I’ve always been unconvinced when it comes to the recent proliferation of so-called ‘maker’ development boards – platforms like Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Beagle Board and so on. One of the reasons I’m not head-over-heels in love with them boils down to an attitude I’ve found is shared by many others in the electronic engineering community: we tend not to take them seriously.
That is not snobbery (at least, I like to think it isn’t) but more a tacit recognition that these platforms occupy a corner of the development ecosystem largely divorced from the professional sphere. But then, of course, they don’t presume to target themselves at the engineering market, per se, but more at hobbyists, tinkerers, students and the like.
To dismiss them as nothing more than a curiosity, though, no good for real-world application, does them an injustice. In fact, you don’t need to look any further than 'Adverts served with Pi' of this very publication to read about one real-world application being trialled right now in the up-market Johannesburg suburb of Melrose. The advertising device in question would likely never have been born if it wasn’t for the Raspberry Pi giving its developer the freedom to experiment, to breathe life into an idea that would otherwise have taken a significantly larger investment in expertise, hardware and time.
Stretching my memory to it limits, I can recall my first experience with a computer (this was shortly before I even set my first terrified foot in a school classroom). It was called the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and it loaded data into its memory from the same kind of cassette tape that music used to come on. My abiding memory of cassette tape as a data storage medium is that it was slow, noisy and unreliable – just like the musical equivalent, in other words.
The extent of my young programming prowess was no more impressive than making that ZX Spectrum display simple shapes in different colours on a TV screen, but it taught me a way of thinking that was built upon later on in my education. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, those early experiments were also teaching me not to fear computers, but rather to embrace what they could do. The potential to teach those same lessons is, I believe, the most promising aspect of this new breed of development platform.
Have a break, have no more Kit Kat
I blame Google for starting the trend to give silly names to serious technologies. While the first two versions of its Android operating system used the conventional names Alpha and Beta, the company developed an obsessive sweet tooth after that. The full list of names since then goes Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean, KitKat, Lollipop and Marshmallow.
Google is giving the public the chance to vote on the name for the next Android release, provided it starts with the letter N. Some of the more interesting or popular proposals thus far include Nacho, Navy Bean, Nectar, Neopolitan, Nougat, Nutella and Nuts. My suggestion is ‘Nope’; now that they’re crossing the threshold into the latter half of the alphabet, this is a perfect time to leave the cutesy names behind.
Of course, the frivolous names belie a company with very serious ambitions, some of which are increasingly raising suspicions of nefarious motives. Having evolved from a humble search engine into a technology leader in both software and hardware, the best place to get up to speed on all the company’s latest developments (other than the top secret skunkworks stuff around which rumours never cease swirling) is its annual Google I/O event.
The main areas of focus at this year’s event in May included virtual reality, wearables, in-car applications, the ability to run Android apps without downloading them, and an overarching vision for a more ubiquitous and conversational way of interacting with technology.
Unusually, Google also previewed in some detail the upgrades and features we can expect in Android N, which is slated for final release this September. New features include more control over notification size from different apps and a new picture-in-picture mode. N could also be a better platform for gaming thanks to a battery of optimisations and a new API called Vulkan that lets developers directly control a phone’s GPU for sharper 3D graphics.
Brett van den Bosch
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