kizza

It's talking about the net productivity to society - now that you have more free time you might start that side project that changes the world :)

GoCatch has moved into ride sharing now - they're relatively big in Sydney and the drivers get a bigger cut so I'm happy using them.

One is a harmless private activity - the other is a large company gaining an unfair advantage by choosing to ignore the law. Even though they are are both about freedom I think it's impossible to compare these.

At least with Uber I think Australian governments are getting it right because even after (imo) Uber acted in bad faith by ignoring the law, ride sharing is still being legalised. I think US governments are still a bit behind, especially as Uber has been there for longer.

I think in many countries companies like Uber and AirBnB are seen to be a challenge to the democratic will of the people. It should be no surprise that we don't care very much for this!

I wonder if Uber could have achieved success in markets with more trusted governments (Germany, Japan) if they started with a softer approach.

Hmmm, except I can't play YouTube videos outside of YouTube and Play Music doesn't give me access to the raw MP3 files, therefore the second point wouldn't apply. I think the difference is that Google isn't proactively enforcing this rule so for example, the Kindle app can link to the Kindle store even though that's technically not allowed.

Yeah, it should really be open source. For face detection, it's really a closed source replacement for what's been in Android from the start: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/media/FaceDet...

I'm using Chromium from the Ubuntu repository, which is good enough for me until they get it sorted out.

WHen the article complains all the time about how it's oh so hard to deal with all those screen sizes I was expecting a terrible app and I was not surprised!

* Has <b> tags instead of actually bolding text

* Shows the price in my locale's format, not what they're actually charging!

* Intro movie is very annoying, and after it's done it moves around a few pixels every 10 seconds or so

* Sign in screen has a massive logo but the email and password fields don't fit on my Galaxy Nexus

That's after about 10 minutes using the app!

I've wanted a 9-patch resizer for ages now - this is great!

For Linux, Trimage does the same thing as ImageOptim, plus it works on the command line:

http://trimage.org/

I can't understand his whining about the removal of the What's New section. Google obviously removed it because it disproportionately helped the spammers. If you released a good app it only got a few minutes on the list anyway before the spam apps pushed it off.

On the Mac I use ImageAlpha to reduce the colours to 256 (it has a preview window so you can see if it's OK), then when saving the file I choose the option to send it to ImageOptim.

On Linux you can get the same by using pngquant, then using trimage. AFAIK there's no GUI frontend for pngquant so I guess how many colours would be ok and check before running trimage.

The reason why I use 2 tools is that ImageAlpha/pngquant is lossy and ImageOptim/trimage is lossless.

"Time zones are an integer number of hours away from UTC"

As someone living in +0930, programmers get this wrong way too often - Crittercism gets this wrong, so I don't know when bugs happened in my apps.

He provides one example - Vienna. Where I live the transport companies are privatised but realise that by providing the data to Google they get more people using their services.

When Apple releases ios 6 they will have to create a new app just because Apple doesn't want to be compatible with the existing feeds that these companies are already providing.

Maybe they didn't want to take the risk of it being rejected as 'duplicating existing functionality'. I know that some apps have got through nowadays, but has the policy changed to allow this, or is Apple allowing these on a case-by-case basis?

Apple could use the same data standard as Google does already: https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/reference

I'm sure the transit providers would be happy to provide the same feed to Apple and Google, but it looks like Apple want to make something new and incompatible.

> It makes some sense as it's not likely you'll accidentally delete one of your photos that way.

Well the file would go in the Trash, so if you pressed delete accidentally it's not a disaster. I use Presbutan so pressing delete on its own works, and pressing enter opens the file, instead of having to use Command-O.

My experience: Phonegap: Responsiveness is bearable on iOS but on Android it is very slow - scrolling is choppy and there is a noticeable delay between pressing a button and seeing it activate. We abandoned it at this point.

Titanium: The layout code seems to be different between iOS and Android so if you get your app to look right in one platform it can be completely wrong in the other. On Android it bundles the V8 Javascript library so it's definitely not native code but at least with V8 the speed is not a problem. Titanium adds about 10MB for its stuff which is annoying to me as an old programmer!

I assume that if you're releasing this for Android, that Clutch for Android is not far away?

Google Maps can display different borders depending on your locale: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/staticmaps/

region (optional) defines the appropriate borders to display, based on geo-political sensitivities. Accepts a region code specified as a two-character ccTLD ('top-level domain') value.

There's not enough contrast between the street names and the rest of the map, making readability a problem. It's the kind of design mistake that young people with nice monitors make!

The biggest mistake here is that it's now impossible to use text to explain what each button means. I'm afraid that with a lot of apps there will be features that do not map to an obvious icon, leaving users with the dreaded old "Mystery Meat" navigation.

For sure, but like I said, I don't have days to spend making half-baked action bar code work.

Interesting how they make sure to say that you shouldn't use bottom tabs like in iOS. For my project I decided to do exactly that instead of using an Android standard action bar, because:

1:The bottom bar fits 5 items. An action bar needs to have the app name as well, which means it can't have 5 items anymore. Having a "More" option is just dumb.

2:The iOS bottom bar has text underneath its icons and the action bar doesn't. I'm afraid the icons I have aren't obvious enough without text.

3:This is a conversion from iOS so the images are already made

4:Getting an Android action bar to work on older versions is very difficult. The Android compatibility library doesn't help here, and the third party libraries I looked at were not mature enough. I'm doing this work as part of a fixed price contract so I can't waste days getting it to work reliably.

Bottom line: Android apps would look a lot better if doing things the right way was also the easiest way.