I had the pleasure of seeing Josh Holmes keynote CodeStock Saturday morning. His presentation, “The Lost Art of Simplicity,” was very well done. Very broad topic, but very applicable to likely everyone in the room. Certainly I took away many good points. In some ways, it’s a lot of points that we *know* at an academic level, but not points that we’ve necessarily internalized and made part of the standard development process. He brought up an example of corporate users copying Access databases around via email, and he asked “what is the *truth* at that point” - meaning which is the ‘master’ data? This echoed my NADS post from some years ago - when you copy spreadsheets around, you end up with a Non-Authoritative Data Source problem.
The talk was aimed at getting developers to simplify, rather than write complex systems. Occasionally I have the opposite problem, with clients wanting more complex systems than it seems they actually need. There’s 20 processes in place when 8 would do, but simplifying the organization’s workflow to scale down to 8 processes would take more effort than just replicating the 20 processes in a computerized system. I have to say this ends up being the most frustrating position to be in, and I tend to want to not get involved in those projects. Sometimes I’ve been able to avoid those projects, but not always.
“Enterprise is a code word for complexity”. He metioned Twitter getting 15k transactions per second before deciding to move to a second server. I wish he’d also mentioned that it’s done in Ruby, just to drive home the point that dynamic languages *can* scale. I think he was going in that direction, but then stopped.
Josh’s talk seemed to get some good reactions from the attendees, and certainly gave us all a lot to think about. Although this is primarily a MS-based conference, Josh’s avoidance of an MS-specific talk was a welcome gesture. I suspect he’s given this talk to a variety of developer audiences regardless of background - it certainly fits. If you’ve got a chance to go hear Josh speak, take it. He’s a hugely knowledgeable person who’s also one of the friendliest guys I’ve had the chance of meeting at a conference in the past few years (we first met at the first CodeMash in 2007).
Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Just saw on TechCrunch tonight that Justin.TV has taken a first step towards DVR functionality in their player. Good to see it, and I just felt like posting that I did call this out as a need last fall :) It’s not quite what I was hoping for just yet, but it sounds like they’re moving in that direction.
Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
I’ve wanted a way to record cell phone conversations for *years*. With the proliferation of smart phones, you’d think we’d have this by now, but it’s still not a feature widely available (and, reportedly, blocked by some device manufacturers). So, to scratch my own initial itch, I’ve put together a service to allow me to record my own calls. It’s not part of a handset, nor is it downloadable software for any particular phone.
The service is just that - a service. Specifically, you just need to conference in the service to your existing phone conversation and everything during the conference will be recorded. Within moments of hanging up, you’ll have an MP3 emailed to you.
Based on the number of posts I’ve found when searching for ways to record phone conversations, this seems like it’s something other people might need or want as well.
Pros No extra hardware to buy
Works with any phone that can conference call
Easy to use - just dial and go
MP3 emailed on completion
Cons
Per-minute cost
This service would like be 5-8 cents per minute to use, or possibly just a monthly flat rate. Is this something that people would be interested in using (or at least trying out)? I’ve used it from my phone (older Ericsson) and plan to test recording a voice call on a BlackBerry Pearl soon. I’ll also be testing an iPhone soon too, just to see how easy it is. If you’re interested in giving this a trial, let me know and I’ll let you take a test spin to see what you think.
I know Google Voice will have a feature to make this possible (recording just by pressing a button) but from what I’ve read, it will only work on incoming calls. If you make an outgoing call, it won’t allow you to record. Maybe that’ll change, but until Google Voice actually allows new people to come in and use the system, it’s of limited value to me and most people. Additionally, as useful as it is, I don’t seen everyone switching to Google Voice any time soon.
Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
This was a very brief demonstration of a sample Twilio app. They have some other interesting demos - I suggest you take a look if you’re interested in learning more. Apologies for the slight hiss/buzz on the noise. This was a last minute recording decision, and I didn’t play with sound levels or anything like that. (For the curious, I used a Kodak zi6) on a tripod, and as you can tell, it was slightly off level the whole time!)
You can also grab the video directly from http://webdevradio.com/twilio/twilio_tripug.m4v if this is taking too long to load (apparently the video plugin will just convert a clickable link to a player, so you’ll need to copy/paste manually).
Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
I wrote this over on TechCrunch but felt like it deserved a home of its own here.
I’m tired of hearing about ‘inventory problems’ that hobbled the Pre’s launch. Palm had an excellent opportunity over the past 6 months to engage developers and the rest of the community to gauge demand and modify production rates. Instead, they blew it.
Palm probably didn’t come up with the label ‘iPhone-killer’ - the media’s been looking for one of those for many moons now. The Pre was just the latest to be labelled that way. But rather than rise to the challenge, Palm was simply rather silent. Certainly there was work going on between January’s announcement and the recent launch, but what were they doing? They weren’t busy sponsoring devCamps - we know that. Perhaps all the internal meetings wondering why a community would rally ’round one of their announced products took up too much time? If they’d focused on building up a great community beforehand, this could have been a totally different launch day, but also a totally different build-up to the launch.
Here’s a few things I would have done differently.
1. Getting SDKs to developers earlier would have helped build early-stage apps, and had developers evangelizing the platform well in advance of the release. A directory of upcoming apps (from early-release SDK devs) with “I want this app” voting buttons would have given devs feedback early on, but also given Palm an idea of what people were interested in doing on the phone even before its launch.
2. Sponsoring ‘public user’ days by raffling off trips to Palm’s HQ for ‘average Joe’ testing, complete with videos and such. Total transparency. $10 tickets for a chance to win a tour of the Palm Pre HQ and meet with the team - all proceeds to go to a charity. Free flights and hotels for the winners. Candid feedback on user experience stuff. Blogged/videod/documented. Thousands of people would have applied. News coverage of the contest, news coverage of the event, and news coverage of the aftermath. No one’s ever done this before. One might almost have called this ‘agile phone development’ - getting iterations of real feedback from real customers during the product development. This generally works well in software, and software plays a big part in the smartphone experience.
3. Same experience for devs, based on which pre-release apps had best community feedback earlier on. Palm could have purchased the apps from the dev community as pre-installed apps. Fly top community devs out to meet with Pre team. What would that have done to your development resume and street cred, having one of your apps make it on to the Pre at launch? Again, this sort of community embracing has not been done before, and would have made a precedent as to how to launch new phones. I fear Apple may end up doing this at some point, staying that much ahead of the curve, and making anyone else who tries it look like a copycat.
Instead of new, innovative and community-embracing steps, what did we get? Standard CES announcement, then months of nothing, then some web ads, then low inventory, store experiences that are the exact same as every other phone on the market (plastic models that don’t work, unfriendly staff, etc.). *In spite* of all this, they still reportedly sold over 50,000 units. Imagine what their numbers would have been had they actually engaged people for 6 months, gauged reactions and demand, and had adequate inventory levels (because they’d have known ahead of time what the demand was).
Apple has a culture of secrecy, and people almost expect it. While Palm wasn’t totally secret about the Pre, they had almost the opposite approach which was just as damaging. Announcing in January, but not shipping until June. They had an opportunity to do six months of community engaging and expectation setting. Instead, we got 5.5 months of no official word, rumors, and another 6 months of comparisons with Apple and iPhones.
Palm had a chance to really change how phones are developed and launched. They had a huge community of people *wanting* something new, and they blew it.
Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
I’ve been hearding a lot about the upcoming Palm Pre smartphone. I’m so on the fence about getting one. I almost got an iPhone two years ago as well (stood in line on the first day but chickened out). I *hate* dealing with cell phone companies - making switches, signing ridiculously one-sided contracts to get locked in to a one-sided relationship for the ‘privilege’ of getting a ‘discount’ on a phone. NEWSFLASH - I’m going to have to use *one* of you stupid major carriers regardless of which phone I pick. Have *decent* service, and I won’t leave. Keep your phone prices under $200 retail, let me choose my carrier, and if you suck, I’ll switch. Chances are, for every person who switches away, you’ll get someone who switches *to* the same carrier anyway. This is the game they play now with inducements to try to get people to switch already - extra discounts, group plans, etc.
I digress…, but really I hate dealing with new phone stuff. I hate the feeling, and (for better or worse) that’s kept me out of the new ’smartphone’ market for some time. As a developer, I’d like to be able to have multiples - I want an iPhone, and G1/G2 Android, a Blackberry, some mobile Windows and now a Palm Pre. If each one was under $200, I’d be very likely to buy them all. I wouldn’t necessarily have phone service on each one all the time, but I’d definitely have more than a couple. As it stands, ‘retail’ - I have to spend $600+ on each one - it’s insane.
Anyway - back to the Pre. I had a Palm VII years ago, liked it, but got disenchanted with all the work you needed to do to write apps for it then try to distribute them. Palm had an ‘app store’ of sorts back then, but the hoops to jump through were (IIRC) quite a lot. I’ve heard mixed things from iPhone app developers about the iPhone situation as well, but there’s clearly enough support there for tens of thousands of people to have signed up in a year.
Thinking that Palm might be embracing their developer community a bit more this time around, with the launch of the Pre just days away, I went to developer.palm.com to sign up for their Pre developer program. “Apply now” was the first orange button I saw, which already had an offputting feel to it. Perhaps Apple’s is the same way, but “sign up” or something more inviting would have been better. “Apply” already intones that I have to pass some sort of approval process, and I was right.
I had to fill out a basic contact form (no big deal) but then they asked a bunch of questions about “what type of app are you going to develop?” To be fair, these were not required questions, and perhaps this is the best time(?) to get some demographic info, but really - I have no idea what I’m going to write. I don’t know what your SDK is like. I don’t even have the stupid DEVICE yet - how would I know what sorts of apps I’m interested in writing, or what’s even possible?
I also think this might not just be purely demographic information - they might be making a decision as to who gets the SDK first based on your answers. I can’t say for certain - and maybe I’ll get approved soon, but I got the following message:
“Please note: because we expect more applications than we have openings for, we can not guarantee that you will get into the program immediately. Because of this, you may not hear from us right away. We will keep your application and you will be contacted by email when your application is approved.”
*NOW* does not seem to be the time to be shy about getting Palm SDKs in to people’s hands. The launch is imminent, developer awareness is piqued (because we’ve not seen ‘in the field’ reviews yet), but they’re being way too controlling about this. Perhaps Apple worked this way too, but this doesn’t seem to be a tactic which serves Palm well.
Is this just a short way of me ranting that I didn’t get the toys I wanted immediately when I wanted them? Perhaps, but there’s likely many other developers that want this stuff too. The more hoops devs have to jump through, and the more delays you put in their way, the fewer devs you’ll have. An underdog platform doesn’t seem to be in a position to keep developers waiting, even if it’s only for a few hours/days.
Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Just saw a presentation on ’semantic web’ at our local user group, and some examples were about Amazon. Not related to semantic web specifically, but I got to thinking about a couple things Amazon could do to enhance my experience and/or their bottom line.
First, when I buy something for someone - indicated by shipping it to an address which is not my name (for example) - do NOT use that in recommendations for me. I buy stuff for family members occasionally - younger brother, dad, etc - and their interests have nothing to do with mine. Yet after buying a video game for my brother, video game recommendations showed up in my list. STOP THAT. You’ve got about 10 years of buying history of mine to look at. Figure it out.
Second, incorporate friends’ data/wishlists. Give me a discount to buy a book and ship it to a friend who has similar interests at the time I buy my copy. Would be nice to say “Robert has book X in his wishlist - do you want to buy it for him?” and give me a % discount for doing it right then and there.
Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
I’ve recently soft-launched a new document management service for insurance brokers. The service allows brokers to set up document distribution sites for each of their clients, with a private log in for each client. It currently includes basic download stats for documents for each client.
This was a service initially set up for one local client, but I decided to expand the service out to others as well. Currently the site is free, and I’m looking to have more insurance brokers test it and give feedback. The design and functionality are both basic, and will likely change some over the next couple of months based on whatever feedback I get from test users.
So, if you’re an insurance broker, hop over to http://mybenefitsdocs.com and register a free account for yourself, then send feedback to service@mybenefitsdocs.com when you’ve given the system a test run or two. Final pricing has not been determined, but the idea is to keep the price relatively affordable.
Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
I’ve been in London most of the last week, and had a great time meeting up with people (DylanS and Sam from the Dojo project, Rajat from Yahoo, some locals putting on a minibarcamp, and others). I’ve done some video and audio of some of these meetings and hope to put them up someplace in the next week or so.
I can’t sleep, have a cold, and am catching a taxi to Heathrow in the next 30 minutes, so I figured I’d just post this quick update here. I’m heading to the GR8 conference in Denmark this morning, and should be there by noonish. If you’re in Copenhagen on Wednesday and care to meet for lunch, let me know. I’ve got no firm plans at this point, and don’t leave Copenhagen until Wed evening (6pm I think). Would love to meet up with some web people from Denmark (PHP, Grails, Ruby, CF, Java, C#, ASP.NET, Flash - even JavaFX!)
Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
It happened to me - the infamous white macbook laptop case cracking. I’d read about this a couple years ago, but had forgotten about it. Until last night. I opened my macbook and the case had a crack in it. Specifically, the area to the left of the left shift key had a larger than hairline crack which results in about a 3/4″ stop of the white plastic just breaking off. Sure the thing was still functional, but it annoyed me. And hundreds of other people on forums too.
Thing is, I’m out of town this week. Out of the country really, over in London. And I still need my laptop in the evenings for work (well, all the time for work, really). I went to the ‘genius bar’ and they were booked up. I spoke to someone (didn’t get his name) and he said “drop it off and we’ll have it back to you in probably 3 days”. 3 days!? I said no, not good enough, as I need the laptop for work, and I’m going back to the US soon. He then says he thinks they could do it overnight. I winced, and he went further and said if I could drop it off, they could either fix it today or have it back to me tonight if they couldn’t. *That’s* really what I wanted. I had a few hours to kill in London anyway today, so I could bear without having my laptop for that time period.
The chap really wasn’t sure if they could do it or not, because it’s an American/US style keyboard. I’d forgotten there was a difference. Primarily the US ‘return’ key is longer - that’s the biggest difference I can see. Oh, and the characters over numbers like #@$%, etc - all different on British keyboards.
Anyway, they managed to have it fixed and ready back for me, no charge, in about 4 hours start to finish. Dropped it off at 10, and I had it in my hands at 2:15. They’d actually called about 1:40 to say it was done, but I didn’t get back from the British Museum until 2:15.
Thanks to the great staff at the Regent Street Apple store for making the repair experience of a travelling Yank as pleasant as possible.
Oh, by the way, I walked all the way from Regent Street Apple store to the offices of cardsmadeeasy.com to get some sample business card paper. Nice staff, nice samples, horrid walk. Note to self and others - take the tube next time and save the feet!
Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
July 1, 2009 
Posted in Business, Conferences, Software, Testing, Tools 
2 Comments »
Entrepreneur, developer, writer, podcaster, teacher, ex-bassist.
Palm probably didn’t come up with the label ‘iPhone-killer’ - the media’s been looking for one of those for many moons now. The Pre was just the latest to be labelled that way. But rather than rise to the challenge, Palm was simply rather silent. Certainly there was work going on between January’s announcement and the recent launch, but what were they doing? They weren’t busy sponsoring devCamps - we know that. Perhaps all the internal meetings wondering why a community would rally ’round one of their announced products took up too much time? If they’d focused on building up a great community beforehand, this could have been a totally different launch day, but also a totally different build-up to the launch.
Here’s a few things I would have done differently.
1. Getting SDKs to developers earlier would have helped build early-stage apps, and had developers evangelizing the platform well in advance of the release. A directory of upcoming apps (from early-release SDK devs) with “I want this app” voting buttons would have given devs feedback early on, but also given Palm an idea of what people were interested in doing on the phone even before its launch.
2. Sponsoring ‘public user’ days by raffling off trips to Palm’s HQ for ‘average Joe’ testing, complete with videos and such. Total transparency. $10 tickets for a chance to win a tour of the Palm Pre HQ and meet with the team - all proceeds to go to a charity. Free flights and hotels for the winners. Candid feedback on user experience stuff. Blogged/videod/documented. Thousands of people would have applied. News coverage of the contest, news coverage of the event, and news coverage of the aftermath. No one’s ever done this before. One might almost have called this ‘agile phone development’ - getting iterations of real feedback from real customers during the product development. This generally works well in software, and software plays a big part in the smartphone experience.
3. Same experience for devs, based on which pre-release apps had best community feedback earlier on. Palm could have purchased the apps from the dev community as pre-installed apps. Fly top community devs out to meet with Pre team. What would that have done to your development resume and street cred, having one of your apps make it on to the Pre at launch? Again, this sort of community embracing has not been done before, and would have made a precedent as to how to launch new phones. I fear Apple may end up doing this at some point, staying that much ahead of the curve, and making anyone else who tries it look like a copycat.
Instead of new, innovative and community-embracing steps, what did we get? Standard CES announcement, then months of nothing, then some web ads, then low inventory, store experiences that are the exact same as every other phone on the market (plastic models that don’t work, unfriendly staff, etc.). *In spite* of all this, they still reportedly sold over 50,000 units. Imagine what their numbers would have been had they actually engaged people for 6 months, gauged reactions and demand, and had adequate inventory levels (because they’d have known ahead of time what the demand was).
Apple has a culture of secrecy, and people almost expect it. While Palm wasn’t totally secret about the Pre, they had almost the opposite approach which was just as damaging. Announcing in January, but not shipping until June. They had an opportunity to do six months of community engaging and expectation setting. Instead, we got 5.5 months of no official word, rumors, and another 6 months of comparisons with Apple and iPhones.
Palm had a chance to really change how phones are developed and launched. They had a huge community of people *wanting* something new, and they blew it.