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Archives for Computing
Wordpress for the iPhone
Today Automattic and Effigent released an Open Source iPhone app that enables you to “write posts, upload photos, and edit your WordPress blog from your iPhone or iPod Touch.”
Hooray. Now we can look forward to even more douchebags “liveblogging” public events.
Who Needs X When You Have Y?
I like to keep my iPhone menu organized. I’m able to rearrange application icons and delete installed applications. However, the iPhone will not allow me to delete or hide icons for bundled applications.
Obviously, a user probably wouldn’t want to hide the “Phone,” “Mail,” or “Settings” icons. But many developers have now created better alternatives to the some of the applications that come bundled with the iPhone. Why do I need “Stocks” when Bloomberg’s free app has a better user interface and more robust functionality? Do I really need both icons cluttering up my menu?
I think, at a minimum, the iPhone should allow hiding of the following application icons:
- Calculator
- Calendar
- Clock
- Maps
- Notes
- SMS
- Stocks
- Weather
- YouTube
Where Are the Full-Featured and Time-Limited Trial Versions?
When it comes to software, I’m much more likely to purchase a license if I’m able to download a full-featured trial version and kick the tires for a few weeks. After a few hours of use, I’ll probably either get hooked or decide an application is not my cup of tea. Provided there’s adequate security in place to limit piracy, full-featured time-limited trial versions can be a winning strategy for both developers and consumers.
Support for this type of distribution method is also a critical feature that’s currently missing from the iTunes App Store.
Today I plunked down $9.99 for Byline. Within 20 minutes of using it, I decided I still preferred the mobile version of Google Reader as a web application. Now I’m left with an application I won’t use. I can’t even transfer it to a family member.
It would be easy enough for iTunes to manage a time restriction on trial versions, since it already serves as a gatekeeper for the installation and management of applications. I would think this isn’t any more complicated than the management of time-limited movie rentals, which iTunes already supports.
By making this type of functionality easily available to developers as a supported feature in the SDK, Apple could also limit the spread of free adware demo versions (like Exposure and Twitteriffic) and free crippleware demo versions (like Karajan Beginner) which are probably less likely to convert to an actual sale (that Apple can take a cut from).
Touch-A, Touch-A, Touch Me
Until I downloaded Remote last Friday, I hadn’t even considered the potential for using the iPhone as a peripheral device to control and extend the desktop experience.
Sure, I would have assumed there would be a number of applications for controlling Keynote presentations, but I really hadn’t considered anything beyond that.
Now I’m intrigued by the wide-range of possibilities. Right off the top of my head I can think of a number of interesting ways to integrate the iPhone with the desktop:
- An application to utilize the iPhone as an external touchpad to enable multi-touch control on older Macs.
- An application to utilize the iPhone as a device for displaying application-specific control keys, which would change appearance and functionality with changes to the foreground task. Imagine this as a better alternative to the Optimus Mini Three.
- An application to utilize the iPhone as a series of sliding faders (like on a soundboard) for audio production tasks.
- An application to utilize the iPhone’s orientation-awareness to control onscreen perspective in a 3D environment.
- An application to utilize the iPhone’s camera as a portable UPC scanner for a Mac.
And that’s just what I was able to come up with in a few minutes. If you can think of any other possible uses, feel free to post them to the comments.
The Waiting Is the Hardest Part
During yesterday’s iPhone launch I found it particularly irritating that AT&T and Apple employees were actually barred from disclosing the quantity of available iPhones to those standing in the long lines that formed early in the morning outside stores.
From a business standpoint, I can understand the intention of the policy. AT&T and Apple wanted people at the back of the lines to continue to wait so they could eventually be cajoled into placing a direct fulfillment order after the store ran out of inventory. But I still think AT&T and Apple should have let customers make informed decisions about whether they wanted to wait to place an order. As a corporate policy, barring this type of disclosure demonstrated a complete lack of respect for the time of some of their most-loyal customers.
The In-Store Activation Blues
The in-store activation for my wife’s iPhone took over two hours this morning, despite the fact that we were both completely “iReady” for the ordeal.
The phone migration process was complicated by a computer error at the point-of-sale, which landed us in a bizarre and somewhat Kafkaesque Catch-22. Because of a hiccup during credit card processing, AT&T had already associated the new iPhone with our service plan before they were able to charge us for it. Unfortunately, they were then unable to charge us for it because their system indicated the phone was already associated with our service plan.
In a rational world, a sales rep would just ring up a $299 charge on a register and straighten out the resulting inventory issue without keeping the customer waiting. Unfortunately, the iPhone 3G roll-out was engineered to remove the element of personal discretion from all AT&T store employees. There was an air of fear in the store, as the employees seemed to believe that any deviation from a strict set of procedures would result in immediate and merciless termination. Even the store manager was afraid to do anything to resolve the situation expediently.
Instead, he had to place a call to a conference-line they referred to as the “war room” to await instructions. When they told me about this “war room” I immediately conjured a mental image of a group of mid-level AT&T executives sitting around a large table in a dark room smoking cigars and wearing fake military uniforms (much like the type worn by high-level “officers” in the Church of Scientology).
Eventually, the manager was able to thoroughly cover his own ass, which allowed us to leave the store with our shiny electronic bounty in tow.
The lesson from all this is that rigid procedures only make difficult operations more difficult. Things will go wrong with any sufficiently large operation. You can either (1) anticipate every possible problem and have adequate provisions for “error-handling” well in advance, or (2) you can give actual people the authority to use discretion to make intelligent decisions on the ground.
Today, AT&T seems to have done neither.
My Kingdom for an SSH Client
I’ve scoured every inch of the iTunes App Store and I still can’t find an SSH client. I can however find:
- Three different guitar tuners.
- Six different “to-do” list applications with eerily formulaic icons.
- At least eight Bible and Bible-study related apps.
- Multiple apps to help you use your iPhone as a flashlight.
- Absurdly expensive ($4.99 to $14.99) subway maps for New York, San Francisco, and Washington DC.
Wasn’t an SSH client one of the first priorities of the jail-breaking community? Why does it seem to be such a low-priority for developers now.
Kenny Wasn’t Like the Other Kids; TV Mattered, Nothing Else Did.
One of the more interesting programs to surface with today’s roll-out of iPhone applications on the iTunes Store is Remote, which was developed internally by Apple. It’s a free program that enables you to control music playback on iTunes, an AppleTV, or an Airport Express. It allows an iTunes library to be browsed and controlled via wifi from either an iPhone or an iPod Touch. It even displays album art right on the screen.
Basically, Apple gave Sonos the shaft, by replicating all the compelling technology in their Digital Music System, and at a fraction of the cost. You can buy an iPhone 3G, an AppleTV and an Airport Express all for less than half the cost of a “Sonos Bundle 130.” And Apple’s offerings will even let you play video on the AppleTV unit. I can’t imagine why anyone would buy a Sonos at this point.
Independent iPhone developers are giving Apple a cut of all application sales made through the iTunes Store. Maybe I’m being overly optimistic, but I would like to think that this kind of financially symbiotic relationship will make Apple less likely to encroach on the turf of existing application developers.
It’s interesting to note that Apple could have easily released Remote as part of the iPhone 2.0 firmware. Instead, they chose to drive download traffic to the iTunes store, which will ultimately benefit independent developers offering their iPhone applications for download.
Does Numbers Make Charts Like This?
I’m in the process of upgrading my first-generation Core Duo Macbook, which is getting a little long-in-the-tooth. So this afternoon I visited Apple.com and I took a little time to review the specs of the newly released models.
I eventually came across the following bar chart, which is accessible as a pop-up from this page. It compares my current notebook (coincidentally) with the one I intend to purchase.
At first glance, it was obvious that something wasn’t quite right. The percentages listed inside the blue bars don’t even remotely correspond to the visual length of those bars relative to the baseline bar at the bottom. It isn’t even close.
I took a screenshot and did some measuring in Photoshop with the ruler tool. The baseline bar is 216 pixels wide. The bars above it are 357, 362, 382, and 417 pixels wide, respectively. That would yield rounded percentages of 65%, 68%, 77%, and 93%.
I assume the numbers are correct and Apple is just being deceptive to make the performance gains look more impressive. In any case, who wants to join a class-action suit?
Abstraction
Jeff Atwood posted the following quote by Nathaniel Borenstein over at his site. I think it sums up the mentality of most programmers quite well.
It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
Obligatory MWSF 2007 Keynote Predictions
Steve Jobs’ Macworld San Francisco keynote speech begins in just over two hours. Here are my predictions.
- Leopard, the latest version of the Mac OS X operating system, will ship on or before January 29th. Why? Microsoft Vista is shipping to consumers on January 30th. This way Jobs can remind the attendees that Apple shipped five versions of Mac OS X while Microsoft was continually changing the release date on Vista.
- Jobs will unveil new 802.11n Airport Base Stations.
- We will see a bump in the speed of the Mac Mini as the line is given Intel Core 2 Duo processors.
- Roughly 70-minutes into the presentation, Jobs will start to wrap up. He’ll thank everyone for attending, then his pocket will start ringing repeatedly. Everyone is expecting the phone–it’s a given. I’m just predicting the gimmicky Jobsian manner by which he will formally unveil the device.
- Jobs will announce a spreadsheet application for iWork ‘07. Poor Roz Ho from Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit will be snubbed.
We Drank the Kool-Aid, and So Should You!
I like open-source alternatives as much as the guy, but there’s something a little creepy about 10,000 random people donating real money to run a two-page NY Times ad urging people to ditch Internet Explorer in favor of Firefox.
TiVo Is So 2003
So you want to know what all the cool kids (read as content pirates) are up to these days?
There’s a new Java BitTorrent client called Azureus that supports plugins. Some enterprising fellow wrote an RSS parsing plugin, which enables a user to point the application to an RSS feed and download anything that matches specified filter settings.
In practice, this allows the user to automatically download HDTV television programs with the commercials already edited out.
This is particularly interesting for a number of reasons:
- Most people’s computer monitors are capable of displaying an image of significantly higher resolution than their television. I don’t own an HDTV, but my LCD computer monitor can handle 420p without breaking a sweat.
- You don’t even have to bother fast-forwarding through commercials. TiVo is so 2003.
- The HDTV files you download are even better than the DVD content you would get if you bought the complete season of your favorite program.
- Programs turn up on the feeds much quicker than you would expect, often within an hour of the time the broadcast aired.
There are already enough HDTV capture cards out there to keep this going until television becomes completely irrelevant, so the broadcast flag isn’t going to mean jack. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see how the networks try to fight this one.
Biting the Hand That Feeds You
I followed the announcements from the keynote speech at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference today regarding Tiger (OS X 10.4).
Apple really does a fantastic job of sticking it to the companies that develop innovative software for their platform.
- Spotlight is a (significantly improved) ripoff of Launchbar.
- Dashboard is a lame ripoff of Konfabulator, which is lame to begin with.
- Automator screws over QuicKeys.
- Safari’s upcoming RSS support screws over NetNewsWire.
Don’t even get me started on what Apple has done to Adobe.
This is why I’m reluctant to develop Mac applications.
The Standard of Weights and Measures
The computer industry deserves to get a memo from Congress (which has the authority to fix the standard for weights and measures) regarding data capacity measurement.
The hardware industry (in general) uses metric units to quantify capacity. When you buy a 200 GigaByte hard disk, it will hold 200 * 1,000,000,000 bytes.
The software industry (in general) uses binary units to quantify capacity. 200 GigaBytes generally means 200 * 1,073,741,824 bytes.
It’s a 7.4% difference that creates massive consumer confusion among the unwashed masses–and, as a libertarian, I don’t have a problem with a little regulation on this one.
Life Isn’t Fair
Playfair is a program that strips the FairPlay DRM from AAC tracks purchased from the iTunes Music Store. I’m sure it won’t be long before the site is taken down at the bequest of Apple’s attorneys, but they really should consider turning a blind eye.
The availability of this application only makes me more likely to continue buying music from Apple. I consider it to be an insurance policy against the iTunes Music Store losing the online music war.
Redefining Support
Why AppleCare Sucks…
So early last week Jack (one of my employees) was having some problems with his 12″ PowerBook powering up. He thought it might have been as issue with the battery, so he took the laptop into the Apple Store in Clarendon and asked if they could swap out the battery–since we paid $349.00 for AppleCare, the premium extended warranty.
They declined and told him to ship the machine to Apple for service, which seemed inconvenient but tolerable. He called Apple and they shipped us a box. We promptly shipped them the laptop.
A few days passed so Jack checked the status online. There appeared to be a delay, so he called the support number. There was some cosmetic damage to the machine (due to the fact that it runs hotter than a toaster) and they wanted to know if he needed the case replaced for an additional $650.00. He indicated that he didn’t want the case replaced, but he needed the machine fixed as soon as possible.
The laptop arrived today and it still isn’t fixed. There was a form inside indicating that we declined the repair. So the machine has already been out of commission for a week and Apple screwed up.
We called Apple customer support this afternoon. They acknowledged fault and asked us to ship them the machine for repair. They indicated they would expedite the repair but they refused to guarantee that they would have the machine back to us by any specific date.
That’s the dirty little secret about Applecare. Apple doesn’t make any promises regarding the wait for repairs. It could take a month.
For $349.00, Apple should really provide onsite service for Powerbooks. Dell provides three years of next-business-day on-site service on comparably priced laptops for over $100.00 less than what Apple charges for AppleCare. And at the CompleteCare level Dell even covers accidental breakage and damage resulting from spilled liquids.
All you get with AppleCare is free phone support and three years of sub-standard wait-and-see mail-in repair service.
Apple really needs to step up to the plate on this–or I’ll be buying Dell Latitudes for my business from now on–and telling my friends to do the same.
Spare Bay?
And just when I was trying to decide what to do with that spare drive bay on the front of my PC: a cigarette lighter.
Now I just need to figure out where to put the tail fins?
Then I Definitely Don’t Want It
Microsoft Office for the rest of my life?
What a terrifying thought.
Someone in marketing over at Apple deserves to get fired for this.
