constructive nonconformist

Daring Fireball Linked List: The Android Surge

From Daring Fireball Linked List: The Android Surge:

My sense is that over the next 12 to 18 months, Android will surge past Apple the way Microsoft Windows surged past Apple in the 1990s.

— Dan Lyons

Android cannot “surge past Apple [iOS] the way Microsoft Windows surged past Apple [Mac OS] in the 1990s.” Microsoft Windows was positioned as the successor to the incumbent market leader, MS-DOS. That Microsoft was successful in moving the established MS-DOS user base forward to Windows is a notable achievement and it’s a set of circumstances that doesn’t exist for Android.

Android is not standing on the shoulders of an established giant user base.

Comparing Android and iOS to Windows and Mac OS is a bad useless analogy.

Review: "HTML 4 & 5: The Complete Reference" By O'Reilly Media for iOS

This is not a book stuffed into an app. It is an application. The second thing to know is that the content is very good.

The content is a refresh of the O’Reilly HTML & XHTML Pocket Reference, Fourth Edition and benefits from have been honed over multiple editions. As a pocket reference it shows a decision to opt for concision over being exhaustively deep. But it is good because it is on point.

The content can be browsed or searched. Browsing includes a list of elements and a list of attributes. From the attribute list attribute entries link back to element entries for the elements that use the given attribute.

The search feature works across both elements and attributes but apparently there’s no word stemming. Searching on ‘sel’ finds no results. ‘select’ finds results that include the select element but not the selected attribute.

The app was developed in HTML5, CSS3, and jQTouch. PhoneGap was used to create an iOS executable. There are plans to bring the app to Android so using PhoneGap probably seemed reasonable. But there are quirks present that probably result from not being directly developed to iOS. Overall I didn’t see performance issues on a first gen iPad and on an iPhone4 but scrolling and scrubbing in the elements and attributes lists was sometimes touchy. What seemed like a light flick would sometimes send the list flying to the end. Touching the scrub bar is not always recognized, so instead of scrubbing through alphabetically the list is only scrolling. There’s no visual cue when the scrub bar has been activated.

Despite a few deficiencies it’s a huge win in convenience and utility to have this content in the form of an application. I’ve been working on updating an older site and this application has proved its worth as what it claims to be: a complete reference.

HTML 4 & 5: The Complete Reference is on the iTunes App Store.

Thanks to O’Reilly for providing the application for review.

Jeff Atwood and Touch Computing and the Hunt-and-peck Pianist

In The Keyboard Cult on his Coding Horror blog, Jeff Atwood surveys mechanical keyboards. But he introduces his survey thusly:

As a guy who spends most of his day typing words on a screen, it’s hard for me to take touch computing seriously.

He trots out Scott Adams trotting out the notion that iOS is for consumption and not creation.

And deeper into his post he writes:

Maybe I’m biased. As I recently remarked on programmers.stackexchange.com, I can’t take slow typists seriously as programmers. When was the last time you saw a hunt-and-peck pianist?

Wow.

Touch typing on a full size keyboard, thumb typing on a physical smart phone keyboard, and 'typing' on a touch keyboard are different skills. The first two skills are related. The last skill is entirely different. The fastest raw typing speed on a touch keyboard will probably never approach the fastest typing on a physical keyboard. The real question is not which is faster, but if typing on a touch keyboard can be fast enough.

Atwood has highly developed touch typing skills and he's understandably frustrated that those skills don't transfer but how much effort did he put into developing 'typing on touch' skills before dismissing touch computing?

Activities that would be characterized as passive consumption requires less complex interactivity than creation activities regardless of the platform. But the disparity between consumption and creation activities is more apparent on iOS. There is a learning curve. It's not a steep curve but it's there. And it's a disservice to pretend otherwise.

iOS is a very young platform. It's already well established but the platform and the applications on the platform have a lot of growing and maturing to look forward to. Some of the tasks that are awkward and slow today will not be in the future. That doesn't help today of course.

Still Atwood's dismissal of touch computing seems extreme. Maybe he's link baiting.

Which brings us to the 'hunt-and-peck pianist'. There are many skills that make for a good programmer. Fast typing is not one of them. Atwood's analogy is plain bad.

Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

This post was written on an iPad.