What followed that announcement was a mess, that clearly demonstrated how few people knew of the decision before Leo announced it. Still they made the best of a bad situation creating two projects OpenWebOS and Enyo.

Enyo was the language that WebOS 3.0 was built on is a really nice language to use, by converting it into a JS Framework meant that it didn’t require you to use WebOS and thus actually get used by developers. Things had been progressing well, a range of small scale events and quick releases meant that I had high hopes for it.

Until today, when I heard that a large portion of the team have just been hired by Google, most likely to work on ChromeOS.

So where now for Enyo? Probably no where good, especially if they fall foul of the restructuring effort taking place at HP which is looking to fire 27,000 people. 

So long WebOS and Enyo, I dont see how they can continue to bleed talent and expect the projects to succeed.

I would expect that ChromeOS is now one to watch.

More to the point as tablets evolve, so to do they tasks that can be achieved on them but so far that has not really included development.

Diet Coda looks to change this, as its designed to help web developers on the go and provide a suitable environment to “make quick fixes on the go”. I loved Ares (Palm’s online webeditor) and feel that apps like Diet Coda can help tablets go beyond consumption and become the devices that we know them to be.

It makes me want to get an iPad, as I don’t hold out much hope that it will be coming to Android.

Go check it out now at http://panic.com/dietcoda/

Palm was a early pioneer in the online web development environment

Typing RIM into Google News makes for nasty reading. If you are unaware of the current situation for the Canadian phone maker, here are some choice headlines:

• BlackBerry delay darkens RIM’s future
• RIM Nose Dives After Another Disaster Of An Earnings Report  
• Apple’s App Store alone worth more than RIM
• RIM’s Absurd Plan To Fix Itself: Do Better Advertising In 2012
• RIM activist renews call for leadership change

And that’s just a snapshot.

If I was Mike Lazaridis or Jim Balsillie, I would be wondering two things, one where did it all go wrong and what can be done about it. The world isn’t interested in the first question and deeply concerned about RIMs’ plan to answer the second.

Continue reading at PostDesk!

PS Vita

My latest article on PostDesk is about how Sony has the option to create three new pathways for the consumer with new convergence devices in the pipeline it has the means to deliver it, but in order for it to succeed it needs to leave devices such as the PS Vita behind.

http://postdesk.com/blog/console-companies-mobile-market

Check it out at http://postdesk.com/blog/android-keyboard-typing

http://www.meetup.com/creativedevelopers/events/40525652/

The first is the learning hurdle, two years ago I used to be a .net developer, creating superawesomesauce applications for teaching and learning and although this was in VB.net (dont throw things). This means that although C# is a different (and vastly superior) language, it isn’t too much of a leap.

The second reason is more pragmatic, namely App discovery.

I meet a lot of developers in my day job as a developer evangelist and they are all beginning to face the same problem, standing out for from the crowd.  At time of writing the most popular App store have over five hundred thousand Apps available for download, how does a developer get noticed? More importantly how does a customer notice a developers work?

Sure if you’re lucky you might get featured on the front page of an App store, but the odds are slim. If you’ve got a lot of VC funding (or a big company behind you), you can afford to pay for advertising and marketing, but this is difficult path with no guarantees of success. If you’re really lucky you might get social media working for you, that quintessential business driver, word of mouth. I trust my friends more than I do advertising (even though they themselves may be recommending based on awareness created by an advert), as there is little chance of their recommendation being anything but genuine.

Indeed Matt Mills co founder of usTwo, creators of Whale Trail spoke to the Guardian on the importance of word of mouth for their revenue model now that Apple’s ‘New Game Of The Week’ promotion has finished:

“We’re hoping that if somebody’s downloading it, they’ll be talking about it, and there are 2-3 big updates planned over the next 6-8 weeks,” says Mills. “We need to get to the people in the pub. Game Of The Week is fantastic: it tells us we’ve made something special. But my wife, mum, dad or sisters don’t really look at the App Store in that way. They find out about new apps when somebody tells them.”

But getting people to talk about your App is very, very hard (but not impossible) so most developers have no choice but to upload and cross their fingers.

So my question to you is this If you are working on your own, is being another item in an overstocked store the best way to get noticed?

I don’t think it is, certainly if you are just getting started in the App industry.

Which is why I am looking at Windows Phone, yes it may only have 5% market share at time of writing and an under developed App store but I see that as an opportunity. The recent Mango update, the Windows Platform has had numerous improvements and it has been well received by industry pundits and consumers alike. The most notable addition has been Nokia’s conversion from Symbian, which has now begun to energise both Windows Phone developers and, perhaps more importantly other hardware partners. Indeed, on watching the unveiling of the Lumia 800 and 710, and the subsequent revelation that these phones would have Nokia’s largest marketing budget ever HTC and Samsung confirmed that they would increase their marketing budgets to compete. Which means that we’ll be seeing a lot more Windows Phone devices around, especially if they can get the price point so that they can offer most Windows Phones free on contract.

But thats the future, in the short term there is still an App store that needs developers, customers that wants to buy Apps and most importantly a provider that is actively promoting developers.

In the end it comes down to this, do you want to be a small fish in a big pond, or a big fish in a small pond?

Today was different.

As I missspelled yet another tweet I decicded that it was time to install a new keyboard; namely Swiftkey. Swiftkey is a popular replacment for the stock Android powered by an AI engine that helps predict your intentions with greater accuracy. Accuracy was something I dearly needed, as since moving to Android I felt like I had regressed to my early dyslexic days getting words and letters all wrong.

So off I went to the marketplace, thinking isn’t it great that I have the option to replace something as fundamental as the keyboard. Perhaps Android isn’t so bad after all.

Installation and setup was fairly simple, and soon enough I had a shiny new keyboard to use. Which promprly started to bog down my system and hold on key presses. Now some of you may have stuck with it, but this really rubbed me up the wrong way and after ten minutes of not much improvement I made my way to the uninstall menu.

Big mistake.

After uninstalling Swiftkey my keyboard defaulted to the chinese/english layout with no obvious way to change it back to the stock keyboard. At this point my girlfriend asked me a question about a tweet of mine, deep in thought of how to sort out this problem I responded with an irritable “What?”.

Afterwards I put the phone away and we continued our normal commute, but I did mull over the problem. As I was walking towards TechHub, it then hit me, that I wasn’t getting annoyed over a keyboard, it was the operating system.

The Android keyboard is a microcosm for the overall platform, the very nature of android and the fact that you can replace something as important as a keyboard is used as excuse for a substandard effort. The mindset feels like (and this is just my personal opinion) that the feeling is that its ok, not bad, satisfactory. Not good enough? Don’t worry install something else!

I fail to see how making the user apply plasters, bandages and gauze to a platform to correct its faults,  is not only acceptable but lauded as a unique selling point.

Android and I are getting a divorce, it isn’t amicable.