Its never too late to pursue your passion!
I saw Larry on American Idol last night. Sixty-two years old, break dancing, standing in front of America singing “Pants on the Ground,” a rap about kids who wear their pants too low. I warn you. The rap is addictive. 
“I have a horrible feeling this song will be a hit,”
– Simon Cowell.
Android App growth: 20,000 strong
Maybe the real battle in 2010 will be Android vs. OS/X. I keep wondering if Google will rebrand it as Mobile Chrome. Regardless, I’m glad Google is finally coming out with the gPhone and letting Andy Rubin go nuts.
The growth in Android apps sure is compelling (see above, taken from Mashable). Its all over the Web this week. 2010 is going to be an interesting year for the mobile market. On the one hand, we’ll have an open store for the Android, much like the early days of Atari (if you built it, they’d pretty much sell it). On the other, we have a closed iTunes store with quality control, like Nintendo. Atari lost that battle in the 80’s as the low quality of games hurt the brand image. Nintendo came out of the gate slower, but thrived on high quality. Will history repeat itself?
Both will prosper as brands will be eager to reach their customers, directly, twenty four hours a day, on the go. Apps will be everywhere, apps with real time information, geo location, gorgeous graphics and human-friendly interfaces with haptics and sensors galore. I look forward to writing software for both
Ben's Iron
Ben Britten Smith, or Ben Britten, wrote the first chapter in iPhone Advanced Projects. Get the book. Ben’s chapter alone is worth the price.
His sample code is elegant, demonstrating a common design pattern for implementing 2D and 3D games. Ben’s explanation of a particle generator on an iPhone is particularly engaging. Particles are simple sprites with textures pulled from an atlas. A Particle Emitter generates sprites within a defined 3D region, like the back end of a tiny space ship. The Particle System is an embedded OpenGL game loop, animating and destroying sprites with every tic. The demo system uses basic physics (velocity, size), a handful of textures, and OpenGL color transformations. Commercial systems are more complex yet follow this pattern.
Apparently Ben was also using Cheetah 3D, a compact 3D modeling package for the Mac, written by a scientist in Germany. While not Maya or 3DMax or Poser, it has many of the same features for a killer price. You’ll want Rob Bajorek’s model exporter, too.
And the Iron? You’ll have to ask Ben. Its the logo from his site. Maybe it has to do with clean code, ironing out all the kinks.
Tom Krazit of CNET wrote an article about the Google Phone recently. He said, quote,
“…assuming Google really is planning on releasing a completely Google-branded phone at retail, such a plan could derail the momentum enjoyed by Google and its Android partners this year.”
Momentum? Do we really want another Windows, this time with Chrome but on mobile devices?
Empower Andy Rubin (the brainchild behind Google’s mobile efforts) to go nuts. He should be given complete, autonomous reign over the gPhone. Pick a set of technologies that compete with the iPhone. Tune ChromeOS to squeeze every bit of joy out of the hardware, blowing away his earlier success with the Sidekick. Then we’ll have some real competition, a chance for Chrome OS to shine. Please make me eat crow for my post on Chrome. I’d like to see a healthy market competition without a green screen of death.
Competition often produces better goods and services, at lower prices. We all win. Go, Andy, Go. Make the gPhone. You have my vote.
The Google Chrome challenge
Ok, so the title is a bit sensational. But here’s my point.
Google is taking a page from Microsoft’s playbook, except this time they’re interested in an Ad on Every Device, not a PC on Every Desk. Verizon’s Droid, T-Mobile’s G1 are just the start. How do you make that happen? Build an operating system that every business wants to use. This time, give it away for “free.” Consumers pay with attention span.
What’s so bad about this? A free OS? Great engineering? C’mon, why is it doomed?
Well, Google Chrome will need to run multiple phones, laptops and more. There will be millions of combinations of devices, device drivers, screen resolutions, graphics adapters, network adapters, storage devices, WiFi, Bluetooth… you get the picture. The engineering challenge is phenomenally hard. Google has hired many of the best engineers in the world, grabbing talent from Microsoft, IBM, HP and other giants. Soon we’ll have a new Blue Screen of Death. Maybe they’ll make it Green. Chrome has all the potential to be the next Windows. I bet they succeed. But it’ll be everywhere, and we’ll learn to have a love-hate relationship as we do today with Windows.
Chrome is doomed to be the next Windows.
I prefer Apple’s philosophy. Don’t overcomplicate matters. Choose a great combination of hardware and software that generates joy and delight in your customers. Tune the OS to squeeze every ounce of performance and fun from your selection. Bundle hardware, software, networking and design into an amazing product. Focus on taste and quality, not quantity.
OS/X is complex, but the technical challenge is vastly simpler and more elegant. Will Google make more money? I have no doubt — they already are. But I prefer Apple’s OS/X. Its a coding and entertainment dream, a wonderful technical cocoon from the masses.
Green Tape
Croton on Hudson took a step forward to revitalize the Harmon District, an area hit particularly hard by the recession. The village board approved a resolution to rezone the Harmon district, a first step toward enabling entrepreneurs to build profitable retail space with rental units. The Mayor (Leo Wiegman) also announced a new “green tape” initiative.
Green Tape?
Its the antithesis of Red Tape. Green Tape is his word for process re-engineering, removing extra layers of red tape, streamlining local government. The title is catchy. It calls to mind other green initiatives, conserving natural resources, preserving our environment.
We all spend a lot of our waking hours at work, in our towns, working with people. Green Tape. We need more of it, conserving one of life’s most precious resources — time.
Cow mooing
One of my first applications was just approved by the Apple Store last night. Woo-hoo!
Pushtone 1.0 is an app for sending hilarious alert sounds to an iPhone or iPod touch. If you’re offended by movies such as Wedding Crashers, Animal House, or comics like Chris Rock… this isn’t for you. If not, grab two iPhones or iPod touches, and pushtone to your heart’s content. Your phone never sounded so inappropriate.
I wanted to experiment with the new Push service, play with images, sounds, animation effects, table views, registration, XML feeds, backend servers in the cloud, embedded feedback through email, SMS gateways, and more. This little app packs a lot. The hard part was making it really easy and viral.
Registration? Its automatic. Sending a pushtone? Three taps. Tap once to get a list of pushtones. Tap a second time to choose a Pushtone. Tap a third to send it to yourself, or tap the phone number and quoted saying to send them to a friend.
The SMS gateway was an interesting challenge. Carriers are more than happy to let us send SMS and MMS messages from a cloud server. You just have to pay for it. Handsomely. Think a nickel an SMS, thirty cents per MMS.
I found a database of over 300,000 phone entries, held by an obscure US Government agency. By law they publish a list of all phone number “sets” and who owns them. A set is defined by the first 3, then the next two digits in a 10-digit phone number. This works pretty well. However, the agency hasn’t yet figured out how to track numbers that were ported.
For example, suppose you first had 914 555 2345 on Verizon. If you bought an iPhone and wanted to keep your number, the phone companies “port” your number from Verizon to AT&T. So, even though Verizon technically owns the set of numbers 914 55x xxxx, they’ve made an exception for you, 914 555 2345, and given it to AT&T. These are apparently not reported to the agencies.
The end result is that the database is mostly accurate — except for ported numbers. I mapped that database to the known email gateways, then send the SMS by sending an email to the appropriate carrier gateway, using their addressing format (e.g. Verizon would be 91455552345@vtext.net).
Ants on Site
Back when we did the web site for the Olympics, we’d occasionally take a break over pizza and brainstorm about geeky “cool” things to add to the site. We called the site our WomBeast. Wom stood for Web Object Manager. Beast was what it felt like working with the sprawl of machines and code 24 hours a day.
One of my favorites was “WomAnts.” The idea was to track where everyone was on the site, in real time, like ants walking around a picnic blanket. We could inspect the ants, interact with them, chat, and see the pathways they created. With the flip of a switch, we’d see ants crawling on the site. Click! We’d talk to you. Flick! You’d be logged off. Ooo, the power of it all.
Now that I’ve had this blog and a number of other sites, that curiosity is as strong as ever. I now create avatars anonymously for all that visit here. For chat, I’m trying out Google Talk. You can see your avatar on the upper left of the title bar. If I’m online, you can click and chat with me. Soon I hope to be able to chat with you, in reverse, for free.
This will take a bit to write in my spare time. Still, its a fun hack.
Are Apps the next gold rush?
Apps are on the cover of Business Week!
The article talks about the $1B App market and young companies like Zynga, Social Gaming Network, Tapulous that are minting cash. Little Zynga has exploded to several hundred employees, offering engineers perks like a Lamborghini for a day. Virtual goods, virtual gardens, social games, Dance-Dance revolution clones for your fingers, business apps, and more are rocketing to the tops of the charts.
But why Apple? Why didn’t this happen before now?
Apple was the first company to release a real, bonafide operating system on a mobile device. The OS includes a graphics pipeline, fun sensors (an accelerometer, magnetometer, realtime audio, realtime video, proximity), mobile networking, gobs of storage and computing power, and the ability to program in near machine language (C, Objective C). No other phone comes close.
These bite-sized apps are such a breath of fresh air when compared to PC bloatware and enterprise drudgery. Apple has made software and computing fun again! We’re happy to pay the buck or two for the pleasure.
Myers-Briggs is popular at major corporations, startups, psychologists and more. They have developed a 4-dimensional matrix of personality profiles, based on whether you’re an introvert or extrovert, thinking or feeling, intuitive or sensing, judgmental or perceptive.
Today a colleague offered up four questions to quickly guess your personality type. I didn’t think it would work. The results were surprisingly accurate (though clearly anecdotal).
Let’s call it Myers-Briggs for Idiots. Here they are. What personality are you?
Answers:
1A = E, 1B = I, 2A = N, 2B = S, 3A = F, 3B = T, 4A = J, 4B = P
String your answers together, E – N – T – J.