camen design · writing

This Is Where We Are Going

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 18:15:00 +0000

This Is Where We Are Going

Google’s Chrome OS announcement is the beacon that those in the know have been waiting for, to be able to point at it and say “hah—there! That’s what I meant”; as if the rest of the world has failed to understand up to this point what we’ve been trying to explain all along:

This is where we are going. There are unstoppable forces in motion moving us to the ’Web. The momentum simply cannot be dammed. Everything that can be ported to the ’Web, will be ported to the ’Web. Anything that can’t be ported, will result in new standards so that it can be ported; even if doing so is stupid, it will still be done.

You have been used to a ’Web that has been defined by Internet Explorer. A slow, painfully inadequate, stagnant browser (even in latest versions). The “OS integration” in IE is about how hard it is to remove it, and keep it removed; not how seamless the experience is (it isn’t).

The fact is that this history has dampened people’s imagination when it comes to the ’Web. They are too used to doing things according to Microsoft’s plan (to lag behind so much that developers are forced to use Silverlight to do anything good).

The ’Web is not slow anymore. Did you see that NES emulator written in JavaScript? What about that demo of Another World, written in JavaScript? We are able to cook up things in web-browsers that you were not even able to imagine a web-browser being capable of doing. Your closed mind will not stop us from cooking up the next generation of web-apps that continue to stun.

And if it is not fast enough yet, it will be soon. We have seen a thousand-fold increase in speed over the last few years. This will continue. To think that it won’t is yet again that softened idea of the ’Web that Microsoft has perpetuated. Just because it isn’t fast enough now for something, doesn’t mean that absolutely nobody is working on the speed issue at all, and the current state is what we have to stick with—just like those years of IE dominance. IE is no longer dominant in mindshare and it’s certainly not doing anything to stop the massive haemorrhaging of market share. Poland: 50% Firefox usage. 50%. For a web browser that isn’t the default on the computer. That means that in essence half of an entire nation chose to change their browser.

We can do OpenGL 3D in the browser too. Using the GPU. Directly. You will one day see Quake ported to the browser, natively. Not yet, but soon. Those without the imagination to push the browser will only try to hinder it.

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.
Matthew 6:24—King James Bible

Google’s Chrome OS does not try to hold up the status quo while they still have ‘back stock’ to sell. What the OS cannot do, Google know that web-developers will fill in for them. Chrome OS forces us to solve these integration problems that have held the ’Web back as an OS. They will be solved, don’t take the status quo to be the only thing that’s possible!

The browser OS is the new paradigm (not Chrome OS specifically). In the long term, it will eventually overtake OS X and Windows. I understand that you laugh at that. You can’t see it because you are comparing features instead of futures. Microsoft and Apple’s investment is in traditional browser-addendum operating systems. Embracing the ’Web with their full passion would directly conflict with their ‘back stock’ that needs to be sold first. It is why Apple will perpetuate the joke that is the App Store instead of giving web-apps the same capabilities as native apps—they can’t control every website on the Internet. If you believe that it’s not possible for all the native APIs to be exposed to the ’Web, then you must be reading this site in IE or something. It’s an API. The clue is in the name. If you believe that to be unsafe then go watch Fox news and rejoice in your App Store rejections.

Google however exist within the ’Web already. It is not an addendum to them. They assume the ’Web. Creating Chrome OS does not conflict with their other projects, it only compliments them. Apple might be embracing the standards with WebKit, but at some point the ’Web is going to get far too smart for their liking, and maintaining WebKit will directly conflict with their ability to sell hardware / software. As noted, this has already happened with the iPhone. Apple would rather abuse developers, than give them an open field to play in.

For example, Apple have invested heavily in the very monolithic iTunes. Apple cannot run iTunes on Chrome OS, they can’t just write iTunes as a web-app†. Their investment does not fit this new paradigm. They will fight—tooth-and-nail—to make sure that the iPod and iTunes continue to work the way they do and abhor Chrome OS and the ’Web. With an entire Internet of innovation, Apple’s walled garden approved-only approach will vehemently stick to the paradigm they chose. The ’Web however will find new ways of doing new things with music. People will discover, use and spread music on the ’Web in ways that iTunes cannot find the UI for. Your music will no longer be completely centralised. When your music is all stored on the ’Web, anywhere you want, anyway you want then iTunes and iPod is going to feel like a very restrictive way of doing things. The notion of “syncing” is going to be a nuisance.

(NB: The iTunes store is now rendered with WebKit, CSS and all; Apple could easily move iTunes to the ’Web. They could have done that already, a long time ago. Why is it that a URL in a webpage has to link to an application that has to be installed, when the content is perfectly viewable in the ’Web? Why can’t I just link to an iPhone App and not have to expect the user to have to download a bloated app just to see some text and images? Apple are treating the iTunes store just how Rupert Murdoch wants to treat his news sites—closed, unless you are a paying customer.)

You cannot make the traditional desktop OS fit the ’Web. There is an inherit boundary between the two. Apple and Microsoft are going to face the problem that they will eventually need to make a new OS, from scratch and start the transition. They can make that as easy or as hard for themselves as they like. I am in the feeling that they are going to make this hard for themselves because they are attached to the notion that the current paradigm is their business, rather than part of their business. Everything Microsoft make is designed to drive people to use Windows. Even the XBox—it integrates with Windows for the media streaming, developers have to use Windows. Microsoft is Windows. If they can escape that, then they have some chance of success. They even try to shove Win CE on ARM laptops, because they don’t have anything else.

Creating something that isn’t Windows is Microsoft’s single biggest challenge.

I do not say any of this because I think that the ’Web is better than native software, nor desktop operating systems. Quite the opposite. The move to the ’Web is much, much, much more worse in many aspects than any transition in computing before us (more on this soon). I say all of this because this is where we are going and it is unavoidable. The ’Web affords us certain usability simplicities that have never been solved in 25 years of modern desktop computing. Even if there are massive disadvantages to porting something to the ’Web, developers still do it because it gives them a platform where everybody can participate relatively easily, data can be managed centrally by the developer and software updates are also central. It rubs out a lot of the hurdles (platform support, installation and app management) that an end-user experiences which only inhibit the size of the market the developer can target. With the ’Web, anybody with a computer and an Internet connection is potentially a customer. Let us not forget what an incredible prospect that is. If you are on the Internet, you can create your own business with a target audience of 1.7 billion.

It is the reason why we have created awful, unwieldy, unmanageable and insecure forum web-apps instead of just sticking to Usenet. Why we have created webmail (and live without being able to properly click e-mail links), instead of just sticking to a local e-mail app. For all the disadvantages, the ability to pull down any application from any computer far outweighs the benefits of a superior local app (in most—but not all—instances).

Why would anybody write a video editing web-app or write a 3D game in the ’Web—it being such a ‘stupid and inferior’ way compared to native toolkits? Because the new generation are growing up with the ’Web, and writing web-apps is going to be the natural concept for them. I grew up in a time before the World Wide Web, so I was used to a time when computers were not connected together like that, and all my applications were local. There existed no concept of a web-app at that time. If I wanted to read my e-mail, I had to literally travel to school to do it. Everybody has Hotmail or GMail now.

Since when has history chosen the technically superior solution over the lowest common denominator?

The move to the ’Web will change the following beyond recognition:

Ownership

Success of Chrome OS will ensure that in the near future you will not own a single thing of your digital existence. Hands up if you own a hard disk. Good, now hands up if you run your own mail server from home. Point made. When it becomes technically difficult and time consuming to store your own data locally, we won’t.

When your data is on someone else’s computer and you require their web-interface to access it then everything you own can be taken away as quickly as one can say “ToS violation”.

Software Versions & Updates

Chrome, the web-browser, has already bucked the trend and does not advertise its version number to the end user. It is always the latest version, and the user doesn’t need to know—and nor should they. Version numbers are for developers. The ’Web removes the need for nagging software updates, but at the same time rewrites the rules on upgrade pricing. It’s not exactly easy to charge users to move over to a new version of the same website (not least that programming all that is more effort than just continual rollout). Which leads us on to:

Purchases & Advertising

All new models of purchasing read: “licencing”† and advertising will come about. The no-native-apps measure of Chrome OS will finally make Software as a Service take grip on the lower end (i.e. not SAP or SalesForce). This will infuriate all of us old-timers who grew up with the concept of a 1000 year old method of paying for things—that is, you pay for something, and it is yours. Though, those inventing new ways of purchasing use of the ’Web will be the ones who succeed. All sorts of wacky, complicated systems will come and go until somebody discovers a way to charge for web-apps and succeed no matter how ‘morally wrong’ us old timers consider it :P

Traditional advertising—shouting as loud as you can on the ’Web to be heard over everybody else—will die out. It has shown only to work to a certain extent and more ‘smarter’, ‘intelligent’ advertising will come about based on basically paying your way into people’s computers and other people’s web-sites.

Privacy

I’ve rarely met a child who gives a toss about who stores their data, and what they do with it, as long as he can use it. The generation before me are very careful about their privacy, I meet many people new to computers who are exceptionally cautious about what information they give out to what websites. My generation generally only cares to a certain extent, but doesn’t want to be left out by what’s popular. The newer generation have literally an entirely different perception of privacy than me. They don’t have any. They are so pressured into using services and are happy to give information away to any old website if it gets them emoticons or some such junk. Yes, they will grow up, maybe get wiser and more tuned into the concept of their privacy, but they have grown up in a ’Web that has had free reign to collect whatever information it wants, for whatever purpose, and in order to participate in the web-services of tomorrow you will effectively have to sign away your life.

The next generation will live in a world where the Internet is not opt-in.
Kroc Camen—“opt-in”

So who do you talk to to opt-out of being tracked by CCTV everywhere you go? That is exactly how the Internet of tomorrow will be. Impossible to avoid if you want to function in society. I’m not saying that that is a bad thing, I’m just saying that it’ll be yet another thing you have no real control of.

Identity

Business 2.0 is about hype and owning people’s identity. Facebook has got people by the balls and won’t let go. Its goal is clear—to make it impossible to function on the web without a Facebook account. Other corporations are looking to solve this problem in a more open way.

Owning your own identity and managing it is going to be one of the big contention points in the future. These proprietary, brand owned identities fighting each other for screen dominance won’t last forever.

I can now easily understand why old people are so crotchety.
The future isn’t what it used to be.

Five Years of Firefox: A Retrospective

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:20:00 +0000

Five Years of Firefox: A Retrospective

Hands up if you use Firefox. Have used it? Know about it? Heard of it?—Anybody left? ’Sites up and down the World Wide Web today will be celebrating five years of Firefox. When I sat down to write this I worried about having to list the history of its features and landmark events and the news of the past five years. Other sites will be comprehensively doing that, there is nothing I can add to that list that Google can’t surmise. Instead I will be telling you what Google does not know, my story of Firefox and what Firefox has meant to all of us.

Like all students, I was taught on Microsoft systems, using Microsoft software. It is taught because it requires the absolute bear minimum of understanding of the principles of what it is you are doing. Microsoft software is like an automatic transmission—you push the lever and it goes, and the teacher doesn’t have to explain why or how.

If you go to college to learn to be a builder you are not taught how to be a cowboy, yet if you want to learn web-design, you are.
Kroc Camen—“web cowboy”

Climbing out of this pit of ignorance is not easy. One has to care about themselves as well as the quality of their code—this is a quality of personality. Some always see the end result as ‘good enough’, and this includes the developers making the development software too. So it is no surprise that I started out making websites using FrontPage. To get an idea of how ill advised Microsoft developers are with web-development, FrontPage actually used Java applets to do mouse over effects on buttons. I literally cannot wrap my mind around the kind of paid developer that naturally gravitates to Java for such a solution, rather than say—JavaScript, or heaven forbid CSS.

Due to my own will power and interest I began to learn HTML properly via w3schools.com and progressed to hand-writing IE-only websites laden with IE-only JavaScript. I had gotten as far as dumping FrontPage at least. But what one has to understand that in 2004 IE usage was over 95%. Everybody used IE, even if you knew what you were doing—because there was no choice. If you used an alternative browser you seemed like, frankly, a weirdo.

If you’re learning HTML now in 2009, instead of in 2004, then Firefox is an unavoidable part of the ’Web regardless of which development tool you are using but back then the Microsoft stack reached from top to bottom. As a student your entire computing experience was Microsoft designed. Your O.S. was Windows, your browser IE, your office suite MS Office. It’s like some closed-shell syndrome. You know only the Microsoft software and you purposefully stay ignorant of alternatives–even pirating MS software rather than using a free piece of open source software.

Firefox entered my world in 2004 as I was developing a website (that I was particularly proud of) for a friend. I was trying out a number of other browsers (most of which were just shells around IE anyway like CrazyBrowser which I’m amazed is still going) to better test my understanding of HTML / CSS and that’s where I came across Firefox just as it had moved to v0.9.

Firefox was the first open-source anything I had used that felt good. It had a distinct feeling to using the software which didn’t induce the usual feelings of either annoyance and rage (from awful U.I. design and experience) or the fact that it wasn’t made by Microsoft. It was more customisable than IE, a lot better at protecting against the usual spyware and virus threats and add-ons made everything better for the eclectic kind of power user.

(side note: as you no doubt remember, that even as a power user between 2000–2004, IE6 being the dominant browser, even us power users struggled against popups, spyware and viruses. Yes, being sensible is one thing, and I’m sure I’m going to hear stories of people who ‘never got any viruses’ but the fact remains that IE6 and Flash were the most insanely insecure software one used every day and many, many websites required them.)

Firefox was a triumph of design, more than it was of software prowess. The Mozilla Suite had existed for a long time and had never scraped much market share. As a power user I would have never considered using it because, ironically, it was too bloated, included more than I cared for and was just slow and unpleasant to look at and use. Let’s not forget that IE6 as a UI was not all that bad.

It quickly became my default browser and so has become a love affair ever since. Firefox was the first browser you could feel that you could participate in, you could contribute to its success. The (often copied) spreadfirefox.com website gave a central place for people to share their experiences and ideas. We felt like a part of a group because we were a niche and passionate about the product. Here was something we could clearly see was better and people needed to know about this.

Firefox’s grass roots spread has been unequalled in the software world. Mozilla created a brand that people felt they could own. Were you on the New York Times ad? Do you remember eagerly watching the downloads counter ticking up to the first 10 million downloads? Then 25 million? 50 million? 100 million? I watched each event in great anticipation, with every landmark the ideas got whackier. Firefox had its detractors, those that would say that the download numbers were not representative of real people since one person could download several copies. Of course, this kind of reasoning only shows how brain dead geeks can be that we would question the numbers and not actually recognise what the numbers meant—that the Firefox name was spreading to regular people on the street. Through 2005–6 Firefox was featured in a number of magazines and on news channels as if it were some Internet meme that the mainstream didn’t get, but it filled the dead donkey slot (like All Your Base before it).

I learned how to code progressively better with HTML / CSS throughout these explosive years of growth as I was tracking Firefox closely through the websites I followed (and the arrival of RSS on the scene). Mozilla’s whole approach to the browser encouraged Doing It Right, vs. the Microsoft model of Do It Our Way®. Tools like Firebug blew everything else out of the water. In fact, Firefox has become one of the best web-development tools. Many developers test and debug in Firefox first. What a change since the days of writing in IE first and fixing for other browsers.

We watched as IE’s market share tumbled. The battle we had chosen we pushed at each day—talking to friends and family about Firefox, installing it on people’s computers, defending it on Internet forums. Collaboratively the world has overthrown a browser monopoly through education, through choice. Firefox has only briefly appeared on OEM Windows machines, it has largely never been shipped with computers. Mozilla proved beyond any doubt, beyond any criticism that people can and do choose their own browser even when they have to download it over the default browser (which doesn’t leave you alone without a fight). It really only demonstrates that the browser ballot from Microsoft has only one purpose and that is to get people to stick with IE through fear, uncertainty and doubt.

I switched to Mac by 2006 and Firefox was there too, to provide an easier transition. By now my involvement with Firefox and developing with it had also helped me learn more about the open source world and method of doing things than any book could have taught me. I had progressed beyond just using the product and began to understand the principles behind it. A lifetime of using Microsoft software will teach you nothing about principles; it will only teach you how to be dependant on Microsoft.

If there were no Firefox, I doubt I’d be who I am now. I literally mean that. I cannot possibly imagine how repulsive I would be if I were a big Windows zealot ragging on about how great Vista is, coding in .NET and writing websites in ASP .NET with awful, awful HTML / CSS, holding the world back with my defiant attitude about how good IE is, forcing Microsoft’s ideas of what is right on other people.

It was various bugs being fixed and new features going into the yet to be released Firefox 3.0 and the website of Sam Ruby that finally signalled the possibilities to me. Safari didn’t have the market share to make a website that only worked with it, that would alienate a lot of people, but for a tech crowd I knew I could do something very bold and make a website that simply did not support IE at all and a majority of people would have no problem accessing it, thanks to Firefox’s massive inroads. It was that day that IE ceased to be relevant to web-development to me.

Working tightly with Firefox, but ultimately making use of the wide CSS3 support in browsers that were not IE I really pushed myself and my design and programming abilities more than I had ever done before. IE was no longer a millstone around my neck that meant that I couldn’t do things in this or that way. For the first time in a long time, I actually enjoyed coding the site. I soared. In June 2008 I released Camen Design, a website that did not work in IE. The HTML5 has no DIVs, the CSS has no classes or IDs. I had come from a Microsoft-only, IE-only background and because of the subtle and parent-like guidance from Firefox I had climbed a mountain I couldn’t have even imagined before.

Would you think that Microsoft care about this kind of thing? Actually want me to make beautiful things in HTML? Does their behaviour communicate that? Microsoft sell tools and runtimes; beauty and elegance at no time is a factor in this. It has become a cultural rift between Microsoft and Mozilla. Mozilla are seeking ever new ways for regular folks to participate, to breath culture into software.

I think I am falling out of love with Firefox, though. Firefox blazed the trail because IE was so far behind and we had all become so fed up with IE. Firefox didn’t try to fix the Mozilla Suite, instead it was a skunkworks project to bring back some sanity to Mozilla after all the bickering and overriding geek control in the Mozilla Suite was hampering its ability to appeal to regular folks. Firefox succeeded because it had the balls to say balls to geeks, this is about all users.

I think Mozilla have simply slowed down on the U.I. front. What is sadder than the fact they will be generally copying the UI direction of Google Chrome with Firefox 3.7 and 4.0 is the fact that Google had to make their own browser because the Firefox project was so slow and resistive to the U.I. ideas in the first place (The lead designer on Google Chrome is Ben Goodger, previously the lead developer of Firefox at Mozilla). Google Chrome is the new Phoenix. It had to be made because Firefox could not be fixed as it was. The crap had to be cut, the ’Web browser had to go in a new direction and the Firefox ship was proving too difficult to steer in that direction.

I myself have been having more and more problems with Firefox as I run up against 9 year old bugs covering basic functionality that have still not been fixed. Priorities within Firefox seem to be about new features and not about making the current features reliable and solid, even when these features predate Firefox 1.0.

Google Chrome on OS X is significantly faster than Firefox and with a much simpler U.I. When it is released, I get the feeling that I’ll be jumping ship. Frankly, I’m angry. I expect more out of Firefox. Firefox has raised me in the ways of open source and standards-based web-development but I feel as if I have outgrown Firefox, as if I’m ready to leave the nest now. I couldn’t have gotten here without it, my entire life has changed because of this piece of software, but these next few steps are my own.

What does the future hold for Firefox? Mozilla have succeeded in creating their own competition and now they must compete. I can only fight for them if they provide me the tools to do so with HTML5 and CSS3 support. Because Mozilla are competing primarily for the public benefit, I don’t foresee a time where Firefox will be irrelevant to web-design. I just pray for a future where Firefox is not a millstone around my neck.

Thanks for everything Firefox and Mozilla. You have changed the world and the lives of many for better in such a short time. Eyes down, the race has just begun.

Has Microsoft Missed the Boat With Mobile?

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 20:06:00 +0000

Has Microsoft Missed the Boat With Mobile?

Sometime ago I conjectured that Microsoft made certain changes to IE8 to force ’Web standards forward and drop backwards compatibility as default (a very un-Microsoft move) because of the need for the ’Web to break out of the blinkered IE6 / Desktop-Browser view of content otherwise Microsoft would find itself unable to compete in the mobile space. It’s been over a year since that article and in such a short period of time it has become ever clearer that Microsoft’s mobile offerings, and their overall mobile platform strategy are failing against the dominant iPhone, the newcomer Android, and a re-invigorated Palm with WebOS.

Microsoft’s mobile platform has been fragmented by the decision to offer both Windows Mobile 6.5 and Windows Mobile 7 at the same time (when it’s released). Windows Mobile 6.5 will support limited touch capabilities, but it won’t be until the end of 2010 that Windows Mobile 7 will provide full touch capabilities to compete with the iPhone. To distance the product from its past Microsoft are even renaming it “Windows Phone”, a shallow effort to try bury a bad reputation for a bad UI model.

The lack of unification and clarity extends even as far as Microsoft’s rebuilt efforts to compete in the PMP space with the Zune HD. Whilst the Zune HD is a lovely, well built product, the lack of a single focus at Microsoft and a lack of tight integration and cooperation between departments has even clouded the Zune strategy.

In an interview the Zune Marketing Manager Brien Seitz’s response was as vague as it was non-committal. In what way is keeping Zune app development close to the chest and hoping that if there’s a way we can work with Windows Mobile or another group inside the company that’s building an app store and take advantage of that, that’s something we’ll look into competing with the iPhone AppStore? Or even acknowledging it, for that matter. Hoping that the Windows Mobile team will get their act together so you can leverage their store for Zune is not exactly enthusing budding developers with the desire to develop for the Zune.

The problem is that there simply isn’t any—brace yourself—synergy… happening at Microsoft. Each department is doing its own thing and not working together on a cohesive, integrated system. Why does the Zune require its own music player and not just leverage Windows Media Player? Why isn’t Windows Media Player being upgraded to support even basic features, like podcasting, that iTunes has had for years? Why is it that you have to use the Zune Player to get these features? Are Microsoft really expecting people to install the Zune Player and go buy a Zune just to get podcasting capabilities? Where on earth is the thinking in Microsoft coming from? Their strategies seem detached from reality.

The web-browser in the Zune is an afterthought, a port of IE6 for Windows Mobile that puts you through a tortured experience. The codebase is incapable of competing with Safari on the iPhone that supports the latest CSS and HTML5 features and lead the way in giving users a browser on a mobile phone that they would actually want to use.

I’m left imagining that Microsoft has a hundred separate departments all rushing to compete with Apple on their own.

How Microsoft Got Here

The boat that I alluded to in the title of this article is Firefox and the modern ’Web standards movement. Microsoft’s complete lack of movement with IE6 saw them totally blind-sided by a competitor that sprang out of the corpse of the enemy that they thought they had fallen for good.

Before 2004 Microsoft were in the very comfortable position of having 95-odd-percent market-share and no need to change anything with IE. Even if the concept of web-apps and the cloud took off, Microsoft were safe in the knowledge that those web-apps would be written only for IE, using such wonderful technologies like Active X.

Firefox changed absolutely everything. Microsoft simply didn’t feel threatened by a grass-roots movement to adopt an open-source browser based on the failed Netscape that Microsoft vanquished five years earlier.

And Firefox wasn’t a threat—really. IE still came as default on Windows, businesses would still be using IE and that wouldn’t change anytime. Firefox hasn’t damaged Microsoft, their own inaction has.

The ability to sway the market has been pulled from underneath Microsoft. Web-developers are coming up with exciting new apps using web-technologies not available in IE. And the market is responding, they’re happy to switch browser if it gets them extra features and gives them access to the websites they want to use.

We’ve seen a complete crumbling to dust of that notion that you need IE. Nobody needs IE, except for businesses stuck with badly-coded Intranets.

And Microsoft have not been able to inject any compelling reason to use IE either. Both IE7 and 8 were lacklustre upgrades that caused more headaches then providing people with things they’d actually want.

You just have to run Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Chrome 3 or Opera 10 next to IE to realise that there simply is no comparison. IE is beat in every single aspect.

HTML5 adoption is progressing quite happily even without official IE support. Microsoft can no longer dictate what features the ’Web will have and when. If Microsoft doesn’t provide it then someone else will and that wasn’t the case in the IE6 days.

Y’see Microsoft’s lack of progress with IE has left them unable to adapt to new emerging markets and technologies. The iPhone completely reinvigorated the stagnant SmartPhone market where companies were practicing such bumbling incompetence with their software / handsets that Palm almost killed itself even without Apple to speak of. The competition that Apple injected into the market sharpened everybody’s minds, and the products accordingly.

That is, except for Microsoft which simply has nothing to show for itself. Microsoft has no single platform strategy. Windows 7 only fixes the problems Vista introduced, it doesn’t bring anything truly new to the table other than a big sigh of relief from users worldwide. It’s still a hulking great disaster of a user-space (hello, registry, didn’t know you were still there) that can’t adapt quickly enough.

Gone on Without You

I strongly believe that Microsoft are three years behind everybody else when it comes to technology and the ability to compete. Microsoft cannot just throw more money and programmers at the problem. This is an organisational / managerial problem that requires them to get the talent they already have working together toward a single platform strategy that can rapidly adapt and apply to new devices and markets.

Trying to catch up simply isn’t good enough. Telling your clients that proper touch-controls won’t be coming to Windows ~~Mobile~~ Phone until the end of 2010 is no good. Why not just use Android or WebOS now. Or buy a freakin’ iPhone.

Nothing short of replacing the rendering engine of IE with Webkit is going to stop the massive haemorrhaging of market-share that IE is experiencing. IE is passé now and once you’re out of the loop it’s going to take more than the odd feature and improvement to bring users back. The exodus is well underway and the IE brand has fallen foul of consumers.

To win me back IE would have to be faster than Chrome, have the extensibility of Firefox and support bleeding edge CSS3 and HTML5 features like Webkit. Oh, and not suck UI and security wise. Does anybody seriously believe that that’s going to happen?

By sitting around idly with IE6, Microsoft have let the ’Web overtake them. Innovation is happening faster than Microsoft can keep up. Microsoft are trying to catch up with competitors and social movements that are traveling faster than they are.

I’m not saying that Microsoft are going to collapse and die and all that rubbish, instead I can see from the past that the future is going to be a place where Microsoft are no longer the ones leading the way. Their desktop market-share won’t drastically change, but innovation will move to the ’Web. A place larger, more diverse and faster than Microsoft and a place where Apple have positioned themselves riding right on top of the crest.

Kroc Camen Writes

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 18:29:00 +0000

Kroc Camen Writes

I’m very pleased to announce that over the coming months I will be publishing here over 200 pages of personal letters written to / from Tanner Helland during 2003–2005. This article will serve as an index for the letters as they are published, as well as a source of background information to the events of my life and projects at the time.

Around 2001 whilst I was still at college I came across a rag-tag band of VB6 developers called “The Gathering Project” (TGP). Like any VB6 group at the time, they had set out to create an RPG in VB6 to prove that it could be done. My skills were certainly nothing special at all, but I think a combination of charm and an eye for detail got me a job there. The project was headed up by Clint V Franklin and Tanner Helland both VB6 programmers, but also an artist and musician respectively.

I can safely say that those early days at TGP were some of the happiest moments of my life. We became a close knit family and discussed the project in great fervour. Looking back, whole essays could be written about why the project ultimately failed, it was one of many such projects going on at the time.

Clint Franklin stepped down from the project early in 2003 and I took over, renaming the project to “The Lost Alliance”. I never had the managerial skills that Clint had used to keep the team together for so long and after many emotional ups and downs I left.

What I gained out of it though was a wealth of experience and the two best friends I have anywhere in the world. I stayed in contact with Clint and Tanner and we kept up to date on our various pet projects making this and that app / game.

It was early in 2003 that Tanner took up two years missionary service that would see him travelling Canada with a busy schedule and no Internet access for two years (imagine that!). We decided to stay in touch by writing letters to each other and thus began a strange discourse that covered in great detail almost every aspect of my life at the time. This was all before I had found my perfect job that I’m in now and I wandered from crummy job to crummy job disillusioned with life, stressed beyond terms I can describe to you and increasingly mentally ill.

I am no longer that person, but the historical record that these letters document shows an intensively creative period of my life where I was still learning a lot of the very basics of what I know now. These letters will reveal much that you never knew about me, and incredibly exciting projects I was working on that have never been seen outside of my inner circle of friends.

On this website, you are used to seeing mostly finished, polished products. I don’t share my failed work. These letters reveal hundreds of designs, programs and ideas in flux, many of them laughable now, many of them I would be ashamed to share publicly. IE-only websites, bad, bad code and highly questionable design ideas. But there are some real gems there that I cherish dearly.

The letters themselves were labours of love, eventually becoming little high quality A5 booklets printed on glossy paper and presented in a designer fashion. Their size was every bit as excessive as the detail, one is 36 pages long.

The letters will be converted carefully into blog-posts on this site. Some fidelity will be lost in having to represent these highly complex Word documents on a site that has no CSS classes using just semantic HTML5 and ReMarkable but I think it’s possible.

I look forward to delving into this forgotten past of mine, and I hope you will find something useful in it too.

To give you an idea, here’s a sneak peak of something you won’t have seen before:

Why Free, Publicly Owned, Publicly Run, Municipal Wifi Is Required for Equal Internet Access for All (And Why It Will Never Happen)

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:49:00 +0000

Why Free, Publicly Owned, Publicly Run, Municipal Wifi Is Required for Equal Internet Access for All (And Why It Will Never Happen)

When people say that access to the Internet is a right, this is wrong. A commercial product, or service cannot be a right. The Internet may seem like a big open environment, but it is a commercial entity from end to end. ISPs charge for access, and you can’t get online—anywhere—without a commercial Internet provider being involved in the ‘last-mile’ part of your connection. Even if the access is free, like a public library, the library (or government) still pays the ISP.

Saying that smoking is a right is an offence to everybody in the world who struggles to receive their basic right to an education and freedom from oppression. If someone has the sheer privileged luxury to afford cigarettes (and the sheer stupidity to smoke them), then that is their choice. It is not a right—something that you have to have even if you don’t like it. Kids don’t like education, but it’s a right. Rights are not opt-in.

This is where the Internet comes in. The Internet can be an education tool, and can facilitate freedom, and therefore is seen as a necessary right for the future.

However, the lack of free, publicly owned, publicly run, municipal wifi prevents Internet access being a right, rather than a privilege. This breaks down to three main areas of issue:

1. Commercial Interests Are Not in the Interest of the Public

All commercial companies exist firstly to make profit. Any altruistic character in a company is even without intention a form of marketing. Cynical? Yes; but also true. A commercial entity can do no good if it does not first ensure that it continues to exist. And rather than continuing to exist being a secondary consideration, it is in most cases pursued to the detriment of everything else. Does a company like Shell say that $4 Billion profit is enough, and they should perhaps—instead of damaging the planet—change business to something more constructive? No. The shareholders must be pleased.

It’s this line of thinking, that the impossible must continually be achieved in order to appease ‘the shareholders’, that can permeate every branch of a business.

When decisions are made—at every level of business—to please shareholders, decisions tend to go against openness, freedom and public benefit. It is why we have proprietary technologies and software. Digital Rights Management. Laws against the public modifying or reverse-engineering the items they purchase. Copyright laws. Vendor lock-in. Annoyances, such as DVD regions and mobile phone locking and least-not rootkits on audio CDs.

These restrictions are put in place to ensure that profitability is maintained. That’s perfectly fair, given the primary goal of any company; they must protect their R&D investments and always strive to have new products that are ahead of the curve. They could not achieve that if they gave away all of their investments to the public domain.

How are students to build the next set of tools for the future, when they are not allowed to know how the tools they are given to use were made?

This is one of the things that is so special about the World Wide Web. Armed with a text editor, you can create the next Twitter, or next world-changing web-app. You don’t require education and tools that are only accessible when you have an employer with enough cash to let you join that club. Whilst you may not have the financial advantage on your own, even Notepad is a tool you can use to take on the biggest corporations. Where else does an individual have that level of freedom with their tools?

One example of commercial interest foregoing public interest is in the case of Netscape. At the release of Netscape 7, AOL did not include pop-up blocking in Netscape, despite the open-source Mozilla suite (from which Netscape is produced) having this feature. Backlash from reviewers forced AOL to release an update: Netscape 7.01, including “pop-up suppressor”. The problem? AOL ’Web properties including Netscape.com relied upon pop-ups for revenue, thus AOL’s sites were on the pop-up whitelist by default—Netscape.com was the default homepage.

A publicly owned, publicly run, non-profit ISP—whilst not being perfect—would not make decisions that directly conflicted with public interests when it came to providing Internet access. The French ‘three-strikes’ rule would not be able to stand given public pressure over a service which they themselves own and operate.

A non-profit ISP would think less about ‘customers’ and retention rates, and more about how the existing service can be improved. A commercial ISP will not lay the lines out to remote areas unless it is eventually profitable. A public ISP would have to, on the basis of equal access for all.

2. Access Requires an Account

There is this notion that we will all soon be computing ‘in the cloud’. Storing our data online, and accessing and manipulating it through browser-based web-apps; even perhaps that the boundary between the desktop and the browser will break down and we will have an always-online desktop-manager with all of our data and apps stored in the cloud and streamed to us.

The reason this will never happen is that it will never be possible to assure that a computer is always online without free, municipal wifi access being ubiquitous.

Since it is not possible to buy a new computer, open it for the first time, and it straight-away be online without any configuration; software developers will always have to design and create to cater for configuring a connection and the machine being in an offline state. This fact is a big problem: To get online you must have an account with an ISP.

Unless we are going to migrate to only ever computing in coffee shops (and they need an account with an ISP too), the Internet requires that you have some kind of account with some company which you must authenticate with.

How can the next generation of always-online software be designed and developed if, for example, every child in Africa needs to sign up for an account with an ISP? If Internet access always requires a contract, then operating systems will not be able to be designed with the assumption they are always online, and never be able to move beyond traditional offline computing.

This comes back to the Netscape / AOL problem; how can ISPs let everybody access the Internet free and without an account? They would have nobody to bill, and therefore would have to take action against the public interest to fund this setup (collecting and selling aggregated traffic data, for example).

The proliferation of 3G wireless broadband only worsens the access problem. Internet providers have been so utterly lax and unmotivated in providing nation-wide Wifi access (because frankly there’s no money in it), that they’ve instead moved their interests to highly profitable 3G access.

Now, instead of open and free wifi access, everybody is walking around paying for their own individual, over-priced, over-restricted network connection which, despite you paying for your own way, still slows down with more people on 3G around you.

The carriers won! Free municipal wifi is dead.
Overpriced, over-restricted 3G is the new wifi.
Kroc Camen

The current 3G network and how you pay to access it is a massive step backwards away from the Internet as a right. You must sign a contract with a 3G provider, undergo a credit check and pay exorbitant prices with massive fines for going over the “unlimited” limit.

How—if this model is to be applied to Internet as a right—are children going to educate themselves if their Internet access is so restricted and that they have to depend on their parents being able to afford access in the first place?

3. Brands Are a Barrier to Transparency

The third reason why commercial Internet Service Providers hinder the Internet as a right, is that no commercial Internet provider actually wants the job that they have. Internet Service Providers are brands. They must assert their brand at all opportunities in order to drum up sales.

Would you, for example, expect the labels on a drinks bottle to have a logo on it for the company who made the UV lamps that cured the ink on that label? No, and as it should be with ISPs too. Internet providers should not be brands that have to combat other brands. They are a service, not a product.

ISPs do not like being marginalised into what they really are: a wire. A cable I use to connect to the Internet. Network infrastructure—a thankless and behind-the-scenes job.

ISPs:
I pay you to put a cable in my house, and let me send things up and down it; no more. I don’t want your useless anti-virus products. I don’t want your “Desktop Help” applications. I don’t want your tray icons. I don’t want your proprietary browsers. I don’t want an e-mail address with you. I don’t want your website as my home page (including a Google search that only shows adverts).
Kroc Camen: A List of People Who Need to Stop Writing Software

Internet access for all should not rely on a brand being popular and being continually asserted. A publicly funded ISP would be more concerned about how to reach more people than trying to tie the users into their proprietary and pointless software, or whatever other backroom deals they’ve been doing (read: BT-Yahoo).

Commercial ISPs in competition with each other have over-sold their network capacity on the basis that most people only use a fraction of the bandwidth they sign up for. P2P has changed that forever. Now that people are using the bandwidth they were sold, legal wrangles have had to be put in place so that their “unlimited” packages are so limited that it’s not actually possible to use the speed advertised as sold. This has gone to the point where an 8 Mb connection can be capped as low as 900 Kb/s.

Whilst a public ISP would also have to manage network capacity, with no advertising costs and the public interest in mind more could be spent on infrastructure as well as putting in place fairer and democratic handling of bandwidth limits.

In Summary

Internet access should:

Non-discriminatory based on location, financial or social status
Not require a signed contract, credit check or other personal identification of status and right
Not require an account with a company in order to get online
Cost nothing to those who can’t pay for it
Not be individualised (3G), but instead municipal (WiFi)
Not depend upon the success of a brand

And why will this never happen? Because like the banking system, our society is founded on the principles of money exchange and therefore currently existing commercial entities cannot be simply swept to the side for the purpose of implementing something better. The only way commercial ISPs will go away is if all of them all go bankrupt at the same time.

There are many more complications and finer details involved, not least funding. The U.K. has just announced a 50p tax on phone lines to pay for improvements to the network to provide ‘universal access to broadband by 2012’¹.

This is at least, a first step.

As for the actual hardware for people to access the Internet as a right, that is another problem to discuss another day.

One Flew Over the Songbird’s Nest

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 20:55:00 +0000

One Flew Over the Songbird’s Nest

Songbird is a new open-source music player that has this week landed at 1.0.

Songbird is described as a web player—a music player for this modern, connected era. It blends the web-rendering core of Firefox (Gecko), with the media capabilities of GStreamer: a cross-platform, open-source media playback engine.

With an integrated (and capable) browser, Songbird allows you to wander off to find new sources of music all within the app itself. It’s in this area that Songbird can claim many features not readily available in other players:

Use a web-page or an RSS feed as a playlist, automatically finding audio files within
’Web search using Firefox’s MyCroft search bar / management, allowing you to add new search providers when visting a site that includes a MyCroft or OpenSearch provider
Last.fm integration
mashTape pane that finds artist info and related Flickr photos / YouTube videos & Google News
Add-ins support using the same XUL backbone as Firefox. (Yes, AdBlock / NoScript are available)

This article will cover me reviewing the Songbird experience, coming from an iTunes user with an already chunky iTunes library of some 6’000 items.

Test Machine:

15″ MacBook Pro (Early 2007)
2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2 GB RAM
Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”

Getting Songbird:

Songbird is readily available from getsongbird.com in these flavours:

Windows XP-SP2 / Vista (11.7 MB)
Linux i686 (28.7 MB)
Linux x64 (30 MB)
Mac OS X Leopard, Intel Only (28.7 MB)

Community contributed builds have also been produced for Solaris and Mac PPC
The Mac download expands into a 117 MB app file (iTunes is 129 MB)

First Run

I’m reviewing this app from the standpoint of a regular user already using iTunes, who has decided to download and try out Songbird, having heard good word about it—much the same story as users trying out and switching to Firefox.

Whilst this might present a somewhat unfair position of comparing Songbird to iTunes in someway, I feel that doing a “clean-room” evaluation of Songbird would not prove much in the real world, as well as it would deny testing one important feature of Songbird: its iTunes importing capabilities.

Migrating from one app to another is always a very fearful experience. You don’t know if the new app is going to make a total mess of your old data and leave you with a clean-up operation that will take weeks. Before running Songbird for the first time, I made sure my Time Machine backup was up to date meaning that I could do a hassle-free roll back should things go wrong. Throughout this review I’ll be keeping my eye on how well Songbird co-exists with iTunes.

Upon starting the app and after a licence agreement and an introduction page, you are presented with the import options:

Thankfully Songbird provides the ability to import an iTunes library, and can handle external changes made by iTunes.

The next page provides some default add-ins to expand Songbird functionality. Personally, I hate any advertising in the software I use, especially stuff that gives information out to websites in order to sell me stuff. However, I let these add-ins be as I would like to experience the default Songbird design.

If anything the benefits of easy plug-in functionality via the add-ins means that one can be mix-‘n’-match according to taste, rather than being lumped with ‘bloat’ with no option to remove it (A problem that greatly plagues software with ever increasing version numbers).

Hmm, checked by default. Personally, I’d close and remove the app right now. I find that kind of behaviour massively disrespectful. Real were pulling this stunt years ago and I still don’t trust any software that asks for an email address, optional or not. Regardless, the average user would in most cases just click Finish.

Songbird took approximately 5 minutes to import my library of nearly 6’000 items. Both iTunes and Songbird start from cold in about the same time (5 seconds).

The playlist folders I had in iTunes were not imported, instead they were converted into playlists themselves. This is kind of a nuisance, as I had been relying on the functionality of iTunes automatically combining playlists live by viewing the parent folder.

The Main Window

There’s nothing special to say about Songbird’s look other than it’s mostly like iTunes, but with the main toolbar at the bottom. This can be switched to the top, via “View > Player Controls > On Top”. The other bar at the top is the tab bar, allowing you to browse and search websites.

The various display panes (mashTape / Album Art) can easily be hidden by the docking buttons below them. Songbird is extra flexible though, letting you get add-on side panes such as a folder view or lyrics browser, as well as swapping around which side-pane module is shown in each of the panes. This flexibility and easy manner to get new modules for the panes should allow for a lot of innovation to happen outside of the main Songbird development.

The genre browser has a different kind of button to hide it which is quite cryptic and not immediately obvious. It’s left of the search bar, but you can always choose the “View > Media Views > List View” menu.

mashTape

mashTape can help solve a lot of your curiosity about various songs and artists, automatically pulling in (hopefully related) info from the ’Web.

The Photos tab finds pictures from Flickr. It seems like something that would entertain YouTube users, rather than a feature I would actually want to make use of.

Audio Playback

Any audio player lives and dies based on its ability to play audio. Songbird’s wide support for audio files is going to please some people. Between ~~users hurt by Apple removing FLAC from iTunes~~ unsure about this, and supporters of open formats like OGG—Songbird caters, but Songbird even plays nicely in a proprietary world; it being able to play DRM protected tracks via hooks into QuickTime and Windows Media Player, as appropriate.

In the mini player view though, I did get odd error messages saying that the song could not be played because it was encrypted, yet it was already playing fine. Clearly just a minor bug.

There is no cross-fade support yet, and I encountered a number of jittery moments where songs cut off a second or two early, or the player just stopped entirely after a song and hung there on the next song waiting for me to hit the top of the box to kick it back into playing.

I miss not having iTunes simple party shuffle mode, and when I do shuffle the play order in a playlist, the focus doesn’t follow the current song as I skip.

Overall though, if your library is diverse and you’re more particular about the formats you store your music in, Songbird will work well for you. Songbird plays generally well with your iTunes purchases so there’s no real reason to not try Songbird out for yourselves.

Bugs

Without effort I found a large number of bugs, here’s some of the notable and easily reproduced ones

Preferences sometimes broken: Trying to open the app’s preferences did not work—it was the first thing I tried when using the app for the first time. Then the app wouldn’t close and had to be force-quitted. If I do get the preferences open, it often doesn’t show some of the sections when I click on them
Main window disappears when focus lost: For a long period, the Songbird window simply hid itself everytime I changed focus to another app
Web-browser functions breaking library view: The “View > Page Style > No Style” menu, despite being for ’Web pages, works in the library view and disables some of the CSS styling of the app
Default shortcuts for next / previous song…: …are Ctrl+Arrows, which are assigned to switching spaces in OS X. iTunes uses just plain left and right arrows when the list is in focus
Keyboard Shortcuts help bug: If using the mini-player, clicking the “Help > Keyboard Shortcuts” menu brings up an open-with dialog
Pressing the close button closes the whole app, entirely: In OS X, the red bead closes the current window but doesn’t usually quit the entire app too, so that the app remains in memory and can be re-launched quickly, or can continue doing something in the background—like, I don’t know—playing music, perhaps. Cmd+Q, or the menu item is the only thing that should quit the app entirely.
Cmd+W closes tab, won’t close window: Cmd+W closes each browser tab, but then doesn’t close the main window when only the library view is left. I’m used to pressing Cmd+W to dismiss iTunes (or any main Mac app), but leave it running

‘Missing’ Features

A feature is, of course, not missing if it was never meant to be there in the first place. However, as this is not a clean-room review of Songbird—whereby I review something by living in a closed box, unaware that it’s no longer the year 2000 and other products have existed for a long time—I take the viewpoint that what Songbird doesn’t have in parity with iTunes is therefore missing as far as a regular consumer is concerned (should they make use of that feature).

That is simply the harsh reality that open source developers must face, and that Songbird does want to face (given its current iTunes importing ability), but falls short of in the following ways

No Video Support

None. This was not a goal of 1.0 and is something to be visited in later versions of Songbird, however what I found shoddy about this fact was that Songbird does nothing to acknowledge that it does not play video.

It could exclude videos from showing up in the library. It could warn me with a message when trying to play a video—instead you just get the sound. It could do something to better warn you that video is not currently an option—rather than hide this fact on the very bottom of their features page.

No True Podcast Support

You can emulate podcasting by subscribing to the podcast’s website or RSS feed - however this is just a static pull of listed audio files. No video support. No auto-pruning. No tidy categorisation / management.

No CD Playing, Ripping, Burning

No, really.

Conclusions

I appreciate it’s a new app and has taken a long time to create, but what am I expected to do? Not use CDs until they get around to it? It seems like Songbird 1.0 relies entirely on a symbiotic relationship with iTunes.

To call this product 1.0 is like throwing in the towel, accepting that it’s just not possible to beat iTunes, or even Windows Media Player, or even support basic features—like playing a CD, that’s been possible for around 16 years.

Songbird is a project that, given its limited resources, has to look toward the future first and pickup the past on the way. The time and effort spent in ’Web integration and add-in support is what makes Songbird a notable player. For if Songbird were without these two aspects of its design there would be absolutely no reason to live with what it’s missing in lieu of what it has.

I believe that Songbird will succeed better in the Linux environment, which—dare I say it—has a more Unix-like software ecosystem that provides many smaller apps to achieve the tasks of one large homogeneous one. Linux distros all have their preferred CD-ripper / tagger / burner and video-player. In Mac OS X and Windows, maybe not so much the case.

Songbird is not an app I will be using anytime soon. It is an app however that covers its nakedness with its innovation. There may be hope, then, that its emperor’s clothes approach to features will be seen as beautiful in the long run.

Pros

Portability across Windows / Mac / Linux and anywhere else someone manages to compile it
Decent mini player

Cons

No direct podcast support, can be ‘emulated’ through subscribing to a website or RSS feed XML
No CD playback / ripping
Vague privacy

Sins

I encountered many bugs, big and small, just in my normal usage
No video support, no UX to acknowledge that

When It’s Better to Receive Than Give:

Sat, 24 May 2008 13:04:00 +0000

When It’s Better to Receive Than Give:

I think that along the way, open source has forgotten what it really means (i.e. in real life) to give.

If I were to hand you a present, (let’s say a nice quality leather-bound journal) I would not do so with a long list of terms and conditions attached to it that you had to agree to before you could use the gift; it’s yours dammit - you own it! You know who the gift came from, I was there when I gave it to you, so you don’t need to agree on a contract that legally asserts that I gave the journal to you, and it can be revoked if you use it for things that I didn’t agree upon (world domination plans, for example).

By viewing this website, its code is now yours. That’s my gift to you. It might be something that goes into a drawer somewhere and doesn’t ever come out, except for those embarrassing times when I happen to mention it. Or, it could be a great gift, something that really empowers you to do new stuff!

Just click on the CSS / HTML and php links at the top of the page and you can look at the source code that makes this website come alive on your screen.

Is this code compatible with GPL v2, 3?

I don’t think you quite understood the word yours, when I handed you the journal. All the code that makes up this site is yours: I don’t want calls at 3 AM in the morning, asking if you’re allowed to write certain things in your journal or not. You can put restrictions on it if you decide to give it to others, sure, but you don’t need to ask my permission for that.

If you’ve found new ways to totally pimp-out your journal, and want to show me, that’s rad, I’d enjoy that! But if you want it to be a secret diary that nobody is allowed to look at or touch, then that’s fine too - whatever makes you happy.

And if you want to sell my gift, no hard feelings, that’s alright. Maybe it’s worth something, who knows. Maybe it was just a poor choice of gift for you, and you’d rather it went to somebody who would get more enjoyment out of it than yourself.

Some of the content on your site is marked with a copyright, or a creative-commons or other licence; I thought you just said there was no strings attached?

Okay, let’s say that along with the journal, I gave you a book (The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, for argument’s sake), or the latest Enya album:

Those things are still yours, because I gave them to you as a present (I hope they were what you wanted). But that doesn’t mean that you now own the copyright to C.S.Lewis’ writing and characters, or the song-rights to Enya’s music. No, you own the physical media, and can do anything you want with the physical properties of those things. You can read the book, quote it in an essay, rebind the book in leather (to match the journal), and even draw all over the pages! You can rip the CD to your iPod, or even remix the music for your own personal use.

But you cannot change the wording and go print a thousand copies of the book and sell it, or go on tour singing interpretations of Enya’s songs – I would seriously have to question your sanity; and what presents I chose to give you in the future. Regular people just don’t do that kind of thing in real life, with physical things.

Therefore, my writings, thoughts and photos still remain my own. You can’t edit the source code or content on this domain name, because this is my website, just as this is the original author’s copy of a book or the gold master of a CD. But your copy of the website you just downloaded to your browser cache, well that’s yours.

My photos, you can print and frame on your desk (if that kind of thing takes your fancy), but you can’t claim that you took the photo, and go selling prints of it; that would upset me and I think we’d have to stop being friends.

You can read my writings, and quote about them on your own website, but you can’t take my writings to a publisher and claim they were your own. So please respect that the content I create on this website is my own work, all I ask is that if you re-use my content, that you include my name so that people know that I helped contribute to your awesome stuff!

The Real Reason Microsoft About-Faced on IE8 Standards Opt-In

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 20:26:00 +0000

The Real Reason Microsoft About-Faced on IE8 Standards Opt-In

Microsoft decided that due to their new interoperability initiative, they would reverse a previous decision to make IE8 default to the IE7 engine, instead of supporting standards-compliance by default.

No article or musing I have yet read has delved into what is increasingly likely, the reason for this sudden change in decision – and that is this: the mobile ’Web is coming.

The iPhone & iPod Touch have caused an influx of mobile web-browsing the likes even Google had not seen. Many smart phones have an Internet browser, only Apple’s has had the interface to make it desirable to use to non-geeks in a way that can be measured in server-log lines, and not in forum-posts by iPhone detractors.

Microsoft have a mobile-browser, how are they competing with this? They are not. Pocket IE is unusable compared to the development buzz surrounding mobile web-apps using Safari, which supports a full compliment of standards.

If Microsoft were to default to the IE7 rendering engine on their desktop browser, how would this affect the rapidly rising mobile browsing market? They would simply get left behind.

Their mobile browser would have to ship both IE7, and later engines to maintain compatibility with a ’Web they were partly defining with their desktop client. Any new fancy features their mobile browser could offer to compete with Safari would be stymied by the fact that the majority of websites would be coded to the IE7 engine by unaware novice web-developers and out of date web-development packages; all the time while web-developers explore new avenues of web-apps using the full set of standards open to them on Apple’s handheld via iPhone-only websites.

Microsoft are having to face their own irrelevance in this market. They could either stick to the age-old excuse of backwards compatibility, and in doing so totally jeopardise progress with Windows Mobile in comparison to swifter competition in the form of Apple, and Google’s Android - or they could jettison the weight of 10 year old business intranets and ship a lighter, quicker, safer and more competitive browser to help them shape how people view the ’Web from both the desktop, and the mobile.

Microsoft are dropping the hint that lagging enterprise customers need to upgrade to standards or be left in the lurch. Ageing web-apps will break. That is a massive change in attitude to “Microsoft of old” a week ago. They would only do that unless the benefits absolutely, absolutely outweighed any short term loss. Businesses can experience the usual upgrade headaches by changing a few web-apps that haven’t been touched in 10 years, they have no choice anyway - where the ’Web matters is no longer the enterprise, it’s in the pockets of individuals.

Competition Is Not Good

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 12:03:00 +0000

Competition Is Not Good

I hear often that when something new appears that “competition is good”.
The primary reasons competition is seen as good, are:

It drives down prices
It gives consumers more choice
It pushes technology forward, quicker

Competition is not good—

Competition is why consumers have to choose between HD-DVD and BluRay.
Competition is why DRM exists.
And more.

In this article, each of the supposed benefits of competition will be looked at in more detail

It Drives Down Prices:

There are many cases where this is evidently true. Car manufacturers compete for better price points and deals. The cost of electronics is generally driven down.

However price != TCO.
The constant battle for lower prices has pushed quality and reliability to absolute lows.

Competition also prevents interoperability. This alone adds massively to the overall lag of the industry. Here’s a “what if” to demonstrate:

If, in coming up with a successor to the DVD, a format was collaboratively designed to be forwards & backwards compatible with most existing DVD players, yet offer high-definition on new equipment, then the new technology could be rolled out quickly and efficiently with almost zero fuss to consumers.

Instead, consumers are forced to buy new players, often new screens too, that are grossly overpriced and offer little benefit (It has been proven that screen size matters more than resolution, 720p is as good as 1080p with moving content at normal viewing distance, plus PCs have had “HD” screens for years, for a few hundred bucks, not 1000s). And that’s if the consumer even gets optimal output, what with the expensive cables needed, and getting the configuration right (I’ve seen HD screens running at SD simply because the consumer didn’t know how to change the right option on the OSD - and they still didn’t care, the picture looked good enough to them)

To view this “high-definition” content on a PC, you need to have approved equipment. If you do not have a DRM-enabled graphics card, cables, and screen then you have just paid more for a film, that looks exactly the same as a cheap DVD. As it stands, getting a fully approved media path on PCs is in such short availability at the moment that almost every perfectly capable PC currently in use by consumers will need to be heavily upgraded, or replaced entirely just to display more pixels, that the user’s old screen already had.

High definition content and DRM has increased the cost of access for consumers, when existing equipment and standards are all adequate.

DRM has cost billions to produce, and proved ineffective every single time, only inconveniencing consumers in the end. You know how in cinemas they have an anti-pirating ad that makes pirate copies out as having worse picture quality? A pirated HD H.264 video will remain crisp no matter what monitor it is played on. Try playing a BluRay on un-approved equipment and you’ll get reduced picture quality, if a picture at all. :)

It Gives Consumers More Choice:

Choice is good when there’s one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are ‘flavours’ of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.

Choosing between HD-DVD and BluRay is not a matter of taste. They both do the same thing, they provide you with a choice you don’t need to make. You wish to watch a movie, since both provide the same thing with no variance in features (the movie content is the same on both), the consumer is therefore having to choose between two of the same flavours, except these are expensive flavours, and one might not be around as long as the other, and it’ll cost you more money to switch sides in the future.

Consumers just want things to work with a minimal amount of fuss. Having just once choice isn’t always better, but in saying that “competition is good because it gives more choice” the difference in types of choices made above is ignored. Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers, all they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.

It Pushes Technology Forward, Quicker:

This also raises T.C.O. People are upgrading and renewing computers faster than ever before. Rather than buying a machine and using it for 8 years, people are renewing every 3 years, often due to the lower build quality and cheaper parts end up breaking sooner.

This is adding to an acceleration of environmental damage. Computers are cheap enough now that in many cases people would rather buy a new one than fix the old one, even if the only problem is a simple virus infection unbeknownst to them.

Technology would still move forward even without competition. People like Sir Tim Berners-Lee would still push forward software & technology. Linux would still exist exactly as it is now. What’s more, without competition favouring half-baked standards and short-sighted designs, the difference industry-wide would be astronomical. Tell me, what would you prefer?:

A 1 GHz computer that was ultimately efficient, 100% interoperable with all equipment, all standards and with no proprietary lock-in
A 4 GHz computer running Windows Vista

I certainly know what I’d find more productive. Even though computers like the Amiga and RISC OS machines are now all but gone, you can’t help but marvel at how they excelled at what they did, compared to Windows at the time. Imagine an Amiga after 25 years of constant leading progress- a multimedia system right down to the hardware level. The IBM design we know now as standard (BIOS/IRQ) was a very poor decision for multimedia work. If it were Amiga instead of Microsoft, we could have been looking at computing hardware with 100× the graphical capability of existing technology. But that’s just hypothetical really. The point is that competition has not picked the best of each generation, it’s not picked the best interoperability nor given new competition equal footing when it’s turned up.

Competition is why in 2007 we have PCs that take longer to start up than 10 years ago. There are endless excuses for why this is; but at the end of the day they’re still excuses and not reasons. The reason is that competition has dulled engineering. An Amiga cold-booted in seconds, there was no shutdown - you just switched it off. Don’t think that because new computers/O.S.es do more that that is a reason to take three minutes to shut down. It’s an excuse, nothing more.

Competition Sets Up Non-Competition:

Competition by its definition is to beat the opponent.
When the opponent is beaten, there is no need to continue with any of the competitive actions, such as lowering prices or improving technology. Competition ultimately ends with stagnation and vendor lock in. The amount that stagnation and lock-in has set back computing progress cannot begin to be calculated. One clear example is the period 2001-2004 where IE6 held a near 100% monopoly on the browser market. During that period no major revision of IE occurred (other than a popup-blocker in SP2), Viruses, spyware and other malware exploded on the ’Web. Even though tabbed browsing had been around for years, Microsoft had no need to add it, there was no competition. Microsoft had no monetary reason to benefit users any more.

We have Firefox and its grass-roots advertising campaign to thank for bringing some small amount of competition back to the ’Web, but the damage has still been done. We’re almost five years behind where the ’Web should be, and consumers will continue to be plagued by malware on an unprecedented level.

Competition Also Sets Up Anti-Competition:

In order to beat someone, sometimes you have to cheat and sometimes you have to prevent the consumer from using any of the competitors. One day people are going to wake up and realise that they don’t own anything, or that everything they thought they owned is suddenly taken away from them. DRM exists solely to prevent competition from others and is not in the best interests of the consumer. Without competition, such restrictions would not be needed, or even if they were, done in a way that actually benefited the consumer through industry-wide interoperability. A DRMed song would not be a problem to a consumer if it could be played on every single possible device produced with the only restriction that they were not allowed to give the song in full to another person, as that is clearly illegal.

Competition exists for one purpose only, to increase the bank balances of share holders. It has nothing to do with consumers. Modern business is based on contempt for customers - name me an example where that isn’t the case?

Has A.R. Finally Become a Reality?

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 18:20:00 +0000

Has A.R. Finally Become a Reality?

“Augmented reality” is the overlapping of digital information and physical environment. Sci-Fi has often portrayed A.R. as interactive, floating, transparent computer screens projected into the air, or perhaps the most absolute example: standing inside an entirely computer generated world.

A.R. in the here and now however, has never taken off. Remember the Nintendo Power Glove, Virtual Boy, as well as numerous failed PC peripherals and software that attempted to provide you with a more physical interface to your computer?

The 2D human interface we currently use to operate our computers is sufficiently efficient. The past attempts at trying to sell a 3D interface to the PC failed because they never tried changing the mouse – an inherently 2D device. Walking down a hallway to find a file is not as fast as pointing and clicking on a file browser.

If the designers of these failed products were given the task of inventing a successor for the train, before cars existed; they would decide to take the train off the tracks so that you could go in any direction you wanted, but would not change a single aspect of the train itself. It would still be steam powered, and have the turning circle of a small planet.

In the attempts to create a new system to interact with PCs, these products failed to change the PC itself. Those who tried to replace the mouse failed because they couldn’t change the software: MS Windows, MS Office &c. are designed entirely around mouse input.

Disruptive innovations can only succeed once all over options have been expended. A third party peripheral manufacturer made a tilt sensitive Playstation controller (but with Dual Shock) in 1996. So why now is Sony saying that the SIXAXIS is such an important aspect of the PS3? The technology was available over 10 years ago.

In the previous (but still mostly current) generation of consoles (XBox/GameCube/PS2), all three major console manufacturers did to some extent fail to live up to “next gen” hype because in the end all they had to sell was better graphics. There was no significant switch in paradigm, unlike the Playstation, Saturn and N64, which all stepped from 2D games into 3D gaming. It is only now that every option has been expended that innovation can come through. To repeat the same mistake of offering only “better graphics” is to offer nothing new.

The Nintendo Wii represents one of the first successful “3D” interfaces with a computer. It is not simply a matter of X, Y & Z.; The Wii also understands acceleration, force, tilt and roll. What this gives us is a wide and natural range of gestures for input, something the mouse is unable to express.

The PC has not gone under any major transition, retaining the same mouse interface since XEORX Parc in the 70s. However, we have sat and dreamt about A.R. for years, and now that it’s in our laps, we have been so wrapped up in the dreams that we’ve not noticed what the arrival of this technology means for the much wider computer industry.

In order for computers to evolve to the next generation, they will need to dispatch of the mouse. Pen based and voice input can provide simpler, quicker access, usable by a wider range of people. Both of these interfaces have failed to catch on properly so far because they have still been tacked onto a mouse-designed system. The Nintendo Wii did not have to tack Wii controls on top of traditional controls:- Wireless controllers have existed for ages. Nintendo started from scratch with a fresh new interface designed only for the “Wiimote”. PCs will not evolve until they can do the same. Tablets don’t need “XP Tablet Edition”; they need “Tablet O.S.” before they will ever take off.

The Apple iPhone also represents a disruptive innovation in the market, bringing A.R. to user. You can interact with your data by touching it; it has made every handset since the invention of the mobile phone suddenly look positively stone-age.

As we’ve seen with the Wii and the iPhone, new operating systems need to be developed to make A.R. a reality. The PC industry will not move on if companies are not prepared to ditch the mouse fully. Within 10 years time, the 2D desktop will look as stone-age as using punch-cards. Companies who only make half-baked attempts at ditching the mouse will be eventually ditched by consumers.