Juixe Techknow

No explanation required, here are some random thoughts that occurred to me during the past month. These ideas are usually to long to force into 140 character limit of Twitter but not fully develop to merit their own post.

Which is worse, a developer that will fight you every inch when you ask him to add a feature that upsets the balance of his understanding or the isometry of his code or a developer when asked to add a feature simply does it without question?

It is estimated that up to 90% of Internet traffic is spam. For some product searches up to 80% of Google results are spam because of black hat SEO.

In the span of year a typical teen on Facebook would have written more text than the whole of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and would contain more drama than Shakespeare’s plays combine but it won’t be considered literature.

I travel for business a bit. I usually stay in the same hotel chain, if not the same hotel. I would like the hotel check-in process to be as easy as Foursquare check-in. In fact, if I am already in their reward program, and if they already have my credit card, they already know all pertinent information about me, why do I even have to check in or out at the front desk? Here is a million dollar idea, have a way book a hotel from you iPhone, you are immediately given a room number, if available, and your credit card in file or reward card is used to open the hotel room door. There is no need, unless you need more towels, to deal with the front desk.

Saying that listing to rap long enough will make you want to shoot someone is like saying that listening to country long enough will make you make love to your truck.

As mobile devices become more and more entrenched and as more mobile devices become available there is a growing number of people that want to quickly develop an idea into an app. Developers of all sorts are picking up Objective-C to develop the next top selling mobile-based and touch enabled app. If you don’t want to learn Objective-C, there are several mobile frameworks to choice.

Rhomobile – A cross-platform mobile app development.
Titanium – A cross-platform native application stack.
MonoTouch – Write iPhone and iPod Touch applications in C# and .NET.
iWebkit – A simple framework to create your own iPhone and iPod Touch webapps.
TapLynx – Rapidly develop iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch Apps without learning Cocoa.
PhoneGap – PhoneGap is an open source development framework for building cross-platform mobile apps.
jQTouch – A jQuery plugin for mobile web development on the iPhone, iPhone Touch, and other forward-thinking devices.
Cocos2D for iPhone – A framework for building 2D games and graphical applications.

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• If rhythm is a dancer, then algorithm is a break dancer.
• If you were a Java language reserve word what word would you be? I would be volatile!
• I get personally insulted when I am prompted to prove my humanness with a captcha. It makes me wanna bust a cap-tcha on some webdeveloper!!!
• Is there group think in the development community? Yes, but we build patterns around group think and call it Best Practices.

Team Leadership

• Change your perspective and you can change the world.
• If you don’t have an original idea you can remix existing ideas in original ways!
• Go hard, go home, go big. Pick two.
• If a web site’s end users are not paying customers, then the end users are the product that web site then sell to their advertisers.
• Why do people compensate their inability to communicate with the belief that others just know what they mean, you know what I mean?
• Hype is the food of lemmings.
• The plan was to have no plan, the backup plan was to leave the backup plan at home.
• Most people are natural born followers, it’s human nature.
• The toughest competition doesn’t always come from a competitor trying to build a clone of your product but from market shift in the industry

Product Placement

• In terms of hardware, mobile, and even operating systems Microsoft is anywhere between 3-5 years behind the leader.
• Startups age really fast in Internet time, by my calculation Digg is already and Old Media Company.
• Like what percent of Tumblr’s posts are reblogs and reposts?
• I want JJ Abrams to do a movie about do a remake of The Muppets in an alternate time line like he did for Star Trek.
• I want an iPhone that transforms into an iPad when I need a bigger screen.
• Google is an advertising company with great search technology. Facebook is a virtual share cropping company with great social technology.
• Who collects more personal data and knows more about a given user, Facebook or Google?
• Apple should add a few filters to their iPhone camera app.

Mini Meme Machine

• Scotty and Christopher Walken Mashup: Captain, I’m giving her all’s she got.  She needs more cowbell.
• You know who would be great in a reality television show? A prison gang! Imagine, Real World San Quentin.
• r-EPO, the performance-enhancing drug of champions!
• Monetize common sense because people don’t have it.
• I want to trademark the & char so that I could file a trademark infringement to all law firms with names of the form Dumb Dumber & Dumbest.
• The best part of a bagel is the creme cheese.
• My all time historical hero is Johannes Kepler.
• Your life comes with terms of service, batteries not included, void where prohibited.
• In Silicon Valley, everyone drinks the kool-aid but using bottled artisan water from a 10,000 year old glacier.
• In Silicon Valley, everyone is more interested in their piece of the pie than in the recipe of success.

Quote

• I didn’t mean for it to be released so quickly because I wanted to control peoples’ being offended by it. – Mark Zuckerberg
• I think people might be slightly offended but whatever, maybe there’s a way to control that. – Mark Zuckerberg
• Quitting while you are ahead is not the same thing as quitting. – American Gangster
• Living at home with your parents is a very powerful contraception. – David Willetts
• We should start a new social media web 2.0 holiday: Friend, Fan, and Follower Appreciation Day!!!

This geek gift guide is not so much for geeks and techies but for those that have geeks and techies in their life and need a little help in finding the right geek gift this holiday season. If you want to wow the geek in your life with the latest technology gadget you need to look no further.

The hottest piece of technology this year has been the Apple iPad. The iPad is great for geeks no matter their passion, music, photography, gaming, social media, etc. A geek that travels a lot would enjoy the 3G iPad so that they can always be connected no mater where they are. Whether you give the geek in your life an iPad or if they already have one, there are a ton of great accessories such as the iPad cases. I have been happy with the standard Apple iPad Case but for something more eye catching then consider the DODOcase. I also enjoy this leather portfolio iPad slipcase.

Targus Hughes Leather Portfolio Slipcase

To get the most out of an iPad you need apps, for stocking stuffers you can consider getting a few iTunes gift cards which can be used to purchase apps, music, books, and movies from the iTunes store. I’ve already written regarding my favorite iPad apps.

Not every geek is into Apple products. Fortunately, there are other viable touch-based tablets such as the Google Android powered Archos 9 PC Tablet or the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

For the avid reader in your life, nothing beats the Amazon Kindle. There are other electronic book readers but the Kindle is the most wished-for and most gifted ebook reader. The latest generation of the Kindle is smaller than previous versions and Amazon provides just about every top book in the Kindle format. What I love best about the Amazon Kindle is that your digital library is available to you in just about every device, iPhone, iPad, desktop, Android mobile device, and more.

This holiday season the most sought after family oriented game will not be on the Wii, it will be on the XBox 360. The XBox 360 has a set of games that do no require a controller to play, instead you play them by controlling the game play with your body. The Kinect Sensor has a series of camera’s that capture your body movements and uses that information to control the character in the game. The best game on for the Kinect Sensor has to be Dance Central. Dance Central doesn’t require any controller or pad for you to get down with your dance moves, you just dance in front of you television set.. The other games to look forward to is DJ Hero 2 and Rock Band 3.

Xbox 360 250 GB Kinect Bundle

As everyone already knows, the standard geek uniform is jeans and a t-shirt. Any self respecting geek needs to have some ThinkGeek shirts in his wardrobe. ThinkGeek gear is like Armani Exchange for geeks, binary fashionable and geek chic.

If you need more suggestions, take a look at previous years geek gift guides: The Ultimate Geek Gift Guide 2009, 2008

The Apple App Store has been proven successful in just about every metric, in the number of available apps, the number of apps downloaded, and the large number of developers flocking to the platform. One iPhone feature that does not get a lot of attention is the how apps are laid out in a series of pages. To visually distinguish apps, each app can use a custom 32×32 pixel image as an icon. The application’s icon image is used in the Apple App Store as a visual shortcut or descriptor for the application. The icon is an integral part of the application’s branding. A visually stunning icon will lead to more downloads and more sales. I feel that the iPhone apps’ logos have developed a new app iconography, a new language based on icons much like the how symbols are used in freeway signs to denote roadside services.

App Ransom Font

A large number of iPhone apps use the first letter of the name of their product or service in the app icon, for example Facebook uses a stylized lowercase F and WordPress uses a W in a circle. Some brands have done a great job integrating their brand into their mobile app’s logo, for example my favorites include American Airlines, Dictionary.com, Hulu, Kayak, Skype, etc. There are so many brands that follow this pattern of using the first letter of their product or service’s name that I noticed I could develop a logo-based App Ransom Font.

I didn’t actually create a iPhone inspired ransom font but I’m sure you can use iPhone app icons if you ever need to create a web 2.0 inspired ransom note.

Please note that I am missing an app whose icon has the following letters: L, X

Philosopher George Santayana said that “those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.” Steve jobs who lived through the Personal Computer Revolution is set to repeat Apple’s fortunes in the Smart Phone Revolution. With the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, Apple took the lead in a novel mobile device segment, the Smart Phone. Prior to 2007, there had been a number of business class phones that at best emulated the desktop user experience in a hand held device but non had the traction to change the cell phone landscape. By 2007, the cell phone technology had dramatically changed that Steve Jobs was able to pack more computing power in an iPhone that ever before and he revolutionized the mobile user experience with touch screens. Apple later took another significant evolutionary step in what we consider a smart phone platform when the iPhone SDK was released to developers and the iTunes app store was made available to consumers. With years ahead it’s nearest cell phone competitor such as Nokia, Motorola, or Microsoft, and key patents under their name, and thousands of apps in their online app store, most pundits would have thought that Apple’s market share would in smart phones would be firmly cemented.

If the iPhone ecosystem were a country, it would probably be a little like China with a strong authoritative central government, some limited free enterprise, and tight censorship. Apple has a tendency to dictate what the customer wants, for example, the common Apple mouse still has one button while a typical windows will have on average 3 buttons and a mouse wheel. Apple has never been an open platform. Apple’s close platform has always been it’s Achille’s heal but also core to how Apple designs it’s products. With the release of the first Macintosh, the first commercially successful personal computer, Apple develop a technical and marketing lead to it’s rival computer makers. With the help of IBM, an open architecture was developed that over time was standardized to the de facto personal computer, this architecture developed over time to the modern desktop which might include a Intel chip, Microsoft Windows OS, and other off the shelf components. A closed platform will always little footing to compete with an open one, especially when hundreds of vendors provided alternatives to fit every possible need and price. Overtime Apple’s market share dwindled to single digits. But even with a very narrow market share, Apple has learned to be profitable, it knows it can charge a premium for beautifully designed products that simply work more often than they are infected with viruses or fatal crashes.

Even being an active participant of the Personal Computer Revolution, and having a front row seat as Apple’s close platform lost market share, Steve Jobs is using the same closed platform playbook with the iPhone and iPad product lines. This time, instead of IBM, Google is leading the charge with an open alternative to Apple’s iPhone. Google’s Android has been picked up by a large number of phone makers. There is a wide variety of Android phones in the market aimed a different consumers as opposed to the two models (iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4) of iPhone currently available from Apple. Google claims that at least 200,000 Android phones are activated a day. It is clear that history will repeat itself, and Android will eat Apple’s lunch, or at least take it’s market dominance. With market share comes developer’s mind share.

Apple has been previously before lit the fuse the set off a technological revolution. It first did it with the Macintosh which sparked the Personal Computer revolution and it has done it again with the iPhone with the smart phone industry. In both situations, Apple held a lead over it’s competitors but gave way because of it’s closed platform. In having a tight and stringent control over the iPhone, Steve Jobs has conceded market share to the Android platform.