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Comment: Re:Mobile apps and screen sizes, legit problem (Score 4, Insightful) 331

by droopycom (#44468105) Attached to: Why PBS Won't Do Android

Tiny screen? Tiny buttons. Tiny text.

Big screen? Big buttons. Big text.

That's a really stupid design concept.

Ideally, on touchscreen devices:
- The right size for buttons is about the size of my finger (Which is fairly constant for most humans)
- The right location for buttons is where my finger can reach it easily. (Again, fairly constant for most humans)
- The right size for text is so it's readable. (That can be quite variable for many humans, and also depend on screen resolution and technology)

If I have a bigger screen, I want to display more information, rather than display the same amount of information in a bigger text.
Also if the designer is really dumb and scale everything to full screen, then aspect ratio is messed up and the pictures look weird

Web sites are sometime hard to use on phones because it's hard to click on links, which are buttons the same size as text. My eyes have better definition than my finger. Phone apps that are not optimized for tablets are wasting the tablet potential.
Running an phone app on a desktop machine is usually a terrible experience.

Apple didnt solve that problem any more than Android, they just have less of it. But they do have that same problem for iPad vs iPad mini. Some apps are harder to use on mini because buttons and texts were sized for the big ipads.

Websites can usually achieve useful compromises.

Comment: Re:That's like saying... (Score 0) 307

by droopycom (#39237225) Attached to: How Steve Jobs Patent-Trolled Bill Gates

As for the origin of the name "patent troll" listen to This American LIfe's coverage on the topic. They talk to the guy that originally coined the term and the reason: fantasy trolls that live under bridges and bully you to pay money if you want to use the bridge. Unlike some users like to think, patent trolls are not named after the forum variety that is there just to bother and annoy.

It does not really matter what the origin of the term is. It's what it means now.

Comment: Re:so the last one (Score 1) 537

by droopycom (#39083531) Attached to: iPad 3 Confirmed To Have 2048x1536 Screen Resolution

Because it's magical. Try one some time. you don't have to be a Mac user.

Plus, you buy the first one, them the year after you get the new one, then your wife or your kids can use the older one.

Yes some people have that much money.

Oh and the battery can be recharged, many times, before it dies.

Comment: Google and Facebook already do this, no ? (Score 1, Interesting) 205

by droopycom (#38020166) Attached to: DARPA Wants To Get Rid of Password Protection

Authenticate based on "activities the user normally perform" ?

Aren't Google, Facebook and advertisers already tracking our every move ? And figuring out when people come back to visit a site ?

I'm sure you can identify people that way, but can it really be secure ?

Comment: Re:Operative words (Score 3, Interesting) 286

by droopycom (#32668134) Attached to: Fifth of Android Apps Expose Private Data

The differences between Android and iPhone are: (AFAIK)

- There are much less of these APIs on the iPhone than Android (eg: I dont think there is any API to access your email from an iPhone App, or make phone call or SMS without user confirmation)

- Android's user confirmation is at install, while iPhone's user confirmation is when the app try to use a particular API for the first time (eg: when it tries to use location) And the app can keep running even if the user denies it the right to use a specific service.

All in all, the iPhone security scheme is much more conservative, with the side effect that you cant do as many things in an iPhone app as you could in an Android App. For example, you could probably write an android app to could automatically navigate phone menus (eg: "For billing press 1" kind of things) while this is probably not possible for iPhone.

Apple is betting that their conservative approach will be more appealing for users if they dont have articles like this one coming out. Google is betting that their open approach will be more appealing to developers, but if more article like this come out, Android will become like windows security wise. It does not matter if it is true, or if it is a matter of user giving permissions, its all a matter of perception.

Comment: Re:Quite impressive, but still fundamentally flawe (Score 3, Insightful) 273

by droopycom (#32656304) Attached to: Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Arrives For Android

But you see, the whole point of having flash on phones was so that you could really get the "full" web, and that developers dont have to redo all their work.

Now, most of the flash content is not designed for touch input and phones screens, so you still cant really access that content on a phone in a meaningful way. (I tried to use the FIFA World Cup Matchcast flash app on a droid, not really usable). Developers will have to redesign their flash sites for phones anyway.

They might as well spend their time writing an apps, or an HTML5 site.

Some existing flash apps might work well enough on android tablets, but where are these now?

Given that Google, MSFT, Opera, Mozilla and Apple are all behind HTML5, if you were a developer, which way would you go? As an individual developer what skills are you more likely to want to develop at this point to differentiate yourself?

Now I'm just waiting for Netcraft to confirm that Flash is dying...

Comment: Re:Kernel update breaking drivers? (Score 2, Informative) 45

by droopycom (#32607430) Attached to: Bluecherry Releases GPL'd MPEG-4 Driver

The point of the story is that they release their driver source code, under the GPL.

So you dont care about binary compatibility, you just recompile the driver for every version of the kernel you need....

And you can fix the source code incompatibilities yourself if they ever happen and they dont keep up.

Comment: Re:Hubris. (Score 3, Insightful) 245

by droopycom (#32605042) Attached to: A Close Look At Apple's A4 Chip

But they are not going to have to spend time and money trying to design a chip that will be able to be used in 10 different products.

See, from my own experience, SoC companies pack more features in their SoC so that they can fit in several products or markets. Apple will only worries about their own devices.

In short, Qualcomm is trying to please 5 or 6 different handsets manufacturers with their snapdragon, each with their own ideas and requests, and they will have to make compromise, while Apple can just focus on getting the exact chip they want for their products.

Comment: California new law... (Score 1) 375

by droopycom (#32596054) Attached to: Geologists Might Be Charged For Not Predicting Quake

Prop 66 warning: This land is known to the State of California to move and cause destruction.

This warning has now to be on display for all real property in California.

Seriously, we should warn everybody living on earth that they should get out because they might be struck by an earthquake, a tsunami, a volcano eruption, a tornado,...

Comment: Re:Yawn. (Score 1) 236

by droopycom (#32581608) Attached to: IEEE Working Group Considers Kinder, Gentler DRM

Of course it won't work, because it assumes it is sufficient to protect the playkey. It isn't[...]

Why not?

At some point some unencrypted content is going to be flowing in some memory for some video codec to decode... thats when you snatch it, and put it on bittorrent....

The only way to fight that now is to track content with individual watermarks and get the lawyers after the guys who are copying.... its going to end up being cat and mouse game to defeat the watermarks, but it would be a lot more scary for the copiers... you never know if you might have left some fingerprints when copying...

Comment: Summing it up for dev (Score 2, Funny) 716

by droopycom (#32423888) Attached to: Apple Blindsides More AppStore Developers


  How can a company be prepared to invest into a platform that is immature and whose app store is a wild west nightmare.

Well, choose your poison...
