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greghollandon Poll: Are you using SSDs?

What I'm interested in is the effect of SSDs on compile time, which is the biggest bottleneck to my productivity. In my case, the build time for Java projects in Eclipse. I've read conflicting stories of how SSD affects this. Over here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/499889/ssd-and-programmin...

its mentioned that CPU is by and large the bottleneck but over here:

http://javamoods.blogspot.com/2010/04/hdd-ssd-battle.html

the author mentions that the SSD gives big speedups to compile time.

Anyone has any data to share in regards to this?

greghollandon Why Android devs are losing money, and it’s not due to piracy

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10072682-94.html

quote

"One difference the mobile phone industry might well find appealing: Apple keeps the remaining revenue, but Google gives it to wireless service carriers, minus billing settlement fees."

greghollandon Why Android devs are losing money, and it’s not due to piracy

Google also has a vested interest in keeping as many apps free as possible. Most free apps makes use of Admob (Google) as their primary source of revenue, this means that Google gets a cut of this. But for paid apps, the 30% that gets taken away from your sales goes to the carrier instead and Google does not see a cent of this. Therefore by limiting the number of countries from which developers can publish apps, as well as the countries where paid apps are available, Google is actually boosting their own profits.

I have almost given up on the Android market, Looking forward to MeeGo and Win7mo.

greghollandon How much can you really make developing mobile apps?

First off, congratulations on your success on both the iPhone store and the Android market. As an aspiring app developer for Android, i'm wondering if you are willing to share some specific marketing/sales strategies that lead to your success.

I noticed that for your android app, there is a trial as well as paid version, does the trial drive a lot of traffic to the paid? How are the return rates like on your android app? I heard that a lot of people does the "buy-app, backup with astro file manager, return app , restore app" trick to get freebies.

I also noticed that you have a website for your app, does this help sales at all?

Thanks for your insights

greghollandon Sony Ericsson to introduce Android 3.0 gaming platform & PSP Go-like smartphone

This is good news. However, in order for Android to become a more viable and successful gaming platform, google better make some DRASTIC changes to underlying Dalvik VM in Android 3.0 or provide us developers with better C++ libraries to write games.

Currently, the Garbage Collector in Dalvik is a total piece of shit. When the GC runs, your game can freeze for up to 100-200ms, totally kills the gaming experience. What most developers who code in Java does is to use object pool and manage memory manually, its a huge pain in the butt.

If you are a C++ developer using the NDK, you are in for a world of pain as well, you can't control EGL context from C++, you can't receive events, can't play/mix sound, can't access assets (easily). To do all of these, you are stuck with using a JNI layer, which just decrease performance.

On top of that, current devices with similar hardware specs (1ghz snapdragon, wvga screen) are all fill-rate limited to 30fps.

greghollandon Android Sales Overtake iPhone in the U.S.

In the ideal world, I want everything to be "open" and "free" too. However, there are simply too many spammers/unethical people out there who abuse such a system. Therefore I rather have a high quality app store over one that is filled with spam apps but is "open".

greghollandon Android Sales Overtake iPhone in the U.S.

The problem with piracy on android is how EASY it is to pull it off. On the iPhone, you have to jailbreak your phone, a step which many consumers are weary of doing in fear of bricking their phone, after this, they also have to find a cracked .ipa to download/install. On android, you simply need to buy an app, copy to SD, return it and viola! free app. Based on stats of my paid android app, there are about 3x as many pirated users as users who actually paid for it =(

greghollandon Android Sales Overtake iPhone in the U.S.

I don't think it will change anytime soon.

1, The marketplace sucks compared to the app store in many ways. There are few ways to feature your apps on the marketplace vs apple which has the "what hot", "new and noteworthy", "top paid", "top grossing" categories. In comparison, the android marketplace doesn't.

2, On the apple app store, you are given more promotion room on your app page itself for more descriptive text and screenshots.

3, The android marketplace is FILLED with crap and spam apps, just go to the "whats new" section of your android marketplace and its filled with 95% crap-ware and those ringtone apps. There is no clear way for consumers to find good apps vs these garbage apps. This destroys the user's experience in the marketplace.

4, Related to above, the lack of regulation has fostered a system where comment spamming other apps's page and creating apps that does shady things with user's data is actually more profitable than creating quality apps. see here: http://tinyurl.com/2f3r4g9

5, There is a culture of "free" and "opensource" in the entire Android ecosystem and most apps are released for free or are ad-supported. Google seem to love this since if you use their ad system, they get a cut and therefore they don't seem to have an incentive to push paid apps to have wider availability.

On the other hand, I'm looking forward to what Meego and Win7MO will bring for us developers. I hope they will follow Apple's model of having tighter control over their app stores rather than the mess that the Android marketplace is.

greghollandon Android Sales Overtake iPhone in the U.S.

Unfortunately, the Android Marketplace as well as the SDK still sucks for us developers. Buggy and inconsistent behavior across different devices; Bad performance (MotionEvent anyone?); The lack of paid apps in different countries and the prevalence of spammy crapware apps on the unregulated marketplace. I wonder if google will do anything to address these issues as Android gain a wider audience. Otherwise I can see this as a hindrance to the adoption of Android.

greghollandon AndEngine - Free Android 2D OpenGL Game Engine

Actually the iphone Cocos2D is much further along in development than any of the android engines. Also, if you are referring to this cocos2d port here: http://code.google.com/p/cocos2d-android/

it is a buggy and rather useless port due to the liberal use of temporary object allocations which totally chokes the garbage collector on dalvik

greghollandon AndEngine - Free Android 2D OpenGL Game Engine

The problem with rokon (when i looked at it) is that it runs both the rendering and game logic on one thread, which is not optimal for performance. AndEngine takes this a step further by running it on 2 threads and only locking them into sync during the geometry submission phase of the rendering pipeline. By doing this, you save about 10-12ms per frame to do your game logic while an eglBufferSwap is happening (on my Mytouch3g), which in some cases can cause a big speedup for your game.