destraynor

I could do a glowing a review with screenshots and all sorts of niceties, but I think the following elevator pitch is enough for most people.

ZYB solves the disconnect between your phone and the net. Your contacts are backed up automatically. Your phone calendar can now automatically update with your work calendar. ZYB works for all phones and all calendars in all countries on all networks. Give it a try. Zyb.com.

Using ZYB, I backed up my phonebook, and synchronised my phone calendar with my work calendar. All in about 3 minutes. I'm impressed. It's a shame they're going for a social network thing as well. I think this will be really useful, especially since I won't be going next or near the O₂ iPhone anytime soon. The " O₂ deal" may as well come with a tube of KY Jelly and and some rusty nails.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted a programming challenge, that’s mainly because I haven’t heard a good one in a long time. I need my friends to do more interviews! Also, I’ve received emails in the past along the lines of “I really like the puzzles, and learn a lot from them, but can you post one a first year could solve”. That’s understandable, most of the puzzles I’ve posted previously might be tricky with only a few months of programming experience. So this programming puzzle is my attempt at monolithic di-ornithicide (aka killing two birds with one stone)

The longest repeated word

Write a method that takes a simple string as input, and outputs its longest repeated substring. When there are two of equal length, output whichever is first lexicographically.

Examples

• abba should return ’a’
• abracadabra should return ’abra’
• Mississippi should return ’iss’

You can get your solution to me any of the following ways, email, blogpost, trackback, IM, phonecall, even twitter it if your solution is <180 characters

Pretty please, I implore you, don’t post it as a comment You'll end up wondering why my blog ate all the rogue characters(< > ; etc). I can’t be bothered digging through 5K lines of someone elses PHP to try and stop it.

I've prepared a uni-step guide to answer the question on all our minds since the Kindle first launched. How well can it run Linux? I thought Lucy Snyder would beat me to it, she's always writing great Linux install guides. Last night , at around 5am I saw my first terminal prompt and I knew I'd won. Sure it crashes, but only on the rare occasion that it actually boots so it's not really a problem. Anyways, here is the guide …

I’m shocked by the amount of criticism that the XO laptop has received. Interaction designers everywhere are falling over each other in a rush to find the next serious violation of a usability metric that they’re mistakenly porting to laptop design for 3rd world children. Just because a guideline exists for rich people and their e-commerce websites it doesn’t mean it holds true for 4 year old children experiencing technology for the first time in Africa. They also seem to forget that a novel enough project can break every interaction guideline in the book and still succeed. There are some experiences you can not hold a yard stick up to, and say “Usability = 20% therefore product will fail”. Remember, it’s not just usability that defines success. I believe usability only determines success when products have worthwhile competitors.

Guitar Hero and Rock Band are hugely popular with people who can't (and probably could never) play guitar really well. When they’re rocking out in their bedroom, they couldn’t give a shit whether it’s real or not, they’re just really enjoying themselves. The same is true for guitarists who close their eyes and imagine they're on stage. Unfortunately I’ve met the following XKCD character and I’m sure you know a couple yourself.

The sheer frustration is evident on their face, which silently screams… “But you didn’t spend years learning guitar, how dare you experience the same joy as me, with just a few plastic buttons? ” If the experience is good enough, the medium is irrelevant. (Yes, I realise thats the selling point of heroin)

Many of the recent social sites (i.e. web 2.0 style sites) presented some serious usability problems, and ignored many previously unquestionable design guidelines. If they were submitted for usability analysis they could have flunked under a sea of "Unexpected behaviour", or "User not sure what the [+] button does". However the novelty of peer produced content, plus the quality of the delivery ensured they would succeed. No matter what Jakob Nielsen says.. It's important to remember that if you're doing something really new, the old rules might not apply that well.

I believe that the XO laptop will do well, and people who are criticising it seem to be underestimating the design challenges the team faced. In 2002 Nicolas Negroponte set about the challenge of delivering a laptop for $100 to children in the 3rd world. 5 years later people are using them. There are now children in Peru who are, for the first time, seeing and recording video footage, drawing cartoons, playing maths games, reading hundreds of eBooks and much more. Considering that previously these children saw maybe four or five books per year, it’s hard not to call this project a success.

Yes, the interface could be better. So could every interface. This is a first run, it will only get better and better. I have no doubt that the next OS will blow "Sugar" out of the water, and that's also something to celebrate. Besides, the children (aka the end-users) seem to like it in its current form. What are you gonna do, tell them they can’t possibly be having fun due to a level 3 violation of Fitts law in the second screen? (OMGZ, how could they make that mistake!!1!)

A while back I wrote “Ship or Shut Up” mocking companies who hype products based on what they could be, rather than what they are. I got a stiff reminder of that this evening looking through the stock markets of the more interesting technology companies. I keep an eye on stock prices regularily now, mainly just to work out exactly how much money I would now have if I ever got off my ass and invested my meagre savings in Apple. (I’d have 134% of my savings if I did it when I first thought about it ) I noticed today that Googles shares are plunging (over $100 in a week), and the chart is pretty interesting…

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To be fair to Google their stock price merely fell back to where it was before people bought into the notion that Google would move from Search and Adverts to hardware manufacturer and mobile operating system design. We can call the above effect "Vapourshares", the impact of Vapourware on Shares. I didn’t buy into this notion, not because of any great foresight, mainly cause I thought that Google don't need to build phones to sell ads, so why bother.

I should state that I am very surprised by the Googles handling of the whole situation. Why announce an invisible product that customer won’t see for months? Even when it is launched they won't really understand it, I’ve had a hard time explaining it to people. The smart ones keep asking “Doesn’t Java already do that? ”. Also, why say anything on the 6^th if the SDK was just a week away? Finally, could they not find one decent phone manufacturer to buy into this? Granted I live in Ireland, so the majority of the phones I see are Nokia and Sony Ericsson. Maybe HTC, LG, Motorola and Samsung have it wrapped up in other countries. Motorola did make a huge impact with the Razr, but for reasons well known, they'll struggle to keep their share. Everyone I know is looking at Blackberrys, iPhones or the new Nokias as the “phones of desire”, I'm not sure where Android fits in. Still it’ll be interesting to find out.

If you're involved in technology for whatever reasons, it's always interesting to keep an eye on whats happening with certain companies. Look at the one year plots and compare competitors. AAPL is probably most interesting to watch as you can see the rumours, and you can see the realities. Rumours (e.g. Tablet Portable 12" Mac) look something like a chart above, realities (e.g. iPhone) result in a sharp permanent spike). Also worth watching is the impact of the Google SDK, if it's any good will it affect the bottom line? Early signs say yes.

• Google (GOOG) - thier main product is something they call “Search”
• Microsoft (MSFT) - They felt that XP was under-appreciated, so they released Vista.
• Apple (AAPL) - They felt iPod was under appreciated, so they released the Zune
• Dell (DELL) - If Price is all you care about, you've definitely got a few of these lying around. (Apologies to Seth