Author Archives: Hannes

Items of note in the Lindholm mails

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Florian Mueller shares his thoughts on Tim Lindholm testifying in court:

He recommended “to negotiate a license”, and with GPL code, there’s no negotiation: there’s a license, and you can take it or you can leave it. If Google had chosen, or decided to choose in the future, the GPL avenue, it would lose the control it currently has over Android. Its proprietary extensions (the Android Market, GMail, Google Talk, Google Maps, Google+ etc. clients) would have to be made available under the GPL as well, due to its “copyleft” (i.e., viral) nature. Not only would the GPL deprive Google of its ability to withhold those goodies from all those who refuse to accept its licensing terms designed to strengthen Google’s dominant market position in search and other advertising-financed online services but its device maker partners would also be unhappy[.]

He also links to trial exhibits brought forth by Oracle, focusing on email conversations that Lindholm has taken part in.
Some items of note:

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Amazon Appstore more profitable than Google Play – or is it?

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AppleInsider reports on a new Flurry-study about what money can be made from what App Store:

In other words, for every dollar in revenue generated from Apple’s iOS App Store, the Amazon Appstore for Android brings in 89 cents per active user, while Google Play earns 23 cents for software available at all three storefronts.

Sounds like a pretty good opportunity to make some money, doesn’t it? Well, here’s the catch:

The applications included in the comparison make most of their money from in-app purchases, which was the revenue type compared in the analysis

When I first read the headline, I was wondering how this analysis fit into Amazon’s “Bring your apps, we’ll set the price”-policy and whether there was still a lot of money in their app store even if they controlled your price points. Turns out that’s not what this study is showing.

So, if you’re on Android the rule of thumb seems to be: if you monetize your app through In-App-Sales, you can’t miss out on Amazon’s storefront. If you make your money through the money-up-front sales, choosing whether you’re on their app store or not should be one of your most carefully thought about business decisions.

UDIDon’t

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Tapbots had one of their apps rejected for the use of (the now deprecated) UDID and updated it with an already finished, planned-for-the-next-release alternative:

Why did we use UDIDs? We used them only for our push notification services in order to be able to match up a given device to its push notification settings. This allowed us to restore push notifications settings after Tweetbot was deleted and re-installed. With this new change in place this is no longer possible, if you delete and re-install Tweetbot you’ll have to setup your push notification settings again.

These use cases are one of the things I’ve been most excited about ever since first hearing about the iCloud-APIs. While there are a lot of cases that can’t be solved easily with iCloud – users not having it turned on or multiple users on one device, for example – and would require an alternative work-around-solution, I don’t see a reason to not use iCloud to save user settings and just fall back to another way of managing things; I guess the situations where a developer couldn’t use iCloud are far less frequent and not the standard use case. This is less about syncing settings between multiple devices and more about an easy way of backing up settings server-side: ever since I first deleted and reinstalled an app on my first iPhone I longed for a way be able to delete apps without worrying about losing all the data I’ve created within (as iOS reminds you off whenever you hit that little “x”). Want to remove that game to save some space, but be able to pick up where you left in 3 weeks? Want to have your Shazam-history on your new device without having to fully restore from a backup (think migrating some data from your iPhone to your new iPad?) iCloud might just make it possible to do so.

Apps should no longer be silos that tie your data to the device (or backup of that device) it has first been created on. Especially now that more and more people not only have one phone, but an iPad (or more) as well and former-iOS-only apps coming to the Mac due to the Mac App Store, storing information locally is really breaking the user experience and immersion.

Android app developers criticise Google for late payment

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The BBC reports on Android developers not receiving their payment on time this month:

He noted that he had been previously been able to contact a staff member at Apple when there had been an issue with one of his apps on the firm’s iOS platform – but said in this instance it had proved impossible to reach a Google representative.

Open.

My guess: Google’s accounting software had problems with this years leap day. I tried to confirm this theory by downloading, looking through and compiling the source code, but for some strange reason I wasn’t able to find it.

Jason Kincaid leaves Techcrunch

⚭   JasonKincaid.net

Jason Kincaid says a Farewell Ahoy:

Sure, there have been some rough times — and the last six months have been dreary — but to tinge this farewell post with an overwhelming sense of sadness or anger wouldn’t do justice to wealth of experience, memories, and friends I’ve racked up during my time here. And besides, my Professional Blogger instincts are telling me I should save up my criticisms toward the AOL regime for a future post.

I never really cared much for him or his writing, mainly because I thought many (though not all) of his arguments against Apple were bad or simply wrong. Maybe it was due to him stumbling into this line of work, as he recounts, but he always seemed a lot more agitated, a lot less reasoned than MG Siegler when the two had their regular short discussions.

I guess the that’s why this is interesting to me, as I always come back to the question of how long Siegler will remain with AOL (and why he hasn’t left already).

(Also funny: Erick Schonfeld’s farewell to Kincaid on Techcrunch. I first saw only the headline and photograph in the site’s header-bar-latest-news-overview-thingy, and hadn’t I known that he had only left TC, I would’ve thought it was an obituary.)

Revolutionary Feature in Photoshop CS6: Presets Export

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Stephen Nielson, Photoshop Product Manager, in a Video Sneek Peak of Photoshop CS6:

I’m very excited to show you just a quick look at some of the improvements we’re working on. Many of our users spend a lot of time collecting and organizing the figure preset & settings to just the way they like it When upgrading getting all this stuff to the new version of Photoshop can be some work. We’re working on an option to automatically migrate your settings from your current version to the new version. this includes all your preset workspaces preferences and settings you also have the option to export all of this information for easy sharing between computers or between coworkers, friends or students.

I’m often in awe and thinking about starting to use Photoshop when I see some of the great stuff that their engineers are doing, such as all the Content Aware-features recently or when a colleague showed me his stitched-together panoramic photos and told me that Photoshop does these automatically with one click. But then I watch videos such as this and remember why I don’t pay 849 Euros or more: Because Adobe is one of those companies that’s on the frontier of engineering, but doesn’t have it’s ducks in a row in the UX department. I mean, even with a product as complex as Photoshop, how hard can it be to code a simple migration, yet alone the even simpler exporting features for things like presets or user settings? Even if it is hard – all the incredible sophisticated work they do with Photoshop et al shows that they’ve got some pretty talented people; if a small software shop can do exporting and migration of the application’s own settings (not even someone else’s which one doesn’t have control of, but their own!), why not Adobe? Continue reading →

‘All’ future Smartphones

⚭   MacRumors.com

Macrumors in an article titled “Verizon to Require 4G LTE Compatibility for ‘All’ Future Smartphones” (notice the quotes accompanying the “All”):

CNET yesterday reported that Verizon has announced a “hard requirement” that all future smartphones released on the carrier support 4G LTE technology for faster data speeds. That requirement has naturally led to speculation that the carrier has all but confirmed that the iPhone 5 will support LTE, which had already been widely assumed and rumored.

Fortunately, I haven’t seem much of that alleged rumors. I guess there is a lot of idiotic writing to be done about how this is reality or modern technology biting Apple in the ass, Apple being on the losing side, blablabla.

Let’s just have a quick look at that quote (emphasis mine):

From now on, nearly every smartphone, wireless hot spot, tablet, and Netbook that Verizon offers will come with LTE guns a-blazing. Yes, Virginia, that includes Windows Phone and BlackBerry devices, too. There will be the occasional exception, however. For instance, phones on Verizon’s push-to-talk network are 3G-only for now, and will remain that way until further notice.

Nearly every. Explicit mention of Windows Phone and Blackberry, but notably not iOS. Exceptions acknowledged – and excuse me stating the obvious, but if there is one company that gets exceptions from carriers, we all know it’s Apple. And that for instance means that exceptions are not limited to PTT-devices.

Stupid rumors are one thing, but everything being used for speculations despite coming with obvious tells that it is not warranted is something even worse.