Tips and Tricks About Computers, Web Development, Linux, the Internet and the Like
Archive for January, 2011
Retorting An Extremely Biased View Against Android
Jan 14th
Introduction
Those of you that have been following my blog for a while, know that I’m a big supporter of FOSS and Linux. It should come as no surprise then, that I have an Android phone. It’s not the best on the market by any means, it’s one of the first to appear on AT&T’s network but it gets the job done and I like it more than the iPhone (v2) I owned for 6 months. I’m not oblivious to the Appleverse, at my office, I have a Mac mini and an iPad. As a web architect, I need to make sure different operating systems can work from both a development and user viewpoint.
I’m also a bit of a console nerd, I prefer to automate as many tasks as I can. Apple’s terminal has come in handy at times but the BSD base and lack of a [good] package manager have left me yearning. That said, this is a blog post is more focused on the fragmented Android market and the points made by Marco Arment, who has recently claimed there is too much hardware choice for Androids. His bullet points are dripping with Mac bias and as a Google and Android fan, I’d like to weigh in on his “points”.
Breaking Down His Arguments
Accessory markets never fully develop. People really like cases for their phones, and if the iPhone has 300 cases for it including that gummy pink one they really like, and the Samsung Whocares XL only has a few drab OEM plastic things available, a nontrivial portion of the market will choose the iPhone on that reason alone.
There’s also more practical concerns: batteries, docks, speakers, and other useful accessories are usually phone-specific, and if the manufacturer (and the market) will only care about your phone for three months until the next minor revision comes out, your options will be very limited, both in the store and when you’re traveling and forgot something.
- “Arment”
This is a very trivial point because many Android devices use common ports and standards. Micro USB, micro SD, standard size audio jacks, etc. I’m able to charge my phone with any micro USB cable, even if it’s not the same phone or even device, anything from audio controllers to hardrives can use Micro USB.
An iPhone can only charge with a device from the Appleverse. An audio cable is only a few bucks from Radioshack or amazon.com if you don’t have one already and good stereos have audio ports. If you need to by another stereo just to dock your iPod or your phone, you’re not thinking rationally or hanging out in the wrong room.
There are so many variations in screen size, screen type, physical size, hardware sensors, hardware buttons, and computational performance between devices that developers, including Google itself, have a very hard time making great software for the platform.
I find the statement “Have a very hard time making great software for the platform” ignorant. This makes me think Marco hasn’t even used an Android because he’s apparently overlooked the navigation software, Google maps, Google Goggles, gmail and others.
My phone has a smaller screen, though I’d prefer a larger screen with a kickout keyboard. I don’t think the smaller screen has any major bugs with Google’s software and it’s running Android 2.1. I’m missing out on some features [, none that burden me] but holding out for a dual-core and hopefully a kickout keyboard.
Some people like choice. The buttons are pretty standard across the phone, I’ve seen different orders or positions but it’s pretty easy to recognize because they use similar iconography. Besides, doesn’t having this sort of choice allow consumers to need less accessories if the phone can serve a purpose as one device?
iPhone has one button, which is circular with a square in the center, if it doesn’t do what you want, then you’re either out of luck or need to buy an
Lets look at some Androids (click to enlarge images)
And now the iPhone
The manufacturers and carriers have very little incentive to maintain the software on devices that are still relatively new and under contract, because they want everyone buying the newest ones instead. We’re already seeing carriers and some manufacturers refusing to release new Android versions to handsets that were launched as recently as 6 months ago, even though most users bought them with 2-year contracts.
This will be moot soon enough anyway, the Android operating system is still fairly new, it’s popular enough amongst manufactures that it’s developing at a rapid pace. It’s not a surprise that carriers don’t want to push updates right away, they are still getting used to it. Android is running across a bunch of different hardware but because of intelligent software design, it’s able to do so. With proper organization of the code and more standard development across phones by companies or consortium, it will become a strong piece of software. Why do you think Linux and Apache are the backbone of many servers, and new open-source languages and software are thriving.
The number of iPhone users claiming insurance purposely breaking their phones to upgrade skyrocketed. Besides that, there are plenty of people willing to drop the cash on a new one. It’s not like Apple gives your old operating system a major upgrade (once) but oh wait, this is what you seem to expect from Android.
Flexibility isn’t well known in the Appleverse because their software only needs to run on very specific hardware. Apple products work best on Apple products. iTunes and I guess Safari (don’t kid yourself Steveo) on Windows increase their market share.
People hate choosing between similar things. The more choice we have at the time of purchase, the more stress we feel making the choice, and the less satisfied we feel afterward because we’re worried that we made the wrong choice.
But weren’t you just arguing that this was what was great about having a single phone design, a thriving accessory market?
Closing Thoughts
If the future battle is for content. Google has the most of it and will figure out ways to get content into its possession. Google is supporting Flash but has been on the forefront of HTML5 supported media since inception. They are setting themselves up to bring the internet towards their own video format, which was pieced together in a matter of days from existing standards when the h.264 vs ogg for HTML5 video debated first started months ago. Steve Jobs got upset that h.264, which his hardware decodes wasn’t chosen and a new format war began.
Don’t expect this change to happen overnight. Dropping flash right now would essentially break the web but as soon as Google can drop flash, it will. They’ve already converted all the youtube videos they can to other formats and now it’s standard when new videos are uploaded.
The pieces are coming together and Android is popping up to serve content in all sorts of unexpected places (nook, cable boxes). Remember, companies have been adopting Android for devices that don’t officially support it yet, these differences have begun to be abstracted as we see better support for tablets in Android 3.0.
This is not an accident and to argue that it’s going to be too different across devices of the future is like arguing against an OS such as Windows on a desktop versus a laptop versus a warship vs an ATM machine. Flexible software running across all different hardware expands the reach. This is something you will never get from Apple, who won’t even legally allow you to run OSX in a virtual machine, however, you can run other OSes inside OS X.
The Appleverse requires total submission, I could not turn on my iPhone or iPad without first connecting them to iTunes, there is no such requirement for Google. You don’t have to associate it with your Google account and you don’t have to give Google your information but if you don’t, functionality may be affected.
Your iPhone accessories won’t save you from the glass ceiling that is hardware dependent software. Arguing that you can jailbreak the phone for more features is admitting Apple is doing something wrong and furthermore, you’re making yourself more prone to an attack by installing software from a rouge app store.
Thomas Edison’s Direct Current was cool when he invented it but Alternating Current goes further and starts less fires.
Henry Ford was quoted saying “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”
Non-free Art In Open-source (FOSS) Video Games
Jan 14th
Introduction
I’ve been interested in art since I can remember, the marriage of computers and art has always fascinated me. I would spend math classes (sorry Mr. D) fiddling around with my calculator, drawing pixel art and saving them in the storage on my calculator. I would hack up BASIC programs or marvel at ASM based games and sub-shells. Later these activities moved over to computers, websites, software, the internet and open-source video games, such as Nexuiz or Xonotic. My brain has always enjoyed trying to pull the worlds of art and science together but it wasn’t always viewing the two alike.
Originally my feelings about art were 2 dimensional, as I’d expect many to view it. It’s easy for art to be a fleeting glimpse. You see the final product, the lines of the creation process are blurred, the definitions of “source” gets lost.
When I first started contributing 2d art to Nexuiz, I was submitting PSD files. I didn’t realize at the time but I was deterring other artists who were without Photoshop the ability to properly edit the file because of some advanced settings in the file that could not be read by open-source software. This hindered others who were trying to expand on my work or create derivative works.
Now that isn’t a completely fair comparison because source is still being provided, only limited to a number of people. However, the reason I bring it up is because it was the beginning of a turning point for me. As I delved more into Linux and the world of Free Open-Source Software (FOSS), I was realizing how important source is to a community. How source code teaches, how knowledge of techniques are passed on. My involvement with Nexuiz and other (at the time) open-source projects, are what kept this message strong in the back of my head.
On Art in Video Games
Source of some art is almost impossible. A hand draw sketch for example, in the digital world however, things are different and art source becomes a very powerful teaching tool. Often, for the creation of maps for these games is not the most straight forward process. The mapping software and map entities require some critical thinking. The most common way to learn to add a feature to your map if you don’t know how, is to identify a map with the feature you’d like to implement, open its .map source file and study how it was done.
The reason this all came up for me today was because of a popular open-source ioquake-based game called Warsow. The code is licensed under GPL and the art has a proprietary, closed-source license. As a core member of the Xonotic team, we faced the decision of how to license Xonotic when we forked from Nexuiz. This decision was not as easy as you’d think because of ‘techniical’ license issues. The code must be GPL because of its lineage, GPL is not so keen on art. Creative Commons is an art license, not so keen on code. They seem like they’d be a good merger but from what I understood they could cause issues for distribution. We’d have to distribute the code and art as separate packages. In the end we licensed everything under GPL to make things easier for ourselves.
I thought Warsow was facing the same problem and today they had a developer Q & A, I decided to ask about this, pardon my bias phrasing.
[-z-] asked: do you think distributing warsow as one package is legal under the licensing terms?
crizis answers: Yes, it is. Even Richard Stallman himself blessed way of having open engine and restricted artwork. All code in Warsow is open source, artwork is not.
I found this interesting and with some conversation with with fellow Xonoticans, I came to learn how Richard Stallman, the founder of free software, feels about art in FOSS and I couldn’t disagree more. How is requiring the source for compiled programs any different than requiring the source for art?
Expanding On My Feelings
In my opinion, non-free art in free software is not in good spirit, it does not help others learn and it can hurt the growth of the game. The distinction between art and code gets further blurred when you see how interactive the artwork is.
I can argue that maps are code. They are a meta file, you can open them up in your text editor and edit them, they are filled with coordinates of brushes and entities, that hold keys with settings for the objects references to textures and can even contain some mild programming. Shader files are used to enhance textures and brushes. It’s not conventional programming, it’s closer to “virtual circuitry” as MrBougo called it.
This information is lost if source is not provided. Mappers have two choices on how to de-construct such features. Reverse engineer or decompile the map. The former likely being a waste of someone’s time and the later being an example of two wrongs not making it right.
I do not mean this as an attack on Warsow, it was only what re-lit my interest in the topic and the views I found by RMS were shocking. I think this should be a topic for discussion because in my eyes, art should fall under a similar license as code in FOSS, especially in software such as a video game where media is more advanced and interactive.
