tuesdayDeveloper;

Google intends to launch a surprise attack on all grocery stores, kitchen pantries, and child lunch boxes in an effort to seise control of every last Twinkie in the world. The purpose? Because the snack food helps Google’s developers concentrate and because Hostess (the maker of Twinkies) recently announced they’re filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy; Google has no choice if they are to remain on top.

“We must have all Twinkies, help us think,” said one Twinkie-deprived Google team member with glossy eyes and an inability to concentrate.

Of course Google hasn’t come out and announced this to the world. The Twinkie plot is cleverly hidden within its new simplified privacy policy.

Of course, you won’t find anything if you search for the words Twinkie, Hostess, or even

Enriched Bleached Wheat Flour [Flour, Reduced Iron, B Vitamins (Niacin, Thiamine Mononitrate (B1), Riboflavin (B2), Folic Acid)], Corn Syrup, Sugar, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Water, Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable and/or Animal Shortening (Soybean, Cottonseed and/or Canola Oil, Beef Fat), Whole Eggs, Dextrose. Contains 2% or Less of: Modified Corn Starch, Glucose, Leavenings (Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Baking Soda, Monocalcium Phosphate), Sweet Dairy Whey, Soy Protein Isolate, Calcium and Sodium Caseinate, Salt, Mono and Diglycerides, Polysorbate 60, Soy Lecithin, Soy Flour, Cornstarch, Cellulose Gum, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Sorbic Acid (to Retain Freshness), Yellow 5, Red 40. (source)

Google lawyers are way to clever, but their’s no doubt about it, Google’s up to something.

Of course Google says that they are simplifying their policies to better serve everyone. Everyone else on the Internet seems to believe that Google wants to control the combined aggregate user information to serve more targeted ads and thus destroy the free world as we know it, but now you know the truth. Think about it though, what is the most simple explanation? It’s obvious that Google isn’t trying to make things simpler for its end use or provide more relevant ads. It’s very clear that Google is trying to take all the Twinkies for themselves in order to lose the trust of its users to get out of the search business and to stop providing revenue generating services to its users because they don’t like money!

The last Google CEO said if user’s don’t trust us, they’ll go somewhere else. That very telling. They want out. And they want Twinkies!

Or maybe…

Maybe when Google is releasing a new privacy policy to make things easier on the user and to provide more relevant ads. Wait a minute, doesn’t everyone do this? Facebook, Pandora, New York Times: they’ve all advertised to me something that wasn’t relevant to the page, but something that I’d recently been researching on the web. Maybe Google is just trying to catch up.

What are your thoughts on Google new Privacy Policy changes? Is Google going to intentionally make a move to scare its users over to Bing and Yahoo (who likely have very similar practices)? What is the world going to do when Twikies are harder to come by?

So I’ve been playing around with creating an offline application. Because I want dynamic data, I needed to figure out how to use a SQLite database. Honestly, I feel quite foolish because I was sure that I was doing everything correctly, following the tutorial (nearly) perfectly (sans “Girls” application, I enjoy being married!).

Despite working at if for several hours nothing I was doing was working. Then I caught it—the typo. Inside of my insert statement I had miss-typed the name of one of the table fields.

No errors. No warnings. No worky.

I guess this is my lesson that with a SQLite database there is no forgiveness. You do it right or you don’t do it. Apparently I just needed a reminder that I’m human.

Google’s Android OS is doing very well, on phones at least, but according to some surveys people would rather have an iPhone. It seems that a lot of people have only joined the Android ranks because it was available on their network and the iPhone wasn’t. This could be a problem for Android since all three of largest mobile phone providers may be offering the iPhone soon since AT&T and Verizon have it already and Sprint may soon join the party.

When it comes to tablets, Android tablet sales are still lagging quite a bit compared to the iPad. There are several possible reasons, some say that iPads are better, perhaps its due to the large number of apps Apple has to offer compare to their competition. No matter what the reason, however, Google has a great OS and it should be doing better than it is.

So what can Google do with a stagnant tablet market and a phone market that may not be so successful in the future? Well, the whole $99 fire sale HP just had could give us one hint. If Android phones and tablets where significantly lower priced than their iOS rivals, that could win over the masses. Of course, Google is subject to the manufacturers choices of hardware and prices, and they don’t control the pricing of the products that hit the market—but the could. Here are two ways that Google can make their platform more successful.

1. Subsidize

The United States Government has subsidized corn production in the US so much that you can find corn byproducts in just about every food you pick up in the grocery store. (Of course this only hurts the farmers and its not good for us either, but that is beside the point of this article.) Why can’t Google subsidize its products?

What if Google started paying manufacturers to produce the hardware of systems running a certified version of Google Android. This would have some big advantages. First, it would limit the customization that OEMs can do to the system and provide a more seamless experience for users moving from one device to another (something I know Google wants). Second, the price savings would go to the customers, meaning that more Androids will be running around than ever before because people love inexpensive toys. (The OEMs wouldn’t suffer like farmers do with corn production, since there isn’t really a middle-man.) Third, it may even bring some Android OEMs back into the fold of consistent experience (Amazon has completely overhauled Android, changing the UI and removing the marketplace…that’s not good for Google.)

If Google subsidized the purchase of certain types of hardware for systems that had the Android Marketplace, Google as the default search engine, and respectable hardware, customers would get a great deal and would flock to Android the way people flocked to the HP TouchPad (even though the thing has no perceivable future).

2. Make the Marketplace More Enticing

There are a couple things Google really needs to with their Marketplace, including making discovery easier, but I’m going to focus on something else.

Amazon has the right idea of offering a free app everyday. When I do finally get my own Android device, I will surely install Amazon’s App Store, simply so I can reap the benefits. If Google did this, or perhaps a “buy ten paid apps get the next one free” kind of deal, the Marketplace would surly be more successful attracting more developers. Google doesn’t really care if they make money on their Marketplace, they really just want people to make more Google searches, so this Marketplace strategy is really intended to attract more users to attract more developers to get higher app numbers to attract more users (who will then make more Google searches when they use their device).

Conclusion

Google is certainly one of the big mobile OS powers, but the game is still new enough that things can change quickly. Google better start acting with some strategy before, say Microsoft, gets ahold of these ideas and makes their platform more enticing for the users.

What ideas do you have to make the Android platform better?

The other day I was talking to one of my coworkers who asked me an interesting question. He wanted to know if there was any significant improvement, when using jQuery, to assigning a jQuery selector to a variable when you repeatedly are referencing the same object. Is there much overhead when jQuery instantiates the variable?

Neither he nor I doubted that there was some overhead, but we both wanted to have a more clear picture so I devised the following test:

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<script type="text/javascript">
	var tests = 100000;
	$(document).ready(function(){
		var date1a = new Date();
		edit1();
		var date1b = new Date();
		var date2a = new Date();
		edit2();
		var date2b = new Date();
		$('#one').html(date1b-date1a + " ms");
		$('#two').html(date2b-date2a + " ms");
	});
	function edit1(){
		for(var i = 0; i < tests; i++){
			$('#one').html(i);
		}
	}
	function edit2(){
		var two = $('#two');
		for(var i = 0; i < tests; i++){
			two.html(i);
		}
	}
</script>

And:

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<div id="main">This is a test page.</div>
<div id="one">Test 1</div>
<div id="two">Test 2</div>

The results were pretty consistent as follows:

     This is a test page.
     3007 ms
     2497 ms

So the most recent Windows 8 preview is out:

Initially my thoughts are pretty generous. The new Windows 8 stuff looks like a well thought out system, but then they also show a full version of Windows desktop running on this touch screen laptop.

While I wonder about how well a system like this would do (partially built for keyboard and mouse but crammed into a tablet, but also a system obviously built for touch expanded to a desktop) my real questions go deeper than the UI.

Tablets (at least all of the ones that I know of that aren’t just convertible laptops) all use solid state storage. This is good for several reasons. First, it keeps a device small and light. Second, it makes devices faster than a slow rotating harddrive based system would be. Solid state storage is ideal for tablets, but it also has its drawbacks.

At the moment, solid state storage is expensive. At tigerdirect.com, solid state harddrives with 120 GB run around $300, if you search for regular harddrives, your first results show 2TB for a mear $80. That’s 16 times the storage for about 25% of the cost!

The cost of solid state drives is typically the reason you only see tablets with 16 – 64GB. Of course solid state harddrives will come down in cost eventually, today they are only affordable by the masses with less capacity.

So coming back to a Windows 8 tablet, how much storage will just the operating system take? If you take Windows 7 and add more onto it for the touch stuff you’re looking at a significant chunk of storage. My Windows 7 VM (with only a couple added programs) takes up more than 20GB of storage.

So without any files, I’d expect Windows 8 to take up the same amount of storage. Not including any programs. Not including huge music/video collections.

One of the reasons iPad has been successful is because it is so affordable, its base model starts out with 16GB. Most of that storage is free when you get the device. For Windows to provide the same amount of free space on a Windows 8 machine they would have to have at least 32GB. Of course that is still in competition with iPad and its upper models, but it also means that Windows tablets can’t compete with the lower models on price.

Perhaps I’m blowing this out of proportion. Maybe an OEM will make an inexpensive model with lots of storage and still beat Apple on its pricing. What do you think?