Smart phones, dumb people

The onset of spring reminds me of many things - beers in parks, the project that was due to finish in February, etc. - but the most relevant one is that I've actually been owning my HTC Desire Z for almost a year. My, how does time fly when you have a smartphone! Remember how tedious the longer trips to the bathroom were back in the day, reading those shampoo labels over an over again, waiting for the relief of the long awaited splash sound? And now you just can't get enough of those moments, replying to your facebook messages in the privacy of the smelly cubicle; and before you know it it's time to wipe, but you still look at the screen while you do. Mobile computing has indeed changed our lives profoundly.

I remember those days when I first fell in love with my latop, thinking that no other gadget will ever get nearly as close to my heart. And I still love it dearly - but let's face it - no matter how mainstream geek culture has become it will always be considred weird to walk out of the toilet with a laptop. Still, I must admit, smartphones have a long way to go - although Android is quite good for what it's worth, it doesn't come anywhere near a full featured OS and my limited exposure to WP7 and iOS has clearly indicated that they have a different but at least equally annoying sets of drawbacks. This is to be expected - one needs to make efficient use of the limited resources of the small device so some cuts have to be made and in the same time the millions of morons that use it around the world should be prevented from from ruining it by downloading dodgy stuff.

My smartphone has anyway found a unique place in my digital life and is inching its way towards my heart. Nevertheless, ask the general population what they think about smartphones - most will be like "Oh, those zombies staring at them iphones constantly, I wonder how they don't get run over by buses! Mine phone shows me the time and takes calls and that's all I need". It's natural for people to not feel needs that have never been fulfilled - you never miss something that you've never had. I'm confident that these are going to be a dying breed soon, though. In fact, it's already happening, at least in London - the overall UK smarphone penetration is at the top of the range for Europe at 40% but this includes rural areas with poor 3G coverage where it makes little sense to own one; in London the tedium of the trips in the tube and the congested traffic has forced most people to kill time by tapping their fingers on various screens. And in Singapore it has already happened, with hefty 90% - gosh, don't they have old people there, I thought it's a civilized country but apperently they euthanize them at 50.

Now tablets are braced to be (or already are?) the next big thing. When the first iPads came out they looked kind of neat although I couldn't quite see their niche. iPads, I thought, are only good for use in cramped seats, and iPad owners never travel in cramped seats. I was willing to try one but as someone that types with more than 60 wpm, I see the physical keyboard as a very important part of the human-device interface, so the urge was not that strong. Then the Android-based tablets came out and although they are still in their infancy I'll be damned if I buy a gadget with storage that I can't browse with my shell but should rather sync through iTunes, one of the shittiest applications every to be shoved down the users' throats. Immature as they are, the tablet wars have already provided for some hilarity with the countless legal battles that Apple and Samsung are locked in, cultimating to the one that invokes 2001: A Space Odyssey and shall from now on be known as the Kubrick defense (after the Chewbacca defence). I another twist in this story, the supposedly game-chaning new screen of the iPad and its heart, the A4 system-on-a-chip (i.e. CPU + GPU) are both manufatcured by Samsong. Go figure! The only thing that's for certain is that the Samsung tablets are not likely to be technologically inferior to the iPads. Now throw in an open OS and lower price and I can see them getting popular quite soon.

Still, I'm not entirely sold just yet. Apart from the cramped seats, which I do use often, I have limited use of a super big phone that doesn't fit into a pocket, which is what tablets pretty much are if you run iOS, or even android, on them. Now if only this thing could have a real OS on it and still last that long on battery!

I kind of like Microsoft's strategy here - they include tablet support for the full-featured OSs and leave Windows Phone just for, well, phones. Subsequently, vendors of Windows-based tablets are trying to fit a real computer into the form factor, rather than going bottom-up (i.e. enlarging a touchscreen phone). An example is the Samsung Series 7 Slate PC, that has a real i5 processor and comes from their laptop, rather than mobile phone division. That's a gadget I'd love to use so much that the 3:30 hours of battery life will simply not be enough. Now there is a lot of hype about Windows 8 and how tablet-friendly it's going to be and I must admit that I'm kind of succumbing to it, if someone manages to put it on something equally powerful that lasts for more than 7 hours on battery I'll be the first to buy one (online - not queueing like an apple addict).

.NET is more open than Java

There has always been this stereotype that Microsoft are sworn enemies of open source and Java is uber cross-platform. Well, guess what, that's not true and the proof came in April 2010. I know that this is about a century ago in software years but for some reason the news have gone past me and I'd hate to not comment on that - be it regretably late.

The story goes as follows - after acquiring Sun (and the Java technology along with it), Oracle decided to sue Google over their use of Java on the Android OS (source), basically redefining 'cross-platform' to mean 'running on any platform that Oracle can make money out of'. The fact that Java had a chance to become the de facto universall development environment for mobile devices doesn't matter.

In the same time Microsoft have this thing called Community Promise, which basically means that they are OK with you implementing a .NET environment on any platoform, and more specifally - it means that they won't pull the same stunt about .NET on Android (source, and yeah, .NET development on Android is possible - http://android.xamarin.com/ ).

Now let's get in the time machine and travel back to present day. It's already October 2011 and in the meantime Android has become the dominant OS for smartphones, and Novell have been acquired by Attachmate and along with it - the Mono and Mono for Android team (Ximian, the company that originally developed Mono was acquired by Novell), followed immediately by Attachmate dumping the Mono and MonoDroid teams - a truly disturbing development for the .NET and mobile development communities. However, a large part of the team that originally created Mono now formed Xamarin - a company that is committed to supporting and advancing this family of products, and they have reached an agreement with Attachmate to be the official stewards of these projects.

So, Mono, MonoTouch and Mono for Android, after changing hands three times are now once again in the hands of a small, dedicated team, which is of course very promising. We'll only need to see who will get to buy Xamarin next...

I really hope for one thing, though - that it's not going to be Microsoft or Google, or for that matter - any other major player in the smartphone game, as this will lead to Apple immediately blocking MonoTouch on iOS. For the ones unfamiliar with MonoTouch - this is a product that lets you compile .NET applications for iOS, and with HTML5's future being uncertain before 2022 - that's pretty much the only way to run anything that was not orignially written on Objective C on the iPhone and other iOS devices. Now MonoTouch is not a true .NET implementation - it's not CLR, it doesn't JIT and execute intermediate language code - it just compiles .NET to native code.

There were times that the future of MonoTouch was quite murky - there was the infamous point 3.3.1 in the Apple developer agreement that stipulated that iPhone apps must be originally developed in Objective C, i.e. the trick that MonoTouch does was officially banned. But then the ailing Jobbs was apparently struck by a dose of benevolence and decided to let MonoTouch do its thing.

The implications of both developments - now you can develop in .NET on every major mobile platform! Of course it's not as easy as it sounds - as Miguel de Icaza (the mastermind behind Mono) points out himself, you can only really reuse the business logic, you'll need to implement the front-end differently for every platform. Still, you'll do it with the same tools, and will follow roughly the same practiceses.

The topic of cross-platform mobile development with .NET is one that has captured my interest and I will be posting more about it in the future, so if there's anything that you are particularly interested in, or have something interesting to share please make full use of the comments.