Author Archives: Max Swisher

About Max Swisher

14-year-old web developer and writer. Avid collector of vinyl, cameras, and typewriters.

Android vs. iPhone

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Android and iPhone have always been one of the biggest disputes in the technology world ever since Mac vs. PC (which still isn’t decided). There are many factors to which makes one better, and with the iPhone soon on verizon, network coverage and carrier subscriptions are no longer some of them.

Why iPhone is better than Android

Lets start out with the iPhone.

The iPhone is made by one vendor, Apple. Apple does everything that has to do with the device: sells it, supports it, updates it, designs it, authorizes apps, etc.

And this allows for a kind of unity that is not found on android devices.

On iPhones, almost 80% of the users are updated to the latest version. Which means that if you develop and app that requires the latest verson of iOS, then 80% of all iPhone users can download it. Also, the updating system is flawless. All of your media, apps, mail, etc. can be synced over a single app on your Mac or PC that you can download for free. In addition to all that, you can also install software updates with the click of a button when prompted. And because apple all works as one system, when the update is available to one iPhone, it’s available to the rest.

With android, things are different. Very very VERY few are updated to the latest version, mostly because there are so many different android phones on so many different vendors that only some of the vendors update some of the phones some of the time. So if you develop an app for only one of the versions of android, few people are going to be able to use it. Some people are still on android 1.5! And if you develop an app for the newest version, same thing. There’s always going to be many users that aren’t able to use your freshly developed application.

In addition, androids have a much  bigger learning curve. To do advanced things like install new unofficial OSes, you have to root your phone and know how to install roms and things along those lines.

Another thing would be apps. The applications for iPhone are coded in objective C, which has a lot more possibility then Java. Many people say that when coding for android, they feel very confined in what they can allow their applications to do. Also, apple has to approve all apps submitted. These combined result in very high quality apps, which are easy to use and have a lot of functionality.

Why Android is better than iPhone

Android also has some nice benefits. First of all, it’s open source. This means that any developer can legally take the software and customize it and install drivers for different devices and do whatever they want with it, all legally.

This also means that if you do the right things to your android, you can install different versions of the operating system that have been modified by people ranging from people in office buildings to hobos living on the streets that happen to have coding skills and an internet connection. Having the ability to customize even the core operating system on the device is a big benefit with androids. And even though the manufacturers may take a year to come out with the new version of the OS officially for your phone, there is almost always someone porting the OS to the device early so you can get it before any of your friends.

Android is also not restricted to the Android Market. On iPhones, to install apps that aren’t in the app store you have to jailbreak. But with android, it’s as easy as checking a box in your application settings. Once that box is checked, you can download APK files from anywhere online and install them without a problem. This is good if an app maker doesn’t feel like putting their app in the market or just wants to keep a closed beta of it. Either way, having this feature is definitely a big plus for android.

And yet another benfit would be the huge variety. There are hundreds of android phones (all of which you can find on android.com) and as many vendors as you can imagine. This gives you a wide variety of different software, skins, hardware, power, price, coverage, and many different plans with different prices and different speeds and different features. Because of the wide variety of phones available, Android is now taking up a bigger market share than iPhone.

Conclusion

Androids and iPhones both have their ups and downs. But I think that I might admit to getting an iPhone when my upgrade is available. Even though I like the availability of open source on androids, I still feel like there is a wider variety of higher quality apps on the App Store that I could use.

The best of GMG!

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I’ve been blogging over here for a couple years now, and I have 40% more daily visitors nowadays then I did about 4 months ago. So for you new readers, I’ve decided to bring back some of the old posts.

Mindnode
 Mindnode is a great free app for mindmaps. It is now available on the Mac App Store.

Wireless tether with Droid Incredible
 Tethering wirelessly is extremely convenient and here’s how to do it.

Omniweb
 Omniweb is a fast and simple web browser that has a really interesting tabbing interface.

Create a WiFi network with your Mac
 Sometimes you are at a hotel and only have one ethernet cable. Here’s how you can use your mac to create a WiFi network so your other devices can also share the love.

Top 5 favorite things about Mac
 I personally prefer Macs over PCs. Here’s a few reasons why.

CloudApp
 Cloudapp is a great and easy way to share screenshots and other images with your friends.

Bluetooth not available? Here’s a ten step fix!
 It has happened to me a few times that when I startup my computer I get the wonderful bluetooth not available symbol in my menubar. In that case, I just come back to this post. It has never failed me!

Air Display
The iPad has a beautiful display. Here’s how you can use it as an extended monitor for your Mac!

Get Facebook chat in iChat
Facebook chat is great because it’s likely that you have a LOT of facebook friends that you can chat with. Here’s how to integrate Facebook chat into iChat using Jabber.

Chat with Phil McKinney
I had an interesting chat with Phil McKinney, the CTO of HP, and his words still stick with me.

swackett

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Sometimes weather is just too damn complicated.

There’s the temperature, clouds, chance of precipitation, humidity, pressure, dew point, wind chill, and feels like.

But what’s the main reason you look at the weather? Usually it’s because you’re going somewhere. And why do you need to care about the weather at that somewhere? Because you need to know how to dress to suit the weather conditions.

Swackett is an app that gives weather to you straight. It tells you exactly what you need to wear, and even labels it for your convenience.

As you can tell, it does give you some of the weather information so you know what to expect, but the main feature of it all is how it tells you what to wear and labels it all for you.

In addition to todays forecast, you can also see that it has the current conditions, tonight’s forecast, and tomorrow’s forecast, all of which tell you what you should wear.

Long are the days of trying to relate temperature, humidity, and chance of precipitation to what you should wear.

This app is available for FREEE on the Mac App Store. You can also purchase different styles of clothing that the weather models wear, but I don’t find that very necessary if all you need is to know what you should wear that day.

App Store direct link

Twitter for Mac

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Tweetie for Mac has always been the preferred twitter client on Macs. However, when the makers of tweetie, atebits, were bought by twitter, we didn’t know what would happen. The tweetie for iPhone was updated and called Twitter for iPhone. We were waiting for Tweetie version 3, but that came to us as an app in the Mac App store called Twitter for Mac.

If you use Tweetie you’ll immediately recognize the interface. The interface of this app is extremely simple and effective. You have a small bar on the left with your timeline, mentions, direct messages, and searches. However with this update we also have lists, which allows you to view your lists that you’ve made, and profile which allows you to view information about your profile.

A couple of small tweaks have also been made, as the window is round and the bar is a bit darker and the dock icon has been modified to have the official twitter bird in it.

But one of the biggest upgrades in this would be speed.

It’s just so fast! You click something and it goes and it loads. Bam.

Also, with DMs, messages come in with a matter of seconds. That makes it extremely useful to use similar to IM, which can be handy (although I don’t use that too often).

You can get Twitter in the Mac App Store for free, and for your convenience here’s a direct link. 😉

Cinch for Mac

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People who use Windows 7 have become very fond of the “snap” feature. What it allows you to do is drag a window to the right edge of the screen and when you let go, it will fill exactly the right half. Drag it to the left side and it will fill the left half. Drag it to the top and if will take up the whole screen.

This is an extremely useful tool, that has finally bridged to Mac.

The app that does this is called Cinch. Now everything I described up there, it does.

Simple, right? All you have to do is drag and let go.

What would you use this for? Here are a couple of ideas.

When doing research, you could have a web browser on the left side and an open document editor on the right. that way you can se the research information and type it up in your document all at the same time.

Another use is moving files. Drag one browser to one side and one browser to the other, and move your files inbetween.

Move one terminal window to one side, one terminal to the other.

Now this doesn’t work for windows that aren’t resizable, but it does work for pretty much every other app.

You can get a demo of this for free here (which will show a pop-up every once in a while) or you can buy the full version for a mere $7. Enjoy!

Mac App Store

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The iOS App Store is the main dealio when it comes to iOS. Everyone goes there for known good, easy to get, (sometimes) effective apps.

At Apple’s Back to the Mac Event, they were trying to bring aspects from iOS over to the Mac. They brought multitouch features, a centralized place for all your apps, but even better, they brought the App Store.

So with Mac OS X 10.6.6, you will find the application App Store in your applications folder.

Upon opening the app, you will find yourself having a flashback to your iPad.

You have Featured, Top Charts, Categories, Purchases, and Updates at the top. Seems pretty similar to iOS, right?

On the featured page you have New and Noteworthy, What’s Hot, and a scrolling feature of featured apps.

But it gets even more iOS like.

Tap er…. CLICK on an app and you will be brought to a page that looks pretty similar to the app page in iOS.

A description, a link that says the price on it, reviews and ratings, requirements, screenshots, iOS FLASHBACK!

And it only gets worse. CLICK the button with the price on it and you are asked to put in your Apple ID information (iTunes account information).

Once you sign in you will be greeted with a quite familiar process.

The app icon will literally fly from in the app to your dock with a loading bar across it (same one as in iOS, big coincidence). Once that is done, your app is installed and ready to use!

Having an App Store for Mac was probably a great idea. It’s an easy and already established way to get apps for your computer.

Another good thing about it is that you can now buy Apple’s bundled apps separately (like the iLife and iWork suite apps) instead of buying the whole bundle.

But my only worry would be if Apple decides to screw over all of the third party apps. Mac jailbreaking would be hell. if all of the sudden people had to start getting their apps approved by apple for them to go to the computers, I would definitely switch to PC. They’ve already done that with the iOS (which I am a rebel against to a degree) so the last source of freedom.

As the mac is right now, with both the Mac App Store AND the availability of third party apps is PERFECT. I think that a unified app store is a good idea but people still want their apps that aren’t in the app store.

Sphero by Orbotix

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While at CES I paid a visit to Sphero.

Sphero, in a nutshell, is a small robotic ball controlled by your smartphone.

The ball itself measures a few inches across and can glow any color across the RGB spectrum.

This thing is pretty cool.
There is a simple (but not too intuitive) driving app on your phone (Android or iPhone) that can control the Sphero as it just rolls around. However because sphero has an open API, the hope is that developers can use the sphero and integrate it into their apps. This means that game developers could create some really cool augmented reality (AR) games. And because it’s open, anybody can integrate the code into their apps.

Because of this I got to be an exhibitor for them. No, not an official exhibitor, but since I was such a good driver I got a t-shirt, and next thing you know all of the people at the booth are asking me questions (which of course I could answer). That was a really cool experience because I got to see both sides of CES.

One of the most popular questions was: Where can I get this thing?

Answer: We’ll see.

These little robots are still in prototype form, and there are less than 17 (maybe more by now) in existence, and the shells are pretty fragile at the moment.

The release of these guys is going to be in late 2011, where they will be available for less than $100. Yes, less than $100.

HOWEVER, you can pre-order one for yourself at http://gosphero.com.

These little things seem to have a lot of potential with one of my favorite associations: OPEN SOURCE!

Top 3 Trends at CES 2011

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CES 2011 was awesome. It was my first CES and I had a blast (but my feet didn’t). I befriended everyone at Eye-fi, met Altec Angel, got a free headset, took 1000 pictures, played a 3D racing game, and became an exhibitor for a booth for a few hours (more on that in the next post). Here are the things I saw that were extremely trending.

Number 3: Mobile
Mobile was as expected,a huge trend at CES. There were new phones announced by different makers, 4G technology, high res displays, and more.

A subtrend of this area would be accessories. There were headphones, mobile speakers, docking stations, backup batteries, a LOT of stands, and a lot of cases.

Number 2: Tablets
Tablets tablets and more tablets!

I got a chance to play with the Galaxy Tab (which I personally didn’t like) the BlackBerry PlayBook (which I loved, more on that later), and I played around with a lot of crappy android tablets.

Many companies all around the world are trying and failing to enter the tablet market. They all use android which is good for apps, but the devices themselves are TERRIBLE! The biggest mistake I saw was the use of resistive touch screens. Basically, instead of electrical content triggering a touch point (which takes the lightest touch) you have to “touch” hard enough to press two plastic sheets together that are over the screen. When I picked one up that had been made in china and tried to use it like I could my phone, iPad, iPod touch, or any other touch device I had, I thought it was broken. After PRESSING on the screen I could get a result.

Another problem is that the creators of these things were making them powerless. They had android 1.6, a 400 mhz processor, a terrible touch screen, poor design, bad graphics, terrible cameras, it was all just terrible.

I think that the tablet situation will be similar to the one with the iPod, where one vendor will rule over all others (in this case Apple).

AND NOW… FOR THE NUMBER ONE TREND AT CES….

NUMBER ONE:

There was so much 3d it was crazy.

Optoma had their whole booth all about 3d. All about 3d projectors and technologies.
Intel’s whole booth (which is quite large let me have you know) was all about their 3d processors which could drive 3d graphics to a 3d tv.

There were 3d cameras, 3d tvs, 3d camcorders, 3d monitors, 3d phones, 3d that you didn’t need glasses for, 3d that made you confused, and 3d that didn’t work. There was a LOT of 3d!

CES was an extremely cool event, but there wasn’t much eye-popping stuff. Everything was mostly just improvement on other things. 3D was big last year too, but here it’s being moved to more devices and more applications.

Creative at CES 2011

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Creative is known for it’s video cameras, software, etc. At CES they released a competitor to Cisco’s UMI called InPerson HD. It allows you to have up to a four way HD video conversation right from your TV.

InPerson HD works with a seperate box from your telivision and requires a subscription to use the service. The subscription price ranges from $10 to $40 depending on the flavour you select from single point to point to 4 person multipoint.

Here’s a picture of what it would look like if you were using it:
This service runs on a box that is powered by android which looks something like this:

This whole setup is scheduled to be released to the public in the second quarter of 2011. The box will cost about $500 (same price as the currently available InPerson which is mostly a video chat only laptop) plus the subscription.

Tinyletter

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Tinyletter is so simple that this post wont end up being too long.

Newsletters are a good way to directly tell people about whatever you want to.

In the past newsletters required something big and complicated, the most common MailChimp.
But Tinyletter is making things a lot easier.

It’s really really really really simple.

Go to tinyletter.com and create an account. Then name your newsletter and make a description and youre done. You will have a page for your newsletter and you can send that to friends who can subscribe with their email address.

Then when you want to write a newsletter, just log in and click write newsletter. Type up your newsletter and hit send. Done.

You can also get embed code for your website, which looks something like this:

Enter your email address:

Delivered by TinyLetter

Let me just say: If you really don’t have anything interesting to say, don’t spam people with useless words. If you are some random person with no life, then I don’t think that this would be useful for you and many people would just end up filtering you to spam. Thanks!

Tinyletter homepage

OMGB-6 WeDoDroid HTC GINGERBREAD UPDATE

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You may have read my post on how to install gingerbread on a droid incredible. Well that was with version OMGB-4. OMGB-5 was released and now, OMGB-6 as well.

OMGB-5 brought a lot of needed updates.

EMMC Access For All Apps
MMS on 3g and WIFI
Microbe LWP
Nexus S LWP
Available on Rom Manager *Hopefully, need my pull request to go through Rom Manager OTA Update Capable
Slightly Modified Boot Animation (by Ocelot13)
Nano Added *Here You Go N_I_X 😛
USB Mounting Fixed! No More Gscripts!
Reverted to Kernel #18 to Fix Touchscreen Issues on Some Phones.

OMGB-6 brought a few nice updates as well.

Actual Nexus S LWP
GPS
Right Launcher Button Remapped to SMS
Moved Bootanimation to /system/media

Yes, GPS. Finally, GPS. That includes working navigation and third-party GPS support and the whole shabang. Yay!! It used to be that whenever i really needed GPS Id revert back to the stock froyo.

Now there are still some bugs:
Video Recording
Led Lights

Also, you may notice that some apps don’t work. This isn’t because of gingerbread or your phone, it’s because many apps just aren’t compatible with the brand new operating system.

Thanks xda-developers and tem WeDoDroid for developing this up so quickly and perfectly!!

XDA Incredible Gingerbread Page

OMGB-6 Direct Download

How to install the ZIP on your incredible

Swishar

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The Swishar is a newsletter that I am going to try to send weekly ish.

It will include my new posts, older posts that I would like to make new again, and different articles on the web that I have found useful.

Put in your email address below to subscribe. 🙂

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Thanks!