Recently my faithful mobile handset dropped dead after five years of duty as a phone and a bluetooth DUN. I reached the shop trying to get myself a similar device and the salesman lured to Xperia arc and started explaining the features. The one feature (ok fact) that sounded too ridiculous was 2,50,000 applications available and the numbers are increasing way too fast. I ditched any advice to go for a hi end phone and settled for a candybar one. I think that there is an android bubble and need to understand how big it is. First look at the market place shows that it allows any application to be available for use without QA from them. This one window allows vendors to mutate, replicate, spam their products on the market. Examples – Ringtones classified as mp3 players, wallpaper changers with just one wallpaper but rendering too many ads, very simple applications which could rather be rendered as a web page. Finding a useful product out of the store is an uphill task.
Secondly; like how every company wanted their website during the dot com boom, similarly they seem to be in line for mobile applications for themselves. Most of the applications are concentrated on content rather than getting innovative by using the accelerometer, camera, GPS, cell site information, NFC and others. Layar is one such application which is a true blue mobile application. My gut feel is once the excitement levels plateaus and the awareness of the mobile applications increase, then we will see high quality products on the market. As a developer I restrain myself not to create a mobile app which can anyways be rendered in a web browser with a good UI.
I never expected watching the movie ‘Spiderman’ would give me an insight about social responsibility. In the movie, Spiderman goes on to wrestle a strong opponent for a promised prize money of 3k$. When he finishes, he is cheated by the cashier and given only 100$ citing some lame reason. As he walks out of the room a burglar breaks into the room, steals all the cash and gets away. Even though the burglar was within the reach of Spiderman to get stopped, he chooses not to act which gives him a satisfaction that something bad happened to the cheater. The burglar’s future action kills the uncle (foster parent like) of Spiderman to get away with the cash. This event makes him feel guilty and makes him go on a mission to protect people in need through his new found powers.
We face many situations on a day to day basis where we may choose to remain inactive as we are not directly affected/influenced by it. In any social setting the loop is closed and our inactivity will hurt us sometime later. We have social circles every where and there is an implicit responsibility to not cause hardships to others. The mutual feeling of getting protected by the others helps us grow in strength and channelize the energy into more productive tasks. The seemingly simple problem will soon grow to be a 800 pound gorilla or the elephant in the corner.
It is not necessary to sacrifice one’s dreams to do whats right like how Aunt May advises Spiderman but it is worth to nip the problems in front our eyes and it is our responsibility too.
Between Spaghetti, Pasta and Sandwich which one would you choose if you are writing and maintaining code, how it should be like? Definitely not the spaghetti right? I have come across spaghetti code and detest it to the core.; but I have also observed that wrong understanding of OO or TOO (too much object orientation) and obsession with modularization leads to pasta like code. This makes us go through multiple files and sections of code to understand simple functionalities. Cannot we translate most of the software requirements into code like how a well prepared sandwich can be nutritious and filling too?
I don’t have an answer to this question but my readings like Worse is better (talks about less and useful features) make me infer that like every person’s hunger can be satisfied with cost-effective, tasty, nutritious and simple to make food; most of the software requirements should also be delivered with simple to write and maintain code. Aesthetics, modularization and other bells & whistles should not come at a cost.
Novi's 