Four months with Android: reflections, grievances and some tenuous metaphors bundled up into a weighty tome

dinnerwithandroid:

OR, The longest, most awkward dinner of my life

tl;dr version: I’m really glad to have an iPhone 4S.

(Note: this was written over multiple days, spaced weeks apart.)

I approached this experiment with a lot of questions, the primary of which was quite simple: why do people use Android? I had my own preconceived answers — they dislike Apple or couldn’t get an iPhone for one reason or another — but I dove in with an open mind regardless. After over four months of Android 2.3 on a Nexus S, I’m left mostly answerless.

That’s not to say I didn’t learn a lot. I have a solid grasp of what makes Android Android, the ins-and-outs of the OS, and, yes, there are even a few really great features I will miss as I transition back to iOS.

But at the end of the day I’m left with mostly a bad taste in my mouth. What follows is a summation of four months exclusively using Android. They’re my opinions. I’m not trying to sway anyone away from the platform, and I’m not looking to troll Android fanboys. I am but one man who likes stupid gadgets and decided to conduct a dumb experiment. Let’s go.

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Scott Forstall, the Sorcerer's Apprentice at Apple

They say he has such a fraught relationship with other members of the executive team—including lead designer Jony Ive and Mac hardware chief Bob Mansfield—that they avoid meetings with him unless Tim Cook is present.

Is this the new Steve Jobs? Pretty awesome read.

RIP Dennis Ritchie

The co-creator of Unix en the C programming language is no more. Great article in the Guardian.

Subclassing UINavigationBar on iOS 5

Did you see the change of color in the UINavigationBar in Tweetbot? iOS 5 broke it. The fix isn’t that difficult. Check out this nice post by Alex on the Oops tech blog.

sizeWithFont:

In HTML it’s easy to scale a field or layer by the size of the text displayed in it. In Cocoa for iPhone it’s a little bit harder. For an app I’m working on I subclassed some layers and made a pretty awesome function which calculated the exact size of the string and draw a nice looking label behind it. 

Today I started with a fresh view and did some more research like James book told me. Found out Apple already fixed the problem for me. This buccaneer style is taking of pretty good. Starting to love it. 

Tonight I’m at the Fink concert. This singer-songwriter made a few awesome albums and I couldn’t wait to see him. But I never knew where he came from. In 2001 he started out as a DJ under the name EVA. A techno DJ to be precise. And besides rocking the clubs he found himself writing with John Legend and producing for Amy Winehouse. Pretty awesome track record if you ask me. Can’t wait for the show to start.

Word: en·vis·age

While reading the Bluetooth 4.0 specs it stumbled upon the word ‘envisaged’. Because English is not my native language and I didn’t knew the word I asked myself “What does it mean?”

1. to form a mental image of; visualize; contemplate
2. to conceive of as a possibility in the future; foresee
3. archaic to look in the face of; confront

“What appears to be chaos is just a form of order I don’t yet understand”
James Marcus Bach