Archive for the ‘Code’ Category
Daring Fireball: Universe Dented, Grass Underfoot
Universe Dented, Grass Underfoot
Thursday, 6 October 2011
After the WWDC keynote four months ago, I saw Steve, up close.
He looked old. Not old in a way that could be measured in years or even decades, but impossibly old. Not tired, but weary; not ill or unwell, but rather, somehow, ancient. But not his eyes. His eyes were young and bright, their weapons-grade intensity intact. His sweater was well-worn, his jeans frayed at the cuffs.
But the thing that struck me were his shoes, those famous gray New Balance 993s. They too were well-worn. But also this: fresh bright green grass stains all over the heels.
Those grass stains filled my mind with questions. How did he get them? When? They looked fresh, two, three days old, at the most. Apple keynote preparation is notoriously and unsurprisingly intense. But not so intense, those stains suggested, as to consume the entirety of Jobs’s days. There is no grass in Moscone West.
Surely, my mind raced, surely he has more than one pair of those shoes. He could afford to buy the factory that made them. Why wear this grass-stained pair for the keynote, a rare and immeasurably high-profile public appearance? My guess: he didn’t notice, didn’t care. One of Jobs’s many gifts was that he knew what to give a shit about. He knew how to focus and prioritize his time and attention. Grass stains on his sneakers didn’t make the cut.
Late last night, long hours after the news broke that he was gone, my thoughts returned to those grass stains on his shoes back in June. I realize only now why they caught my eye. Those grass stained sneakers were the product of limited time, well spent. And so the story I’ve told myself is this:
I like to think that in the run-up to his final keynote, Steve made time for a long, peaceful walk. Somewhere beautiful, where there are no footpaths and the grass grows thick. Hand-in-hand with his wife and family, the sun warm on their backs, smiles on their faces, love in their hearts, at peace with their fate.
Previous: Teardrop Skepticism
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I would always hesitate to quote John Gruber on opinion but this is beautiful, insightful and hopeful http://oranj.us/4u
Perka aims to punch-out physical punchcards with mobile app – via The Next Web
via thenextweb.com
Perka and similar alternative payments/loyalty startups always bring up a feeling of complexity because this space can be extremely challenging to get right. Trying to think through some factors that are crucial
- Geography which immediately implies the need for a sales force that needs to engage merchants across many diverse cities and markets.
- Which immediately makes scaling a factor of complexity
- Assuming you have a driven & creative sales force and an awesome loyalty product that somehow gains traction with some critical number of merchants in various industries, to make money you need to build into and integrate into the larger alternative payments ecosystem.
- Which means that at some point you have to deal with and integrate into financial institutions, merchant networks and the likes.
Towards dealing with and planning for this complexity, I would love to work for two types of companies in my future – alternative payment/loyalty companies and large scale computing companies. Both roles are towards preparing for complexity – one more engineering focused and the other more entrepreneurship focused. But both problems of architecture.
Why are we selling the iPhone 4S short so quickly?
Initial Reaction :Meh
Post-Twitter-Meh-Rant Reaction: This device and update may have more to it than meets the eye – though undeniably the immunity to the iPhone magic juice is growing.
- This time was different because the changes are as much in the software – ios5 as they are with hardware – the camera, processor, RAM, the new line up, the prices.
- Because Apple had previously announced iOS5 and iteratively put out the iOS5 betas, we already have taken for granted iMessage, the heavy twitter integration, reminders, and the 10s of other pretty significant updates to the OS. As in Loius CK’s rant, we so quickly take something for granted that we did not have a few minutes back.
- Apple is focused on usability – thats all they focus on sometimes to the extent that they will allow a pretty glaring hole in their products – remember iOS before copy&paste? – rather than put it out without making absolutely sure it has been implemented to perfection. I now place focus on this trust to assume that they have made sure to have gotten the Siri voice assistant feature down pat. Because if they have and if it works as advertised, this will be a monumental update that will eclipse anything they have done before because it might – ironically – make users talk into their phones again.
- Do not lose focus on the fact that they now have an iPhone competing with the lowest cost Android and WP7 phones – the free ones – and although the lowly 3GS cannot perhaps compete with the Android & WP7 devices in their price-band, do not also discount the aspirational buyer who can now own an Apple device and enter the Apple ecosystem that has been just out of reach for so long. There is now an iPhone for most of the price-bands.
At the very least, I don’t know any Apple naysayer who will dispute that irrespective of what they think of the iPhone 4S. My point is merely that there may be actual valid reasons to buy the iPhone 4S.
The Marketing machine that is Apple will sells millions of these and they do not need our support or any more fan-boism than they already have in rabid amounts. However, when some pretty significant feature updates make me go meh, I feel I need to re-watch this. I’ll leave you with it:
Let’s make the web faster – Google Code
Just found these gems on optimizing web content on Google Code.
Question from a recent discovery meeting: What are your views on the Flash vs HTML5 debate?
That question came up (as it often does) in a discovery meeting with the very talented UI Team lead of a client and partner who was trying to place me on the competency scale.
The problem with my answer was that I answered to his question when I should have re-framed it. I told him that Flash was definitely going to lose ground while a combination of more core web technologies was going to replace it. It might take a couple more years but it would happen.
Except that is definitely not the correct picture is it? The truth is that the web is more than the presentation layer and honestly the set of technologies that is loosely termed as HTML5 is just another presentation layer. There is this rabid and staunch stand taken by many web evangelists that insists that HTML5 is the way forward – except each expert’s definition of HTML5 is different and when you drill down to it, the whole debate is not even that important.
Here is what everybody needs to get – and call me a blind moron but remember me as the blind one who saw it first (or at least one of the first) – we will start building for user stories rather than for presentation layers. A new application will build 2-3 presentation layers with significant differences in features but built for the user story and for the platform.
How is this different from what is already happening? Facebook has the web interface and an iphone app and an Android app right? Right. Except I bet their UI team did not start thinking in terms of “web” vs “mobile” stories. The web came first as and still remains the primary interface – all experiences – mobile or otherwise lead back to it.
Towards this thinking, consider instead the Google+ app. Their mobile feature set is still very web centric but has a feature (hangout aka messenger) that is not present in its web UI – though the web UI has a comparable feature that is built with a sharp focus on the web experience. That is an illustration of thinking that does not start with one interface and then cascades it to other interfaces. It starts with features cleanly sliced and diced between the mobile story and the online story – and other stories going forward.
What this also implies is that its hardly important whether the technology is HTML5 or a native iOS/Android app or Flash or a command line interface. It may be all the above – whatever works best for the audience in question.
Developers/ Engineers – and I am one -will often start with a technology – either from the ideological or familiarity standpoint. But as should become evident, stop caring about it. Build for user stories and make your technology decisions based on the user story and who your user is -not the other way around.
Interfaces will arise, interfaces will fall away.
There is no interface that is permanent.
So why are you thinking for one?
The user on the other hand – is always there.
Whether behind the command line or behind an app,
both matter.
I need to think through these thoughts a little more, I know. I hope to nuance this more as I think through a little more.
XCode 4 & The broken Application Loader
I tried uploading an app to the App store from XCode 4’s Organizer and it would keep throwing up an IO error.
com.apple.transporter.util.StreamUtil.readBytes(Ljava/io/InputStream;)
Tried again and again to no avail. I suspected that it could be something to do with XCode 4 because the App loader was working fine a few days back. I hit up the issue on stackoverflow and looks like many people had faced this issue. Most had gotten the issue resolved by uninstalling XCode 4 and rolling back to 3.x.
I was too lazy to do that and decided to just roll back Application Loader from 1.4.1 to an older version. Downloaded 1.3 and installed it. Upload worked!!!!
Download Application Loader 1.3 from Apple here:
or
direct link:
http://itunesconnect.apple.com/apploader/ApplicationLoader_1.3.dmg
The mind of the coder
So the mindful coder discovered something himself.
- Furious coding and ideation helps stave off any self pity or the lows.
- But if I find myself low or thinking those thoughts that take you to dark places, coding just doesn’t seem to do it. I found out what helps today. Uninstalling and installing random things – especially on Linux. I went through Plone and mindTouch installations today and now am trying to fix an issue with a phproject deployment. It’s taking me a lot of time but that is helping. I feel much better 
A Prediction API? Why didn’t I know of this?
This sounds ridiculously interesting…and like it’s been around for some time. I had no idea. A prediction api?? I am looking forward to liking the bones after chewing it’s api-tastic flesh off this weekend
http://code.google.com/apis/predict/
