XENTIENT

MWC 2012

I'm very disappointed with the tablets that were introduced in Mobile World Congress 2012, especially the tablets by Samsung.

I don't think that Samsung really understands why the Galaxy Note is popular. It's popular because it's the phone with the largest screen available. The pen is secondary to the beautiful high resolution 5'' screen. People love large screens.

I had my hopes high for an 11.6'' tablet that could replace my large screen TV for personal TV viewing. But Samsung dropped the ball. Now I'm hoping that Asus will take advantage of this opportunity and introduce the product that many of us dream of: An 11.6'' Asus Transformer.

An 11.6'' Asus Transformer would not only be able to compete with the iPad 3, but it would also compete with the Macbook Air. Asus, please make this product. We're willing to pay a premium for it.

My Next TV

 I remember how excited I was as a kid when I got my very own television. Before I even knew computers existed, TV was my first love affair.

TV exposed me to a much larger world than the one I was growing up in. To me, TV wasn't just about passive media consumption. It was about firing my imagination. That's why it took me a long time to realize that I no longer need a TV.

Wait, didn't I just say that I loved my TV? No, I didn't love my TV. I loved its content. The movies, the TV shows, the documentaries, the cartoons. That's what I loved about my TV, and I still love them, but I no longer need a TV to consume them.

I grew up in an era where a TV in every room became the norm, because we all wanted to watch different things. Then, the Internet came along, and along with a TV in every room, we also wanted our very own computers. Now the two are finally merging together in the form of the Tablet.

The Tablet is not only the most personal of the personal computers we've had, but now thanks to digital video downloading and streaming, it's also our very own personal TV that can follow us to every room in the house.

Tablets aren't going to replace every computer or TV in a household. There will always be a need for a large screen TV to share some family time together, but the TV in every room, and computer in every lap, is soon going to be replaced by a Tablet in everyone's hands.

I'm anxiously waiting for my future Samsung or Asus 11.6'' Tablet.

Security

Today there's a story about the many security holes still remaining in one of Google's newest products: Google Wallet.

I have to agree with the article that Android was not designed to be secure. But the same can be said about iOS and the upcoming Windows 8. Because security has to be built-in into the foundations of an operating system, it can't be grafted on as an afterthought. Just witness how Microsoft has been trying to secure Windows for years without much success.

And the much vaunted walled garden of Apple doesn't do much for security. Imagine that you own a very large warehouse that stores millions of dollars worth of merchandise, and your only defense is a security guard standing at the door. If the crooks can get by that security guard, they will be able to steal everything.

That's what the walled garden of Apple is, a security guard standing at the door. If you can get past it, you're in, you can take anything that you want. This has already happened numerous times with rogue applications that have managed to get past the security guards at Apple.

In the real world, you wouldn't have just one security guard standing at the door as you're only defense. You would have security cameras, dogs, security guards, compartmentalized rooms with their own security and access controls, a vault for high-value items, etc. Because real security is built in layers, so that an attacker has to defeat multiple security measures in order to do any real damage.

Therefore, I'm very disappointed with all the current consumer operating systems. They were never designed to be secure, and the companies that created them view security as a public relations problem, instead of an engineering problem. No one really cares about security.

Open Source Jobs

There is a discussion on Slashdot about where to find a job working with Open Source. The answer is pretty simple: Go work for a Startup.

In a Startup, getting as much bang for the buck is standard operating procedure, so you won't find any Oracle licenses or Windows Server licenses. Instead, you will find plenty of Open Source technologies like Linux, PostgreSQL, Java, etc.

That's why all the giants of today, like Google and Facebook, don't use Microsoft technologies internally. They started with Open Source, so why should they change to proprietary technologies? To increase their costs?

The Perfect Android PDF Reader

I've tried all of the free PDF readers that are available for Android, but none of them have the features that I want: Text reflow with a continuous scrolling single-page view.

Reading PDF books on a tiny screen is impossible without a text reflow feature that allows you to increase the size of the text. But that creates another problem: The amount of information displayed on a screen shrinks as the size of the text increases. So instead of a 300 page book, you end up with a 600 page book, or more.

The problem with that, is that all of the PDF readers I've tried use page-based navigation when using text reflow. I read a lot of books and it's very important for me to be able to absorb a lot of information very quickly, and every time that I have to switch to the next page, it breaks my concentration. I find reading web pages with their continuous scrolling pages, and adjustable text size, a much better experience than reading PDF documents in Android.

I haven't tried any of the non-free PDF readers because I'm not willing to buy something without knowing if it's going to do what I need it to do, and Android's fifteen minute return policy is ridiculous.

I would pay for a PDF reader if it did exactly what I need. The more time that I spend with Android, the more that I hope for a third alternative to Apple's and Google's vision of the future. Maybe Tizen or WebOS can surprise me someday.

Android Market

I'm a fan of Android, but I have to say that the Android Market sucks, both for developers and for users.

A long time ago, all commercial software was written only by large corporations who had the resources and connections to get their software into retail shelves, but then the online revolution started, first with Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and then the Internet.

This new distribution method opened the doors for many small independent developers who now had a low cost way of reaching their users. It also created a new economic model for software development: Shareware.

I started writing Shareware when I was a kid in school, because I thought it was the most fair to both users and developers. People could try my software for a period of days, and then, and only then, if they liked it and wanted to continue using it, they could pay me for it. I almost never had people request their money back because they'd already had several days to test it.

It worked. It worked for me, and it worked for my users. I could charge a decent amount of money because only people who loved my software had to pay. It kept the complaints to a minimum too, because users already knew if the software met their needs before they had to pay. It was so much better that even the large software companies started to distribute their own software as Shareware/Trialware.

So I have to ask, in today's world of App Stores and Android Markets, where is the Try before you Buy software?

The Android Market charges you before you can even try an application, and you only have fifteen minutes to test it and get your money back if you don't like it. That's ridiculous. You cannot evaluate anything in that short amount of time.

How am I going to pay $20 for something that I don't know if I'm going to like and evaluate it in only fifteen minutes. The answer is: I'm not.

I'm not going to pay for something sight unseen without a proper return policy. It means that I'm only going to pay for something if it is so cheap that I'm not going to bother with a return if it turns out to be garbage. This is why these so called app stores are littered with $1 software.

Who does this benefit, and who does it hurt? It benefits Apple and Google. Because you have to give your software for free or practically for free. Does it benefit the user? Maybe. It's great to have free or cheap software, but any complex piece of software requires thousands of hours of work to polish it. Do Apple and Google expect developers to work for free?

As a developer, Apple's and Google's policies affect me, because it means I'm never going to write any commercial software for them, unless I know I can make a profit. It also hurts me as a user, because high quality applications that require a lot of time to write, are never going to come to my phone, because there is no economic incentive for them. As a developer, and as a user, I end up with a lot less choice.

Apple and Google want us to believe that today's phone apps are not like the applications we've been running all these years on our desktop computers. 

In the future there will be no more desktop computers. Our phones and tablets will be our only computers. I want the freedom to do whatever I want with my computer, to install whatever I want on it, and pay for whatever I want in whatever way that I want. I want my choice back.

Fixing Chrome Part II

This one is for international users who are being driven insane because Chrome insists in redirecting you to a localized version of Google. For example, when I first install Chrome, it insists in sending me to google.com.mx, no matter how much I try to tell it that I want the English version (google.com).

To fix it, you have to close Chrome and then manually edit a file named Local State. The location of this file depends on your operating system. On my machine it's:

/home/ignacio/.config/google-chrome/Local State

Then search for last_known_google_url and last_prompted_google_url, and replace them with the version of Google that you want to use. For example:

"last_known_google_url": "http://www.google.com/",
"last_prompted_google_url": "http://www.google.com/",

When you launch Chrome again and do a search, it will take you to the desired URL, but it will still ask you if you don't want the localized version instead. For God's sake, Google, NO! Thankfully, it doesn't do it again.

This is a problem that's reported again and again in Google's forums, but they refuse to fix it.

Fixing Chrome

I don't always agree with everything that Dvorak has to say, but this time I do: Mozilla, Google, Microsoft: Fix Your Browsers!

Chrome in its default configuration has a lot of problems, but some are fixable. This is what I do every time I install Chrome:

1) In Preferences > Under the Hood > Privacy, I disable all Google services, like the prediction and the phishing services.

2) In Preferences > Under the Hood > Translate, I disable "Offer to translate pages that aren't in a language I read."

3) In Preferences > Under the Hood > Background Apps, I disable "Continue running background apps when Chromium is closed."

--process-per-tab --disable-hang-monitor --disable-metrics --start-maximized --disable-java

Posterous

I just realized that Posterous also makes me have to click twice to logout. Damn interface designers! Usability should always come first.

Google Plus

I haven't updated this site in a very long time, so I thought that creating a Google+ account might keep me posting more often. The experiment didn't last more than a few minutes.

I find all of the Google web sites extremely frustrating to use. Their user interfaces are poorly designed, confusing, and inefficient. I mean, how is anyone to know that you have to click on your own name to log out. It's not intuitive, and there's no visual indication that you can click on your name. And even if it were redesigned to be intuitive, it would still require two clicks to log out. It should be a crime to have to click twice to log out of any web service.

They say, never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Google is many things, but not incompetent. They just don't want you to log out, ever, so they can track you everywhere you go on the internet.

If I could stop using Google for search, I would, but there aren't any good alternatives. I've tried.