rc3.org Rafe Colburn on software development (and other topics)
Links from June 3rd
- Edmunds.com: “Confessions of a Car Salesman” Updated for 2009. The original series was a classic on the shady business practices of car dealerships. Turns out the same basic practices are still being applied.
- Bloomberg: Ballmer Says Tax Would Move Microsoft Jobs Offshore. Microsoft exec threatens to move more jobs offshore if the government closes some unrelated tax loopholes that the company takes advantage of.
- Dan Froomkin: Celebrity Journalism at the White House. A strong critique of NBC’s silly news special this week on the Obama White House.
- slacktivist: Killing in the name of. An important blog post on the history of the anti-abortion movement.
- Carrer Blog: 1 line CSS Grid Framework. Everything good and bad about CSS in a single line.
- Daring Fireball: Why Palm’s WebOS ‘Media Sync’ iTunes Integration Can’t Be Legit. Don’t miss the followup on the legality of the Palm Pre impersonating an iPod.
- Hivelogic: Deploying ExpressionEngine from GitHub with Capistrano. This approach should work for any PHP app.
- Andrew Leonard: GM: Into bankruptcy, out of the Dow. Companies that file for bankruptcy are automatically delisted.
- Joe Gregorio: Wave Protocol Thoughts. On the plumbing.
- Trader Joe’s Wine Compendium. A blog that reviews only wines sold at Trader Joe’s.
- The Atlantic: Do CEOs Matter? What do chief executives add? One thing’s for sure, a bad CEO can certainly be a disaster for a company.
Satirical programming
The folks behind the iPhone Twitter client Tweetie have added a brilliant spoof of the economics of the App Store. It must be incredibly frustrating to work hard on applications that are innovative and interesting, only to be upstaged in the popularity rankings by fart noise generators and “flashlight” applications. This is the best response I’ve seen.
Free Software Foundation vs iPhone
The Free Software Foundation’s list of reasons why you should avoid the iPhone have gotten plenty of coverage, which is of course the point of making such a list. I assume their tactics are the same as Greenpeace’s criticism of Apple’s environmental practices.
The goal is, of course, to get Apple to change its behavior, but I suspect the primary goal is also to educate consumers about the aims of the groups making the criticism. Apple is more effective than any other company in technology at garnering tons of press coverage, most of it positive. Activist groups target Apple with the knowledge that it’s the best way to advance what I expect is probably their primary goal — publicizing their cause.
The FSF wants consumers to think about their definition of free software, the risks of DRM, and how your software may expose your private information without your knowledge. Criticizing Apple on those grounds is clearly an effective way to get that message out in front of the public.
In the end, Greenpeace was successful in getting Apple to change its practices, but I suspect that was less important than the light they shined on the bad environmental practices that pervade the computer manufacturing industry. I also think it’s more important that more customers will be thinking about whether they will accept DRM and who is allowed to control what software they put on their phone than is any success the FSF might have in provoking change from Apple. That’s probably a good thing, because I think it was easier for Apple to reduce its packaging and do a better job of recycling old parts than it will be for them to give up some of the control they’re exercising over the iPhone platform.
iPhone 2.0 password masking
Apple made a clever user interface change with iPhone 2.0:
When you enter text into a password field, it briefly displays the character you just entered. After a few seconds, it changes the character into the mask, but it gives you some visible feedback that you’re entering the characters you think you’re entering. (I always had problems entering passwords correctly until this feature was added.)
It’s an acknowledgement that entering text using a virtual keyboard isn’t foolproof, and it provides a good compromise between masking passwords so people can’t see your password over your shoulder and enabling users to avoid typos when entering them.
By the way, this screen shot was taken using the new screen capture feature in iPhone 2.0.
Update: Commenters have noted that other phone makers have been doing it this way for years. I guess what this really means is that the iPhone is the first phone that I’ve ever used to enter a password.
Will Blackberry users like the iPhone?
John Gruber digs into opinion among Blackberry users on the iPhone’s virtual keyboard. My theory on the iPhone has been that people switching from non-smart phones will love it, and that people who are switching from other smart phones probably won’t like it. If you are already a heavy Blackberry user, the loss of productivity switching brings on probably doesn’t compensate for the areas where the iPhone is superior to the Blackberry.
I didn’t have a huge amount of evidence to support that theory, just my own preconceived notions and the case of my Blackberry-dependent friend who tried to switch to the iPhone and wound up returning it and getting a newer Blackberry instead.
It’ll be interesting to see if the upcoming features for the iPhone make it worth it for Blackberry users to ditch their mad Blackberry skills and start over.
Links for April 19
- Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty? Darned interesting article on the impact mobile phones have on society. It’s a feature on Jan Chipchase, a researcher at Nokia who publishes an incredible blog that I’ve subscribed to for awhile.
- Position Is Everything. Yet another site documenting browser CSS limitations.
- Daring Fireball: The Unsatisfying State of Twitter Web Clients for the iPhone. Useful for anyone who’s developing Web sites that target the iPhone.
- Stephen O’Grady: The State of MySQL. I wonder what percentage of MySQL users don’t know the first thing about MySQL? To them, it’s just something they install to make WordPress, MediaWiki, or PHPbb work.
- Waxy.org: Milliways: Infocom’s Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Some insider gave Andy Baio access to a hard drive containing Infocom’s unreleased games, along with lots of other archived information from the company before its fall. Wonderful stuff.
Links from March 19th
- Roger L Kay: Apple’s Icarus Effect. Linked as a reminder to avoid anything written by Roger L Kay.
- Adam Sternbergh: Why White People Like ‘Stuff White People Like’. Surprisingly thoughtful analysis.
- WSJ.com: The Week That Shook Wall Street: Inside the Demise of Bear Stearns
- Elizabeth Spires in Slate: Why the Fed had to bail out Bear Stearns
- Wired Compiler on Eric Burke’s great cartoon about simplicity: Why No One Uses Your Application or Website
- TPMMuckraker: Obama Spends 3 Hours with Chicago Press to Chat about Rezko. Best resource so far on the Rezko scandal.
Links from March 14th
- Sports metaphors for Clinton vs. Obama. – Excellent top to bottom. I still contend that the rules of Quidditch prove that JK Rowling was never a sports fan.
- jQuery creator John Resig demonstrates some cool JavaScript programming tricks in Search and Don’t Replace.
- Fred Clark explains how rising land prices can put mobile home owners in a horrible position. They own depreciating mobile homes and rent appreciating land to put them on. The fundamental problem here is that mobile homes aren’t really mobile.
- Andrew Leonard reports on home equity loan defaults. Homeowners who are behind on their loans have figured out that they can’t take your house away for not paying your HELOC.
- The Great Daylight Saving Time Conspiracy – Lobbyists are busy people.
- Anil Dash creates embeddable versions of his blog posts. Step aside,
blockquote. I’m still trying to puzzle out the implications. - John Gruber analyzes why Apple’s iPhone SDK allows only one app to run at a time. He later posted the counter-argument.
- The Obama campaign circulated a point-by-point takedown of talking points that the Clinton campaign circulated to journalists. Life imitates blogging.
- kottke.org is ten years old today – An incredible milestone and an interesting design retrospective. The rc3.org ten year anniversary celebration arrives latter this year.
The physics of control
When Apple announced the iPhone, there were no provisions whatsoever for third party applications. If you wanted to use the iPhone, you used Apple’s applications. People (myself included) went nuts over it, and Apple responded by telling developers to write Web apps.
Many people strongly suspected that Apple had plans for more than that from the beginning, but nobody really knew what those plans were or when they would be announced. Last October, Apple promised to announce support iPhone-native applications in February, and yesterday we saw what the landscape for those applications would look like.
In terms of ease of development and ease of deployment, the iPhone looks great. The development tools are free to use, and it only costs $99 to register as an iPhone developer, which enables you to distribute your applications through the store application that will be installed on every iPhone as of June. The catch is that there are a number of restrictions on what developers are allowed to do, and that deployment to the iPhone is tightly controlled by Apple. The only way to get your app onto the phone is with iTunes or the phone’s store application, and you have to pay Apple 30% of your licensing fee for the privilege.
It’s the classic walled garden scenario. Apple’s garden looks very nice, but they are intent on remaining the sole gatekeepers when it comes to controlling the iPhone (and iPod Touch). Clearly Apple still has not surrendered to the idea that iPhone is a general purpose computing device that users can tinker with as they wish.
John Siracusa has some interesting musings on whether this walled garden approach can really work, and on what the implications are for independent developers. As he points out, the trend in the computer industry and the mobile device industry is toward open platforms, and you have to wonder successful Apple can be resisting that trend.
Will Apple’s strategy still work five years from now, if Android takes off among handset providers and independent developers? I doubt that Apple is willing to find out. It’s a lot easier to surrender control than it is to reassert control once surrendered. It seems to me that Apple is being very conservative with the iPhone, but at the same time, that they’re listening to customers and relinquishing control at their own pace. At the same time, they have people doing massive amounts of market research for them by jailbreaking and augmenting their phones. I’m certain that the team working on the iPhone SDK was keeping track of what the pain points were for the people writing unauthorized software when they were designing the SDK.
I think it’s a mistake to assume that the business model for iPhone developers will be the same two years from now as it will be in June when iPhone 2.0 launches, and I think it’s a mistake to assume that the API restrictions imposed on developers then will be the same as they are now, as well. Smart analysts will be trying to figure out why Apple is imposing those restrictions. Once they’ve cracked that case, they’ll probably have a good idea of what has to happen for those restrictions to be lifted.
iPhone WebClip icons
A couple of notes for iPhone users. The first is that Web pages you add to your home screen do not automatically update their icons when the creator of a site changes them. I noticed that Google Reader had a new favicon this morning, and guessed that they’d added an iPhone WebClip icon as well. I opened Google Reader to see if the WebClip icon changed automatically — it did not. However, when I deleted the WebClip bookmark and added it again, Google Reader did in fact have a custom icon.
The second note is that Google Reader has a new WebClip icon, so go get it. Google Mail and Google Calendar still don’t have their own icons.
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