Philosophy

Android

Android philosophy is quite close to Linux philosophy. We have a lot of software, stuff is free, so there is mass. The stock software is a bit so so, but since everything is open and free somebody else can and probably will do a better application.

Okay! That’s cool, but if you’re NOT a NERD, but just a regular user, how much time will you spend to find the best software for something like email.

This is the Linux (and the Windows) problem: The stock software is somewhat usable but at least I get frustrated since they lack features. What does this mean is that you end up digging up the internet, install something, try it out and it’s crap. Yeah, crap – that’s what Android Marketplace is full as is Linux package repositories.

Android is a Linux.

iOS

So how does the iOS philosophy differ from the Android one? The difference is very simple – the default has to be good enough. If you buy an iPhone, the stock software is already so good that you in most cases don’t need better. They’re hardly perfect but in most cases you’re not going to be frustrated using them, or at least I’m not.

App Store vs. Marketplace

Marketplace

Let’s face it, Android marketplace is full of crap because nobody is looking after it. This is fairly similar thing on Linux all over, it’s really hard to find ANYTHING from there! Okay, a correction, you will find something, but it’s CRAP, if you exclude some few exceptions.

Marketplace relies on the same kind of idea as does App Store, user reviews. I don’t exactly know why this doesn’t work, but when I try finding something from the Marketplace most of the time the reviews, stars or comments, aren’t very helpful. I just end up trying things and wasting my time. Maybe this is because there’s so many (crappy) applications, that it’s just impossible for someone go through them all?

Of course it’s also nice to have all those applications free but that actually means that YOU, the user, has to work for finding the applications you’ll be willing to use, if you ever do.

How to make Marketplace better?

So how could we get the experience on the Marketplace better? I think there should be a community review process which would weed out the crappiest of the crap. Now there are multiple sites that do reviews on the applications but this should be somehow integrated with the Marketplace just because star rating with comments made with the phone are hardly enough.

The community model should be some sort of hybrid of the StackOverflow model with the current star rating and comments. There should be community moderators that look through the applications, they would get karma for going through the stuff and with more karma you could do more stuff on the review process.

Coming up with this model would be another blog post altogether…

Amazon Appstore

Of course now you ask: “What about Amazon Appstore?”. Well, my answer is pretty straightforward. I don’t know. It doesn’t work in Finland yet and I don’t know when it will work outside US. Maybe this is the saviour for the Android application discovery experience.

App Store

There’s a lot of pretty good applications in the App store. The quality stays always a bit better because somebody is actually keeping at least track of it. It’s of course not perfect since with moderation there’s always stupid rules on the content and some applications don’t get in because somebody at the App Store review team doesn’t like something or Apple doesn’t like something. Anyway, I prefer that somebody actually goes through the crap before it is sent to the general public, then I don’t have to work so much. I might miss out on something, that’s true, but at least I don’t get some of the horrific shit you can end up installing on the Marketplace.

Experience

So let’s agree that when I’m talking about experience and usability it’s of course only my exprience since I haven’t conducted any studies about it and don’t even claim to be any kind of expert at it.

iOS

I’ve been using iOS way longer than Android so of course I’m biased and some people might call me an Apple fanboy because of this but I don’t really see myself as such.

Apple has been leading the way of smart phone operating systems lately. There has been great innovation in the App Store and the execution of it, the simple and yet fairly powerful user interface. In addition iOS has a really good web experience, tight integration with the iTunes (in good and bad), really good stock applications and very rich set of applications in the App Store.

So of course when the setup is like this, it sounds like Android as operating system is starting off as an underdog and that has to be acknowledged. This said, I won’t be going on too much detail why I like the iOS, but I’ll go through on the next section what are my beefs with the Android and there you’ll also can see where the comparison favours the iOS.

Android

Somehow on the Android I feel that there’s not enough UX testing been done with it which can be partly due to the fact it’s meant as a platform for the manufacturers to build their experience on top of it. Anyway, I bought some what of a flagship product from the maker of the platform albeit the hardware was supplied by Samsung. The experience on the Google Nexus S should be top of the class, am I right?

Well, it isn’t. There are a lot of problems I noticed and yes some of them might seem small and irrelevant, but still they somehow annoyed me. I made a nice little list about them.

Problems

• Facebook application sync is disabled.
• Lack of shared controls for the media playback
  • You can have multiple media sources overlapping and there’s no simple way of switching between.
• The stock email client
  • (Re)moving multiple emails
  • Filtering support (to be fair iOS doesn’t have this either)
• Notification sound mixing with current media playback
  • Might not be a big thing to you but felt really choppy since iPhone has this.
• Podcasts
  • There’s NO support as default.
  • You can’t sync them from your computer.
  • You have to keep track what you have listened with your computer.
  • Downloading them with your phone drains the battery.
  • Google Listen is BUGGY.
• Flash support
  • Funny enough this seems to be a boon and a bane.
  • Think about all of those nifty flash ads on the mobile.
  • Thank goodness you can fairly easily disable it and enable it when needed.
• The browser
  • There’s lag when you’re scrolling pages.
  • Somehow the zoom isn’t quite as good as on the iOS.
  • The experience just feel less smooth than the iOS. (Sorry about the vagueness, but the analysis would be another post altogether.)
• The widgets
  • They make the UI lag.
  • Facebook and Twitter widgets are just a bit crappy.
  • There’s just not many widgets that are really fleshed out.
• The notifications
  • For some reason Facebook notifications and Twitter notifications aren’t as reliable as on the iPhone.
• Transitions and animations
  • The transitions and animations are way smoother on the iPhone.
• Scrolling
  • Scrolling experience depends on the application. On the iPhone I get a fairly consistent scrolling experience on lists, but not here.
• Synchronisation
  • Everything syncs to the cloud.
  • It’s pretty much effortless for the user.
  • Where is my information? Is it safe?

And more crap on Android experience is that the Spotify application on the Android SUCKS because at the moment it still crashes due to “too many” playlists.

Plusses

So that this doesn’t sound too sour, let’s add some good things about the Android experience.

• The notification area
  • Provides a simple and neat view on the all of the notifications.
  • This is probably the best feature of the Android OS.
• The widgets are kind of cool.
  • I really like the flash light widget that uses the flash led.
  • The weather + news ticker is nice.
  • The wi-fi, bluetooth, location and brightness control widget is handy when you want to control the battery life.
• Free software
  • Having a lot of free software is a boon and bane.
• Less limitations
  • Google is way more liberal on what you can do with the phone.
• Synchronisation
  • Everything syncs to the cloud.
  • It’s pretty much effortless for the user.

Conclusions

So you could say that the Android experience for me hasn’t been the smoothest. I’m at the moment lacking a nice way of listening to podcasts. And since the phone I got had a defective headphone socket which I know because the headset remote on the headset I got with the phone isn’t working, I haven’t been too pleased with it.

Even if I take that out and just look at the user experience on the Android and the iPhone you can see that on the iPhone there’s way more polish. It’s not just about eye-candy but the quality of how things are done. I actually prefer to get a really good and thought out way of doing something than just some way of doing it.

On the Android you a lot of times you have some way of doing the thing you want to do, but it can be horrible, but that’s okay, since you’ll get used to it or maybe someone will make it better. In a way there’s always hope for something better that doesn’t exactly lie on one company but that’s also a problem if nobody really takes the responsibility.

Android user

If you really want to spend time with your phone customizing it, finding the best software to do the one thing you want do and you want to have flash, get Android. It’s not a really thought out product but you’ll be able to do most of the stuff adequately, but you’ll be missing out lot of the cool content in the App Store. Then again you will have a lot of free applications, better notification UI and widgets.

iPhone user

If you want to use your phone mostly on defaults, are more interested in getting things done and are willing to accept the fact that Apple will tell you what you can and can’t do, get iPhone. Most of the time they’ll provide you good tools on doing the basics but sometimes you’re just stuck with defaults and there’s nothing you can do to make it better, besides maybe jailbreak. You’ll have all the cool apps at the App Store but you’ll have way less free options.

What will I do?

For now I’m going to choose Android for a while since I already bought the product and I see that they’ve at least tried to innovate where iOS hasn’t been very exciting lately. I’m a weird combination though since I don’t really want to do a lot of customisations but most of the time prefer defaults and just want to use my device. I still see that there’s potential in Android but it’s still behind iOS. I hope they catch up. And I won’t be giving up my iPhone either…

Now that the privacy settings have been made more clearer, it still doesn’t really mean that people will understand why to use them. As the privacy isn’t just about the technology but awareness of people. I still think that part of people don’t really understand why it’s important to have the privacy features or what is really good to share. I’m sad to say that at the moment I’m not still all convinced that defaults in Facebook privacy settings are all quite OK. I wouldn’t want to undermine people and say that they won’t get why privacy is important but I’m afraid that’s what is going to happen.

Most of my Facebook friends aren’t really my friends but more like acquaintances. You still add them there because you don’t want to be rude and you might want to get to know them. Do I really want them to see all the things I want my close friends to see? No, I don’t. I know how to manage that, but can the average Joe do it? I think not. He won’t probably even care until something bad happens.

This isn’t of course only issue with Facebook. It applies generally to internet privacy and I don’t have a clear solution for this. I wouldn’t mind though if the default privacy settings would be more stricter.

I wrote this first as a comment to a Facebook and Privacy: It’s Time to Move On article/.

Edit: I got a cooler, now it’s not so bad. \o/

UI designing

I’ve started designing the user interface for the Receipt loan system. I’m making it like a webshop of some sort because the nature of the loans can varie a lot. There can be many different kinds of items connected to one loan from magazines to maps. So the nature of webshop like surfing and selecting items should suite the needs quite nicely. When you’ve selected all of your stuff then you just click Loan and the system does the tricks for you.

What else? Well, I got few projects to work on. Both fixing and implementing new things on already existing systems. It’s not that bad and it should be nice pocket money/stuff so that student life doesn’t feel so miserable. We were thinking of getting a modded XBox because playing with a PC is such a hassle. It would be a nice media system as well ie. playing movies and such.

Studies

Well, they’ve started. Few modules(=kursseja) have already started. Mainly concentrating on one of my secondary subjects, economics. Basic bullshit and management is roughly what the modules are about. Not really interested on those but hey they are compulsory There are some modules though which I’m keenly waiting to start, like System Architectures (Ohjelmistoarkkitehtuurit) and Software protocols (Sovellusprotokollat). Don’t really know if my translations are good but you get somekind of image what I’m studying.

Dumppi

Our student organisation, Dumppi, needs me urgently but I’m not sure if I can give them all the attention they would need Loads of bugs on our software and new feature I’d need to implement. We’ll see, there’s no price or catch so it’s not my priority number one. I’ll do it but when I have some time.

Console tournament is yet to come. I’m organising the practical side of it because I’ve done that two times already. We’ll see how it’s going to develop…

That’s it folks for this time…

…more to come in the future

ISP – Keycom

In Tufnell Park Halls of Residence you’re able to get only Keycoms Keynet ADSL service. They borrow you a modem and you can register your connection in their internet service as well as handle the payment. That’s OK. Give’s a good image of the service. Everything goes smoothly if your credit card is ok and you know how to fill the form. Plain simple and easy.

It turns out that the first impression is quite far from the actual quality of service(QoS). Every week there are at least two or three network cutdowns which last usually few hours and if that wouldn’t be enough there is also very poor latency as well as huge packet loss. I’ve been told that I’ve got used for too good in Finland. That might be the case, but if I’m paying good money for the service I want it to work. The charge for the service is about £20 per month. They’re just using their monopoly status top rip off students. This is crap and I’m figuring out to do something about this.

Hygiene

I was actually reading Mika’s blogging about the lack of hygiene in his halls of residence and I realized that it’s not only this residence where the trouble lays. I don’t know is the reason that people are young and don’t care or they just don’t know a diddly squad about hygiene. I think it might be that mothers haven’t done their duty teaching youngsters anything about hygiene in the kitchen. I have no idea how to change this because I don’t to be the mom in here…

University and lecturers

I hate the eCommerce module lecturer for the fact that he’s trying to force everyone to buy the book by referencing it all the time in the practical sessions and in the lectures. Does he think it is his job to teach us how to read a book not the actual subject of the module?-) The book is quite Dreamweaver centered so I’m not going to buy it nor the ASP book. I trust Google to be my source of knowledge.

I had a talk about this subject with one other student who I’m doing the coursework for HCI module. He said that university gets a nice commissions from the sold books. I had thought about this already but he verified my suspicions.

Actually the guy suspected that the lecturer has a deal with the Namecheap, domain registering company as well because he gave us a code with what we could get discounts from the register fee. That’s propably true because it’s good deal for both of them. They lecturer forces everyone to register a domain for the coursework and gives a discount code for certain company. How obvious.

Everything truly is different…

Everything is different in the big world. People are greedy and use other people for their own benefit. Of course I knew this already but I didn’t think I would find it in the university world.

I’ve decided not to stay here for the year but only the first semester. Mostly this decision is because the course I wanted to do in here didn’t start and I’m stuck with the modules which are kind of trying to replace the ones I wanted to take. Secondly it’s because I’m not getting that much worth for my money here. It’s expensive to live in London and living in the halls of residence just isn’t my thing. Thirdly the education is in higher standards in University of Jyväskylä. Fourthly, the internet connections are way better!

The modules again

I ended up doing only three modules for this semester. The Graphics and Imaging was dropped for this semester due to lack of students and I just couldn’t find another module to take. Now I’m just hoping this won’t be a problem. It shouldn’t be because I get 22.5 ECTS credits + 1.7 ECTS credits per month for my language studies. That should cover it nicely It’s also fun to have more free time.

My girlfriend is coming!

Johanna will arrive here on Sunday 30.10. \o/ Oh the cheer and the joy! You probably know what we are doing for the week she’s going to spend here. Of course we’ll go and see all the sights in London and probably go to Scotland for the weekend. It’s going to be a fun week.

Now!

I’m waiting for a message from Alberto to go to the central and do something…