Ars Technica: Google frags fragmentation with Fragments API for older Android versions

In a post on the Android developer blog, Google has announced the availability of a new static library for Android developers that provides a more portable implementation of the Fragments API. This will allow third-party Android application developers to take advantage of Fragments without having to sacrifice backwards compatibility with existing Android handsets.

This brings to mind the difference between preventative and corrective healthcare. The United States has been seeing a diabetes epidemic with more and more people being diagnosed with it each year. The reaction to this is just that – to react with corrective treatment. One way to respond to this problem is reducing the amount of corn-based products on the shelves of our super markets so people don’t grow to be so fat, putting them in the high-risk category.
Google’s Android platform is becoming fragmented across the various hardware units it’s being deployed on and they too are reacting. Perhaps a better approach would be to design a more scalable system less prone to fragmentation. As it stands now, Android phones being built by various hardware manufacturers have different screen resolutions, proportions and hardware button configurations.
Apple solved this problem not only by controlling both the software and hardware, but to limit the number of different hardware configurations. All iPhones and iPod Touches feature the same screen proportions (they were all 320×480 pixels prior to the iPhone, which has double the resolution – 640×980 pixels).
We can’t future-proof everything, let alone technology, but a little design thinking can go along way.

NewTeeVee: Adobe Hopes Wallaby Can Vault Apple’s Flash Blockade

Ever since Steve Jobs issued his “Thoughts on Flash” almost a year ago, there’s has been a lot written about the conflict between Adobe’s favorite runtime and Apple’s iOS platform, supported by the powerful new capabilities of HTML5.

It’s starting to look like those arguments won’t matter any more, however, since Adobe appears to be switching its strategy and launching new products that can cope with Apple’s restrictions. The first major example: Wallaby, a system it is launching today to convert basic Flash files — such as animations and banner ads — into code that will work on iOS.

This is a good sign.
Wait, Tom Barclay from Adobe has words about Wallaby:

“There’s still room for improvement, but I think we’ve addressed a very specific use case for banner ads on iOS,” he told me.

Fuck.

PSFK, via, asks: Can The Facebook Like Button Supplant The Hyperlink?
Answer: No.
I’m really tired of hyperbolic headlines.

NYT: Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software

When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of “discovery” — providing documents relevant to a lawsuit — the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates.

But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.

I’ve said it before and I’ll continue to – it’s amazing and sad to think we went from rich, film-based photography to the up-until-recently inferior digital photography.
These are shots from the Great Depression (1939-43):



Photos from The Denver Post (via Good Shit)

Quick thoughts on the new iPad 2 from Apple.
I was thinking about how they self-proclaimed this the year of iPad 2 and how no other company can do that due to the multi-vendor nature of the Android market.
Google simply provides the operating system, Android, to power all the mobile devices and tablets other hardware vendors make. So while Motorola could try to proclaim this the year of the Xoom, they won’t because they know they can only hope to sell a fraction of the units Apple will sell.
In addition, the names of the products change so often in the Android market, they never stick around long enough to garner a following.
Sure, hardware vendors could proclaim this ‘The Year of Honeycomb’ – but consumers will have no idea what that means. Promoting Honeycomb is calling attention to the software, so any of hardware vendor who builds devices for Honeycomb can make that claim and that’s bad, because LG, Samsung, Motorola and the rest need to differentiate themselves from each other.

This is worth repeating. It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology is not enough. It’s tech married with the liberal arts and the humanities. Nowhere is that more true than in the post-PC products. Our competitors are looking at this like it’s the next PC market. That is not the right approach to this. These are pos-PC devices that need to be easier to use than a PC, more intuitive.

—Steve Jobs, from Apple’s iPad 2 Event, 2 March 2011 (via Engadget)

From the NYTimes:

WASHINGTON — In a lively decision that relied as much on dictionaries, grammar and usage as it did on legal analysis, the Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled unanimously that corporations have no personal privacy rights for purposes of the Freedom of Information Act.

Chief Justice Roberts dropped some serious vocab on AT&T’s ass:

In addition to considering dictionary definitions for and the common usage of the word “personal” standing alone, Chief Justice Roberts said the word should also be considered in the context of the phrase “personal privacy.” Here, too, he said, “AT&T’s effort to attribute a special legal meaning to the word ‘personal’ in this particular context is wholly unpersuasive.”

“Two words together may assume a more particular meaning than those words in isolation,” he wrote, adding that “personal privacy” suggests “a kind of privacy evocative of human concerns.”

The chief justice had examples here, too. “We understand a golden cup to be a cup made of or resembling gold,” he wrote. “A golden boy, on the other hand, is one who is charming, lucky and talented. A golden opportunity is one not to be missed.”

Thanks, Bryan.

From the Financial Post:

Peter Schiff is not what you’d call a typical homeowner. He doesn’t think buying a house is generally a good idea.

At least, not for the reasons many people give when they pull the trigger: That it’s an investment. That it will gain value. That when you’re all grown up, it just seems like the responsible thing to do.

“I own a house but I don’t expect to make any money off it,” says Mr. Schiff, chief executive of Euro Pacific Capital. “I own a house like I own my car or my boat. I need a place to live and I enjoy it. And I expect it to depreciate just like all the other things that I own.”

GigaOm: Why Google Still Needs to Buy a Groupon Clone

Google is launching — or at least beta-testing — a Groupon-style discount program for small businesses known as Google Offers, something that was first reported by Mashable and then confirmed by Google in an email to Search Engine Land. The program appears to be identical to those run by Groupon or one of the dozen smaller group-buying startups, in that it allows merchants to offer a discount that only gets triggered if enough people sign up for the deal. But does Google have what it takes to build up that kind of service on its own? Probably not. Which is why the company should still think about buying a Groupon clone.

Sure, that’s all it takes. Whatever market you’re in, if you don’t have a product to use against the competition, just buy one.

Live the Sheen Dream

via TUAW

RIM’s Jeff McDowell reacting to HP’s Jon Oakes claim that RIM is copying HP with their Playbook tablet (via LatopMag):

I feel that we set out from the ground up to define a Human Experience that we felt would delight our customers, and we landed in a place that may look like other competitive devices. But there was no intention and no preconceived notion that this is what we want to end up looking like. In fact, I think QNX had that design lined up before we even started working with them.

You know, cars over time end up looking a lot alike because you put them through a wind tunnel, and when you’re trying to come up with the best coefficient to drag ratio, there’s one optimized shape that gets the best wind resistance, right? Well, when you’re trying to optimize Human Experience that juggles multitasking, multiple apps open at once and on a small screen, you’re going to get people landing on similar kinds of designs.

I always love when car analogies end up in tech stories and I can understand McDowell’s point of view.
There’s always going to be overlap in user interfaces on computers. It happened when Steve Jobs created the Macintosh after seeing Xerox PARC’s work on the GUI, then the same thing happened when Microsoft released Windows 95, an OS heavily influenced by the Mac OS.
But as with any creative endeavor there’s a line between inspiration and duplication.