So this giant blue arrow on google points me to +! Cool!. Techmeme and other sites have headlines about google plus opening to the public now. As a long time early adopter of google products , finally I can sign in!. So I click and……
EVEn PAID Gapps users aren’t allowed! WTF!
This player is amazing, works on Mac/Linux/DOS . So you can have the same player no matter what OS you are stuck with. It’s super-fast compared to other popular players. Whereas other SQL-based players choked scanning my library this one had no problems. It’s free as in freedom open-source. It’s fast and easy to use with fully customizable hot-keys (if your OS lets you do that). I hope it becomes the default player in KDE.
Clementine: http://www.clementine-player.org/
So I am reading a newspaper article. The install extension bar comes on WTF. Spyware? no…They have a browser extension to help me get their news better. Like the fuckign bookmark is not working? It got me to your site, “DIRECT IN MY BROWSER” even! Then they eat up the screen with more app shit below it. Okay there’s an ad there too (being pushed aside by the stupid phone app notice – can’t they fuckign detect i’m not on a phone? it’s pretty easy in CSS )
YOU ALREADY HAVE A BIG GIANT APP ITS CALLED YOUR WEBSITE.
Imagine if you would, if there were an open, easy to use, well-entrenched platform that could serve PCs, Tablets, Phones, Gaming Consoles and just about anything. No more cross-compiling, learning gotchas on each new version, or accidentally picking the wrong ABI before building.
Imagine further if this platform were so flexible that it didn’t rely on binary code. That it was moderately easy to read 10, 15 years later. And modify or update to the newest version.
Since this exists, and has for about fifteen years. I ask you – why are you bothering to make apps? Is not a bookmark or shortcut to your HTML app better for everyone in the long run? Do I need 300 apps on my phone, one for each site I visit? Few I ever open again?
I can see if you’re doing games that binary apps make complete sense. Where 1/2 an FPS is a difference. But for just about everything else we have this incredible platform that just works on so many devices and doesn’t require building 6 versions of the same thing, just one that has the right CSS.
I have been toying and testing phones and their SDKs lately. All I can say is wow how are people putting up with this shit.Don’t get me started on the quality user experience of the touch screen. Here’s a quick run down of the developer options.
RIM: no emulators or SDK for anything but Windows. Given Windows non-existence in mobile and suicide pact with Nokia , it’s hard to fathom what RIM is going for here. Maybe they are sitting on a fence getting ready for Droid? I didn’t even test this as I can’t run Windows as a serious developer, if there is no SDK for MacOS or Linux there’s no SDK.
iOS: no SDK unless you pay. WTF? Did I travel back in time? Anyway, after you pay $4.99/download or $99 a year to be on their market . The SDK only runs on iOS/MacOS. Again here this is pretty lame given MacOS’ traditional inability to work with VM hypervisors on other platforms (even if you figure it out with osx86 it isn’t legal). But at least it runs on one acceptable developer platform. The emulator sucks for general testing, and it uses a language no one should have to know (ObjectiveC). It’s got a nasty looking IDE that makes emacs look appealling , but it basically works.
Droid: their SDK is free for Mac, Windows, Linux. Emulators for a plethora of phones, an easy to use VM manager for them where you can tweak screens, memory, phone features, etc. The SDK plugs right into Eclipse, the most popular IDE. The SDK and VM tools have worked for me on all platforms BUT on Windows its a bit of a second class citizen, without a decent underlying OS you end up having to use Cygwin to be comfortable – or just give in and throw Linux in a VM. But like RIM’s option , running a phone VM inside another VM is pretty slow and annoying. Still with the great support of Eclipse and running on MacOS and Linux it’s pretty hard to beat this option. Using Java and being integrated into Eclipse makes the learning curve that much shorter than other platforms.
I haven’t tried HP WebOS but the SDK is free and to register to be in their market you don’t have to pay but you need Paypal to signup.
The inability to use your IDE with the SDK , and use your normal keyboard+mouse setup to develop and test really makes iOS hard to test on. It’s dramatically slower than Droid for working.