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I’m quite a big fan of Buzz, despite its many teething issues. Like most of what Google does, the technology is open and builds on or creates standards everybody can use. I found this article while reading about how it all works – if you like knowing how web applications work then you’ll probably find it interesting.

While Facebook, MySpace and Twitter all want to get everybody to communicate within a little closed off, monopolised area of the internet. Buzz is based on technologies you can read about and use for yourself – no Facebook Connect button required.

People say that social network sites are by their nature monopolistic: if people join the one that their friends use then there will always be just one or two major players in each country. Buzz is an attempt to do things differently though. If Buzz takes off (and the initial plans are followed through) then lots of different sites can be views on the same data in the same way that I can talk to anyone with an email address.

On the internet this has always been the right approach to technology. The web took down the closed gardens of Compuserve, MSN and AOL because it was open. Email is open and far more useful than AOL messaging was, or Facebook messaging is now. HTML5 will (hopefully) kill off Flash because you can use it without plugins and you can write it without paying Adobe for expensive software. Gordon – a Javascript Flash runtime is worth a look too, but it’s still interpreting a broken and closed technology.

Obviously Google isn’t being altruistic – if Buzz became popular and people still chose to use GMail as the client then they’d be fine with all the extra advertising – but by allowing anybody to use the technology they’re giving Buzz every chance of becoming the web’s social network.

I can’t believe it was nearly 6 months between blog posts. The flurry of activity that started this blog, and my iPhone development hobby, was ended pretty quickly when Google asked me to interview. I may blog about that at some point (I have plenty of notes), but it means asking for permission from the recruiters as I may have clicked through a Non-Disclosure Agreement without realising it.

Suffice to say, it took up about 4 months of my spare time thanks to a very drawn out interview (and re-interview) process. It ended badly in that I didn’t get a job, but other positives came from it too…

So I got an invite to try out Google Wave. It’s very reminiscent of earlier chat applications from when I first got an Internet connection – I’m thinking ICQ and PowWow.

The live chat thing is great and is the feature that most makes me nostalgic for the early chat clients. Seeing people type, make typos, correct themselves and rephrase what they’ve said is very engrossing. This is a novel experience (and I only have one contact at the moment, until my invites get to my friends) but seeing what people are writing as they write it means conversation can flow faster and you feel more involved. You know when people are typing and when the wave has their focus, so you know if you need to be paying attention or whether you can get on with something else for a few minutes. It’s a lot more immediate than just seeing “so-and-so is typing a message…”.

That said, it could be a nightmare to deal with lots of communication in Wave. I think having the option to enable this within GMail would be very useful – but not for every email conversation. I like the idea of publishing Waves to blogs and using them as the commenting mechanism – this was in one of the intro videos. The idea of a group of friends editing a holiday/weekend plan together sounds nightmarish, an etiquette needs to evolve or be enforced by the wave itself. I can’t see it replacing email entirely – email is far too well entrenched now, and it has a lot of advantages over Wave.

It seems like a more direct replacement for IM clients. Most of the time you’ll use it as a straight chat window, so maybe there should be an option to lock it down to that functionality. It would also be great for document collaboration but how then far is Google Docs from having that same functionality?

These are just some initial thoughts, it will be interesting to see how it changes and what ways it works with other applications. What would be crazy is if this became a proper paradigm in the way that email, IM or social networks did – it’s too complicated for most people, but maybe as time goes by it will seem more normal.

I found an interesting response to the Pirate Bay trial outcome on Next Left – a blog for the left-wing think tank, The Fabian Society. I agree with most of the points raised, especially with regards to the need for free (as in speech) content and the general criticisms of the copyright-industries for neglecting the out-dated copyright laws until it became too late to save the situation. However – the article praises Spotify as the future of music, making the claim that advertising supported streams are the ‘future’.

Getting music for free in exchange for viewing/hearing adverts will only really benefit the most popular acts surely? The pittance available to less popular stuff wouldn’t support anybody. That said – something has to give in this situation and it won’t be the fast-moving, innovative, smart, tech-literate internet generation that has become used to free (as in beer) content. Digital Rights Management has failed for music (even iTunes are allowed to sell MP3’s without DRM now). Prosecuting individual file-sharers risks further alienation of customers. Shutting down Napster, Oink, Pirate Bay and their like just acts as further incentive for ‘better’ technologies that make it harder to track the sharing and/or shut down the information sources.

They use more sophisticated DRM techniques for video content, but even there the battle cannot be won. As an example, see this post on a BBC blog from last Tuesday

DRM Insanity

This diagram from the post, shows the restrictions on recording and distributing HD TV, and it’s nuts. How can a technology whose primary purpose is to inconvenience people ever be accepted? It’s being used to prevent the BBC allowing HD recordings of HD content. The majority (if not all) of the BBC’s content should surely be free (in this case – as in speech, but in general – as in beer)? At least for those who live in the UK and pay the license fee.

Going back to the music – it’s hard to justify £10 for a CD of an album recorded 40 years ago – especially when similar products like DVD’s are available for fractions of that price. However, in some senses the music industry has an advantage over most of the movie/TV industry – their product can be used as ‘bait’ to sell tickets to live performances. Live performances are much more integral to the way music and comedy are sold, as well as being something that people perceive to have more intrinsic value. I have a feeling that this is the direction the music industry has to be moving in.

Development progress has been a little slow over the last couple of weeks due to a lack of free time. I’ll get back to the iPhone development this week hopefully. In the meantime I’ve got my hands on iPhone OS 3.0 – I spent the money on joining the developer program so I may as well do something with it. I give you a preview of the new features I’ve been able to try out so far.

First impressions – not all good

It’s quite laggy. The iPod app takes forever to load, switch between categories (podcasts to videos, for example). The same goes for the Messages app, which is the new name for SMS. Obviously this is beta software so I don’t expect the performance to be this bad for the stable release – in fact I’d be quite pissed off if it was.

Safari seems to be much less stable than it had been in the recent main releases. This is surprising as not much has changed on the surface. However, I’m aware that there are quite a lot of new features for web developers (access to the GPS sensor on the phone for example). Again – beta software – but it’s a step backwards from the big improvements in speed and stability that came through with the OS 2.0 patches.

O2 – who are the sole mobile network contracted to sell iPhones in the UK – have disabled MMS on iPhone tariffs. Obviously this made little difference until now, as the iPhone couldn’t do MMS, but why bother even disabling a feature that couldn’t be accessed? I doubt Apple will let the situation remain this way as the Summer release of new features approaches, but it’s still annoying.

Spotlight

Spotlight searches are very useful

Spotlight is the funky built-in search function on all Mac OS computers. It’s like Google Desktop Search on Windows, in that it provides really quick searching of all the files on the computer. This includes e-mail, web history, and the contents of standard stuff like Office files. Spotlight is a step-up from this in that it also lets you search menu options on running apps, as well as the application itself. If you’ve got a lot of applications installed it’s often quicker to just start typing the app’s name into the Spotlight box and start it that way.

The best thing about iPhone 3.0 is that Spotlight is now part of the iPhone OS. This provides built-in searching of pretty much everything on the phone – although I’ve noticed that SMS is not included in the search for some reason. I’m not entirely sure but, given how good the SDK is overall, third-party applications will probably be able to hook into this search facility. Once you get to 4 or 5 pages of apps installed on the phone, it will be quicker to just type an application name into Spotlight rather than hunt through pages of icons.

I think, really, the Spotlight function is the only standout-amazing new feature I’ve used so far. There are lots of good little tweaks – things like auto-filling forms in Safari, or switching off the annoying beeping every 2 minutes once you have an unread text. A lot of the features are currently out of reach, since they enable new capabilities in third-party applications – which will not be available from the App Store until the actual release of the software.

Copy and paste is a little awkward from within Safari

Cut, Copy and Paste

This is one of those things that everyone carps on about, but how much do you really use copy and paste on your phone? If you could attach a full-size keyboard via Bluetooth then this might be more useful, but then it would need to support keyboard shortcuts and the like. Anyway, it’s a nice feature to have and no doubt I’ll use it now it’s there.

My one gripe is that the whole double-tapping gesture doesn’t seem to be picked up very well. Safari is the worst offender, as it already uses double-tapping for zoom (a more precise gesture than ‘pinch’, since it automatically sizes the view to the paragraph width). To get copy and paste to trigger, I seemed to need a very slow tap-then-tap-and-hold. However, now that I have the knack for this, I can get it to trigger most of the time.

Things I’m looking forward to

It will be sweet to have a proper IM application running on the phone. I use Google Talk (through various different clients) for both work and home accounts so hopefully something will be released that deals with the Jabber protocol on multiple accounts – Meebo demoed their app during the OS 3.0 launch, and their website already does this, so that will do. This will be dealt with using the push notification features to tell you about new messages, which will be awesome for things like Facebook, Twitter and sport scores too.

2-player gaming. My girlfriend has an iPhone too, and she loves the simple puzzle games – of which there are many on the App Store. It will be wicked to be able to do live 2-player gaming between our phones.

Tethering. I recently took my MacBook down to London for a day working on-site with our customers – it was so frustrating to have a fully-functional internet connection on the iPhone but be unable to share it with the MacBook (this was on the train – we have a mobile broadband dongle to use on-site, but it’s always kept on-site). For occasional use, I wouldn’t mind paying as I use the feature. I don’t think I’d get enough use to justify paying extra money every month though.

Turn-by-turn GPS. Being able to get a Tom-Tom or Garmin app for the phone will also be really useful for drivers. I don’t even drive but I could imagine myself paying for something like this just for the coolness of plucking out my phone in someone else’s car to get directions. Hopefully, the rumours of Apple banning the apps from talking to you while you’re driving are just rumours.

Conclusions

Obviously as a developer I’m very excited about what these new features allow me to do. I also realise that this is the reason for the preview coming so far in advance of the release: it gives developers a chance to ready applications for launch day so that people will be eager to upgrade their software. I think some of the really exciting stuff as far as new features hasn’t even been revealed yet – but that’s because it will require the new hardware. Rumours indicate as many as 4 new iPod touch and iPhone models this summer (as well as a possible tablet/netbook device) – video recording, high-quality photos, improved graphics and higher 3G speeds are all touted as incoming features that would require new hardware.

Even without new hardware, these new software features will be really useful come launch day. They address a lot of long-standing criticisms while increasing the possibilities for third-party developers. I doubt Apple could have foreseen what a success the App Store would be – much the same as iTunes before it – but now that it is a success, they will really want to keep everyone using their stuff. That is exactly what these new features will do.

The new software lacks polish at the moment, which is understandable with 3 or 4 months until the main release. If we assume that the speed and stability will be the main focus of the development work between now and launch-day then this will be another great update for the iPhone.

The renovation of TouchWheel is on hold after some inspiring conversations with friends at the weekend. It’s tough to imagine how to make something which is essentially a joke about Apple (and specifically iPods), not look like an iPod…

The follow-up application is no less retarded in concept, but has a much more extensive feature list. Let’s think of it as an interesting social experiment. That’s how they described Big Brother when it started, and there are some parallels. Watch this space.

An hour or so after publishing my last post, I got the rejection letter from the App Store. Now I know how all the wannabe authors feel… or maybe not.

The rejection cited the use of a trademark image. I guess the question is: how can I make an input device designed around the iPod, look different to the iPod?

Another benefit of moving to Mac OS X has been the chance to learn how to write applications for my iPhone. Since getting my iPhone last July (I think?) I’ve been pretty much welded to the thing, it’s very convenient to have the Internets in your pocket!

While faffing around looking for Mac software I noticed that Apple give away an IDE capable of writing both native Mac apps and iPhone apps. It’s not exactly free to write iPhone apps, you have to pay 60 quid for the right to load them onto the actual phone and/or submit them to iTunes – but this didn’t really hinder my surge of enthusiasm. All in all, this is quite a good deal – it’s no wonder so many people have started writing apps for the iPhone.

I’ve now got a list of potential apps I could be working on, but decided to go with the most simple one first. If you head over to The Onion, you’ll find this video, which formed the basis of the idea. I also quite liked the idea of my first submission to the App Store being a mild piss-take of Apple.

I’ve translated it into my first app, Touch Wheel.

I’m pretty sure you can tell how it works by just by looking at it (the interface is so intuitive after all!) – you scroll through letters by sliding your finger around the wheel. Pressing the centre circle adds the letter to your message. The forward and back arrows add spaces or delete characters respectively. The up arrow switches between upper and lower case. When you’re done, pressing the Mail button puts your message into an email and transfers you over to the email app on the phone so you can send your masterpiece to the world!

Obviously this is all quite simple but it let me get my head round a lot of things in Objective-C and Cocoa Touch – I had no experience with either prior to this. As a Java programmer, a lot of the OO ideas are quite familiar but there are a few real pains – some are because I’m so accustomed to Java, others just seem deliberately broken. Examples of both:

• Pointers – these make no sense to me at the moment. In Java everything is a pointer, when an object is not referenced by any pointers then it’s gone and the memory it occupies is freed up. I’m starting to get to grips with the alloc/retain/(auto)release stuff but I’m still not completely clear on when to use/avoid pointers. Sometimes the compiler complains if I get it wrong, but I guess there must be times when you have the option? Am I safe to just use pointers all the time, making it a pseudo-Java language (with the added complexity of deliberately managing your own memory)?
• Strings. What a hassle! Making/concatenating strings is so painful. Why can’t they have ‘+’ work with Strings? Why do you need to start a constant string with @” instead of just “?

When I get some time I’ll make a start on my next app, which should be more complex, but I also have some ideas for the upgrade to Touch Wheel. This upgrade could happen in one of two ways: either Touch Wheel appears on iTunes and I can start work on the update, or it gets rejected (which, let’s face it, is more likely) and I have to add stuff to make it more useful. There is also the possibility it will get rejected for imitating a famous Apple device, in which case a more fundamental re-think will be required.

I’m a recent switcher to Mac OS X. It’s been quite a controversy among some of my friends; I think they see Apple computers as pretentious – but I’ll ignore these luddites for now and maybe talk about that another time. I’ve bought a 2.4 GHz aluminium MacBook with 4 GB RAM. Technical details are important to me. I am a geek. I really love my laptop, so let’s start with talking about things I like.

Time Machine – this is an amazing feature – I think it is the best thing I’ve found so far in Mac OS X. You connect a large USB drive to the laptop and it backs up everything on the laptop to that drive. Then, once an hour it saves down anything that changes. Backups are notoriously tedious (literally nobody does backups, they’re for wankers) and this solves the problem in two ways:

1. It’s automatic, you don’t have to do anything except plug the USB cable in when you put your laptop on the desk.
2. Using Time Machine is actually fun! The interface has to be seen: it’s stupid. When you choose to go into the time machine view for the folder, you can look back through all the backups taken for that folder. You can literally travel through time and retrieve anything that was in the folder during any of your old backups. Just browsing through the time dimension is fun, and the graphics that Mac OS uses to do this are so over the top, that I sit there clicking on the arrows just to see the smooth animations.

Aside: In the interests of fair reporting I should say I spent a few hours wrestling with my laptop just after writing this – Finder started crashing whenever I opened Time Machine. It turned out to be some bug with the display port – more details here.