Blogs

I’ve moved my blog over to http://ambiguiti.es from now on. Over there I’ll be talking about web and mobile development, and maintain a more general blog relating to events, conferences, job postings, and other such news in the industry.

I recently installed Skitch for doing mac screenshotting after I switched to Mac from Windows. I found it to be cumbersome and not exactly intuitive. Then I discovered a really handy screenshotting tool that comes as a Dashboard Widget. Check this out (Screenshot Plus).

MobileMe is Apple’s answer to Microsoft Exchange with some additional features that look a lot like that Microsoft is offering with their new Live Workspace service. Essentially it gives you a unified way to handle eMail, Files, Photos, Calendar, and Address Book between all your machines including your PC, Mac, iPhone (iTouch), and AppleTV. For a marketing overview, check out the video over at apple.com. Its main advantage for business users is probably the way it provides similar functionality to Blackberry with the Push-Email Push-Contacts and Push-Calendar features. This means that the very moment an email is sent to you, you are notified with an audible noise from your iPhone without having to wait for it to page the server. Pretty cool indeed, and I bet RIM is shaking in their boots.

The Good

Email. The web based eMail application seems top notch. Clearly mirrored on Microsoft Outlook, it provides a clean, fast UI with seamless integration to the other MobileMe services. The push-email to mobile devices such as iPhone and iPod Touch make this feature an excellent choice for business users. Also, the Ajax-y goodness baked right into the Sproutcore platform makes this a really competitive webmail solution – right up there with Yahoo Mail and Gmail.

Online Storage with iDisk. This is something that has really been missing all-in-one suites. Some way is needed to move large files about the web between devices that doesn’t feel so ‘tacked on’. I was really impressed with the way Microsoft is solving this problem with Live Workspace, and it looks like Apple is following suit with 20GB of storage.

Calendar. This feature is well executed. The calendaring synchronization between devices is perfect, and the UI for the calendar interface on the web is as good as Outlook’s.

The Bad

No Chat. Integrated chat is conspicuously missing from this package. While I can do texting-yes, I cannot see those conversations in the web view if I am away from my phone or don’t want to use my phone. I’ve really gotten used to this feature with Google Apps.

Browser Support. It’s odd that a solution targeting PC users does not support IE6 and only has limited support for IE7. As a rich-ui web developer I know that it’s far easier to build a web app that supports these browsers from the beginning than to go back and fix it later.

Price. Apple is asking for $99 for an individual account (per year). If you buy an iPhone or Mac you can get it for $69. To me this is steep. If I fork out the $2200 commitment for a new iPhone (with 3 year contract in Canada) why are they asking for $70 more bucks just so I can have the same level of communications Blackberry offers me all-inclusive? Also just generally what I expect these days for $99 is quite a lot when it comes to online services. Microsoft will sell me an entire office suite for $170 – I feel like I’m getting ripped off by paying $100 to Apple to make their own devices talk to one another. If I had to pick a price that would make sense for me.. I’d go closer to $49 for the Individual account, and no more than $20 if I buy a new computer or iPhone and sign up within 30 days.

Data Migration. I have so far seen very little on how they are going to help me move my data from Blackberry/Exchange/Google Apps to MobileMe. This is huge for winning converts and my biggest objection so far.

The Verdict

Apple has bitten off a lot for the first release appears to have chosen well for the baseline featureset. As always, I am wary about jumping on new Apple products right when they come out because I usually get burned (either with unanticipated price drops soon after launch, or hardware/software failures). However, my main objection to mobileme is that I am a committed Google Apps user and would have a hard time migrating all my data – as well as my email address. I will certainly keep my eye on this because I would love to get this level of integration with my devices, and like a lot of what Apple does, it looks oh-so-sweet.

I recently became aware of a beta version of a new SVN client for MacOS called Versions. I downloaded the beta to try it out.

Let me say this is probably the new de-facto SVN client for Mac users. Not only is it a powerful and full-featured client (along the lines of TortoiseSVN but with more features), but its intuitive and easy to use. I love the TRAC integration (although I havent got into it yet). I highly recommend giving it a try. Here are some screenshots:

I was excited to get home last night to finally rent a movie on my AppleTV. Apple just recently announced that rentals were now available in Canada. Here are my notes:

The Bad:

There don’t seem to be all that many movies for rent. Also, you cant see which ones are available until you click on it – which is time consuming if you are just browsing. I expect this will improve over time though. One thing that really frustrated me was I could not browse for rentals from my AppleTV initially. I had to go through the process of renting one through iTunes before the menu options would appear in my AppleTV.. and they still didn’t all appear after I did. The system of ‘activating’ an AppleTV for movie rentals and encouraging users to try it out needs to be improved, or people just will not discover the feature.

The Good:

I rented a non-HD quality version of I Am Legend (starring Will Smith) for $4.99. The movie downloaded almost right away (it took about 22 minutes) and I was able to quickly sync it to my AppleTV (with some trouble.. the first time syncing it quit with no error message). Watching it on the AppleTV was simple and the video quality was excellent. All in all I was happy with this. I did not appreciate, however, only having 1 day to watch the movie after I started it.. I would be running really close to the wire if I decided to start watching it after work one day, and then finish it off the next.

All in all, the system worked well enough that I will do it again, but I wish they would improve the experience of actually renting the movie from AppleTV, and that they would tell us if a movie is available for rent without having to select it first.

According to Forbes, Apple “has been quietly positioning millions of units of a mysterious new product-almost certainly the new iPhone-in key markets since March.” Despite this, there has been no public announcement or images released of this new device.

It will almost certainly support 3G – a faster mobile internet system (so you’ll finally be able to actually watch those YouTube flicks while on the bus). Probably the storage capacity of the device will be increased too. If we’re lucky they’ll have done something about battery life too – although that seems doubtful with the demands of the 3G circuitry and any additional storage they intend to cram on there.

Mobile devices from Apple in the future may have the ability to draw power from the sun for longer battery lives. This revelation came to light today as people at Trade the News (a better article is here) noticed that recent patent applications from Apple included technology to harness sunlight.

While it may be a ways off in the future – photovoltaic cells beneath the touch-screen could add hours to battery lives – making devices like the iPhone much more practical for business users – who have been complaining about the limitations of the small battery for users who are constantly on the go. This is one of the major reasons consumers won’t be leaving Blackberry anytime soon for business communication.

Of course the bigger story here is that with solar energy and using other types of micro-energy devices we could one-day take our mobile devices completely off-grid. It has some appeal, if you can get over the idea that you’ll never again have the excuse ’sorry my iPhone battery was dead.. wasnt receiving any calls’.

On the proverbial eve of our Q2 release I’m thinking about how far we’ve come with our components. We’ve been building components for 5 years or so now and I dont mind telling you that it took us a while to figure out that we are essentially in the business of making complicated things simple. That being the case I guess we have something in common with companies like Apple, Microsoft, Books for Dummies, Internet Dating sites, and the like. The hard part for all these guys is modeling complex real-world problems as software features, but their market success is driven by how well they package those features so they are in-turn, dead-simple (if not fun) to use. This isn’t an airy-fairy ‘do what feels good’ problem – but it’s a worthwhile place to invest your time if you’re a software or hardware vendor – I mean heck: Apple is selling almost 20,000 iPhones per day. They didn’t do that with entertaining commercials alone.

As anybody who has become a fan of how Apple (and indeed Microsoft to some extent) packages their software and hardware solutions will agree, communicating technical features is just as much a science as software development itself – even if the lines are blurred sometimes. You would also agree that Apple has made buckets of money focusing on this aspect of their products, and has even created a sort of ‘premium good’ effect around this experience. Apple products sell for more than their competition, and with some notable exceptions we just can’t get enough.

This advice applies also to many of our customers – who are also building software products. Here are some random examples from our (very niche) world of computers and programming in general to help make my point: invest in usability if you want your technical product to succeed.

NSite was a customer of ours from way back. These guys had built a product around allowing business users to rapidly assemble and customize web applications without writing a line of code. Everything was done through their web interface, and you could build spreadsheets, import Salesforce.com data, connect to web services, build forms, and generally run a lot of CRM data through their system in an easy to use web-app. They’ve since been snapped up by Business Objects although not until they racked up a whackload of customers. Of course, there are others doing a similar thing using newer technology like DabbleDB.

Why Conventional Wisdom Says it Should Have Failed

Why should developers be interested in hog-tying themselves to a proprietary web framework that doesn’t even let them get in and code? Why should non-technical users be interested in developing applications? Who has the time to learn their development paradigm and the imagination to see how it can be jury-rigged to suit real business problems?

Why It Succeeded Anyway

Who wants to pay a developer to write something in one year what I (as a business user) can set up in 3 days on NSite? The fact that they made the back-end open with lots of ways to get data in and out meant that real developers could extend and connect to other enterprise systems. Another thing they must have realized is that a lot of business users would love to get in and tinker with their business apps. It’s like customizing your hot-rod to get things just right for you. They combined that effect with a hefty sales force of their own to create a dynamite product concept that consumers loved. Hello Business Problems, meet Simplicity.

For those who don’t know, Ruby on Rails is a web development framework based on the Ruby language. If you really don’t know anything about it, read the Wikipedia page on the subject which is written for anyone to understand. Basically, it appeared on the scene in 2004/2005, and quickly formed a cult following in the web development community. It employed concepts from Model View Controller, package management, Ajax, and combined that with a scripting language known for its brevity or terseness. The result was a platform that was tailor-made for rapid prototyping of “Web 2.0″ applications – If you bought into it’s very radical view of the universe (more on this below). Fast-forward to 2008 – Ruby on Rails books are the fastest-growing book category. The movement has spawned a series of conferences, has gained a worldwide fan-base, and has influenced other frameworks (including .NET), probably making the founders quite rich in the process.

Why Conventional Wisdom Says it Should Have Failed

A question for software developers: How many times have you heard the following? Here is a brand new and very opinionated development framework that forces you to learn a new scripting language, and develop in a totally different way than you probably were before, with virtually no enterprise support? Sound like fun? Actually, a lot of critics point out that in some ways, RoR is a very restrictive way to program. You simply cannot build applications in the same lazy-ass way you did before in RoR, forcing you to re-learn your approach. Who has time for that? Also, problems with the web server, mongrel, meant that it was relatively more difficult to build large scalable apps owing to a lack of multi-threading in the software. Popular RoR apps like Twitter are infamous for continually going down at the worst possible time.

Why It Succeeded Anyway

The truth about RoR fanaticism is definitely more complex than I’m revealing here, but the essence of it is that RoR does more things right than wrong. Rails offers a way to build web applications that is ridiculously fast, and once the shroud was lifted, the early-adopters who stumbled onto it couldnt believe their eyes. It’s worth giving up a little bit of flexibility for the sheer power of being able to write features as quickly as you can imagine them. Want an Ajax-powered autocomplete? 5 minutes. Want some simple animation? Just a few simple lines of code. Want to connect to a database? You barely need to even think about it. Turns out, programming doesn’t need to be complicated to be powerful or worthwhile. If the stigma of being one of the ‘cool rails kids‘ doesn’t bother you, you’ll do yourself a favor by checking RoR out

This one is a little obvious, but hopefully I can spin it in an interesting way. Apple Computers are king for making things simple where they were previously complicated – and consumers are throwing themselves before the church of Jobs (Steve) begging them to open an Apple Store in their town or city – in which to worship. I think we all know a little about the history of Apple, but it’s the recent incarnation that has everyone foaming at the mouth. I’ll jump right into the bad:

Why Conventional Wisdom Says Apple Should be a Tumbleweed on the Plains of Computer History

Apple computers are expensive. In an age where you can by a brand new laptop computer from Dell for $500, why would you spend $2000 for something similar from Apple? On top of that, when you own a Mac, you pay for everything. Virtually none of the software is free. You cant even have a photo sharing account without paying for it. If you’re a gamer, you’re out of luck too because historically very few games were ported to the Mac. On top of all this – the operating system that Mac’s run on used to be thought of as something a child or non-computer-savvy person would want to use. What did this do? It left early-adopters out of the equation because those people are typically very tech-savvy. Finally, Mac’s are known to suck when it comes to interoperability. The file system was totally different, so while you could open a document on a Windows-formatted disc, you couldn’t do the opposite. On top of that, networking a PC and Mac together was tricky. All in all it was an IT Managers nightmare to have an employee on an Apple (unless they all were).

Why Its Succeeding Anyway

A couple of things work in Apple’s favor. One – people are increasingly fed up with Windows and Microsoft. Improved anti-piracy technology in Windows and on Windows-based software in general means the price gap is shrinking all the time. While that’s true, it doesn’t explain the meteoric rise in Apple fandom. The real secret is to do with how Apple has managed to make their machines the most powerful PC’s on the market at the same time as the easiest to use. Computer-illiterates love Mac OS because they’re elegant, functional, intuitive, and minimalistic. Geeks love them for the same reasons, but also because under the hood there is a lot of power and control available to those who want it. There is a legitimate premium built into the price because consumers know that when they want to connect to the Internet, or install new hardware, it will just work. When they want to build a photo album or burn a CD, it practically does it for you.

Conclusion

The point I wanted to make here is that there is a culture shift happening in software development, and it’s mirroring what is happening in the consumer marketplace too. I think that engineers used to think that if something isn’t complicated, it’s not valuable or worthwhile. I think people are starting to think differently – as we at Nitobi are with our components. There’s no reason why we can’t achieve both goals – power and simplicity, with some care and attention.

Saw some exciting news today about the possibility of iPhone opening itself up to 3rd party developers for native-run applications. (http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9798932-37.html). I think this was innevitable, but I’m really glad its happening so soon. I think for companies like Nitobi this will create a lot of opportunities to create mobile applications for business users – especially when you combine that with the facility for photos and sound recording, geo-tagging, and web.

“This is an empty box”. I love it.

This really shows the contrast between a young and aging tech brand.

BTW, if you’re curious about iPhone packaging.. See my earlier post.