iPods, Touch Screens and the Future

With the release of the 2.0 software update for the Touch, Apple has made a mockery of every smartphone on the market as well as the DS and the PSP.

Short of an iPhone, it is quite simply the indispensable gadget to have on you at all times.

I have no Exchange servers to connect to and haven’t tried MobileMe. But I have been in the App Store. And boy, have been buying.

I’m a Crash Bandicoot fan from the dark old days of the PS1, so the first game I got was Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart Racing 3D. And it does not disappoint. The tilt controllers make it a compelling game, as well as a challenging one. And one you will strive to master. Just play it standing still as the tilt sensors are sensitive. 

iPint is hilarious. For a free app its brilliant. I’ve been generating laughs with it all weekend.

I installed DutchTab as well. Thought I’d get a chance to use it over the weekend, but it didn’t present itself. Calculating how to split the tab is difficult so I usually don’t bother, just leave an unusually large tip. This should change that.

However, not all the applications in App Store are iTouch compatible. GPS and Camera apps naturally will only work on an iPhone.

This makes the iPhone 3G a really compelling device to get.

There has been lots of discussion over on FriendFeed about how this changes the nature of personal computing ( see here, here and here for a selection). The basic idea is that it changes personal computing in a big way.

I’d also say that the idea of ubiquitous computing comes closer as well. With a device like the iPod Touch and the iPhone, we take computing power where ever we need it – it seamlessly integrates with our lives. We take the web with us as well, fulfilling the dream of constantly connected devices. Push email is not  a new idea – Blackberry owners have had it for years. But Apple had taken it to a whole new level. Using the touch screen, ur interactions with our devices become so much more natural and compelling. A keyboard and mouse reminds you of what you are using, a touch screen uses the human mediums of touch, feel and gestures to communicate.

This is where computing is going in the next few years. I prefer using my Touch for web browsing because of the touch screen – its feels more natural. Windows & will have touch screen built in, and Microsoft Surface is already capitalising on the naturalness of the touch screen to re-definite the way we interact with computers – and redefine computers themselves.

As science fiction writer William Gibson said:

The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet

Friendfeed Feature Request

Will someone please give me a way of associating two items together?? Would really help. Thanks.

PS. Don’t take me wrong, I love FF .

FriendFeed as a Service

I’m on holiday and just logged on to FriendFeed after a week away.

What I found was a load of Twitter comments that make no sense outside of their conversation context and two items of interest (Why Twitter is better than FriendFeed – which makes little sense and Internet-savvy voters shake up US presidential election which does).

The point being that on any particular day one’s  noise filter varies – in this case I wish to be rid of Twitters because I’m out of time (I’m being charged for WiFi – Net Neutrality for you!!).

Second, the interestingness ( yes, Yahoo I’m infringing on your patent) of the items is arbitrary. Thus what appeals to me one day may be the next based on my current circumstances ( this time I’m in a hurry and a summary would be best). In this second point, FF has done very well, giving Best Of filters for the Day, Week and Month ( through one could argue for the value of a Year filter). The Weekly best of gives me this item that springs to my attention:

Steve Rubel: “I am working on a post about the implication of Friendfeed, Mahalo and other human discovery engines on PR and journalism. Interested in your thoughts please share. ”

There’s  fascinating discussion in the comments. Its rather noticeable that items with lots of Likes and Comments appear in this filter.

Buts its my first point that needs to be addressed: I want to temporarily blog twitters, for example when I’m busy. Its noise control for when its needed.

But don’t get me wrong – I like the noise.

Online Aggregation - a la FriendFeed

If you read regularly, you’ve probably begun to wonder where i’ve been these past few weeks. I’m not blaming you.

Between FriendFeed and exams there aren’t enough hours in the day.

FreindFeed itself is great. Being able to aggregate so much data in one place is very useful. FF ( as FriendFeed is shortened to) supports 35 ( or more) services directly and more through the use of the RSS feed(s) that you can add.

Robert Scoble is the prime example of this. The sheer amount of online output the man generates makes you wonder if he ever sleeps.  Go on, click the link and admire this river of news, posts, tweets, videos and photos. Then take a look at how many friends the guys has- well over 10,000 people as friends ( people that either are subscribed to him or he subscribes to). FF has a Friend of a Friend feature that add some of his friends posts to your home page on FF. This gives you a tremendous amount of noise to wade through.

And combine this with all your other friends. This gives you a long, long river of news to read through.

However, FF is not a true social networking site. It aggregates data from a huge amount of sites. But your Friends are nothing more than people you’ve subscribed to for their feed. Its rather like saying that because you have a subscription to the NYT you are their friend and they’re yours.

To reinforce the point there is zero information about you save a picture - which suits me as you’ll notice I don’t have an About Me page ( I’m thinking about putting one up, though). And I’m dithering on what picture I should put up.

Jennifer Woodward Maderazo made the point that its very personal having all this information in one place. Possibly. It depends on what information you share. Robert Scoble and Thomas Hawk have no problem with this - they’re subscribed to practically every service available. I mean, its darn interesting to see what photos Thomas favourites on Flickr. I’m sure its possible to figure out his taste in photos and his political leanings from his content. Even how he likes Mac and  Microsoft solely for its Windows Media Centre.  But there is no real, personal  information being shared here.

On Jennifer’s second point about no real interaction - come on!! I comment more in FF than outside, often commenting as a post comes in, and as part of a conversation. I like a lot as well ( comments and likes are another way if discerning peoples taste - but no real information is there. See above). If there is anything to suggest its no otherwise the case, its that comments don’t follow items as they are ReShared or posted within FF. This inevitably leads to fragmented conversations and a reduction in interaction. Also blog and FF comments should be synced in some form that will lead to even more interaction.

And Jennifer’s last point about information overload is just plain wrong. We have fine grained control of what turns up in our feed. from hiding friends of friends completely to hiding on a per-friend-per-service basis ( you can also blanket hide a service entirely - so no Twitter tweets show up from any friend, ever).

The Flickr favourites feature I mentioned above is a compelling reason to join Flickr ( I’m with SmugMug and intend to stay - you’ll see my photos show up).

One thing that is surprising is that FF is slowing taking attention share away from Google Reader. Not just when it comes to commenting, but I post links that I find interesting. Steve Rubel, for example, tweets and posts links fairly often that point to interesting material - I share some. But those don’t show up in my Shared items to your right ( from Google Reader Shared items). I’m thinking of some way to integrate them together using the FF API.

Another reason is the Imaginary Friend feature. I currently only have one at the moment - MarsPhoenix. If that sounds familiar to you its that lander NASA just put on Mars’ north pole. Its got two blogs and a twitter feed. This Friend combines them into a one feed with posts from both blogs mixed in with the numerous tweet updates and makes it dead easy to follow via FF or RSS. These appear as fart of my feed on the FF homepage along with everything else, making it doubly useful.

FF is literally Google Reader gone wild (rather than Twitter). Its subscriptions based. And, one up on Google Reader, shares all of your online activity back to the community. Its not even Digg (I can’t remember the last time I logged in to Digg).

Many belive that Robert will be going on about another service in a few months time. But FF has the traction ( its many services and thus audiences that it serves) and the leverage (the huge number of adopters it has at the moment) to survive. It straddles the difference between a true, thoroughbred networking site like Twitter ( or Facebook, if you prefer) and the disconnected consumption of content of a RSS reader. Its perfectly situated to bridge the gap between all these disparate services.

Quote of the Day

Echoes’ outlines Microsoft’s biggest challenges: the inordinate amount of time they spend on developing products that are either a platform or a suite forces them to make too many compromises. One can’t blame the company whose DNA is Windows (Platform) & a Suite (Office.) This is a malady which makes them unable to move ahead and define the future.

-Om Malik

Normal posting resumes shortly.

Link of the Day

via Scott Rosenburg:

Pentagon’s Accounting Mess - Portfolio.com: Yet Another Federal Software Quagmire (cf. the IRS, the FBI, the FAA, etc.). An account of the Pentagon’s failure to upgrade its ancient mainframe-era accounting system; the tale unfolds in a building in Indianapolis the size of 28 football fields, and explains why the U.S. military cannot be audited. The Pentagon literally cannot tell you how much it has spent or what it has purchased. If you ran your family this way, they’d disown you.

Err, this is the 21st Century and this should not be too difficult to accomplish.

And they’re still using COBOL?? What can I say?

<humour> Solution? Call Microsoft </humour>

Subversion Source Control

This post has been bouncing around my head for sometime since finding the time to write has been a little hard.

The fact is that the whole Subversion vs Git vs TFS vs [insert preferred system here] debate can get to the point where its quasi-religious (as are numerous other tech debates - windows vs mac being one of the notable ones).

Now I, bad developer that I am, have only recently started using Subversion. The need to sync source code between my desktop and my laptop outgrew the copy/paste via Windows Home Server share approach.

The fact that Subversion is free is also a big deal maker ( compared to, say Team Foundation Server).

I have been using it on another free product, namely Netbeans 6.01 for my Java development. Its nothing major, only university projects. 

The fact is that Netbeans comes with Subversion and CVN support baked into the IDE. Additionally, Netbeans uses its own Local History feature to keep track of your files wether you’re using formal source control or not. Every time you build your project it makes a commit to your Local History. This means that one has both Local history for the small changes and Subversion for the big changes.

The fact is that having it baked into the IDE makes all the difference - it allows one to interact with the code in revisions directly. Let me explain. One can make line-by-line rollbacks from your previous versions wether you are using Local history or Subversion or both. Powerfully, the rollbacks count as changes to your code and are committed right back to the database.

(I plan to do a post on the value of a good IDE soon as well)

In the (Subversion) case above, the local copy is out of date (on the right) and the remote changes (on the left) are shown in blue. The changes were made on my laptop, committed and I’m comparing them against the desktop copy of the files.

By clicking on the blue arrow one can insert the changes into the local copy with out inserting all the changes. The same applies for replacements (in cases where the lines have been modified rather than outright replaced).

The green area in the local copy no longer exists and by clicking on the red cross one can delete the highlighted lines.

Local History works in exactly the same way.

This is a small example and one needs to actually use it to understand the power of the concept.

Now, the fact is that the vast majority of my coding gets done in Visual Studio. And Visual Studio , the TFS edition aside, does not support source control. Period.

However, VisualSVN actually has an Add-In for Visual Studio that brings this functionality into the IDE. The problem is  that the Add-In isn’t free. Its $49 per licence. Personal licenses are restricted to one per order ( but not corporate licenses) and open source projects qualify for free licenses. And, no, I haven’t yet decided whether to get a license.

I agree with Jeff Atwood that software such as Firefox should take the most popular Add-Ins and fold them in the main code base. Which gives rise to the question that if Source Control is so important and popular (is it for non-TFS Visual Studio users????), why doesn’t Microsoft add it in?

I mean its only Subversion. Surely Microsoft must have some pretty good selling points related to why TFS is, like, totally better than Subversion ( ). That takes care of the “They already have source control” pundits.

Source Control is simply good programming practice and if Microsoft is serious about attracting people to its platform (and the freely available express editions shows that they are somewhat serious), they should provide it.

Contrast Visual Studio to Netbeans and that’s enough said on the subject.

Now the easiest way to install Subversion is to head over to Jeff’s blog post about it. If you don’t subscribe to Jeff’s blog, i suggest that you do - its invaluable.

I went the VisualSVN server route which set everything up with the addition of  the ability to browse the server using a web browser (it does this by using Apache). To avoid Apache conflicting with Windows Home Server, its running on a Virtual Server virtual machine ( that image runs a few other odds and ends). Setting up Virtual Server on WHS is itself the subject of another blog post. It took me literally 2 minutes.

Before letting you go, Scott Hanselman has a great podcast on Subversion vs Git for Source Control and it comes highly recommended.

Vista Service Pack 1 - First Impression

Literally:

 

Windows Server Longhorn Business Edition??????

Seriously, what’s up ?????

Visual Studio Install Error 1935 (HRESULT: 0×80070BC9) Fix

As  I wrote here last week, getting Visual Studio 2008 installed was a bit of a problem for me on my main Desktop PC.

And I couldn’t find a fix anywhere. So since the installation was successful on my laptop ( they are both nearly identical systems) I set about trying to find some difference between them.

I came up with the fact that I’d had Visual Studio 2008 Visual Web Designer Express installed and had uninstalled it before my Visual Studio 2008 Pro install.

So in the finest tradition of Voodoo Troubleshooting I did the following:

1. Mounted  the Visual Studio Express Editions DVD image available from Microsoft here
2. Installed Visual C# Express ( it looks as if any edition will do)
3. Restarted
4. Uninstalled only Visual Studio C# Express (the runtime prerequisites will also uninstall)
5. Restarted
6. Installed Visual Studio 2008 Professional

I’m not quite sure why this works. I put forward the idea that it fixes the registry or the .Net Install ( see my earlier post for details).

Happy Coding !

Installing Visual Studio 2008

UPDATE: I found a fix. See here.

Right. Let get this straight. I’m running Vista Business with Visual Studio 2005 Standard installed (and All the extras - SQL Server etc).

The short version is that Visual Studio 2008  Professional refuses  to install itself. It installed .Net 3.5, Document Explorer 2008 and the Web Authoring Component and then quit at some point while installing Visual Studio itself.

Heres the error log:

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition - ENU: [2] ERROR:Error 1935.An error occurred during the installation of assembly ‘Microsoft.VC90.DebugCRT,version=”9.0.21022.8″,publicKeyToken= “1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b”,processorArchitecture=”x86″,type=”win32″‘. Please refer to Help and Support for more information. HRESULT: 0×80070BC9.

I’ve no idea what is going on. If you Google search  the Error Code you get this error for VS2005 (or SP1), .Net 2 or SQL Server.  Searching by HRESULT points to this MSDN Forum where the discussion is about a VS2008 Compile problem.

Now here’s the thing. It installs perfectly on my laptop (also running Vista Business with Visual Studio 2005 installed with all the bells and whistles). So the download ( and no, its a perfectly legal copy) is definitely not corrupted.

HELP!!!!!