Someone once asked me why would people work on an open source project or a free project (as in they aren’t getting paid by anyone to do it). They wanted to create a community around these people but did not know them (weird idea to me, create something for someone you know nothing about). I have worked on a few of these projects and have a site going for one right now at http://www.myhtcphone.com
What’s my reasoning for doing this? For the site I am working on, a developer ported Android to my phone, HTC Vogue (Sprint Touch) and I was interested in it. I want to see what Android can do and based on early impressions, it is looking really good. Fast, responsive and seems like it could be almost infinitely expandable. That is something I am very interested in. I created the site and started making contributions to the community because I want to help further this project. I want to be able to do more on my phone and since Sprint won’t help me get there, I had to look to other fans who were taking a proactive stance. I wanted to be one of them.
Another reason I am working on this site is a monetary one. I have ads running on the site, and eventually I will put other money making systems in place to bring in some revenue. I am not looking into turning this into a cash cow though. I just want to bring in enough to cover server costs and future expansions and then, if there is anything left, give that back to the community. I want to be able to give something back to the people working on this as a thank you for their time. Maybe invest in a couple of test phones so they don’t have to use their own phones. I also want to do other things like that for this community that is working so hard on something no one else will pay them for …. yet at least.
So the reason I work on these projects is mostly to help something that is useful to me. If it isn’t available yet and I can use it/need it, then I want to help out. I want to make things that others will find useful. I want to be part of something that is greater than myself and where I feel I can actually make a contribution.
If you contribute to this type of project, what are your motivations?
dzo over at xda-developers.com has ported Android to the phone I am currently using, the Sprint Touch. The phone also goes by the name VX-6900 (Verizon) and Vogue (generic name). It is made by HTC. It comes with Window’s Mobile 6.0. Carriers are starting to release version 6.1 which includes threaded messaging, EVDO Rev. A and GPS. The threaded messaging is nice because it means no more 3rd party apps are required for something that should have already been built in. Palm had it on the Treos for years so why did it take Microsoft so long to make it standard? EVDO Rev A speeds means faster Internet connection. The connection was pretty fast before, slightly better then low DSL speeds, but now its 2-3 times as fast, or it seems like it. The GPS isn’t true GPS, I’m not sure if any cell phone does have true GPS, but it works pretty well, when it works.
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Another post from Clear Night Sky:
Steve Nelson recently sent me, and a few other people here at Clear Ink, an article from the New York Times. It tells about a new approach being tested to measure a marketing campaign’s effectiveness. The company, IMMI, is providing cell phone service for it’s test audience, and in return, the audience doesn’t have to do anything. Well almost nothing – they are asked to carry the cell phone around like normal, as it replaces their existing phone. IMMI monitors what these cell phones can hear throughout the day and then match it with whatever marketing they are measuring. They say it isn’t listening to your conversation, only the media around you. Very Big Brother-ish if you ask me, but how do you know that your *current* cell phone isn’t already doing this already?
And with GPS apps like Google Maps, it even knows where you are and where you have been. Of course, most cell phones have built in GPS anyway so you don’t even need to have the app installed to be tracked. Granted some of this is pretty cool when used right, but where do we draw the line between usefulness and having the CIA know our every action, word and location?
Another one of my posts over at Clear Night Sky:
TV is dead. Or it will be dead unless it evolves drastically. I came to this conclusion sometime in 2002-2003. That was the point when I was abruptly weened off religiously watching television. Since then, only a few shows have caught my attention enough to actually turn my TV into a TV, and not just the screen for my XBOX(/DVD player). However, I have seen a new direction for TV, and it came from NBC of all people. Their great show last season got me hooked into a new way to watch TV shows. Online viewing. And boy am I hooked. No cable service to buy, no expensive equipment to buy or lease, no endless commercials. Its just great. I can watch when I want, pretty much anywhere I want to and the commercials are minimal. I like it so much I even got my technologically-limited mom to start watching this way and its amazing how quickly she caught on.
Commercials are the real thing I wanted to blog about though. While watching Heroes online, I did get some commercials, but strangely, it seemed to be the same commercial every 10 minutes. But it was only one commercial every 10 minutes it seemed like so I could deal with it. Yet I found myself wanting more commercials, or at least more relevant commercials. This was a strange feeling for me, having always changed the channel or went and did something else while commercials were on.
Being online so much, I am always looking for more to do, more to see. I usually have at least 4 different programs running, some with 2 or more viewable things each. Call me ADHD if you will, but only call me that because the Internet made me that way. So when I said I wanted to see commercials, I was serious. I wanted something to focus my attention and keep me on that one screen. While watching Heroes, I would switch it to take over my whole monitor, one of them anyway, and I wanted something to fill the space the inevitable commercial would take up. I don’t think I am alone in this feeling either.
TV execs, if you are reading this, take note. Give me options. Give me choices. You already do it by giving me the choice of which TV show to watch, so why not extend that to commercials. Here’s a simple way to do it online that benefits you twofold and is very simple thing to do. Give me categories of commercials to choose from such as movies, cars, technology, food, etc. This benefits you because then I would be interested in the commercials and would probably watch them. It also benefits you because then you would know what I wanted to see and you can tell your advertisers: “See? He wants to see your content. Give us more money and we pretty much guarantee your ad will get the placement you are aiming for.” After all, isn’t that what advertisers want to hear, guaranteed product placement?
Now that I have a HDTV, I feel this is even more of an important issue. Draw me back to TV. Live TV. I pretty much get all my content from the ‘Net now. Especially since it was so easy to hook my new TV up to my computer using a standard DVI port. I think my apartment still has cable … I would never know since my TV rarely leaves PC mode (Except to play video games).
I posted this awhile back on Clear Night Sky and I liked it so I thought I would repost it here:
Yahoo! just released a beta 3.0 of its Yahoo! Go mobile service. Version 2.0 gave you mobile access to your Yahoo email, calendar, contacts, news, maps, traffic and more. While 2.0 was ok (would have been great if I could use my slide out keyboard on my phone), 3.0 looks simply amazing. I am truly excited about 3.0. It’s doing what Facebook Apps did for Facebook, but on something I use constantly, my cell phone.
My normal cellphone of choice is a Windows Mobile device so I am used to having real applications on my phone that are fully functional just like on my computer. But Yahoo! Go 3.0 will let me write apps for it in a simple-ish language and have the added benefit of being able to use it on my other cell phone line (don’t ask, it’s cheaper for me to have 2 cell phones and service then 1 so I go with it), or any cell phone that can support Go. There are so many uses that someone could come up with for this, but me, I am looking forward to finally being able to write a ledger for my accounts so I can track my spending. Call me new school but I never carry a checkbook around, or even a pen for that matter, so being able to enter this on my phone and have it update online would be really useful to me. It’ll be interesting to see what others develop for it.
In the title I called Yahoo! mobile crazy cool and the last paragraph gave just a hint of how cool it could be, well now just a taste of how scary it can be. While not supported yet, Phase two of Yahoo!’s launch will try to make use of some of the phone’s built-in features like location based services. This means the application will be able to locate where you are physically and update the service with that information so you can get usual facts like nearby restaurants. This sounds cool to, but combine it with the tracking and stats they plan to implement soon and then anyone, not just the CIA, will be able to track where you go. They can also track how long you stayed somewhere, what people you were close to (if they also have the program installed) and where they went. Of course, the thing that makes me feel better about this is that it *should* only work if you have the app running.
Overall, I am excited about this news but slightly worried. I may be a lot more worried when they roll out phase 2 but for now, I am going to go write a checkbook widget.
Read more about this at Yahoo! Mobile
I finished reading ‘A sign of Macs to come’ by Matt Asay and must say I don’t entirely agree with some of the points. First thing that sticks out is this quote:
Yes, you can run Microsoft’s Office for Mac natively on the Mac, and it actually looks better on the Mac than on Windows. It works as well on the Mac as iTunes works on Windows.
Now, when I read that line, I laughed. iTunes doesn’t work on Windows. Yeah sure it plays music and videos and probably syncs to iPods and iPhones (wouldn’t know since I don’t own either and have no interest in either) but it slows computers down to a crawl. It takes up so much of your’s resources that it is ridiculous. I am a computer nerd and know pretty much everything going on with my computer so I can say that with some confidence. 3 different computers with different configurations have led me to that conclusion. I like the ease with which I can change tags and I like how good it sorts my music in the file system but I hate how slow it makes things. Given that my computer is pretty fast and has lots of memory so its not that bad, it still shouldn’t do that.
Another thing about that quote that I just thought of, iTunes doesn’t alway play nice on Windows. I remember last year when an iTunes update broke Outlook. The iTunes update did something and installed an Outlook plugin that prevented Outlook from sending emails and other weird stuff. Why in the world is iTunes trying to integrate itself into Outlook??!!?? It took awhile to figure that one out. We had to tell people that they could only install Outlook or iTunes, not both. It was crazy. Eventually they released another fix that problem but c’mon, it shouldn’t have happened.
I believe Macs have their place somewhere. I am firmly a PC guy (Not Window’s guy even though thats what I most use, but I use Linux often enough too) and don’t see what the big draw is to Macs. They are expensive (sometimes twice as much for the same exact hardware), not always expandable and are not as widely supported in terms of programs. It sometimes makes things try to be so simple that it becomes sometimes extremely easy to mess things up on your computer. Like you can have a million things loaded and then wonder why your computer is slow. All the icons are somewhat hidden on the launch bar thingie and applications can have all their windows closed but the app itself is still running.
I just don’t know. Most techies I believe prefer PCs and if they, the experts, prefer PCs, shouldn’t everyone?
I don’t know if it’s Joomla’s wackiness or the MVC model in general but I am still having trouble wrapping my head around the whole concept. At times it seems clear, but then I’ll read something and it blows my thinking out of the water. I think it could be a good concept, maybe I even use it at times already, but right now it seems to only add more steps to something that’s already complicated.
I like the idea of having as much separated out as possible providing the cleanest code, but I also hate it at the same time because you have to reference so many different files to see the whole picture. Overall I still am not sure about MVC programming but maybe with time and more practice I’ll come to like it better.
