Interesting Links for 06-12-2013

[andrewducker]

• Why You Can't Build a Smartphone
  (tags: mobile_phones )
• Forget Winning the Hunger Games - One of the Best YA Series Is a Story of Failure
  (tags: fiction scifi )
• An Obituary for the Letter E
  (tags: language )
• UK government to pave way for driverless cars
  (tags: cars robots )
• Yes Scotland have a bunch of answers to frequently asked questions. Is

Comments

The sad truth

[cartesiandaemon]

"Soon they will be pure commodities. Just as I wouldn’t suggest anyone build a new line of PCs or cars, smartphones are becoming a rich man’s game."

Yeah, except that when we've solved all the major outstanding problems in a field and the technology is cheap, reliable, and ubiquitous, I don't think "Oh no, we've run out of problems to solve" I think "Woohoo! We've won! OK, let's go home and revolutionise something else next."

Re: The sad truth

[andrewducker]

Well, there is the issue of ending up in a local maxima, where you've got something good enough that nobody can easily compete with it without setting up a huge amount of infrastructure, but it's not actually as good as it could be.

But seeing as Android allows you to replace large chunks of the interface, I don't see why new UIs shouldn't be able to evolve in situ.

Re: The sad truth

[cartesiandaemon]

Oh yes, that certainly is often be a problem.

Eg. many people were stuck with Windows for decades because it was "good enough" and hard for anyone else to enter the market. And I suspect cars are often in a similar rut, that a completely new-designed car might be quite different, but none of the existing manufacturers have a lot to gain by trying it.

But if it's a side effect of mass-production making things cheap and ubiquitous, it seems more like "a step forward, with further steps increasingly difficult to take", not "a step back".

seeing as Android allows you to replace large chunks of the interface, I don't see why new UIs shouldn't be able to evolve in situ.An independent app-store might be a good thing to have if someone could build one, so we're less locked in to having one per OS-manufacturer

Re: The sad truth

[andrewducker]

There are multiple app stores for Android. https://f-droid.org/ for instance has lots of open-source apps. Amazon run their own one too, for their Android fork.

I do like how the feedback cycle works. Swype got picked up by a lot of people because you can replace the keyboard software in Android, and now that functionality has made it into the standard one.

[ajr]

Never tried replacing the keyboard, but I do use a replacement camera app - my only quibble with it being I can't find a way to make it replace the default camera app for the camera button at the bottom of the screen, have to have a shortcut instead. Ditto email and Google.

[andrewducker]

Until I switched phones I wasn't running the default phone app, keyboard, SMS app, dialer, or browser.

The new Google keyboard that allows you to swipe is much better, so there's not as much point in Swype any more. The new dialer in 4.4 is much nicer, so I don't need the old one I used to run. And the SMS app I was running now crashes all the time, so I'm using Hangouts, but that's fairly horrible, so I'll be finding something else soon!

[ajr]

Aha. Don't use the phone part so have no need to change the dialer. But am not keen on the default SMS app, so if you find a good replacement do mention it so I can try it too :)

[andrewducker]

I really like GO SMS, because it does a popup when messages come in, and you can reply from that, without having to switch to the actual app.