Telirati

It's hard to drag a legacy UI into a touch world As Microsoft well knows, it's hard to drag a legacy UI system onto touch devices successfully. Microsoft tried numerous times, notably in the past for the UMPC format and Windows mobile, and more recently in Windows 8.1 to evolve Windows into a touch OS. or to bifurcate it and leave the legacy UI behind. Neither approach worked. Touch and the browser Microsoft has, however, dragged OEMs into building touch laptops. Google acknowledged this trend by creating the Chomebook Pixel with a touchscreen. Google felt they needed to "own" the issue of touch and Chrome in case touchscreen PCs were successful. Chrome OS and the Chrome browser, as well as Google's Web apps would have to adapt to a world with lots of touch systems running Windows. Chromebook OEMs are following Google with their own touchscreen products in laptop form factors. But that never happened and touch in Chrome OS has become a stagnant an...

SoCs are mostly the same One of the mysteries surrounding the question of why Intel hasn't gotten inside your phone is that systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) are all quite similar. Some CPU cores, a GPU, and i/o peripherals share a bus, all on one chip. If high-level architecture is so similar, and apparent barriers to entry low enough that numerous new entrants have flourished, what's up with Intel? A combination of factors If new entrants can get in the game, and SoCs are difficult to differentiate, it is unlikely that you can find one factor, or one problem to solve, that will unlock the mobile market for Intel. Here are some of the factors cited over time as keeping Intel out of your phone: Power management:  ARM CPUs were designed for low power applications and ARM licensees have all the expertise in integrating systems that result in low power SoCs. Intel has largely overcome this barrier, though it took more product generations than it should have, and Intel may ...

Photo by Matthew Hester (CC BY-ND 2.0) Google has become something of a slumlord. While Google+ has been accused of being a "ghost town," at least it looks pretty, even now after what feels like a long period of stagnation and un-addressed bugs. But Google+ isn't the most neglected neighborhood in Googleland. Where is the Blogger blog? Various parts of Google, notably Search, use Blogger to convey news about new releases and their development road map. Blogger is key infrastructure for Google itself. But where is the Blogger blog? Like some other semi-abandoned properties, Blogger no longer has frequent updates about features. If you want a history of Blogger and it's features, you'll have to rely on Wikipedia. Evidently there are ardent Blogger users who keep track of these things. Why does this matter? There are a lot of abandoned places on the Internet. Blogger, however, is emblematic of the problems that precipitated the departure of Vic Gundotra...

The trust problem US technology and Internet services companies have a deep trust problem. They are accused of collaborating with the NSA and, on top of collaboration, being exploited by the NSA. The NSA, in turn, is seen as operating without boundaries, turning America and much of the world into a glass-walled panopticon, devoid of privacy and confidentiality. This loss of trust has already cost tens of billions, and will cost tens to hundreds of billions more in lost sales outside the US and the "Five Eyes" nations most closely collaborating in NSA surveillance. Any nation that aspires to have practical sovereignty, competitive industry, and independent decision-making finds they cannot trust US technology and services. Solving the trust problem is one of the most valuable goals in the technology and Internet services industries, and it has proved to be a sticky problem. The key may be to change the terms of the discussion. Describing the threat The NSA...

This might not be the single most interesting bug in all of Android, but out of the ones I have encountered or heard of, it definitely caught my attention. Combating fragmentation with a single code base A key set of features of Android is good forward and  back-compatibility. That is, you can write an app that uses new APIs, but runs on old systems, by testing for the API level and not calling unimplemented features. This enables developers to keep a single code-base for many versions of Android. However, old Android versions can't see their own future. That means that when new permissions are introduced, it is possible that an app created their own permissions with the same name. And therein is the basis for a vulnerability identified in this paper by Indiana University and Microsoft Labs researchers . Bad Android! The result is an app that never asked for a permission, but got one anyway. That's bad! It's not just bad implementation bad, it...

Every year, Tomi Ahonen publishes an almanac of industry numbers and analysis. He has consistently pointed out that the way he compiles and compares the numbers has, for several years now, embodied the view that smart mobile devices are computers. Here we take a look at how treating all computing devices as a single market can change your perception of priorities when making software development resource allocation decisions.  Tomi's Numbers We have prettied up the numbers he published in his blog with some graphs. We think the idea that computing devices are not just traditional PCs, and programming, especially interactive programming, is applicable to all interactive devices is valid and we should visualize the industry in a way that captures that idea. The graphs in this post should drive home just how thoroughly smart mobile devices have changed what you should be paying attention to when you think about what to target when you write a program, or...