Nick Bradbury's Shared Items

My First iPhone App: Lessons Learned

2009-06-07T11:04:08Z

I recently finished my first iPhone app and submitted it to Apple to get a feel for the iPhone App Store. I didn’t want to invest a lot of time into this experiment, so I decided to add some polish to a very simple game I had already written for my own amusement, and put it out there.

I’m probably going to write a second article detailing some sales numbers (they’re practically non-existant, so I’m not sure how interesting that is going to be), but since sales never were the goal of the app, I’m going to start out with some more important things I’ve learned when writing and releasing this app.

Search

This is just something weird I have noticed. Different stores show different results for the same search term. Searching for the exact name of my app in the Swiss store shows it as the first search result, while the search position in the US store fluctuates:

I have no idea what causes the difference.

Reviews

Most larger sites are swamped with review requests and won’t even respond to mail. Smaller sites and YouTube Channels are happy to get promo codes, but they don’t have much reach. Some sites encourage posting gaming news to their forums, which is pretty cool because it gives you quick feedback from people who actually play your games.

To my surprise¹, some sites and podcasts actually request money for reviews or frontpage placement of news items. Some even take money for reviews, and offer to not release the review if it turns out to be negative. Others have written about this:

But when I find out that certain sites are using gutter tactics like selling reviews on the sly, that’s where I draw the line. I recently lost an advertiser to a competitor that offered him a review along with his advertising package – «impartial,» of course - to better promote his game.

Needless to say that this is not the kind of behaviour the iPhone app market needs. Perhaps this might help.

iTunes App Loader

Since «Release» versions of iPhone applications are signed with a specific App Store Provisioning Profile, there’s no obvious way to test them (there is, however, a non-obvious way). In fact, you can’t even be entirely sure that the application is signed properly. To get around that, you can use the Application Loader to upload apps to iTunes Connect. It seems that the Application Loader will verify the signature when uploading the app, although I haven’t tested this (signing worked fine for me). The bickbot blog explains where to find the Application Loader.

Crashes

About a day after releasing the game, I got a mail saying basically «well, you got my money, but I can’t play your app because it crashes.»

To me, this feels like getting punched in the stomach: Somebody gave you his or her money, and the app doesn’t work because you screwed up or didn’t test enough or didn’t think of some special case. They have every right to be pissed off, because you basically stole their money.

From the description of the crash, it became obvious to me that the game crashed because it ran out of memory. During beta testing, nobody had had this issue. I assumed that my app’s memory usage was well within the limits of what any iPhone should be able to handle.

So I made the boneheaded decision to ignore memory warnings; I simply assumed that my app was small enough that it would always fit into the iPhone’s available memory and never receive a memory warning.

Turns out the person who had the crash had a jailbroken phone that hadn’t been restarted in a while. Restarting solved the problem, but the other issue is the jailbreak. Jailbroken iPhones tend to have less available memory, probably mainly due to background processes that some non-Apple-approved apps can create.²

I haven’t found an easy way of testing my app for iPhones with memory issues. What I did to check my fixes was to

Create a test build which allocates and retains a bunch of unused memory when the app starts
Create a test build which constantly leaks memory, eventually triggering memory warnings

That should cover most situations people might actually encounter in real life.

Daniel Ericsson points out that memory warnings can also be tested by using «Hardware» -> «Simulate Memory Warning» in Simulator.app. That that doesn’t replicate the actual low-memory situation on the actual hardware, but it’s useful for testing the code triggered by memory warnings.

For the record, my game simply turns off some animations when it receives the first memory warning, releasing the images used for those animations. This seems to have fixed the problem.

2.2

Something else I discovered during beta testing is that a lot of people still use iPhone OS version 2.2. Some don’t want to risk updating a well-running phone. Another reason is that updating jailbroken phones requires quite a bit of time, and a lot of people with jailbroken phones simply won’t bother to do it.

So it’s probably a good idea to support older versions if possible.

Performance is your Number 1 Problem

I started writing this particular game even before I got accepted into the iPhone developer program, simply to get acquainted with iPhone development. It ran just fine in the simulator, but when I put it on an actual iPhone, I was able to get about two frames per second. There was no way to salvage my code; I had to rewrite the game, making entirely different assumptions about the iPhone’s performance.

There’s a saying in software engineering: premature optimization is the root of all evil. As a general rule, this may be true, but on the iPhone, you should probably optimize constantly. Otherwise, you might end up with an application you can’t possibly get to work.

Start out with a «performance prototype» simply to see whether your idea can actually work at all. Then, during development, do on-device performance tests regularly. Fix issues as soon as they come up if you don’t want to get stuck with a wonderful application you can’t get to perform acceptably.

Finally, not all «Touch OS» devices have the same processor. Some newer iPods have faster processors. Make sure to also test your app on older, slower devices and perhaps allow the app to adapt to them in some way, either by measuring performance, or by checking what specific device your app is running on. For example, some racing games show fewer opponents on slower devices. Here’s a way to detect what device your app is running on.

Memory is also your Number 1 Problem

As noted above, memory is a constant issue on the iPhone. You may be tempted to improve performance by increasing memory consumption. On desktop computers, this typically works just fine since the operating system can page out idle applications and give your app almost as much real memory as you ask for. On the iPhone, this doesn’t work. You pretty much get the amount of memory that is currently free, and if you want to use more than that, you’re shut down.

So it’s often not a good idea to fix performance issues by increasing memory consumption. As a general rule, you should probably keep memory consumption low and release stuff as soon as you can, even if it’s bad for performance. You’ll be glad you did once the iPhone grows the ability to multitask³.

Even if your app runs perfectly fine on your iPhone and your beta testers’ iPhones, chances are your actual customers will run into memory issues you did not. They will have jailbroken phones with background processes running. They will have iPhones that haven’t been restarted in weeks or months. So even if your app requires little memory and you never had any issues, it’s probably a good idea to catch low-memory warnings anyway.

Yeah, it may be naïve to expect some kind of basic amount of integrity from online gaming news sites ;-) (and no, just to be clear, I did not contact Gamespot and do not think that Gamespot would ask for money in exchange for reviews; I merely linked to this article as an example of sleazy behaviour. Also, I do not think that all online gaming sites are unethical. In fact, as far as I can tell, most of them are doing a fine job) ↩
Please note that I have nothing against people who jailbreak their phones. There are valid reasons for jailbreaking an iPhone. I don’t blame people for jailbreaking their phones, I blame myself for not making sure the app worked properly in low-memory situations (which, incidentally, helps people with non-jailbroken phones, too). Furthermore, merely jailbreaking the phone will not increase memory consumption. Certain things which are enabled by the jailbreak do, such as services like web servers, applications with background processes, running normal applications in the background, and certain changes to Springboard. ↩
Note that I have no reason to believe that the iPhone will ever allow for multitasking, other than the fact that it seems like common sense to add the feature once the hardware can support it. ↩

Getting Pretty Lonely

2009-07-02T18:09:48Z

This very post is delivered to your browser or news reader by the famous and fabulous WordPress blogging system. In my work as the developer of MarsEdit, I am exposed to countless blogging options, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. And yet, I stick with WordPress because it strikes a balance of power and ease of use which feels comfortable to me. Not to mention that Joseph Scott and others are tirelessly working to improve its API.

WordPress is licensed under the terms of the Gnu Public License (GPL) which, in a nutshell, stipulates that you are free to use the software however you like, but if you make changes and distribute those changes, then you must share those changes under the same terms. This simple, radical restriction means that you are prohibited from taking a GPL project and incorporating it with a closed-source project.

Violating The GPL

Violating the GPL is easy. All you have to do is write some code, intermingle it with some GPL code, distribute a changed copy of the original, and refuse to share your contributions. Bam! You’re toast. Assuming the original authors discover your violation and decide to pursue a resolution.

Once a violation occurs, it might be settled privately, or could escalate to legal court procedures. But the most obvious form of resolution is for the author of the changes to release their code to the public under the terms of the GPL.

Depending on how much code you “mixed” with the GPL code, this could mean only a small portion, or it could mean the entire source code of your project. This so-called “viral nature” of GPL is what scares the bejeezus out of companies, large and small, who fear the consequences of having to give up their own intellectual property to the public.

The terms of the GPL sound pretty simple at first read, but due in part to the epic consequences of a violation, there has been a great deal of debate and uncertainty about what legally constitutes a violation. Most of the debate seems to boil down to two questions:

What counts as a change to the original product?
What counts as distribution of those changes?

If you can legally justify that your additions to a GPL project either don’t change or derive from the original product, or haven’t technically been distributed, then you are not subject to the restrictive terms of the license.

Take GIMP, the popular GNU-licensed image editing application. The application supports plugins, analogous to the types of plugins you might find for the commercial, closed-source application Photoshop. A savvy developer may argue that a plugin doesn’t meet the criteria of changing the original application, because the original application still runs in its unaltered condition whether the plugin is there or not.

But promoters of the GPL take the position that plugins, by nature of being loaded into the same code space as other GPL code, do constitute a modification of the original, and are therefore subject to the terms of the GPL. As far as I know this is not a question that has been well-tested in courts.

Let me take a moment to make this abundantly clear: I respect the rights of authors to license their software under whatever terms they choose, including the GPL. In my opinion, all the legal mumbo jumbo ceases to matter once the original author’s intentions are made clear. So if the author of GPL-licensed code clarifies to me that it cannot be run on Sundays, then their GPL means it cannot be run on Sundays. But this is one of the problems with the GPL: its terms are not often understood, even by the authors of GPL-licensed code.

WordPress Themes & Plugins

WordPress supports two explicit forms of extension, each of which may affect the appearance and functionality of the product. Themes tend to work as a “skin” for the appearance of a blog, while plugins tend to introduce completely new features. Since plugins in WordPress are analogous to GIMP or Photoshop plugins, it would stand to reason that they would also be covered by the terms of the GPL. But what about themes?

Themes have been controversial in the WordPress community, as a few commercial business models have sprung up to take advantage of bloggers’ desires for high quality themes at an affordable price. One approach is to distribute “free” themes that contains commercial ads. So you might stumble upon the perfect theme for your blog, only to learn that the glaring “Brought to you by Hostess Cupcakes” line near the bottom of your page cannot be removed.

But the terms of the GPL, if themes are covered, would require that end users be granted the legal right to modify and redistribute their own copy of the theme. Zap the sponsorship, reupload to your site, and you’ve got a free, high quality theme with no ugly ads.

Today, Matt Mullenweg of the WordPress project announced his lawyer-supported opinion that themes are partly covered by the GPL:

I reached out to the Software Freedom Law Center, the world’s preeminent experts on the GPL, which spent time with WordPress’s code, community, and provided us with an official legal opinion. One sentence summary: PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.

If you’re starting with the understanding that WordPress itself is GPL, and WordPress plugins are GPL, then it’s not so much extra hay on the camel’s back, to also clarify that its themes are to some extent GPL. But it got me thinking again about my own blog, and about the restrictions the GPL imposes on the kinds of things I can do with the software that runs it.

GPL Stifles Participation

Now for the most controversial point of this article, where I suggest that the GPL does more to harm collaborative development than it does to help it.

For the purposes of this argument, let me reduce all the source code in the world down to three rough categories. I recognize I have omitted some classes of license here, but for the sake of argument, most projects fall into these camps:

GPL code. Changes may be distributed only in other GPL products.
Liberal-licensed code. (MIT/BSD/Apache/etc). Changes may be distributed anywhere. Appropriate origin-attribution may be required.
Closed-source code. May be distributed only by the copyright owner and other explicit licensees.

Now, there are a few people in the world who, for political or philosophical reasons, will only participate in a GPL project. And for comparable yet opposite reasons, there are some who will only participate in commercial, closed-source projects. But I propose that the vast majority of developers will participate in any project that is advantageous to them.

So let’s imagine a representative, run-of-the-mill developer who is working on a project that falls into each of these three camps. If this developer is not radically committed to their own project’s license, they will naturally look to outside resources in order to bolster the success of their own work.

As the developer evaluates communities to participate in, they must evaluate the legal impact such participation will have on their own project. The closed source communities are, by definition uninviting to outsiders. GPL communities are open and embracing of other GPL developers, but generally off-putting to liberal-license and closed-license developers. Only the liberal-license communities are attractive to developers from all 3 camps.

I know what some of the GPL-enthusiasts are thinking now: “leeches don’t count as community.” Many GPL developers take comfort in the fact that their hard work can’t be quietly taken and incorporated into a commercial product, without any payback of time or money to the original project. But you’re piloting an open source project, and the first step of building a community is to get people in the door. Liberal licenses? Whoo-eee do they ever get people in the door.

If you operate from the presumption that great developers love to build great projects, the first step in any successful open source project is to get as many great developers in the door as possible.

It’s Your Party

Yes, this is just me and my crazy theories. I haven’t done exhaustive research to prove that liberal-license communities thrive more than GPL communities. But the anecdotal examples are staggering. The very foundation of Mac OS X, the operating system through which I’m typing, is thanks to the liberally-licensed FreeBSD operating system.

Looking over to the right of my screen, I’m watching this sentence appear in a live web preview as I type, thanks to the WebKit project, whose liberal license makes it compatible with closed source projects such as Safari, as well as open source efforts such as Google’s Chromium project.

For years, the problem of a generic HTTP client library that runs on every major platform has been addressed by libcurl, whose liberal license has caused it to be embraced by countless companies and projects.

The popular Subversion source control system’s liberal license enabled Sofa, a commercial software business to contribute value to the community with its extremely polished, award-winning client application. Meanwhile, the newly popular distributed source control systems presents three major choices: git, Mercurial, and Bazaar. All are restricted by the GPL-license, and therefore none is likely to inspire development of a Versions-caliber client.

I’ve touched the tip of the iceberg, and yes I’ve neglected to mention some GPL success stories such as Linux, MySQL, and gcc. These communities have thrived to some extent because the passions of the GPL community are strong, but we can’t know whether their success is in spite of the restrictions their license places on participation by the broader developer community.

Speaking of GPL succeses, WordPress is itself an example of monumental success. All of its developers have something to be immensely proud of. But whenever I am reminded that WordPress is GPL, my passion for it takes a bit of a dive. I’m more comfortable with the true freedom of liberally-licensed products. If a liberally-licensed blog system of equal quality, ease of use, and popularity should appear, my loyalties to WordPress would not last long.

It’s your party, and you’re entitled to write the guest list. But take a look around the room: not as many folks as you’d hoped for? Liberally-licensed projects are booming. Speaking for myself, a developer who has been to all the parties, I’m much more likely to pass through the door that doesn’t read “GPL Only.”

XHTML WTF

2009-07-02T20:35:07Z

The web's future isn't what the web's past cracked it up to be. 1999: XML is the light and XHTML is the way. 2009: XHTML is dead—kind of. From the W3C news archive for 2 July 2009: XHTML 2 Working Group Expected to Stop Work End of 2009, W3C to Increase Resources ...

BBC - Earth News - Ant mega-colony takes over world

2009-07-02T02:45:05Z

HomeSite R.I.P.

2009-06-30T06:42:35Z

Earlier versions of TopStyle were developed by Nick Bradbury, who originally developed Homesite... and the new version has been developed by Stefan van As, a veteran Windows developer who had worked with Nick. ...

Nick Bradbury says goodbye to the old Homesite.

2009-07-01T16:12:43Z

Nick Bradbury
(credit: Will Pate)

My friend, Nick Bradbury, writes about the discontinuation of HomeSite, an HTML editing software he developed before most people ever heard of HTML. He created the software in 1995 and sold it in 1997, so it has been a while since he’s been involved with the product. (After a few sales and corporate consolidations, the software ended up at Adobe.) Nonetheless, the announcement by Adobe provided Nick with the opportunity to reflect on the early days of the software’s development and how he depended greatly on the users of the product to shape it — something else he helped pioneer.

I especially like this quote:

“Sometimes in this blog I’ve made disparaging remarks about HomeSite, but that’s not because I disliked it. It’s just that it’s hard to look at something you created so long ago without seeing all the mistakes that you’ve learned not to make since then. I’m actually very proud of HomeSite, and very thankful that it enabled me to quit my job and work at home. And, funny enough, HomeSite is also what paid for the home I’m living in now.

I’ve never used HomeSite. Heck, I’ve never even used Windows. But I’m grateful for the software. Why? Because when Nick quit his job and started working at home, he decided that home would be in Nashville — making him the Jack White of web software developers.

Page views required to generate $1M in ad revenue?

2009-07-01T16:47:54Z

Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Beebo, Plaxo, Orkut, and MSN Spaces are the biggest well known social network spaces. But what about the 800 other sites scrambling for audiences in the social network space? Can they generate $1M in advertising revenue per month, or even per year? Will they ever be profitable?

USA Today says "Social Network Sites Work To Turn Users Into Profits" and summarizes the problem with this quote;

"Short of striking it rich with online ads or creating a new revenue stream, how can so many sites leverage their vast audiences? In many respects, it is the same query that dogged portal companies in the mid-1990s and search engines in the early '90s. Some were sold. Some went public. Some went belly up.

The ongoing challenge is to concoct a potion — be it through banner ads, premium subscriptions or licensing agreements — that no one has perfected. Facebook, crown jewel of the field, is valued at $15 billion but barely turns a profit."

CPM versus CPC - Big audiences are great but how you monetize them is the key to financial success. Google and the search companies are able to sell Cost Per Click (CPC) ads and command very high rates. Content sites and social networks don't have a search term to key off so they charge Cost Per Thousand (Mil) or CPM rates. In some cases it can take 1,000 page views to generate the same revenue as one click on an ad.

A penny for your thoughts? I talked to a Facebook App developer at the ReMix conference a few weeks ago. He told me his app is generating 300 million page views per month. Wow! Then I asked what kind of CPM (Cost Per Thousand) ad rates he was getting. He shrugged and said somewhere between $0.02 and $0.05 per thousand. That pencils out to between $6K and $15K of advertising revenue per month for those 300 million page views.

How much traffic is needed to generate $1M in ad revenue? It all depends on how well you can target your audience and how much you can charge for CPM rates. But, based on a survey of social network sites let's assume an average CPM of $0.40. You would need 2.5 Billion page views per month to earn $1M in ad revenues. That is 2,500,000,000 page views...and how many sites can sell out all their page view inventory?

A New Revenue Model? - Google revolutionized the search business by banning display ads sold on a CPM basis, and instead offering text based ads where you only pay when someone clicks on the ad, what we now refer to as CPC.

It will probably take a new revenue approach to make many Social Networks profitable. From the USA Today story;

"Facebook's ambitious plan to reshape advertising — via a new approach to social marketing, called Beacon — was a bust. The idea was to inform friends whenever a Facebook member purchased something from online retailers. When consumers protested its invasion of privacy, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged the miscue and promptly apologized.

Even Google, as close to a money mint as anything online, has struggled. Google has a deal with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. to place ads on MySpace, and owns Orkut, which flopped in the USA. Co-founder Sergey Brin recently admitted the "monetization work we were doing there didn't pan out as well as we had hoped."

Which new model will work? No one knows at this point, but there will be billions of dollars for whoever figures it out.

Beacon was innovative, but privacy concerns killed it. We are often influenced by what our friends buy, maybe just a slightly different approach will work.

Social recommendations are very powerful. Back in the early days of the web there were several attempts to consolidate buyers into groups to get better prices. Could social networks do something similar?

Businesses and advertisers are anxious to tap into the power of social networks. The social networks are building huge audiences but can't figure out how to monetize them. When they learn how to connect effectively the benefits will be amazing for everyone involved.

This is a business problem, not a technology problem. The answer will be simple and obvious. In fact, it has probably already been considered and rejected several times. Someone will come along and put a slightly different twist on it and...Eureka!!! Don't you just love business? How do you think this will play out?

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Free vs Freely Distributed

2009-07-01T00:21:29Z

With the publication of Chris Anderson’s new book Free, the discussion about the role of free, today and in the future has expanded. Articles from Malcom Gladwell in New Yorker, and Seth Godin discuss the various merits and challenges of Free. Is Free inevitable ? Is Free the beginning of the end ? Let me answer the question.

First of all, what we are experiencing right now is “Better Than Free”. The videos on Youtube, magazine articles, newspapers reports, anything that used to be analog that now is digital have a perceived value that is based on their legacy delivery. We value all those TV shows on Hulu highly because we assign a value to what we pay for cable or satellite. We assign a high perceived value to newspaper and magazine reports based on the years we spent paying for them. Anything that we paid for as recently as last year, that we now get free, of course we assign a value of more than free. That makes it worth the effort to find it for free. Because the effort is worth your time. You are getting something for nothing, who doesnt want that ?

Of course that is a challenge for those industries. Not only do they face the challenge of their former customers wanting their content for nothing, but they have the problem that their costs are based upon their ability to sell their content.

There in lies the problem for the free movement. The subsidies of pro content producers from the newspaper and magazine industries will disappear as those businesses contract significantly. What happens then ?

You get the music industry. Anyone can create any song for no cost, and they do. The problem of course is getting your music to stand out among the millions of songs available at any given moment. Its expensive. Very, very expensive. (If it werent for groupies, would the number of musical artists contract 90pct ? )

The future of content outside of the music industry is exactly what you are now seeing inside the music industry. The music industry uses what they have learned from more than 10 years of competing with free. First they cut the size of their organizations to the bone, keeping just those they hope and pray will know best how to guide them through the world of free.

Those survivors have learned or are learning how to identify the music and artists that best fit the new world of free. They learn how to work with the artists and those willing to pay for music in some form, whether CD, Download, Licensing or in concert, and do their best to maximize the return on their investment. They use free as a weapon. They use free as an asset. They use it anywhere they can leverage it into something more. Something hopefully profitable.

What they music industry realizes that they have to offer quite a bit of music for free. What they have learned however, is that they dont have to allow it to be freely distributed. They can and do control where its delivered. You can have it for free, if thats how you want it, but you have to come get it where we want you to get it. On our websites. On websites we co produce with Youtube or Hulu or whoever. If you want it for free, you have to go through the exhausting effort of clicking to our website and giving us something in value in return. It may be your attention. It may be your interest. It may be a referral or your email address. We give you something free, you give us something that costs you nothing.

The music is often free, but it is NEVER freely distributed.

The TV and Movie business are realizing this is the case. Hence TV Anywhere. They will give you access to content for free if you are already a customer of their distributors. And before you IT ALL HAS TO BE FREE BIGOTS EXPLODE, even google requires you have internet access of some kind, which costs you in subscription fees , taxes or coffee.

Newspapers are catching flack for saying there should be copyrights on their news reports and the summaries. They are right. Their work, their ability to control it. They should have the right to control where it appears. If, as Chris Anderson and others suggest, there will be plenty of content creators and the quality of the work is sufficient for consumers of that content, then there will be plenty of open source content and it shouldnt matter what the newspapers request for protection. The market will decide.

Newspapers are also catching flack for saying they dont want their content openly distributed. On this point, they are correct again. They should have complete control over where it is distributed. They should have the ability to choose where it is offered for free.

Not only should they have this control, taking back this control is the exact right business move. Im not saying it will save newspapers or magazines, it wont. But it will make their website offerings stronger in the long run. If Im them, I take the risk that the “printed” content business follows the path of the music industry.

In other words, you take on the role of identifying the best in breed for your business and use your resources to help those talented people figure out how to make money for themselves and for you. You provide your resources and knowledge to make them smarter and then you go and compete against the masses.

In the long run, printed content producers should have a brand, and use their institutional knowledge, their core competencies and ability to procure, improve and market to maximize the value of their brands and the perceived value of their content. Whether its on a central website, a co produced website, in print or on a hologram in the evening sky, I should go to the NY Times because they have demonstrated to me that they have the very best articles on the subjects I am looking for. That they are the best source for breaking news about the topics I care about. THEY NEED TO MAKE SURE I DONT HAVE THE CHOICE OF GETTING IT ANYWHERE ELSE BUT WHERE THEY DICTATE. If they cant make their content stand out from the open source masses and convince enough people to transact with them in a way that makes them money they dont deserve to exist.

They should distribute their content for Free where they believe it maximizes return, but should do everything possible to keep it from being distributed Freely.

ShareThis

Calling BS on the Real-Time Web

2009-07-01T08:58:46Z

The tech world is full of the real-time web. Google seems to have missed it, Twitter is on top of it but sucks at indexing it, Friendfeed is the aggregation king, and Facebook might get there by copying Twitter and Friendfeed all along.

Personally I think it is not worth the hassle. Real-time web is a publisher’s thing, not a consumer thing. There are few situations, usually disasters, where I might be in need of a real-time web. The geek will tell you that it is great to be able track what people are saying when a plane crashes, Obama is inaugurated, or a famous pop star dies. The problem I have with those examples is that life isn’t like that every day. Most of the times we get along quite well without the ability to track these rare situations, and when they do emerge we’ll find out about it quickly enough.

Another argument is real-time search. That’s a lot of BS too. there is so much twittering around that it is impossible to get valuable real-time results in search. Google Pagerank uses an algorithm to decide what could be relevant. You may not like the algorithm, but it does attempt to ensure that there is a reasonable objective approach in getting you valuable results. Chit chat isn’t the way to do that. There currently is no algorithm when real-time search is running. There is only people, and the things they publish right now. It leads to a lot of clutter and near-zero value in search.

The Friendfeed crowd will argue that it isn’t about real-time search, but about real-time conversations. I don’t buy that for a minute. Have you ever seen a discussion on Friendfeed? the service gets praised for their ability to let people interact over content. It’s the best service out there. Personally I find many of the “discussions” hardly interesting or useful. There is too much content, too many people, too many comments, no structure in discussions, too many geeks. But most important hardly anyone is actually listening (the basis for ANY good conversation is the ability to listen). A Friendfeed discussion isn’t an interaction, it’s a mob screaming out loud. A voice lost in 2000 other voices. I get much more value out of the posts that are aggregated in Friendfeed than the discussions that take place below them.

The real-time web currently is a geek’s wet dream. I’m sure it will eventually get to a point where people will find aspects of a real-time web useful enough to incorporate it in their lives. But for now I don’t think it is worth all the hassle. I don’t have a “need” for the real-time web. There are more important things in life then having access to a fire hose of unfiltered nonsense. How about getting me the right information at the exact right time!

Posted in Facebook, Friendfeed, Google, interaction, real-time web, Twitter Tagged: Facebook, Friendfeed, Google, interaction, real-time web, Twitter

An Ant, Close Up

2009-07-01T16:35:45Z

GigaPan:

This ant is composed of 400 pictures, and it’s magnified 400x using a scanning electron microscope. The ant was given to us to image by Brian Fisher an entomologist at the California Academy of Sciences.

The intersection of horrifying and wonderful.

★

It May Be Free, But It's Sure As Hell Underwritten

2009-07-01T02:57:30Z

There's quite a wonderful authorial kerfuffle happening between Chris Anderson, whose recent book "Free" has been the target both of plagiarism charges (from Wikipedia, of all places, oh the wonderful irony, one might think Chris actually planted the whole damn thing...) and Malcolm Gladwell, who never met a clever anecdote he couldn't convert into a well turned (and dammingly entertaining) book of his own.

I won't go into the whole thing, because, honestly, I just don't have the, er, free time.

However, I do find it noteworthy that Chris's much-linked to riposte to Malcolm's initial evisceration comes on Wired.com, where, shock of all shocks, advertising is prominently featured. Free, of course, doesn't come without a business model.

Seth Godin Says Malcolm Gladwell Is Wrong

2009-06-30T23:21:06Z

Godin says he disagrees with Gladwell’s review of Chris Anderson’s Free, but it’s unclear to me exactly what he thinks Gladwell is wrong about. What I took away from Gladwell’s review is that Anderson is wrong that free media alone will satisfy our demand, not an argument that existing not-free media institutions must somehow be preserved.

On a related point, several readers have asked why I seem opposed to Anderson’s view, given that I’ve made a nice career for myself by giving away my own writing for free here on Daring Fireball. My answer to that is that Daring Fireball is decidedly not free. It’s simply a question of who gets charged. Readers don’t, but sponsors and advertisers do. What makes it work so well (so far) is that this makes everyone happy. I’m earning a nice salary. Readers get to read my writing in exchange for a small portion of their attention which I direct toward ads. And sponsors and advertisers are happy to pay a fair price to reach an audience of good-looking, intelligent readers such as yourself. But there’s nothing free about it.

★

Doom Resurrection released for iPhone, iPod touch

2009-06-29T21:49:00Z

Doom Resurrection, a new Doom game from Id Software, is available for download from the App Store.

Raising free-range kids

2009-06-29T04:25:10Z

I wrote recently about my childhood growing up in Downstate Illinois. I mentioned me and my friends roaming all over town on our bikes, walking to the movies and the swimming pool on our own, and riding our bikes through rain water backed up after thunderstorms. Also, for that matter, through piles of burning leaves. One of my classmates wrote to mention that the Boneyard, the creek running through town, was a drainage canal. "What?" I asked. "Where we caught crawdaddies?"

One of the comments on the entry was from a reader in Florida who said, rather sadly, that his 15-year-old son had just taken his first unsupervised bike ride through the city park. When he was growing up, he said, things were different. But not "today." We use that word today as code for the dangers lurking everywhere in modern society. Another reader sent me a link to a web site advocating the raising of Free Range Children. I learned this has become something of a movement, cheered by a book by Lenore Skenazy. The movement believes we are punishing our kids by over-protecting them.

Certainly today we take for granted things that we never imagined in our own childhoods, like child car seats, bike helmets, bottled water, security guards, sunblock, hand sanitizer and childproof bottles. I mentioned my childhood memory that we boys would pee behind trees, shrubbery, or garages ("If you run home, your mom might grab you and make you do something"). I forgot to mention that one of the reasons we needed to pee is that when we got thirsty we drank out of garden hoses--our own, and anybody else's.

That was in a small town. Over the weekend I attended the reunion of Chaz's class from Crane High School in Chicago. After the banquet and before the band started, they played a game called Remember When? A classmate took a hand-held mike around the room and everybody took turns remembering things like popular hangouts, teachers who were characters, high school romances, and Herb Kent the Cool Gent on the radio.

Free Range girls violating the school insurance policy

Then one alum said: "Remember when...we dressed up neat to go to school? When there were no drugs? No drive-bys? When a neighbor felt free to whoop you if you did wrong, and if your parents found out about it, they'd whoop you again? When there were no serial rapists? No kidnappings? When we got to play outside until the streetlights came on?"

Remember when.

We live in a reign of terror. Outside the home, molesters and drug pushers lurk. Children drown, are hit by cars, shot, electrocuted, bullied, burned, stabbed, attacked by pit bulls, or kidnapped and end up with their photos on milk cartons. When they play, they make "play dates." They can ride their bikes outside--but don't leave the block. They can shoot baskets, but in the driveway, or at a supervised playground. If some kid tells you to go f*** yourself and you whoop him, you'll be seeing his parents in court. If he comes over to play and falls down your basement stairs, you'll get sued for the house.

Many parents keep firearms in the house for protection, even though most shootings in the house are tragic accidents. Now I learn of a church whose pastor has asked his congregation to bring their guns to church, in support of the cause of Visible Firearms. That pastor is getting mixed messages from above. My friend McHugh was sitting in O'Rourke's one night when a guy flashed a gun stuck in his belt. "What are you carrying that for?" he asked the guy. "I live in a dangerous neighborhood," the guy said. McHugh told him, "It would be a lot safer if you moved."

You might fall and break your necks.

We believe that all undesirable things can be eliminated by legislation. In England this has gotten so far out of hand that that a 10-year-old boy is forbidden to cross a parking lot, and girls can't skip rope on public property. In America, have you seen grade school football players recently? They wear more armor than Robocop. It's safer for them to sit on the sofa and blow people up in video games.

We have three grandchildren, and I share some of this paranoia. It would be very, very hard on me if something bad happened to one of them. They were raised in the Chicago suburbs of Naperville and Lisle, claimed by some magazine or another to be the best place in America to raise a family. But there's teenage drug use there, like everywhere. Parents talk about the little potheads who corrupt their children. Every little pothead is somebody's child.

We have three times as many children in America now. Therefore, three times as many crimes against children. I don't have the statistics but you know what I mean. The rate has not gone up. But crimes against children are played big on the news. We want to know every detail. The word rape at one time wasn't used in newspapers. Now we want to know the name of the rape victims, and see their photograph, and watch them sitting side by side on a sofa with their protective parents, and asked that most futile of all interviewer questions, "How did you feel?"We don't need no stinking helmets.

I had a free-range childhood. So did most kids who grew up before about the Vietnam era. Marijuana was unheard of in high school and even college. You felt safe when you left the house. At 16 I had a newspaper job requiring me to drive home at 2 a.m. No problem. In grade school my mom gave me an "emergency dime" to carry if I ever needed to call home. I still have it. Now parent get antsy if they don't hear from a kid for more than a few hours.

Kids sometimes do foolish things. Or bad things happen to them. Those are not the inevitable result of leaving the house. When he was still legally a juvenile, the son of a friend of mine was arrested for shooting his .22 at the trailers of semis on the interstate. He spent a month in custody. Today he is the mayor of a medium-sized city. It wasn't been that many years ago. What does that prove?

Maybe it shows that kids can do damn fool things, and they should pay the price, but you let them you believe they are better than that. It's too easy these days for a "good kid" to become a "bad kid" after one mistake. Sometimes early trouble can damage a lifetime. Surveys have expressed alarm at the numbers of primary school boys on behavioral drugs like Ritalin. A sociologist writing for the Spectator said their treatable condition is Being Boys. In a school system run by women, girls are rewarded for being more docile. Boys Will Be Boys, but when they are, they're diagnosed as troublemakers. They can start believing it, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I am reminded of the 1938 movie "Angels With Dirty Faces," about two kids who grew up as best friends in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan. One of them (James Cagney) became a killer who ended up on Death Row. The other one (Pat O'Brien) was the priest who walked the last mile with him. "All right, fellas," the priest said after his childhood pal had been executed, "let's go and say a prayer for a boy who couldn't run as fast as I could."

Published in 1957. Things would get worse.

So much is simply chance. You can't plan for bad luck. You can't pass laws against it. You can't be innoculated for it. You can't wear protective clothing. Forrest Gump inspired the bumper sticker, Shit happens. Mankind knew that before we developed speech.

I don't know what the answer is. I understand why parents are frightened. If your child seems strangely reluctant to go to school, it may be about more than a dislike of school. Kids know what's going on, and may have reason to fear. It's worse these day than just getting shaken down for your lunch money.

It is no coincidence that a graph charting the rise in perceived danger in American society would parallel one charting the rise in drug addiction--and the rise in laws and police action against drugs. Agents seize tons of drugs coming into America, we're told. For every pound they seize, how many pounds get in? The police can't handle it. It's not their fault. I once had a long talk with the chief of the Narcotics Bureau of a very big American city (not Chicago). "Everything we are doing," he said, "is a complete waste of time and money. When people start using drugs, sooner or later they will need to use drugs. You can't pass laws against that need."

Maybe there is something to the Libertarian notion of legalizing drugs. That would diminish the profit motive for cartels, the mob and pushers. If we imported drugs, we could supervise their distribution and sale, imposing conditions such as now apply to alcohol. That would also be a blow to criminal elements in the supplier nations. Fewer Americans would spend years or the rest of their lives as part of the world's largest prison population (by percentage). Would legalizing drugs encourage their use? Are more people alcoholics because booze can be purchased legally? Are the drug laws actually keeping anybody from using drugs today? If you are a crack user, and you want crack tonight, do you know where to buy it?

I don't know what the solution is. I really don't. What I do know is that something fundamental has disappeared from the American landscape, and that is the sight of girls and boys running around and playing. In 1957, there was a best-selling memoir about childhood titled, Where Did You Go? Out. What Did you Do? Nothing, by Robert Paul Smith. These days, a kid had better have an answer ready for that question.

¶

Every kid used to carry a Boy Scout knife. This is a wonderful video.

What she learned from "How to Do Nothing with Nobody
All Alone by Yourself," the sequel by Robert Paul Smith.

She allows her 9-year-old son to ride the New York subway by himself.

Tom O'Bedlam reads "Fern Hill," by Dylan Thomas

They learned to be free range from a movie

Google Reader Lite

2009-06-29T16:45:00Z

Google Reader's homepage has been updated and it features a small feed reader with three categories: "news", "sports" and "popular". The iframe points to this page and I think Google Reader should offer a customizable version, so you can embed it in your site.

Google already offers a cool AJAX Feed API that can be used to display the most recent posts from one or more feeds, but Google Reader's interface is more user-friendly and it lets you read the posts without leaving the page.

Things we said today

2009-06-29T08:14:05Z

Today I got a call from my sister about our other sister. When the phone rings from one family member to another, and it’s not birthday season, it’s always bad news. Our other sister, because that’s how we always called her, was dead. She was the adopted daughter of our father’s third marriage, and she was a very unhappy, angry person who the rest of us had a hard time liking, or even caring about.

At various times I’ve felt guilty about my attitude toward her, not wishing ill of someone who had such a hard time with life. But honestly, in the end she could be downright mean and nasty. Eventually I grew hardened and suspicious, resentful of her attempts to brush aside years of similar behavior with others of her siblings. I feel bad about her sad life, but that’s about all I can muster.

As this played out this afternoon, so did a quarrel between two friends on the network. The trigger, but not the root, of this was the demise of the Gillmor Gang some weeks ago. In the aftermath of that event, the realtime world of FriendFeed and to some extent Twitter seemed caught in an ugly spiral of what Mike Arrington calls mob behavior. I share Mike’s alarm at this wave of off-the-cuff vitriol, even as I continue to be at least partially blamed for the drama that swirled around our show.

I’ve tried to stay out of the controversy, other than to speak my mind during the attempt at talking through the incident in a restarted show. I even took my show’s archives down as a way of indicating how strongly I felt about the tone with which many people spoke about members of the cast and myself. I’ve enjoyed producing the show through its many incarnations and participants, and have felt for the weeks since then that something would have to change before we could return to our sessions. Today’s continued vitriol over Mike’s attempts to frame the seriousness of the issue don’t bode well.

I’m 60 years old and have always felt proud of what I’ve tried to do in my career as a journalist, filmmaker, producer, and whatever my role in the Gang could be called. I take my work seriously, and have always tried to take others’ seriously as well. Sometimes I am guilty of hyperbole and failed attempts at humor; I don’t suffer slights and insinuations with the best of grace, and stumble far more than those whose work I admire and attempt to match. I most often err on the side of silence, hoping to say nothing with as much or more impact as wading in.

We need to fix this problem, whether it’s called realtime or social media, or whatever. We need to recognize that words mean something, and those that are thrown casually or viciously carry the same force as weapons. As a community, we must begin to own that responsibility, to make it clear that disagreement can be expressed without name calling, that fighting for innovation and progress does not excuse ugliness and slander, that we live in a world where news travels fast and emotions faster. We need to own our words, and we need to help each other to understand when we go too far.

I can understand when people make mistakes, when their passion gets the better of them. But saying nothing while people heap scorn and ugliness on others needs to stop. We must learn to separate argument from personal attacks. No one is immune from this criticism. I have failed at this regularly, even as I pretty it up with humor and caustic silence. It’s easy to want an eye for an eye, but we have to start somewhere to break the cycle. If that means I need to say what I mean instead of waiting for others, so be it.

When I got off the call with my sister, I told her that even though I didn’t want to admit it, the bad news could have been a lot worse. I wished my other sister no ill will, but thank god it wasn’t any of the others. I have to live with that feeling about myself, that sometimes things go too far and there’s no turning back. If I’ve gone too far down that road with any of you, I apologize. Let’s try and work toward less of this ugliness, and failing that, figure out a way to share in a community of people who respect some sort of rules about discourse.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

The paradox of the middle of the market

2009-06-28T10:11:00Z

The middle of the market is the juicy part, where profit meets scale.

The paradox is that it's almost impossible to make a product or service for this segment, because they want the tried, the true and the boring.

A friend writes a blog and books for this market. They need his writing. He delivers a lot of value. And yet, it's going to take years (if ever) before he reaches them. That's because this market doesn't seek out new ideas, doesn't leave comments on blogs, doesn't spend a lot of time urging others to check out this new thing. He's spending all his focus on this market, and they're not repaying his focus with their attention.

The middle of the market is the home of Sinatra, Diamond, and Streisand. There's an endless list of others that would like to break in, but it rarely happens. The leading edge of the market is a lot smaller, but far easier to cater to, because those folks are looking and listening and talking. The middle will catch up, eventually, but that doesn't mean you have to bet on them.

In my post yesterday, I talked about the temptation to merely pander to the geeks. It's not that difficult to write a blog, for example, that repeatedly shows up on Digg or Reddit. The thing is, this audience is fickle and they don't often convert into paying customers or long-term fans. It's not that difficult to be haute couture, to be fashionable, cutting edge or fickle. What's difficult is figuring out how to make it pay.

I'm not talking about compromising or dumbing down your product. A very hot hot sauce is remarkable. A sort of hot one is boring, and no one, not even the geeks will talk about it. I'm talking about designing products that are simultaneously remarkable and palatable to people in the middle of the market.

The middle of the market is a paradox because of the inherent contradiction between the ease of reaching the nerds and the geeks and the need to reach the middle. The solution, if there is one, is to enter a market to the enthusiastic cheers of those in search of the new, but to build a product/service that appeals to those in the middle. After the initial wave of enthusiasm, you hunker down and ignore those that first embraced you, obsessing instead on the needs and networks of the middle. It's a difficult balancing act, but it's the only one that works.

Ultimately, you end up disappointing the hard core that first found you, but because of their initial enthusiasm (and more important, because you designed your work for the masses in the first place), your product crosses the chasm and reaches a larger group. The formula starts with a service or product that's purple enough to spread, but not so hyper-fashionable that it merely entertains the insiders.

Amen to that, brother

2009-06-28T02:47:06Z

My esteemed ~~competitor~~ colleague, Nick Bradbury, has put up an interesting post on the importance of doing your own tech support:

If you’ve never supported your own software, spending just one day doing tech support will be an eye-opening – not to mention humbling - experience. You’ll have to keep your ego in check, because most people who contact tech support do so because they’re having problems with your software, some of whom will use colorful language to describe the annoyances they’re running into.
…
You also need to hear an unfiltered view of what people want your software to do for them. If you rely solely on your tech support team to tell you the features that customers want, chances are you’ll develop those features without really knowing why people want them.

And while I totally agree with this, he fails to mention one critically important thing: you have to use the software yourself as well.

But these are two sides of the same coin (and I know he knows this). The best, indeed probably the only way, to really find out where your software has problems, where it needs improving (and yes, also where it does well) is to actually use it. You need to see how it handles in the field, either by using it yourself ^[1] or via feedback from people who are using it themselves. Sounds obvious, doesn’t it, yet it’s amazing how many layers exist between developers and customers at most companies because they insist on playing Chinese Whispers through an army of tech support people, sales droids, managers, their managers, their managers’ managers, to the point where the people actually building the software have no contact whatsoever with the people who use it. Not exactly a recipe for first-class software.

Years ago, I used to work at a company that wrote newspaper publishing software and one day, they arranged for all the devs to go on a tour of one of the major newspapers here in Melbourne that used our software. It was quite a buzz for us to see floors of journalists and editors all using stuff that we had written in their day-to-day work, and I’m sure it was kinda interesting for them to meet us (we only copped a minimal amount of abuse ).

And for the same reason, I don’t mind doing tech support for Awasu either, since I get to see how all you people are using Awasu, which not only gives me an idea of what features and improvements are needed, but also that it’s being used at all The only reason software exists, the only reason it gets written at all, is to provide a service, to do something useful, so to see people using Awasu to help them get their jobs done is gratifying indeed. I’ve always said that a sign of really powerful, well-designed software is that people use it in ways that it was never originally intended for, and so being able to help people like kevotheclone when he comes to me saying “I’ve thought of another weird-ass way of using Awasu, do you think it’s possible?” is pretty cool as well

But getting completely OT now, reading Nick’s linked-to post reminded me of how similar our backgrounds are. We both used to cartoon in our younger days (although it sounds like he was a lot more serious about it than I ever was), we both play music (he plays piano, I play sax), I do Aikido, his son and brother both do karate so he may well do it as well. Clearly it was our destiny to write feed readers

And of course, we are both programmers, although I do C++ while he does (sniff) Delphi Nevertheless, I’d still buy him a beer ^[2] if he ever came to Oz. Still, while we probably don’t look alike, if we were twins I would bet good money on me being the evil one…

^[1] And being the developer has the advantage that if there’s a feature I need, I can just add it in myself. Very OSS
^[2] The highest compliment you can pay someone in Australia. No, really!

If You Want to Write Useful Software, You Have to Do Tech Support

2009-06-27T23:54:15Z

Before I fell into the world of shareware, I worked in the bowels of corporate America developing client-server applications. And I hated it.

Perhaps the thing I hated the most was that I rarely talked with the people who ended up using my software. I was given a list of requirements, told what was expected, and that was it. I never found out whether my work met the needs of those using it, never got to ask them how I could improve it, never knew if my software was a blessing or a burden to them.

Apparently that was smart business, because the companies I worked for charged their clients an obscene amount for my work. But it was a lousy way to write software. The whole point of writing software is to create something useful – to create something that, even if in a small way, makes someone’s life better. And how can you know whether you’re doing that if you don’t talk with the people who use your applications?

I broke out of corporate development by getting lucky with HomeSite, which I never expected to become as successful as it was. Looking back, it’s clear that its success wasn’t because it was a “killer application” (it wasn’t), but because I opened the floodgates and directly communicated with my customers. HomeSite wasn’t a very polished application (honestly, the UI is hard for me to look at now), but by talking with customers I ensured that it met their needs, which is the best any developer can hope for.

It seems so obvious: if you want to develop software that’s useful to people, you’ve got to talk with them. But too many developers take the anti-social approach and consider customer support to be beneath their status. Besides, talking with customers would distract them from important code-slinging.

Look, I can understand that viewpoint, especially if you’re working on something that’s very popular. You can’t create anything if you spend all your time doing support. But avoiding support completely is a big mistake.

If you've never supported your own software, spending just one day doing tech support will be an eye-opening – not to mention humbling - experience. You'll have to keep your ego in check, because most people who contact tech support do so because they're having problems with your software, some of whom will use colorful language to describe the annoyances they're running into.

But that's the stuff you need to hear. You need to hear it because you're the one who can solve those annoyances. You're the one who can get rid of all the things that prevent your software from being that kick-ass program that people recommend to their friends and co-workers.

You also need to hear an unfiltered view of what people want your software to do for them. If you rely solely on your tech support team to tell you the features that customers want, chances are you'll develop those features without really knowing why people want them.

And that's not meant as a criticism of your tech support team. When NewsGator was still doing tech support for FeedDemon, they did an excellent job of answering people's questions and forwarding feature requests to me. But I would still follow-up with customers to figure out exactly why a feature was necessary, and quite often it turned out I didn't really need to add a new feature, but instead needed to change how an existing one worked. A lot of feature requests were the result of people being annoyed with how an existing feature worked, and they wanted some way to get around it.

If you really want to write useful software, stop spending all your time keeping up with technology. Don't worry if your resume isn't filled with the latest buzzwords. Instead, invest your time in talking with your customers. They don't care what programming language you use - they only care whether your software meets their needs, and the best way to ensure that is by breaking out of your cone of silence and opening the lines of communication.

Non-Programmers Can Create an iPhone Newsreader App With TapLynx

2009-06-27T16:09:28Z

Have you ever wanted to create an iPhone app, but can't code your way out of a wet paper bag? Users of NewsGator's NetNewsWire iPhone news reader will have to wait a little longer for the next version of that application because its creator, Brent Simmons, has been busy working on a new iPhone framework called TapLynx. The goal of TapLynx is to help users generate topic-focused media applications for the iPhone without any programming required. The first application, created by Simmons, has already been built for All Things Digital.

Sponsor

Fans of NetNewsWire who have been patiently waiting for an updated version shouldn't have to wait too much longer. The next generation of the NetNewsWire iPhone app, which promises to have added functionality like the ability to mark news items as unread and send articles to Instapaper, is said to be based on TapLynx.

According to NewsGator's Brent Simmons:

"The idea behind TapLynx is that you can take a collection of feeds and some artwork, make choices about colors and gradients and behavior (all in a configuration file you edit), then create an iPhone app. Without doing any programming.
But you can do programming if you want to -- use TapLynx as the base and add more features. (In fact, that's what I'm doing with NetNewsWire 2.0 for iPhone -- it's a custom app built on TapLynx.)"

Being able to rapidly develop customizable and unique iPhone apps with no need to learn Cocoa is great news to those of us who are interested in building such apps, but know very little about developing them. We are anxiously awaiting for TapLynx to make its way out of beta, but meanwhile you can sign up for the SDK here and the company will let us know when it becomes available. Be sure to follow @taplynx on Twitter.

Discuss