Coda 2 and DietCoda

One of my favorite software publishers for the Mac, Panic, is shipping two apps on May 24th.  Coda2, a major update to their Mac OS web developer IDE.  And DietCoda, a web developer application for iOS.

Given my experience with Panic’s other software, I can pretty much guaranty that ill be getting both of these this thursday.

If you aren’t using The Verge for a source of tech news and reviews you are sorely missing out.  Do yourself a favor and take a look at the depth of information available.

And their video show On The Verge is always on the top of my must watch list.

The folks at Web Designer Wall have posted a great tutorial on mobile navigation design.  I highly recommend anyone working on a mobile website to take a look.

One of the common challenges when designing responsive design for mobile is the navigation menu. If the site has many sections or pages, it gets challenging to squeeze all the items into a small mobile resolution. The navigation most likely ends up running into multiple lines or the buttons stacking on top each other. So I’m going to review some of the design solution and provide a quick tutorial on how to create a mobile navigation with jQuery.

Not too long ago, AT&T requested Apple to update the data label in the status bar of the iPhone 4S to read “4G”.  This of course started a flurry of debate over whether or not Apple should have allowed such a name change when no data speed change actually occurred. 

What AT&T’s marketing team was trying to get at it was that their 3G speeds are typically much faster than that of their competitors.  And that’s not just AT&T’s claim.  Various technology groups over the past few years have done their own testing and found that AT&T’s claim holds up.  Most of the third party testing found that on average the 3G speeds on AT&T are almost twice as fast.

Enter LTE…

Current LTE speeds on any carrier launching the service are found to be 3 to 4 times the speed of AT&T’s 3G if not even faster than that. First adopters in certain regions are finding the speeds to be upwards of 40Mbps!  And since LTE isn’t as prevelant as 3G I start to wonder what would one think of their data experience when they leave an LTE area and enter a 3G area.  Would the speed difference between AT&T’s 3G (2-3Mbps) and Verizons (500kbps - 1Mbps) be even noticeable after you have been use to having 10+ times that speed?

I have been debating this on a personal shopping level ever since the new iPad was released with an LTE radio. It now seems a bit more likely that Apple will be putting the same radio into the next iPhone when that presumably debuts later this year.  And as a long time customer of AT&T (since I live in one of the few good service areas) I am for the first time tempted to switch to Verizon since they are currently the only LTE carrier in the area.

I think it all comes down to coverage area and percentages.  Over the next week I am hoping to get a test unit from Verizon to do some LTE coverage testing.  If I am under LTE coverage for 90% or more of my daily use I think it will be worth it.

I’m in the process of cleaning up the Heroic Pixel design with a simplified user interface and cleaner graphics.  Look for major updates over the coming weeks.

I have always found it interesting how certain scenarios can appear so appealing on paper and yet feel like so much less in reality.  Perhaps more interesting is the number of people that can be sold on an idea without using it in the real world first.

We are living in a very technology rich time where thanks to the recent introducitons of music subscriptions and streaming services have made it possible to have every song ever produced at your fingertips nearly anywhere you are.

Sort of…

I have been trying out Google Music beta lately along with several other competing services. And while the prospect of having thousands upon thousands of songs available to me anywhere seems fantastic.  The reality hasn’t matched up.

And to be totally fair, the problems that plague the idea of streaming all of your music over the internet are not the fault of those offering the services.

The first problem is bandwidth, in that usually there isn’t enough even in the best locations.  I found that even in areas where I had four or five bars of 3G service with download speeds of 1mbps and up that I would experience long delays before songs buffered enough to start playing and several times experienced interruptions in songs as downloads fell behind.  And it makes sense when you think about the fact that an average song at descent bit rate will be anywhere between 5 to 10 megabytes.  Which all of which needs to be downloaded at a rate that will complete in less than 3 minutes.  Ideally this problem will be solved as 4G becomes more prevelent.

Which leads me to my next problem location, in that usually you aren’t in an ideal one for streaming music.  Most of the locations I am at during my day do not have 5 bars of 3G coverage at which point streaming music becomes less of slight delay and occasional annoyance and more of a major pain if not a complete impossibility. Thankfully most streaming services offer a way for you download some songs to your device when you anticipate being in a low or no signal area.  But you might be suprised how often you are in an area with low signal that you didn’t plan for.

And last but not least there is the battery, in that you won’t have much of it left after streaming everything over 3G.  Until battery technology improves dramatically you won’t be able to truly enjoy streaming music without running out of battery before the end of the day.  On the days I didn’t stream a lot I would make it to the end of the day fine on my iPhone 4.  However on days I streamed all day long I quickly found myself searching for a charger.  And this problem will only grow worse with current interations of 4G which have said to drain battery life twice as fast as 3G in some cases.

I’m still excited about the idea that I won’t need to have a massive capacity device in my pocket to get all the content I want.  But unless we start carrying around car batteries and have 4G in every corner of the country its not as an ideal solution as it sounds like on paper.