Why Android's UI Is Laggy Compared to iOS and Windows Phone | Daring Fireball

Daring Fireball Linked List: Why Android's UI Is Laggy Compared to iOS and Windows Phone

Interesting technical look at the design of Android’s graphics and event processing by Andrew Munn, trying to explain why it feels so laggy compared to iOS and Windows Phone:

Android UI will never be completely smooth because of the design constraints I discussed at the beginning:

• UI rendering occurs on the main thread of an app
• UI rendering has normal priority

[…] This is the same reason why Windows Mobile 6.5, Blackberry OS, and Symbian have terrible touch screen performance. Like Android, they were not designed to prioritize UI rendering. Since the iPhone’s release, RIM, Microsoft, and Nokia have abandoned their mobile OS’s and started from scratch. Android is the only mobile OS left that existed pre-iPhone.

Juicy Bits | Daring Fireball

Juicy Bits

Fun story by Mike Swanson, on how he left his job as a developer evangelist at Microsoft to be a full-time iOS app developer.

William Gibson on The Setup | Daring Fireball

Daring Fireball Linked List: William Gibson on The Setup

This man has his priorities in order:

Neither hardware nor software excite me very much, after whatever brief (and usually painful) novelty has worn off.
Good interface design is as transparent as possible, because I don’t want to have to think about it. I just want to write, or do whatever else I’m doing, and not have to think about whatever I’m doing it on.

Universe Dented, Grass Underfoot | Daring Fireball

Daring Fireball: Universe Dented, Grass Underfoot

I like to think that in the run-up to his final keynote, Steve made time for a long, peaceful walk. Somewhere beautiful, where there are no footpaths and the grass grows thick. Hand-in-hand with his wife and family, the sun warm on their backs, smiles on their faces, love in their hearts, at peace with their fate.

Daring Fireball: Demoted

Daring Fireball: Demoted

Today’s was a jam-packed keynote. Apple announced a lot of news; there is much to talk and think about. But the key line was when Steve Jobs, describing iCloud replacing iTunes as your digital hub, said, “We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device.”

Daring Fireball Linked List: The Sound of 1,700 Jaws Dropping

Daring Fireball Linked List: The Sound of 1,700 Jaws Dropping

Larry Jordan on Final Cut Pro X:

I can’t think of any other company that could so totally redefine what a non-linear video editor is than Apple. Since the release of Final Cut Pro 1, each version of FCP has contained incremental improvements. This is a complete restatement at every possible level.
As Phil Schiller, senior VP for world-wide marketing for Apple told me after the presentation, “This is a total rethinking of how we tell stories visually.”

Daring Fireball: Cutting That Cord

Daring Fireball: Cutting That Cord

After Apple’s iPad 2 introduction event last month, I ran into Josh Topolsky, and, of course, we talked about what we thought of it. Topolsky made an interesting observation: that the iPad 2 epitomized how Apple seems to be a generation ahead of its competitors on the device side — both hardware and software — but a generation behind on the cloud side.

I’ve been thinking about the iPad in this context ever since, and I think it’s a perfect synopsis of the state of iOS. There will be no tablet this year from any competitor that matches the iPad 2 in terms of elegance, battery life, or build quality. No competing OS will match iOS in terms of on-the-device user experience.

Daring Fireball Linked List: The Gap Theory of UI Design

Daring Fireball Linked List: The Gap Theory of UI Design

Yours truly, speaking at Webstock in New Zealand back in February, taking a tour of the entire history of Apple’s graphical user interfaces, and forming a basic theory about the philosophical difference between the old way (pre-Mac OS X) and new way.

Success, and Farming vs. Mining

I saw this on Daring Fireball and it is definitely worth a read:

Call Me Fishmeal.: Success, and Farming vs. Mining

The problem with mining in the software business is that it doesn’t work. It creates broken, useless companies.