Apr
14

Key To Successful Android App Development

WGHubris on April 14th, 2011

Want to be a successful developer on the Android platform? There may be one major factor you are overlooking in your software business strategy.

Top 5 Keys To a Successful Android App

  1. It can be moved to the SD card.
  2. It can be moved to the SD card.
  3. It can be moved to the SD card.
  4. It can be moved to the SD card.
  5. It can be moved to the SD card.

I hope that was clear enough.

You see, when your app MUST be installed on the phone, it has to compete with all of the must-have apps that are already on my phone. After you install the Google Maps app, a weather app, a navigation app, and a handful of others like maybe the Facebook app. When I run low on space, and I will run low on space, which apps do you think get deleted first? It’s not Google Maps, I’ll tell you that much.

Widgets Prevent Moving to SD Card

I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say that if you have a widget that it can’t be moved to the SD card.

Code your app so that it CAN be moved to the SD card if we don’t use the widget. I don’t need anymore widgets. I have plenty.

If you want your app to get a fair shot, make it as small as possible and make it movable to the SD card.

After spending a month getting Seesmic Desktop, Seesmic Web, and Seesmic App all setup just the way I want them, I am very happy with the software. But, I downloaded TweetDeck to my phone, because if I can move it to the SD card, I would switch without hesitation.

(Unfortunately, TweetDeck will not move to the SD card. However, it clocks in a 1.84 MB for the application and Seesmic is 4.01 MB. Looks like I’ll be moving from Seesmic to TweetDeck unless TweetDeck is missing some function I can’t live without.)

Tags: , , , ,

Software No comments »
Apr
12

Microsoft Bing Now Controls 30 Percent of Search

WGHubris on April 12th, 2011

The any-big-business-is-a-monopoly-and-that’s-bad-mmm-kay groups have been sharpening their knives recently and salivating over the thought of taking on Google in court. There’s just one little problem. Today, Hitwise reported that Microsoft’s Bing search engine accounted for 30 percent of search in March 2011. Granted, in order to get that number, you have to add up the people using Bing and the people using Yahoo (which just does the searches via Bing), but 30 percent, is 30 percent. Maybe Microsoft’s business strategy is paying off.

bing-search-share-googleIn March, Google only controlled 64.4 percent of search. While it is possible to have a monopoly with control over just 65 percent of a market, it isn’t likely to hold up in this case. First, the other 30 percent is controlled by a single competitor, so we aren’t talking about one company with a huge share and then 35 companies fighting over 1 percent scraps. In fact, a 65/30/5 split sounds like a lot of markets with a number one and a number two player.

Sadly, these numbers won’t stop the anti-trust trolls from making a run at Google. For one thing, in the U.S. at least, anti-trust is often highly political, and in politics perception is reality. Right now, the perception is that Google is all mighty.

For another, anti-trust lawsuits are, by nature, historical in nature. In order to prove that a company has used its dominate market position in an anti-competitive nature, the company has to have already used its dominate market position in an anti-competitive way.

In other words, the anti-trust actions that come Google’s way would be talking about 2009 and 2010, not March 2011, although Google may be able to play those numbers — particularly if they continue — into lesser penalties should they lose and/or choose to settle.

After all, it doesn’t make any sense to go breaking up the number one company in an industry just so the number two company can become the number one company.

In the meantime, maybe the company has paid a price for Google’ broken search algorithm being allowed to run too long. Maybe other non-Microsoft companies like Blekko can gain traction. And, maybe, all of this is nothing but a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Either way, the headlines for the technology writers out there virtually write themselves for anyone looking to get into a tizzy about the whole thing one way or another.

Tags: , , , ,

News No comments »
Apr
5

Firefox Calls Out Slow Loading Add-ons

WGHubris on April 5th, 2011

One of the things that makes Mozilla’s Firefox browser so versatile is the wide array of add-ons and plugins users can use to customize exactly how the browser looks, works and feels. Plenty of addons, like Firebug, add functionality that goes above and beyond what is necessary in a standard web browser. However, all of that extra code comes from other developers without any oversight from Mozilla. The result can be problematic.

firefox-slow-loading-add-onsWhen Google Chrome first came out, the first thing people noticed was how fast it started. The chorus of users claiming that Firefox had gotten too big, too bloated and too slow grew louder. Firefox developers worked hard to streamline the code and make Firefox faster and more efficient, but for some users, the improvements were not enough. Much like me, they began to use Chrome as their quick browser and Firefox as their power browser. Of course, the constantly running googleudatetaskuser process annoyed me enough to keep it from leaping to the front of the good resource usage pack.

It turns out that Firefox’s slower loading may not be its own fault. Users who load their browser down with numerous new addons and plugins are adding not just functionality but more code to run at startup as well. The result is a slow loading web browser that cannot be fixed by making Firefox faster.

No longer willing to take the blame for slow starting web browsers, Mozilla’s Firefox development team began calling add-on developers out by publishing a listing of the most popular Firefox addons showing how much they slow down the boot process of Firefox.

One popular developer plugin, called Firebug, slows the startup time of Firefox by 74 percent. Put another way, the load time of Firefox is nearly twice as long if you have Firebug running. This is sobering news, both for Firebug developers, and Firebug users.

As a website developer and freelance technology writer, I both publish and write for numerous websites. I have the Firebug extension installed on my Firefox browser because I occasionally need some of its features. For example, Firebug can show me which links on a webpage are nofollow links. It is also necessary to run Google’s Page Speed plugin which analyzes how quickly a webpage loads and provides suggestions to make it load faster.

I do not need to use Firebug all of the time, however. In fact, I only use it a few times each week. But, with Firebug installed, my Firefox browser starts slower, much slower. By disabling Firebug and only re-enabling it when I actually need its functionality, my browser starts much more quickly. (I have long disabled unused add-ons to make Firefox snappier, but I never suspected Firebug of being a big speed killer.)

With this new spotlight on add-on speed, developers may refocus some attention on making their plugins more efficient. As a result, Firefox will start faster and load more quickly. In turn, some users may find the startup time of Firefox so quick without numerous bloated add-ons installed that they don’t need a “quick browser” anymore and they can just use Firefox all of the time.

It’s a win-win situation for Mozilla and users. For developers, it’s time to re-evaluate how well their code is written.

Of course, this is only half the problem. Since Firefox is still the only major web browser that requires a full restart to enable or disable an add-on, users are forced to decide what functionality they want to enable ahead of time or wait for a Firefox restart when they change the state of a plugin. No matter how fast Firefox starts up starting (or restarting) it three or four times to get the right functions working makes is slower and less usable than its competition which already allow on-the-fly enabling and disabling of add-ons.

Tags: , , , ,

Strategy No comments »
Mar
22

New Color in Microsoft Security Essentials: Gray?

WGHubris on March 22nd, 2011

If you use Microsoft Security Essentials as your anti-virus tool, you may have started feeling uncomfortable after a recent update to MSE changed the background color from blue to gray.

Apparently, according the unmoderated Microsoft Answers website, there is a new color scheme for Microsoft Security Essentials and the new gray color is not an indication that MSE itself has been compromised.

mse-new-colorsIf you want to be 100 percent sure, you’ll need to run a boot-time virus scan and / or download the Microsoft Malware Removal tool. You could also run one of the other anti-virus company’s online virus scans to get a second opinion, although if MSE were compromised in such a way that kept it from being detected by the Antimalware Service running on Windows 7, it is likely the same virus would be able to avoid detection by an online virus scanner.

See my latest Citibank rewards card review…

Security Essentials Updates

It would be nice if Microsoft had mentioned the new color scheme. After all, security software is the one thing that each user has to be very careful about monitoring and installing correctly. It does not inspire confidence when one goes online to Microsoft’s website or the Security Essentials help files and finds nothing but screenshots of MSE running with a blue color scheme instead of the new black and white looking gray color scheme.

mse-help-video

The above is one of the support videos on Microsoft’s official Security Essentials website. Notice the familiar blue color scheme for the background and the tab colors.

A different background color might be just the sort of thing to clue a computer user into the fact that there was something wrong with their antivirus software. A little notice or heads up of some sort might have been nice.

Good day to you all.

Tags: , , , ,

Software No comments »