- China’s $122BB Boom in Shadow Banking is Happening on Phones (Quartz) — Tencent’s recently launched online money market fund (MMF), Licai Tong, drew in 10 billion yuan ($1.7 billion) in just six days in the last week of January.
- The Weight of Rain — lovely talk about the thought processes behind coming up with a truly insightful visualisation.
- Data on Video Streaming Starting to Emerge (Giga Om) — M-Lab, which gathers broadband performance data and distributes that data to the FCC, has uncovered significant slowdowns in throughput on Comcast, Time Warner Cable and AT&T. Such slowdowns could be indicative of deliberate actions taken at interconnection points by ISPs.
- Javascript Puzzlers — how well do you know Javascript?
"mobile" entries
Talking to Chromecast from iOS
Part One: Easily find Chromecast devices on your local network
Now that Google has opened up the Chromecast API for anyone to play with, it’s possibile to create iOS applications that can leverage the $35 device as a way to display to HDMI devices wirelessly. In this series of tutorials, we’ll go over the API, starting with configuring your project to use the framework, and finding devices out on your local network to play with.
Let’s assume you’ve set up a Chromecast device attached to an HDMI TV and have it configured for your local network. Now it’s time to get an App set up to use it. We’ll use the iPhone Simulator in these examples, since it can talk to Chromecast devices just like a physical device, as long as the Mac you are developing on is on the same LAN as the Chromecast dongle.
Begin by creating a project, as usual. For this example, I used a single-view Storyboarded app. I set up an UITableView inside the default UIView, hooking it’s datasource and delegate to the default view controller the wizard had created. Next, I went to the Google Google Cast API page and downloaded the iOS framework, then used the “Add Files…” project option to add the framework to the project, copying in the files.
Four short links: 11 February 2014
Shadow Banking, Visualization Thoughts, Streaming Video Data, and Javascript Puzzlers
Four short links: 10 February 2014
Sterling Zings, Android Swings, Data Blings, and Visualized Things.
- Bruce Sterling at transmediale 2014 (YouTube) — “if it works, it’s already obsolete.” Sterling does a great job of capturing the current time: spies in your Internet, lost trust with the BigCos, the impermanence of status quo, the need to create. (via BoingBoing)
- No-one Should Fork Android (Ars Technica) — this article is bang on. Google Mobile Services (the Play functionality) is closed-source, what makes Android more than a bare-metal OS, and is where G is focusing its development. Google’s Android team treats openness like a bug and routes around it.
- Data Pipelines (Hakkalabs) — interesting overview of the data pipelines of Stripe, Tapad, Etsy, and Square.
- Visualising Salesforce Data in Minecraft — would almost make me look forward to using Salesforce. Almost.
Upward Mobility: Your phone is your robot’s best friend
Rosie the Robot may feel more comfortable talking to Siri than to you
Recently, Glenn Martin wrote an article describing how robotics in moving out of the factory and into the house. And while Glenn restricted himself mainly to the type of robots that pop into your head when someone says the word (either the anthropomorphic variety or the industrial flavor), the reality is that there are a lot of robots already in the hands of consumers, although it might take a moment to recognize them as such.
I’m speaking of drones, and especially quadcopters, which are proliferating at an enormous rate, and are being used to do everything from documenting a cool skateboard move to creating a breathtaking overflight of a horrific disaster site.
Four short links: 31 January 2014
Mobile Libraries, Python Idioms, Graphics Book, and Declining Returns on Aging Link Bait
- Bolts — Facebook’s library of small, low-level utility classes in iOS and Android.
- Python Idioms (PDF) — useful cheatsheet.
- Michael Abrash’s Graphics Programming Black Book — Markdown source in github. Notable for elegance and instructive for those learning to optimise. Coder soul food.
- About Link Bait (Anil Dash) — excellent consideration of Upworthy’s distinctive click-provoking headlines, but my eye was caught by we often don’t sound like 2012 Upworthy anymore. Because those tricks are starting to dilute click rates. from Upworthy’s editor-at-large. Attention is a scarce resource, and our brains are very good at filtering.
Four short links: 28 January 2014
Client-Server, Total Information Awareness, MSFT Joins OCP, and Tissue Modelling
- Intel On-Device Voice Recognition (Quartz) — interesting because the tension between client-side and server-side functionality is still alive and well. Features migrate from core to edge and back again as cycles, data, algorithms, and responsiveness expectations change.
- Meet Microsoft’s Personal Assistant (Bloomberg) — total information awareness assistant. By Seeing, Hearing, and Knowing All, in the future even elevators will be trying to read our minds. (via The Next Web)
- Microsoft Contributes Cloud Server Designs to Open Compute Project — As part of this effort, Microsoft Open Technologies Inc. is open sourcing the software code we created for the management of hardware operations, such as server diagnostics, power supply and fan control. We would like to help build an open source software community within OCP as well. (via Data Center Knowledge)
- Open Tissue Wiki — open source (ZLib license) generic algorithms and data structures for rapid development of interactive modeling and simulation.
Upward mobility: TVs are the new mobile
Mobile developers to gain a new set of platforms for their apps
One of the perennial technologies that regularly appears at the Consumer Electronics Show is the smart TV set, but they never seem to gain the kind of traction that the manufacturers hope that they will. This may finally be coming to a end, however, as a new generation of smart TVs are poised to enter the market. Even Apple is finally supposed to release their own products in this space this year. And when these hyper-aware TV sets enter the Internet of Things, they are likely to do it running mobile operating systems.
The reasons for this are several. From a purely economic standpoint, the margins on televisions don’t really afford room to pay for a full-blown desktop operating system license, nor the hardware required to support a rich desktop environment. It’s also unclear that anyone would want to run Microsoft Word or other general types of software on their TV. While a free operating system such as a desktop Linux OS might fit the bill, especially since it is famous for being able to run on a meager amount of hardware, it is equally unclear if it will be able to run the software that manufacturers and users are going to want to see on a TV.
The altar of shiny
Web design trends often carry hefty performance costs
Web and mobile users continue to expect faster sites and apps–especially when it comes to mobile–and this year I’d like to see people who work on the web spend more time focusing on performance as a user experience priority instead of chasing trends.
I recently ran across this article in Forbes, which lists a number of web design goals/trends that Steve Cooper is eyeing for a site redesign of online magazine Hitched. My intention is not to pick on Hitched or Cooper per se, but the list is a molotov cocktail of potential performance woes:
- Continuous scrolling
- Responsive design
- Parallax sites
You can use most of those techniques without creating performance nightmares, but it is unfortunately rare. I feel like I’m living in an alternate reality where I’m hearing that users want simpler, faster sites, and yet the trends in web design are marching in the opposite direction.
Four short links: 10 January 2014
Software in 2014, Making Systems That Don't Suck, Cognition Troubles, and Usable Security Hacks
- Software in 2014 (Tim Bray) — a good state of the world, much of which I agree with. Client-side: Things are bad. You have to build everything three times: Web, iOS, Android. We’re talent-starved, this is egregious waste, and it’s really hurting us.
- Making Systems That Don’t Suck (Dominus) — every software engineer should have to read this. Every one.
- IBM Struggles to Turn Watson Into Big Business (WSJ) — cognition services harder to onboard than seemed. It smells suspiciously like expert systems from the 1980s, but with more complex analytics on the inside. Analytic skill isn’t the problem for these applications, though, it’s the pain of getting domain knowledge into the system in the first place. This is where G’s web crawl and massive structured general knowledge is going to be a key accelerant.
- Reading This May Harm Your Computer (SSRN) — Internet users face large numbers of security warnings, which they mostly ignore. To improve risk communication, warnings must be fewer but better. We report an experiment on whether compliance can be increased by using some of the social-psychological techniques the scammers themselves use, namely appeal to authority, social compliance, concrete threats and vague threats. We also investigated whether users turned off browser malware warnings (or would have, had they known how).
Upward Mobility: Predictions for 2014
All predictions are for entertainment purposes only!
It is a generally accepted requirement that all technology pundits attempt a yearly prognostication of the coming 12 months. Having consulted my crystal ball, scryed the entrails of a falcon, and completed a 3 day fasting ritual in a sweat lodge set up inside a Best Buy, I will now tempt the Gods of Hubris and make my guesses for the year in mobile.