Won’t you think of the kitties?
Seems this week is ending on whimper despite such promising blurbs in the mobile industry. We’ll get to the kitty cats in a moment, but first….
The ATT T-Mobile Mega Deal
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We still had information fallout of the ATT + TMobile announcement. Details are coming in like Basically, this whole thing stinks to high heaven and our circus that is D.C. is working really, really hard to give at least the appearance of being concerned about the impact of such a merger on the marketplace. T-Mobile has been trying to sell itself for a while now. Someone was going to buy them. The party couldn’t last forever. Guys like Roger Altman, chairman of Evercore Partners, says it’ll go through. |
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Pontificatin’ on some market share
There were several reports about Android blowing past the iPhone in terms of market share.
Everybody is really excited about that.
So excited, that it is being predicted that Windows Phone 7 will pass the iPhone. Whoa there, Nellie. That’s a bit of a stretch in my eyes. Yes, it is certainly possible that it could happen but seriously, predicting the mobile industry three years out is a little much.
Really folks. Lets keep our heads about us.
Making a federal case for Privacy
As I mentioned in this blog post, there’s a lot of news about the user privacy. Lawsuits are flying around, and people are getting pissed off. Not much is really being done at this point. But Pandora is getting pretty beat up; which disappoints me greatly considering how much I use Pandora.
A reminder for myself: We post just about everything about ourselves onto Facebook but we’re surprised that programs running on our phones are invading our privacy? It’s a computer, just like the one you use at work. There are programs for it that aren’t necessarily friendly either.
New products and shameless self promotion
The TMobile G2x is fetching $800 on EBay ahead of the official launch. I like this type of hype. It’s different than the obligatory stories about people standing in line to buy the latest Apple product. Sometimes, I wonder if they line up just so there will be lines.
Either way, one of my favorite quotes is from (NSFW!!!) sh*tmydadsays.
Nothing like humor to bring us down from the clouds.
One more thing…
We released Dream Player for Android this week. It’s a specialized audiobook player that automatically sets a bookmark when you fall asleep. Perfect for sunbathing, lying on the beach, or have a story read to you ever night. It’s only $.99. Please buy it. You’d make my cats really happy.
One of those cats that you’d make really happy is Yeti. Yeti is a double polydactyl. He has way more toes than a cat should. Yeti needs special clipping and has confidence issues. Wouldn’t you if your feet were three times their normal size?
Won’t you think of the kitties?
A cool way to localize your Android app
Dream Player from inzi.com is a Android only audio book player that we released yesterday. If you’ve not tried it, please give it a whirl! One thing I really wanted to do with this application was to localize it as broadly as I could.
English, however, is the only language I know. All the space in my brain to learn another language is taken up by such things as C, C++, Objective C, Java, Assembly, and other computer Languages.
So, to localize Dream Player I used a really neat Eclipse plugin called Androlate. Androlate from Cicada Lane uses Google Translate to modify your Android project to provide localization. Granted, Google Translate isn’t always the most accurate. For me, though, I considered it better than nothing and much less expensive than hiring a professional translator.
Here’s how it works
For non Android developers, Android projects use various folder structures to contain resources. You have folders such as libs, res, assets, and src. Each holds something specific to your Android application. For Androlate, the important folder is the res folder.
Res is short for “resources”. Within the Res folder lie several folders, each containing data your application can reference. For Android, text can be stored in a file called strings.xml.
Androlate will read your strings.xml file and use Google translate to create a new strings.xml file in the languages you select. It’s not the quickest so you may have to let it bake overnight.
Granted, using Google Translate to localize your app may not be the best solution, but it is certainly a cost effective one. Who knows, maybe your app will the source of the next “all your base are belong to us” meme!
Apps Shouldn’t Collect Unnecessary Data & Share it with 3rd Parties.
If you missed it, the fact that some app developers gather unique information about you and sell it is becoming a pretty big deal. In fact, someone it making a federal case out of it. How much fun is this? Especially after we learned that Verizon customers were part of the hoard of people exposed in that recent massive data breach of Epsilon.
I love Pandora. Some people don’t, but I’m a premium subscriber and it has replaced all music radio in my life except AM like The Ticket in Dallas. I don’t hear ads and I have a very large list of channels. A friend tried to get me to try rdio and after playing around with it I’m back to Pandora. One of the things I love the most is how it finds similar music and plays it for me. I love discovering new artists, songs, and genres. There are some areas where not having to tune every dynamic of my entertainment is preferred.
Pandora got a subpoena in a grand jury investigation into apps early this year. In their S-1 filing with the SEC for an IPO, they disclosed the subpoena as a risk. Pandora is part of a larger suit brought against Apple that Bloomberg touched on in January.
That is a different case than the one I linked to at the beginning of this article. The first link is an investigation in New Jersey. The Apple suit is in San Jose, California and was filed in December of 2010.
This is a smartphone issue and an industry wide problem; this is not an Apple issue.
Basically, the claim is Apple is allowing app manufacturers to sell the unique ID of the phone, thus letting these 3rd parties identify such like
“your location, age, gender, income, ethnicity, sexual orientation and policical views.”
AKA – Everything. CNet news reports the following apps are part of the suit: Pandora, Paper Toss, Weather Channel, and Dictionary.com.
The rub here is you expect some information to be gathered, but are you ok with the people who write the app selling all your information without your consent to advertisers?
There’s an easy fix to this. Just make all applications alert the user when they install it that the publisher of the application will gather data about you and sell it. That way, we can choose weather to or not to use the app.
In the end, the Wall Street Journal reports that this legal probe could be very serious because it “involves potentially criminal charges that could be applicable to numerous companies”.
I wish identity protection companies offered a service that would inform you of every company selling your personal data. That’d be an app worth buying!