Skip to main content

How To Own A T-Mobile G1 for One Week

So I've had my G1 for about a week now and I'm happier with it every day. There are still some issues I have, but none that are related to the most important piece: the Android operating system. I love the software available and new things come at a decent pace. There are some network issues, but limited to my particular side of the apartment complex. I don't know anywhere else in town that I don't have good coverage.

Interestingly, to me, my favorite application is Bubble, a basic bubble level app that works vertically or horizontally or to test the level of a surface. I don't have a lot of use for it, but it highlights some of the things I like most about open, portable devices. I imagine a real reduction not just in the number of devices I need (I'll be selling my iPod soon) but just the number of things, period.

Now, I have felt like there is a lack of games for the system. More, that the games there are have been pretty much feeling like prototypes pushed to the Market because it feels cool. I'm really hoping this will change, but I think the mobile gaming market is going to need a good cross-platform solution before we see really nice things. I'm sure the iPhone people will tell me how they have better games, but I can't imagine really good entertainment available until we get a common platform for Android, the iPhone, Windows Mobile and Blackberry devices, and their brethren. Get on it, Adobe. If you loose mobile, you loose your foothold.

I've started to get really interested in mobile development. Some serious thought went into hacking in the Android SDK to get Jython on the device, but I feel confident it will be done and I simply don't have the cycles for it. It has given me a new mindset in my web work, however, and I'm giving some real consideration to the problems there are doing just about anything on the mobile web. Yeah, this Android Browser can handle just about any page I've tossed at it, and I'm really happy about that. We can't deny, however, that it just doesn't work to implement the same on something completely different. I don't like dragging text and I hate horizontal panning with a passion.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful...

Announcing Feet, a Python Runner

I've been working on a problem that's bugged me for about as long as I've used Python and I want to announce my stab at a solution, finally! I've been working on the problem of "How do i get this little thing I made to my friend so they can try it out?" Python is great. Python is especially a great language to get started in, when you don't know a lot about software development, and probably don't even know a lot about computers in general. Yes, Python has a lot of options for tackling some of these distribution problems for games and apps. Py2EXE was an early option, PyInstaller is very popular now, and PyOxide is an interesting recent entry. These can be great options, but they didn't fit the kind of use case and experience that made sense to me. I'd never really been about to put my finger on it, until earlier this year: Python needs LÖVE . LÖVE, also known as "Love 2D", is a game engine that makes it super easy to build ...