lnanek

They said during the key note that they are lighter than many sunglasses. Many of the team were wearing them when taking orders as well. So they are trying to show off they are natural and easy to wear.

Brin also said they do a lot more than share and view video feeds, but it is tough to show. I imagine they at least replace your mobile phone and headset, at the minimum. Consumers gave up cameras for their new smarter phones, and this can be positioned as just an even smarter phone doing more.

The reason cloud streaming is so important is because wireless streaming from a device eats the battery alive. Amazon recently announced that battery and then price are the primary drivers for users buying tablets, and battery is amazingly import for phones as well.

Cables are a little iffy, a lot of non-techies simply aren't going to go plug their cable in to show off their pictures or music. A simple enough UI, though, can bring them in. Successful consumer mobile products generally prize being ridiculously simple because that's the only thing many people will use and media oriented, because that's the thing most people do with the smart part of their phones, nothing more.

At the fireside chat afterwards the Android team said the real term they use internally is jackbusting. Butter is just a marketing term.

Put me in as a nut job then. I've seen plenty of users who make no distinction whatsoever re case of characters in passwords. One day their password is working, the next day it isn't, and the organization ends up spending the custom care money to deal with it just because they started typing "af" at the end of their password instead of "Af" or whatever.

If you need more complexity in a password, better to just encourage them to use a phrase with the words being the individual complexity rather than the characters. Like it or not, we live in a world where 80% of end users can't turn their wifi radio on and off on their phone, and we need to make systems that are a pleasure to use for them.

How is breaking backward compatibility simpler? If you don't support legacy commands and options you are forcing countless programs to be rewritten. Many aren't even actively maintained any more and businesses will avoid upgrading to your new 'simple' platform due to the huge cost, complexity, and risk of the rewrite project not succeeding, like many software projects. That's why OpenGL has so many old methods and commands, they are used by old, expensive CAD programs.

Speaking of OpenGL, more efficient memory routines he claims are worthless have probably saved me months of optimization programming real time games. If you don't have sufficient frame rate there for a good experience you end up doing enormous optimization work.

Agreed. Was very impressive seeing Googlers respond, and respond helpfully which is not always easy in tech esp to outside parties, and have forums and regular G+ hangouts so it isn't a one time thing. Not to mention other people with similar problems point out the delay in reapplying the signal, etc..

I've run into multiple situations at work where someone I was working for knew how to code, even if it wasn't their job, and it made things so much easier. I probably shouldn't reveal the details, but in general they were able to identify situations where just writing a quick app would help a lot vs. not having one, even tried writing it themselves, after when I ended up writing it and sent the source code along (they didn't have source control access) they were able to modify it as needed to be much more usable without bouncing it back and forth to me over and over, etc..

In another situation the person again figured out when an app would deliver really awesome results over the bog standard 60's way of doing things, and during the meeting to see if we could help out and all the subsequent revision communication, they just knew a lot about how apps get written. They'd suggest things that made it 10 times easier to write, understood that throwing in an option for everything instead of having a set functionality makes testing and code branches and maintenance a real pain in the ass, approved slight changes that made things a lot easier to write ahead of time instead of demanding meeting the requirements exactly as they were written, etc..

It's sort of like when you hear about someone trained as a doctor and who can also code doing all this awesome stuff. Except in a large organization we already have a ridiculous amount of skilled people available, so it's closer to you just need to know about people's capabilities and how they work to get really close to a similar situation where you can take advantage of both fields. So anyway, even if it isn't someone's job to code, it can be very valuable for them to know how to, and it can make them a lot easier to work with for those of us who do code professionally.

Make sure you have clicked on a story before you try to scroll, that got me for quite a while too. There was nothing to tell me to click on stories to read them. I only figured it out because I tried to click on an image and got a story instead...

You sound dead on to me. Java tooling is basically light years ahead of JavaScript, just because it's so much easier to write for a static language. Most people don't learn all the advanced features of Eclipse and other IDEs and debugging until they are stuck writing in them for years and years anyway. I know how to do things in hot keys in Eclipse that I don't even know how to do otherwise. Hot code replace and debugging and all the other stuff is similarly an advanced topic, even for many Java coders, so it is no surprise JavaScript programmers think it is something new.

I hate to break it to the guy, but I can't remember the last time my browser was at 100% zoom, so his perfect pixels will never look perfect on my screen anyway...

It's a tough call for the company. They don't make money on old versions of Photoshop, they make money on selling the current version. Engineers may have long since all been assigned to working on the current version or later, or even switched companies. So if the fix required significant work you'd have to make some current product schedule slip to go fix an old product used by people who haven't bought the latest version and may never buy again. Do you put your resources into supporting your current and future buyers or put your resources into supporting old buyers who haven't upgraded and may not, just on the off chance it helps your reputation, and you get more buyers in general...it's an extra step of indirection that may lose the internal support to redirect the resources to fix the problem.

This sort of thing used to happen a lot at an Android app company I worked for. It would be easier and cleaner to implement something like a button background in XML, but it wouldn't look nearly as good as a button produced using real graphics. It wasn't just looks either, they were less usable in that case. If a button doesn't look 3D due to being limited to a simple linear gradient or something then users are less likely to click it, and we did have user testing reports of people mistaking the biggest buttons that we wanted people to click most for section titles. So even if a shadow can be pulled off, what else is missing that a raster graphics solution would include. ;/

Man, whenever me or a family has Prime, amazon is the first place we check. It's a great lock in. The trials and share with family functions help make it viral even.

Businesses love subscriptions too. Get paid even when they subscriber doesn't do anything? Yes, please! So now we've combined lock in and subscription.

We hear Zynga makes a ton of their profits from whales, so low numbers of prime subscriptions doesn't really scare me. Those are whales.

Amazon is a business, if they haven't already figured out this will make money and it doesn't end up making money, they'll stop after a while.

Makes plenty of sense to me. This isn't a big deal.

A friend who really loved the game tried to show it to me, but it kept having server problems. I wonder if that was just an isolated case or if it was frequent, in which case it could drive off users.

Hmm, I've had to do similar in Java before and it just took breaking out what I wanted to retry into a separate method. Nice simple clean Ruby is preferred, but it is possible already, at least...

I admit I didn't make it through reading the article, but I disagree with how he sees the CEO talking about wanting retail reps to sell the phone as a bad sign. Every single phone OEM that sells in the US wants that very badly. In fact, I'd be scared for any company that didn't constantly try to improve it even if they were currently first or second at it. You constantly see OEM's run contests, hardware giveaways, bonuses for selling one or x amount of a device, training sessions, etc. - all sorts of goodies - for the retail reps. That's just how most phones are sold in the US. Google selling the Nexus One from www.google.com/phone didn't work out because they didn't get this, so Nokia is already at least off to a running start if they realize where the battle to get sales is at.

I had one of these and the touchscreen on my phone while charging was indeed unusable, as he warns can happen. I almost wrote off the phone as broken before I realized what was causing the problem...

The world isn't black and white. Just because fruit has some healthy aspects, doesn't mean it can't have bad aspects as well. In fact, different fruits have different ratios of fructose to glucose. So you can't even generalize to just fruits. Unfortunately, evolution seems to have chosen glucose as the sugar that makes us feel full and that can be used directly by the body. Fructose has to be metabolized in the liver and doesn't make us feel full as directly. This was a good bet before we started custom making all our food, because most sugar is sucrose anyway, which is a combination of glucose and fructose. Unfortunately, man can now add only fructose to things and the body hasn't evolved to understand that signal. You are still way better off eating fruit than empty calories, of couorse, that is manufactured food with little nutrients or fiber and lots of calories.

Other advertising solutions for Android apps often pay more in my experience anyway, like Millennial Media, for example. I don't know why offhand, maybe there are fewer apps on them, so advertisers end up paying more for fewer slots. There's also AdWhirl and Mobclix which can act as mediators farming out your slots to other networks as needed. They are all just about as easy as AdMob to integrate, which is pretty straight forward, since most ad libraries are basically just dropping an extra WebView into an app somewhere.

Yeah, I saw an entire screen of players turn toward me once before as well and turn away immediately later. Hopefully players end up in the same world with just a lot of computer opponents as well...

Hmm, favorite strategy: zoom ahead full speed with a spammed bullet stream in front of you. After wrapping around enough times your bullet stream (and probably you) are going to nail someone. As you get better you can adjust your course a little to hit more, or hunt down people after that who are critically damaged by the bullet stream. :)

Fun, all in all, and an awesome tech demo. For finished games, there's already http://www.getcontinuum.com/ which is basically the game with rules and rounds and teams and whatnot. Although that is thick client.

Hmm, well, re the last thing he wants, carrying it around; if there were a Kindle version of this it would be in the Kindle app on my phone which is with me almost constantly. A physical book, I don't think I'd bother carrying anywhere, which would probably prevent me from doing anything else to it or with it except one quick read and giving it away or having it rot on the shelf.

Would have bought it if there was a Kindle version...heck even a PDF version...

Isn't call for a price a good deal for little guys? If IBM calls for a price, they are going to get charged a huge number like 100k. If a Mom and Pop shop calls they are either going to get told to take a hike, or given a much better deal. Seems like the companies that can afford to pay more will be footing the bill.

I had a ton of stock options that would have made me rich if Yahoo had accepted Microsoft's buy out well above the trading price a while back - something shareholders would have loved. So even this particular company is well known for not following the duty of making the most money for its holders...

> total amount that the average user spends for apps

This is like complaining about the total amount the average user spends on web sites. Most of the web is free to the user and not supported by direct purchases of content by the user...

The link's "getting angry" comment reminds me of this bug report bingo card: http://the-b.org/~kenny/bingo.txt

Which I just saw linked from this issue with an open source Android app: http://code.google.com/p/connectbot/issues/detail?id=100

It's an amusing list of all the complaints and threats issue reporters make trying to get someone to do work for them for free. :)

This reminds me of how PHP used to turn HTTP request variables directly into global programming variables by default. Now it only happens when you enable the register_globals option. I don't think I've ever met anyone who didn't consider it a huge security issue.

This rails behavior is actually even more powerful than the old PHP one for hackers because with this you get directly into the model and then the DB when everything is still left as generated, not just the temporary variables. It's actually pretty surprising how much resistance there is to fixing the issue.

It could be that the proposed whitelisting isn't the only solution. It does require annoying configuration. With PHP, nowadays, most people just access a particular array when they want their request variables. Similarly, maybe Rails could have a request model object and a DB model object with simple methods for copying state between the two. Maybe combine it into some sort of validation logic with user friendly error messages being specified. I guess it is still more work that default overwriting of the DB with request variables, though.

Just because he prefers to buy online doesn't mean other people do. Google tried to sell phones online and it just didn't work, for example...

I've actually had ad companies complain about banners too close too buttons in apps before. They can tell, statistically, when users are clicking something by accident rather than interest. Raganwald's screenshot seems similar to me. The web site designer chose to blend the ad into the text content and Google may not even be happy about it due to the lower quality incoming traffic on the ad.