Android Design

In an attempt to reign in the variety of design styles within Android applications, Google unveiled Android Design.  It’s a site that was released specifically to give developers ideas on how to make their Android Apps look and feel more integrated into the Android operating system.  The site includes design principles, an overview of UI, and many other design related resources for Android developers to take advantage of.

As expected, the Android Design site itself is quite beautiful.  Their message about design and UI concepts would probably not carry much weight if they weren’t presented with great design in mind.  It seems that the search giant is starting to see that focusing on simplicity and keeping design tasteful will help them win in the long run.  My primary complaint about Android thus far has always been that it feels too cluttered.  Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), along with design help like this, will help to alleviate that complaint and push Android even further into the market share lead.

International CES 2012

Well, it’s that time of year again.  You know…that time of year when every other tech geek blogger is usually spouting off about the next best technologies being demo’d at CES.  For anyone that doesn’t know, CES is the world’s largest consumer electronics tradeshow.  In fact, it’s epic in size.  Some 3,000 companies show up to peddle their latest tech to the masses.  And every year, the “experts” predict the next top consumer technologies from the heap of contenders.  The issue that I take with CES is that inevitably, the most hyped technologies turn out to be total duds once they hit the market.

Remember 2009?  The hot tech buzz coming out of CES 2009 was Palm’s webOS.  How’d that work out?  Oh that’s right, Palm ended up near death and got purchased by HP only to see their precious webOS get turned into an even bigger failure in the tablet market.  Another hyped product from CES 2009 was the “Netbook”.  Remember these?  I know several people who actually got one.  Cheap, low spec laptops designed with couch web surfing in mind.  The result?  Enter the tablet, exit the netbook.

How about 2010?  Well, everyone was certain that 3D television would be the next smash hit.  Cut to a couple years later and 3D television isn’t really any further along than it was then.  I’ve seen 3D television in action before and it’s kinda cool.  It probably isn’t going anywhere as a technology, but it will probably never be a true selling point.

Well, what about last year?  CES 2011 was the year of the Android Tablets!  Something like 100 different Android based tablets were splashed around in front of the cheering ocean of consumer geeks.  They were ALL going to give the Apple iPad a run for its money.  I LOVE Android tablets.  I prefer a good Android tablet to the iPad.  However, MY opinion doesn’t translate into financial success for a technology.  The masses wanted iPads.  Most of the tablets exhibited at CES 2011 never made it to the marketplace at all.

So what’s my point?  When I see every tech blog out there spraying nonsense into the ether about this technology or that technology based on reports from CES, I get frustrated.  Ultra Definition Television?  Really?  They aren’t even trying anymore.  Flying cars, robot servants, holographic video phones…The utopian technolust world of The Jetsons sadly seems like a fallacy.  Perhaps, the best we can do is get The Jetsons boxset in 3D.

Funding Breakdown for SOPA

With SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA still looming, I have been coming across lots of ways to gain access to websites during a government shutdown of the internet.  Everything from dial-up modems to creating a mesh wireless network for communicating with others.  In the event of a DNS shutdown, all sites that have a dedicated IP address will still be reachable.  All you have to do is enter the IP.  Here’s an emergency list of IP’s for such a situation:

At least this register isn't empty...

As most PC users are aware, one of the first steps you take when connecting that spanking new gaming rig to the internet is make sure you have installed and configured a firewall to safeguard your system and connection from unwanted intruders.

Apparently, for approximately 200 small businesses, including at least 150 Subway franchises, whoever set up their Point-of-Sale (POS) systems was absent the day they taught Network Security Basics in school.  Over 80,000 customers had their credit card information stolen in a scam dating back to 2008, according to recently released court documents.

The culprit:

POS systems with open internet connections.  All the hackers had to do was run a simple port scan to find a way into the system, then they set up their trojan to collect and dump the data periodically.  Voila, free money.  Well at least until they got caught.

POS systems are actually supposed to be secured according to standards set forth by the individual card vendors, such as Visa and MasterCard, although there is a trade group, PCI, which has some basic standards in place, but no methods to ensure compliance.  PCI states that vendors should have two factor authentication in place if they accept swiped transactions, something that most likely would have prevented these attacks.

Think about this kind of stuff the next time you swipe your card to get that $5 footlong, and be vigilant in checking your account statements frequently to detect any fraudulent transactions.  Be safe out there kiddies!

For more info, check out:

https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/index.php

and

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/12/how-hackers-gave-subway-a-30-million-lesson-in-point-of-sale-security.ars

iPhone 5

After expecting the iPhone 5 earlier this year and instead being presented with the iPhone 4S, a lot of people have dismissed the iPhone 5 for now.  Not us though!  We are still digging through rumors and strangely worded press releases to get the truth for you!  We have come to the conclusion that the release date for the iPhone 5 will likely be in mid 2012.  We would bet on Summer 2012.  As soon as we get more information, we will post it here!   Below are some rumors about the coming iPhone 5.

iPhone 5 Specs

If you want to know what will be in it, just look at the licensed hardware manufacturers!  A glimpse at ARM’s roadmap shows a quad-core processor planned to launch around the same time as the iPhone 5.  It will likely be called the A6.  Quad-core will be the mobile trend of 2012.

iPhone 5 Mobile Network

The iPhone 5 will most definitely be 4g LTE.  It would be the death of the iPhone if it didn’t!

iPhone 5 Form Factor

When the iPhone 5 is released, we will be seeing a completely new form factor.  It will likely be a drastic change from the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S.

We will continue to post updates here as we get them!

Eclipse

A while back, we published an article chock full of free apps.  There was a lot of stuff that we left out though.  One of the glaring holes was in the Programming/Development section.  We completely left out Eclipse.  One reason for this is that Eclipse isn’t really an app.  It is an entire development environment.  The project is completely open source and it is one of the most powerful resources available to developers…and it’s free!  So, what is Eclipse exactly?

About Eclipse

From their website: Eclipse is an open source community, whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle. The Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit, member supported corporation that hosts the Eclipse projects and helps cultivate both an open source community and an ecosystem of complementary products and services.

Where to Download

You can find the Eclipse Project at http://www.eclipse.org.

What do those html hex values for colors actually mean?  Well, I intend to explain it as clearly as possible right here.  HTML colors aren’t supposed to be complex or confusing.  The hex values are six digits following a (#) sign.  The six digits are actually 3 pairs of digits.  Each pair represents either Red, Green, or Blue (RGB).  The lowest value that a pair can get is 00.  The highest value that a pair can get is FF.  So, #000000 is the lowest RGB value possible.  #00FF33 has the lowest possible value for Red (first pair), the highest possible value for Green (second pair), and the value “33″ for Blue (third pair).

With all three colors allowing values from 0 to 255, there are a total of 16 Million colors.  I know this isn’t anything ground breaking, but I have found that while many people are familiar with the #FFFFFF hex notation, very few actually know what the hex values mean and how to use that information to tweak colors.

Below is a nice color chart to help you find most of the hex values you’ll need for web sites:

Space Elevators and Lunar Landers

There is a top secret lab in the Bay Area called Google X.  Some might think that this is where top secret proprietary software and search algorithms are researched and developed.  In reality, Google X has nothing to do with Google’s current software or search engine interests.  The lab is devoted to planning the future of the human race.

Lofty projects including space elevators and personal robots are rapidly being researched and developed at Google X.  There is an elite group of engineers working on a list of 100 of these projects.  Many of them are focused on robots, and with security that is run as “mysteriously as the CIA”, you could only imagine how advanced some of this research must be!

I will be perfectly honest – I know nothing about Solaris other than it is UNIX-based, but am learning so hopefully I can be up to speed on the subject when it matters.

But for those who are in the know, this seems to be a big deal, since Oracle announced it on Nov. 9th and their financials took a nice little hop.

Yay progress :)

~Roxy!

Adobe Flash Player in the Android Marketplace

Today, Adobe announced that it is cutting Mobile Flash along with 750 jobs.

“Over the past two years, we’ve delivered Flash Player for mobile browsers and brought the full expressiveness of the web to many mobile devices, however, HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.  We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.”

- Danny Winokur, Adobe’s vice president of interactive development

I hate to say this, but Apple sure got this one right!  I never would have thought that HTML5 would kill Mobile Flash so quickly.  I’m happy with the forward progress of HTML5, but I will be sad to see Mobile Flash Player go.