February 2011
4 posts
4 tags
Fixing the Galaxy S File System
My phone felt pretty fast when I got my hands on it last summer, but I’d done my fair share of complaining about seemingly super slow apps. I figured the developers of those apps just plain sucked. I was a little surprised that my brother, owner of a Droid X, didn’t notice the same slow downs. A Google search later, and I found out it was actually Samsung who sucks. Samsung built a...
January 2011
11 posts
2 tags
Android 3.0 Platform Highlights →
It seems like we just had the 2.3 highlights, but I won’t complain about 3.0 coming quickly behind it.
I’m kind of torn with the new UI. Some parts of it look really stylish, like the email message view, or the contacts view. Yet, I feel other parts really clash with the metro-esque look. The whole bottom bar of buttons and the time look terrible. I’m also really not feeling...
2 tags
Twitter, Reblog, and Email Comments →
The ways that you can comment even when an author doesn’t provide you a comment form.
What I particularly like about this is that then, when you use these other means, you own your comments. If you leave comments on someone’s blog, they own it.
So, I get to show only the content I want to on my site, and everyone else gets to own their comments.
2 tags
Hypothetical Tumblr Pro →
Nick Cernis:
Imagine a web publishing platform that costs $10 per month.
$5 of that $10 goes to the platform company for the boring stuff.
The other $5 gets split evenly between the writers, photographers, videographers, designers, and other creative people you follow who also pay to use the platform, up to a maximum of — say — 20 followers, hand-picked by you.
I love it. I...
3 tags
Why U.S. Galaxy S Phones run Android 2.1 Still →
Another reason why these hardware companies shouldn’t be allowed to be involved with software:
Most U.S. carriers aren’t very happy with Samsung’s decision to charge for Android updates as feature updates, especially since they are essentially charging for the Android Open Source Project’s efforts, and the effort on Samsung’s end is rather minimal.
1 tag
The Open Internet →
Beautiful, fun site. Plus, it shows why net neutrality is so important, in a way normal people can understand.
4 tags
H.264 and Chrome →
Google is trying to force everyone off of closed codecs like H.264 and use open codecs, like WebM. Other companies have tried to force away bad technologies, and while they were hated at first, eventually everyone realized it was a good move.
What’s surprising (perhaps it shouldn’t be), is that one of the companies to have done this previously is Apple, and yet, much of the Apple...
1 tag
Tweet Nest →
Really neat looking app to keep a viewable, searchable, and customizable archive of all your tweets. Since, you know, Twitter ditches all old tweets. Personally, I’ve setup a tumblr account to pull in all my tweets, but this definitely looks and functions better. It just costs having your own server.
5 tags
Honeycomb Video →
Looks really cool. Though, it also looks surprisingly un-Android.
1 tag
URL Design →
Excellent article by Kyle Neath. Continuing on the subject, Ian Hines created a nifty structure for his site:
`http://ianhin.es/wrote-about/iphone`
However, my only concern with such a structure for blogs is what happens when you write about the iPhone again? For blogs, I actually do find the /year/month/slug format to be informative to me. It gives me context: “Ok, so its about the...
3 tags
The Care and Feeding of the Android GPU →
Charles Ying:
Android’s UX architecture needs work. UI compositing and the view system are both primarily done in software. Garbage collection and async operations frequently block UI rendering.
As much as I like Android, this is definitely a low point. It gets rather frustrating when an app doesn’t respond because of some blocking URL request, or a huge amount of garbage collection...