Alternative Android markets
One good thing about the android system is the ability to create your own application markets to cover functions unavailable on the default Android Market or to get an application market onto devices not approved by Google. Since I couldnt find any good lists on the markets available I browsed around my android market mailbox and searched the web a bit to come up with this list:
SlideMe (4/5)
Website: slideme.org
Number of apps: ~4,000
Payment methods: Paypal, credit and debit cards, amazon payments.
Activity: Good. Top app has more than a 150k downloads. Very very low to default market but high for alternatives.
Extras: Developers can get payments to a SlideMe Mastercard. Downloadable native client called "SAM"!
Handster (2/5)
Website: handster.com
Number of apps: ~4,000 (>10,000 for all platforms)
Payment methods: Paypal, credit and debit cards.
Activity: Seems low. Public number of ratings show 0-5 for most popular apps.
Extras: All platforms at one place.
Comments: Offering locales where they seem to have made automatic translations, at best, makes it seem less reliable.
AndAppstore (1/5)
Website: andappstore.com
Number of apps: ~1,800
Payment methods: Only paypal.
Activity: Fairly low. Around 60 comments posted for their native client.
Extras: Native android client.
Comments: Very basic site. Comments without ratings seems to lower overall rating. Complaints about non-delivered apps on their client comments. Seemed promising but in the end didn't deliver any trust.
OpenMarket (-/5)
Comments: Specialized for htc phones and south africa makes it very narrow. didnt catch more interest by web 2.0 catchphrases and unbrowsable categories.
Amazon appstore (2/5)
Website: amazon.com (?)
Activity: Unknown
Comments: Yearly fee for developers of $99 which is 3 times what you pay for your google market account. First year waived. Needed to sell apps on amazon.com. I still don't see the need or what is so special with this market - unless they are coming with their own device.
Poketgear (2/5)
Website: pocketgear.com
Number of apps: ~4,500 in android section
Payment methods: Payapal, credit and debit cards.
Activity: Ok at best. 7,000 downloads of angry birds compared to millions on default client.
Extras: All platforms.
pdassi (3/5)
Website: android.pdassi.com
Number of apps: ~4,500 in android section
Payment methods: Payapal, credit and debit cards.
Activity: ~13,000 downloads on most popular android application. Other sections much more well used it seems.
Extras: Native android client. All platforms. Good localization for german, dutch and italian.
Comments? Did I miss any? Do you know any devices that ship with an alternative android makert?
Free as in promotional trick
MPEG LA delivers the widespread news that H.264 will be royalty free permanently.
This is merely a trick to promote it's adoption in HTML 5 and popularity in the mainstream. Nothing really changes with this statement. H.264 did note become more free in any important aspect.
Firstly it does not change anything for 4 years. The previous license was valid until 2014. We all know that is a long time given current tech progress.
Secondly only free video broadcasting is included. Should you decide any alternative delivery methods, want to actually create videos or anything other it is not included.
This is only making it free to actually transfer the bits that you already have. A limitation that I would argue should even be allowed to exist. And even if you still feel safe - MPEG LAy can change this license at any time.
Microsoft does not love open source
Microsoft now claims to love open source:
www.networkworld.com/news/2010/082310-microsoft-open-source.html
There is a very speaking quote from the interview about Ballmer describing Linux as a cancer:
The mistake of equating all open source technology with Linux was "really very early on," Paoli says. "That was really a long time ago," he says. "We understand our mistake."
Reading the original quote it is clear that they still dislike Open Source:
The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source. If the government wants to put something in the public domain, it should. Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works.
What they have and had problems with are actually the GPL licenses and how it attributes copyright. This limits Microsofts ability to make use of open source efforts in their propietary software.
What Microsoft should be saying is that they support open source only when they can make use of it in their world of closed source. This is not working WITH open source, it is working AGAINST open source.
Android versions in the wild
Google recently released figures on the version numbers of Android phones accessing the android market. It's just validating what mostly all developers already know. All 1.5+ versions are important to support and different screens are as important.
Users are very fast to let developers know this, though. Already 3 months before the OTA update of Android 2.2 for my Nexus One I got a message about not being able to find an application in the 2.2 market from a user. The error is common, a default manifest file that has limits on API versions. I couldn't have tested the application on a higher API level at the development time so the abscence in the untested OS was not really an error. However it shows how easy it is to get feedback from users to correct such errors.
I have also gotten feedback on enabling the 2.2 install device (SD card or phone memory) as well as automatically generated crash reports that are also new in android 2.2. Adding to that it is for an application exclusively for Sweden where no 2.2 device has even been sold as of yet (but of course imported in different shady ways).
The chart below shows how important it is to keep backwards-compatibility in your applications, just like for web development and old browsers. Luckily the android emulators are very good and theres a fully functioning image for each and every API level. There's also other developer emulator images circling around where you can test the functions missing in the default images, such as a paid-app enabled market.
Source: developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-versions.html
Huge server architectures
I enjoy to read about the architecture about some of the bigger internet related systems around. Be it about database sharding, Hadoop usage, choice of languages or development methods. I will continuously try to post some numbers from these adventures. Here is a start together with links that can be followed for more details.
From Data Center Knowledge quoting a talk at Structure 2010 by Facebook’s Jonathan Heiliger.
- 400 million users.
- 16 billion minutes spend on Facebook each day.
- 3 billion new photos per month
- More than a million photos viewed per second.
- Probably over 60,000 servers at date (Data Center Knowledge)
- Thousands of memcache servers. Most likely the biggest memcache cluster (Pingdom).
Akamai
- 65,000 servers spanning 70 countries and 1000 networks.
- Hundreds of billions "Internet interactions" per day
- Traffic peaks at 2 Terabits per second
Source: Akamai
- Server number estimated at 450,000 at 2006 (High Scalability)
- Server number estimated at 1 million by Gartner (Pandia)
Why Swedish web TV isn’t as big as it could and should be
Swedish TV channels has well over a million weekly users watching full episodes on their web TV players. A big majority of it is the ad free SVT (state television) that is funded by tax payers. The rest is scattered amongst the 3 big commercial actors (TV4, Prosieben with kanal 5/9 and MTG with TV3/6).
With a somewhat unstable connection it is very easy to see some very easily fixed ways that they drive away their viewers.
Doubling the ads
All of the ad supported channels effectively throws ads at you. Firstly when you start the clip and later when you pass the ad spots in the video clip. However, they do not handle it any differently should you want to fast forward into minute 20 where you stopped watching the TV, or where you´re stream disconnected last try. This means you first have to wait for the introductory ad for a good bit, take a second to fast forward and then have to wait for a minute more for the in video ads that you fast forwarded past.
This nuisance is sure to scare away a lot people with disconnecting connections or those seeing short parts of the videos. It is incredibly easily fixed by putting the second ad spot after 10 minutes of watching the video instead of 10 minutes into the clip. It takes a technology change at a level where the channel itself has no direct control, though.
Unreliable fast forwarding
If you decide to do real streaming instead of pseudo-streaming, then at least make sure that the one feature the user will notice actually works.
Supporting slow connections
Be it an unreliable 3G connection or a foreign connection - a lot of people are not using stable 2+mbps connections and still want to watch the videos. There are two easy ways to support them - either you make it a pseudo-stream where you can preload the entire movie (see Youtube) or you also have available a lower bitrate video that is actually getting loaded instead of leading users into buffering land. None of the Swedish web TV stations does this anywhere close to good.
Ad bitrate
If your users can view the video - they should also be able to view the ads without buffering. Ad bitrate has to be the same, or lower, than the normal video playback to stop this.
Ubiquitous error reports
A lot of web TV players wants to make the users known when there is an error so they will know it is not the best you can get. However many of the players have so much false positives that it is soon enough getting normal to now and then get a semi-transparent layer on your movie saying there is an error with the video playback. However the only problem with the video is the error message covering it!
All of these problems together can create many very annoying experiences especially to new web TV users or new Internet users that are easily scared away. The problem is however that the competence in the areas is most often nowhere to be found in the broadcasting companies. Instead they have outsourced every part of the video processing and delivery - sometimes to several different parties. The route to only fix one of the problems may be very long this way and may even mean having to chose a different provider.
Why I still don’t want to like Apple products
Apple really continues to show they want to lock in and control even their potential users. Constantly I see new reasons why Apple are working against open standards, freedom in development and freedom of choice. Some recent examples:
HTML 5 Showcase
Stupid! browser lock-in. Not even the index page that does not showcase any HTML5 at all is accessible in any other browser than Safari. A warning, maybe even as a modal dialog, about browsers and their support could be convenient - but to first block all browsers and then talk about the open web standards that are the future of the web gets, in lack of better wordings, silly. Now where Apple in general with Safari and their website works against open standards and freedom one must admit that their open source decision on the webkit rendering engine is a step in the other direction. But to me everything points to this being a strategic decision to have the a good, stable and fast development of the rendering engine that is just more and more important in their other proprietary systems.
WWDC for (almost) everyone
In 2010 you do not need to require registration as well as require usage of a proprietary download manager (iTunes) to be able to distribute video content. I was going to look at some video presentations of the conference but when realizing I had to download apple software where I need to be very careful to unclick 5 items to not get extra shortcuts, update managers or codecs I do not want - I turned around. Obviously thi