Every Joke Has A Part Of A Joke

Kids, get away from appliances, we're gonna reboot the house!

I wish I could take the credit for this phrase, but I can't. This was said by my friend and colleague Frank Jones. What makes it interesting is that he said in 1997, when the talks of home automation were rudimentary and sounded rather like jokes. In fact, it *was* intended to be a joke. Turned out to be a prophecy.

Jumping back to today - they're going to have App Store for cars. Whereas this idea is somewhat overdue already (just look at the progress of dedicated GPS devices and compare it with the clunky and stone age old GPS in your car, even if it is a few months old, and you'll see what I mean), it is indeed scary. Just take a look at the evolution of G1 software, which is in a perpetual beta house of dreams, and shudder.

I think that was a cue for Microsoft Car jokes to materialize.

Android: Welcome To The App Hell

We all know all too well what DLL Hell is.
We also know what is Jar Hell.

Welcome to the new stage, the App Hell.

Multiple applications for the same device, all trying to solve their particular task, with their developers each scratching their own itch, and stepping on each other's toes, with little or no way of finding out about each other.

Just a quick example:

Ring Control - controls the ringer volume and vibrate settings;
Locale - controls (at this point) ringer volume, vibrate, WiFi;
Power Manager - controls GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth;
Toggle Settings - controls GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth.

The answer to this predicament is much bigger than a humble blog article can contain, all I'm trying to do here is to open the can of worms.

I can just guess that there has to be a device-wide capabilities discovery and current state notification bus the applications can subscribe to, and cooperate. Priority management wouldn't hurt, either.

Meanwhile, prepare for Android balkanization... And try to remember which of your gadgets does what and not go nuts in the process.