is compatibe with all browsers right now, but an excellent way forward when you know that Microsoft are trying to kill IE6.

All in all, QCon was a good experience. I'd definitely go again, but pay more attention to what's on offer. Day three was the best for me. I've only highlighted a few things above, but for the more traditional software engineers (as apposed to web developers) there's a lot to see.

You can check out a handful of photos that I took, over on flickr.

This past week, Apple announced a few new products. Every one of them got the fanboys into a highly excitable state, and rightly so. Apple's products are gorgeous, well built and most importantly, despite annual refreshes, they last.

One thing that reared it's ugly head again, as it has done at almost every one of Apple's Keynotes over the years was Apple Tax.

Apple Tax is what I like to call the undeniable difference in price between US and UK products. I'm sure all countries suffer from the same problem, but it doesn't make it any less fair. On a low cost product, like an iPod Shuffle, the AT doesn't matter so much. $49 equating to £39 isn't a bad reflection on the current exchange rate, but then you have to allow for the addition of VAT (I've used 20% as the VAT figure in this article, rather than the current 17.5%) in the UK. In fact, £39 is bang on what you'd expect to pay for an iPod Shuffle. This is all on the reasonable assumption that Apple's profit is surely built into the original $49.

AT becomes a bit of a nuisance when Apple’s pricing is applied to a device like the Apple TV. $99 is an amazing price for a decent set-top box that combines the luxuries of the vast iTunes catalogue along with an easy to use remote and small physical footprint.

This same device costs £99 in the UK. With the current exchange rate, that’s just £66. Add 20% VAT and $99 still doesn't translates into £99. When you've done the maths, you actually get £79.20. Almost £20 less than they're currently charging. Again, surely the profit is built in the dollar price? Maybe the price allows for the adjustment of the USD vs the GBP?

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I've been posting a lot about Android lately, and this is the last one I intend to post for at least week or so.

As I've documented already, the HTC Wildfire is my phone of choice for my foray into the world of Android.

Having used the phone quite a bit over the last two weeks, I thought that it was time that I shared my thoughts on the phone, Android and the surrounding ecosystem.

First Impressions

The HTC Wildfire is a small phone, both compared to it’s Android siblings and the iPhone. My last phone was extremely small, but that’s what I wanted. A small phone that didn’t take up a crazy amount of real estate in my pocket (in the process destroying the whiskers in my unwashed jeans).

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HTC Sense usually refers to the user interface on your device and is a bit like a layer of gloss that HTC apply to Android devices. It's actually not that bad. It's quite a decent, yet subtle, set of changes to the default UI. Admittedly, these arent to everyone's tastes and nearly a week into my Android adventure, I'd like to try an Android device without it.

As a result, I searched and messed around and thought it might be useful to document how you can disable and re-enable HTC Sense on your Android device so that you can make the most of it. Having disabled it myself, I've found the phone to be just a little bit faster and more like what I was expecting from Android.

The steps I’ve put together all apply to HTC Sense on a HTC Wildfire which is running Android version 2.1. It's fairly easy to do and you'll find them at the bottom of this article.

Pros

• I found the phone to be a bit faster
• Can always re-enable the HTC Sense UI
• The home button takes you to the home screen you were on

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After it’s debut a couple of years ago, it has taken me a little while to jump onto the Android bandwagon. Not that I didn't want too, more that I couldn't justify the cost to make it happen.

My phone history

Since early 2006, I’ve been mostly Mac based (exclusively for the last 6 months!), so the jump from OS X to iOS wasn’t a big leap. Having said that, the jump to iOS is so small, it's ridiculous that Apple have been able to make such an easy to use device. During those 4years (and counting), I've been keeping up with Apple's journey and in October 2008, I purchased an iPod Touch. In February 2009, I moved from T-Mobile to O2 and that move bought with it, my first new mobile phone in over 4 years! I went from the brick that is the Nokia N70 to the brand spanking new, Nokia 6600 fold.

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When it comes to Apple, I don’t really take the time to speculate but I thought now would be a great time with the imminent launch of the 4th generation iPod Touch, it seems like a great time to start.

My iPod history

The launch of the original iPod saw a new era for music. It’s taken an extremely long time for record companies to come around to the idea of music being digital and I feel that consumers are still being ripped of. Ripped of quite a lot since the introduction of Apple’s 3-tier price structure in iTunes.

With the release of the iPod Mini, I found my own way into the iPod market as I needed an affordable storage device but wanted a small factor MP3 player too. The Mini fit perfectly, although it’s 4Gb capacity wasn’t ideal for the video editing projects I embarked on in University.

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My BMW key fob has had an issue for years where the middle button wouldn't lock the car, and as a result the immobiliser wouldn't initialise.

After a quick search on Friday, I couldn't confirm that the key fob could be opened. Today, I took to it with a stanley knife and prized it open and fixed the offending button. A small metal cage had come loose and a flexible piece of metal had made its way to somewhere else in the fob!

Now that everything was back to where it should be, and had to superglue the two parts back together.

If you need to repair or replace the battery, don't be afraid. Attack with a knife, as carefully as possible and you'll be ok. Superglue or the equivalent is necessary to get it back together, but not as hard as I thought it might be!

As part of the Nike+PHP project, I wanted to display the download count for the project. Mainly as a badge of pride, but also as a tool I can use to gauge the popularity of the project.

Google don't really offer anything like this on their own site, let alone as a widget, so I launched gCount this week.

Entering your Google Code project name will return a total download count and some JavaScript you can pop onto your website that will display the same count. I'll post updates to twitter if I make any enhancements and maybe even promote projects using the service!