Spencer Elliott

@romainguy:

The World Ends With You is now on iOS. I loved that game on Nintendo SS and I’d love to see it on #android

Going back to webOS

While working on a web application for work, I decided that I would boot up webOS on my HP Touchpad to test the pages using the browser. I have been running Cyanogen ROMs on it for quite some time now and I hadn’t booted webOS in what seemed to be ages.

I remembered that I just restored the OS to fix a corrupt disk that occurred when loading Android on to the tablet for the first time. All of my credentials needed to be re-added and all of my apps were still downloading. Once the initial configuration and downloading was done, I was left with what little memories I had of this ill-forgotten operating system.

I tested my application and began to play around with the OS some more. Everything was working swimmingly and I had remembered how well webOS handled multi-tasking. The card interface was really intuitive again and almost made me wish Android had something similar. It really is unfortunate that HP and Palm could not capitalize on this system because it’s great for basically everything I use my tablet for on a day to day basis (save for Netflix). If the platform had more time to mature and its lifespan wasn’t cut so short, I think it could be a fairly big player in the field of mobile computing. I’m really glad the developers of the Cyanogen ROM decided that webOS was worthy of keeping around. They have really made switching between the two operating systems extremely easy and it just gives me another reason to switch over to webOS on occasion just to play around with it.

I really hope that anyone reading this will decide to give webOS another chance or even just boot it up once and play around with it. Now that HP is beginning to open source a lot of components to webOS, I’m sure we’ll be starting to see little parts of the recently forgotten OS in other parts of our applications.

Just finished Resident Evil : Revelations! Definitely the best original handheld game I’ve played and best game in a while and it lasted a good 7.5 hours

Finally, a reading week with not much more to do than relax and play some games :D

Epic Sax Guy got a Best Apps Award!?

So, I was checking my Google Analytics for my website and noticed that a few hits came from Best Apps Market. I went to the website and searched for Epic Sax Guy and lo and behold, there it is!

Now I can introduce Epic Sax Guy along with this Best Apps Award:

Now I just need to spend a bit more time and add some more features.

Lose the Android “fragmentation”

So, I’ve been noticing that Apple has been really digging in to the whole “fragmentation” issue of Android. On one hand, I don’t think the issue is as bad as Apple is trying to make it seem but I do think OEMs need to start dialling back the completely different interfaces they’re offering. For example, Moto Blur, Sense UI and TouchWiz are just some of the interfaces offered by these companies.

As an Android user and developer, I find these interfaces to be completely inconsistent. Something could work one way on TouchWiz while working completely different (or not existing) on Sense UI. If users are switching from one Android phone to the next, they would probably assume that they’re getting the same experience. That isn’t the case at all and I really wish there was a way to get consistencies across all Android powered phones.

Sure, Android may be pulling ahead of iOS and Blackberry but how many are vanilla builds of Android? Cyanogen is a good example of complete AOSP builds and with their increasing number of devices supported by it, I’m hoping it will reach more and more users. I think that manufacturers should continue to offer unlocked bootloaders and even provide a way to install Cyanogen that doesn’t break warranties or even a controlled AOSP rom provided by them. Why lock a user into an interface that built on top of something already supplied?

I have been using Cyanogenmod since version 4 starting with my HTC Dream and I’m currently on Cyanogenmod 7 with a Samsung Captivate. I plan on getting the Galaxy Nexus in the near future so I can finally own a device that has the vanilla Android experience as Google provided it in the first place. 

I’ll leave this topic open for you to discuss. Do you think Google should start locking down what can or cannot affect the Android experience or should manufacturers still be allowed to change interfaces and add proprietary frameworks otherwise not available on other devices? I’m not saying that an Apple style of control should be put in place, but it would be nice to have consistent experiences across devices from different manufacturers.

I was browsing Hacker News last night and I found this awesome guide on how to run Android within VirtualBox. The greatest part is that it runs way faster than the emulator that comes with the SDK and it can even be used to debug your applications.

I created a new boot animation for my Samsung Captivate since I was tired of all the elaborate and super animated boot animations. If you’d like to download it, visit:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=18186495

R.I.P. Steve Jobs

I got a call from my dad today:

Dad: “Did you hear the news?”

Me: “No.”

“Steve Jobs died.”

“No he didn’t…”

That felt weird to hear. I’m not an Apple fan but there is no denying that Steve Jobs is one of the reasons why computing is where it is today. The boom of smartphones and tablets were all because of the iPhone and iPad.

Steve Jobs chose to think outside the box and is considered a visionary in computing today. It’s going to be a different Apple now that he’s gone.

I don’t have much more to say but I’ll leave you with this speech given by Steve:

R.I.P Steve