Monthly Archive:: December 2012

"For two decades, X has been the foundation for Linux graphics. Ubuntu's decision late in 2010 to switch to Wayland shakes things up all the way to those roots. Just over a month ago, the official 1.0.0 release of Wayland appeared, as well as its associated Weston project. How will these milestones affect working GUI programmers? What will happen to all the existing toolkits - Qt, wxWindows, Tk, and others - on which so many graphical applications already depend?"

"Update 6 is a rather unique update in that it includes no bug fixes. What Update 6 does include is a new and more efficient way of delivering bug fixes. A new 'Update software...' menu item on Workbench now launches AmiUpdate which will now handle all future AmigaOS software updates." A nice universal operating system update functionality is always nice.

"For a seventh consecutive month, the Samsung Galaxy S III is the most popular smartphone in the United Kingdom. The data compiled by uSwitch is based on live searches, pre-orders, as well as postpaid sales. Curiously, Apple's current smartphone flagship is not even second. The iPhone 5 is outperformed by its predecessor, whose lower price and improved contract offers helped it remain appealing. The Samsung Galaxy S II completes the quartet at the top. The rest of the top ten smartphones is entirely an Android party. It includes the Google Nexus 4, who entered the rankings a solid fifth. The second half of the top ten includes the Samsung Galaxy Ace, Samsung Galaxy Note 2, Sony Xperia U, HTC One X, as well as the Samsung Galaxy Ace 2." This is getting ridiculous, and it's not good for the market. For the love of Fiona, people, buy something that's not Android. I don't want to live in an Android-dominated smartphone world.

"Apple may be taking some of the burden of assembling the new iMac off Chinese supply partners by performing parts of assembly in the U.S., as a number of newly-purchased standard units are showing an 'Assembled in USA' notation usually reserved for made-to-order machines." Cool. You'd think we'd have more information on this than the article contains, but alas.

News Corp. has just announced its iPad-only newspaper The Daily will be closed down. What do you know, a platform-specific publication fails in the internet era. I totally did not see this coming at all. Times are changing, people. Platform-specific is so 2007.

Interesting theory, backed up by data, to explain the difference between Android device sales and browser usage share. "The stock Android browser in previous versions reportedly had problems rendering non-mobile optimized web-pages, leading to lower usage. If a user realized that certain webpages were improperly rendered on a mobile device, it would obviously lead to a drop in future browsing sessions from that device. Meanwhile, on Android 4.0, as consumers have realized that the browsing experience is more "desktop-like", it has led to an increase in browser usage."

I need everybody's help. I was selected as a finalist for the local science museum's contest to identify the innovation that I would most like to see invented and create a small exhibit about it. I put in a huge amount of effort to make a very well researched and prepared presentation, and even built a kid-friendly museum exhibit and presentation to illustrate my idea. The winner gets a trip to Italy. But get this: it turns out the winner is going to be determined by an easy-to-game online poll. So I feel like an idiot for spending so much effort, because the person with the most Facebook friends is going to win. Please help me fight for justice for voting for my project. (It's project #1). Update: Somebody was stuffing the ballot box, so they enabled some fig-leaf anti-cheating protections and reset the vote.

I was on vacation to the US last week, and a few technology-related things stood out to me. One, the in-flight entertainment things aboard international Delta flights are absolutely terrible. Worst software I've ever used, and many of them were plain broken. iPads/Android tablets please, Delta. Second, there were more employees than customers in the Las Vegas Apple Store. Since there were a reasonable amount of customers, there were even more employees. It looked ridiculous. Are they all like that? Three, using a Windows Phone 8 device to mooch off an Apple Store's wifi is strangely satisfying. Four, there are a lot of technology commercials on US TV, and they are all corny as hell. Two iPads playing piano? Children holding a PowerPoint presentation to convince their parents to switch mobile plans? Seriously? Is this what this industry has come to? Five, it's pretty clear iPads and iPhones are way, way, way more popular in the US than in The Netherlands. You see them everywhere, and people display them so openly. It was jarring. In The Netherlands, I always feel as if people are ashamed to take devices out of their pockets in the first place. No wonder US-based writers like Gruber and Arment think Apple dominates everything - if you rarely leave the US, it seems as if they do! Six, and this is not technology related at all but I want to get it off my chest because us Europeans could learn a thing or two from it: Americans are the nicest people I've ever had the pleasure of dealing with. I knew this from my existing American friends and from my previous trip to the US (Texas, ten years ago), but it bears repeating. Open, interested, kind, helpful, considerate, and nice. Not exactly qualities I'd ascribe to most of my fellow countrymen. Alright, as you were!