Month: November 2008

Android phones hands down over iPhone

For one simple reason: Apps can run in the background.

Simple

The iPhone is amazing, the apps that have been developed for it are incredible and useful. The user interface is a dream. It is truly unfortunate that Apple hasn’t been staying true to it’s roots as an operating system and computer company and is bowing to the desires of the overly protectionist mobile industry. The development environment is good, the fact that they were forced to open it up is kind of sad. They should have had the foresight to do so themselves. Unfortunately they are dictatorial and don’t encourage innovation beyond the framework they have setup.

The Android platform on the other hand has serious user interface issues (though not nearly as bad as Windows Mobile or Symbian S60). There are some good apps, it doesn’t have the clout that Apple has garnered over the past year and a half or so and so on. The big difference, they are open, open, open at least in terms of app development. You don’t have to distribute your App through Google or the carriers, you can simply allow people to download it directly from you.

Now, Android isn’t perfect, it still has to work with the carriers and therefore bow to them in many ways but having just played with a friend’s G1, I have seen the light.

You can background applications..! This means that theoretically I can have additional services running in the background all the time! Twitter can alert me when I get a direct message, I can continue listening to AOL Radio while I check my email.. Apple limits these capabilities to their built-in apps and services (phone calls, SMS). Google seems to have it right.

We need a Moore’s law for web development

We need a Moore’s law for web development. I think it should go something like this: Within two years time, it will become within reach for the average developer to re-create the 50 out of 100 of the top sites on the internet in a matter of 6 month.

For instance, from a purely technical standpoint, many of my students are perfectly capable of building Flickr, Del.icio.us, YouTube, MySpace and the like. This is not to say that they can create those sites, just that they have the skills to build them. By create, I mean the incredible amount of work that it takes to get the requisite number of users using them and visitors visiting them and other special sauces that go into making a successful web venture.

(This is also not to say that they can build them from scratch, thankfully for them, many open source projects have taken on much of the burden and gotten them past some of the more technically tricky portions. In fact, open source is a crucial part of my argument.)

So, what’s so special about Flickr, YouTube and MySpace that keeps people coming back?

Well, momentum is one thing.

Flickr certainly wasn’t the first photosharing app, YouTube was no where near the first online video aggregation site and MySpace is among a series of hot social networking sites that have gone into and out of vogue.

While the fact will remain that the average developer will not re-create these sites, the possibility is there.

So what will my students build?

Why should you care?