Oct 13
Oct 13
Jul 17
Yesterday I was at the monthly meeting of the Groovy and Grails User Group at Skills Matter to hear about the recent release of Groovy 2 and a standard event bus for Grails applications. The evening was split into two sessions – the first on Groovy 2 and the second on a new Grails event bus.
May 20
About ten days ago I finally received the OTA update for my Galaxy Nexus that would take it from 4.0.2 to 4.0.4. Of course it didn’t show up at a convenient time despite my numerous checkin requests over the previous two weeks, I was on the motorway, using Google’s Navigation app. Ten minutes later however I was in a stationary traffic jam so I elected to apply the update. All went well and the navigation app was back and running inside ten minutes.
Mar 27
Last year’s Google I/O conference sold out in under 60 minutes. This year, with many more tickets available, it sold out in just 28 minutes (according to my browser) or 20 (if you read Vic Gundotra’s Google+ post here). Google could have sold every ticket at least three times over last year. Or, if you just count the tickets not sold to previous attendees – at least ten times over.
In any event many people were not going to get a ticket for this year. I was fortunate enough to go last year (thanks to eBay) and after reading this year’s registration FAQ was hopeful that demand from scalpers would be damped down by the price rise and non-transferability of tickets making re-selling a big gamble. Add in the fact that this year there was no opportunity for previous attendees to pre-register and you have 5000 tickets available instead of the 1500 or so. What’s to go wrong?
Mar 24
Samsung is a company that has successfully renewed itself in recent years. If I want a good quality and feature packed TV I look at Samsung, not Sony. And If I want a good looking, up-to-date Android device then they have some fantastic hardware that performs well and looks good.
At Google I/O I got my hands on the Galaxy Tab, which is about to receive an Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade. This was when I first started to realise that Samsung have become, compared to the rest of the large tech companies, more Apple-like. They have a distinct brand name for their devices – Galaxy – and their hardware feels good and looks good. I’ve had my Tab for nearly a year now and when I’m not developing software it tends to be my go-to device for email, web browsing and media consumption.
Feb 04
Android has been taking a back seat recently (although that is about to change) as the new Formula One season looms and I’ve been comprehensively overhauling the fantasy game web site I’ve been running for over ten years, fantasy-f1.net.
Last year I spent three months removing the Struts MVC layer, restructuring the underlying code and then implementing a new JSF 1.2 user interface. Once you’ve got used to the quirks of the JSF lifecycle its a relatively frictionless way to create well-structured and component-based web sites. There’s no need to write tag libraries any more – just develop your component in situ and then extract it into its own XHTML fragment and – hey presto – you have a re-usable component.
Dec 14
At this year’s Devoxx, Google’s Tim Bray gave a thought-provoking keynote which covered several areas but what stood out for me were his comments around writing applications for Android. In summary his message was “give software away and sell a service” and “make it social”.
Giving software away and selling a service is a whole other discussion which I intend to address separately. With regards to making it social, this is fine provided that there is a significant social angle to your application.
Sep 22
Having published a first Android application Audio Clock in the Android Market my attention has turned to developing something new. Audio Clock was simple but this new application is on a whole other scale.
Audio Clock had a minimal UI – in fact just some configuration views and a notification bar entry – and ran in the background, waking every 15 minutes to chime. It has no web component, no remote connections. In other words it was kept almost as simple as it was possible to be whilst till providing some useful purpose.
The current application, which I should be able to start testing in the wild with some willing victims within a week is completely different. It will have a relatively complex UI. It will use more hardware features. It will require an internet connection and I will have to write a server component.
