Short Takes: October 1, 2010
By SD Times Editorial Board
October 1, 2010 —
(Page 1 of 3)
Appraising those app stores
With the announcement of Intel's AppUp, it would seem that truly everyone has their own app store now, even companies that don't actually deal with consumers very often. But Intel is not the first company to get on the bandwagon, not by a long shot.
It all began with Apple, as it usually does when there is a UI paradigm shift in the marketplace. The iPhone app store fixed everything that sucked about smartphones. Remember when you got your first BlackBerry? Or Palm Pilot? Remember how difficult it was to find good applications for those devices? And when you got them, you had to download them to a PC then upload them to the device.
Fortunately, that's all part of the past, unless you still use a BlackBerry, in which case finding their AppWorld store is half the battle. Today, we have the Android store, Google's Web applications store, the Palm app store, the Java app store, and a dozen other also-rans on the Web. It's getting a bit out of control, really.
I'm actually happy to see the rise of app stores. For years, finding good software has been a hunting-and-pecking affair, often driven by word of mouth. Rarely was it possible to find a comprehensive list of software that wasn't out of date or horribly skewed toward the proclivities of one software maker.
In Windows, this is an even keener problem: Users are expected to find applications in the wild, and then to install these apps themselves. Sure, that's no problem for you and me, but for the average inexperienced user, that's a difficult process. Never mind the fact that this also raises the chances of someone downloading virus-ridden software, or loading an app that will never go away and constantly pesters the user to register.
Of course, us Linux users have known and used app stores for years. We just call them repositories. — Alex Handy
Jobs report
The U.S. high-tech industry added 32,000 jobs between January and June of 2010, a 0.5% gain, according to a report released by TechAmerica Foundation, a non-profit organization that researches the U.S. technology industry.
Related Search Term(s): Apple, mobile development
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