Category: Commentary

You know, sometimes the user interface is the easy bit. The user interface of when you’re using a piece of software is easy. The user interface of GETTING TO the the bit where you can use it every day is a lot harder. It’s got to be REALLY simple, the instructions (if there are any) have to be incredibly well written and there has to be no room for error.

So it’s got me thinking. It’s the HOW rather than the WHY.

Going to load up Interface Builder and have a wee play.

Rumour has it that Toy Story 3, as made by Disney, has been cancelled. That’s entirely not surprising now that Lasseter and Catmull are now the big fromages at Disney Animation. Who knows what’s going to happen now?

The Pixar/Disney deal is so reminiscent of the NeXT/Apple deal. There’s an acquisition and suddenly the company heads are all belonging to the company that was acquired! Of course Steve is getting better at it. NeXT was acquired for $400 million ($350 million of cash and stock, $50 million in paid off debt). This Pixar deal has ballooned to over 7 BILLION. He’s learned a bit, that Jobs bloke.

Anyway – back to Toy Story 3. It’s not clear to me whether TS3 has been actually canned or just going to be remade by the Pixar team. If the former then I guess the decision is made to not create a sequel for the sake of it. If the latter then I guess they just want their baby back.

Dragging this topic to business and, separately, software.

The idea of ephemeral businesses, most often short lived microbusinesses, is intriguing. A business opportunity that opens for a short while and the founders get in quick, make their buck and then get out. The company doesn’t fail – it just lives it’s life and expires gracefully – it’s role fully fulfilled. It’s not the usual way that we view businesses, but then these days what exactly does tradition have to do with business? An example was the enterprising chap who would automatically track XBox 360 deliveries and provide you with the info for a fee. Sure, he can repeat the experiment with the PS3 and with other devices but as supply begins to meet demand, the need for the tracker business expires.

On the software front, are there software products (other than an automatic XBox 360 tracker) which have a finite lifespan? As movies start to emulate/repackage/are replaced by video games, will we see the same phenomenon with software? Will there be a time when software just completes it’s life cycle? Is this when the next big thing comes along? Or is this when the need for the software dies? Or is this when the software has become “perfect”? Again, Guy Kawasaki has a theory that when your first product ships (thus becoming your cash cow), then you should immediately get started in creating your cowslayer. Cash is not going to roll in ad infinitum from your first product. You need to have a new product that will become the new cash cow for the company. And in assuming it’s role, your older software will be allowed to retire gracefully.

I’ve rambled a bit this evening, but it’s just thoughts crystallising. My friend Simon seemed somewhat interested in some of the ideas I had for the software by Infurious, mostly because they served to address some of the itches he would like to scratch.

Goodnight.

There was a post to the RubyCocoa mailing list about two weeks ago, talking about how to compile RubyCocoa for Universal usage. I noticed that one of the committers on the project added a configuration switch to do this about two days ago, so here is a combined installer for the latest versions of both Ruby and RubyCocoa (1.8.4 and 0.4.2 (+ extras)) for running on both PowerPC and Intel based Macs.

Please let me know if you run into any trouble using this package.

Download

I’ve put together a Universal (i.e. runs on both ppc and i386 architectures) binary version of ruby, intended for developers of Ruby apps who want to ensure that their applications run on both old and new Macs.

It’s only really going to be useful to those people who write ruby code which relies on something binary underneath–any of the bundles (shared libraries) that come with ruby, for example. On the other hand, it also just happens to be a distribution of the latest version of ruby (1.8.4), pre-compiled and ready to go. The current Mac OS X version is 1.8.2.

http://www.quayperformance.com/downloads/RubyUniversal.dmg

Google is offering a censored internet search service to China. This is certainly a compromise which has drawn Google a lot of flak because, frankly, it’s a sucky decision to have to make. But is this any difference to the censorship Google already applies in France and Germany (censoring porn and Nazi-related content). Some people think so. The fact that China does not have a democratically elected government seems to be the big difference. I think that’s clouding the issue.

Google is not being “evil” by complying with laws of national government. But isn’t it fashionable to target them as “bad” because they’re doing so well in business?

There’s some hubbub on the ‘net at the moment about how it is easy to use iWeb, part of iLife ’06, to create web sites, blog entries and podcasts/photocasts/videologs. There’s a little bit of complaint that the use of HTML/CSS isn’t completely perfect. Scott Stevenson says “I’m pretty impressed.“. Scott is a very mellow guy, he’s also a very talented web designer. He has some valid complaints so it’s not all one-sided, but overall it’s a very slick piece of software. To be honest it’s the first “user friendly WYSIWYG web page creator” I’ve seen since we had Claris HomePage, Symantec Visual Page and Adobe PageMill. FreeWay comes close but it’s a LOT more expensive. Granted it’s not perfect, granted it doesn’t produce the best and cleanest code but it’s certainly better than anything that has been in the past (and about a bazillion times better than Adobe GoLive).

I’m waiting for my copy of iLife ’06 to arrive any time now.

I’ve also been a fan of iWork for a while. I don’t need to create too many Keynote presentations, but I absolutely love writing in Pages. The fact that it now does calculations means that I can effectively use it for everything I do and retire InDesign for writing quotes and my CalcWidget for adding up numbers and doing the VAT. I used to write a lot and my first two books were written (and I mean written) in FrameMaker. Pages isn’t the same but it really has the same look and feel. My last book was formatted in Create by Stone Design. I’m pretty excited about the improvements. Would the calculations mean I didn’t need to have Excel or Mesa? i wonder!

I’m also waiting for my copy of iWork ’06 to arrive.

I spent a lot of time reading through methods of source code obfuscation today, particular for Ruby. With Objective-C, there is immediately one layer of obfuscation, as the code gets compiled to a binary format which is generally not human readable. Ruby, however, is plain text. This means that any commercial application developer (soon to be us) leaves all their intellectual property exposed to anyone who buys a license to use the application.

There are no obfuscators currently in existence for Ruby, or at least none that I can find that seem to really do anything effective. Zenspider is working on one which turns your ruby code into C code, and then you can compile the C — however, this is not yet available and will be a commercial application (the former concerns me, the latter only concerns me if it’s expensive ;-)).

I’ve also done a lot of reading about encryption and obfuscation in general. I think that Zenspider is definitely going about things in the right way. While translating Ruby to C is not trivial, it’s also not impossible. However, right now the most important thing is getting the app to the point where it can be released–I can worry about protecting it later.

Computers are simply way too hard.

I spent some time this evening helping a well educated adult get a driver for her printer. Nightmare. In the end I went to the website, downloaded the driver and sent it over instant messenger. Then was the fun of getting her to run it. Absolute nightmare.

Made me think “My god, Windows is crap.”

But really, Mac OS X is not different in this regard. Both operating systems include a slew of printer drivers but adding a printer driver is NOT as easy as it should be.

Mac OS 9 used to have a mechanism where, if you plugged a USB device in, it would ask you if you wanted to search on the Internet for drivers. Of course it never really worked, never found anything and that was probably due to poor communication between Apple and device manufacturers.

Isn’t it about time that a device included its drivers on a built-in Flash RAM chip? Or at least a mini-app that dialled home to download the appropriate drivers?

I’d bet that the privacy goons would be out in force bleating about how some printer manufacturer was using this to spy on them and whether they were using sanctioned cartridges. Woo woo!

I’ve been working on an application that involves using the RubyCocoa framework, and I was worried about the commercial reality of distributing the application. RubyCocoa is released under the LGPL, something I think is a bit open to interpretation. So, I got in touch with Fujimoto Hisa, who wrote RubyCocoa and administers the project. Hisa said his understanding of the LGPL means that we can distribute RubyCocoa along with our application without any worries. Yay!

It would suck to have to install a 3rd party library to run a commercial application. I’ve promised Hisa a free copy of our first app 😉

Let’s say you’re a software developer. You’re busting for a bit of independent software development action. What to build, you think. What great idea would put you on the map. I spent a bit of time this week talking to some software developers and I’m just drawing from the conversation. All of them are continuing with their efforts but I hope that they all think a little more carefully about where to go from here. I’m paraphrasing my conversations here.

Hmmm, how about a spreadsheet. A new spreadsheet unlike any other?
In a marketplace dominated by Excel, a powerhouse so influential it managed to stop Apple from releasing their own spreadsheet. And you’ve got competitors in the shape of Calc, Mesa, Flexisheet, OpenOffice, ThinkFree Office (and until recently AppleWorks). I could see some leverage if your new spreadsheet supported the OpenDocument format.

How about an email client?
What feature would you shout about? You’ve got competitors in the shape of Mailsmith, Thunderbird, Eudora, Entourage and half a dozen others not least Apple’s own Mail which is built into every Mac. I could see some leverage with a client that connects to MAPI-based servers. Exchange is still the big man on campus and Windows SysAdmins are terribly unwilling to turn on IMAP/POP services and none of them seem to know anything about how they could allow access to their own directory server. And I think there’s a lot of opportunity with RSS based email readers.

Well, how about a web browser….
You have got to be kidding….

This all discounts someone with a fabulous idea. An example being those Flock guys.