

Issues with smartphone apps - brkumar
http://www.thingsthatscale.com/2010/03/10-issues-with-smartphone-apps/

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Auzy
I'm not really sure about this. Sound's like the suggestions I agree with, is
being aimed for anyway.

3) "Applications work unless they don’t." Not just a smartphone thing! And it
isn't done on purpose. The OS shouldn't just magically skip over conditions
which cause crashes normally (that could create infinite loops for instance).
Naturally, he hasn't actually explained how this would be possible. Maybe he
knows a magic spell that will work?

4) "The application development environments don’t leverage any of the new
ideas in software engineering". Like Keltex says, unit testing is included.
And whilst I'm unsure about the iphone SDK (haven't used that), I see plenty
happening in the android toolkit which isn't exactly archaic (and I'm only 3rd
chapter in the book).

I wouldn't put Ruby on Rails on a pedestal anyway. There isn't a single
published book out there that I could find where the 1st example provided
wasn't broken (I tried at least 3 of them ). All used depreciated API's, or
relied on a much older version of the eclipse addon. So clearly the Ruby
developers have a thing to learn about stabilising their API.

6) "Password sprawl." Welcome to OpenID. Maybe he should avoid all sites which
don't use it? The good thing is that we wont see him on hacker news because it
doesn't support it. I'd love to hear his solutions for this. Granted OpenID
isn't the most secure technology in the world, I don't see him suggesting any
ways to make it work better.

It's worth noting that the author is an eBay employee too. That's semi-
hypocritical, considering that Paypal, skype or ebay (all the same company)
don't use OpenID. In fact, of all the large companies out there, they are the
ONLY one without even a company-wide means of centralised login (yup, even
Yahoo has a single sign in mechanism for their services).

Sorry, but this article seems to be living in fairy land. I'm not saying his
wrong, but he doesn't provide any worthwhile solutions or evidence that his
suggestions can be done anyway. I think I can simplify them "don't crash", "be
totally secure", "magically centralise all your logins", "make coding
different, and uber easy". Yes, all that stuff would be nice in theory. But if
he trusted his ideas (like the store), he'd go implement them.

OH WAIT! Yes, that's right, its rumored eBay (his employer) wants to get into
the mobile application sales business. And yes, I guess providing featured
applications would make sense to them then. I'm guessing the implementation
he's proposing is to offer the market provider slightly more profit, for the
opportunity to be featured? Yeah.. Funny that..

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keltex
"Stale coding practices. The application development environments don’t
leverage any of the new ideas in software engineering, like Ruby on Rails with
its built-in unit/functional testing;"

Well since Ruby on Rails is a web application stack I'm not sure how this
applies. And both the Android and iPhone SDKs include unit testing...

~~~
jcromartie
iPhone apps have unit testing support with OCUnit, however it is a huge pain
in the butt and practically nobody does it (even people that _want_ to unit
test)... so there is kind of a point there.

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Groxx
Odd that fully 1/2 of those relate directly to the operating system, not any
apps. Not to say I'm defending that half, just that this list has little to do
with apps and much more to do with OS / infrastructure.

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njharman
What struck me is how much this list applies to web/online apps, even more so.

1\. IE comes to mind 2\. sub radio for bandwidth 3\. yep 4\. not so much 5\.
uh huh 6-8. security as afterthought 9-10. web's a wilderness

