The two day Google I/O conference ended yesterday with a ton of exciting news from the team over at Google. The event showcases all the projects Google have been working on for the past year and this year they did not disappoint.
During the event Google’s CEO really shot down Apple and really made a point to show the products and services they were delivering were completely going to cater for their shortcomings. In short heres what we can expect from them:
Read MoreAs you may already know HP has recently bought Palm for a tidy sum of 1.2 BILLION DOLLARS! Ah Palm it really was a shame you couldn’t sell the Pre. It had such good hype and really was a great phone. Its staggered release in Europe and their marketing campaign lead to the ruin of them and as such Palm even severed it’s ties with their digital agency Modernista who were responsible for (take a deep breath) this.
So now that the giant that is HP owns Palm can we hopefully see that beautiful operating system WebOS on the Slate? WebOS by the way is Palm’s awesome multi-tasking, gesture loving operating system that currently ships on all their new shinny devices including of-course the Palm Pre. With HP’s rival Dell delivering an impressive range of Android phones soon, HP have decided to join the game to secure their share in the mobile market. Having WebOS on their side certaintly gives them the home advantage.
Since the iPad was unleashed on the market 1 million units have been sold in the US and pre-orders in the UK are already off to a great start for release date of May 28th (update – pushed back to June 7th now). HP thought they had the upper hand with the Slate providing a fully blown OS (Win 7) but as usual they forgot their target audience. You can’t sell to the average geek anymore, you need to go mainstream! Target the bubble gum chewers, the Tamagotchi crowd, right?!
For 10 months now I have sported an iPhone 3GS, and I have to admit that I finally feel like I’m living in the future holding a friggin’ tricorder! On occasion I find myself just leisurely unlocking the phone with a slide of my finger, scrolling the numerous screens and then locking it again without having any intention to use the device for anything purposeful. The high quality capacitive touch screen, mid-range processor and the phones slick UI really make this phone such a joy to use.
Apple lures us into their minimalistic designed stores and an hour later we leave with a giant smile on our face, an empty wallet, a shiny new toy, and a collection of extremely overpriced third party accessories (I still hate to admit it but I paid £175 for my iPhone and unbelievably forked over £25 for a little piece of plastic to slightly protect only half of the phone). But DAMN do they produce beautiful products. The software/hardware combination is so bespoke and well crafted that it really is just a must have product. So yes the iPhone in its current form is marvellous but what does apple have in store for us next and just how far behind is the rest of the competition?
Read MoreAn open letter written by Steve Jobs has been posted on Apples website citing his reasoning behind not allowing flash on the iPhone/iPad. Jobs seems to be on an absolute tirade to destroy flash on the internet whilst claiming his toys as leading the new revolution of the internet and pronouncing flash as old as the mouse. Take this snippet from the letter:
“Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on “rollovers”, which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. ”
There are in fact rollovers in HTML (CSS hover tag) and there are many javascript rollover menus on the web. With the anticipated release of Flash 10.1, the ability to take advantage of multi-touch and gesture controls already seems to show Adobe are trying to innovate in this field
Flash allows the internet to be all it can due to CSS and JavaScript’s bad performance and infantile language state. However Jobs is not entirely wrong with some of his accusations as the Flash player really does have its shortcomings. I believe the problem lies solely with Adobe not improving the platform and changing it to withstand the fate of time. The obvious problem being is that Flash is a big black box, a compiled binary file that is quite closed. The not so obvious problem which is very hard to address is that flash is both a designer and developer platform. You can’t make the platform to intense for the designers as you then alienate them and visa versa. AS3 was a big step for flash which brought about a much stricter compiler and a push towards a more object orientated programming language. This has stopped some really sloppy programming but that has not been enough to cure the problem.
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