Headworx

Living with Android every day, whenever I grab an iPad, I can't help admiring how responsive it is. It is not faster. But much more responsive. Whatever the iPad does (and yes, I still use the version 1), the reactions to user's actions are instant. There is no lag. The iPad does not load nor renders web pages faster than Android. But while using the iPad, it feels like a physical object. The reason is simple. The software code responsible for processing the user input and rendering a visual reaction to that input runs at the highest priority. Every other task (and there are many) waits whenever the GUI has anything to do. You can check that easily. Open a web page and just when it starts loading put your finger on the screen and keep moving it back and forth quickly. If you move the current page up and down quickly enough to keep the processor busy, the new page will never load. But the content on the screen will be following the movements of your finger without any lag....

I have mentioned the mobile (Android) edition of the Google Reader a number of times recently. But this time I think it deserves a dedicated post. Because I have just realized I stopped using the desktop (browser - based) version at all. Yesterday I removed the tab containing the http://www.google.com/reader/view/ web page and its associated bookmark from my FireFox browser. Because I have not used it for more than three months now. This is one of the most significant changes in how I consume information. The Google Reader, which is my database of RSS subscriptions, delivers around 200 posts daily. That is a lot of material to go through. And reading the posts on my Galaxy Note superphone means I read them in so called wait states. Like waiting for the lunch to be served at my local cafe. Or taking a commuter bus ride. Or standing in line to the ticket counter at the railway station. Just the moment when you would normally read a newspaper. The Google Reader App has fantastic, t...

I have moved to Google Docs entirely. Dropping the Microsoft Office all together. And I am not going to do yet another comparison of the one to the other. Emphasizing just one, fundamental paradigm difference instead. The lack of the "Save" operation. We were living with the old paradigm of Load / Save / Save As for 30 years, since 1981 to 2011. But it is gone. Forever. I am really not sure how it started. Probably with editing the OS batch files. UNIX vi or DOS edit. There was a file on a disk. The disk was the nonvolatile storage holding the data, when the computer was powered off. The data was organized in files, files were chains of disk sectors. A processor could not change the data on a disk character - by - character. It had to write the entire sector, or the entire file. To edit, the file had to be loaded into the RAM memory, manipulated there character - by character and then saved. And this paradigm continued on to office packages, like the Microsoft Word. Bui...

I am a big fan of smart design. The subject has been on this blog since the beginning and recently I have even devoted a dedicated label to it. And in general, being a "glass half full" type, I prefer to post good examples. But sometimes it hurts what I see. And it has been proved learning by bad experience is quite effective. A child will learn the oven glass is hot when it actually touches it. So have a look at the screenshot on the right. Samsung + Google, the two mighty contenders to the throne after Apple. And at the very bottom they let things like this one to the final release of their products. Yes, it hurts. It has been a long time tradition to laugh at similar dialogs being popped up by Windows applications. The problem is, we, as the industry, do not learn. Windows is gone and now we have Android and Web applications repeating similar nonsenses everyday. Is Apple the the only one who successfully fights the problem? BTW: the solution here is the easiest one:...

Going through the troubled RIMM's quarterly earnings conference call I hear "it plans to focus on “incentivizing” (read: subsidizing) carrier partners and consumers to purchase BlackBerry 7 handsets". Unfortunately, you cannot do both. I mean, it is either carriers, or consumers. RIM has always been keeping the carriers' side. But today, as Apple and Google have shown us, the carriers no longer control the market. The power has shifted and is now in the hands of consumers. And being good to the carriers, you are bad to consumers. Let me explain. I was a BlackBerry user for more than two years. I had Blackberry Bold, Curve and Torch handsets. I loved them as devices. But my overall experience was crippled by the carriers. I broke my contract with T-Mobile just a few weeks after I signed it , paying the agreed penalty. The reason? The BlackBerry on T-Mobile's network in Poland was useless. Why? Because T-Mobile allowed just a few selected applications to ru...