Category: Blog

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Blog Mobile News

Samsung’s playing hardball

This detailed article from Horace Dediu at Asymco discusses how important mobile is to Samsung, and just how much they are spending on advertising and sales-related expenses (commissions, incentives).

It might be surprising to note that Samsung spends considerably more than Apple and Microsoft. But it also spends more than Coca Cola, a company whose primary cost of sales is advertising.

However, advertising is not the only form of promotional spending. Samsung also pays commissions and “sales promotion“.

They are in this to win, which is one reason they are the only company besides Apple who are showing profits in mobile. You can bet that this will eventually translate into more influence over the Android platform, if not an outright purchase.

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Blog

A quick WordPress tip…

…for folks that haven’t updated their blog in forever, like me. Be sure you categorize and tag your posts when you write them, going back afterwards is tedious and error-prone. Also, using the QuickPress interface from the WordPress dashboard isn’t such a good idea, as it defaults the category to ‘uncategorized’ and only lets you manually type in tags. When you do fix categories and tags on your posts, be sure that you don’t inadvertently change the publish date in the process, I managed to do that somehow as well.

This may be different in the new version of WordPress, I must admit. I also must find out soon, I’m long overdue for an update. WordPress is great, but it changes often and it’s easy to get behind. There are also generally new versions in the pipeline, too. WordPress 3.5 is now in release candidate status, so doing the recommended update to 3.4.2 is probably not the best idea, but updating to the newest version has its own risks of breaking themes and plug-ins.

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Blog Internet Marketing Mobile News social media

Mobile Links for 21 June 2011

Mobile App Use Overtakes Web Use

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Blog iOS development

WWDC 2012 Sell-Out – sign of platform health, or symptom of bigger issues?

It’s very disappointing that the WWDC announcement occurred the way it did. So far, my developer’s account still hasn’t even received an official announcement from Apple, and being on the West Coast, the conference was sold out before I woke up.

This is more of a problem for Apple than just a few disappointed developers in California, though. Lack of reliable information about iOS slows the adoption of new features, and the biggest value of WWDC is the hands-on labs. While user uptake of 5.0 is very high (over 80% of the install base), developers need time and information to absorb new features. The iOS announcements at WWDC are also largely under NDA, leaving developers no way to share information until the official release.

The model of holding one conference close to Cupertino and driving 1000 engineers to Moscone for a week is not sufficiently scalable for today’s developer demand. In the past, Apple has done some road shows where they send people to major cities to talk up their new technologies, but even that is an unreasonable amount of scarcity. The development forums and Apple’s current paid support structure are very hard to search and navigate, and the forums are very light on things like submission policies, acceptance, etc. The large media company I’m currently working for has dedicated Developer Relations support, and even they have issues getting answers; you can imagine what it’s like for smaller developers who don’t.

I think it’s high time for Apple to build and staff permanent dedicated Developer Relations Centers in key cities. These should be staffed with working software engineers (not just evangelists) who can provide detailed help with tools, libraries, and policies, and escalate tougher problems to Cupertino. These places could also be a great focal point for training classes and other services to developers.

Another way they could mitigate the information gap might be to provide developer services at key Apple Stores, with features like a regular schedule of talks, a showcase of apps developed by local developers, and a Developer’s Genius Bar to help navigate questions about the HIGs, content standards, and other policies. More importantly, it gives Apple a much better way to listen to the community and prioritize new features and policies. This is a very low-cost and low-risk way for Apple to do developer outreach.

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Blog Esoterica

The art of Burning Man – 2011

If you’ve wondered why I go to Burning Man, perhaps this will answer your questions.

Where else do you see technology and industrial equipment bent to the purpose of art in such a harsh environment?

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Blog

Facebook Messenger a disappointment on iPad

The new Facebook Messenger app looks like a nice streamlined UI to Facebook IM, one that uses location and push notifications to provide an alternative to both IM and texting.

However, they dropped the ball when it comes to the iPad. The app is built as an iPhone-only app, which means it appears on the iPad in a little window that you can pixel double up to full-screen size. Yuck.

One wonders why they didn’t at minimum build it as a Universal app, which lets the UI scale up to full screen using the full resolution of the device. This takes literally 5 minutes to implement in Xcode. The ideal solution, however, would be to use the iPad split view, which would show your list of chat buddies on the left, and your conversation thread on the right. This is a bit more work to implement, but still easy to do for an iOS developer with any iPad experience.

Facebook seems to have the opinion that the proper way to use their service is through the iPad web browser, and that certainly works, but having the ability to take advantage of push notifications and all the other native goodies and access your conversations with a couple of pokes would be a better way to exploit the immediacy of the iPad interface.