Tag Archives: Tablet

Business, Technology

Mobile Memory Management Advantage: Multithreading in Android verse Apple iOS

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I walked into an electronics store today in Athens where they proudly displayed the latest Mobile technology like the iPads (iOS), Android and Windows OS tablets, and as you enter the store, I believe roughly in that order. However they had iOS in front of the store, but MSFT translation terminals for inventory, transaction execution, etc., which is interesting politics, in itself.

Anyway, as I was leaving the store, collecting my US power converter, I noticed something I’ve seen dozens of times before especially in previous iOS versions, but the latest iOS still has its multithreading implementation with applications exiting to the main menu, but not quitting, therefore leaving a memory footprint, and the application at the very least, is in a low memory, idle CPU, and at the most, a potential for issues with consumption of the resources mentioned.  I’d suspect the application is still running in memory for notifications.

To the contrary, in the Android OS, you will typically have a quit application menu option; however, I don’t remember how they perform the notification process, think it runs as a separate thread, as a service, not Y application, which one may argue may take up more memory.  However not all applications are designed to provide notifications to the user, therefore not a one to one correlation of Android application to a service.  Apple iOS forces a memory footprint regardless. Inefficient resource management on a relatively resource constrained device.

Business, Technology

Microsoft Surface, MacBook Pro, the MagSafe 2 Power Port, & Licensing

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I checked out the Microsoft Surface in the Microsoft Store, and the new Microsoft Operating System is leaps and bounds beyond Windows 7, on par with the intuitiveness of Apple.  I recently purchased a MacBook Pro to replace my daughter’s old hand me down MacBook I had from January 2009.  It is awesome, I wanted another white one, but I am ok with the silver one as well.  Still the Apple OS is amazingly intuitive, and in many cases my 12 year old runs rings around me with knowing her Mac OS.  It’s the first time something like that happened.  I’ve been programming since I was 8 in original basic, and had a BBS when I was 12, program in 9+ computer languages, but my 9 year old put me in my place. It was a bit of a humbling experience, but I gave her a computer when she was 3, and she was using it like a champ then, so I should be proud, and am.  For my other daughter, she is a PC girl, nine years old, my little blond, my first is a brunette, and my son now is just over 1 1/2 another blond, my luck.  Tough guy too so far.  Anyway, We went into the Windows store and Eric, the sales representative, was very knowedgable about the OS.  I am a flurry with questions but tried to guide my nine year old, and shut my mouth, after all, it will be her PC/Tablet, with the cute little Keyboard.  I was initially worried about the physical design with respect to the keyboard, popping on and off, thought they were using some kind of classic interlink, cartridge like, locking mechanism, but the sales representative said they were using a magnetic locking mechanism.  So, slowly in my mind I thought about the power of the magnetics, interference with the display, electronics, and the half life of a weak magnetic, and came to the conclusion, if Apple could do it with their powering mechanism, although small, same physics should apply.  Further into the sales presentation, he showed me each of the ports, and wouldn’t you know it, powering the Surface Tablet also uses a similar technology of magnetics, same as the Apple, so after I was completely sold on getting my youngest daughter a Surface Tablet, despite small evolutionary, yet, I am sure, with progression, they would develop the obvious small features I would like to see, I was again, enamored with Microsoft, and that has not happened in a long time.  I’m already trying to pitch to my wife all the angles how to spend the money for the device.  Office is included in the Surface RT Tablet, so that’s a ~300 USD savings right there, I say to the guy, as I am trying out my own pitch to the wife.  Already lowers the price of the device, so I go home, and start thinking, I always knew there was some kind of Gentleman’s agreement between MSFT and Apple, and even saw the presence of that in an article.

Here was the bit, with all the lawsuits, why is Apple not suing Microsoft over the “MagSafe 2 Power Port” magnetic power outlet, from their specification? They must be either licensing the technology from Apple, right?  If not, there must be a major deviation in the specification of the port, although it clearly looks similar.  Anyway, it was just something to think about, because if Apple is not suing Microsoft, they are not officially licensing the port specification, and the magnetic powering specification is similar enough, then that seems to be a huge double standard between Apple and Samsung.  Thoughts?  Interestingly, the Windows Surface RT Specifications don’t even mention the power port as a feature where as Apple does highlight this feature, great feature by the way.

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Business, Technology

Tablet Developers Make Business Intelligence Tools using Google as a Data Warehouse: Completing with Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft SQL Server

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And, he shoots, and scores.  I called it, sort of.  Google came out of the closet today as a data warehouse vendor, at least they need a community of developers to connect the dots to help build an amazing Business Intelligence suite.

Google came out with a Google Docs API today, which using languages from Objective-C (iOS), C#, to Java so you can use Google as your Data Warehouse for any size business. All you need to do is write an ETL program which uploads and downloads tables from your local database to Google Docs, and you create your own Business Intelligence User Interface for the creation and viewing of Charts & Graphs.  It looks like they’ve changed strategies, or this was the plan all along.

Initially I thought that Google Fusion was going to be the table editing tool to manipulate your data that was transferred from your transactional database using the Google Docs API.  Today they released a Google Docs API and developers can create their own ETL drivers and a Business Intelligence User Interface that can run on any platform from an Android Tablet, iPad, or Windows Tablet.

A few days ago, I wrote the article, which looked like they were going to use a tool called Google Fusion, which was in Beta at the time to manipulate tabular data, and eventually extend it to create common BI components, such as graphs, charts, edit tables, etc.

A few gotchas: Google Docs on Apple iPad is version 1.1.1 released 9/28/12, so we are talking very early days, and the Google Docs API was released today.   I would imagine since you can also use C#, someone can make a Windows application on the desktop to manipulate the data tables, create and view graphs, so a Windows Tablet can be used.  The API also has Java compatibility, so from any Unix box, or any platform, Java is write once, run anywhere, wherever your transitional database lives, a developer is able to write a driver to transfer the data to Google Docs dynamically, and then use Google Docs API for Business Intelligence.  You can even write an ETL driver which all it does is rapidly transfer data, like an ODBC, or JDBC driver and use any business intelligence tools you have on your desktop, or a nightly ETL.  However, I can see developers creating business intelligence tools on Android, iPad, or Windows tables to modify tables, create and view charts, etc., using custom BI tool sets and their data warehouse now becomes Google Docs.

Please reference an article I wrote a few days back, “Google is Going to be the Next Public and Private Data Warehouse“.

At that time, Google Fusion was marked as Beta on 10/13/2012.  Google has since stripped off the word Beta, but doesn’t matter.  Its even better with the Google API to Google Docs.  Google Fusion could be your starter User Interface, however, if your Android, iOS (Apple iPad), and Windows developers really embrace this API, all of the big database companies like IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft may have their market share eroded to some extent, if not a great extent.

Update 10/19:

Hey Gs (Guys and Gals), I forgot to mention, you can also make your own video or music streaming applications perhaps, using the basic calls of get and receive file other companies are already doing such as AWS, Box, etc. It’s a simple get / send API, so not sure if it’s applicable to ‘streaming’ at this stage, just another storage location in the ‘cloud’, which would be quite boring.  Although thinking of it now, aren’t all the put / send cloud solutions potential data warehouses using ETL and the APIs discussed and published above?  Also, it’s ironic that Google would also be competing with itself, if it was a file share, ‘stream’ videos, and YouTube?