WhoIsKevin

I’ve been thinking about this post for some time and I finally decided I should go ahead and try to express my frustration with current application development.

The root of the problem is that currently the applications that are given the most press and the most “excitement” are useless. We are at a time when there is computing power literally in the hands of users that until now was unprecedented. Yet what are we developing on these new platforms like the iPhone, Blackberry, and G1? Well a quick survey of the popular applications will tell you very quickly that apparently the great achievement of having a “smart” phone is being able to play games. I don’t know about all programmers out there but I’ve never gotten excited about the potential of a game. After all it doesn’t save a company money or make a user more productive or increase safety or anything that a really well designed application might be able to accomplish. If it isn’t a game it is a restaurant finder or something that identifies a song on the radio or pretends to pour a beer. Well there is a great advancement to our society a device that pretends to pour a beer! However, one programmer did connect up a phone to a servo motor to pour a beer once you have loaded up the bottle and the empty glass of course.

Similar problems exist with the “run anywhere” platforms like Adobe AIR. So far I haven’t found many real applications written in Adobe AIR. Sure there are little apps you can download that will show you twitter feeds or pull other RSS feeds to your screen but what about a real application. I actually did find one application called Klok for tracking time that seems to be an actual application and not another glorified RSS reader. But a quick review of the Adobe AIR marketplace will let you decide for yourself.

And what about the great web applications frameworks that are supposed to allow us to put together great applications on the web? Anything out there with meat to it? Rails, Grails, Django and others all claim to speed our development and to some degree they do but what are we developing? Another friend application so I can communicate useless status to people that I probably don’t hang out with but for some reason need to be my friends. I laugh at social media applications that pull together all my RSS feeds from every useless service like facebook, twitter, linkedin and all my other “essential applications” (I apologize to my friends that have worked on these applications since I know the code does take some time but for the “real” aspect no such apology). I want to see really useful tools that people can use to really do something meaningful like save money on groceries, gas or save on heating costs.

All this useless development leads to a lot of dead ends. It causes rates to go down and makes it so that the average business person has about as much respect for programming as they have for what their kids are doing on their smart phones.

So what is the answer? I have a suggestion. Let’s all start to look beyond games and communicating with our virtual friends. Real programmers can certainly make something useful for these platforms. Let’s try to develop things that really matter? Of course this won’t be easy. First we would like to get paid. Free software is for people without families and bills to pay. So that means real work. Not some weekend of coding that produces another RSS feed reader but real work with a long time line and possibly some real use in the future. If you are in college and considering programming as a career learn more about the real world connections to computers like embedded systems and hardware. Don’t just think you can write the next facebook. Ad supported models are not good business plans. I think the future of application development is going to be in understanding how to use real data like temperature and energy use to then make real changes that can benefit users. If you are thinking about writing another game or “social” application then good luck to you. Personally I think that is the reason we will continue to see hard economic times…we can’t focus on anything beyond a day or two and that leads to games and “social media”. Which by the way tells me we are not in hard enough economic times when people are still paying an extra thirty to forty dollars a month for a data plan that allows them to look up restaurants, compare prices of other things to buy or send email.

A short while back I decided to switch my phone plan to a “MyFavs” plan. I realized that with the majority of my calls going to only a few numbers I could save $10 to $20 a month with unlimited calls to those numbers.
There was a small problem in that my 7100t Blackberry didn’t support the “MyFavs” functionality. So I had to get a new phone. That made the savings have a much longer payoff but I decided to go ahead.
Just before that a friend had asked about good phones on a list I participate in with some past co-workers. I had recommended the Blackberry because it was a solid phone with great battery life and features. Others had recommended the Dash because it supposedly had great features and could connect to wireless. In theory you could not pay for a data plan if you used the wireless but I don’t think that works when you consider that you probably want to check email on your phone without having to find a wireless hotspot.
Despite my own recommendation I decided to try the Dash. Next time I’ll know better than to ignore my own advice. The Dash stinks as a phone. The battery life leaves much to be desired and the features are not that amazing. Before anyone asks I didn’t leave the wireless on. I also had one unexplained issue synching the Dash which required a hard reset of the phone before I could synch it again.
So I’ve ditched the Dash and I’m back to a Blackberry. I forgot how much better the Blackberry is compared to the Dash. I had to get a newer model (the Pearl) but it is the same solid Blackberry functionality that I now know is far superior to the Dash.
Email from multiple accounts automatically shows up in the messages area on the Blackberry (the Dash did not do this automatically). The really nice feature is that on the Blackberry I can delete a message and choose to delete on the handheld only or on the handheld and mailbox. Messages deleted only on the handheld show up in my Outlook inbox later but if deleted on both they are gone. This is a much better way to manage email. On the Dash it didn’t matter if I deleted them or not they would always show up in Outlook.
The Blackberry also has a scheduled on/off functionality that allows me to schedule my phone to turn off and then back on at a set time for weekdays and weekends. This makes the battery life of the Blackberry even better. Even without that feature the Blackberry’s battery life is easily 3 to 4 times longer than the Dash under the same usage.
And the final reason for the Blackberry is that the data plan for the Blackberry is $10 less a month than the same data plan for the Dash.
So the bottom line is I will only recommend the Blackberry. Skip the Dash it is a waste of time.

After some severe and unexplained issues with my T-Mobile Dash I was able to find the hard reset procedure. The manual only lists using the start menu method. Of course that is fine if your device is working but if it isn’t then you can use this method to reset the device to factory default settings.

Master Reset:
With the device powered off, press and hold the 2 soft key buttons (buttons at the top on each side with the dash on them) and then press the power button once and then keep holding the 2 soft key buttons until you get prompt (Black screen with white text). Be sure and hold the two buttons for a second or two after the black screen appears or it will disappear again. Press the Green phone button (send) to start the reset procedure.

After the phone goes through a reset it will prompt you to press confirm to reboot the device and it should be clean at that point.