To Root or Not to Root
Posted by Mike Chandler in Android on May 26, 2011
I enjoy my Android phone a lot because the platform allows me to highly customize my experience. Android users can enjoy a lot of flexibility without having to root the phone, but rooting your device opens additional possibilities. Recently, Google announced movie rentals as a soon-to-be service, but indicated that rooted phones would be excluded from the service. The likely reason is because of the unknown or uncontrolled factors of rooted devices and how that may conflict with digital rights management.
I can’t say that I completely object to the move. Contracts with film distributors are probably difficult to lock down with the notion of a tampered device. Convincing movie studios to stream their intellectual property has been an uphill battle for years and I can see this being a necessary compromise in order for Google to get this service off the ground. But as a user, this just plain ol’ sucks. My device is rooted for completely different purposes, and I suspect most others who are rooted are as well. Frankly, I have no clue how to get around DRM with a rooted device and am not inclined to find out. I suspect I’m not alone.
From my standpoint, rooting my device is more important than streaming/watching movies on my phone. I doubt I’m the only one.
ColdFusion on the TIOBE Index
Posted by Mike Chandler in ColdFusion, Objective-C, Programming on April 28, 2011
Things aren’t looking too hot for ColdFusion on the TIOBE index lately. Have a look:
TIOBE Programming Community Index
It’s hard to spot, but you’ll find “CFML” waaaay at the bottom in the 50 – 100 list. It’s listed in alphabetical order rather than ranked by popularity because, according to Tiobe, the differences in popularity among the bottom 50 were so marginal that it made little sense to order them. Yikes. As someone who’s been programming in ColdFusion for so many years, that’s a hard pill to swallow.
Interestingly, it seems to go along with what I’m seeing in the community for ColdFusion developers seeking work. Programmers that have a pretty advanced toolset are jumping to other platforms where the jobs are more plentiful and they’re doing well. Candidates who respond to my openings for ColdFusion developers don’t always have the chops, and it takes a very long time to locate and hire qualified candidates for ColdFusion jobs. That does make sense if the language is truly as unpopular as the TIOBE index suggests.
I began looking at this a few days ago when I found a two+ year old article regarding the release of the iOS SDK by Apple. I can’t find the article now or I would link to it, but the author was opining about the bad decision by Apple to release an SDK for a popular platform like iOS that requires programmers to use Objective-C, an unpopular choice from the author’s perspective. Clicking the same link above, a flash forward of more than two years from that article, and you’ll see Objective-C jumped from being very low on the index to being the #8 most popular language today!
It’s surprising how quickly things can change. As developers, we should be prepared for sudden shifts and keep our toolsets up to date and ready for what may come.
Mobile Dev – ColdFusion or Native?
Posted by Mike Chandler in Android, ColdFusion on April 20, 2011
For mobile application development, I’ve participated in discussions (or debates) about the best approach to take from a development standpoint – native versus a web-based hybrid using your tools of choice. Ultimately, the answer depends on the long term objectives of the application and its intended user base, but it’s hard not to determine a preference early on.
As a ColdFusion developer (and obviously someone who is surrounded by ColdFusion developers due to my job), it’s hard not to be interested by the concept of building a web based solution. ColdFusion could be used for back-end hosted functionality, and the front-end can be developed as a web view with HTML and JavaScript. Thanks to tools like PhoneGap, the source can be compiled as a native application on several platforms. It sounds interesting at first, but the details make me want to reconsider this choice.
To be competitive, the user interface needs to be a relatively rich experience that takes advantage of all things possible with the smart phone user experience. While those are all possible with HTML and JavaScript thanks to powerful libraries like Sencha Touch, they’re certainly not overly simple to produce. JavaScript is an elaborate, object-oriented capable language, and frameworks like Sencha Touch contain many custom libraries and components that take a bit of studying before you can implement them. In my opinion, you get no short-cut advantages building a mobile app using HTML and JavaScript.
My preference is to build a native application. The Android SDK is just plain old enjoyable to work with. The UI API allows your app to look and feel like what an Android user would expect without a lot of wrestling or trial and error. There is also a nearly limitless number of open source initiatives out there, both plain old Java and Android specific, that can really give you a leg-up on your final development goals.
I think there’s a place for web-based development of mobile applications, especially in a client-server situation where deployment to multiple platforms is an expectation. But for me, native is the way to go.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on Android
Posted by Mike Chandler in Android, ColdFusion on April 18, 2011
Sadly, my blog became uninteresting to me and by the time I thought to revive it, I had lost all the posts. And so begins another…
As a long time ColdFusion Developer, I have a loyalty to the language and platform. However, I have strong interests elsewhere. Among them is Android development. To get into a new language, it’s always good to have a project that interests you. For me, that project is the revival of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — the classic text adventure from Infocom.
As a kid, I loved playing the game on our Atari 800XL. We had obtained a bootleg copy of Zork I and completed the game, so when my brother got a copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for Christmas, despite not being familiar with the famous novel by Douglas Adams, we were very excited. The unique story-telling style, characters and language in the game made it one of the most enjoyable and memorable text adventure games. Thanks to a couple of open source initiatives in Java, I’ve compiled a working install of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that I plan to make available as a free download for Android.
I spent about an hour playing it the other day and can safely say that it works, though some unforeseen bugs may be lurking. Hopefully I can get some feedback from the user base upon release that will help keep it stable and well used by retro gaming fans. More to come…