1. I want to decide what application to install
The current situation how Apple is handling the app store an treating it’s customers is not acceptable any more. I have bought a phone and own the hardware so I decide what kind of applications are on my device. If apple want to protect their users it’s ok for me but they have to find a possibility to support my need too. Just watch Json’s comment on this issue in his This week in Startups.

2. Download my pod casts directly on my iPhone
This is really what I was missing until the beginning. Where is the refresh button like in the iTunes to update all pod casts with the new content. I don’t understand why I have to go to the app store to click on the new episode by hand and get an message afterwards that says “Sorry file is too big and can’t be loaded over the 3G network”. What is the issue with big files? I have a 3Gb all inclusive package it’s no big deal to download 20Mb.

3. Mark positions in a pod cast
While listening to pod casts or books on your iPhone, and I am listening to much of them, there is no possibility to mark positions for later research. I am really missing that. While listening to something interesting there is often no time to write it down or search the web for further information. I don’ want to search several minutes in the audio file to find the correct position to get the information I was looking for.

4. Us it as a USB Storage device
What have I bought here? – was the first reaction when i tried to store files on the iPhone. I had an old iPod and never thought that using it as a USB storage device wouldn’t be possible. The WebDav applications are no real replacement because there is sometimes no open WI-FI network available to transfer the data.

5. Bluetooth Profiles
Ok, I really don’t get this – why transferring pictures or vCards form a other phone to the iPhone via Bluetooth is not supported? MMS was/is not available so how can data be transferd from a phone that does not have a mail client? In general there is no reason why they support so view profiles.

6. Customizable Tones
The notification from the calendar that reminds me of a new appointment is not even hearable in room where nobody speaks, not to mention to sit in a open space. I am not fan of the typical Nokia notification tone for an appointment but at least you can hear it.

7. Better Gmail Application
The current mail application on the phone is one of the best of mobile systems I have ever seen but for a Gmail user I really missing the possibility to assign several different labels to a message and the powerful Android client and the web client is not a real alternative.

8. Better Calendar
At leas for me the G1 calendar was really grate to work with. It would be so nice to have a week view like in Outlook or calendar in a wide screen view to see the my appointments of the whole week.

I know that most of the features are available in a jailbroken iPhone but why is Apple treating it’s customers to do that? Just see the phone as a platform and not as a device you have to protect.

I am really impressed by the functionality the system provides and how you can extend it. At the beginning I focused on the integration of third party systems like the publishing of photos and content to your blog and the communication back of the comments into your wave. I thought this may be also useful for our current issues with Social Networks to aggregate the content in one place but I have to admit that this may not be the best way to see wave and aggregate Social Networks.

When Google presented the system on the Google I/O conference they introduced it as “The new mail system” which was a really good teaser to get people excited about it, but it is not what I think wave really is. I wouldn’t see it as a protocol that finally supports the collaboration on content between people over organization and provider boarders. For Google, who treats mail with GMail and the Google Docs integration already as some kind of collaboration platform it may make sense to call it is as the new mail system but for others it may not. Wiki systems (e.g. Confluence) already tried to provide such platforms but the protocol to exchange the content between organizations to share just certain stuff and bring in information from other systems was still missing. This may really be a revolution within this area but may not be as easy as the introduction of SMTP back in the days of RFC’s because there are hundreds of companies and thousands of people who have their own products and opinions that need to come together to agree on such a new collaboration protocol as a standard for the industry.

I am really excited about the wave system and hope that I can play around with some of my friends in the near future to try out how this real time experience changes the way we collaborate in the future.

I really like the live messages and are following them them very often, especial at conferences e.g. the EclipseCon I visited a view days ago the medium is very useful. On the other hand I don’t have the time to follow the live messages all the day and special because I am living in Europe I miss moste of the messages in real time. This is really an issue because all clients I know are focosing on the live updates and fancy dynamic content that is updated nearly the same second the person is hitting the enter button on his keyboard and are not taking care about people who want to be able to read the content in a more ‘offline’ way.

I am looking for a interface that is more like gmail. It should of course support keyboard navigation and give me feedback about information I have already read. I have just downloaded Adobe Air (TweetDec is developed on it) and will try to prototype an application.

Was an interesting Keynote. Most of the stuff was not really new to me but at the numbers are always impressive. SmugMug presented their Solution which is really impressive. They are doing all their processing in the cloud by amazon and are very happy with that. The interesting part is that they are just acquiring resources (servers) as they need it. He spoke a little bit about their solution and how they have designed their Infrastructure. An server checks periodically how many requests are in the queue and what kind of they are. If they decide that they need more resources they are just starting an or more server instances at amazon EC2. The server is an plain instance of linux an just has some configurations that after starting he calls home what he has to do. If there is still work to do the server provides him with information where to find the software and what to execute. After the work is done he makes the same call. If there is more work to do the server receives the new work item and new software if needed. If not he shuts itself down. Nice concept and very easy to maintain.

After the presentation of the SmugMug CEO amazon announced their new AWS Toolkit based on Eclipse which is really a grate tool for managing servers in the cloud.

Presentation

Building Communities: The Rise and Fall and Rise of the CDT Project

Doug Schaefer gave a grate talk about building a community and how to help them to stay on live. One issues he had noticed is that you can’t just go and say commit. This would not work out because there are to many people and especial to many bosses involved, furthermore if you want the things to happen than you have to contribute and not rely on others.
Prepare to be frustrated because it is very frustrating to build a community, for every vendor or person that contributes there are four just taking the stuff and are happy with it.
It is important that as an committer in the professional area you have to wear two hats. You have to make your vendor happy and also work for the community. Asking people is not enough, you have to create the need and meet face to face with the people to have the chance to build an hold a community. Communicate, communicate, communicate and be honest to the people and if you have a hard time to get people convinced maybe they are just not interested in your idea and you have to rethink it.

Presentation

Building LinkedIn’s Next Generation Architecture with OSGI

This presentation first of all showed me that applications are growing and some of the most used sites are just a mess. LinkedIn is based on some war applications but most of the logic is in one file located. Because this became a maintenance problem they decided to come up with an OSGi based infrastructure where they extracted the services and tomcat was just one container within the OSGi container. It became a problem that they had so many dependencies between the different bundles now that they had to start refactoring. The nice and bad thing with bundles is that they make the dependencies visible because you have to declare them.

Presentation

Eclipse @ eBay

Michael Galpin did a great job explaining the history behind the eBay Website. They build it about 4 times, where the first one was written in Perl and did not have a database. After that they tried an c/c++ architecture. 2001 they started to replace it with Java. They used an XML/XSLT Layer for the frontend, but that did not work out for them therefor they decided to switch all to Java. Of course Java is not the Silver Bullet, but they tried to bring the all information on one level and use code generators to represent the information.
What was really interesting to see was the issues companies with an service oriented architecture are facing. Because of the high amount of different projects/services they needed to write software that is setting up the desktop of a developer in a way that he can work with, otherwise it would take him days to find the correct configuration and plugins. Because of that they stick to eclipse as their platform and wrote plugins to set up the environment. They have also written other plugins for eclipse one of them is a java script editor which mabye announced at the javaone .

Presentation

Working in the Cloud: Development, Deployment and Project Management for Force.com

Was more an advertisement of force.com than technical information.

Presentation

Symmetric Service Oriented Programming

Was an nice presentation about OSGi and dependency injection and how to combine them.

Presentation

#if defined (WIN32)
 ...
#elif defined (LINUX)
...
#endif

blocks in C++.

The software-update-button for example doesn’t make sens in an Web application. As the talk points out, there is also no graphic context within a Web application. So you can’t draw arbitrary shapes, as it’s possible in an RCP application. There is also no possibility to catch every mouse-move event, which will provoke heavy network traffic to the server.

The conclusion for me is, that it is a very interesting possibility to reuse code, but not the silver bullet, as some people think (or hope).

I was really impressed how easy it is to develop an application for Android with the modeling tool they build it is really strait forward to build the interaction within an diagram. I really would like to compare the platform of the iPhone and the android one. Let’s see which of them will hype more in the future. I can see potential in both of them.
On the other hand i found some things concerning EMF we where doing wrong in our own implementation. Will have to take a closer look at that as soon as i am back in Vienna. For further information i would suggest to take a look at:

Presentation
developer.androide.com

Executing BPMN

Was an nice talk about BPM and all the acronyms that twitter around in this area. At least the presenter was realistic in some way as he mentioned “it will never happen that a business analyst can design an WF and deploy it without any developer”. I totally agree with that and have to admit that i we should have taken this more into account while designing the CEP system at Senactive. Anyway i am still confused by all this different standards and quasi standards (BEPEL, BPMN, jBPM, ….).

Presentation

e4 Project in Review

In my opinion this was one of the most interesting sessions i visited at the conference. It showed at least some of the details in action that e4 will change in eclipse. In particular they showed the new Resource framework and XWT with the Model behind the Workbench. They are also going in the right direction by removing the whole Singleton chaos that exists in the current WB to provide the possibility to use the RCP in an multiuser environment. This in particular is needed to give better support for the RAP project which by the way will also be an essential part for the e4. e4 is still in the incubator but will release an first version in July this year and hopefully ship in Summer 2010. As there are several advantages with e4 we will still have to wait for about 2 years to get a stable version that we can use for RCP development.

Presentation

Make Money Fast! Market Your Killer App with the Eclipse Pulsar Initiative (formerly Eclipse Mobile Industry Working Group)

This was an interested discussion about the Pulsar initiative that was announced some time ago. Some mobile companies including Motorola, Sony Ericsson and Nokia are trying to build an environment for mobile developers based on the Eclipse Framework to support an easier way of development for their devices. For me it sounds like they want to form abase against the two other big new players in the market, Apple with their iPhone and Google with Android. The discussion itself was a little bit boring and i am not sure how this will work out in the future.

Presentation
Announcement

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