Fran's Blog

While I’m on the iPad tip. I wanted to get the multi-tasking issue off my chest. It plagues the iPad, iPhone, and soon the Windows Phone 7 I own none of these but want to take an unbiased view.

I agree with Apple (and really, Microsoft) though. GASP! I do though. Any good product manager or developer has to consider at least 1 thing about the user. The user is stupid. I don’t mean in a bad way, I mean, they don’t know how to use the product as well as they would. It makes for better product development. The iPad has, apparently, amazing battery life. Now, take your average user. They open Spotify, they open the Word processor, they open the browser, they open their Mail app. They keep doing this, and never close anything. That kind of behaviour is just dandy on a usual PC or Mac, the processor and RAM are ample. They can do this. On a mobile device, it isn’t so good, yet. The processor will be using all this and the battery will just die. I haven’t even started on the badly written apps that some guy with a Mac decided to try on his weekend to make a quid or two.

So if multi tasking was enabled. The user would be saying “since that latest update, the battery lasts 2 hours, it’s a crap product”. So either way, Apple and Windows Phone 7 can’t win.

However, there is a thing here. As my good friend and life mentor Mr Mathias Hellquist once told me. “Keep it Simple. If there is a way of faking it, fake it well and make it look like it’s working”. At a tech day by Microsoft I went to today, they really showed this. The new Windows phone OS is really damn nice. What they do is they don’t multi task, but they pause an application when the user opens another, they then allow it to stay in a state to receive notifications, taking up much less resources (and I think the iPhone does the same as well). It’s great, it looks like the process is running in the background, but really, it’s just faked. Excellent.

I think, even more than this, the developer should be able to opt to run one application in the background, e.g. an audio application. They could register as an audio app, then the user could only run 1 audio app at a time in the background. The device could then run a few categories that the user may want, but only have one of that category running. It still tricks the user, but they could listen to audio while emailing their someone else. It’s also as close to multi tasking without the potentially hundreds of apps (or even tens) running at the same time.

Anyway, until devices are more powerful, we have to put up with less multitasking, the iPhone, Windows Phone 7 (which, by the way, is really very nice. Microsoft gone and done good! Ground up re-builds always mean some serious work has gone in) and the iPad are all powerful, but they are not laptops with anything like the same power. My Android phone frequently runs out of battery and slows down to a crawl if I run multiple apps (Spotify and email simultaneously). It’s a great phone, but it is early days, and I know this, unfortunately, the general non-tech user just wants their stuff to work and don’t know/care about the ins and outs of it.

Ok, so everyone is talking about this blasted iPad now. It’s been named the everything killer, the new world, the way cultures should have been in the beginning. lovely. The one quote I’ve had trouble with is “the ipad is for the normal stupid, non-techy user”. I have to say, I disagree. Ok, it is simple to use. It is a cut down OS, less to go wrong. I understand that. But I like to speak to normal, non-techy users about tech. My girlfriend and some of my best friends are a fairly good test bed, though they all understand tech a lot more than your average person still.

Now, if I said to a lot of these users “you’ll be able to read the newspaper on the bus with it”, they’ll come back with. “Yeah, but I can buy the newspaper for £1, that would make me have to buy 300 newspapers, then a new iPad would be out by then”. It’s the same if I said that you can read books, view films. They can buy a book, they can watch a film on their existing laptop. And I have to say, I don’t disagree with them. No one can explain to a normal user that the iPad is just sexy and it has a screen like they would to me. The average user wants function. Like their laptop which keeps on crashing, but it works with that trailer site they watch because their laptop has Flash. They can use word while listening to, I dunno, something cool on Spotify.

So take these semi tech users. Now take the older part of the population, who have no idea how all this works, and to them, an iPad is a new sanitary towel. Can we convince them? I’d like to see you try. No, I think the iPad is something I will buy because I know that I read RSS feeds every morning before embarking on my bus journey to work. Wouldn’t it be good to read RSS feeds on the bus? Yes. I could do it on my phone, but the screen is too small. I would like to just have a bigger screen. And I will justify it in some way, but it if it isn’t too much and I enjoy it But I don’t buy the idea that it is for the average man on the street who isn’t a techy because $500 or whatever the price is (for just the one without the 3G, which I reckon is essential, 3G will have extra cost there buddy) can buy you a good load of other stuff. For me, I want one ‘cos it’s nice, and it has a screen, and screens to me are like crack!

As you may have seen from this blog, I have something of a love hate relationship with Apple. I love their stuff, but I hate their anti-competitiveness as they act like Microsoft in the 90s but on a smaller scale yet all the open source evangelists have a Mac. It doesn’t make sense to me why they wouldn’t use Linux. But hey, Apple’s products look great and they do that really damn well.

Now despite that rant above, I also love and respect Apple, the iPhone is quite a thing. Their great designs go from their hardware to their software. And something I greatly respect is passion. It pushes people to do something most wouldn’t have the capacity think of.

Jonathan Ive is one of those guys. I love the fact a Brit does Apple’s designs, I also love his passion. He’s quite a hero of mine, and you watch the video below, and you realise why Apple are so successful. He doesn’t fake that passion, he even forgets himself as he starts on the manufacturing process. Now jumping about on stage as some CEOs do in corporate America isn’t really passion, ladies and gentlemen, I give you, real passion…

The recent announcements that Adobe are working on a full version of their Flash platform for mobile is making me jittery. Over the years of developing I have been well aware that Flash, for whatever reason, hogs resources. It uses processor aplenty, battery life, RAM. I’ve even worked on some projects where it has slowed my whole browser environment down to a crawl.

I have a fairly new Macbook at home. Using a fully 100% Flash site usually gets it to warm up, start sweating and the fan starts after a while. Not in a small way mind, but full on “OH CHRIST, THE PROCESSOR IS BLOWING UP”.

On a phone, this will be much worse with the lesser processor, less RAM, less cache, less battery life. It isn’t just the Flash platform that gets me worried though. It’s the actionscripter. I have used a fair amount of Android apps now, some are written with memory in mind. But some hog so much system resource I am forced to close it and uninstall to get my phone to work again. This doesn’t even depend on the complexity of the app. A Flash developer tends not to worry too much about battery life etc. as they predominantly develop for a notebook or desktop, as long as it works there, we’re all good. Not to mention the download needed for assets like the HD background to make it all look nice that the designer wants in there. How will the processor cope with that? The designer cares not for battery life or bandwidth.

So those of you with an iphone, thank your lucky stars that you may never have this issue. You may still have the resource hog applications every now and then, but we all have that.

I’ve just read this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/02/uk_eu_data_menace/. In a nutshell, it is about a UK government system, which holds all kinds of information about us, being shut down because of a security alert.

This time it isn’t just for UK residents, it’s for residents in the European mainland too. The best part about this quaint story is that it wasn’t that the computer was hacked, that someone broke into the office Mission Impossible style. No, some employee had the key codes on a USB disc and lost it in a pub car park!

I’m still sure there are government offices which send private data by email. Fault of computers? No. Fault of some ignorant government worker? Yes. I still see people hesitant to buy something or sign up to anything online because they are afraid their credit card details or some such may get stolen. Speaking to an Amazon employee at a conference a couple of months ago, she said “we do take security very seriously because we all know that if there is one leak in our system, we’re probably finished”. And I believe her. For Google and Amazon, getting security right is paramount. I doubt they even allow anyone to carry something which would jeopardise the security of the company (of course, i do assume). It’s encrypted to the hilt. Their jobs depend on it.

So, my online data, which really doesn’t have that much about me remains pretty secure on a server, encrypted in a vault somewhere, yet access to the astounding amount of detail the government keeps is dropped in a pub car park. Hell, agents from MI5 have lost laptops with security data on tubes in the past! No, I’m not afraid of my online data, but I am scared crapless by what hapless officials do with the other personal data.

I just moved home about 2 weeks ago now. It’s lovely, we’re having a smashing time. In typical “that is so Francis” fashion I had the broadband installed as we moved in. “Fantastic” I thought. But alas the line is noisy etc. and giving me about a 50th of the speed. “No worries” I thought as I started a conversation with my trusty ISP. We tried a few things, none really worked, so I decided to call them. And so the story begins.

It was 12am, I thought “best get this sorted sooner rather than later”, so, slightly drunk, I decided to call. The young lad took me through the steps. He reeled them out “Is the box plugged in and switched on?”, “is the phone line plugged in?”. I closed my eyes and patiently waited until he got through the list of stock questions before getting to the advanced stuff.

Through the easy questions my mind harked back to Scott Hanselmann’s suggestion of Fizzbin. The idea is that it is a Tech Support handshake. Like saying “I know tech, I have checked the obvious problems like the unit being on,I know the lingo”. The conversation could go something more like:

“Hi, Internet Tech Support…what’s your issue?”
“Fizzbin.”
“You have an IP?”
“No. Your DHCP isn’t passing out IPs. Am I banned?”
“Looks like your MAC is xxxx, you’ve been running a torrent?”
“Yes, I’ll stop.”
“Cool. You’re un-banned. Fizzbin.”
“Sweet. Catch you later.”

(Courtesy of Scott H)

Though I fear my technical support guy had no clue about technical stuff. It’s now been elevated to his superiors, whatever that means.

It’s 1am and I really should be going to bed. I received my Arduino board today which, for me, is very exciting. I had a few problems setting it up (nothing more than user error, by not selecting the right board). First stop was to get the light flashing, which I did, then to make a simple circuit with a button to light an LED. I then customised it up a bit to play about. And here’s where I got to.

I’ll finish here, it’s quite a thing re-learning stuff you learned at school roughly 16 years ago. Looking at ohm ratings for resistors, but the fun is all there! Just a nice little hobby to pick up, start from the start and then be able to get some decent little projects going once you’re a bit better at it. At this point, it’s just me and the learning curve.

I am waiting impatiently for something I have been looking for for a while now. A way of programming hardware in a fairly easy way, being able to build circuits and make real life things work. This thing I speak of is called an Arduino Board. There are other controller boards out there, but this is the one which is open source and has a huge community. Projects show how creative developers can get.

Arduino was built to be a simple device for artists to build cool installations. More recently, developers have become more aware of it and have created projects like Baker Tweet from the tech team at Poke and the singing sock puppet (see below).

Singing Sock Puppet & The Meters – Blues in F from Matt Brown on Vimeo.

I’m excited, very excited. I was pretty damn good at circuits at school, so something like this is potentially a dream come true, in a very, very geeky way, which is what I love. Come on Mr Postman, deliver me my board!

Whether you like them or not, mobile service providers are here to stay, they’re a staple part of our daily lives, we pretty much all have mobile phones nowadays. A question I get asked semi-frequently is “which mobile provider should I be with” (second to “which mobile should I choose next”). I have to say, I am a bit lost with the provider question as I’ve been with Orange since 1999 or something stupid. I do really think that they are much of a muchness today as they try to compete on price, service etc.

So imagine my delight today when I read Tech Digest had had a run down (or deathmatch) of the big 5. So, I’ll stop talking now so you can read:
Tech Digest Technology Deathmatch

According to my favourite news source The Register or “El Reg”, C programming dominated the open source projects in 2008. I’m surprised and impressed!

I always put C down as the old thing you learn in computer science. It was certainly the first language I learnt and is a good base to start (albeit quite hard to learn as it is a little more low level than the Java and C#s of this world). I’m also guessing they encompass C++ and objective-C when they say “C”. Objective-C is making a big growth since the iphone’s applications are written in this language.

But I’m excited. I’m excited because low level programming languages allow good things; like the speed of them can be phenomenal if written correctly. They are tough to write partly for this reason. Memory management is not done for you. Scripting languages like PHP and Ruby have taken a slight tumble because of the C revolution. I’ll be interested to see where this goes in any case.

I really think since Microsoft Windows 7 is shaping up to be a slick (comparatively) little OS where they concentrate on performance and Apple’s Snow Leopard OS is doing the same, the next few years will be more concentrated on speed of an application rather than adding more features. This is exciting because no one likes to wait for things to load, or have to buy more RAM to upgrade to a new version of software. Slick and quick is, well, lovely.

Using C badly though could cause slower applications, and bugs that could cripple memory. Let’s hope people are writing wisely. Assembly anyone?