I know I’ve been bad for writing stuff on here but I’ve got a lot of good content I’ve been brainstorming. It’s just a matter of time before it sees publication.

More importantly though is that I’ll be going away to Italy for the month of May. So you can expect not to hear from me on this site until I return. Instead you should take a trip to our trip blog at http://roamingrome.wordpress.com/

Hopefully we’ll have lots of updates for everybody over there.

The way classrooms have been designed for thousands of years stands the instructor in front of their students in order to profess and impart new knowledge unto his/her students. Teaching was worked down to a science. Since the introduction of technology into classrooms professors have been off balance unsuspecting of the immense shift taking place in the way people consume information and learn. When it comes to integrating the vast amount and types of technology available into learning a lot of teachers are still trying to get their footing.

What’s so unique about where we exist in time and progress at the moment is that most students have grown up with technology in their lives and therefore have grown up using technology to learn along the way. This gives these students the advantage of being able to conduct self-directed learning which instinctively integrates technology. These students typically integrate technology in their own unique ways which allows them to have personalized learning through the user-focused nature of technology. The best part is that this personalized learning is based on a lifetime growing up alongside technology and integrating it into their learning so the effectiveness of the students ability to integrate the technology in the learning only gets better as time goes on and new tools become available.

Teaching which effectively integrates technology is hard to come by. Teachers nowadays have turned to slide shows hoping that they are the answer to integrating technology into teaching. But the potential is far greater than that. There are however some major barriers to teachers trying to integrate technology into teaching; barriers like the fact that most teachers are digital immigrants who have not grown up using technology to learn so have no idea how it could be used to teach.

We can all be happy though because the times they are a changing. As time progresses were seeing more and more digital native teachers entering the system with a far better idea of how technology can be used both in the teaching and learning processes. As these teachers get older and gain more accreditation in their industry, they will be able to change the education system and create a more modern classroom format to substitute the medieval classroom format which is still being used today.

Well I have no doubts that everybody in the world has heard about iPhone OS 4.0 by now. And all I have to say is that the rumors were right! (some of them)

Multi-tasking is confirmed for the platform which leaves me with mixed emotions because I want multi-tasking but I am writing a white paper which describes the iPad as “task oriented” and now that might be moot.

More iPad rumors are surfacing about Apple wanting to bring different scale models of the device to the market in the near future. Rumors say that 5 and 7 inch devices are in the works already.

On a personal note: My apologies for letting the blog dry up. I am finishing up my degree and lets just say schools a little hectic right now.

Note: I try to update the interesting news on in the sidebar daily so everybody can at least see what I would likely be writing about if I were able to.

There has been plenty of speculation about the new Windows Phone 7. I’ve reserved judgement for as long as possible to see what would actually happen with the device upon its release. But I’ve been asked to give my first impressions of the phone so I bring you this.

WP7 is entering a firestorm. Which could be a competitive advantage or a really really stupid move (note the emphasis on stupid). My biggest qualm with the WP7 is that it doesn’t have feature exclusive to its platform which will give consumers a reason to buy it. The biggest following this phone will get will be from existing Microsoft ‘junkies’ who love all things Microsoft and swear by them.

There are a number of features which have become pretty much a standard among the other major smartphone platforms which are missing in the WP7 platform. WP7 will not support expandable memory, or multitasking, along with copy and pasting.

The WP7 major selling points are it’s user interface and its ability to plug into Xbox Live. Two features which don’t really chime a need to get this phone (even for a hardcore Xbox gamer.)

Microsofts version of the app store, Marketplace, has a number of apps on the way but nowhere near the 150,000 apps boasted by the iTunes app store or the 30,000 apps available for the Android phone.

But like I said “time will tell.” Microsoft is an enduring tenacious company and people said the same things about them when they decided to enter the gaming market. But look at them now; they own the gaming market. I have absolute faith that the WP7 will not be a complete blow-out like the Palm. So, for now, let’s just sit comfortably in our seats and pay close attention to the feeds from our iPhones and Android phones.

There has been a wealth of patents being filed lately by Apple. Many journalist are speculating that these patents give insight into the technology that we can expect to see in upcoming iPhones; I think they might have a different purpose.

As we continue to watch the mobile platform war rage on it’s becoming increasingly obvious that Google and it’s constituents are worthy competitors. Apple recently filed a lawsuit agains HTC for infringement on nearly 20 different patent owned by Apple. But what Apple might have thought would be a easy victory by pure intimidation is about to turn into a full-fledged legal battle.

There has been a number of existing patents which surround the iPhone platform in the past to never see the light of day. So in my eyes I think this excessive patenting by Apple is to try and lock down all the good ideas before opposing companies can get to them.

I have to admit, however, that some of the rumoured features would be super cool. Notably the ones mentioned is my post regarding the RFID chips being built into the phones.

Anybody and everybody who lives in our current era of complex commerce has grown used to the elaborate task of managing their money among many different accounts and payment methods. With more iPhone rumours circling the internet regarding a certain patent recently submitted by Apple. People can take a breath, or more of a sigh (of relief), that companies like Apple are working towards making things easier for all of us.

Geek.com’s description of the patent that hass been filed describes the use of RFID chips in Apples next generation of iPhone devices. What’s so exciting about this is the ability to carry one device which manages every mobile aspect of your life from payment to accessing protected places or things.

Gizmodo published an article talking about what appears to be a rather unwieldily accelerometer based combination lock. But what’s more important is how the article goes on to describe potential uses of security apps relying on the internal RFID.

More on the topic of money and iPhones is the news of an upcoming PayPal app which allows bumping money from iPhone to iPhone. Lifehacker published an article describing the app which (apart from its money bumping ability) enables advanced money/account management functions making those awkward college dinners with friends and stacks of IOU’s far easier to manage.

Things are looking interesting for iPhone fans in the near future. The next rumoured launch for an iPhone might be this summer. We should all remain securely planted in our seats until we see these rumours actualized in the release of the next iPhone.

As the Smartphone wars rage on it is becoming increasingly difficult for Smartphone device owners to feel secure in their decision regarding which team they’ve chosen; be it team iPhone, or team Android, or some other less significant faction.

With rumours resurfacing about the iPhone becoming a multi-tasking platform I’m left wondering if that means an upcoming hardware upgrade for users who wish to take advantage of this [rumoured] upcoming functionality. Obviously the added stress to the hardware that is a product of multitasking will mean a number of less awesome side-effects. For instance, slower overall phone performance, less memory for existing apps to work with, which might mean updates and with the rumours of updates coming at a cost in the future this could mean big spending for iPhone owners in the near future, and most notably — reduced battery performance.

I trust Apple will do their best to contravene these side-effects but I suspect there to be a new iPhone coming out this summer if this update is more than just rumours.

On the development side the ability to multitask opens a lot of doors for developers. Every time I hear this rumour I nearly jump out of my seat with excitement but after seeing no truth to these rumours up to now… well lets just say the excitement is wearing off.

Regardless of my preaching about my excitement for the iPhone I know for fact that Android is a very good platform. I would love to have access to an Android phone to learn how to develop for it but I suppose I’ll stick with developing for my team for now. Both companies take very good care of their customers and I trust this battle will continue to rage for a long time now.

Note: I suspect if Apple brings multitasking to the iPhone that it will appear on the iPad also. In fact, if you pay close attention to the commercial it looks like the mail app is running over-top of another application. In another scene it appears as if two apps are running side by side.

Just wanted to point out that along the right side of this page is my Twitter feed, where you can expect frequent updates from me, and my interesting reads feed, which is also updated very frequently with articles I am reading and have dubbed important enough to be featured as one of the only things that matter.

I promise to make up in those two things what I fail to give in blog posts. Be gentle on me — I am after all a college student in his final year who has three families and travels a substantial distance weekly.

I’ve been a blogger now for about five years. My blogs were never really anything of significant quality or importance but it has always been fun to have the ability to share my thoughts with the world. I’ve always struggled to focus exactly what it is I wanted to accomplish with my blog. For a long time I was in a blogging group called ‘The WAFN project‘ after having a poorly-maintained personal blog for some months before-hand. In fact, I’ve always had a personal blog of some form, but I’ve managed to have a number of side blogs including one which had to do with my introduction to the world of Open-Source named OSoSoon (Sorry, no links completely Death Star’d¹ these ones.) The most recent iteration of my personal blog before this one was called ‘A Binary Musical’ (Again Death Star’d). After being met with repeated boredom in all blogs I settled to just name my blog after my domain space: ‘tjbro.com.’ But throughout the many blogging adventures I’ve had I’ve focused on topics like recent news, gaming, open source, technology, and personal topics. But never have I been able to distill the purpose of my blog to a simple mission statement which would allow me to use the WordPress tagline option on this site.

Being a person with unique outlook and opinions on things who also tends to have silly adventures on regular basis I figure I should give you my version of recent events along with random entries giving insight into the ridiculousness that I tend to live out from day-to-day.

Taking these things into consideration I’m please to welcome you all to “tjbro.com: the only things that matter.”

Wish me luck!

¹ Death Star’d: Ending the existence of something by the process of firing a planetary super-laser at it and completely demolishing it.

It’s a hard knock life being a mobile app developer. Even worse if your a mobile app developing company that’s trying to make money offering apps that work across the many Smartphone platforms that are now available.

I might be dreaming but I can see a significant business opportunity in developing a standard for the next wave of Smartphones to comply to which offer a standardized SDK so mobile platform developers can develop their apps once and only once and people constrained to using an iPhone or an Android phone don’t have to worry about the app being unavailable to them.It would be beneficial for everybody.

In the ideal world the companies manufacturing the Smartphones would make donations to a group to develop the standards and SDK’s rather than having to spend a much larger sum internally to develop the standards and SDK’s themselves.

But that would be too logical for the competitive firestorm happening now between the major Smartphone manufacturers as they might see it as a loss of competitive edge. Sorry for getting the rest of you mobile developers all hard and stuff but it looks like we’re all stuck in the real world together for now.