by John C. Bland II | Oct 30, 2013 | Google
https://plus.google.com/+JohnCBlandII
Google announced a solid set of updates yesterday and one of them was the expansion of custom URLs. They emailed me this morning with the opportunity to grab mine so I did.
I left Twitter for Google+ earlier this year and haven’t looked back. I’m more productive, since I don’t obsess over watching my feed, but more importantly the conversations are more engaging [death to 140 character limits!]. I use Twitter from time to time but not very often.
With that said, Google+ is it for me. If you want to keep tabs on my happenings, mostly professional as Facebook still serves as my personal social network [although that is changing a bit as well], find me on G+.
by John C. Bland II | Sep 4, 2013 | Android, Apple, Google, iOS
I ran across this post by Audiobox through +Matias Duarte and enjoyed these nuggets:
For reference, Google’s developer instructions for how to set up beta testing are ~350 words. Apple’s? 2800.
That’s critical. Google’s alpha/beta updates from May rocked my world too.
Worlds apart:
According to Apple, iOS app beta testers who run into crashes are expected to sync their device to iTunes, find a CrashReporter logs folder on their computer, and then email a log file to the developer.
Android testers hit “send” on a popup.
0-60 (asterisks mine):
Android, by comparison, is a breath of fresh air. […] Trying the very first build of your app on real hardware is as easy as hitting “Run.” No provisioning profiles. No developer accounts. No bull**.
Deployment:
While everyone else is building for iOS and wasting weeks in the App Store submit-review-deny-resubmit doldrums, you could be racing ahead on Android, where app burnout hasn’t yet set in.
That’s because the best part, the dirty little secret, is that Android users are starved for beautiful apps.
Yes. Exactly. The beautiful apps desire is strong on Android and it is the right time to build beautiful apps.
Obviously iOS is a great platform but the approaches are literally night and day. I do like what I’m seeing in XCode 5 and iOS 7 dev [posts coming soon] for native dev but 0-60 has changed much.
by John C. Bland II | Jun 27, 2013 | Android, Google
Beginning today, the Android beta program will give users who opt-in access to the latest versions of Facebook for Android before the general release. Our goals with this program are to expand our pool of testers and gain feedback across a more diverse set of devices. Just by using the app and reporting issues, beta testers will be able to help us improve performance on a wide variety of Android devices we may have otherwise been unable to test at scale.
Facebook posted this today. It falls in line with my thinking on Google’s efforts. Simply put and IMHO…the Play Store definitely provides one of the best developer experiences.
by John C. Bland II | Mar 21, 2013 | Google
Here is my deep analysis of the Google Reader situation…in pictures. (more…)
