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Android Addendum, Part II

Blogtober 11 catch-up, part V

When I went to Melbourne a few months ago I was faced with a bit of a dilemma. One of the most enjoyable dilemmas I’ve had to face, but a dilemma nonetheless.

You see, it was right around the time I was experimenting with various smartphone platforms, and it just so happened that I had all four smartphones at that time — the Dell Venue Pro, the HTC 7 Mozart, a Samsung Nexus S, and of course, my trusty iPhone 4.

The only problem was that I didn’t know which phone to take. Like I said, a pretty enjoyable dilemma.

On one hand, I needed something that would serve me well. Something that I was already familiar with — and that meant my iPhone 4, capable of pretty much anything I wanted to throw at it.

On the other hand, there wouldn’t be a better test case for how well Android would hold up in an unfamiliar city, in unfamiliar surroundings, where a few seconds could make all the difference in the world.

I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to take the any of the WP7 phones — as this was pre-Mango, I didn’t think they were quite at the level I wanted them to be for every-day use.

For the record, I ended up bringing both my iPhone 4 and my Nexus S. I used the Nexus S as my primary phone, but my iPhone 4 was always waiting for me in my other pocket, or in my bag.

And you know what? The Nexus S wasn’t too bad, with perhaps one issue: the GPS was incredibly, incredibly slow to get a solid lock. I mean, you don’t appreciate just how fast the GPS lock is on iOS until you’ve experienced the same thing on Android. Now, I’m fully prepared to admit it might have been my particular phone and software combination — but then I ask myself, if this is the experience that Google mandates, I can only hope that other manufacturer and software combinations are much, much better.

Once it got a lock it was fine, though. The 3D navigation stuff was particularly impressive, even on foot.

Bottom line: Android isn’t bad, but I still prefer iOS.

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.

Up and Down

It’s like a rollercoaster over here.

The past few days have sucked completely because I’ve been very unproductive (and that will have some consequences I’ll face some other day), and for a moment there, it was almost funny — I’d think about how much work I had to do, do completely none of it, then think about the consequences of not doing so. This led into a spiral of doom which me feeling pretty sucky; getting angry at myself for not doing any work, knowing any consequences I would have to bear would be all my fault, writing semi-depressive blog posts on the subject under the guise of unanswered questions, questioning all sorts of things.

Yeah, it kinda sucked.

But the thing is, now those deadlines have come and gone, I got a whole heap done today. There’s no hugely pressing deadline per se, but I did have to get a few things done by tomorrow or the end of the week — and today, I pretty much ticked off every single thing on my list. Weird, right?

It’s not that I can’t work under pressure  — arguably some of my best work is when I’m thrown into the deep end. So what is it? The pressure of doing my best work knowing that someone is looking over my shoulder every step of the way? I used to say that I did my best work alone, but now I’m not so sure. Perhaps I need that pressure of being accountable, that pressure of knowing that I’ll have to answer to someone for my work— someone other than myself.

You know what? I’m actually not sure what it is. Perhaps it’s the fact that when faced with a million seemingly-insurmountable tasks and the lure of a good game, I’ll choose the game every time. Or perhaps it’s the fact that sometimes I just can’t be bothered — I could do the work if I was bothered, but man, sometimes I just don’t see the point.

In any case, I got a few things done today that I’m pretty proud of. Unfortunately, I’ve also made some pretty poor decisions in the past week — the consequences of which I’ll face some other day. No sense getting dragged down by the past now, is there?

Over and out.

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.

 

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.

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 →

Just Do It

As it stands, I have two assignments due in just under a week. They’re both major assignments — one requires me to write a few thousand words on ubiquitous computing with references AND do a not-insubstantial iOS programming task that involves pigs (no, it isn’t an Angry Birds clone), and the other requires me to do a Java-based version of Minesweeper.

I, of course, haven’t started either.

It’s not that I find the content boring (okay, maybe the Java one isn’t all that appealing) — heck, just today we were making a super basic read-only version of Twitter (but without actual tweets). The spec called for a normal UIButton to be placed somewhere in the interface that would link to a map view of the “tweets” on a map (I think the idea was that we were playing around with CoreLocation and MapKit). After trying a few different things and deciding that looked like crap, I stuck a UIBarButtonItem in the UINavigationBar, which made it look much cooler. A tiny, ten-second version of going above and beyond, but my interest was definitely piqued.

Like I said, it’s not that I find the content boring. Most of my Uni subjects have been interesting enough, but try as I might, I just can’t find the motivation to get things done (and by things, I mean super-huge-mega-assignments that always seem to get left to the last minute).

It’s not that I’m lazy, either — at least, I don’t think it is. I’m definitely very un-lazy about some things, recent examples including staying up for Apple keynotes, and downloading and installing the Battlefield 3 beta so I can play — and later this month, I plan to go to the midnight launch of Battlefield 3 at my local games store. That’s not lazy, right?

So what is 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.