What version of Android should you support?

During today’s flight to MacWorld/iWorld the Boeing 757 I was on, had to reboot their in flight entertainment system multiple times. These planes have been in service for some time. But the seats look to have been updated within the last 5 or so. I wasn’t surprised to see the Linux penguin during the boot sequence. As a matter of fact, a friend of mine has been leading the development team for one plane which recently rolled out to their customers, and they are using Android for their inflight entertainment system. The part that is surprising is that they are using Android 2.2 for their operating system. It seems that in some of these embedded systems they are not as current as the latest mobile phone.

This all got me thinking, for android apps, do you go for the largest potential customers, knowing that you will be 2-3 years out of date on operating system features? Or do you go for the new and cool features, knowing that you will have the potential for longer life for your app?

Yearly Sojourn

Well it’s almost here… My yearly sojourn to San Francisco to geek out with Mac and iOS users. This year, I decided to focus on iOS development while I am there, and am taking a full day intro class on iOS programming. You may ask, why take an intro class? I like to understand what people are learning, as they get started in programming. I’ve been coding iOS for three years now, and always learn something new when I see how others are learning. People starting by learning iOS6 get a completely different perspective than those of use who have been coding since iOS3.x.

While I am out there, I am also looking forward to catching up with friends and acquaintance from over the years. If you are planning on heading out, drop me a comment or tweet and let’s meet up for a beer or a coffee.

The two thoughts of DevOps

I was able to make the local Triangle DevOps meetup this week. The topic was how local email marketing company, Bronoto, has evolved their deployment processes over the last few years to address their incredible growth. Listening to Doug Hairfield talk about how the system admin team has changed from managing their production hardware as hardware to managing it like code, was very much an ops centric view of DevOps. Doug talked about how the ops team had learned a lot from the way the development team was managing their code, using SCM, testing and validating their configurations. Very cool presentation.

Many people I work with think about DevOps from a development self service method. This comes from a cloud centric view of the world, but Bronto still has a physical infrastructure to management. When you come the cloud/developer perspective you also get to the idea of infrastructure as code, but it reflects the developer centric view of the world. Get it done, and get I done fast so you can get onto the next cool thing. The ops centric view of the world is about getting it done right and making sure that it is repeatable.

When I think about DevOps, I come at it from a business perspective. To me DevOps is how you provide the business with the functionality with more capabilities, as fast as possible, with the least amount of risk. To that end, we need to have both Dev and Ops focus on the business reasons, and address their piece of DevOps with the basic goal of low risk/high velocity Busines change.

Upcoming activities

So, what have I been up to lately? Shortly after my last blog entry I got sick. Very sick. The kind of sick that you basically lay around for two or more weeks, and can’t even think straight enough to read. What a pain. The good news is, that’s over now. The other news is, I also perform light opera in my spare time, and have been cast in a local performance of Pirates of Penzance. Come see the show in march – http://www.durhamsavoyards.org . January is also the month that I go to what used to be called Macworld Expo. So I will probably be pretty quiet on the blog for a bit.

So this has given me time to start thinking about how to get more engagement on this site. This is tough, since I post an entry when I have something to say. I don’t post just to drive traffic… But I want to have a dialog with other developers locally. So the question that comes to my mind is, what do you think the largest challenge is to get your app the viability that it deserves?

Co-Working and Innovation

One of the things that I try to do, every month or so, is work at a co-working site.  My current favorite is  Bull City Co-Working.  The reason I like co-working sites, is that you feel a vibe in the space, of people doing great things.  People who come to co-working sites, realize that while we can all work at home nowadays, being around other people is important.  Yes you can use Twitter, or instant messaging, or Facebook to “socialize” while you work, but those activities, are still “removed” from actual people.  When I look around the room, and see other people hunched over the computer (well, hunched is probably the wrong word…), and hear the background hum of people using a conference room… I am at work.

You may ask, well, why not just go to a traditional office?  I do have one, but that is a  cube farm.  Cube Farms, do NOT inspire me to be creative or innovative… they are actually the antithesis of inspiring.  Cube farms, make me feel like a drone, I feel I should be wearing a green visor and sleeve garters, with a gigantic in box full of forms…”Oh, we loath, the old one… Oh, we loath, the old one…”  bring out the flying monkeys my pretty!!!

I feel like I come up with Innovative ideas, when I can talk to and work with people who have no idea what I am talking about.  Or when I can talk with people who have different reference points, but some level of common vision.  Co-Working sites, put you in a space with other people who are working on very different things than I am.

I am sure I will post more about co-working, but I’ve been meaning to post something for a while.  Is there a co-working site that you go to?

App development and promotion

One of the big things I keep trying to figure out is why so many of the popular apps tend to be developed on the west coast of the US. I don’t mean the Angry Birds of the world (which are built and grow so popular due to their first in class status), but I mean the popular utilities, camera apps, and other various social apps,

Years ago, when I was working on my MBA, a classmate of mine created a site called EZ2FindMe. It was a social network for business and college students to keep up with each other. It was built right before Facebook was being built at another college. Why didn’t it catch on?

I believe it has a lot to do with the network effect. And given that the West Coast is also the global media capital of the world – thank you Hollywood, the network economy is strong. This means that people are used to self promotion. That self promotion mind set is how you make it in Hollywood.

Those of us who are working on mobile apps need to realize that you can’t just right the best app. You have to work hard to code, but you have to work even harder to promote your app. For many this is not our natural tendency, we like the instant feedback if the compiler. The code we’ve
been working on has magically transformed into a tangible app and we can play with it. In promotion, we spend time tweeting, blogging, going to events, and talking about our app – or our vision if the app, and we have to wait for the network to take hold.

Yes it’s hard, but you have to do it. Go out there and talk to people about what you are doing. Show off your hard work. It can be fun…and the more people who see and get your app, the more opportunity you will have to get back to writing the code.

Books I am reading now

I tend to buy a lot of technical books, and I read many of them. Very free of them are just used as reference, Right now I am take a break on the technical books and am re-reading the Hobbit in time for the upcoming movie.

So what books am currently in progress on? Two of them… One is a book on AppleScript Automator for Mac OSX 10.6 – by Ben Waldie. I’ve had this book for a couple of years, since seeing Ben at Macworld Expo in 2010. I’ve decided that I am doing too many repetitive activities, and figured it’s time to learn how to automate them. Ben’s session was very informative, and his teaching style is very hands on. At the time I didn’t have anything to actually use it on, so the book has become more of a refresher to the course I took.

The second book I am reading is iPhone programming the big nerd ranch way. I recently was struggling with some coding on my iPhone game, and went to the Big Nerd Ranch’s objective C book to help me straighten it back out. Their books and examples are well structured, provide you with the information you need, and provide meaningful challenges to expand your skills beyond the material.

I find that both of these books are examples of the right way to reach technical topics. Definitely looking forward to many more books to read and learn from.

Can Mobile Save your local Newspaper?

I’ve been thinking about Newsweek’s announcement last month – “Newsweek goes all digital” and the implications to newsprint, which has been struggling for many years. The New York Times has been providing both Digital and Printed material for some time, and has erected a paywall around much of their digital content. It seems that their paywall has been effective, even though I don’t have any insights on how profitable it may be.

We’ve had multiple examples of all digital content that has stumbled but I am not sure if that will be the same with local papers. There are two challenges that local papers are facing:

  1. Ad revenue – yup popular wisdom is that Craigslist has killed the local ad revenue – and I don’t have anything to disprove it.. Yard sales and swap meets no longer use the local paper. This has caused many local papers to be purchased by national media outlets. Those national companies can bring in national ad campaigns, thereby allowing local beat reporters to focus on local stories. And national stories from the national news bureaus. The challenge I see with this is that you get local reporters telling stories on national events. They don’t get the visibility and reach, to gain experience and move up in the media.
  2. Declining readership – more and more people are getting their news from social media and the Internet. We are all working longer days, due to global reach of businesses, and the time to sit in the morning, with a cup of coffee, reading the paper before work has basically disappeared for many. If we work in a traditional office, we may spend 20-45 minutes in a car rising to work, but reading a paper during the drive is dangerous at best (when I lived in Atlanta, I did see people doing it!!!).

So how do you fix this? Mobile apps! Apps that can stream audio of local stories, and with modern accessibility features in mobile phones, even read stories to us. While multitasking we can listen to the local news, and local reporters can be discovered via social media to share storeis which have a reach beyond the area code they were written in.

At a recent mobile developer meet up, I met a local developer whose company has developed a platform used by one of the local tv stations to provide their news feed via mobile devices. I have dug thru my notes and can’t find the name of the company, nor the local tv station, but as soon as I do, I will do a deeper review and see if it can be used for the local papers too. Perhaps they can help us save the local paper.

Windows Phone 8 Launch

After a week of work overload and ending up getting sick on top of it, I finally had a chance to watch the video stream of Monday’s Windows Phone 8 announcement – Thank you TWiT specials for hosting a stream I could watch after the fact.  I got to see Joe Belfiore  present via the stream, and I have to say he did a great job of presenting a very compelling vision of what Windows Phone 8 is all about.

(Hope that TWiT doesn’t mind that I grabbed my screen shots from the – they get all the credit for that – and I highly recommend you go watch them for the full feed).

The slogan that he used throughout the  presentation was “We didn’t make one Phone for all of us,  we made one for EACH of us.”  I thought that was a great way to differentiate the Windows Phone 8 experience from what Apple and Android are doing with their phones.

Let me start with my reaction to the lock screen – a great feature of Windows Phone 8 is that the tiles can show realtime information from your social feeds, like Twitter, Facebook, etc. ; however, the demo showed some of this personal data on the lock screen.  I hope this is VERY optional, as it could be a security issue for anyone who has ever lost their phone.

Joe did a great job of talking to the Apps that will ship with Windows Phone 8, he made multiple references to 46 of the current top 50 apps would be available for the platform.  That is a great statement, and I believe will allow the average consumer to feel confident that they can get good (or at least popular) apps for the device at launch. The larger question will be how many app developers will develop apps for the platform organically.  Nokia, Samsung, and HTC all were announced as having Windows Phone 8 devices at launch, which means that there will be a huge push for adoption, and hopefully allow for enough traction for developers to get new customers.

I did like that they announced a year of free Pandora when it comes out, however I was surprised that it was NOT available at launch.  It will be made available “early” in 2013.  I am wondering what is causing this delay?  Pandora is already available as a webbased app, and on most platforms (heck, my BluRay player from Samsung has a Pandora app on it).

A few interesting capabilities that should encourage uptake were DataSense, (when the carrier is enabled – and currently they only mentioned Verizon), will allow the phone to optimize your data usage thru compression, automatic adjustment of bandwidth consumption, and smart WiFi locating.  I would like to understand as a developer how to take advantage of this, and what the implications may be for my app. (Perhaps this is the delay of Pandora?).  Kids Corner was another feature that was gone thru in detail, where you can build a customized start screen for your kids.  I was amazed to see Joe bring kids on stage to demo (always risky… but was great to see it happen).  The funny part was that since he didn’t lock his device, the little girl by-passed the kids corner.

The other aspects that deserve mention is the integration with SkyDrive, Microsoft does seem to have the cloud done right.  Would be interesting to see if DropBox, Box, and other services are available on the device when they come out.  If you are like me, you have multiple different cloud based services that you use.

Overall this was a great presentation, and if you believe analysts, Microsoft may be able to make a major push with Windows Phone 8, providing both Android and Apple with a much needed additional competitor.  I just hope that they have not waited too long.