Obama's Shoulder Angels

The cherubic Mark Zuckerberg on one shoulder, and the death-like Steve Jobs on the other.

App markets

Lots going on in the mobile app market space, Google has a new market and is coming out with music and video marketplace. Windows Phone 7's market bans open source software (as has iTunes, though it is not enforced). And Apple has their new subscription service that requires content resellers to pay a 30% vig and offer the best price on their market.

It's easy to see which market is most open to developers and content providers.

Nokia

The Nokia / Microsoft partnership looks like two enterprises without a clue on mobile software development.

The iPhone is successful because of it's app ecosystem. iPhone apps are appealing because they are more responsive and engaging. iPhone apps are more responsive because iOS developers have more precise control, through Objective-C and C, of how their apps use device resources. Apple's smartest decision in iOS was to give developers access to the hardware, rather than mediating access through various virtual machines.

Most previous phone platforms used some form of the JVM and suffered for it. Java performs poorly in a client apps and is too much of a resource hog for embedded applications. Google tried to get around the problem with a careful re-implementation of the JVM in Dalvik, but Java's architectural problems show through and iOS apps just work better. Google has begun changing direction by beefing up their NDK.

Microsoft's problem is not a VM but Windows. Every mobile implementation they've done, including WP7, is too bloated for small platforms. And that is why Nokia's strategic partnership with Microsoft is doomed. Nokia's remaining strength is in low end phones, WP7 is too demanding to run on low end phones. Chinese manufacturers selling Android phones will own the low end, displacing Nokia.

Nook video conversion

ipod guide

ffmpeg 264 guide

The Nook Color will only play h.264 video with stereo.

ffmpeg -i INPUT -ab 128k -vcodec libx264 -s 640x360 -ac 2 -vpre lossless_slow -vpre ipod640 -f ipod -crf 22 -vol 4086 -threads 0 OUTPUT.m4v

Windows Phone 7

I've been trying to get a handle on the WP7 OS, I have yet to see a developers review of the system. There are lots of C# developers excited to have a mobile outlet for their talents, but no one publishing a critical comparison of the OS and it's development environment.

At best I've seen a handful of tweets pointing out what one would expect from MicroSoft - a heavy, monolithic OS that handicaps users and developers. The biggest red flag is that the framework only allows communication on port 80, eliminating WP7 as an Internet aware device in any meaningful sense.

Oracle Java and Apple

Java's slide, touched off by Oracle's patent suit against Android, is accelerating.

Brian Krebs has been raising the alarm as Java JVM security holes outpaced Flash as the primary browser hacking vector. As Oracle released a major security update he pointed out that Apple typically follows with updates a number of months later, leaving the OS exposed to known exploits for long periods. Apple has now deprecated Java, and will no longer provide those updates.

This makes a lot of sense for Apple. Oracle's agressive stance against outside development of Java, the significant cost of maintaining a forked version of the JVM, the inherent insecurity of Java's design, and Java's steady retreat to 'Enterprise' only development make continuing support economically irrational.

Java developers, who found a refuge in the Mac's native Java support, are outraged and wonder if Apple has considered the loss of that market. Their arguments prove the point, they chose Mac because Apple made the considerable investment to make Java (the "platform independent" language) usable on Mac OS. Java has never been platform independent. It failed on the desktop, then failed in the browser, and has finally withdrawn to server-only applications where it's platform independence is largely irrelevant. There are no remaining markets where Java provides a competitive advantage, and it now only survives because of a large pool of mediocre developers who learned it to get a job. Apple's future is not in the hands of mediocre developers, so that community's complaints do not affect it's decisions.