I wonder how many people have noticed the icon change for the new Firefox 3.5? It has been changed. The change is not very significant, but it was significant enough for me to take notice (with a significant delay though).
So here we go, old and new icons side by side:
The old and the new (respectively left to to right) side by side
The old and then the new one - larger versions :)
Find the differences :)
If you need to pop up a dialog or any screen actually from a process that runs in background on BlackBerry, it is fairly easy to do, unfortunately it is (as pretty much everything with BlackBerry development) easy to figure out how to do.
The following piece of code should do the trick:
synchronized (Application.getEventLock())
{
Ui.getUiEngine().pushGlobalScreen(new CLAScreen(), 1, UiEngine.GLOBAL_QUEUE);
}
There are also a few things you should be aware of when using this code:
Microsoft can very well loose the portable space completely. It already practically lost the mobile phones war. Although this happened not due to being able to support ARM processors, but due to the fact that mobile phone can not be efficiently powered by an operating system designed to be used on a desktop.
There are rumors that Microsoft is hoping to make a big splash in the Netbooks space. Netbooks are ultra small and portable laptops which are mainly intended to be used for internet - browsing/email/messaging and possibly light office tasks on the go. Those hopes however might just fall apart very easy with proliferation of Netbooks powered by ARM processors. Same processors that power most of our mobile phones.
"Inventec, a Taiwanese company that makes laptops on behalf of several of the world's best-known PC brand names, is developing up to four Snapdragon laptop models for customers, said Mark Hirsch, vice president for marketing at the company." They will showcase one of the concept laptops at the Computex in Taipei. The reference laptop is intended to demonstrate the possibilities of the platform uses a 1 GHz Snapdragon CPU. It has a 1,024 by 600 pixel resolution screen, a 64GB flash disk and integrated 3G wireless. And it only weighs about 800 grams - quite impressive for ~10" laptop.
Those specs clearly show that you get quite a useful package which is extremely light and portable, plus you can usually go for more than 6 hours with a typical network usage. Not like current WiFi connectivity, integrated 3G wireless promises everywhere connectivity easily accessible at speeds comparable to those you will get on a weak WiFi link.
All of the above clearly makes the Netbooks attractive productivity devices on the go and for small tasks and my guess is that we will see a lot of those small laptops coming very soon and which is more important many of them will be powered by ARM processors. Since Microsoft does not currently support ARM processors, they will not be able to compete with other OSes in this space. There were rumors that Windows 7 will support ARM architectures, but it was not officially confirmed yet.
Many Netbooks are coming out powered by flavors of Ubuntu linux or recently reworked Android operating systems. Being targeted at embedded devices and open source - Android is an ideal choice for underpowered, small devices.
The final word of proliferation of Netbooks will probably remain after WiMAX. If the Netbooks can support WiMAX better and it gets sufficiently widespread, more and more people will choose Netbook over traditional laptop, especially when the Netbooks can be 2-3 times as cheap as laptops and people that do not need the processing power but rather need battery life and better connectivity will choose Netbook over a laptop in a heartbeat.
I have just signed up for the early pick developer program Palm inc is having for the developers. I have missed the window a little, since the submission process started about a week ago, but I think with my wast experience with developing for mobile devices and having diverse development platforms (I develop on Mac (OS-X) and (PC) Windows pretty much simultaneously, leaves me pretty good chances to be admitted.
WebOS is supposed to be at least as appealing as Android and iPhone. I personally like much more Android development than the iPhone development, but this is probably due to openness of the Android and the fact that I actually have quite successful application for Android, while iPhone development didn't result in end user product just yet. I am not even mentioning the Blackberry development...
You can submit the application here
I was contemplating quite a lot about the title for this post. Originally I wanted to give it the title of "Why developing for Blackberry sucks" but then I thought it might be too harsh and does not really reflect the content of the post which is about comparing the experience of developing for Android and experience of developing for Blackberry and settled for the current title. There were other titles revolving in my head, but all of them were just variations of the original "why developing for Blackberry sucks"
I have been developing for Android for some time and lately I have been working on developing for Blackberry and I must say development for Android wins hands down in all aspects. Many times, especially frustrated with Blackberry buggy IDE or other cumbersome experience I wanted to write this post, but I had to find the time for it.
So what is so bad about Blackberry development? It starts at the very basics - development environment. Google has developed a very nice plugin for Eclipse which works very well and even has the basics of support for visual editing of user iterface screens. RIM - the company behind Blackberry for a long time had their own development environment - JDE. Written using basic SWING components, there's no need to mention how bare boned and outdated it looked. They have recently introduced Eclipse plugin as well, but it is pretty buggy and half baked. It is hundreds times better than the first version of the plugin, but it is still from being stable and feature rich.
Then we have the emulators - gosh, why do I have to restart the emulator everytime I want to test a new build? It can take up to a few minutes to restart the emulators for the more advanced models. To feel the pain, just imagine the nightmare of programming the UI for Blackberry in that setup. And no, there is no visual helper that can show the layout quickly, not to mention visual builder.
The compiler, or more exactly the packager - "rapc" has many times weird problems and behaves like a whiny child with lots of attitude problems. Same goes for the MDS server emulator.
Compared to Android, this can be nightmare. Yes I've had some issues and observed buggy behavior with aapt while developing for Android, but it was quite easy to resolve. For the UI part of the development, Android beats Blackberry as well. Constructing layout using XML is much easier than writing actual Java code. (Apple had actually went one step furthergiving the developers visual tools.)
Localization is much easier in Android as well. Besides conceptually being easy, the support of the Eclipse plugin for localization is half baked and buggy and what's most important, it is not that easy to find documentation on how to implement localization for Blackberry in Eclipse.
The last but not the least (and in fact probably most important) is the vibrant, enthusiastic and active community of the Android platform. It is so much easier to find answers to any problems you have while developing for Android. I was a little considered about Android being all open source in a sense that there is no central authority with central responsibility for certain things, and Blackberry has all this and it turns out that what many enthusiasts can do, easily outweighs any size company organized or not.
So, what is essentially ad aggregation network you might wonder. You certainly know ad network businesses. Even if you think you don't, you encounter them everyday. One of the largest ad networks is the Google Adsense. Another example of huge ad network is DoubleClick, well, Google owns this one as well.
Publishers can sign up with an advertising network, place a snippet of code on their website, ad supported desktop application, or recently added mobile applications on iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Once the appropriate code snippet has been placed, the ads will start to flow to your visitors/users. You don't have to worry virtually about anything except how to drive more traffic to you website/application and optimize the ads to give you best revenue. And that in fact makes a lot of sense to the publishers, since worrying about those two is quite enough to begin with and should be the only concern of the developer and/or publisher. Using advertising network relieves you from worries about where to get advertisers, how to bill them, implement an advertising platform so that you can track what is going on with the ads etc... etc...
Let's take a glimpse into the history of online advertising. (All said, also applies to software advertising as well, but online advertising accounts for such a large portion of the "computerized" advertising, that I will just mention "online" advertising).
Since the appearance of online advertising, certain companies understood that being the mediators between the publishers and advertisers is very solid and profitable business model and many companies made big utilizing this business model and still continue to make great profit out of this business.
Those advertising platform companies did not appear right away. There was a considerable amount of time when advertisers and publishers will "manually" find one another and negotiate rates. The usual business incentive quite unsurprising applied here as well. If you were a small publisher, it was up to you to try and find advertisers to sustain you online business model. However if you were reasonably large publisher, advertisers will line up for available space on your website.
You can imagine what a pain it can be to find an advertiser if you are a small web publisher. You would have to spend considerable amount of time solving this problem, instead of worying about improving your publishing media. This deficit was identified when the problem become large enough to be noticeable and to be profitable. Companies started to aggregate advertisers and publishers and act as a mediator (or the middle man) usually in highly transparent manner for both advertisers and publishers.
When you concentrate on doing one thing, you would usually do it much better than if you would be concentrating on doing several things. Since those mediator businesses were concerned just about one task, they could offer much reacher experience both to publishers and advertisers, suplying advanced management and statistics tools. Advertisers were getting tools to make their campaigns target more specific audience and publishers in turn could receive much better revenue for the traffic.
Now we getting to the present where online advertising seems to be outgrowing the current model and requiring additional layer of aggregation. That's where the ad aggregation and mediation networks come into play. Those networks do what ad networks did in the past. They aggregate advertisers and publishers, but instead of direct aggregatio, those mediator networks aggregate another ad networks. Those are essentially meta ad networks.
It would be interesting to see how successful those meta networks will become with time. Right now it is too soon to tell.
This problem is similar to the missionaries and cannibals problem puzzle. One additional twist to the missionaries and cannibal problem in this problem is the fact that rather than being all the same, men and women have roles and although it appears to complicate the solution, it really does not.
Problem:
Three jealous husbands and their wives need to cross a river. They find a small boat that can contain no more than two persons. Find the simplest schedule of crossings that will permit all six people to cross the river so that none of the women shall be left in company with any of the men, unless her husband is present. It is assumed that all passengers on the boat unboard before the next trip and at least one person has to be in the boat for each crossing.
As I've mentioned in the problem statement, this problem is quite hard for humans and might be very easy for a machine to solve (with the right formalization of course). The reason is that this problem can contain infinitely many repeated states. If we don't keep track of states we have been in, we could easily end up going in rounds with the same man in the boat for infinity. Thus, we have to keep track of states we have been in, and do not repeat them, since getting back to them, means that all the "progress" we made has put us back, and therefore was useless.
Another thing to pay attention is that it really doesn't matter which one of the missionaries will we get into the boat first/second or third. This is also true regarding the cannibals. In fact this small note saves us a lot of states space, making this problem very simple indeed, when treated properly.
Therefore, if you still want to try solve it, try drawing all possible situations while not distinguishing any importance given to the order between different missionaries and cannibals, and keeping track of repeated states as well.
Solution:
MMMCCC | |
Missioner and a Cannibal go, Missioner comes back
MMMCC | | MC MMMCC | | C
Two Cannibals go, one comes back
MMM | | CCC MMMC | | CC
Two missioners go, Missioner and a Cannibal come back
MC | | CCMM MMCC | | CM
Two missioners go, the cannibal brings the boat back
CC | | CMMM CCC | | MMM
Now all the cannibals can get to the other shore easily one by one: two go, one comes back.
I've encountered some interesting problem which is famous mainly because it has much to do with AI (Artificial Intelligence) development. The problem is called "Missionaries and Cannibals". The description is:
"Three missionaries and three cannibals come to a river. A rowboat that seats two is available. If the cannibals ever outnumber the missionaries on either bank of the river, the missionaries will be eaten. How shall they cross the river?''
The following statement - "If the cannibals ever outnumber " means that cannibals can't outnumber missionaries while counting anyone in moored boat. (otherwise the problem is simple)
The problem has an elegant and pretty easy solution, yet it is usually hard to humans because humans don't do a formalization of the problem which leads to many repeated states. This issue is mainly why this problem is popular. Amarel (1971) considered several representations of the problem and discussed criteria whereby the following representation is preferred for purposes of AI and why this problem is hard for humans.
1) If you understand it and can prove it, then send it to a journal of mathematics.
2) If you understand it, but can’t prove it, then send it to a physics journal.
3) If you can’t understand it, but can prove it, then send it to an economics journal.
4) If you can neither understand it nor prove it, then send it to a psychology journal.
5) If it attempts to make something important out of something trivial, then send it to a journal of education.
6) If it attempts to make something trivial out of some-thing important, send it to a journal of metaphysics.