Tuesday 23 November 2010

Android Fragmentation

I've been reading a lot about fragmentation of Android - multiple devices, form factors, versions, operators, certificates. This is nothing new, it's exactly the same as happened with Java and Symbian. And it's a solved problem.

At Rapid Mobile I automated the whole fragmentation solution with ThinkPhone Deliver, an intelligent provisioning system. Other people adopted conditional-compilation solutions such as J2ME Polish, Wurfl and no doubt other approaches. Yet many of these new entrants building mobile apps for the first time are running around wringing their hands and wailing. It's a solved problem guys, learn from our early adventures!

No need for the iPhone fanbois to look smug either. Loads of fragmentation between all the different models, ranging from API support to plain performance issues. Older devices, such as my first generation iPod Touch, are no longer being updated and most of the recent apps I've tried fail or are so slow that they are painful.

Plus รงa change...

Monday 22 November 2010

Moved

Having decided to concentrate on this new domain name, richardmmarshall.com, I had to establish some way of linked from the old domain, richard-marshall.com to this one. Sounds easy, but it isn't because the Blogger/Google Apps interface that this is running on only allows one domain name to point at it.

So I tried various solutions to come up with intermediate stages that would redirect automatically, but they all came up needing some payment, which is irksome. Not so much because of the money, we all have to eat, but because of the requires further on to renew and all the rest of that. So I was looking for a free solution.

In the end I created a personal Google Sites instance associated with my normal Google account and put a simple text link in. While this incurs an extra click, it has the advantage that people get to see that I've moved; an automatic redirect doesn't do that. Eventually I can just stop using richard-marshall.com completely when there is no traffic left.

However the real reason is that I can find no way of adding JavaScript to the Sites, or at least not the kind I wanted to use. Maybe I'm missing something. Let me know!

Friday 19 November 2010

Moving Host

This is the first post in a new Blogger-based blog as part of a general migration of services to the cloud.

Something more material will appear later, and hopefully an archive of the old material too although the Wordpress-to-Blogger converter is reporting an error deep in the XML which I haven't fixed yet.