Bart De Waele » Wolf's Little Store

Wolf's Little Store (4 unread)

Lumia

Posted: January 1st, 2012, 12:51pm CET by Wolf

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Here’s a shot of the Nokia Lumia 800 I’m testing. I’ve written an extensive review of it that will be published when I feel I’ve used the device enough to form a definite opinion. Overall I’m very impressed by it, but it also has major faults.
New year

Posted: January 1st, 2012, 12:44pm CET by Wolf

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So, the first day of the new year is here. Happy new year everyone.

So much happened last year. I went freelance January 1st, and completed 60 varied projects so far. Some full websites, some website designs; helping small companies set up shop; sometimes working for a startup, digging deep into the HTML & CSS and iterating on features.

The most interesting project to me is one with national impact, which I hope I’ll be able to tell people about at some point in 2012. I’m striving for this year to be even busier than 2011 so if you need design work, get in touch.

I got my driver’s license. I moved to Antwerp. I re-visited New York for 2 weeks. I went to the Dutch Fronteers ’11 conference, and travelled to Ireland for Build. I organized two designer meetups: one informal get-together and one typographically themed evening with a professional speaker (Yves Peeters). I gave a talk called Design for Developers. I took up a big interest in photography.

I don’t have too many New Year’s resolutions, other than to keep doing what I love. 2012, onwards!
Android Catch-22

Posted: January 1st, 2012, 12:33pm CET by Wolf

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I bought an Android phone 4 months ago because I thought I was going to sell an Android project and wanted to research the UI. I set up the phone, I hated it, and never really used it again.

Said Android project never landed and now the phone is gathering dust on my shelves. I only ever use it to test websites in the Android browser (and only when doing — extensive — browser testing, it’s not part of my standard testing procedure).

Sometimes I think: maybe I didn’t give it enough of a chance. I tried to use it. I tried to love it. But I couldn’t.

My intention is not to anger Android fans. I don’t hate Android. I love the concept of an open platform that people can tinker with and use to create whatever they want. Apple’s walled garden is flawed in a lot of ways (no demos, censorship, no fair competition if Apple already created [your app functionality]).

But if I look at Android as a designer I see a lot of faults. It’s UI is inconsistent: there’s HTC’s UI stacked on top of Android’s default UI, then whatever developers came up with in their apps.

As a user I can’t help but notice that Android is extremely slow, not only in rendering UI and switching screens but also in browsing. Why sell a phone that runs an OS it can’t handle a 100%? The Desire S is certainly not on the lower end of Android phones.

By almost any measure my iPhone is a better phone: the only thing I like more about Android is the notification system and being able to make your dashboard/home screen useful (iOS is particularly bad). But mostly it looks like somebody tried to rebuild iOS but failed at a lot of points.

The only reason I’m keeping it is to be able to test Android apps for clients and/or test new apps that are Android exclusive¹.

The nice thing about software is that it can improve. However, as a customer I’m locked out of Android improvements.

According to my twittering Android friends HTC is not likely to issue an update.

If I want Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) on my phone I have to install a custom ROM, made by hobbyist coders, probably not very stable, which in turn voids my warranty. And if I do that, my device is not representative of the general population’s Android phone anymore, making it a bad testing device. Catch 22.

Maybe Android is a cool OS now – but if I want to see that apparently I have to buy a new €600 device. I just want to plug the phone into the computer and update it. This device is six months old. Why can’t I do this?

If you bought an iPhone 3GS 2,5 years ago you can still have iOS 5. Some features have been disabled, but you get most of the goodies.
1. To my knowledge there are no super sweet “Android only” apps out there: if it’s a good app, it has an iPhone equivalent.↩
Google vs. Bing

Posted: January 1st, 2012, 12:26pm CET by Wolf

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Last night my car didn’t start anymore. I was testing the Windows Phone I got, which defaults to Bing search. I searched for “VAB” which is the organization to call when your car breaks down in Belgium.

Bing found a Wikipedia article on Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) as the first result. The next 20-or-so results were not what I wanted. In fact, looking through all of the search results the VAB site (url is at www.vab.be) was nowhere to be found.

Tried Google then: VAB is the first result. Because I use Google every day I lost appreciation of how terribly good it actually is.

Now how can I remap the hardware search button to Google?