Blog about the Xojo programming language and IDE
The issue of mobile ads is of particular interest to me as I am forced to think of mobile ads from three different perspectives. First, as a developer since Xojo can be used to create iOS apps; then as an entrepreneur because we advertise Xojo via mobile ads; but also as a personal consumer of mobile ads.
I think I’m on firm ground when I say that mobile ads are universally hated. We hate them more that TV commercials and certainly more than magazine ads. Why is this?
Comments closedWhen I was a kid, computers were responsible for almost nothing, at least in my daily life. Big companies used computers to run their accounting departments and NASA used them for analysis, but most peoples’ daily lives were unaffected by the existence of computers.
Comments closedBeing that it’s Left Handers Day and I am left-handed, I thought I’d share some interesting facts about being left-handed and how it relates to Xojo, Inc.
At Xojo, the percentage of left-handed people has always been high. Currently 33% of our staff is left-handed. I can’t explain why that is. I don’t think we have a bias towards lefties. On the other hand, my brother who is a lawyer specializing in employment law, will tell you handedness is not a protected class in the US, so we could discriminate if we wanted to do so. Nah, you righties are interesting and fun to watch. 🙂
Comments closedJust about everyone I know uses mainly one OS, for me, that’s OS X. But because Xojo is a cross-platform development tool, I also use Windows and Linux. When Windows 10 was announced, I was curious as to how well it would work for me as a causal Windows user.
Comments closedLast October, I wrote a blog post about how vulnerable Google is in its search business (the overwhelming source of its revenue). I realized this vulnerability after discovering that another search engine, DuckDuckGo, was started for less than $10 million, has equivalent search results, a clean looking interface and a low cost of switching. I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for over 8 months now, I didn’t make the switch from Google for privacy reasons, I simply liked the cleaner interface, but I’ll be honest and say that the privacy it offers is something I appreciate. Apparently, I’m among a growing group of savvy searchers.
In the ideal world when you do something, you do it right the first time. In the real world, we learn more each day and what seemed right yesterday, a month ago or a few years ago, may no longer be right today. Xojo has been around for a long time now and in all that time we have learned a thing or two. One of the things we have learned is how to deal with errors.
In 1905, Albert Einstein published a paper revealing his theory of Special Relativity to the world. The theory says that not only do mass and energy have an equivalence (an idea that was not new) but that they have a specific equivalence expressed in the equation E=mc2. That equation basically says that the faster you go, the more energy you need to continue to accelerate. The unfortunate consequence of this is that you can’t reach the speed of light because at that point, your mass would be infinite which is of course, impossible.
It occurred to me recently that this concept applies to more than just the cost of going acceleration. For example, the larger a company gets in terms of just about any way a company is measured (revenue, profit, employees, customers, etc.), the harder it is to continue growing at that same rate. It isn’t that big companies don’t grow, they of course do, but they don’t grow a lot compared to smaller companies. It’s not difficult to grow from $100,000 to $1 million in sales compared to growing from $1 million to $100 million.
Comments closedWhile the iOS App Store is a great solution for commercial software, not all iOS apps are for public use. If you are building an app just for use inside your company, you won’t want to go through Apple’s app review process (which can take weeks) nor make your app available to the general public. How do you quickly and easily deploy an iOS app just for use by others in your organization?
Comments closedGoogle is by far the most popular search engine in the world with 71% of the market. While Google does many things, they make over 90% of their revenue from ads. In terms of revenue, that means that Google is a one-trick pony. If users switched en mass to another search engine, could Google’s ad revenue quickly dry up?
Comments closedIn the mobile development world it’s common to support many devices, and therefore many screen sizes. Android devices come in a huge variety of sizes as do iPhones and iPads. Desktops and laptop sizes vary; but mobile is where you really notice the variety because they are so radically different.
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