Multithreaded

Just been listening to the March 14th newscast from the JavaPosse where they spend a lot of, very interesting, time talking about the new SDK on the iPhone and the apparent restrictions in the terms and conditions which prevent people from distributing apps which run on a VM. This would mean that developers could not distribute Java applications which required the VM to be present to run. They discuss a lot of interesting points, and speculate a lot on the motivations, sinister or otherwise, of Apple in deciding to limit developers. Obviously, not being Apple, they’re not able to draw a lot of definite conclusions.

I’d like to offer a different perspective on this issue. As developers, we see the iPhone as a development platform with huge potential. Since the moment it was released, I’ve been wanting to have other apps running on it. It makes a great connected device and it’s easy to compare it with other, open, platforms such as the Nokia N800. However, I believe Apple did not create the iPhone, and are not looking at it, as a device for developers. This is a consumer device, first and foremost. Apple’s priority at all times is that someone who has bough an iPhone, as a consumer, should get the best possible experience all of the time and if that means that developers are left frustrated then so be it.

I think that the directive against VM-based apps it based on this principle. Apple do not want people to come browsing the software on the iPhone store, seeing something they like and then being told they need to download one or more other components in order to get it to run. Or worse, downloading (and perhaps paying for) an app only to find it won’t run because they didn’t know that they needed to download (and possibly pay for) another component before it would run. Supporting this in the iPhone store would mean dealing with dependencies between components and then you get into all the problems of version handling - what happens if I have the Java 5 runtime installed but another app needs Java 6?

Looking at my experience of using a Nokia N800, it was great that it is a very open device and that there are lots of third-party apps for it, but my experience of installing those apps was often frustrating as I needed to locate libraries that those apps depended on and download them separately. Even as a programmer I found it very annoying and tedious. I can well see that Apple to not want that to be the experience of the average user who expects things to just work.

In fact, I would not be surprised if Apple did not take “it just works” as their yardstick for deciding how and when to open up aspects of the iPhone. As the JavaPosse discussed, the delay in releasing the SDK was probably not down to not wanting people to develop for the iPhone, but rather taking the time to ensure that the experience the developers have is a great one which probably meant considerable cleanup of the libraries and tools between the launch of the phone and the release of the SDK. For iPhone users they are going to be even more stringent in applying that principle.

Of course, another aspect of that is that they would want all apps on the iPhone to be as consistent as possible in their look and behaviour. The first part of that is the visual component library which means getting people to use the native SDK as much as possible. The second part is the UI guidelines, but Apple developers are usually pretty good at sticking to those. I have used Java apps on Symbian 60 phones and generally they look and behave very differently from the native S60 apps which can cause a lot of confusion and just be downright annoying sometimes. Again, a situation Apple would love to avoid on the iPhone.

In conclusion, I think that if you take a step back from your developer viewpoint and look at the iPhone SDK and software distribution system from the point of view of a consumer then Apple’s behaviour seems a lot more understandable and a lot less sinister.

Given my rants about the customer service, or lack of it, I received from Orange back in 2006 when I made the mistake of taking up their broadband service, I thought I might redress the balance a bit by singing the praises of two companies I have dealt with, one recently and one longer-term, whose service is exceptional and diametrically opposite to Orange’s efforts.

I’ve recently moved house and of course I needed to sort out the broadband. I looked at some of the more well-known offerings from Virgin, Sky and the like (funnily enough I didn’t consider Orange) but then I remembered a recommendation from a friend many years ago - Andrews and Arnold. Look at their website and you’ll see it has none of the glossy, flashy marketing stuff that appears on most service providers’ sites. However, behind that site are a number of experienced, intelligent, dedicated techies. Okay, it’s a little confusing to find the information about pricing and bandwidth, but it’s very encouraging that right on the front page they mention things like Reverse DNS and IP6. They even have a link to an IRC channel right there on the front page!

Now admittedly, your average householder looking for a bit of broadband for the weekend is probably going to take one look and head off to BT or the like - this is not a service for them. For the likes of me, a long-term techie who is as comfortable configuring up his own firewall and setting up SSH ports, etc, this tells me that these people speak my language and know what I am talking about. They are also refreshingly honest, telling you up front that the bandwidth you’ll get is dependent very much on the quality of your line and distance from the exchange and that they’re not going to make promises about that until the end of the first ten days by which time they’ll have monitored the line enough to tell what is the optimum speed to drive it at.

But the real kicker was when, on my way to work two days after I installed the service, I got a text message informing me that my line had just dropped. I immediately called the support line and got through to James who had all the details of the line history, noted that the line had been dropping off-and-on over the past couple of days and suggested that I might want to take the front panel off the phone socket and plug the router directly into the BT master socket to eliminate the internal wiring from the circuit and so see if that was causing any problem. It would also ensure that during the line training period I’d get the best quality from the line and when the speed was finally fixed I’d be getting the most from it. Moreover, the next day James called me back unprompted to check how the line was looking from my end and ask if I’d had a chance to plug into the master socket.

At the moment I am reading “Managing Humans” by Michael Lopp (aka Rands). In one chapter on outsourcing he describes an interaction with a customer support person for his broadband provider and talks about all the “idiot filters” he has to go through just to be able to get to talk to a human being. I can clearly say that A&A have no idiot filters in place - they assume that you know what you’re talking about and I doubt they’ve ever told anyone to re-install their operating system.

There are other things which set A&A apart, such as the card in a clear plastic envelope attached to the top of the router with all the IP addresses on one side and, on the other side, all the login details for the router and the ADSL line so that you can fully access the router or, if you prefer, set up your own. All of this is the opposite of most service providers who try to lock you down and prevent you from accessing anything, presumable on the basis that they think you’ll screw it up. I can, without hesitation, recommend A&A if you are a techie looking for broadband in the UK. Oh, and there’s no 12-month lock-in, just a modest (£5) disconnect fee, or no charge if you are migrating away to another supplier. Oh (2) they provide static IP addresses as standard.

The other company, which I have been dealing with for a while, is FogCreek, makers of FogBugz, a very fine commercial bug tracking system. Why would you buy a bug tracking system when you could just use Bugzilla? Well, it’s like Apple equipment. For the most part it just works. There are lots of little details in the user interface which show the care and thought which have gone into it. It’s clear that the FogCreek guys use it every day as part of their environment which means they have covered most of the things you would want from a bug system and some things I certainly never considered. But also there’s the fact that these guys are so nice to deal with that you almost want to give them your money anyway. I recently moved from hosting my own instance of FogBugz to using the On Demand service. I had, however, recently renewed my support contract on my locally hosted licenses. I mentioned this to support. “No problem”, they said, “we can either send you are refund or apply the balance to the On Demand service.” No hesitation, no quibbles about contract, nothing. Just treating me like a human being and like they care. Many of you may know that FogCreek is Joel Spolsky’s company and already read his blog or have read his books. Joel definitely lives by his no-nonsense philosophy which basically says if you treat your customer as king and treat them fairly then you don’t need to worry about giving refunds or such as these will be vastly outweighed by the revenue generated by repeat business and recommendations generated by the goodwill you’ve created.

These companies demonstrate how I expect to be treated as a customer. Not only that, but their attitude and approach reflect a high degree of confidence that the service they are providing means that customers won’t want to leave so they don’t have to have financial penalties to stop you going. I just wish all companies were like these.

A post by Fake Steve Jobs led me to Jason D. O’Grady over at ZDNet who has blogged about how much he hates the new Apple keyboards. I bought one when they came out to try it out and since then I have replaced they keyboards on all my Macs with the new ones.

It seems that the feel and design is something you either love or hate. I really love the low-profile light touch on the keys. I am a programmer and I use my keyboard probably 10 hours a day. Whenever I use an old-style keyboard now all I can think is how clunky and heavy it feels. It feels like I’m using an original IBM PC keyboard. Interestingly, my Mac Book Pro keyboard, which always used to feel light, now feels quite solid and I actually enjoy using it more now that I’m using the new desktop keyboards.

I don’t mind that Jason doesn’t like them. It really comes down to a matte of taste. His other objections centre around the design and here I think he is on shakier ground. I love the low-throw of the keys. They give enough click sound to give me the feedback I need without the tactile feedback. And objections to the change in the location of they various function keys are really just complaints about change. Millions of new Mac users in the coming year will never care about that and it’s something that most people can easily adapt to.

But most importantly, the keyboard and mouse are two of the most easily replaceable components on a computer. Okay, there may not be as many Mac-specific keyboards on the market as there are for PCs, but there are still plenty to choose from, so if you don’t like the one that Apple puts in the box then go get another one. Personally, although I love the design of the Mighty Mouse, I don’t really like using it so I use a Microsoft Intellimouse (actually, I’ve always felt that MS were a far better at hardware than software) which, of course, works fine.

I agree that it would be nice to see a full-sized bluetooth keyboard, but I’m still looking forward to receiving the cut-down one when it finally ships to me here in the UK.

My point in all of this is that I’m fine with Jason hating the new keyboard, but please don’t try and justify it with opinions dressed up as objective design complaints. There’s far too much of that already in the world.

Well, they’ve finally reaped the full value of their actions. SCO have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection 5 years after making claims that Linux violated their patents because of code supplied by IBM. They never produced any evidence in court of the violations and carried out a cynical campaign to try and extract money from companies using Linux with the promise of not suing them if their claims were upheld. This was pure protection racketeering and only a few paid up - not even enough to cover their massive legal bills.

Many people seem unaware that this SCO has nothing to do with the Santa Cruise Operation that once contributed hugely to the development of Unix back in the 80’s. That company was bought out a long time ago and the purchaser changed their name to SCO to try and reap some of the positive image, but they’ve never really been anything other than a destroyer of value and never done anything except threaten people with lawsuits.

The final blow was when a court ruled that, although they bought UNIX from Novell in 1993, somehow they did not buy the copyrights along with it (leaving open the question of what they did actually buy.) A company of lawyers, and not very good ones at that.

RIP SCO.

Joel Spolsky makes this insightful, erm, comment on allowing comments to blog posts or not. I have to say, I have a lot of sympathy for his view, where he is in agreement with Dave Winer, of not allowing comments to blog posts.

It is interesting for me that on this blog (not the most popular or active in the world, for sure) one of the most popular posts has been my rant against Orange for their disgusting broadband service. To date there have been 104 comments from similarly frustrated and dissatisfied Orange customers and it has become something of a forum for people to not just express their emotions on the issue, but to keep people informed of the progress they are making in the fight against a totally broken customer service situation, and, in some cases, to announce their final victory.

However, this kind of post may be unusual in its nature. Joel and Dave make the point that their blogs are where they can express their, possibly unpopular, ideas and if anyone wants to comment on them they should do so in their own public forum (i.e. blog) and not as a comment (possibly anonymous). Joel also makes the good point that comment threads often rapidly descend into bun fights, especially for just those controversial issues that he feels blogs are best suited to and the trackbacks should ensure that all the posts are linked together.

So, with that in mind, I have disallowed comments on this post. If anyone is actually reading it, and wants to comment, you know where and how to do it.

That was an interesting move by Apple at the WWDC yesterday, making Safari available on Windows. There seem to me to be a couple of good reasons for this:

Firstly, on June 29th the iPhone will be released (in the US at least, we Apple fanboys in the rest of the world will have to wait a little longer to get our hands on one) and a million or so people, not just Mac users, will be buying them over the next few months. Of course, Safari is the browser on the iPhone. Not a cut-down, limited version of Safari, but the full Safari 3. All at once there is the possibility of running the exact same browser on your Mac, your PC and your phone. Bringing Safari to Windows gives all the non-Mac iPhone users an opportunity to have the same browsing experience on their desktop, laptop and mobile phone.

That’s the short-term reason I see. The second, longer-term, reason is that this is giving more ‘ice water to someone in hell’ as Steve Job’s commented when asked why iTunes was so popular on Windows. Making Safari available is another way of giving Windows users a little more taste of what the Mac experience is like. A lot of long-term Windows users have no idea how using a Mac is just different from using Windows. I certainly didn’t until I made the switch two-and-a-half years ago. I remember the excitement of realizing that this wasn’t simply the same ideas as Windows packaged differently, but that the whole approach was different. By making more of that available to the 93% or so of computer users who have never experienced a Mac, Apple will tempt a lot more of them to go for the full switch.

In the future I can see more and more of the core apps being ported over to Windows. Mail, Address Book and iCal would all sit very comfortably alongside iTunes and Safari. There’s no direct economic benefit, since they’ll all be free downloads, but the aim would seem to me to be to infiltrate the Windows territory, give a taste of what’s on offer and get people to switch. Apple currently has about 6% of the computer market. Currently they’re not aiming for 93%, they’re aiming for 10%. You can see that in the Mac/PC ads - they’re not designed to appeal to everyone, but they are designed to appeal to the next segment of users that Apple want to attract.

Apple clearly have a long-term strategy going here and seem to be very effective at executing it.