One geeks thoughts on the geekeries of the world.
Archive for the ‘Software’ Category.
Here’s just a quick bit about open source on the iPhone. We all know that the iPhone development kit agreement prevents developers from making open source iPhone applications. This means that every iPhone application has to be developed by a company, or individual. You can’t have a team of people around the world collaborate openly to make an amazing iPhone application.
It might be surprising, but despite my high level of connectivity, I don’t do so well with the social web applications. I started with Orkut back in the day. We got all of our friends onto it, then we got tired of it after a few weeks. I have a Facebook account, but I don’t actually use it for anything. I primarily just use e-mail, IM and web forums for communication with the new world, and the telephone to communicate with the old world. Twitter is the first thing to put a kink in the works in quite some time.
This is going to be an uncharacteristically short post for this blog. I have something important to say, but it isn’t very complicated. Basically, I want other software developers to remember that people sometimes want to write code when they do not have an Internet connection.
I ride the train to work every day. While I am commuting, it would be very nice if I were able to work on various software projects. It is very easy to setup a development environment on my laptop to actually get work done, but it is not easy to get the documentaiton. Most documentation these days is, understandably, done online, often in a wiki.
Online documentations is awesome, and definitely needs to stick around. However, offline documentation should not suffer. It’s not too difficult to make some sort of weekly, or even monthly, cron job that exports the online documentation into some sort of offline format. Even just static HTML with proper links is enough. Yes, I know there are scripts to download wikis, and also wget -r, but they are usually not satisfactory.
Not everyone has an Internet connection all the time. When working with new frameworks and libraries, documentation is a necessity. I’m sure there are plenty of other developers out there like myself who would very much like to have documentation available offline. Please don’t forget us.
I’m looking at you Javascript library and web framework people. You know who you are.
If you give me a new hammer, I will suddenly have a strong urge to hit nails with it. As I walk around a hardware store, the tools sing out to me as if they are all Excalibur. They so desperately want me to use all of them. I do not think I am the only person who experiences these feelings. Continue reading ‘Open Source Development Tools Encourage Play’ »
If you pay attention to technology at all, you probably know about Google’s Android platform. People have largely panned it because they were expecting a gPhone to do battle with the iPhone. I think they are missing the point. This is the first time ever where there is a well documented and supported open source mobile platform. I joined the Android developer’s mailing list last night, and I’ve already gotten almost 200 messages on it. Whether or not people are excited, developers are excited about developing mobile applications for this new platform. Some of that excitement might have to do with the cash prizes, but I doubt that’s the only factor.
Anyway, one of my major disappointments with the iPhone is the lack of podcatching software. If it had a podcatcher, I probably would have bought one right off the bat. Android has presented me with the opportunity to write my own mobile podcatching software. I’ve decided that I’m going to go for it. Being an Ubuntu user, I had to setup the SDK to get working. However, I ran into a few problems along the way. Since I suspect many other Ubuntu users out there also might want to get into the Android developing business, here I will post how I got the development environment setup in Ubuntu. Continue reading ‘How To Setup Android SDK in Ubuntu’ »