Life by bits & numbers
An interesting infographic from the mobile advertising provider and mediation company – InnerActive was produced encompassing the timeline between the last year’s MWC in Barcelona and this year’s MWC.
A compilation of mobile UI resources:
Enjoy! 
Just got an email from RIM with news and such and noticed the link to the OS center they run on their website to help developers choose which BB OS to target. After looking at the stats, I decided to make a comparison and see how the official stats from RIM differ from what I see within my applications.
Here’s the distribution published by RIM (dated March 3-d) I am not sure what they compiled into the March 3-d, i.e. what the timestamp of March 3-d actually means. Was it based on OS tracked for March 3-d, was it for last month, week or such. I couldn’t find that information.
And below is the distribution I have compiled from the data for the month of April 2011 (a month worth of data)
The breakdown by OS version is not identical but the picture is pretty much similar, except that my chart is much nicer I’ve got 6.1 devices (hmmm!) and the 5.0 OS section is a bit larger for my statistics than it is for the official statistics. But again, the official statistics are pretty much 2 month old now and actually since the rest of the sections pretty much coincide with the official statistics, I would assume that the number of OS 5.0 just got larger in these 2 month; which by itself is great news for BB developers. Hooray to that and I will try to keep up with statistics to see how the distribution shifts, maybe another post in couple month or when something interesting happens. Let me know in the comments if you’d like to see something like that in the future and whether it was useful for you.
I wrote yesterday about my (mostly) negative experience working with these companies, but some of you might give it a try and maybe your results will be much better or maybe things have actually improved lately. In any case, the code here should get you up to speed covering most of the dirty work of working with these companies’ APIs.
I will post 4 classes here:
If you are using this code, please give an attribution when applicable with a link to this post.
I needed recently to basically remove my app installation from the Windows Phone 7 emulator. I could not find how you can remove the app from the emulator, but I found a way to reset and force the Windows Phone 7 emulator to cold boot.
You can clear the windows phone emulator state, by deleting the saved state file in:
%ProgramData%\Microsoft\XDE\*.dess
You can just hit the windows key on your keyboard and paste this “%ProgramData%\Microsoft\XDE\” and you will be taken to the right location.
Delete the *.dess files. This will force the emulator to reset and run the cold boot sequence.
Too bad, it’s not possible to do simulator reset right from the development tools. Here’s hoping that Windows Phone Tools development team will improve that situation in the future releases.
Please share your thought in comments.
BlackBerry Developer conference is starting tomorrow. I have arrived to San Francisco at noon today and just had a relaxing day browsing the sity, visiting the beautiful Chinatown and the Coit Tower from where you can see pretty much the whole city. It’s my second time in San Francisco, first time being here about 1.5 years ago for the Google I/O 2009 (so sorry had to miss it this year…). San Francisco is an interesting city and I like it, but it is a little dirty for my snobby Bostonian taste.
Anyhow, this is not about the city. BBDevCon 2010 is tomorrow and I am expecting it to be a turnkey for me, it was a long time of love and hate relation between me and BlackBerry. The platform is not evolving (yeah yeah, BB OS 6 – whatever… this is so 3 years ago) and in the super fast paced space as mobile, standing still is actually equals to moving back as everyone is innovating with the speed of light.
I will be looking for cues as to whether RIM will be able to at least maintain its current user base and improve his ways in treating smaller indie developers.
There have been rummors about BB Tablet – BlackPad, to be announced during the BB DevCon 2010. I am personally very skeptical about it, but we will see. Also – it is almost clear to everyone that RIM will announce it’s advertising API availability to the public – not great news though. They have the worst performing advertising so far, and this is one of the major points for me personally, if there is no promising (I am not even wishing for bright) future on the horizon, BlackBerry will be the last platform to receive any attention on my list.