Linked List: December 8, 2010

Wednesday, 8 December 2010

Pre-Installed Android Apps 

Whitson Gordon for Lifehacker, “How to Speed Up Your Old or Sluggish Android Device”:

If something is constantly running in the background, it may be causing some of the performance hits on your device. Unless it’s something you can’t live without (and are thus willing to live with any slowness it might cause), uninstall it and find an alternative.

Note that some of the worst offenders in this category are apps that come pre-installed on your phone. Unfortunately, you need to be rooted to uninstall these, but we’ll talk about that in a bit.

Andy Rubin, two days ago at D: Dive Into Mobile:

Walt: I notice more and more they are taking on the personality of the carrier, not Google, not the handset maker. There are lots of what I would call craplets. Verizon, for example, swapped out Google for Bing. Is there a danger it is being taken over?

Rubin: That’s the nature of open. That’s actually a feature of Android.

Jim Dalrymple: Mac App Store Launching in January 

Jim Dalrymple:

Reports earlier this week claimed Apple would launch the Mac App Store on December 13, ahead of the holiday shopping season. However, according to my sources, Apple will launch the store in the new year.

While a specific date was not given for the official opening of the store by my sources, Apple will meet the 90-day deadline given during its October “Back to the Mac” media event.

How the iPad Is Influencing Web Apps 

Christina Warren:

Google’s official line might be that Android is for tablets and Chrome OS is for netbooks, but in practice, it looks like more and more web developers are designing their web apps with the tablet form factor and features, like multi-touch, in mind.

She’s got a slew of examples of Chrome web apps whose design is based on their corresponding iPad app.

Android vs. iOS: A Developer’s Perspective 

From one of the developers of Whereoscope, a previously iOS-only location-tracking app for parents, a very favorable look at Android development:

Somewhere inside Apple, there’s a guy who is receiving untold, nay, unspeakable pleasures by inflicting on the development community a kind of suffering that is as acute as it is pointless. That pain comes in the form of a series of hoops that one is forced to jump through in order to turn your phone into a development handset. There’s provisioning profiles, ad-hoc builds, certificates, and countless screens that I clicked through, not really caring what they did, because they brought me closer to being able to run my code on my phone. On Android, you check one option in preferences. That’s it.

Garbage collection (Android has it, iOS doesn’t) is his biggest gripe.

MarketWatch Names Steve Jobs ‘CEO of the Decade’, Asks Rob Enderle for Quotes 

MarketWatch:

Adds Enderle: “He is not somebody [who] any one of us would want watching our kids, but, in terms of running the company, he’s excellent.”

What the fuck does that mean?

European Phone Carriers Ask Apple and Google to Help Pay for Additional Network Data Usage 

Bloomberg:

Google Inc., Apple Inc., and Facebook Inc. need to pitch in to help pay for the billions of dollars of network investments needed for their bandwidth-hogging services, European phone operators say.

I’m sure they’ll get right on that.

ThinkGeek’s ‘2001’ Monolith Action Figure 

No longer a joke.