Well, this blog was harder to maintain then I foresaw. I’m going to close it down and switch my efforts to the Best of Construction Phone Apps page. I’ll try to keep that updated with the latest and greatest in apps that can help on the jobsite. Thanks for watching.

According to security researchers in this Guardian reveals a new security concern for Apple iPhone users: there’s a secret file that tracks where you go. Anybody with access to your phone or computer could use this tool to see where you have been.

This information has always been trackable by the cell phone companies but only the police had access with a subpoena. Apple never asked permission to install the tracking file in an update last June.  Now a “jealous spouse or a private detective” can use your phone to find detailed records on your whereabouts.

As app developers, we rate the major players like this:
Android: Great, easy, a little Wild Wild West
Blackberry: Dinosaurs. Nice try but way behind.
Apple: Monsters. Miserable mites focused on control and heavy handed dealings with customers , developers and partners

Hattip to Neal Leininger for sending me the article

I’m currently visiting family in the Netherlands (hints: don’t call it Holland and don’t compare them to Germans). The Dutch are a wonderful people and though they’re too reserved to admit it, they secretly know that they’re the quintessence of Europe: multilingual, ferocious advocates of personal liberty and the seat of many European institutions. As for their business skills, there’s a Japanese saying that “where the Dutch pass, the grass does not grow.”

So it was interesting to hear my cousin and husband talk about how they use the cloud for collaboration in their work. He works at an institute that studies the letters sent between the great scholars of the Medieval age. They’re looking to see how ideas spread between the thinkers just like historians will one day have to trawl through the hordes of data being generated by this generation. Sifting the data involved in hundreds of thousands of letters in collections across the world and in dozens of language creates quiet a problem. He’s helping to build an automated system that finds links between the spread of ideas. One of their main programmers is a Hungarian kid genius who can’t stick in one place. So while he works on his PhD in Singapore or spends a few months on holiday in South America, they use Dropbox and Google Docs to keep everybody in the loop with no old versions of the code floating around to screw things up.

My cousin Fia freelances in communication and with her years of expertise, she’s writing a book with a colleague. They do all of their work in Google Docs because of the real time collaboration. She can see where her partner’s cursor is and what she’s typing. While editing, they’ll type messages in the document to each other like “How could you write that? It doesn’t make any sense.”

One of the advantages of using Google is that the systems are constantly improving. Here’s a blog post from the Google Docs blog about a new commenting system so you can discuss the document with collaborators in the sidebar and leave the original document unchanged. I think this would be a great help for a small construction company for creating estimates, writing up contracts and working together on the hordes of paperwork that are needed to build cool things.

Exciting times at Construction Knowledge.net. We just released version 2.0 of our apps for Android. Blackberry and iPhone apps will be out soon.

The next version allows you to email, text or copy the results of wood beam calculations, unit conversions or the schematics & dimensions of a steel beam. We also have snazzy new icons and improved user interface. Many of the improvements came from user comments so let us know about improvements or bugs.

You can see the apps here in the Android Marketplace.  We’re in the process of developing some new apps so we’re all ears if you can think of something to help you get a job done in the field. How can we help you build cool stuff with more efficiency?

According to this blog post at Android Community, one more reason to go Android instead of those jerks at Apple:

“Each year the Pwn2 Own hacking contest is held to see who can hack various browsers, software and OS’ the fastest. There are money award to those that are able to hack the software in some instances. In the latest edition of the content Google put in its Chrome browser and the Android OS to see if anyone could do the deed.”

“Google made it through the competition with no one reportedly able to hack Chrome or Android. The same can’t be said for the iPhone 4 with the browser on the iPhone falling and the smartphone being hacked during the contest as well. Along with Android, Windows Phone 7 survived the hack contest.”

Here’s Google’s blog post detailing their newest feature. You can tell they’re excited because they crossposted it across about a half dozen of their many blogs.

Google Cloud Connect

This piece of gadgetry will allow people using Microsoft Office to work on their documents in Google with all the benefits of offsite backup and online collaboration.

I think this is a resource worth checking out for any small company. Here’s a blog post from the unofficial Google Operating System blog about how to enable this new feature. You don’t have to undergo the hassle of switching yourself over from Microsoft Office to Google (although it’s fairly easy and almost always worth it in my opinion) but you still get all of your data backed up in the cloud in case of catastrophe.