Tag google

Why despite the EU's €4.3bn Google Fine, things won't be fine.

A few days ago, the European Union decided to hit Google with a €4.3bn fine. The reasons put forward by the European Commission focus on the company’s MADA or Mobile Application Distribution Agreement, that all device manufacturers that want to license Google’s apps and include the Google Play Store with their devices are forced to […]

On CalDAV and Google.

People are annoyed about the demise of Google Reader. Yet more than Google Reader, a service I've used and loved for more than 7 years, I am truly annoyed by the fact that Google is canning CalDAV. And not just because CalDAV is an open, free and widely used protocol (all very good things), but because, in the past, Google has been a champion of open protocols, because its support for CalDAV was reaffirmed only two months ago when it dropped Exchange Support from its Google Docs apps. Because it demonstrates that Google has been somewhat cavalier with its use of 'Openness'.

On the Google IO Keynote

So Android announced Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), the next version of the operating system with much awaited performance improvements and some new (marginal) features, available to Galaxy Nexus users in mid-July and the remaining 99% of the Android ecosystem sometime between a year and never. Along with the new version of Android, Google announced several […]

On Device Identifiers.

Mere hours after pressing ‘Publish’ on the previous mini-article concerning walled gardens, an article on TechCrunch, this morning, clarified the situation we have more or less been suspecting for a while now: that Apple, after deprecating UDIDs (one of the things they truly did well in iOS from the beginning), they will start rejecting apps […]

Location and Privacy

Yesterday a story about Apple’s unauthorised logging of timestamped location data on iPhones running iOS 4.x versions of the system software was published in several articles in technical and mainstream media worldwide. This is important, not only because of the ubiquity of location-based services available to consumers worldwide and the significance of location in safeguarding […]

Google Art Project

Amazing work by Google, I hope it expands to other great museums all over the globe.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/aYXdEUB0VgQ

Oh the horror (pun intended)

Or "How Google seems to have lost its way with search as of late", from one of the founders of StackOverflow and Co.

The spirit of the community (AOSP 2.3 source is out!)

Android 2.3 was announced a few days ago. The previous day, CyanogenMod 6.1, the most popular community mod was released, based on Froyo (2.2). And today, just a short two weeks after the announcement, the source code for the latest version of Android is being released! The release marks the end of the 2.x era, […]

Chrome OS and Cr-48

Still watching the Google Chrome Team Livestream. Google is on a massive release streak that clarifies their strategic outlook for the next two years. In two days we’ve had: Android 2.3 and a short Android 3.0 sneak-peek, the eBook store, (V8) Crankshaft, Chrome Webstore and Chrome OS. The Store. With the Chrome Web store, Google […]

An enthusiast product for early adopters

This is what Andy Rubin stated in his 'D: Dive into Mobile' interview, yesterday. And that's probably the best descrption of Android I've read. Like desktop linux was (and arguably still is in some respects), like Mac OS X was in its first three years and like Windows was for a very long period until --- arguably --- Windows 95 came out in August 1995. It's hard for 'normal' people to get excited about Android, because there's little that appeals to normal people. Even from a development standpoint it's clearly work in progress, with volatile APIs, significant bugs and vastly inferior performance (incl. power management) compared to iOS. As I've written before, Android development is moving fast and I reckon it'll take a couple of years at most for it to reach maturity.