Irish Android

I have been a fan of Wolfram for a while. The impresario is Stephen Wolfram a physicist who turned business bloke to sell and develop his maths software. Maths software is not all that hard to come across on the web. A lot of it is free - from Sage for general maths to R for statistical work the field is well populated. Mathematica though seems to be in a different league. I am not working in maths, but did a degree in it while in college. I think I have an idea of what I am talking about and this has pushed me to want a copy of Mathematica. I have not taken the plunge yet as the full version for home use is €175. This is a bit beyond my budget at the moment, but soon I reckon I will take the plunge. Their computation engine is called Wolfram Alpha. Although a bit clunky (return values of the I did not understand that input sort, spring to mind) the idea behind it is solid. There are a lot of sources of data on the web, but standard queries just pass the data back to you. If you ar...

I've been reading The Economist for the last few years and could only watch with a green eye from the Android corner when they released an iPhone/iPad app earlier this year. That was resolved in April when the produced an Android version. There is no arguing with the quality of the journalism in this paper whether you agree with their stance or not. However good content does not necessarily a good app make. Ease of use can make or break an established title's move to mobile. Opening page The Economist app is excellent in this respect. You get the latest version as soon as it is available on Thursday. And its cover is what greets you when you launch the app. You can click on the cover (or that of any of the back issues still on your phone) to get to the table of contents. This is an exact replica of the paper version, albeit it laid out vertically in a nice clean phone format. Clicking on a story brings you to that section of the paper. The layout of the stories is ...

I have always liked entertainment.ie . The sheer volume of stuff that's on and I didn't have a clue about always impresses :) The android app is a bit mixed in design and usability, but it does give you what you asked for - listings of stuff to do. The opening page is a scrollable list of counties with a number of events beside them. They are ordered by number of events which is a bit silly. Alphabetically would have been better, or cleverer still - by distance from the user. Not that hard on a handset and a feature that was also ignored on yesterday's app . One of the issues with mobile devices is their small screen sizes. People like Apple and Google have done a lot to alleviate these problems by hiding menus offscreen when not in use, removing unnecessary borders from screens and generally reducing clutter. This aligns them well with the current trend for clean interfaces like twitter . entertainment.ie however have cut a big chunk out of the interface. Somebody some...

Spar  have created an Android app to promote their new TV series on RTE Television. The app has 3 sections: List of episodes from where you can get to a text version of the recipes featured that week A store locater  Links to their Facebook and Twitter locations The list of episodes is nicely designed, but once you click on a week you see an Apple style home button at the top of the screen. This is just not an Android feature and emphasises that this is a conversion and might be a poor relation of the iPhone version. Occasionally clicking on the Android back button quits the whole application instead of bringing you back one level.  The store locator is a bit pointless. All they have done is take the latitude and longitude of all of their stores and overlay them on a map. I can't really think of when I would ever use this. Showing the nearest stores to the user in order of distance would have been far better an limiting the list to a small number. The ful...