Monthly Archives: February 2012

Ego-code

Need to know why your favourite phone/car/band is better than everyone else’s? Use this handy code:

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/**********************************************************
Class:      myFavoriteDevice
Desc:       C# pseudo-code to determine if your device/car/band is better than someone else's
disclaimer: coded by hand inside gitHub, may require tweaking to compile.
***********************************************************/
Class myFavoriteDevice() Implements FavoriteThing {
	string[] similarWords = new string[3] {"Ripoff", "Blatent Copy", "Patent Infringment"};
	string[] differentWords1 = new String[4] {"failure", "abomination", "stupid name", "bad idea"};
	string[] differentWords2 = new String[3] {"too many buttons", "not enough buttons", "sharp edges"};
	
	string function compareTo(inferiorDevice)
	try {
		if (this.formFactor == inferiorDevice.formFactor) {
			string similarTerm = similarWords[random.Next(0, similarWords.Length)];
			system.out.print "pfft, the" + inferiorDevice.Name + "is such a " + similarTerm + " of the " this.name;
		} else {
	 		string derogatoryTerm1 = differentWords[random.Next(0, differentWord1.Length)];
			string derogatoryTerm2 = differentWords[random.Next(0, differentWord2.Length)];
			system.out.print "pfft, the" + inferiorDevice.Name + " is such a " + derogatoryTerm1 +". It has " + derogatoryTerm2 + " and nobody will buy it."
	} catch (YouProbablyNeverHeardOfItException as Hipster) {
	}
}
 
TODO: extend FavoriteThing for myFavoriteCar and myFavoriteBand classes
view raw compare.cs This Gist brought to you by GitHub.

Path Reactions and Response.

The outrage over this Path  address book upload issue is interesting. It’s a good discussion to have but in my mind there are other privacy issues we should be way more worried about.

But I didn’t write this post to talk about that issue. I found the response from Path to be quite interesting:

We believe that this type of friend finding & matching is important to the industry and that it is important that users clearly understand it, so we proactively rolled out an opt-in for this on our Android client a few weeks ago and are rolling out the opt-in for this in 2.0.6 of our iOS Client, pending App Store approval.

 

First of all they added the opt-out feature to Android *first*. That’s odd, given that their app was iOS-only for the longest time. Their user base also *must* be  larger there. Is the Android team just more on the ball than the iOS? I doubt that, given they haven’t added the notification control that the iOS version has. Maybe the iOS team was busy working on a bigger ‘yet-to-be-released’ feature. Or are Android users more sensitive to privacy? Definitely a sign that Android has become an equal contender to iOS at least in terms of development  Maybe I’m reading way too much into this, but it does raise a lot of questions.

Second is the ‘pending AppStore approval.’  There *has* to be a better way for development shops like Path, especially with small code-base updates and especially for things of this nature.  The developers at Path aren’t going to add in code that sends costly SMS message to Nigerian short codes. This doesn’t *quite* fall under the ‘expedited emergency security hole’ approval process Apple has but there really needs to be a middle ground. A middle ground for companies that produce one of the top 5 social media apps currently in use.

 

 

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