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Writing Efficient Android Code - Android

Well, it looks like the move away from the desktop is in full swing. I remember theorizing about the Google/Microsoft endgame scenario which went something like this:

Google would litter the Earth with GoogleOS CDs much in the same way that AOL has littered the Earth with their "1000 free hours" CDs. People would pop these into their PCs and they would be able to boot up, get online, and do stuff. Word processing, no problem. Photo editing, no problem. Email, no problem. It'd all point at Google and their partners and it'd all have no out of pocket costs for the user. And like that...Microsoft would would be in deep trouble. Not that they're not already in deep trouble, but the GoogleOS CD would really accelerate the decline of the lumbering giant (troll?).

Then I see this $200 Walmart PC that gets entry level users online and functional in a non-Microsoft world. Whoa. Way back when, people would start their truly productive computing lives on a Microsoft OS when they started work. I think they must have mistaken their productivity to be as a result of using Windows rather than as a function of their sheer need to get stuff done in order to keep their jobs.

But I digress...the $200 buck PC with linux and links to the web is a great way to go. I wonder if the MSNTV users would be interested in this?

It seems that all of our travel reservations have gone up in smoke. Well, the reservations are still there, but the email confirmations have disappeared. I think gmail really doesn't want us to travel this summer so it has gone and deleted all of the email that had anything to do with us paying for our plane tickets. 3 or 4 in all.

It happened when I labeled them "Travel Reservations" figuring it'd be a good idea to have a quick way to take a look at them. The next morning I went to look something up and they were gone. Hmmm...curious. I decided to search for them using the much touted "search" feature in gmail. Nada. Hmmm, how about the trash folder? Nope, try again. SPAM folder? Nope, not their either.

"WTF?" I'm thinking to myself at this point. I start trying to remember the places I bought tickets from. American Airlines for the Dublin to LAX flight, Northwest (I think) for the LAX to Amsterdam flight, and Aer Lingus (maybe) for the Athens to Dublin flight. Without the confirmation numbers though I'm screwed. Then I remembered spending a while to debug problems with our networked printer at home and had printed everything so we were saved.

Phew...and being the obsessive backup-er that I am, I keep Windows Live Mail Desktop (yes that's the name of the app...and yes, I hate the name) running on my desktop PC at home at all times, quietly sucking down all of my Gmail all day and night. When I got home yesterday, I found that I had not only a hard copy (mental note: print EVERYTHING out), but also a copy of all of the emails sitting in WLMD (not to be confused with the president's WMDs). I could not have imagined a day when Microsoft saved my ass from a bungle over at Google. The world has truly turned upside down.

Well, in my last post on the subject, I had let my allegiance to Bloglines mobile fall by the way side as I picked up my new fancy: Google Reader mobile. I found that for all of the nice-new-ness of Google Reader, I was consuming less articles in the same amount of time.

So I decided to peek back at Bloglines mobile and they had restored their original functionality...I so hoped for some minor upgrades (image resizing, pagination anyone?), but none were found. They just fixed the glaring header bug.

Sigh...I'll have to wait for some decent pagination I suppose. 15-20 posts per page with image resizing would be just about right in my opinion. I could scan through a quick set of posts, reload and take an eye break, and continue scanning away.

Can someone please fix this (I know doubtful since Bloglines makes no money off of their mobile offering).

I'm a HUGE fan of Windows Live Mobile and use it religiously (I do have to commute up the god-forsaken hell-hole of a freeway that is the 880 at least a few times a week after all). I'm glad to see that Microsoft finally gets a fair shake, not only in the mapping department, but also in the mobile OS space. Ahem...and I quote:

So which is better? Without a doubt, Microsoft's was the winner.

Even just comparing the mapping and traffic capabilities, this matchup could have been a bit uneven. We were running WLS on a Windows Mobile phone, which gave it a "native-app" feel, because it was a native app. Google Maps on Java ran like Java always does. Painfully

Yee haw! Link

Does Bloglines mobile blow or suck these days? They have some html rendering bug that seems to leave the h2 and anchor tag unclosed for each blog post's heading. As you can imagine, giant underlined text has been arriving over the EVDO for days and I finally got tired of waiting for a fix (yes, I reported the bug several days ago...they said they were on it).



I decided to try Google Reader mobile out. It works a little differently, but I sure like it. With Bloglines, you would choose a blog, then they'd list all of the posts for that blog (up to 200 posts a time!). With the EVDO connection it was not terribly slow, but pushing several megs to the phone makes it perform terribly.



With Google Reader, they just push all of the post titles into a big list so it all gets jumbled together. I kinda like it though since you get a nice mix of stuff. Then when you click the post title, Google loads the single post. They allow you to add stars with only one page load (Bloglines takes two page loads then it marks eveything in that feed read...going back twice sometimes mantains your state sometimes, but sometimes not). Anyway, Google reader looks promising...maybe Bloglines will fix their bugs and add pagination (that's what will bring me back).



Sent from my Window Mobile 5 Pocket PC.

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