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Unanswered Questions

Blogtober 11 catch-up, part IV

Sometimes, just sometimes, I have many questions. Many, many questions, and too few answers.

Sometimes, stupid little questions, like: why did that girl stare at me? Is my fly undone? Do I have something unpleasant coming out of my nose? Is there something wrong with my face? Did I say the right thing? Did I act the right way?

These questions don’t really matter. I usually forget them after a few minutes, and then I move on to some of the more important stuff.

More important stuff, like: what kind of message do I want to convey when writing? What do I want to write about? Should I hit publish on this piece, knowing that it might not be my best work yet? Or should I publish that piece anyway, and just throw caution to the wind?

These questions matter a little more. They don’t really affect anyone apart from myself, and even then they’re usually forgotten the next day, or a few days later. There’s nothing wrong with these questions, per se, and sometimes they should definitely be asked, but the real, life changing questions are where it’s at.

Questions like: what should I be doing with my life? Am I really happy doing this Uni degree? Why can’t I seem to get the right work done? Why does the reward always seem to dictate the amount of effort I put into things? Where is the light at the end of the tunnel? How am I supposed to feel about various things? What kind of an effect does that have on my life? Where do I want to be in 5 years? Where do I want to be in 10 years? What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?

If only I could answer all these questions. I know no-one has all the answers to everything, but why are there so many unanswered questions anyway? Where do I get the answers from? How do I get out of this rut?

And finally, the most important question of all: what graphics card should I get for Battlefield 3?

This post part of Blogtober 2011, just a little thing of mine where I (attempt to) post something up on my blog every day in October 2011.

Android Addendum

Blogtober 2011 catch-up, part III

Because some of still couldn’t be convinced that my comparisons were good enough, this is very likely just a small response to a few points I’ve seen around the place.

Your issues are due to hardware!
Are you serious? The Nexus S is a newer phone than the iPhone 4, and if you’re actually insinuating that  the Gallery lag is attributed to hardware issues, you must be mistaken, because there’s no way. I mean, if Android doesn’t run on the phone that Google use for development, what hope is there for other phones?

I don’t have those issues with my phone!
Oh, this again? Look, I’m not made of money, I’m just an ordinary consumer trying different smartphones for kicks. I chose the Nexus S because it’s the flagship Android product — the product vetted by Google — which means that it should provide the best Android experience. TouchWiz or Sense might lead to a better experience for the end user, but that comes at the cost of other issues.

Ice Cream Sandwich will fix most of your issues!
Well, if we always waited for the next great thing to come along, then we’d probably be back in the dark ages, wouldn’t we?

I think that’s about it.

This post part of Blogtober 2011, just a little thing of mine where I (attempt to) post something up on my blog every day in October 2011.

Instapaper

I love Instapaper. There, I said it.

I do a fair bit of public transport, and that means lots of time to chill out with tunes and just read. Sometimes I even write, but it’s mostly about reading.

I don’t know when it happened, but about a year or two ago I stopped reading things in the browser. Not just the long-form articles or editorials I occasionally come across, but pretty much everything — shorter news pieces, reviews, basically anything and everything longer than a paragraph or two. I use Google Reader a lot, and nothing there gets read either — only skimmed, and if found to be interesting, sent to Instapaper for later perusal.

I don’t read books as often as I used to (which was sparse to begin with), but I do read my Instapaper list. I’m usually only a week or so behind my unread list — but there are some things in my “serious reading” folder (for long-form stuff) that is years old. With Instapaper, I’m never without anything to read. Now my only problem is running out of battery power when I’m out and about, but that’s a story for another time.

Instapaper isn’t just for reading, though! I also use it as a bit of temporary link storage. Links come in — from Twitter, from interesting websites I don’t want to read right now, from things on the internet which I want to refer to later — and links go out, either when I read items, or get to my Mac and open up all the stuff I’ve Instapaper-ed from Twitter or wherever else.

Remember how I was saying it’s all about the apps? Throughout my experiments with various smartphone platforms over the past month, I found that exactly none had decent Instapaper clients. IOS obviously has the official client, but there’s no such thing for Android or Windows Phone 7 — at least no client that matches the iOS one, anyway.

All the niceties you’ve come to expect from the official client just don’t exist elsewhere. There are a lot of clients that sync with Instapaper, but none that do the job as well. I’m not even talking about things like jumping to the top and then returning to the bottom, I’m talking really basic things, like the reading interface itself. Typography, style, layout — all of these things matter. If you’re an app developer, it’s great that you’re making an Instapaper client for something other than iOS, but make sure your app is good for reading; if your app isn’t usable for reading, it probably isn’t suitable for Instapaper.

This post part of Blogtober 2011, just a little thing of mine where I (attempt to) post something up on my blog every day in October 2011.

Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner with Android — Part Deux

 

In my previous post in the series, I detailed a few of the more user-facing things about Android, like app management, music syncing, and so on. In this post, I intend to talk more about some of the finer points of things like text selection, general usability, and finally wrap it up at the end with a few choice sentences about Android as a whole and how it compares to other mobile platforms. If the previous post was about a 3 (not quite computer illiterate and yet not quite your average nerd) on the Benny Ling official scale of nerdery, this post is about a 6 or a 7 (getting up there). Not to mention it’s fairly long… You have been warned!

You want to talk about fragmentation? Okay, let’s talk about fragmentation. Fragmentation isn’t an issue. Geeks like us might like to harp on the fact that everything (apps-wise) doesn’t run on, everything (hardware-wise), or that some apps are restricted to certain regions, or that different versions run on different devices, but the fact of the matter is, fragmentation isn’t an issue for most end users. I say “most”, because if you’re one of the unlucky few who has chosen either the cheapest Android phone you could find, or somehow gotten stuck with a manufacturer notorious for releasing updates very slowly, or even worse, not at all, then, then, fragmentation might be an issue. You can hardly blame Google for your fragmentation issues though, as it’s up to manufacturers to release updates for their phones, which also makes it super-easy for them to drop support in way of software updates for a particular phone. Exactly why I would only ever buy an Android phone either from the Nexus series (as you’re guaranteed software updates, it being the flagship Android phone at any given time)), or from HTC, or any of the other big players (Samsung just manages to sneak in here) — any other manufacturer is a crapshoot. I mean, sure you can put the latest ROM or whatever from XDA Developers on your Motorola Milestone, but do you really want to learn about bootloaders, custom restore images, and all that kind of stuff? Perhaps if you’re a geek, otherwise, probably not.

First seen in iOS, there’s a rather nice visual feedback effect to let you know when you have reached the end of a long list, or scrolled to the bottom of a webpage. The UI “bounces” to let you know there’s no more content, the scrollbar appears for a second to do the same, and you can go about your merry business. Android 2.3 brings a similar sort of effect, only instead of a UI bounce, you see a nice flash or orange whenever you reach the end of a scrollable section. It’s pretty nicely done — as you drag more and more away from the edge, you get more and more visual feedback (but only the very edge is tinted with orange, the rest is a semi-transparent white that builds upon the orange effect).

The funny thing is, I can only think of the Windows Phone 7 accent colour whenever I see these orange flashes. Orange is a good colour choice as it manages to stand out against pretty much everything, but it would have been nice if we had a choice of colours to choose from; I’m guessing that their particular implementation of this kinda of visual feedback means that basically any colour will be visible against the background. As it stands, the orange is used lots of other places, too — like when the spacebar can autocorrect a word for you, there’s a orange line that appears on it (more on text entry a little later), and even punctuation keys and suggested words use this orange colour. It’s not bad, but it could have been better. Continue Reading →