Category: Software

Apple and Steve Jobs

~ rbonini

So its all over the internet. Its covered both my FriendFeed and Twiter streams. Scoble already has a post out.

TechCrunch is on it.

Engadget is on it.

Dave Winer said it for all of us:

Dave Winerdavewiner steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs steve jobs 29 minutes ago from web

Steve Jobs is stepping down. Albeit for 5 months.

On the one hand since something changed between the time he issued THAT press release, it is a course for concern. Especially worrying is that according to the BBC, his health issues are more serious than first imagined.

On the other hand, my non-tech-savvy mother got an iPhone today. How is that related? Apple does not stop making money, selling iPhone, Macs or Apple Tv’s.Apple is more than Steve Jobs. Just because Steve Jobs is not at the helm, does NOT mean anything will interrupt apples string of successes. Since Jobs took Apple over, he has imbued it with his vison, his persona, his drive, his ambition. It has worked for Apple and will continue working.

Work is the largest obstacle to recovery. I know that for experience. So i applaud Steve for taking the time off to recover fully and completely. I send him and his family my good wishes.

Hopefully, the Apple faithful will see him once again in June.

Windows 7

~ rbonini ~ 2 Comments

Yep. I’m writing this from my Windows 7 VM (on Virtual PC 2007 SP2).

Performance wise, The setup inside of the Vm is making it sluggish. But of the gig of RAM its got, its only using 32%. Which is notable. Vista beta 2, on the other hand) on the same machine in a dual boot configuration used up 80% (of one gig of RAM) standing still.

Talking of performance, I’ve backed the VM up to Windows Home Server. It took all of 20 minutes. Which frankly surprised me. given the fact that this was a new OS running under a VM.

So I’m inclined to wonder exactly how similar to Vista is 7, file wise? Since WHS only copies to the server files which it does not have a copy of (or a version of). Or, it could be that 7 is optimised for WHS to backup (Which makes sense on a number of levels, but not to the European Union).

The other thing i notice is the new taskbar. I’ve grown used to the Vista taskbar for some reason or other, but this is a pleasant change. The fact that the  task bar items can be configured to show application names or not, is really neat.

They do, however get confused with the buttons in the Quick Launch bar quite easily.

The UAC logo has changed colour, to yellow and blue, in keeping with the OS colour scheme. The UAC prompts themselves are worded differently.

The absence of a sidebar is nice. And I hope that the performance hit that running Sidebar produced is gone too. Gadgets are still there, just in the background and way less conspicuous.

Its quite a please feel to the whole OS. Does it feel like Vista?? A little. Its familiar territory. But In truth, I’ve yet to explorer the OS thoroughly. So that answer will have to wait.

One thing that is defiantly different is that Google Chrome 1.0 looks different.its a dark Blue instead of alight blue.

Talking of web browsers, i decided to install IE8. Which didn’t install. It didn’t recognize the OS for some strange reason. Must try again cause I hear that a few people have managed to do it.

I must say that I’m impressed enough to be considering upgrading one of my Vista machines to Windows 7.

This Beta 1 makes me look to Beta 2 and Release with a lot of hope that Microsoft have learned their lesson of the Vista Release debacle.

The one thing that no ones said anything much about is the WinFS file system that Vista was supposed to ship.

With Sun’s ZFS redundant file system, Microsoft are lagging behind. Even OSX has ZFS built in ( it has to be enabled with some obscure command line tricks, but its there).

Even if Microsoft released a separate beta version with WinFS, I’d be happy. 

NTFS is old. Time to innovate it.

Favorite Tweets/ FriendFeed Comments of the Day

~ rbonini

Ok, quickie post here. I’m still alive but busy on university projects and studying for exams :(.

In no particular order

  1. FF : Ian May posted “My wife said, "Whatcha doin today?" I said, "Nothing." She said, "You did that yesterday." I said, "I wasn’t finished."”
  2. FF: Stupid Sleepy (aka Tina) asked: “Caption, please!”

    sumocaption.png

    See the suggested captions at FriendFeed here.

  3. FF: BreakingNewsOn – Tweeted:

    “Statement from Israel on boat collision involving former US Congresswoman McKinney: http://www.bnonews.com

    To which Evan Brown commented: “Thankfully, McKinney is no longer in Washington screwing things up. Unfortunately, she is now oversees screwing things up”

  4. FF: Stupid Sleepy (aka Tina) posted this story:

    Mr Fixit’s Emily Newton, left, and Sara Cooper are ready to make the Taste toilet experience more enjoyable.

    I beg you to read the hilarious comments on FriendFeed here.

  5. And finally, while there its not funny, theres a twitter/Friendfeed effort to get Robert Scoble an interview with Steve Jobs of Apple. See here (FriendFeed) and here (Scoble’s original tweet) and here (@joshaidan’s response).

To be honest, emailing Steve Jobs is a bit daunting. But I will get round to it.

So come on,  help Scoble get an interview with Steve Jobs: email Steve: sjobs@apple.com. @joshaidan says to make it personal.

Back and ready to rock

~ rbonini

So I’m back from holiday (Florida – no ride queues and was great).

And I’m raring to go .

To start the year off, WHS4Smugmug development will resume ( after a year of being busy and feeling guilty). There’s a great series of posts on Add-In development on the tentacleBlog:

And I’ll be using them to bootstrap development and hopefully get moving.

One area I’m worries about is the file/folder structure that it’ll pull the photos from and send them to Smugmug.

So I’ll crowdsource this problem. Please leave a comment on how you organise your photo folder. Thanks.

This’ll help me with the 8000 photos I took in Florida.

Twitter Vs FriendFeed

~ rbonini ~ 1 Comment

Ok, so I got the FF bug before going to Twitter (you can follow me here).

So I installed Twitterific on my iPhone and turned on FF-to-Twitter integration. And I imported Twitter into FF, too.

This whole set up works very well. Twitters that go out of FF (as items that are posted to FF) aren’t re-imported to my FriendFeed stream (clever!). And comments in reply to twitters also go to Twitter.

The above accounts for 90% of the updates on Twitter.

So, what value do I see on Twitter?

Well, I have had several conversations, both public and private on Twitter with people all over the world. So yes, there is value there.

But I increasingly find that its easier to talk to those people that I’ve been following on FF for a few months already. And you’ll find that most of those people I follow on Twitter I also subscribe to in FF.

This raises an interesting comparison: what service do I get the most value from when i follow the exact same people in both?

FriendFeed is the clear winner here.

  • One, FF makes it a lot easier to follow conversations, even across several different items. This makes for focused interaction on specifics. Threads rarely ramble, and usually spark a new one if that happens. I’ve see and been part of more debates that I can count, but always come out of it feeling good – win lose or draw.
  • Two, we get far more from the stream. FF allows anything with a link or even just a message to be posted. Videos play right in the stream. YouTube video appear automatically when you post them. Google maps appear for location based services. Pictures can accompany the links, giving nice visual feedback on the item even before you click on it. all these little things and more engage the user far more than simple text can.
  • Three, Likes and Comments. Both are nice to get on a item you’ve posted. And both help item to rise to the top of your stream. Its not unusual to see items a few hours or even days old suddenly appear. These are usually some of the good stuff that been posted. these allow you to see the real hotbeds of activity on FF. Twitter has no such system.
  • Four. Twitter integration. This is a circular argument, but its nice to pull stuff back into Twitter. Especially since I’m not that fussy about using twitter directly.
  • Fifth. The team. The FF team use FF itself to engage and interact with the users, giving them a voice into changes to layout and such. This is important. user know that they are being looked after. this will prevent people leaving easily. it certainly makes me feel better that they’ve got my back.
  • Sixth, and finally – the API. The FF API has no restrictions on it and they provide libraries for all platforms and languages. Getting data in and out is easy.
  • Seventh, Ok, this really is the final point. Rooms. The notion of subject oriented streams has really taken off. You name the subject and there’s a room for it on FF. The US Politics room was particularly useful during the election. The nearest Twitter has are hashtags.

So, I will continue to use Twitter. And I’ll continue to use FriendFeed. Both are very much essentials for the modern internet hog. Even if you don’t like (or have) an account with the facebooks and myspace’s of the internet, even if blogs don’t figure in your online presence, both Twitter and FriendFeed are as good a start as any.

The shared opinions of millions live on the internet, but I have my little corner of that universe. And that good enough for me.

iPhone UI Rant

~ rbonini

I present to you my dear reader the first in an infinite series of posts in which I rant.

Now my iPhone ( which I got about 4 weeks ago) is great. I love it.

But every now an against there are a few things that crop up and bite me.

Now I’m a big believer in the UI. the UI makes or breaks a program or device. And the Ui needs to steer a fine line between restricting the options avaliable and leaving its users howling. Or opening too many options that can end up breaking the program (one cannot know the precise combination of large numbers of inputs an their effects in a large number of different situations).

So I understand that. But I’m asking for Apple to enable a few more options in the settings

  • Apple: the battery on your device sucks. Unless you turn off 3G, you battery life goes down the toilet. So heres what I’m asking you to do ( since this is your problem in the first place). Allow me to toggle a setting such that 3G is only turned on for Safari or other internet applications and turned off when I quit. Do the same with Wi-Fi. And since there is no MMS or video calling, no one is gonna need it anyway for calling and texts anyway.
  • Your keyboard sucks too. But your software dosen’t. I’ve even taken notes for a two hour lecture on my iPhone and its worked out well enough. Just let me have pervasive tilting so that I can type on the larger keys.
  • Mobile Safari crashes on me with astounding regularity. When an app crashes, at least do it gracefully. A black screen or the home screen does not cut it. Do something like your arch rivals in Redmond do and let your users know that you have collected the error data so  that you can work on it. Its amazingly calming (the flow of updates on the first Tuesday of every month provides that psychic calm to Jerry Sienfeld). And offer to restart the app too. Since you don’t get crashes on OSX very often, we’ll give you some time to get it right.
  • The appearance of an unified mailbox would be nice. Its a pain having to go all the way back to the accounts tab to swap accounts.
  • Do not tell me that syncing with a new exchange server wipes my current calendar and contacts. Seriously Apple this is a major mistake. And has multiple level of fail. This is 2008 and people are going to have more than one calender. Get used to it. And people have hundreds of contacts. Who is going to take responsibility if they mysteriously disappear?
  • If a Youtube video is unavailable tell me, don’t take me to the Youtube mobile search page. Is that so difficult?

Now don’t get me wrong, the UI is brilliant. It answers all my other gripes about other phones.

Even my mother (who would have been frightened of a Mechanical Turk) can use it. She required no instruction whatsoever and is as happy as a clam using it.

Apple, history has handed you on a golden platter the chance to completely redefine what people do with handheld devices forever.

Use it.

Sliverlight 2 Ships!!!!

~ rbonini

The next version of Microsoft’s Flash competitor is out.

And why is this big news? Well, a number of things stand out about this release.

The first big one is the number of languages that you can use with Silverlight: VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby. though this, potentially isn’t the whole list. Any language that is targeted for the .Net CLR can, in theory, be used. This opens up the number of developers with the skills to use Silverlight. Microsoft may not have the install base that Flash has, but its making that up  by allowing as many developers as possible to get started quickly.

So Microsoft will leverage the .Net developer corps as well as the Python and Ruby community to jumpstart Silverlight and Silverlight Adoption.

In addition, Scott Hanselman says that you can use Eclipse to code Silverlight:

But there’s also http://www.eclipse4sl.org/. Yes, that means you can code Silverlight in Eclipse. Details and progress at the Eclipse Tools for Silverlight Blog. It’ll be licensed under the EPL 1.0 License.

 

Scott Guthrie  adds (I missed this on first reading):

Today we are also announcing that Microsoft is partnering with Soyatec to sponsor additional tools for developing Silverlight applications using the cross platform Eclipse development platform.  Click here to learn more about this and download the free Silverlight Eclipse plugin.  Click here for a step-by-step tutorial that walks-through how to use their Eclipse tools today to build a Silverlight 2 application.

The other big thing, at least for me is the tools library. This has been the one thing stopping me from enjoying Silverlight to the full.

Scott Guthrie provides the details:

Today we are also announcing the "Silverlight Control Pack" – which will deliver dozens of more controls that you can use with Silverlight 2.  We will continually add new controls to the control pack over the next few months (we expect to ultimately have more than 100 controls total).  The first release of the control pack will include controls like TreeView, DockPanel, WrapPanel, ViewBox, Expander, NumericUpDown, AutoComplete and more.  All controls will ship with full source, and with a OSI license that allows you to modify and use the source for any purpose.

Let me repeat that: All controls will ship with full source, and with a OSI license that allows you to modify and use the source for any purpose.

Unbelievable. I’m gonna have some serious fun playing with and tweaking those controls.

This is yet another element of Silverlight that will attract developers in droves. It all fits into to Microsoft’s pan of driving adoption of the platform on both the developer and client sides. I mean, Flash has no controls (except the most basic root level elements). And here is Microsoft offering developers the nirvana of controls and full source. It will boost productivity not only for developers, but also for designers who want to add that extra special flourish for their customers – its just a small tweak away.

Also, there’s one little line in Scotts post that jumped out at me:

We are also announcing today that we are releasing the Silverlight XAML vocabulary and schema under the Open Specification Promise (OSP), which enables anyone to create products that read and write XAML for Silverlight.

That’s really interesting. Is Silverlight XAML going to become like XML is now? Where we output XAML on the fly? The possibilities that can come out of this little bombshell are quite amazing. can’t wait to see what people come out with.

That’s what got my attention (of course, there is more in Scott Gu’s post)

And just to wet your appetites, Scott Hanselman has a talk at PDC which includes Silverlight and his now famous Babysmash application that will showcase the networking capabilities of Silverlight:

I’ll also show a Silverlight version of BabySmash that talks to the same server-side endpoints, and we’ll all (the audience) run BabySmash Silverlight on our laptops during the talk (better than just checking your email, which is what you usually do in talks) and see if we can’t crush my server live. Then I’ll talk about new .NET 4.0 features that I could use to take the whole solution to the next level.

The Boom is Over

~ rbonini

It is all over Techmeme and FriendFeed: Sequoia Capital (the venture capitalists behind Yahoo and Google, to name just two), have called off the tech boom and told their companies to start preparing for the worst.

image

Lets think about this for a second. Is the technology sector as a whole vulnerable to this downturn? Yes, but probably not that much.

Consider Google as an example. Google gets bundled with every install of Firefox ( and if memory serves, some OEM PCs as well). And Google is pretty much the homepage of the Internet. So Google’s traffic probably wont suffer that much.

However, Google make money off ads,and it requires advertisers to buy those ads (or be charged for them). Now this could be very bad or very good depending on the industry doing the buying.

For example, Jeremiah Owyang just said on FriendFeed:

“The economic downturn is a good thing for social media, it’s going to force innovation, revenues, and productivity benefits –the other tools will fall by the wayside. Agree or disagree?”

So either ads will become more aggressive in an effort to lure ever reluctant consumers into the open.

Or they will cut back. Some ads just don’t work as well as traditional methods.

My bet is that, as Jeremiah said above, the online space of ads and social media will be leveraged to an ever greater degree and firms try their level best to stay above water.

So why did Google’s stock drop yesterday? Again, I think that investors are nervous that Google, while having a very broad range of services, hasn’t spread its revenue streams widely enough.

Google need to figure a way to monetize Youtube ( for starters), rapidly. Youtube gets millions of views per day that Google earn $0 from.

I’ll tell you what Google should do. They should go to Adobe and license that audio-to-keyword tech in CS4 and run every video on Youtube through it.

Gmail is another one. Personally I have never EVER clicked on a link from the Ads in the sidebar. Sure they are accurate and frighteningly well targeted, but I have never clicked on them.

For the tech industry as a whole, software is integral to the lives we now live. It ain’t going away anytime soon.

FriendFeed Gets My Images, Too – FriendFeed Notify 0.2

~ rbonini

Like this picture?

(Yerba Buena Island – Thomas Hawk)

Me too. How about this one:

(Passage- johopo)

Nice huh?

One more:

(Untitled – Me)

Couldn’t resist.

My point is that the above three images will be posted to FriendFeed along with the link to this post by the new release of FriendFeed Notify 0.2.

Now this isn’t for just for photography buffs like me and Thomas Hawk. It works for any images embedded in an img tag and greater than 50x100px.

Now the release isn’t actually feature complete. There are a few things I’d like to add to it. These will be in the 0.2.1 release. Including picking and choosing which images to post and  the posting of a comment by way of summary. These are simple to implement and I don’t thing it will be too long before they are out.

So go and get it from here.

Anyone looking at the code will see that i am using the .Net frameworks webbrowser control to retrieve images. This runs in the same dialog you are shown the images.The regexes I tried are all in the code, but commented out. If anyone can help with these, that would be great. It would cut down on the overhead. Thanks.

For those of you reading this and wondering hat happened to my Smugmug add-in for WHS.its been on the back burner for a while. I didn’t expect the hiatus to take this long. In the meanwhile, Omar Shahine has updated his Send To SmugMug utility. Some of the features for the next release that people are voting on are similar in concept to my add-in. So, go vote. I still intend to do this Add-In and get it integrated with WHS.

Enjoy.

A Word of Caution

~ rbonini

Since the quake in California,  old Vimeo and Youtube videos that people have favourite have been showing up in FriendFeed. Current thinking has it that the data must have been destroyed and recreated from backups.

Some of them are, NSFW, shall we say (I’m putting it very, very delicately). There is even one particular user that has a lot of these videos showing up in his stream (and I’m not linking to them – I’m keeping this blog respectable).

So given the current employers habit of Googling prospective hires, it might be safer to be careful what we add to our online personas.

Just saying.