Rogers has announced they will be launching the first Android based phones in Canada. They will be from HTC.
See the press release
I received an email from Google today saying that it’s now possible to publish free applications in Canada. Still no word on when paid apps will be allowed though.
In theory this should also mean that Rogers or someone is going to introduce Android based phones in Canada soon.
Hopefully soon we will be able to publish our paid applications in the Android Market without having to setup a presence/merchant account in the US.
Trying to lookup some information about Gentoo Linux and I came across Funtoo. It seems this is a fork of Gentoo that is maintained by Daniel Robbins.
Daniel Robbins was the original creator of Gentoo Linux. He did a good job too but some users were not happy and kept pushing him to manage the project more in the “community”. From there, you get the Gentoo council and lots of processes. Now things get masked longer, more software in overlays of varying quality, devs leave because of personality conflicts, and the distro seems a bit stagnant.
I was glad to see Daniel developing again. I emailed him to get more details about Funtoo. Depending on what their goals are, I might switch over.
Today Research in Motion debuted the Blackberry App World. When first heard about there were not many details other than they planned a 80/20 split for revenue with developers (Apple, Google and Microsoft all are doing 70/30).
I see now that you need to use PayPal for consumer purchases and to accept payments. For anyone who’s familar with PayPal that means even more fees to get your money. No wonder split is 80/20.
For development, it says appears to be Java/Eclipse based. Interestingly it seems the requirements say you need Windows. Perhaps their Eclipse plugins are not cross platform?
Also troubling is that you need a different JDE depending on which device(s) you want to target. From RIM:
For example, an application built in BlackBerry JDE 4.1 runs on a BlackBerry smartphones running BlackBerry® Device Software 4.1 and later. It does not run on a BlackBerry smartphones running BlackBerry Device Software 4.0. Thus, when building applications, you should use a BlackBerry JDE version that matches the lowest version of BlackBerry Device Software you want to support.
How do you know which versions are most common in the wild? Should you just assume everyone has the latest version?
Will their users actually buy apps too I wonder. Their biggest customer wins historically has been older people who wanted to get work email on the go. Not quite the kind of person who downloads apps on a whim. The pricing tiers are okay, but interesting you can’t charge $0.99 for anything. It’s either free or $2.99 USD and goes up from there.
Doesn’t look very appealing to me as a developer. We will have to pass on this market. I’m really starting to think RIM is the modern day Nortel.
Saw some good news this morning as WebKit GTK+ released v1.1.3 and along with it comes the first Epiphany release based on that code.
I’ve been waiting for that for a while. I’ll have to try it out soon as I find that Epiphany/Gecko that I’m using now crashes a lot.
Saw over on Engadget that Microsoft has released details about the Windows Marketplace. They want to charge a $99 USD developer fee and another $99 USD for every application you submit.
Like Apple and Google, they are doing the 70/30 split with the developer for revenue. They plan to have the marketplace open for business in Q4 2009.
I don’t have a problem with the developer fee or the 70/30 split. However the $99/app charge just feels nickle & dime. They don’t do this if you are developing for Windows desktop and/or server.
Windows users have a very bad history with piracy. I know more than a few Windows Mobile users who pirate/steal things like TomTom and other 3rd party apps. I wonder how piracy will play out in the new marketplace.
Recently I got a new notebook, a Dell Latitude E6400. Everything has been working great since I got it.
Once thing I wanted to do was update the BIOS to the latest vendor recommended version. Unlike my old D620, the E6400 BIOS is some kind of Windows/GUI thing and no longer fits on a DOS boot disk (~2.88MB for BIOS update alone). Since I run Gentoo Linux I have no way to update the BIOS.
It was suggested I try using something like BartPE to boot into a Windows Preinstalled Environment. This failed as well because for some reason WinPE just hangs on boot. I’ve tried numerous things to workaround but nothing helped.
Asking Dell about it, they explained the E6400 only supports Windows Vista. That’s just lame. They should be able to provide a Linux-compatible way to flash the BIOS or at the very least provide a WinPE boot disk to do it.
Update:: Found a solution using FreeDOS/syslinux here
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