Prediction

I have a lot of debates with people about the iPhone, and so for posterity’s sake, I thought it prudent to write down my prediction of the iPhone’s future.

What most people don’t care about is that Apple has always been a very closed, very proprietary company.  That is why they lost the first war against IBM.  This time around, however, they hired some marketing geniuses (to whom I give unconditional kudos), which blinded everyone to Apple’s core philosophies.

Microsoft’s Windows Mobile was never much of a platform because, as I’m sure they now realize, they only put a half-assed effort into developing it.  This is what Microsoft always does until they have a reason to do otherwise.

But then comes Android, which I see as a very large threat to Apple’s closed platform.  Sure, it’s been here for a little while, but we’re just now seeing some real phones being built that use it.  At first it will only appeal to geeks and developers because it is so open.  However, it is only a matter of time before the applications surpass those that currently exist on the iPhone.

I say the Android applications will surpass those available on the iPhone because the Android is so much more open to developers.  There are already 10,000+ apps available to it, and this number is bound to grow exponentially as the platform is embraced.  Linux-minded developers aren’t the only target, either, due to the existence of Microsoft’s Silverlight platform that the Mono project has developed.

Because of this, unless Apple makes their platform more open (e.g. removing restrictions from their 3rd party software distribution network), I foresee the software development community embracing the open Android platform, and the Android taking, at very least, a large chunk of Apple’s market share.

Unfortunately for Apple, if history is any indication, Apple has no intention of ever making things more open.

It worked!

Just an FYI, my quest to become #1 search result for the word tombstonable worked!  That was easy.

Just for fun!! Tombstoneable & Tombstonable

Tombstoneable & Tombstonable (which is the real spelling… hmmm) has almost no Google results!

Sooo…. here I come top position!  hahah…

Eclipse Network Connection Error during Update

In my previous post, I mentioned a reboot seemed to fix my network connection error when I tried to update.  However, the problem was actually that the path length to Eclipse was too long.  The folder I copied Eclipse to was this, which resulted in broken updates:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Eclipse-3.3-wpf

However, Eclipse Updates started working when I changed to folder name it to this:

C:\Program Files (x86)\E-3.3-wpf

Weird, huh!?

Eclipse 3.3 (Europa) Vista x64 Render and Connection Errors/Bugs

I am trying to use Eclipse 3.3 (Europa) from Vista x64.  Everything seems to work fine except for the Preferences dialog.  The General/Key tab is missing most of the GUI the first time I view it and is blank every other time.  This means that I couldn’t change any of my keybindings (key bindings).

I tried a million different things to get this to work.  Finally I tried a using a beta 3.3-wpf release of eclipse, which does render the preferences correctly!  Come to find out so does 3.4-wpf.  However, 3.4 without wpf does not render correctly.  So, something with the win32 graphics library is broken.  Eclipse 3.2 didn’t have any problems, so it’s something that was introduced with version 3.3.

However, when I tried to do an update from the newer versions, I got weird connection errors:

Network connection problems encountered during search.

Unable to access “http://sitename“

Error parsing site stream. [Premature end of file.]

Premature end of file.

But from my original 3.3 version, updates worked find.  In this case, a reboot seemed to have fixed something, but I don’t know why.

Microsoft Really Sucks at Describing What Their Software Does

I was just browsing through my MSDN library, and came across several pieces of software that I have never used before.  However, even after reading the descriptions of the products, I still have no idea what they do.  It is sad when a marketing team can’t even explain what their own product does.  Here is an example.

Live Communications Server 2005 provides a standards-based platform, allowing developers the ability to presence-enable existing applications and create next-generation solutions with real-time capabilities.

Oh good.  It was horrible how I couldn’t build next-generation solutions before; thanks for allowing it now!  And I love getting capabilities in real-time!  Saves me the trouble of having to download them.

Smart Client Software Factory and Setup Error 2869

I received this error while trying to install the Smart Client Software Factory. The workarounds are:

1. Disable UAC (in my case) or else install using an administrator command prompt.
2. Close Visual Studio.

Apparently, the install messes with devenv.exe, which is my Visual Studio had to be closed.