Posts by Martin 72

I've just started using mflow which seems to be a pretty good (free, ad-free) alternative to Spotify, but I know it is only a matter of time before it goes the way of all those who came before and erects paywalls all over the place.

I've always thought that it might be a good idea for Amazon to do something like this. Major clout with content providers so it has a better chance of negotiating a good price, an existing MP3 store that they can link in to, the IT infrastructure to deal with the load, Amazon clouddrive tie in for those who want their purchases/music collections available anywhere.

The trade off: Amazon would also get to track what you listen to so that it can better target its advertising.

More like: 'If Apple's announcement wasn't the iPhone 5, then what's the rush?'. Maybe they don't have every little detail sorted and now feel like they've got time to polish it some more.

Learn ye some Java

I can't imagine why anybody would want to pay for Mono for Android.

From what I understand from the FAQ (http://mono-android.net/FAQ), Mono for Android is sufficiently cut down from standard Mono/C# that you can't just drop your WP7 or existing desktop mono application in to it, you'll have to do at least some extra work.

It doesn't support moonlight/silverlight.

It doesn't have a UI builder so you'll need to construct your interface using a separate application.

It doesn't support sharing a UI with a MonoTouch project.

It doesn't expose all of the functionality that is exposed through Dalvik, so you will probably end up needing to learn something about the Android Java API at some point, and when you use those Java features you'll incur an overhead, because your call has to transition from the Mono VM in to Dalvik and back again.

Considering that Eclipse and the ADT are free, and that the Java syntax is so close to its clone C#, unless you really love LINQ, there is zero reason why MonoDroid would make any sense in the long run.

Do yourself a favour and learn how to program for the platform the way its makers intended.

Honeycomb looks pretty, the Marketplace still sucks

Dear Google,

I can't believe you are the company behind this godforsaken marketplace application.

Why, after all this time, is it not possible for me to sort applications by a way of my choosing? Virtually every other e-commerce interface allows me to sort by: Popularity (number of downloads); rating; name (A-Z); and price.

And another thing: Why does the relevance of the search results suck so much? Why does searching for 'Barcode Scanner' yeild 'Calorie Counter - MyFitnessPal' with 9,505 ratings as the second search result, whereas the app called 'Barcode Scanner' turns up at number 5 with 162,191 ratings?

I thought this might just be a limitation of the phone app, but you carry this awful lack of functionality over to the web? I thought you guys were all about the web?

Don't get me wrong, I'm really happy with Android overall but finding apps for it without resorting to third party app stores/recommendations sucks.