"Happiness as a byproduct of living your life is a great thing,” Barry Schwartz, a professor of social theory at Swarthmore College, told me. “But happiness as a goal is a recipe for disaster."
Lovely graphs showing the difference between iOS and Android new version adoption rates. Yeah the data isn’t perfect - but I think most people would agree with the general trend anecdotally.
After iOS5 OTA updates, this is going to get even better. Funny story - my girlfriend once called me in a panic because her phone had turned off after she’d pressed something and she was worried she’d broken it somehow. I explained that she’d just pressed ‘yes’ to updating the firmware. Always read the words in the popups, people.
This could be good. Hopefully they’ll make whatever product comes out of this available to people using non-official Twitter apps. Another way twitter seems to be making steps to make my life more interesting and useful, whilst I increasingly feel that Facebook is like a private detective trying to dig out my past.
A great essay with too many good suggestions to summarise. This sums up how I feel about academia in the UK, and I’m sure a lot of other people too. I doubt it’s a priority for any government to fix the problem though, but maybe if they read this they could stop breaking it any further.
I’m not sure I see this happening quite as quickly and simply as Marco Arment, but it’s interesting to wonder how it’s been allowed to happen.
Yes, the ‘openness’ of Android has something to do with it, but I don’t think this would have happened if Google hadn’t made such a mess of the Android Market that Amazon felt it could make a rival store which seems to be so bad for developers.
What’s wrong with the Android Market? Well, I don’t have an Android phone, but as I understand it, the main problem is the failure of Google Checkout. Seems unrelated, doesn’t it? I don’t think it is - if Google Checkout had been more widely adopted, Google would have all our credit/debit card details, just like Amazon and Apple. As it is, it makes it a bit of hassle to buy from the Marketplace. Add to that the lack of currency conversions so that people are left with currency loading fees for foreign currency transactions etc, it’s all very messy.
The only way people will pay for content on their phone is if it’s easy. I buy stuff happily without thinking about it. All I need is my iTunes password. Google isn’t particularly interested in taking money from your credit card - it just wants to advertise to you, and that is what Android is for. It can do that better if apps are free and ad supported.
The University of Bristol and Bristol City Council have decided we can all use both of their networks. This is good in terms of freeing me from my desk to go work in the library, although the downside is that my phone will now have more opportunities to desperately try and connect via the distant remnants of Uni wi-fi when I walk past any council owned building.
Plausible, though I suspect it could be just beta features being tested internally and the code is too difficult to remove for the final release.
Great article. Difficult to give a tl;dr version, but basically:
- Talk yourself up
- Making money happens in boring things
- Companies don’t care how you make something work, just that it works
- You can program in any language you like, you’re good enough to learn
- Making friends is important
But that doesn’t give credit to how good this article is. Set aside ten minute and enjoy.
On September 19th, I said goodbye to my trusty MacBook Pro and started developing exclusively on an iPad + Linode 512. This is the surprising story of a month spent working in the cloud.
It all started when I bought my first MacBook a couple of years ago. Frustrated by the inconsistent…
This is amazing. I mainly use VIM too, and have access to an SSH server. Actually, if I could set my desktop machine up at work with dropbox, I’d be in a very similar situation.
