For all those different models with different screen sizes and different input options, a developer will have more work just making sure his or her app works for the wide variety of phones.
For keyboard input, I would assume that the operating system abstracts away whether the phone has a physical or touchscreen keyboard. You have a point about the screen size, but it's not like that's a new problem in software development, so any competent interface designer and/or programmer knows how to deal with it.
Relating to screen sizes, it's not that big of a deal. It's all handled by XML layout descriptions, so you can either use relative sizing or specify different XML layouts for different screen sizes.
Once you've built your app, how do you market it on the Google app store? Do you need a license or registration to upload it? How do you upload it? Does it have to be signed or otherwise processed after it's an executing binary? How do you get paid? How do you include a GPL or other license, and the source code if required/desired?
Those details of "development" are going to be the greatest incentive, or inhibitor, to developers. Especially like me.
You generate a key and sign your binary. Applicable links would be : http://developer.android.com/guide/publishing/app-signing.html and: http://developer.android.com/guide/publishing/publishing.html
I recently developed an app for Android. It took a moderate amount of Java programming knowledge and a week or two to crank out a working application (working in my spare time). I figure that's a pretty resounding endorsement of the SDK.
Linux may be free, but there's no truly viable MS Office alternative, nothing that matches Exchange, there's no professional level Photoshop, there's nothing to edit videos with, nor post processing, good luck doing complex audio work
Ardour, anyone? It has been around for quite a few years, and is a really great professional grade DAW/production system. Try googling before posting something quite that ridiculous.
If you are a creative professional -- Linux is completely worthless. Sorry, but it is. I wish that were not the case, but there's no professional-level creative apps for Linux.
I guess all those Xara users, Ardour users, Cinelerra users, MainActor users, Blender users, VariCad users, Jahshaka/CineFX users, etc, are completely boned.
Of all the programs available for Linux, few are of comparable quality to those available to Windows or OSX.
That's just stupid. There are programs of poor quality on all of the major operating systems. Linux has its share of badly put-together programs, but saying that "few" are of comparable quality simply illustrates that you don't spend very much time with Linux systems or just have very poor choice in software.
It's much like Ford did with Mercury and Lincoln.
I think the term you were looking for was rebadging.
Hyper-virtualisation. Running OS's under other OS's. In other words, this is a patch for Linux to make it run well on Microsoft systems, so customers will feel less need to actually install Linux on servers. It's not a friendly gesture to make normal Linux systems work better, as the title suggests.
I think I'm way more likely to virtualize *Windows* servers on a Linux host than otherwise. The company I work for doesn't run Windows on bare metal anymore.
A good reason for that is that Windows isn't really administrable via a serial console, so that if networking is blown, you'd require either an iLO/DRAC type hardware solution or would have to go with relatively costly KVM over IP.
Honestly, I don't think this is big news. The host component isn't being opensourced, so you need a Windows-whatever server to run Linux hosts under it. I think I'll stick to Xen for paravirtualization and VMware/Virtualbox for full virtualization, thank you.
Assume you buy Windows 7 for $200. You will probably get 10 years out of it.
Maybe I'm a pessimist, but you seem have a very optimistic idea of hardware life expectancy. I would assume that by the time your hardware gets old and dies in a few years, the mandatory upgrade that Microsoft will be selling will probably require buying a software upgrade to make it functional
If they thought you only had to buy from them once every ten years, I don't think they would be doing as well as they are now, since their model is upselling everyone on the latest and greatest version of (insert product here), whether or not you actually need any of the newer features in it.
(Disclaimer: I neither have, nor have had, for the last 10 years or so, any hardware running a Microsoft-based operating system, so YMMV.)
Couldn't you just buy an Android dev phone now and swap the SIM out of your Sprint phone?
More money up front, of course, but no contract obligation and you have root access to the phone.
Disclaimer: I haven't received my dev phone yet (it's supposed to arrive today!), so I'm not certain this will work. I'm planning to toss in the SIM card out of a Walmart Special prepaid phone I have hanging around, but that's a T-Mobile unit.
Would work well if Sprint didn't use CDMA, which unfortunately precludes the use of SIM cards.
As does Google Sync, for the most part. And definitely across more platforms than Exchange does.
Funambol also supports some pretty aggressive syncing as well.
Why is that so great? How about hotmail? Would you endorse that?
Google Mail, etc, is a bit more palatable since it allows standard IMAP, SMTP, etc. I wasn't aware of hotmail supporting client access via standard protocols (although apparently they do support POP3 now).
The problem has always been the ABC shows I like, such as Lost. They won't work under Linux . .
They barely work under Windows. Every few weeks a Windows or Firefox update or a streaming change at ABC causes ABC's player to break in new ways. Which means I've gotta google the latest problem to fix my wife's computer so she can see her stories again. It's the 21st century version of fiddling with the rabbit ears, adjusting the fine-tuning knob and pounding on the TV set.
Too bad Torrentocracy shut down. If you didn't mind the grey legal area for torrents, it grabs beautifully encoded copies of television shows without DRM, hokey flash players, or any hoop jumping at all.
High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection
Anyone noticed that HDCP seems like a shortening of the word "handicap"? Wonder which moron in marketing missed that one
The querystrings/all the get prams are still being passed, there just passed in a "visually" pleasant way for the user. All the data is still there meaning mod_rewrite dosen't help with the "bandwidth" issue at all. It just looks pretty.
Moving persistent data to sessions is probably a better way of doing it. My guess would be that only a few things are going to be passed from one page load to another. Whether you GET or POST the data, passing it during every request is a waste of time, not to mention more difficult to sanity check everything.
"Conversion, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will." -- Virginia Woolf, "Mrs. Dalloway"