Why My Faith in HTML5 Has Been Reinstated ( Or How I Learned *again* to Love JavaScript )

Over the long weekend, I was lamenting over how many times I had to write the same routines in different languages… Objective-C, Java, PHP, etc… I realized that I have, and would have wasted tons of time writing native code, and how, really most of the functionality of the application can be handled with various features of HTML 5.  Originally I had been against this, but now that the iPhone has finally caught up and has a reasonable processor, I think that the HTML5 experience can be nearly as good as native.

The funny thing is that much of what is driving my decision is the desire to have my applications have data and interfaces that are available everywhere, mobile, web, desktop, etc… aka, the original promise of the web.  Using local caching, the JavaScript key/value store, and the database will help to allow me to provide a compelling disconnected use experience.  The code that I write will be useful across all of the platforms that I use.  The one caveat that I am making is that I need to focus on one browser, or approach, and for that WebKit based browsers seem to be the logical choice.

Now I realize that not all of my application concepts will be possible with HTML5 and JavaScript, however this recent thought experiment I realized that most of the features that I would have normally insisted needed to be done natively can be done with HTML5.  The biggest issue that I have run across is the 5 MB limit on database sizes in Mobile Safari.  I know it was there in iOS 3.x, I don’t think they have lifted this in the current OS.  The other issue is the forced UTF-16 encoding of characters.  While I understand this technically, it makes it difficult to store data larger than 2.5 MB on a device in the SQLite storage available to JavaScript.  The approach taken in desktop Safari, where you can ask the user to increase the available size if your database creation fails is a much better approach.

Another interesting pattern that I see emerging is that of utilizing HTML5 as the UI tier, and establishing the business logic and control structure behind a HTTP server that would expose additional native functionality to the HTML5 app.  The benefit here is that your local server implementation could match the remote server implementation, such that your client APIs could remain consistent.  This seems to me to be the best architecture for minimizing the work involved with porting solutions across platforms.  I absolutely love Cocoa and Objective-C, I enjoy the concepts behind the Android APIs, while despising Java’s syntax, and I think that .net is pretty cool as well, however when it comes to getting applications deployed to the maximum number of users in the leanest manner possible, I think it makes sense to leverage the web heavily up front, and then backfill the native implementations as necessary.

How to Fix Nexus One Killing a D-Link Router

The Awesomest Phone Ever

I had this problem… whenever I would walk into my house with my Nexus One, and it connected to the internet, my router would slowly die.  I would have to unplug the router from the power and plug it in again to fix it.  I think I’ve found the solution, at least for my DI-624 wireless – N router.

It turns out that there must be some problem with the Nexus One handling TKIP encryption, or at least with the way the D-Link DI-624 is sending it.  The fix for me was first to fix the router to channel 11.  This fixed some other issues with netgear equipment a while ago, secondly, and most importantly, force WPA2 encryption on your connection instead of auto or (WPA or WPA2).  You can try setting the encryption to AES only, but that didn’t work for me, it was only once I forced WPA2 that the issue went away.  I am running mixed B-G-N as well.  Now my Nexus One no longer kills the router.  I am not sure whether or not my PSP will work now on my router since I remember it not supporting WPA2 a while ago, but it may be enabled with the current firmware.  All of my other stuff can connect over WPA2 so it shouldn’t be a problem for me.  If you have some stuff that can’t use WPA2, then getting another router might be the best option.

The Corporate Disconnect : Millenials Against the World

Disclaimer, I am not a millennial, I am in that strange area between generation X and generation Y, being closer to the Y. What does that have to do with the topic, you ask? It puts me in a unique place to watch the struggle of ideas unfolding between the engineers coming into companies, and the engineers / businesspeople running corporations.  This is not to say that all current executives are outdated, but in many companies, they have failed to update their model of the world to match increasing numbers of their customers, and the incoming flock of engineers.

The fundamental issue is that people who have had success in the past have a hard time considering that what gave them the success in the first place is not likely to continue producing success.  As an example, existing business processes for tracking hours is typically to have each individual estimate ( after the fact ) how many hours they have worked on a specific project on a given day.  The current method, as best as I can tell, is for engineers to estimate via points how much time it takes to perform a given programming task and do a post-mortem if the task takes more points.  But this daily reporting is eliminated, which is a better, more efficient process.  It is also one that revolves around trusting the engineer.

Another example is that it is not uncommon for developers working on a project to push out information about that project to the public via Twitter.  Even down to the level of code commits.  For the users of that product, they can choose to follow the official company feed or they can decide to follow their favorite engineers.  The concept of privacy has been diminished to a large degree in modern companies.  The benefit of this is that users become partners, not only in the debugging and troubleshooting process, but also in the development and planning phases.  You can find, for just about any startup, engineers posting what features they are thinking about and feedback from engaged consumers, either providing amplifications, their own feature suggestions, or strong negations about where the company should be spending its precious resources.  In such an environment, extreme secrecy is a huge liability.  Likewise, within corporations, keeping the status of the company, and what the customers are saying about the products from the engineers is disastrous to engineers’ morale, as well as harmful to the level of understanding of the executives as to what is happening within the company.  In more modern companies, the developers are treated like the partners of the product managers and the executives.

I think most of the fallacy in this regard comes from the manufacturing metaphors that have dominated the majority of the corporate worlds’ view of software development.  When I look at the waterfall method, and some of the organizational structures around engineering departments, what I believe is being attempted is to reduce development to an assembly line with shift managers and the like.  This can’t really work for software engineering  for many obvious reasons, but probably the most obvious is that programmers, even self taught ones have more in common with lawyers than they do with assembly line workers.  Assembly line workers can highly optimize their tasks due to the extremely specific level of requirements, as well as the consistency in their tasks.  Developers, and the product people working with the developers, almost never have requirements detailed enough to complete the given task.  Similarly, developers have a wide latitude to perform tasks in different ways as tools, managerial practices and or technology change, which is nearly daily at this point.  While most manufacturing systems change once every 20 years or so, a particular manufacturing worker can master their skills and have that be applicable for their entire career.

Attorneys are typically highly specialized, and operate with a widely varying set of rules, like software engineers, they need to parse and execute on sets of specifications ( laws ) to the benefit of the person contracting or paying them.  Their interpretation of a given law may not always be standard, but if it achieves the intended goal, then they are considered successful.  This interpretation in law as in software engineering is more of an art than a science.  This variability in going about the job from day to day creates odd management challenges that are being exacerbated for software engineering management as the millennials come into the workforce.  To a large degree, having fewer, more productive, empowered engineers is obviating the need for traditional engineering management.  Of course someone needs to be accountable, but if you have small groups of developers, the group can be accountable for a specific feature.  Small groups of engineers make it easier for them to triage why something went wrong and prevent it from happening again.  Failure is part of the software development process, but it doesn’t have to be a destructive part.

Millennials, and their immediate predecessors appear to be very comfortable with dealing with this sort of environment, they do not seem to need clear guidelines or even a clear goal.  Many software projects that utilized the “agile” philosophy, which even itself is becoming dated, typically manage the process with smaller tasks that everyone in a company seem to be involved in creating.  The new crop of engineers seem to be more comfortable with the self-taught, with it being more about what you can show than what you have done.  Resume’s appear to be losing their value relative to a solid portfolio of open source work and products.  My advice to people in high-school and college about to enter the work force is to work on a portfolio of applications first, or contribute to some open source projects, even more than attempting to get an internship at some big company.  If they can make some money off their portfolio, all the better.  The teams appear to be more distributed, with wide acceptance that each individual is working on their own business ideas not related directly to the company’s goals, or product portfolio.

All of these things fly in the face of the traditional command an control structure, however I believe that it will speed the pace of innovation, and improve the overall level of developers.  Smart companies will harness this multitasking and openness and provide avenues for their developers to contribute new products under a “labs” or a “demo” banner, even if they have nothing to do with the products that the company makes.  These companies will not mind as one of their “labs” projects earns more than their flagship product, and will provide the creator of that product a team and budget to see how far they can go.  That will rapidly become the only way to retain talent as the cost of starting a business online continues to drop.  Executives at these companies will treat their developers as peers in strategy as well as in the software development lifecycle.  It will become clear that this method of structuring a business is correct when not the one, but the many startups offering services begin to completely demolish the incumbents.  It is going to be an interesting ride… are you ready?

Mides SFTP / FTP Uploading Bug

A few days ago I submitted Mides 1.8.5 to the App Store with some cool features and fixes to a number of minor bugs.  I was happy when it was approved and then went live.  Unfortunately, there was a bug in the release for iPad users, a hidden dependency that was broken with the changes that I made to the file view, and as a consequence, file uploading was broken.  The workaround, to type the file name into the now blank rename / upload screen will work only if the file resides in the root path, any files in subpaths will upload a file called (null).

While there is a partial-workaround, and the fix was a two-line change to a single class, it is still what I consider to be a severe bug.  As soon as a customer let me know about it, I fixed it and submitted it to Apple, emailing wherever I could to try to get the fix deployed to the App Store quickly.  I am super grateful to my customers for letting me know right away that there was a bug in the update.

I guess what I really want to say is that as a one-man shop, especially one with a day-job, it is extremely difficult to move quickly.  The approval process makes it extremely painful to keep short release cycles and iterate as I like to, because there is a risk that you will have a severe bug.  On the web, and elsewhere, recovering from this is pretty easy, just push an update, boom everyone has it.  With the App Store I can’t, since the review process can take a while, and while you are waiting, your ratings and reviews get destroyed.  Very few people go back and update their one star reviews after you have fixed their problems, so your ratings are unrecoverable.

So I am going to slow down the cycle of releases,  and allow myself adequate time for rigorous regression testing.  My hope is that this should improve the quality of each release.  I think this is Apple’s intent and desire, and maybe they are right.  As for me, I have learned my lesson, this is shrink wrap, not web development, and I will think about it that way.  I’m sorry for anyone who is experiencing a hardship due to this bug, and I hope the fix is approved soon.

Why I Disagree With Gruber : AT&T’s Price Changes Suck

First, let me get the link to Gruber out of the way : good and bad regarding at&t data plans.  I read his post, I disagreed with AT&T’s price changes, and after reading it, I still disagree with the changes.  They are all bad.  First AT&T announces that they are upping their cancellation fee to $375 from $175, which was bad, but understandable given the percentage of their customers buying the iPhone.  Then they announce this garbage.  My biggest issue with it isn’t that they are charging for it, it is the way they did it.  They took a device that we all love for its simplicity and tied it to a maze of complicated data + text + voice plans.

Remember, when the first iPhone launched, there was just the iPhone plan, and the only choices that customers had to make was how much extra to pay for SMS, which sucked but at least it was understandable.  Now, trying to explain to regular people what will happen if they buy the iPhone HD is nearly impossible.  When I told my wife about it, not technical, she said, “but wait, it was supposed to be unlimited.”  It doesn’t matter if the cap is high, as soon as people know there is a cap, they will change their behavior.  They will start to think, maybe I should wait to look up this site until I get into Wi-Fi, or maybe I shouldn’t watch this YouTube video, or how many kilobytes per second is the streaming on this h.264 video, all way too complicated.

Going from bad to worse, we were on the verge of a new age for the internet with plentiful, high speed data everywhere.  We were going to start seeing a new class of always connected applications, able to provide real-time data.  Consumers are likely to start self-restricting their mobile data use unless they are on the few and far-between Wi-Fi hot spots.

There is a class of argument along the lines that AT&T was drowning with the amount of data its consumers were using and that no carrier could keep up with providing quality service for the prices they were charging. I can buy that, but the solution is simple, instead of complicating everything, increasing ETFs, and other stuff that is hard to understand for most people, just raise the price of the iPhone plan to $99.99 and give unlimited everything.

Contrast this to T-Mobile, who recently re-iterated that their unlimited was really unlimited.  One could argue that they have fewer customers and can afford to have more aggressive pricing.  That is true, however to the end user, unlimited is unlimited.  Unlimited is better than limited.  It is simple to understand.  I am very glad that I bought a Wi-Fi only iPad, or I’d feel like a sucker who got baited and switched after Steve Jobs got on stage and announced a “breakthrough” data plan for the iPad.  A 2 GB capped plan is not breakthrough, it is hobbled.  The iPad is designed to watch video, stream audio and in general consume the hell out of bandwidth intensive content.

Basically I’m glad I terminated my AT&T contract when I did.  My iPhone 3GS makes an awesome iPod, my iPad can take its place, I will be able to use my Nexus One for tethering when Froyo comes out if T-Mobile does what I expect and make it free.  AT&T’s crap makes the next generation iPhone look less attractive, since after all, the shine wears off on any new technical gadget, no matter how wonderful, but you are stuck with the crap contract.  T-Mobile also one-ups AT&T by offering attractive no-contract rates if you want to just buy your phone outright.  When the Nexus Two, or the dual-core Snapdragon HTC Scorpion or whatever comes out, I can just save up the money, buy the phone, slap in my SIM card and away I go, I don’t have to wait for 2 years.

The cell phone industry ought to be ashamed of itself for what it is doing.  Even with crappier cell service, which is getting better, T-Mobile is a far better carrier than AT&T.  At least they don’t bait-and-switch their customers and partners with half-truths and complicated one-off deals.  If this doesn’t make people look around for an alternative carrier to AT&T I don’t know what will.  You can get overpriced, horrible service, not be able to make calls, not be able to use the data you are paying for, not be able to get out of your contract for a fortune, and still have to pay large amounts each month for garbage service.  What happened to the model where the business didn’t take their customers for granted, where they actually did things to be better than their competition?  Why are we stuck in the US with carriers who just want to squeeze their customers for every penny while providing as little service as possible.  I don’t understand what is good about AT&T’s price changes, and I hope they don’t set a precedent for other carriers.  If so we may find ourselves, in this country, at the far back of the line as far as wireless connectivity goes.

The Battle Between Geeks and Non-Geeks

This weekend, on a bike ride, I was thinking through the Apple vs Google situation, as well as the paid vs non-paid, and this whole concept of open systems vs closed and I came to the conclusion that it is really just about geeks vs non-geeks.

For about the past 20 years or so, computer stuff, anything digital really, has been produced primarily by the geeks at Microsoft, and later by various open source geeks around the world.  It was reflecting their world view, that everyone ought to be able to tinker, and that they might want to.  This caused the severe amounts of confusion that people have had for years.

It would appear that now that consumers have a clear and viable choice in Apple and the iPhone that they are choosing, in droves, really, the closed app store based system.  It would appear that consumers would prefer an app store to the open web, an individual coherent vision to multiple pieces of different developer’s visions of the optimal way to do x.  As Apple likes to put it, they want an appliance, in which applications are just another type of content, and all methods of doing anything are consistent.

I would say that consumers have chosen that, but not because Apple always provides a superior method, or that they like being closed an limited,  I would say that it is because Us, as geeks, have not done a good job of providing clear and usable alternatives.  For developers and geeks, configuration and making tons of choices are just table stakes for getting our devices and software working exactly the way we want them to work.  We have a difficult time creating things that violate the ability to choose a different way.  Part of that is that most of us never have the hubris to think that we can decide for others how to do a given thing, or which thing to choose.  But that is exactly what makes Apple more powerful than Google to the consumer.  Google is catching on, but in a way, at the same time they just don’t get it.

I, personally, understand and prefer many choices.  I like Mac OS X and Linux, particularly because there are so many different ways to set things up, the 3rd party developer community, around the Mac especially, have done an amazing job of filling in the usability gaps that Apple has left.  Should users choose these productivity enhancers, Apple has wisely seen fit to let the 3rd party devs keep doing their thing.  The problem with Android, and the internet in general is that most people are not like us.  They don’t want to seek out and try 5 different text editors and window managers, and text expanding solutions before finding the right one.  They want to just use it most of the time, and they would prefer if the base implementation didn’t suck.

Geeks, and Google, we would prefer to just let the base interfaces and systems suck, since our partners are either going to replace them, or augment them.  That is exactly what shouldn’t happen.  Technical solutions should be like European Socialism… The government provides a generally acceptable set of services that everyone pays for, but it is possible to get better solutions.  This provides something of a floor for service providers.  Likewise, if you are developing a music solution for example, provide a playback solution that works with it first, then give the ability to plug into other services if the user prefers.  That way, they aren’t left hanging initially.

Where I get frustrated with Apple, and where I continue to choose Google’s services, even they are less usable, are that they do not give me the latter solution.  They provide a kick-ass initial implementation, but when I want to go and replace or augment it, particularly around the iPhone ecosystem, there are no options, in fact, they go out of the way to defeat any other option.  If I wanted to use Apple’s music purchasing service, but I didn’t want to use the iTunes application, I am SOL.  Apple feels that they make the best music playback solution as well as the best service.  For some they may, but for me, I would much rather use AMAROK or something else to manage my music, inferior or no.  If I chose the other way, I might want to use Amazon’s MP3 service for buying, but iTunes for managing.  Apple should make that easy for me.

At some point, geeky companies like Google, and to their credit, they are starting to, need to create good baseline solutions that run up to, but stop short of competing with other products and services that are auxiliary to their primary product.  Apple needs to accept that people may occasionally choose to do their own thing and allow them to.

I do not buy the assertion that in order to provide a cohesive solution you have to block all others.  I feel that a system can be aesthetically pleasing and useful, as well as permissive.  Karmic Koala I think gets really close to being there, but there are still too many places that I can get into with the OS where regular users would go WTF?!!?

This is why I am continually working on a new OS that as an ambition would combine the completeness and ease of use of the Mac OS, but honor the internet, as well as user choice.  They are not mutually exclusive, and the only way to prove it is to build something that shows it.  It is a huge amount of work, which is why the only way to do it is open source, but since you have to make clear choices for the user, at least in the initial state, some stuff just couldn’t be committed.

Basically, end-users won’t realize the cost of the choices they are making until they are gone.  In a balkanized, app-store-ized internet, choices will be limited, prices will be high, and satisfaction will be generally low.  That is where we are going, that is the choice that users are making because they can’t wrap their heads around the internet.  It is our fault as geeks, and we are the only ones who can fix it.  The average user is going to pick the shiniest and easiest widget.  There is no reason we can’t make that.

The Future of The Internet May Not be HTML5

A few days ago, Joe Hewitt wrote a Twitter tirade about how web development has been stifled by the glacial nature of innovation at the w3c which caused a lot of reactions across the web, even some from Google.  Joe Hewitt also quit developing for the iPhone because of the App Store’s policies.  I have been thinking for a while about this, and it is what makes me want to write a web browser.

I agree with Joe Hewitt about Cocoa, the framework is awesome, for someone who has been fighting browsers for control of the UI for years, it is like a breath of fresh air.  However, this is true for any native rendering solution.  It is part of what makes it hard for me to go back to developing web applications.  I like JavaScript, but HTML and CSS not so much.  Talking it over with friends, and thinking about it further, I think that HTML5 may be exactly the wrong direction for us to be taking the web in.  Before you click away, this is not some “Apple should allow flash” argument.  I am thinking about this on a deeper level, about the types of applications that we are making today on the web, and some of the issues we are bumping our heads against.

The web has been good at delivering applications with zero-install, as well as presenting formatted documents.  The latter is what HTML was designed for.  XHTML was created because HTML was overstepping its bounds.  Currently I believe, even though native developers tend to look down on web developers, that developing a web application is one of the single most difficult challenges for modern development.  There are multiple languages that one needs to master, each with a different metaphor, syntax, and implementation.  There is overlap between the languages.  There are latency issues, networking issues, lack of resources on the client, these are all incredibly difficult things to deal with in general even with native implementations, the problems with the web exacerbate these issues.

At the heart of the problem is that with native frameworks and systems, you expect for everything to be different as you move across platforms, business stakeholders have an appreciation that moving from a Windows app to a Mac app will be hard, and they will staff up and provide the appropriate resources to do that.  In truth, coding a cross-browser application is no easier, however the issue with web development is that it appears to be easier.  HTML looks like a ubiquitous rendering language, it appears as though it would work exactly the same across the board, but it doesn’t and it likely never will.  JavaScript appears to be the same language across the browsers, but nothing could be further from the truth, it performs, and behaves differently in each.  CSS seems like it would be identical since all browsers comprehend the same syntax, but the same style can appear vastly different across the browsers, and in some not appear at all.

That is the current situation, and we are pressing further into the problem instead of dealing with it.  My opinion is that HTML should be present in browsers as a legacy rendering system.  What I would like to see is a raw vector based rendering engine, similar to the canvas tag, as the browser view that will give me, as the remote agent, the size of the window and the capabilities of the browser, such as audio, OpenGL, Sound, DirectX, etc…  It should also tell me what the origin of the screen is, UL, UR, LL, LR so that I can give the correct rendering directives.  It should send me a list of the languages that are supported, or are enabled by the user, binary, javascript, ruby, python, etc…  Then the browser should progressively download the code and execute it as it receives complete instructions.  The binary stuff could be jitted using LLVM + an appropriate front end, and cached.  The memory addresses could be sandboxed and virtualized.  The user could set heap sizes for the amount of memory that the applications were allowed to use.  Google’s native client is a step in this direction, but it doesn’t go far enough.  Scripting language code could be executed pretty much as it is.  This would allow the frameworks to control everything about the experience, as opposed to the browsers.  Innovation could happen overnight, and browsers would be more responsible for enforcing security policies than rendering.

The benefits of this approach, full on applications could be developed as one stack and would appear on the client as the developer wished.  The performance would be insane, the execution environment would be simplified such that we could develop an adequate sandbox.  Authentication would be up to the developer and would be native, many of the security issues would go away.  One could code their application as code + data to render as pages easily.

What are the issues with this approach, no one has managed to build an adequate sandbox, however as we have seen JavaScript + HTML isn’t really a great sandbox either, there are tons of exploits out there.  The delay in downloading the initial code, although with progressive execution, this should be mitigated.  The biggest issue is lack of crawlability.  This is where XHTML 2.0 comes in.  If your content is available as resources through a service, instead of crawling your app, your content could be crawled.  This would dramatically improve the value of search engines.  If you give an appropriate resource id, the engine could point the user to a URI that would render the content in your application instead of raw, or the crawler could be an application that shows your data in a slightly different format.

I think that native jitted code + data mixed together are likely our future, especially watching how the App Store is taking off with consumers.  Even they seem to be choosing native applications delivered over the internet over web apps.  I think that this is a primitive method of what I am describing, but the benefits to the end user and for the user experience are clear.

HP Buys Palm for 1.2 Billion

Yesterday it seems that HP bought Palm for 1.2 Billion dollars. I think it would be wise for HP to use Palm’s hardware instead of their own hardware, which has been less than awesome for quite a while. I would also not try to brand it iPaq. I think that HP may have paid too much for Palm, except that recently it seems that HP has been trying to design it’s own operating system for a few months now.

A friend suggested yesterday that Palm had bought Be a while back, but in reading further into it, it seems that BeOS is owned by a holding company called Access Co. At any rate, what I hope happens is that HP uses the webOS for some of their media devices.

It is interesting, to say the least, but I don’t know if HP operating Palm as anything other than Palm makes any sense. WebOS is interesting as well, but it really needs to track the chromium project more closely, maybe it is and I just don’t know, but much of the HTML 5 stuff doesn’t seem to be fleshed out really well.

Conflicted About App Store Policies

Last night I started down a train of thought that I wish I hadn’t. I started thinking about what the world would be like if Apple had been the dominant player, and Microsoft had faded away into semi-obscurity, if Linus hadn’t created Linux. What if the app store had come about years ago, and had become the primary method of reaching any significant number of users, with what other blogs are saying existing in their developer agreement.

What that future looked like was something that frightened and disgusted me in many ways. First and foremost, scripting languages, like Ruby, Python, Perl, and PHP would have been mostly prohibited on significant platforms, and thereby would have been relegated to mostly research oriented platforms. IE, no serious development of those languages would have taken place. Java would have been killed almost before it began, resulting in a much weaker web environment, as well as eliminating much of the boom that accompanied the web development land rush. Some very innovative companies would have had a much harder time achieving scale without the efforts of OSI around them, many of them would likely have never come to full bloom. Companies like Google and Amazon would have had to first develop their own operating systems free of Apple patent infringement, and free of the app store.

Much of the above is an argument for no software patents, which I generally agree with, but I think that isn’t where we should focus our attention. The main issue is that basically the fundamental structure that we all take for granted came about because there was always a viable alternative, that was open, and that the distribution of software was never limited or conflicted. Microsoft may have been many things, most of them negative, but one thing it got right was realizing that an open and free developer community is critical to the growth and improvement of the art. It will sometimes cause issues, and produce hideous products, but it is not the responsibility of platform companies to protect users from developers. Rather it is to assist in the developer-consumer conversation, especially as regards features and capabilities of the solutions being developed for them.

I actually hate Flash, I think it is outmoded and needs to go away, that being said, I can, and should be able to choose to develop solutions for my customers in whatever language or framework meets their needs. That choice needs to be made by the developer and the consumer of what that developer produces.

Apple has every right in the world to prevent developers and consumers from doing whatever Apple decides is wrong on their platform. That is their choice. Apple’s scale and access to customers, however is forcing am uncomfortable choice on their developer base. It is a choice that will itself go away if developers don’t do something about it now. It is the choice to either develop the way Apple wants, the solutions that Apple wants for it’s customers to have, or get off the platform and develop somewhere else. If developers don’t nurture alternative platforms, that ultimatum will become, either develop the apple way or don’t develop.

For those who think this is far fetched, Apple is poised to pass Microsoft in market cap, and probably has one of the strongest brands in history right now. They are almost the only game in mobile, with Android and Blackberry chasing, Palm, obliterated, and Microsoft marginalized. Mobile is every bit as important as desktop, in some ways more so.

My application, Mides, is actually being caught as collateral damage in this apparent developer agreement mess. It was my hope to create an environment in which developers could create and and test their web products using the scripting environment of their choice, be it ruby, php, or python. Apple had prohibited this sort of thing, by my interpretation, basically from jump, deciding that it was a feature that users of it’s products would never be able to have. That may have been an inadvertent choice, but it speaks to the types of use cases they have in mind for their devices, any uses that someone can come up with, even if there is a market for it, are prohibited. The end user volume that Apple has seems to say hay the end user likes this model, however I would argue that they don’t know what they are missing yet.

What does this amount to for me? Well, I am not going to make any overarching claims about developing for the Mac/iPhone platform, and I am not going to claim that I am going to stop using Apple products, they really are amazing products, but what I am going to do is vote with the only two voices I have, my money and my development efforts. I don’t like the way this app store pattern is going. I want a future where kids have access to modify and do crazy things with the devices and software that they use. I want for them, and for myself, to think differently, and try things that don’t work, or cause problems, because in the end, that is how humans learn. To have someone else decide for me what is safe, or what is cool, or how I should do what I do is the very anthesis of what I believe in. Designing amazing user experiences is one thing, dictating how I interact with the world through my computer and its peripherals, is completely different. I feel that Apple has pushed across the line of consumer advocacy, and has moved into something more sinister.

What I am going to do is to actively develop for other platforms, such as the web, Ubuntu, and Android, even though I am still angry with Google for banning me from their user group for no reason. The rationale behind my decision is that Google doesn’t control Android, anyone can fork it and do what they want. If I want to push out a beta, I can, if I find a bug I can push out a release in the morning and my users can have it in the afternoon. I am back in the loop with the conversation that my customers and I are having without having a disinterested intermediary in between. I will from now on, very carefully think about my consumption of Apple hardware, and their software and services, before buying them.

This line of thought completely knocked my Apple fanboy hat off, if Apple cares, and I hope they do, they will work to re-establish that childlike sense of wonder in me that I am developing for the best platform in the world, if not, it’s not a big deal, if I am alone in the way I feel, Apple has millions of developers and consumers, they don’t have to care about one, but I’m betting that I am not alone, and throwing all of our weight around is going to be a big deal to them. Apps make and break a platform, and by capriciously throwing away the developers of those apps, Apple is making a huge mistake.

Google Will Buy Palm

I hear a lot of prognostication about who will buy Palm now that they are officially up for grabs.  People are suggesting that HTC, Lenovo, or even Apple would be the most likely to buy them, however I don’t think any of them will get Palm.  I think that Google will get Palm for around 1 billion dollars, and here is why.

Primarily, the main reason is that Palm’s WebOS falls directly in line with Google’s philosophy of web first, native second.  That with the Google Native Client could make for a compelling addition to Android.  One could argue that Android is lacking only in UI, and WebOS has a UI second only to the iPhone.  Secondarily, buying Palm would give Google patent ammunition to use in assisting HTC in their legal battle with Apple, especially since it is Google’s Android OS that is causing the issue.

It doesn’t make sense for Apple to get Palm, even if they are in the bidding, because Google has shown in the past that it is willing to go way above a company’s valuation to snag them.  This makes just too much sense so it has to happen, that is my prediction, it is sort of hopeful because I like WebOS and Palm, and would like to see it continue, albeit in a more pure HTML 5 sense.