kevin

October 6, 2015

TechCruch on the new Lumia phones: “… the best phones no-one buys”

I have to admit I have zero interest in a new Windows phone. It just doesn’t do it for me. The UI looks like a random mess of data competing for my attention. A poorly designed random mess at that. Anyway, that aside, Microsoft announced their new flagship Lumia phones running “Windows 10 Mobile-whatever” and the general consensus in the press seems to be “they look great but who cares because no one is going to buy them”.

A selection of stories:

TechCrunch: “… the best phones no-one buys”
PC Magazine: “… beautiful but doomed”
cnet: “… headed down a path that has largely fallen out of favor”
Gizmodo: “half-baked”, “… usable but not easily usable”
Ars Technica: “…the most disappointing part of the phones is their styling”, “mundane”, ” generic”

The point made by cnet is rather interesting. In the US, apparently only AT&T has signed up to carry the new phones, although the deal is not exclusively with AT&T. Which you can only read between the lines as the other major US carriers, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint have all passed on carrying the phone. At least so far. If AT&T turns out to be the only carrier then this, as cnet points out, is an unusual move to launch a new flagship phone with only one carrier. If you were Microsoft you would want at least 2 or 3 of the major carriers to be promoting and selling the phone, but only AT&T is interested. This can’t be good for potential sales.

Anyway, as TechCrunch says, this is the phone OS that no-one buys, even if it is the best version yet, so who cares. Maybe no-one. Have to wait and see if it turns out to be a surprise hit or not. But I wouldn’t bet on it. Or buy one.

October 2, 2015

Installing command line dev tools on Mac OS X 10.11

After upgrading to El Capitan (10.11) last night, I lost my XCode command line build tools. You can reinstall by doing:

xcode-select –install

and then following the prompts to download and install.

More info here.

September 30, 2015

Are Oracle abandoning Java?

That’s an alarmist question, but recent goings on at Oracle suggest something is changing.

Today there was an eye opening story on InfoWorld about a letter from a ‘former high ranking Java official’ (maybe one of the Java Evangelist team recently laid off?), that

… the company [Oracle] was becoming a cloud company, competing with Salesforce, and “Java has no interest to them anymore.” The subject line cited “Java — planned obsolescence.”

This follows the recent layoffs in August/September of several key players on their Java evangelist team: Simon Ritter, Cameron Purdy, James Weaver, and others.

Maybe I’m scraping the barrel for facts here, but I noticed earlier this year that the java.net site hadn’t been updated with any new stories or updates since April:

And @javanetbuzz, who used to tweet Java related stories from the java.net site hasn’t tweeted since February 18th this year:

Incidentally, this might just be horribly bad timing, but both java.net and netbeans.org websites have been down today:

So have Oracle been quietly ramping down their Java related efforts this year? JavaOne is only 3 weeks away at this point – is there going to be some news or announcement from Oracle about their plans for Java, or are they just going to continue as if nothing has changed?

Updated: As I wrote this, java.net is back with this message (although this is dated from a few days back, so I’m assuming this message was already there on the site for a few days):

September 30, 2015

iOS and Mac OS X will not merge, says Tim Cook

Given Microsoft’s focus on a single, combined version of Windows for all devices, desktop, tablets and phones, Tim Cook, Apple CEO, has said in a recent interview that he believes desktop and mobile operating systems should be separate:

We don’t believe in having one operating system for PC and mobile … We think it subtracts from both, and you don’t get the best experience from either. We’re very much focused on two.

… and I have to believe this too. I can understand from a cost reduction point of view that if you’re developing a mobile OS for phones/tablets and also a desktop OS at the same time, the attraction of merging your development efforts to a single product would be attractive to reduce development costs from shared assets, smaller development team, combined testing efforts etc.

The problem with this approach that Cook mentions, is that a mobile device compared to a desktop (or even laptop device) are such radically different user experiences, that any attempt to combine the two to a single common product is going to be a compromise that is going to impact the ability to capitalize on the key features that differentiate a mobile device from a desktop device and vice versa.

I’ve thought this for a while now seeing Microsoft, in my opinion, struggle to find the right balance of common features across device types with Windows 8 and now Windows 10. And yet, haven’t they already been down this path before with Windows Mobile on smart phones back in the early to mid 2000s? Anyone rememeber trying to use the Start menu on a phone in the early 2000s with a stylus? It was a terrible user experience – worked well on the desktop with a mouse, but translated very pooly to a small screen either touch or pen based. But, Microsoft believes they can still get this right. Uhuh. Call us when you’ve got something worth looking at.