Monthly Archive:: April 2015

Android Wear is getting a new update today that's easily its biggest yet. Google's introducing several new features that change how we use our watches, from Wi-Fi support to hand gestures and hand-drawn emoji. Individually, these changes are small, but collectively, they promise to make even year-old hardware seem new. They also ensure that Android Wear keeps up (and in some cases surpasses) the Apple Watch from a pure features perspective. That could become important down the line should Google’s plans to release Android Wear for the iPhone come to fruition.

Sortix is a small self-hosting Unix-like operating system developed since 2011 aiming to be a clean and modern POSIX implementation. There's a lot of technical debt that needs to be paid, but it's getting better. Traditional design mistakes are avoided or aggressively deprecated by updating the base system and ports as needed. The Sortix kernel, standard libraries, and most utilities were written entirely from scratch. The system is halfway through becoming multi-user and while security vulnerabilities are recognized as bugs, it should be considered insecure at this time.

Sortix 0.9 was released on December 30, 2014. It is a very considerable improvement upon Sortix 0.8 and contains significant improvements all over the base system and ports. The previous release made Sortix self-building and this release works hard towards becoming fully self-hosting and installable. Several real-life prototype self-hosting installations of Sortix exists right now, I expect the following 1.0 release to make real Sortix installations available to the general public.

Windows Phone fans pining for the days of Metro panoramas and integrated experiences have had a tough couple of years, with Microsoft steadily removing many of the platform's user experience differentiators. But as I've argued, there's reason behind this madness. And now an ex-Microsoft design lead who actually worked on Windows Phone has gone public and agreed with this assessment. You may have loved Windows Phone and Metro, but it had to change.

Rumors of a Microsoft and Cyanogen partnership have been making the rounds recently, and the Android mod maker is confirming them today. In an email to The Verge, Cyanogen says it's partnering with Microsoft to integrate the software giant’s consumer apps and services into the Cyanogen OS. Bing, Skype, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook, and Microsoft Office will all be bundled later this year. As part of the partnership, Microsoft has committed to creating "native integrations" on Cyanogen OS.

The European Commission has been examining Google’s Android operating system for nearly three years, and it is now ready to launch a formal investigation into claims of unfair app bundling. Google services and apps like Maps, Chrome, and YouTube are often bundled with Android devices, and competitors have complained that it’s giving Google an unfair advantage. Regulators previously questioned telecom companies and phone manufacturers, to see whether Google forces them to bundle apps or services at the expense of competitors.

The combined company will have unparalleled innovation capabilities, with Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs and Nokia's FutureWorks, as well as Nokia Technologies, which will stay as a separate entity with a clear focus on licensing and the incubation of new technologies.

Google will on Wednesday be accused by Brussels of illegally abusing its dominance of the internet search market in Europe, a step that ultimately could force it to change its business model fundamentally and pay hefty fines.

Margrethe Vestager, the EU's competition commissioner, is to say that the US group will soon be served with a formal charge sheet alleging that it breached antitrust rules by diverting traffic from rivals to favour its own services, according to two people familiar with the case.

The FCC officially published its new net neutrality rules to the Federal Register yesterday, opening the door to legal challenges. Opponents wasted no time. CTIA, the trade association that has represented the wireless industry since 1984, filed a lawsuit with the DC Circuit Court of Appeals today. In a blog post, the group wrote that it intends to push back against "the FCC’s decision to impose sweeping new net neutrality rules and reclassifying mobile broadband as a common carrier utility." The National Cable and Telecommunications Association and the American Cable Association also filed suits along similar grounds.

Apple today announced ResearchKit, a software framework designed for medical and health research that helps doctors, scientists and other researchers gather data more frequently and more accurately from participants using mobile devices, is now available to researchers and developers. The first research apps developed using ResearchKit study asthma, breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and Parkinson’s disease, and have enrolled over 60,000 iPhone users in just the first few weeks of being available on the App Store. Starting today, medical researchers all over the world will be able to use ResearchKit to develop their own apps and developers can also contribute new research modules to the open source framework.

Microsoft has been keeping its promise on releasing more frequent builds of Windows 10, but this is not stopping private versions to leak onto the web. Windows 10 build 10056 was just spotted outside the walls of Redmond, and it shows significant cosmetic changes and various improvements coming to the operating system.

When Apple first showed off the Apple Watch, I was stunned. It looked glorious and larger than life. Shiny and precision-machined. Like an object from the future that time-traveled back to the present just to blow everyone away.

This past Friday, the first day that the public was allowed to handle and play with the Apple Watch, everyone who had been obsessing over videos and photographs finally got the chance to use one firsthand. I made it to the Apple Store on Friday and was one of those people.

I came away underwhelmed and a little disheartened.

How to improve user experience? How to invent new ideas? Why are some designs changing? How to ensure that new ideas actually improve the user experience (UX)?

There are many more design related questions for sure. In this blog we will start to provide you with design insights, explain what is important to us, what is our way of working, our project objectives, evaluations and conclusions as well.

In short: how we design Sailfish OS.