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But Apple entered the smart watch market by making an iPhone accessory. Whereas when they entered the smart phone market they made a phone for everyone, not just Mac users. On the other hand IIRC the original iPod required a Mac and they opened that up later.

Nor does soy

Just Mayo does not include palm oil

While it might be a fun thought experiment to find situations where a non-vegan dish includes less animal cruelty than a technically vegan dish, for 99.99% the people reading this and in 99.99% of the real world situations they ever be in, choosing the vegan dish will mean choosing significantly less animal cruelty.

A common pro-vegan argument is actually less land use for growing feed crops for raising livestock.

I had an unusual timezone related bug.

I was adding "Night mode" to Nova Launcher, allowing a dark theme to be applied after sunset. To accurately calculate sunrise/sunset the location permission is required, but that's the only thing Nova Launcher needs the permission for, and only Android 6.0+ has runtime (optional) permissions so I didn't want to force the permission on everybody and needed a fallback.

I knew that time zones aren't offsets but locations (ish) and for calculating sunrise/sunset they should be close enough. Nova pulls the device's time zone (something like America/Chicago ), maps it to a lat/long, and calculates the sunrise/sunset. It just depends on how accurate the timezone data is.

Public beta went fine, but stable release we start getting a small, but concerning, amount of emails from people saying that their icons won't load, or disappear, after the update. We're asking for information trying to find a pattern, but it's across different Android versions and devices. Finally we notice all the carriers are Canadian. Then it gets more specific, it's Winnipeg (turned out it was actually Manitoba, the province Winnipeg is in). First thing I test is setting my device timezone to America/Winnipeg, but everything works fine for me. We're getting some more device information from the reporters, and their timezone isn't America/Winnipeg. but America/Resolute. That must be close to Winnipeg right? https://goo.gl/maps/E5vj5nHfJgu Notice how far north it is. https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/canada/resolute And the sunrise/sunset times, or lack thereof...

I actually anticipated this, and there was some code to just use hard coded times for cities too far north to have a sane sunrise/sunset. However either that code broke later, or it only worked with GPS coordinates, and I assumed all the timezones were safe.

I don't know why carriers in Winnipeg report the timezone as Resolute, but the fix came in two stages. 1) Properly handle locations that don't have sane sunrise/sunset times. and 2) Treat America/Resolute as America/Winnipeg

It narrows the market, it requires explaining and justification, and it's unappetizing. It sounds like they've figured out a good approach to heme, why bother using actual blood?

I was thinking a similar thing about "veganic" farming: http://www.veganic.com/veganic-defined

Yet although organic crops are grown without the use of chemicals, an organic certification does allow farmers to use animal waste, including blood meal and bone meal, to fertilize fields. Some organic farms purchase these animal by-products from slaughterhouses and other non-organic sources. The animals have been given antibiotics and hormones throughout their lives, and exposed to pesticides and other chemicals.

So why isn't there an organic+ that only uses organic animal waste? My guess is that it's because it's not worth advertising. Most people probably don't want to think about what kind of waste their produce grew in, and hearing that these potatoes grew in hormone free blood meal doesn't really make you more inclined to buy them. Whereas veganic can explain it's advantages without making you think it's gross. Plus the potential audience for veganic is all inclusive.

Sometimes plant-based is used as a more socially acceptable word for "vegan". I think there's also a difference between titling a product "vegan" and specifying that it is vegan. "Vegan donuts" isn't as appealing to non-vegans as "Donuts (vegan)". Likewise I'd be discouraged to get something labeled "Gluten free cookies", but if I saw "Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (gluten-free)" I wouldn't hold it against them.

She mentions that we should think of the android apis as a "system framework", and I remember a different Google Android engineer saying something similar about the RecyclerView, that right now the focus is on making the technical functionality and API solid and stable, even if not so developer friendly. Someone else, or future Google, can make a more developer friendly API on top of the awkward RecyclerView API. The problem with designing APIs that aren't really meant for app developers, but instead for higher level framework developers, is that those higher level frameworks don't actually exist, and even if they did, there's no clear message for developers to follow. Less choices, or at least a "recommended" approach, would be valuable.

There are also non-vegan vegetarians who eat a lot of vegan food, or are health or environmental conscious so they minimize egg/dairy while not cutting it out completely.

I wonder if it was something like .adobe-A3DF0910 that they were targeting, so they couldn't completely hard code the path and neglected to hardcode the prefix. Or maybe it was a purely randomly named directory without any prefix.

It's actually just a setting in the Amazon Underground app to disable tracking of apps. The "actually free" apps require the setting enabled. He disabled it and it's telling him that. The CyanogenMod/Privacy Guard/Location stuff is all unrelated.

The "60% of all names" is wrong. Let's imagine there are 3 total names, Alice, Bob and Casey. Alice is > 80% female, Bob is < 20% female and Casey is 50% female. Even though we're using the 80/20 cutoff, only 33% of the names are unisex, not 60%. You can't just subtract 20 from 80 to get the number of unisex names as the distribution is unknown (or unmentioned). You'd have to actually measure or take the distribution into account.

I really like the science in his write ups, there's obviously a lot of science in baking but so many write ups focus on story building and act as if there is some magic behind the steps or ingredients that obfuscates their true purpose.

Mattie also has another site (foodcraftlab.com) that has even more involved recipes, including a good read about cream cheese, I love the idea of, though I'll likely never find the time to make: http://www.foodcraftlab.com/food/fermentation/vegan-cashew-c... .

App updates also throw off reviews quite a bit, an update that changes a behavior (or color like you said) is likely to receive a large amount of negative reviews, just because users were used to the old way. These reviews are potentially valuable information for other users of the previous version. However it's mostly irrelevant to new users.

It's a version string, which as far as I know, has been acceptable since the beginning of open source. They just let us know that Google Play scans APKs for that string. I imagine Google Play also scans for other libraries, open source or otherwise.

https://github.com/google/flatbuffers/blob/master/include/fl...

1 star (and 5 star) are always going to be the biggest buckets. Even if you try to be very fair and strict, what does a driver that doesn't show up get? 1 star. What about a driver that stabs you? 1 star. Crashes? 1 star. Gets lost and makes you late? 1 star. Smells bad and a bit rude, but gets you there on time? Maybe this is finally 2 stars. These are all bad, but getting stabbed is a lot worse than not showing up or getting lost.

Likewise for 5 stars. Friendly, safe, on time, gives you a cold bottle of water, have a nice conversation. 4 or 5 stars. Chases you down with the bag you forgot in his car? 5 stars. You fall in love and get married? 5 stars.

The limit is being addressed, though not fully in L. It's discussed in the podcast at http://androidbackstage.blogspot.com/2014/08/android-develop...

Basically they're aware it's an issue and they're working on it both for the future of the platform but also in a backwards compatible way (using multi-dex and reflection).

This hack can't screw up another application, the author is wrong about that. It's changing the local process only and has no influence on any other apps (which are not just sandboxed into their own processes but also their own user ids)

Harmless Harvest explains it on the bottle and their website. They suggest that it shouldn't be pink when harvested, but if it turns pink later that's natural and okay. http://harmlessharvest.com/results/coconut-water#pink

In freshly cracked coconuts, pink water can be a symptom of spoilage. This is not the case with Harmless Harvest which is completely clear when bottled.

All of our coconut water is clear when bottled. However, some bottles turn pink with time due to varying levels of antioxidants, or phenols, interacting with light. We could use additives to hide the color change, but the pink bottles are just as delicious and safe to drink as the others. Variation is a part of nature. It’s ok to be pink.

They actually are doing the knock to wake. BLE works and is an instant lock/unlock. Sending a command via wifi will let you know (on the phone) that the lockitron is in a power save mode and the command will be executed in 20 minutes (or whatever the actual time) or when you knock on the door. So if you leave the house and forgot to lock the door, you could lock it remotely and know it'll lock itself eventually. Knocking does work consistently to wake the device up.

It's definitely not the same experience though. I live in a condo and have the lockitron on my unit's door. I have the choice between opening the lockitron app in the elevator and send the unlock signal via wifi, but that means I'll need to knock for sure. Or I could wait until the elevator gets there and try to unlock, and if i'm really lucky it will be via BLE and unlock instantly, but generally the BLE hasn't managed to connect yet and I get no indicator, so I send the command to early and I need to knock anyway.

Speed is such a critical factor here. It doesn't take that long to pull your keys out, and it feels more awkward to stand and wait at your own front door than it does to fumble with the keys for a while. If I'm carrying groceries or a baby, then Lockitron has the potential to make things easier, but currently I still need to fiddle with my phone for a while (maybe in the elevator, but still) and knock so it doesn't really feel easier than using a key.

Perhaps something that groups (or even just a weighted score) people and comments by voting habits. If I consistently vote up memes and receive votes from other meme voters, then show me more of that kind of content and give my posts more visibility to that crowd. But if I regularly downvote memes then sink those posts from me, and sink my posts from them.

I imagine tuning such a system would be very difficult though, and you don't want users stuck in a bucket that they don't feel fits them.

I've done this. Not for sneaky/malicious purposes but just to provide a better experience. Also batching features around adding permissions, I'd rather release one update with two new permissions than two different updates each requesting a new permission.

Nova Launcher has had the "Set Wallpaper" permission from the start, most launchers have it and use it, but Nova didn't actually needed it initially as the set wallpaper functionality was just calling other apps that held the permission themselves. But I knew Nova would at some point require it (and indeed it does now) and users completely expect the launcher to be able to set the wallpaper, but users still get confused or annoyed by the new permission screen.

"Google Play License Check" is another permission I've requested but not used. It's a reasonable permission for a paid app to have and not one that users email me asking about, but when I first added it to WidgetLocker I did get users asking about new permissions (The "Android Market" at that time didn't specifically point out which permissions were new, so people would just ask about any permission they didn't realize the app had all along). In a future update I ended up disabling license checking because it was proving to be more trouble than it was worth, but I didn't remove the permission because if I ever wanted to turn it back on I didn't want users to be prompted about the permission again.

Requesting something like Read Contacts without actually using it would probably upset users, as some will ask about those kinds of permissions and expect a reasonable answer. Saying it's just for future use would seem a bit suspicious.

It took me a few tries to quit Kid Pix because of this. But now that I think about it when the change was introduced to not require click and hold (7.6? 8.0?) I hated it.

There's a persistent notification that never goes away, even after you tell Android not to allow notifications from the app (no idea how they did that, never seen another app do that)

This is actually a bug in Android 4.3 and nothing malicious on Blackberry's part. While fixing a bug that allowed apps to start foreground services without a notification icon, Android 4.3 inadvertently broke user disabling notifications for foreground services.

App stores are great for commercial developers but culturally clash with open source apps. If someone were to take grep and commercialize it, no one would use it. (Though I have seen stories about it happening with Blender). But if grep were an app in the Play Store, and it was open source, someone would grab the source, commercialize it, and maybe even invest in advertising to make their grep to the most popular one.

Spare Parts is (was?) part of the Android Open Source Project, but got posted to the Android Market with ads added and only minor changes. Romain Guy (of Google's Android team) posted sample code for a Shelves application and had the same experience.

I love open source, but make my living with closed source Android apps. One of my early projects actually was an LED flashlight app. I tried selling it for a week or two, then switched to a free and donate model which doesn't make much money. My other apps do, and it's just a flashlight so I have no interest in monetizing it. I also rarely update it, don't answer support emails for it, and certainly don't buy banner ads to promote it. Without any marketing effort on my part, there is no way it will compete with the commercial offerings. I've considered open sourcing it, and maybe I should, but I'm still a bit attached, as it was one of my first apps, and I'd hate to see a fork of it with ads and junk grow more popular than it. I also wouldn't have much time to review pull requests and build/test new APKs to publish.

The app is TeslaLED. If it works on your device (works on most modern devices) then it's probably what you're looking for. Sadly if it doesn't it is unlikely to get updated in the near future with support.

> Who's Mozilla to presume they know what users want?

The developer and designers of the product.

They might not always be right, but they need to be able to make decisions for users in order to move forward. Apps need a champion to lead them and guide them, and sometimes even to upset some users to improve the product for other users.

But for a user that legitimately wants to turn off images or javascript (why?), they won't want to see that message on every page. If the message only shows once then the problem the message was trying to avoid returns. If the message shows on every page legitimate users of the option are inconvenienced. Of course you could create yet another setting saying "Warn when I have obscure settings enabled"...

If the developers/designers of Firefox don't have a reasonably answer as to why a large enough amount of users would disable these settings, then they should be removed (or to avoid upsetting existing power user moved to about:config).

If we ignore the word "user" it feels (and is) a lot less like abuse and actually fits very well. Linux has a proven and secure method of isolating access, and on linux servers and linux on the desktop this is used by different users to protect them from each other (intentional or accidental). In Android it's more important to isolate access between apps, again protecting them from each other, intentional or accidental. Even for well intentioned apps, like Chrome or Flash, that kind of secure isolation is extremely desirable, and I don't see much value in a custom built sandbox over reusing the isolation that's already proven.