willcodeforcoffee.com » My Two Cents

Blocking Stores

eric — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 16:52:39 +0000

Recently, after an Apple Terms of Service change the Audible and Amazon Kindle apps had to update their apps removing links to their respective online stores. I’m assuming this is to force people to use the iTunes and iBooks stores instead. I think this is anti-competitive in its own right, but there is another problem I see for Apple here…
Apple has deliberately ruined the user experience for me on their devices! I can now buy books easier on other devices than I can on the iPad.
I do not feel compelled to use Apples stores instead because I already use these other services.
I wonder if this will ever cause people to stop using Apple products?

Late To The Party

eric — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 19:11:33 +0000

Doesn’t anyone else think it is odd that while there was a Windows XP Tablet Edition (in 2002 even), and even Vista had an on-screen keyboard, most people say Microsoft was late to the tablet party? I do.

I remember the first tablets coming out, but they were expensive and under-powered. Still, I remember seeing them at the doctor’s office and a few other places. A $2500 tablet is inaccessible to most people, Apple got it right with a sub-$1000, heck sub-$600 iPad tablet. It wasn’t a full on OS, it was a slightly bigger phone OS, but iPad was what got people into tablets.

Microsoft recently demoed Windows 8 on YouTube: Windows 8 Demo

It looks like a pure tablet OS – except it is a full version of Windows. It will also run on ARM processors, the cheap processors in your cell phone, not the expensive mobile versions of desktop processors that previous Windows tablets used. This means reasonable prices and a desktop caliber OS.

A recent interview with a Microsoft executive showed Microsoft’s concern for hitting the market. There was a huge lag between IE6 and IE7, Windows XP and Windows Vista. Microsoft’s product cycles are measured in geological time, something unacceptable in a fast moving high-tech world. They’re acknowledging it, and moving on it, but its too late – they’re already buried.

Apple is clearly dominating the tablet market, and the iPhone is the gold standard for cell phones. Steve Jobs and the Apple team know exactly how to place a product in front of people and turn them into consumers. Microsoft is doing well with Windows and Office because people are comfortable with them, but they haven’t got a clue when it comes to introducing new products. When Microsoft finally does bring out a tablet running Windows 8 they need to capitalize on the market they were first to, but was opened up by Apple.

The Mobile Web Browser

eric — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 15:19:37 +0000

Remember back in the days of the browser wars? We chose a browser and that was what defined our web experience. In the end Microsoft won with Internet Explorer. They had the desktop marketshare and IE was integrated into the OS to the point that it was (arguably) the fastest and easiest to use. Eventually sites were just built for IE only, or Netscape Navigator only. But a new browser war is forming. In these “modern times” the web browsers are integrated into the phone’s OS as IE was with Windows 95, and we pretty much live with them the way they are: Safari on iPhone, whatever is labeled “Browser” on the Android and BlackBerry, Internet Explorer on Windows Phone, etc.. But a new battle for browser market-share is forming with Opera and Mozilla drawing battle lines.

When the iPhone first came out it made waves. It had probably the best web browser available on a phone. Apple was banking on people using the web on their phones. Apple’s Mobile Safari had a lot of tricks built into, especially CSS tricks, to make a consistent “Apple-style” UI with mobile websites. Unfortunately at the time consumers did not agree, and developers demanded a programming API to write native applications instead of web applications.

Things are coming around full circle now. Late last year RIM (BlackBerry) CEO Jim Balsillie said you don’t need apps, you need the web. Its a funny thing to say, because when Steve Jobs said it he was wrong – and especially when there are so many thousands of apps in the various “App Stores” out there. Its funnier still that I think he might be right this time.

The desktop internet world has matured but the fragmentation we saw during the browser wars is coming back in the mobile world. One interesting fact though is that the default iPhone web browser (Safari) and the Android web browser are both based on the same desktop browser engine: WebKit – the same WebKit that Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome desktop browsers are. The new BlackBerry Torch has the new BlackBerry OS 6 also including a WebKit based web browser. This is good news: WebKit is one of the best HTML5 browsers available right now. Both Safari and the Android Browser score pretty high on Html5Test.com, (I don’t have the exact figures) so I assume that the BlackBerry would as well. With all of these big companies working on the same open-source project we are seeing some good results in the WebKit area!

I recently loaded up the Firefox Mobile browser on an Android phone I have and I was EXTREMELY impressed despite the fact it is beta bits! It has the best mobile HTML5 support I’ve seen in a mobile device (207 + 9 points at Html5Test.com when 3.6.12 for desktop gets 139 + 4!). The best part is the navigation and control though: like tabs on the left and the back/forward buttons on the right. It was designed for mobile from the start.

Opera Mini is another popular browser, though slower than Webkit and Firefox, it still has some other nice features – and has been around a lot longer. It (severely) lacks the HTML5 support of Firefox and Safari (only 27 points!), it does have the nice “Speed Dial” feature. Opera is really pushing the mobile browsers though, so hopefully they will be innovating in HTML5 quite a bit further, but despite that it is still a decent mobile browser. Opera is available on almost any smartphone too (even iPhone!), while Firefox is really only on Android.

I have Windows Phone 7 with mobile IE, like its desktop cousin it is easily the worst of the modern mobile browsers, thankfully the Mango update to Phone 7 will bring more advanced features, but it will still leave mobile IE way behind. Despite the lack of features and polish in Safari though, IE is a very capable browser.

It doesn’t look like fragmentation will stop, since each browser is defined and tied to the phone OS (just like the IE bad-old days), but this time it looks like the competitors are on a more level playing field.

This is How Microsoft Sells Windows Phone 7 To Me?

eric — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 12:41:27 +0000

So Microsoft released Windows Phone 7 last week. I’ve talked about the phone before. I was pretty disappointed with their ads though:

YouTube: Season of the Witch

I’m baffled. The way the ad looks to me someone was texting while driving and almost killed everyone in the commercial! And then everyone is too busy texting about it to notice each other…

It’s time for a phone to save us from our phones is the big take-away line. The problem I see with this ad is that it condemns all phones as causing accidents and distracting people.

Microsoft: people love using their phones! I do, even my lousy Storm. Phones are distracting because they’re good. Sell me a phone I want to use and does the things I need. In a way, I think that is what you’re saying, but I’m seeing something different.

Windows Phone 7 Thoughts

eric — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 14:49:36 +0000

Yesterday I saw a preview of a Windows Phone 7 (WP7, or #WP7 on Twitter) when Joey deVilla and John Bristowe were in town for a one day coffee and code at a Second Cup in downtown Edmonton.
I’m not going to do a big preview of the phone, I didn’t get that kind of access. I tried out a demo phone running Windows Phone 7 software. Engadget did a great preview with lots of details. Is Windows 7 going to kill the iPhone? I really doubt it. Will it kill Android? I think its likely to take a lot of market from Android, but I’ll talk about that later.
I’m not interested in Apps. WP7 will have Twitter apps, and has Facebook integration built in. Probably a lot of the popular iPhone and Android software will eventually get ported over to WP7. As a web developer I am most interested in the web browsing experience, and it looked pretty good.
The Web Browser
The WP7 web browser is based on desktop Internet Explorer 7, but it isn’t IE7. Joey said he liked to call it IE7.5; it also has a lot from IE8 put in it. He told me Microsoft is working hard on porting a lot of the HTML5 goodness from IE9 onto the phone, but I wouldn’t expect that until WP8. I think this is pretty amazing myself, because they are using the same software as the desktop browsers on the phone. Since it is based on the desktop software I’m sure we can expect it to have a lot of the features of the desktop software. Unfortunately IE7 wasn’t really all that great to begin with, it was just a marked improvement on IE6.
I am glad it isn’t another WebKit browser, the browser engine behind iPhone’s Safari and Android’s browser and the new browser on the BlackBerry Torch. Why? Just because its good to see competition. WebKit is an excellent browser, but it is lacking HTML5 support in many areas also. Competition will improve this.
The Windows Phone 7 User Interface
The UI is very different from any I’d used before. On computers we are used to scrolling up and down only, and for the most part that is true on phones as well. The iPhone has pages of apps that you scroll sideways on, but it wasn’t the same as on the WP7 UI. The WP7 UI is based around hubs, shown as squares on the main page. The biggest difference I saw was just how much side-scrolling was used in the page menus. You could tell each swipe brought you something different, another context. It was very interesting and intuitive.
Predictions: The Future vs. Android
I said earlier that I thought that WP7 could take market share from Android, and I really do think so. Android has good potential as a platform, its open source (sort of) and can be customized by manufacturers. Unfortunately the manufacturers don’t do it well. Their software is terrible and this results in an unstable phone that crashes a lot. My brother has told me he can’t even take pictures anymore without having his phone reboot! The manufacturers are also tight about allowing OS upgrades because they would rather you buy a new handset from them. With the iPhone 4 coming out, I’m hearing a lot of people say they wish they had gotten an iPhone instead of an Android and will not buy an Android again.
Windows Phone 7 has the potential to break this. From what I understand the basic WP7 OS will be the same across all manufacturers without customization. Upgrades will be via Microsoft (probably like Windows Update). No more TouchFLO, no specific Motorola bits. The main difference between WP7 phones will be in the hardware – cameras, memory, processor speeds. This means a much more consistent look and feel, and hopefully better reliability.
I see most of the WP7 market share being taken from Android.
Predictions: The Future vs. iPhone
I don’t think WP7 will beat iPhone right now. Perhaps Windows Phone 8 will compete better, but WP7 lacks too many features that are already in iPhone 4: cut and paste, multitasking and a huge lead in App development. iPhone also has something that neither Android/Google or Microsoft have: fanbois. Sure there are a few Android and Microsoft fanboys out there, but Apple has a rabid and loyal following, whereas Microsoft is mostly derided and Google taken for granted as the search engine and nothing more.
Microsoft didn’t buy any loyal fans with their previous generations of phone software. Windows Phone 6 was a flop. Microsoft released the Kin back in June but bailed completely by August. Not enough time to gain a following. But on the other hand, Tony Curtis was buried with his iPhone – inseparable even in death.
Apple’s high-price-for-high-quality reputation is starting to get tarnished. Call quality has never been great on the iPhone in the first three generations and with the iPhone 4 “Antennagate” fiasco, I wonder if some people might start to get dissatisfied with Apple and its poor customer support. Apple’s first acknowledgment of the antenna problem was to say they were reporting the signal quality wrong this whole time.
Predictions: The Future vs. BlackBerry
BlackBerry is a different kind of animal – its more of a work phone. With Microsoft’s strong exchange integration I could see them taking a lot more of BlackBerry’s market-share away. BlackBerry doesn’t make good consumer phones. The Storm flopped (don’t I know it), the new Torch is supposed to be really good, and we’ll have to see, but its not making enough of a mark in the market right now. I’m predicting that BlackBerry may eventually start selling Windows Phones because innovating with their OS is too expensive and difficult.
Handsets:
Antenna problems excluded, the current iPhone 4 hardware is amazing: 1GHz processor, 16GB or 32GB of space, an amazing camera and that gorgeous Retina Display screen technology. I’m sure that there will be a lot of comparable hardware for WP7 out there, but will it be significantly cheaper? I believe Android is popular is because the handsets are cheap. If WP7 phones can come out and be $100, $200 cheaper than iPhone then it might compete a little better.
The WP7 phone I saw yesterday had LG branding on it, and the Engadget phone was a Samsung. These are two great hardware brands. I looked closely at the LG screen, and I’m sure it wasn’t quite as high-resolution as the iPhone Retina display, but it was still very very good – better than an iPhone 3GS. It was probably in the 800×400 pixel range, where the iPhone 4 has 960×640 pixels in probably the same area.
But the LG did have a slide-out keyboard. While this isn’t really that that important, a lot of people want keyboards on their phone – and this illustrates my point: when you buy an iPhone 4 you get the same iPhone 4 as Stephen Fry, Tony Curtis and Steve Jobs. You get the same iPhone on Telus, Bell or Rogers. If you get a WP7 phone you’ll get more options, just like with Windows PCs. Do you want one with an 8MP camera, or 5MP camera, or no camera? A slide-out keyboard or not? This is both good and bad because we’ll have shop in the WP7 market, and some phones will only be available with some carriers. But we’ll probably also see phones from $399 up, whereas with iPhone you get 16GB for $659 or 32GB for $779.
Apple’s stand (on all their hardware) has been higher price for higher quality. Apple’s quality is questioned a lot more now, but they still have a great reputation. Consumers will not know how reliable their WP7 handset will be.
Developers, Developers, Developers
As usual, Microsoft is betting the bank on developers (developers developers developers) to build compelling apps for their platforms. WP7 uses Silverlight, a simplified version of their Windows Presentation Foundation user interface designed for the web, and now for devices. Any developer using familiar .NET languages like C# and VB.NET can develop apps for the Windows Phone now – without having to pay extra for the SDKs. Even the tools will be free.
To develop on the iPhone you have to own a Mac (expensive) and XCode. You cannot develop for iPhone on Windows or Linux using the Apple tools. Developing for iPhone requires learning a new programming language (Objective-C) and libraries. Objective-C itself is an older lower-level language than .NET or Java and requires memory management and other tools developers really don’t do anymore in a ‘modern’ language, increasing the learning curve.
To develop for Android you only need the SDK and Eclipse, both freely available for Windows, Linux and OSX. Android runs applications programmed in Java, a fairly modern and well taught language (most university Computer Science and Engineering students in the past ten years have had some exposure to Java).
I think Microsoft really has the advantage here. Most Windows developers will be able to easily get into Windows Phone development. Microsoft is also very good at finding ways to help developers use more of their “stack” – and Microsoft has a much bigger programming stack than Apple: Azure for Cloud Computing and storage, tons of Silverlight components from 3rd Party partners like Telerik and Infragistics, ASP.NET for web service development, CodePlex for open-source project hosting – all of this tied together through the Visual Studio platform.
Perhaps only Google has a bigger web stack, but they have nothing tying it all together.
Probably even more telling is the fact that Microsoft has sent out its evangelists even to major Canadian cities to help out developers and encourage them to develop on the platform. As far as I know, Apple does not do that, and neither does Google. Microsoft is pushing hard to succeed here.
Conclusion
Microsoft has probably built a very compelling alternative phone in WP7. I’m looking forward to the launch and the months and years that follow. I’m not predicting the end of the iPhone, but I see the Android and BlackBerry platforms losing a lot of ground to WP7 – provided that Windows Phone can be more stable than Android and a better office/work experience than BlackBerry.

How the iPad won me over

eric — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 02:39:21 +0000

I was probably the most skeptical person out the when Steve Jobs was making the announcement about his “magical” iPad. In this day and age you can’t take any salesman seriously when he uses that kind of language. But when I saw one in action surfing the Internet the other day I started to see the potential of the platform.

It’s all about web browsing and the consumption of media. The iPad is the perfect tiny web browser. Its just the right size for reading and a good resolution for surfing, about 1024 pixel wide when leaned on its side. It is much better than surfing on a phone, not as good as a computer.
It’s all about consuming media (via apps), but not just the Internet: Marvel Comics, Netflix videos, iBooks and Amazon Kindle, Globe & Mail, The New Yorker, etc… These apps are all about consuming media on the iPad. And it works fantastic!
On the flip side I tried to write this blog post on the iPad, but I ended up getting sore fingers and moved back to my laptop. The iPad is not for creating content. It works, but trying to place the cursor anywhere on the screen using your finger is an exercise in frustration. Extreme frustration. It is so bad I wonder why there are so many writing and composing applications for the iPad. The “keyboard dock” accessory also lacks cursors. The most typing I want to do on an iPad is a username and password, that is all.
So in short, and for what it is, the iPad just could be a revolutionary new device, no hocus pokus.

NoSQL and the End of Object Relational Models

eric — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:06:24 +0000

There is a lot of buzz on the NoSQL track these days, and it is gaining a lot of traction in the blogger world. But in the old school world of big business and big government there isn’t much movement, at least not that I’ve seen. In these industries there is still a lot of entrenchment with database companies like Oracle and Microsoft. These companies have invested a lot of money into their relational database infrastructure.

Its hard to see the “death” of the relational database right now. I don’t think a switch-over from relational databases to non-relational databases is coming – but there is a game changer coming; another new technology getting a lot of buzz and traction in the blog world: Cloud Computing. I think the biggest driver in changing from relational to non-relational databases will be The Cloud.

Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Amazon, RedHat, JBoss, Ubuntu, Rackspace and many others are starting to provide cloud computing hardware, operating systems and hosting services. Cloud computing provides cost effective scalability and resource sharing for web applications. Looking at three of the main cloud contenders out there, Amazon Web Services, Google AppEngine and Microsoft Azure you see three common components:

Scalable Computing / Web Hosting computing
Scalable File Storage
Scalable Database Storage

The first two are pretty obvious and typically similar to traditional architectures, or not that different – however the Database storage is where things change: all three (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) have non-relational engines! While Amazon and Microsoft also have a cloud relational database, each comes at a different cost.

I see Amazon SimpleDB, Google’s BigTable, Windows Azure Storage Tables and others being a big NoSQL driver because of their price and scalability features. Once enterprises start moving into the Cloud and onto Cloud services I think we will see more architects evaluating and pushing for NoSQL.

Oh Unit Tests? Wherefore Art Thou, Unit Tests?

eric — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:07:05 +0000

There are few things that help a developer maintain an application better than Unit Tests. There are a few things that make me nervous when I open a solution from VSS, but nothing makes me more nervous than a lack of unit tests projects.

I know the Unit Testing drum has been beaten for years, so instead of getting on a soap box and berating the Internet for not Unit Testing, I’m going to give you a story about a recent project I worked on, and how unit testing helped me succeed.

It all started last fall when I started work at a new client’s office. I opened the project from VSS and red flags started popping up. The first red flag was that this was a Visual Studio 2005 project and I was using Visual Studio 2008 (they did not install VS2005 on my computer), but this wasn’t really a problem – I was assured that they had standardized on Visual Studio 2008 now and the .NET Framework 3.5. The second red flag was the five projects in the Solution that couldn’t be found in VSS – each one ending with .Tests. I still don’t know why they were removed – but my guess is that they were removed because they didn’t pass.

The first thing I did was create a new Unit Test project. After examining source code thoroughly I created a test harness of unit tests of the existing functionality of the project. This is a very difficult and risky task since these tests are built under the assumption the current code works correctly! This is not a safe assumption when projects are missing from the solution. However, the fewer behavior changes I introduced to a program already in production use the better.

During this period (probably one week) I uncovered and fixed many bugs. I re-factored a lot of code. I did more testing.

Then I added my new functionality, retested and it worked.

I added more tests. They went from red to green.

My confidence grew with each little green light.

I added integration tests to the unit tests. These all passed.

Eventually the program was ready for deployment to the testing server (UAT – User Acceptance Testing) – a model of the production environment. And I was confident! My tests were passing!

This is when everything went wrong.

The Problem? Updating to the .NET Framework 3.5. Of course I had been misled when they assured me that they standardized on 3.5 – the production environment was still very much in 2.0 (and I was strongly assured they would not upgrade – even though I hadn’t asked).

The Solution? Unit Testing! I had extensively used the new productivity features of 3.5 like LINQ and Extension Methods. It took some rewriting and work but I was able to revert and rewrite everything back to 2.0 compatibility in one afternoon! The only reason I could do it so quickly was the unit tests I wrote that told me the functionality was still there and working in the old Framework. It took more time to find another computer with Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 installed (and not the 3.5 installed at all) than it took to rewrite the app to the older framework version.

There were more problems that were solved with more testing, but Unit Tests saved me a lot of time and guessing. There were some other things that could have made the project more successful such as better communication with other developers and the production team. Those issues were beyond my control. But I was so glad I had those unit tests, they saved my bacon. They gave me confidence in the completed software. The Unit Tests were also something I could show my client, the maintenance teams, and the testing teams in terms of functionality assurance for them.

Ah success! A new project! Another Solution! …and guess what? No unit tests. *sigh* Here we go again!

Blocking Google

eric — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:53:54 +0000

Rupert Murdoch has been blustering about Google stealing his content and shutting down access to Google to any of his websites, including MySpace and some newspapers. This is a really strange position and most pundits, including myself (if I can call myself a pundit), think it is extremely poor judgement. Murdoch wants people paying for his content – probably because the advertising revenue he’s getting isn’t covering costs yet.

Google isn’t the Internet, and they aren’t the only search tool in town, but the idea that Google is stealing your content is pure ignorance. Google drives traffic to your sites. It’s what Google does – sell advertising by getting people to stay on the Internet as long as possible! Having Google link to your content is good news for any publisher!

But then I read this post at Neowin and my mind reeled. Microsoft is encouraging websites/content owners to block Google and partner with Bing, Microsoft’s search tool! OK, way to go Microsoft for trying to capitalize on a billionaire’s lack of internet savvy, but this isn’t good for Bing! But Murdoch wants people to pay for the content on his sites! If I have to pay to visit all of the search results I get from Bing there is no way I would switch from Google.

This could be an opportunity, but Bing is still the real underdog. Google is a real Goliath, but we haven’t found a real David in Bing yet. I wish Bing luck, but I still Google almost everything.