This is my habanero chilli plant. It is starting to flower. 100,000 Scoville heat units, come and get me.
Mat from Gizmodo has a mental breakdown upon realising just how ridiculous CES is.
Splitting Up iTunes
iTunes is a monstrosity.
It was originally a music player that you used to manage the music on your iPod. An application that did two things well. Then a music player with a music shop. Then they added device syncing, movies, movie rentals. iTunes is not the appropriate lace to manage device syncing. Photos, contacts, the iOS app store and eBooks simply don’t belong in what should be, through and through, the best media application in the world. iTunes’ bulk makes it horrible to use.
On an iPad, iPod or iPhone, all these features are managed by separate applications. If I want to buy an application, I go to the App Store app. If I want to play music, I go to the iPod app. Ditto for buying books and music. This is how things should work when syncing on OS X.
The Windows version probably rightly has everything rolled into a single app. Apple doesn’t control the Windows desktop, so that’s not something I want to touch on. On OS X, however, this is how I’d like to have things work.
So this is the current iTunes layout with my iPhone plugged in. In the same way you manage all your photos in iPhoto rather than iTunes, apps and books have no place here. One could argue that books should be left in, but only for lack of an OS X iBooks app. Devices? Shouldn’t be managed here at all. iTunes should be where you manage, buy and play your entertainment media, and not much else. Let’s cut out the guff.
There. Much nicer. Although to be honest the layout of iTunes is incredibly stale, so a complete redesign of the interface is probably the best bet at this stage. But taking out things that aren’t directly related to music or movies is a great place to start.
So how do you buy apps for your iPhone, iPod and/or iPad now it’s gone from iTunes? The same way you buy apps for OS X, in the App Store:
All app purchases and management is done from a unified App Store. All updates also come through this channel. Once an iOS device is synced, though, checking for app updates would need to be done and whether the App Store pops up to do this, or it’s done in the device management interface (more on this soon) I’m not sure. Any which way, Apps come through the App Store. Simple.
So how are iOS devices managed on OS X? Through tight integration with the operating system, from the desktop. Below is my concept on this. I’m sure people with even the slightest of design acumen could do a better mock up than I:
In this mock-up, I have my iPhone and iPad plugged in and they’d sync automatically in the same way they do when I plug them in today (sans iTunes launching and taking over). The management interface seen above would come up from a single or double left click, or a right click, or some such. If I want to managed my music manually instead of syncing via albums, artists, playlist and the like, it’d simply be a matter of dragging the desired media from iTunes onto the iPhone icon. Ditto with apps, from the app store and photos from iPhoto. This is the device interface directly ripped out of iTunes. Managing playlists would need a new tab which I forgot to include above.
That’s my basic concept. Whether we’ll see a rethink like this from Apple for OS X Lion or later is unclear, but as iTunes stands now (in all its 32 bit glory, mind), is simply below par for Apple.
Bone fragments of St John the Baptist appear to have been found on Sveti Ivan Island near Bulgaria’s southern Black Sea.
He is considered one of the most important figures in Christianity.
Further tests are still to be carried out on the fragments, which were discovered late last month.
Further tests!? Seriously, what the fuck are they going to test for? Isotopic ratios of Baptisium (Ba)!?
“Good thing we have DNA of John the Baptist, guys, that way we can be absolutely sure these bones fragments are what we think they are”
They know churches have had claimed miraculous artifacts throughout history to frighten and awe the masses, right? Claiming sheep’s blood is the blood of Jebus and such. But oh no, these bones are the real thing.
Sigh.
BP and Gulf Clean Up Donations
Why should I donate to clean up the Gulf? BP makes twenty billion dollars a year ($20,000,000,000!) - they should be damn well paying for the mess they made.
Google Android vs iPhone OS fragmentation
Over on the Android Blog today, Dan Morrill, Open Source & Compatibility Program Manager posted his opinions on the topic of Android fragmentation, and how he sees it’s not an issue to worry about:
“Fragmentation” is a bogeyman, a red herring, a story you tell to frighten junior developers. Yawn.
I’m an iPhone developer, so I find the loosely-bound world of the Android OS quite intimidating. Taking just three features into consideration (version of Android OS, screen resolution and presence of a multi-touch interface), an Android developer has 12 possible feature combinations to consider when planning an Android app. An iPhone developer has 3 (at most - more on that later).
To illustrate the differences between the two platforms, I’ve drawn up an infographic (above). Devices are divided between OS version, touch interface and screen resolution. You can decide if things look fragmented.
Android
The Android graphic shows a total of 12 possible combinations of OS version, screen resolution and multi-touch interface (although this is a minority feature). The operating system version is the highest available for each device. As Android hardware is varied and the individual releases of each version of the OS are determined by the hardware vendor, a range of combinations is present. Resolutions also vary with a range of pixel densities and aspect ratios, the most common being 320x480 - the same resolution as the iPhone and iPod Touch.
The Android phones featured are by no means an exhaustive representation. At the Google I/O conference in May 2010, Google boasted 60 Android-based devices on the market. The inforgraphic above shows just over a third of these.
iPhone
The iPhone OS graphic shows a single operating system as all but the 1st generation versions of the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad hardware will be able to upgrade to OS 4.0. The 1st generation hardware is 3 years old, and is apparently old enough to be deprecated by Apple (therefore will not be supported). Multi-touch is present in all iPhoneOS-based devices. An application written to display at the 320x480 resolution will be scaled up by exactly double to display on the generation 4 iPhone’s (rumoured) 640x960 pixel display. Both 320x480 and 640x960 resolution apps will work as-is on the iPad. As such, an iPhone OS developer could develop an application at the 320x480 resolution and sell it on all three device combinations, or take a pragmatic approach and publish a unique iPad app, and two resolution versions of the iPhone/iPod Touch app.
Unfair Resolution Comparisons
I will admit I have made and unfair grouping comparison for Android phones running at 240x400 and 480x800. The latter will display apps written for the former at exactly double scale.
Compatibility According to Google
In his article, Dan Morrill says the following on compatibility between Android platforms:
We define “Android compatibility” to be the ability of a device to properly run apps written with the Android SDK. This is a deceptively simple way to frame it, because there are a number of things that can go wrong. Here are a few:
Bugs - devices might simply have bugs, such as a buggy Bluetooth driver or an incorrectly implemented GPS API.
Missing components - devices might omit hardware (such as a camera) that apps expect, and attempt to “fake” or stub out the corresponding API.
Added or altered APIs - devices might add or alter APIs that aren’t part of standard Android. Done correctly this is innovation; done poorly and it’s “embrace and extend”.
Each of these is an example of something that can make an app not run properly on a device. They might run, but they won’t run properly. These are the things that I spend my time preventing.
I decided to omit basic features such as whether or not a device has a camera, GPS or other hardware features. The Android graphic would become so unruly were I to try and incorporate all possible variation, that’d it’s cease to be useful. Finding complete specifications for all the featured Android devices also proved tricky.
What’s the Solution?
The solution to all this variation, according to Dan Morrill, is an Android Marketplace filter that only allows compatible devices to buy and download your app.
Insofar as I’m concerned, that’s not a solution at all. Such an approach reduces potential users to a lowest-common-denominator before a single line of code is written. You can never write an Android app in this case, only an app for an Android subset.
Devices Featured
iPhone OS
iPad, iPhone generations 2 (3G), 3 (3GS) and 4, iPod Touch generations 2 & 3
(6 devices in total).
Android
Version 2.2 (320x480) : Google Nexus One
Version 2.1 (320x480) : HTC Legend, HTC Hero, Motorola Quench, Samsung Moment
Version 2.1 (480x800) : HTC Evo 4G, HTC Droid Incredible
Version 2.1 (480x800) : Motorola Droid
Version 1.6 (240x400) : Sciphone N21, General Mobile DSTL1
Version 1.6 (320x480) : HTC Dream, HTC Tatoo, Motorola Devour, Samsung i7500
Version 1.6 (480x800) : Acer Liquid A1
Version 1.6 (480x854) : Sony Ericsson Xperia X10
Version 1.5 (240x400) : Highscreen PP5420
Version 1.5 (272x480) : Geek Phone One
Version 1.5 (320x480) : Huawei-U8220, LG GW620, Motorola Cliq, Samsung Behold II, T-Mobile Pulse
(23 devices in total)
Notes
Android OS versions were drawn from Wikipedi - List of Android Devices.
Though iPhone OS 4.0 isn’t on general release at the time of writing, any iPhone developer currently working on an app will being using the OS 4.0 beta SDK.
Displayed devices are not shown to scale.
Article and image originally showed 1st generation iPhone and iPods as being supported on OS 4.0. This is not the case.
Image Reproduction
If you’d like to use the infographic, feel free to do so. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license. For attribution you can link back here or mention my twitter profile @Yorrike.
Space junk break down
- 41% — miscellaneous fragments
- 22% — old spacecraft
- 13% — mission related objects
- 7% — operational spacecraft
- 7% — rocket bodies
Doing the math, that is 93% pure junk and only 7% useful satellites circling the earth. More disturbing, 50,000 uncatalogued objects larger than 1 cm (the largest size which modern shielding can likely deflect) are estimated to be spinning through space at hypervelocities.
BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | ‘Giant’ orb web spider discovered
Only the females of this groups of species are giants, with a leg span of up to 12cm (4.7in); the male spiders are tiny by comparison.
