Posts for Tag: google

Vietnam schools teaching kids skills for the future

This is a must read.  It's pretty sad that it takes a foreigner to teach me new things about my motherland.  Neil Fraser is an engineer at Google who made a recent trip to Vietnam and found that Computer Science is being taught at all levels.  What surprised me even more was that he said some of the school work they are doing would allow half of the 11th graders to pass the Google interview process.  That's worth repeating ... 11TH GRADERS PASSING THE GOOGLE INTERVIEW PROCESS.  How many 11th graders in the US could say the same?  We need to wake up to the fact that the world is passing us by in terms of educating the next generation.  I for one shall be enrolling my daughter for computer camp as soon as I can.

New iPhone, iOS6, etc.

Can't believe it's been two months since I last posted.  Things got busy, I got lazy, etc.  But lots of things coming up so felt it was a good time to get back on the saddle...

According to UPS, my new iPhone 5 arrives by 10:30am tomorrow.  Should be sweet.  

The biggest thing I'm looking forward to?  64GB of memory since I've got about 1.5GB left on my 32GB iPhone 4S (damn baby pictures/videos).

I've been reading about a ton of backlash with iOS6, especially maps.  I think this is great!  When everyone is constantly patting you on the back, you get complacent.  I even think all the success coming from the Android camp is welcome because it forces Apple to be better.  Competition helps everyone.  On a side note, I think the iOS6 maps aren't as bad as everyone makes it out to be.  Sure, there are some warped looking satellite images but I don't rely on that as much as I do the turn-by-turn directions which though aren't perfect, don't seem to be any worse than apps like Waze or TomTom.  I've gotten plenty of wrong directions from those guys.  Plus it's free and Apple will make it better.  I've been using the iOS6 developer beta for a couple of months now and trust me, after a few months of usage, you do get used to the maps.  The only glaring exception is Street View which I liked.  If Google decides to release a new Maps app for iOS, I'll probably download it.  If they decide to give it turn-by-turn directions, I'll probably use it over the Apple Maps app.  Outside of that and the occasional need to use Street View, I'll be using Apple's Map app most of the time as I'm sure most people will.

I so called this 4 years ago...

Yahoo! Appoints Marissa Mayer Chief Executive Officer

A stopped watch is right at least twice a day, right? Let's not get into analog or digital (though it is a great song). Maybe Marissa needed that 4 years of extra seasoning but regardless I think she's exactly what Yahoo needs. Enough big company internet experience mixed with just enough technical chops to keep a technology company focused on of all things, technology. Good luck to her and hopefully she gets someone to fix all the bugs in the My Yahoo product.

Best $25 an iPhone designer could spend @Glyphish

I'm currently working on a new iPhone app and starting to understand how difficult it is to build something that is both good looking and also simple to understand/use.  There are so many small nuances to consider since there isn't a lot of real estate with which to get your point across.  One of the most maddening things to get right are icons.  People don't realize how difficult it is to build great looking icons from scratch.  There are only a handful of apps that I consider beautiful and even among those, I have issues with the icons.  After revision after revision of icons from my designer, I started to scour the web for examples of good icons.  To my chagrin, the answer was staring me right in the face - Glyphish.  Here was an extensive set of beautifully designed icons that are so simple and yet so clear in what the icon is supposed to represent.  How good are these icons?  They're used by little known companies like Google, Twitter, and a small phone manufacturer called Apple.  The best part of it?  $25 for a full pro license that doesn't require attribution and can be used in an unlimited number of projects (free version requires attribution, doesn't include Retina Display version of icons).  I've seen icon sets costing four times as much that are no where near as clean and well designed.  Kudos to Joseph Wain for creating these and providing them at a ridiculously cheap price.

Oh, and his $10 set of background images are well worth it, too!

Windows Phone actually looks good ... No for real!

The good folks at Microsoft have built a great demo site to demonstrate the experience of Windows Phone. I have to admit, it looks very slick. Of course, using it in real life situations is another thing all together but so far things seem to work really well. One thing that always irked me about some versions of Android was that it felt clumsy and sluggish. Almost as if scrolling and smoothness were an after thought. Windows Mobile seems to have nailed the scrolling and smoothness factor for me. I don't know if I'd switch but I'm more likely to jump to something like this than Android. Direct link to the demo is below. Best viewed in a mobile browser.

http://m.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-us/demo/index.html