Archive for May, 2010

Having used Windows Mobile for 4 years (both the smart version and the touch version), Palm OS for 3 years, iPhone for 2 years, and soon an Android, I think I’ve been through the “mobile revolution” for quite some time.  As I’ve been researching the Android platform as of late to get rid of the crappy service known as AT&T, I’ve come to the conclusion that people who’ve never used all the flavors do not “get” what each of the companies really offer.

First off, a smartphone needs to be able to make calls and receive calls stably.  This concept seems so obvious that “hackers” just seem to forget about this.  When I used Palm OS (4.5) and Windows Mobile (6-6.1) it was almost expected of you to run “cooked” roms.  These alternate firmwares will always add and remove features of the stock rom, thus making the bland phone OS faster, prettier, and more functional.  The caveat is, it almost ALWAYS made the phone unstable in some sort of way.  I can’t begin to even count how many times my phone would reset for no reason, drop calls because the phone locks up, or just plan crash due to memory errors.  Couple this with the fact flashing your phone is no quick endeavor along with having to replace apps, contact information, setup your app configs, etc it gets irritating fast.

I bring this up because it seems the majority of folks are claiming that Apple NEEDs to open up their phone to beat Android.  My question is why?  Other than a few hackers wanting to “customize” their phone,  what purpose will it serve? 

The Apple SDK is miles ahead of the Android SDK/NDK at this point.  Heck Android runs ALL of it’s code in an interpreter.  The Android NDK is far from complete to allow access to all of its hardware acceleration, specifically audio/video which is what the majority of the people care about as it pertains to games and such.  So the big question is what will you gain from the iPhone when it’s opened that you can from Android?  It certainly isn’t the ability to “root” the phone as the majority of the Android phones now are still not rooted and all iPhones/iPads/IPod Touches have been jailbroken.  It certainly isn’t from the apps as we’ve already seen the iPhone kick ass with some of the most intensive and amazing graphics on ANY smartphone in that territory.  So I really don’t get it.

At what point do we stop “hacking” and just use the phone for it’s intended purpose?  Maybe I’m getting older or just finally seeing the light, but I’d venture that the majority of phone users don’t care about all that mumbo jumbo.  If my phone can make and receive calls, execute code that I’ve written or someone else has written, and integrate smoothly with the internet I’m a happy camper.  I don’t want to have to hack my OS, I just want to use it for it’s intended purpose.

In the end I honestly don’t care if I’m running an iPhone or an Android at this point and look forward to the Sprint Evo as I’ve had nothing, but good service from Sprint all these years.  The Evo will give me the SAME functionality of an iPhone including the apps that I use often at this point as a phone.  The only thing I will miss is the music integration with my car and home, but I’ll likely still keep an iPod around for that (sorry no other phone/media player/device has as much integration power as an iPhone/iPod).

So Android community, stop trying to be “better” and just be better with actual useful and fun software.  You can complain how “closed” an iPhone is, but in the end does it really matter? 

I’ve spent the last two months or so working on websites for various endeavors  and I’ve gotten to REALLY enjoy CakePHP.  So much so that dare I say that web development is now fun again!  In the olden days (about 5-6 years ago) we had to code up our own libraries to connect your website to MySQL and create queries, headers, etc.  With a good PHP framework, we can now spend more time coding and less time dealing with the intricacies of just getting your DB connections working (ie: more fun coding the working pieces vs the supporting pieces).

I’ve evaluated both CakePHP and Symfony and I liked both for various reasons.  I have found that the Symfony framework is just overly complicated when building a website that isn’t necessarily enterprise level from the get go.  To add insult to the injury, the framework isn’t thoroughly documented.  I found it extremely difficult to find something as basic as options for methods and the associated values that the options can contain.  Asking the forums just got overly redundant and thus required me to manually go through the framework code.  This isn’t too bad, but just took way too much time.  Isn’t time saving the reason why I chose a framework?

CakePHP on the other hand is very well documented.  In fact, the documentation is so good that you can get up and running in a few hours.  While the ORM isn’t as detailed as Symfony, I didn’t have to learn a whole new language in order to create simple queries.  CakePHP, to me just, just fits the PHP mindset better.  If you understand the MVC model and PHP, you probably can get the ball rolling in CakePHP within the hour.

Having said that, the testing utility in Symfony is amazing and the fact that you can develop offline using Symfony by using the built in models works really nicely too.  CakePHP is still faster for me for developing and creating databases and tables in MySQL using PHPMyAdmin is much more intuitive than hand coding everything in Symfony using Doctrine.

Apparently the early gripes with CakePHP were about HABTM tables, but those are now fixed in at least CakePHP 1.3.  The documentation in CakePHP as well as the support community on IRC is much more complete than Symfony.  This leads to a much faster development time and less downtime when you are stuck for an answer.

Overall CakePHP 1.3 is the clear winner in my book for development of the majority of the websites out there.  If you need enterprise level code Symfony might work for you, but I’m fairly certain the majority of the developers will develop from scratch to accomplish complete security and thorough code auditing.