I personally like Android Studio better than dealing with Xcode and their project and storyboard files. I don't think Xcode is designed well for small to medium teams -- having to merge those files is a "gruesome embarrassment".
You mean like using Android's SyncAdapter and setting inInexactRepeating()? Android has supported this basic type of background scheduling since the start of time. The main difference is that Android you can do more - which can be abused. And their solution for abuse is a battery monitor that allows you to see which app is using the most battery. In a way you can say Android is more superior/powerful or you can say that the iOS is more limiting and thus potentially more user friendly.
Unfortunately, I think many Android app developers either don't know or care about "API abuse". When my Android phone is sitting "idle" with the display off, adb logcat still shows tons of debug logging from apps doing more work than they should. I like the freedom that Android gives developers, but, as you suggest, I think iOS provides a better user experience.
I can think of many ways Google could fix some of this bad behavior by throttling apps running in the background.
Google bought Motorola for 12.5 billion and then sold off it's Home division for 2.3 billion. At the time of the purchase, Motorola had 2 billion in cash so in the end, Google probably paid 8 billion ish for Motorola. Considering that in those 1.5 years, Moto and Nokia's values have been decreasing as well, I think they are pretty close in value.
If that's how it really worked, I'm starting to get the strong sense that no one on a Windows Phone ever actually used maps.google.com.
That looks completely unusable. Considering they launched the new version over a year and a half ago[1] and there was no widespread discussion (at least reaching outside of windows phone blogs) about the pain of the "interaction" those videos show, I'm not really feeling like a lot was lost here.
I would love to see a survey of Windows Phone users and how many have ever even attempted to use it. I know if I'm using a phone that can run a web browser at all, I would never even think to not use the native mapping app.
Google was wrong on the principle, but was anyone actually in the forest to be harmed? In any case, everyone should think hard before the next time you feel compelled to make a joke about testing and Opera's marketshare.
I second this, Nokia Maps is awesome and the many times I used it, it has not let me down and the experience was good. Also I've noticed that my Lumia can very quickly get a GPS signal vs iPhone and some Android phones I've used; this is very useful when you need a shortcut.
In the videos the position in the map is fixed. The video only shows only two uses of pinch to zoom, but it doesn't show any example of drag to move. (I don't have a Win8 phone to try :( )
If you are constantly getting spammed by a fan page that you explicitly liked or followed, then the appropriate answer is to unlike or unfollow it. There's no reason to curate information that you wanted to get to begin with.
What if Twitter implemented something like this where certain tweets from a person you are following do not appear? How would that feel?
This strikes me totally as a money play and not for the user.
> There's no reason to curate information that you wanted to get to begin with.
But are you sure users actually wanted that information? I strongly believe this assumption is false.
If I "like" something, I want to express that I like it. I want my friends to know it. It's not a "subscribe" button, it's a "like" button, and contrary to what people in spam^H^H^H^Had business may believe, people actually attach meaning to what is written. It's not a #:G4202 button, it's a "like" button. If you call it "follow", you get a different meaning and different expectations.
> What if Twitter implemented something like this where certain tweets from a person you are following do not appear? How would that feel?
Twitter is not Facebook. Twitter is about following people. Facebook is about showing people (my friends) what I like (and not necessarily caring what it has to say).
I, for one, welcome these new changes and want to repeat by GP: good riddance!
I think you've touched on the base problem of both sides of the argument -- it's a UX issue.
Facebook has given too much power to the 'like' button. There should be a different 'follow' or 'subscribe' button. If you subscribe to a page, you would expect to always get updates from it.
I only subscribed to facebook to be able to watch some dev videos. As I slowly became more used to it, I wanted to know how to get updates from the company page I work for. When I asked how to do this and was told to 'like' the company, that made no sense to me. What if I don't actually "like" something, but I still want to watch its activity?
Yes..this is exactly what I mean. If you don't want to be spammed from liking something, then don't allow the brands to reach out to users who liked their products. You can only do this with "follow."
By this definition, brands won't tell people to "like" their pages anymore, they will just say "follow" them. FB blurred the links and now no one knows what "like" or "follow" will do.
I can follow a brand and still not get all the information from that brand. This is ridiculous.
> Facebook has given too much power to the 'like' button. There should be a different 'follow' or 'subscribe' button.
Oh yes, please. I want to see the epic torrent of butthurt from "Brands" like Mark Cuban when that happens and they find that less than 10% of their "fans" are actually interested in their "messages" so their reach is far smaller than now.
I agree with everything you said, but as a practical matter I wanted to point out that it is possible on Facebook to like something and then "hide" it from your newsfeed. This allows you to register your like without all the spam. This is what I did with "Barack Obama", because I do support him and wanted to publically acknowledge that, but I don't need to see three captioned photos of him per day.
That doesn't stop your likes resulting in targetted advertising to your contacts (depending on their how-closely-they-follow-you settings, presumably).
For instance I sometimes see "sponsored links" of the form
"<sister-in-law's-name> likes <retail-outlet>, here is an offer that they have on at the moment" - I've never liked <retail-outlet> on facebook let along done that and subscribed to see absolutely all posts from them.
Yeah you're probably right about that. I think they can each individually hide those though, right? In any case, I agree that the UI for this is terrible and that's probably by design to make it less likely that the masses will hide everything.
Well, that's not the way the like button works. The like button is the "follow and get updates" button. Like it or not (heh) that's the use of the button, and I believe people get this.
When I look at the button, I see the word "Like", not the words "follow and get updates". Why should anyone assume something else that what is written on the button?
BTW. it's my anecdote vs. your anecdote; I wonder if there are any studies on the topic of how people perceive likes.
I don't think the answer is so binary. Just because you like a product/company/person's page does not mean that you always want to hear from that page. The EdgeRank algorithm is supposed to rank social response and especially your friend's engagement in determining the importance of a post. However, there are clearly cases where the poster would want to attribute increased importance to that post and make sure that more people than usual see it (e.g. an important announcement). That is what Facebook is charging for: the ability to get around its algorithm. I think the problem in the past year for many brands is that Facebook has not had this feature, and the fact that you can pay for it is probably reassuring to many companies because it means they have a guaranteed channel if they need it. The alternative: people get annoyed with liking pages because they are too noisy and start unliking everything and you ruin the channel.
However as you can see from that screenshot, a brand can target fans and friends of fans, so even if you don't like it a brand, you can see see the ad if your friend does
Andy Rubin: "...and for those wondering, we count each device only once (ie, we don't count re-sold devices), and "activations" means you go into a store, buy a device, put it on the network by subscribing to a wireless service."
Does this take into account people who are upgrading to a new Android phone from an old one? If not it could really impact the metrics if one is looking at this as a measurement of new entrants into the Android ecosystem.
This metric is used is because Apple uses it for their iOS devices in keynotes. Surely both platforms could use "app store accounts with their first device added" per day as a metric if they wanted to. And for Android, you'd want to know what version these activated devices are - no reason a 1.5 device couldn't still be activated today even if the app ecosystem has seemingly moved on.
Because if the used the word sold, the Internets would be full of people claiming, that the products were just hauled from factories to sellers warehouses, where they are sitting and not being bought by anyone.
I'm a student and I need to make sure I'm not missing any summer classes I may be taking. Also, some people work and may have to notify their supers early.
Great analyst? He's basically an apple PR personnel. Most of his posts van be summed up into Apple can do no wrong. Anyone opposing apple is wrong and stupid. There is no logic. It's blatant and it's almost like he does it for page views
