Steve Hannah: This week

Just discovered this wonderful tool which uses Webkit for generating PDFs. Now generating a PDF from a Web app is just that much easier.

http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/wiki/Usage

I have an iPhone with a pretty good data plan through Rogers (6 gigs/mo for $30). No complaints. I generally use under 100 megs per month. I recently bought an iPad but didn’t want to spring for the 3G version because they are trying to make us spend an additional $35/mo for a separate data plan for that unit. My original hope was that I could tether from my iPhone to my iPad so that I could make use of my existing data plan. Well…. they thought of that and disabled tethering intentionally on the iPad. They want to squeeze that additional $35/mo out of us.

No worries, though. For now I’m happy to just use the iPad at home on WiFi.

A second scenario came up this past weekend. I was traveling in the states with friends and I need to have internet access at all times due to my online businesses so I looked into the options that Rogers has for me to be able to use my 3G in the US. For $30 you can get 10 megs!! That means that if I used 100 megs in 5 days (which is entirely likely) it would cost me $300 for 5 days. Get real!

My next idea was to see about getting a sim card from AT&T to use my iPhone on AT&T’s network while I was in the states. AT&T seems to be drinking the same cool-aid as Rogers, however because in order to get 3G with tethering support I needed to sign a 2 year contract at $60/mo with them. Not really worth it for 5 days.

So I walked into Best Buy to see if there were any other solutions available to me. There I discovered the flourishing pay-as-you-go market in the states (that is non-existent in Canada). I was able to buy a Virgin Mobile Hotspot for $150 that generates a WiFi network wherever I am that I can use to access the internet on all of my devices (my 3 friends and I were all able to work online while we travelled down the I5). All I had to do was buy a $20 access card for Virgin which gave me 300 megs of 3G data (more than we needed). And if I ran out I could have just paid another $20 for another 300 megs. If I’m ever traveling in the US now I can just throw $20 on my account and have full internet access wherever I go.

This was an awesome solution so I decided to see if we have anything comparable in Canada.

Lucky me! Rogers sells a MiFi device that is very similar to the Virgin one for only $249. The only thing is that they don’t have any form of pay-as-you go packages. Their cheapest package is $35/mo for 500 megs. Remember that I’m already getting 6 gigs on my iPhone for $30/mo. So for more around twice as much money, I can get less than 10% more usage (when I’m currently only using under 10% of my existing 6 gigs per month).

This is just greed. They offer no solution for me.

So I guess we’re out of luck in Canada. Guess again. A quick search on Google brings up an iPhone app called MyWi which will transform your iPhone in to a wifi hotspot. That way you can run your computer, your iPad, your iPhone, and whatever else you want off of your iPhone’s data package.

Of course Apple doesn’t want you to use this (so it’s not in the App store), and Rogers doesn’t want you to use this. They to milk you for everything you have. No thanks.

I’ve been playing around with iPhone and iPad web app development for the past week or so (I’m working up to building a native app, as there are benefits to playing both sides of the field here). Given my familiarity with jQuery, I felt inclined to try out the jQTouch framework to start with. After some successes and failures, I then decided to take Apple’s Dashcode development environment for a spin. Here are my initial impressions:

My adventures began by modifying the demo jQTouch application to do what I wanted. I was impressed by the capabilities of this framework out of the box. It looks good on both the iPhone and the iPad - and feels just like a native app. The user can add the page to their “home screen” to load it up just like a native app also. My first stumbling block came when I faced the iPhone’s “no multi-tasking” limitation. If the user spent some time browsing to a particular place in my app, then left the app for any reason (e.g. to take a call or check their email), then they would be sent back to the start screen of the app and lose where they were altogether. I tried a number of workarounds the involved things like local storage, session storage, cookies, sessions and the like, but all were a little klunky. I realize that this problem will be fixed in iPhone 4 with the advent of multi-tasking, but many iPhone’s don’t qualify for this upgrade so it was important to me to at least be able to retain state.

Rather than hack jQTouch to pieces to try to implement this functionality (believe me, I tried), I decided to see what else was on the web app development landscape. That led me to Dashcode.

So I started the project more-or-less from scratch using Dashcode. I was impressed most by the Dashcode interface - how it allows you to drag and drop GUI widgets, or code snippets. It really is a model to follow if you want to develop an IDE. With Dashcode, you are almost completely insulated from the HTML markup. Instead you work with the visual WYSIWYG pallettes or with the javascript API to update the model. Rendering is done using MVC, and the performance of the resulting app is noticeably (on my older iPhone 3G) snappier than with jQTouch..

Unfortunately, I ended up hitting the same wall as with jQTouch: saving and restoring application state is a bit of a bitch. It involves more than just recording “where you are” in the app, because of the way the “back” buttons are set up, you have to recreate the entire environment, history and all. This is more than I really wanted to do right now.

So at this point I had 2 nearly complete, and almost identical apps. One using jQTouch. The other using Dashcode.

But now that I had climbed the learning curve in both of these frameworks, I knew I could do better. So I started, more-or-less, from scratch with a new project using jQTouch that will incorporate all that I had learned. I’ll be releasing the app in a few weeks.

Here is a brief comparison of these two ways of building iPhone/iPad apps:

1. Dashcode produces an app that is a little snappier and a little more native (on the iPhone).
2. jQTouch seemed to allow me more flexibility since I have direct control over the markup. In addition the development cycle seemed to be a bit faster using jQTouch. (However I’m sure you could improve the dev time on Dashcode if you used jQuery and other productivity libraries on the javascript side of things… I had been trying to use its API directly).
3. Dashcode doesn’t seem to scale up to the iPad larger screen as easily as jQTouch. The extra flexibility in jQTouch with markup etc, makes me feel better equipped to customize the interface for the device.
4. Dashcode is a fantastic IDE.

The internet has no shortage of pundits complaining loudly about the iPad’s extensive use of DRM (digital rights management). They say that the device is “crippled” by DRM and that it is a giant step backward for the software freedom movement. I’ll concede that it is a step back for the free software movement (a movement that seems to push for the abolition of any form of intellectual property), but I don’t think that DRM is necessarily a bad thing, especially in this case.

Over the past 20 years we have seen technology improve to the point where almost anything of intellectual value (e.g. software, literature, music, movies, schematics, business processes, etc..) can be copied and shared freely. In addition we are now at the point where it is easier than ever to produce creative works. If you’re a writer you can start a blog with the click of a button, or publish e-books on the ‘net for download. If you’re a movie maker, you can shoot, edit and publish movies all for virtually free using common software and video distribution services like YouTube. I.e. the barriers to entry into the world of creative productions became very low. These two trends complement each other to some extent since the increased demand created by the free distribution of content is met by an increased supply of content due to the lowered production costs.

So analyzing the trend with our broad economic brush we might conclude that everything is fine and that we have just reached a new equilibrium with an unprecedentedly high demand for creative content which is nicely met by the record levels of supply. Unfortunately our purely economic metric is incomplete. The axes on our familiar economic model are marked “Price” and “Quantity” only, and a shift both the demand and supply curves to the right (i.e. increased quantities at lower prices) should indicate greater wealth for all. But what of quality? How does the quality of the content fare in this new utopian equilibrium where content is both “free” to consume and “cheap” to produce? Now that we are a little over a decade into this experiment (that arguably began with the advent of broad-band internet) I believe we are in a good position to see a trend along the quality line - and it does not look good.

Over the past 10 years we have turned to the internet for more and more of our entertainment. At the beginning the quality of content paled in comparison to competitive content through conventional sources. You could stream or download audio to your computer but the quality still wasn’t as good as CD and it was time-consuming and inconvenient to go through the hassle of trying to find music that was decent quality - and then ultimately burn it onto CD in a 2X CD recorder (it would take 40 minutes to burn a CD). You could get some news off the ‘net from various news sites but it wasn’t in an easy to read format, nor was it comprehensive. Video seemed a life-time behind the conventional media formats (e.g. DVD, satellite TV or cable … or even VHS for that matter). You could download a smattering of books, but there wasn’t an easy means of copying it to a portable device for reading - so it was a far inferior experience to the real thing. What the internet provided wonderfully at this time of birth and exploration was access to a wealth of amateur content. People were able to, for the first time, try their hand at publishing and share their thoughts and art with the world. And the world could take it or leave it. This period of the internet was an exciting time and didn’t present a threat yet to quality. If you really wanted to watch a good movie, you still needed to look outside the internet for it. Similarly you had to seek the professionals for quality news and editorials.

This baby that we called the internet, grew like a weed, however, and in a mere 10 years has improved to the point where everyone can become a publisher, and aggregators like Google have solved the problem of comprehensiveness that limited the early internet. Everybody can contribute a tiny piece of the puzzle and old faithful Google will assemble the pieces into a shallow approximation of the complete picture. This approximation amounts to a cartoon-y picture of the real picture where only the primary colors are every present (no shades, skin-tones, or mixtures that we expect in the real world). The fact that technology is now able to paint these 4 color portraits of our world and culture is a remarkable achievement. We can look at these 2-dimensional, computer aggregated cartoons and quite easily imagine their real world equivalents (we see that the people have only 3 fingers, but that’s OK, we’ll settle for that - it’s close enough). The insidious problem with the ease with which these cartoon representations of reality are produced is that now there is little to no demand for the art of producing photo-realistic paintings (or any style other than 4 colour cartoons), because the “free” cartoon puzzles that are assembled by the internet aggregators are “good enough” to satisfy 99% of the demand. And without demand, the price to produce a real painting that accurately represents the world it is meaning to portray goes through the roof - and ultimately the craft disappears into history despite the fact that it is a far superior product to the free cartoons that it was replaced with.

This analogy of the cartoon puzzle describes the state of creative works with ever increasing accuracy as time goes on. We have been corralled into consuming mediocre content on a regular basis because it is so easily accessible.

So how does all this relate to DRM? A big reason why the cartoon puzzles have become much cheaper to produce than photo-realistic paintings is because the transaction cost of obtaining the painting is higher by “legal” means (i.e. purchasing the painting legitimately) than it is by “illegal” means (i.e. copying from a friend or downloading from torrent). So even if there remains a market for quality paintings after it is flooded with cartoon puzzles, there is a logistical barrier to the distribution of it. Purchasing the painting legitimately currently involves having to go into a store and purchase some physical media on which the painting resides (e.g. a DVD, news paper, magazine, book, etc…). This is far more difficult that simply turning on torrent and downloading it - for free!. If we make a digital version of the painting available for sale, then it will soon be copied to torrent for distribution. And having to fill in credit card information on a web site and all kinds of personal information just to buy a $5 painting is still far more of a hassle than simply downloading the product on torrent - for free!. Only when the transaction cost of obtaining the painting legitimately is *lower* than that of downloading it from torrent, will there be reason for a customer to buy the painting.

Enter the iPad, a device that is now infamous in “free software” movements as a “crippled, trojan horse of DRM”. It provides two powerful remedies for our assailed painters:

1. The extensive use of DRM makes it difficult to illegally distribute the content on torrent once downloaded (this will help to increase the transaction costs of obtaining the paintings illegally).
2. The seamless integration with iTunes’ payment system makes it completely painless to purchase the paintings legitimately. One click and it’s yours in a format that is ever so elegant and pleasurable to consume. This significantly decreases the transaction cost of obtaining paintings legally.

After only the first couple of months of the iPad being on the market, the signs that this strategy is working are quite evident. Already “painters” like Time magazine, marvel comics, the new york times and more have cast their lots and started delivering high quality paintings, the likes of which have not been seen yet in the digital world. The promise of a digital market for paintings is once again compelling artists to pick up their brushes, dip them in the ink of their personal creativity, and cover the canvas with innovative and truly unique paintings. As patrons return to the market place, and the rank of artists continue to swell in this new platform we may be in for a new renaissance and a return to a world where quality and originality is king. If not, then we may doom ourselves to a prolonged dark age of cartoon puzzle art. I’m optimistic that we’ll choose the former, despite ourselves.

Just picked up an iPad today and am very impressed - not only by its potential for changing the world, but for its immediate utility. Here are just a few things that I notice after playing with it for 4 or 5 hours:

1. When reading, scrolling down a page is quite hard on the eyes (you get kind of car sick doing that too much). I notice this particularly because of the extensive use of side “sweeping” in iPad applications. E.g. the Comic book apps allow you to read a comic one page at a time, and then just flip the page to see the next cells. This is very easy on the eyes. The Financial Times app also makes use of side scrolling to read its news paper - less scrolling down - more sweeping across. This makes for a much more pleasent reading experience. Look to see much more of this style in the future as more devices like the iPad hit the market.

2. It looks like there’s nothing for sale yet in iBooks (probably a delay because we’re in Canada). However its extensive selection of free titles (generally classics that have passed their copyright expiration dates) makes for lots of choice still. I started to read “The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government” by Jefferson Davis (the president of the Southern Confederacy during the American Civil War) this afternoon to complement the a book I’m currently reading about Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet. The iBooks experience is almost as good as reading a real book. It makes it very easy to flip pages, change font size, and skip to any part of the book. I appreciate it’s little status message ever present at the bottom right corner indicating how many pages are left in the current chapter.

3. The Kindle App is also quite good, and currently provides a much larger selection of books to purchase. (iBooks appeared to have zero books available for sale). The only problem is that they make it damn hard to purchase any books. The Kindle app has a button to “Shop for books from the store”. But this just takes you to the amazon web site which is not optimized in any way for mobile devices or the iPad. After logging in, entering credit card info, and finally finishing the purchase, it downloaded a book on iPad software development into Kindle. They really need to build the purchase mechanism into the iPad to make it competitive with iBooks (which allows you to simply click on a book and purchase it on the spot - and be reading it in seconds).

4. Comics! The iPad is a savior for the fledgling comic industry. Reading comics on this thing feels very natural. I downloaded both the Marvel Comics app and the Transformers Comics app, which allow you to read comics in a rich, full-screen, environment. They offer some free comics and have others for sale. I purchased one issue of Transformers for $1.99 and it was as simple as one click and I’m reading it.

5. News papers are now multi-media. I downloaded the free Financial Times app which is a UK news paper. Reading it was much like reading a news paper, giving you the same ability to read the articles in columns and scan to the right to see other stories. They have embedded videos associated with some articles, and tapping on the video displays the high quality video right inside the window (as expected, but still really cool). I think we’re just hitting the tip of the iceberg in our exploration of how different media can be melded together to enhance the user experience.

6. HTML5 Support - After reading about iPad’s rich support for HTML 5 it occurs to me that Apple is doing the world a favour by taking a hard stand against browser extensions like Flash and Java (sad to say). The market share of the iPhone OS (estimated at over 318 million units between iphone, ipod, and ipad) is so big that Apple is able to single-handedly force us to endure a little pain for the greater good in the long run. HTML has been moving at a snails pace since it’s introduction and this has been a sort of chicken-and-egg problem, whereby developers don’t use any cutting edge features because of lack of browser support, and the standard hasn’t progressed very fast because there hasn’t been the demand for cutting-edge features from the development side. Apple is changing that with the powerful HTML 5 support in Safari for iPhone and iPad. Finally HTML/CSS/Javascript is at the point where you can create a full desktop application using open web standards. In addition this model for networked applications is much cleaner and safer than previous strategies (such as Java and Flash applets) because they truly run inside a sandbox where they cannot harm your computer.

The Apple war against browser extensions (Flash and Java applets) reminds me in some ways of the American civil war and the related end to slavery. Just as slavery was entrenched into the culture of the south to the point where they could not willingly let the practice go without experiencing major economic hardships, we, as computer users, have become dependent on proprietary browser plugins like flash to make up for features that ought to have been built into the browser to begin with. Just as it took a bloody war (or some southerners might say a Northern dictator) to force the issue on slavery, it takes a dictator from the South to force us into the future of computing for our own good, when we lacked the will to make the leap on our own.

I’m very excited to start developing HTML 5 applications, now that there is a reliable and stable platform to target: the iPad!

This article confirms my fears after noting that Apple hadn’t updated its downloads in over a month. The Apple Downloads section was my bread and butter for advertising new releases of my Mac software. Since apple discontinued its download section, my sales have taken a significant hit.

This section offered a compelling reason to develop Mac software. It provided an instant market place for my software and despite the mac market being smaller than the windows market, this connection point more than made up for this shortcoming. With its demise goes much of this advantage to the point where developing for Windows becomes much more attractive.

I have recently rediscovered the joy of programming in Java for desktop Applications. Mac OS X provides a perfect deployment system for Java applications since Java 1.6 comes standard, so you don’t have to worry about directing your users to download Java for your applications to work. What’s more, since your application is written in Java it can easily be adapted (and perhaps unchanged) to run on Windows and Linux. So what is so great about Java:

1. It is multi-threaded from the ground up.

Although threads can be used in many other programming languages, Java presents by far the cleanest and complete implementation I have ever come across. The language is built for threads at its very core with locking and monitor capability on any object.

2. Namespaces and packaging

Between Java’s rich namespace support and it’s native packaging JAR format Java allows you to build applications component by component with minimal hassle when it comes to putting the components together. Unlike interpreted languages like Ruby, Python, and PHP, you are able to build your sky-scraper of an application without worrying about the size of it affective the speed of it. When you’ve completed a library, you can package it up an wrap it in a bow and feel confident that this component will serve you well for many projects to come.

3. Garbage Collection

Most of the time, honestly, I don’t want to have to worry about mundane details like deleting objects that are no longer being used. Garbage collection does add a bit of overhead to an application, but it is well worth it 99% of the time.

4. Swing

Say what you will about Swing, but it still stands up as one of the most powerful and portable GUI toolkits available on any platform. With only a few lines of code you can have yourself a full-fledged application with the look and feel of the native operating system, and have it run on Mac, Windows, and Linux without the need for any form of recompiling. It gives you the building blocks that you need to have a rich application, and allows you to extend quite far also.

There have been some troubling trends over the past few years as they pertain to Java. New dynamic languages like Python and Ruby have gained a lot of attention at the expense of Java. Windows has stopped shipping with Java and the IPhone and IPad don’t support Java and likely never will. My website stats indicate that only about 85% of Windows user have Java installed - this is definitely less than 10 years ago when virtually all Windows machines were equipped with Java. If you do a Google search for “Java OS X” or “Java for Mac Desktop Apps” you’ll find a plethora of articles circa 2002. There is scarcely anyone talking about using Java on the Desktop in the past 3 years. Has everything worth writing been written, or is this just the writing on the wall.

I hope this does not foreshadow and end to the glory days of Java as a development platform on OS X. It would be tragic if, one day, Apple decided to leave Java out of the default install. That would force users to install Java before running any software dependent upon Java - which would make Java a much less attractive platform to develop on.

Looking at open source business models, it can be difficult to find something that looks viable. Here are a few models along with my assessment of their pros and cons.

1. Pay for support and Consulting

In this model you provide the software for free and open source, but charge for consulting and support.

Pros:

• Easy model to understand - you just charge an hourly rate for consulting and support.

Cons:

• Since you don’t get paid for the 90% of your time that you spend developing the software itself, you are forced to charge 1000% of your required hourly rate just to make ends meet.
• You would be better off finding another open source project that someone else is sweating over and just charge for support on that one. Don’t waste your time developing anything new.
• If you insist on this business model, you’ll be in direct competition with anyone else that wants to set up shop to do consulting on your software - and they can charge 10% of your price since they don’t have to spend time developing the software.
• This only works when your software is something that people generally require support for. If your software is too well made, then people won’t need support or consulting.
• Gives incentive to make software that is complicated and hard to work with .

Conclusion: This one’s a big loser.

2. Charge for add-ons

With this model your primary product is free and open source, but you charge for add-on modules.

Pros:

• If you have a large user base this is a good way to give you a relative monopoly on the market for your add-on.

Cons:

• The open source culture may resist attempts at monetization of this sort. Users of free software often resist or resent attempts to add pay software into the mix.
• You must have a very large user base for the market to be big enough to support add-ons.

Conclusion:
This model has potential if done the right way.

3. Charge for Documentation/User Manuals

With this model you provide the software free and open source but you charge for access to the documentation. This model could work well for software that requires documentation to take advantage of (e.g. software frameworks, libraries, or complex systems that are managed by an administrator). In fact, in certain cases this has the same effect as charging for the software while keeping the software itself open and freely distributable per the spirit of FOSS.

This is because those people who are explicitly using your software and its features will need to purchase the documentation (so it’s kind of like purchasing a license for the software itself), but they can still freely distribute the software itself as part of their own projects (so it retains the basic freedoms that sit at the core of the FOSS movement).

Pros:

• Could work well for technical projects or software components that rely heavily on documentation.
• Acts like commercial software for revenue (1 documentation license per user).
• Software remains freely distributable.

Cons:

• Only works if the software is heavily dependent on documentation to use.
• Gives incentive to create software that is difficult to figure out (non-intuitive).

Conclusion:
This is a good model for technical software.

4. Donation-ware

This is the model where you offer your software up for free and ask (beg) for donations. This is a ridiculous model. It is not even a model so it isn’t worth a pro-con matrix. There are no Pro’s. I am philosophically opposed to the concept of donation-ware. I am a software developer, not a charity. If someone feels compelled to donate money to a cause, there are thousands of good causes: Cancer, Haiti, etc.. But don’t donate it to a software developer (unless he’s creating software to cure cancer).

You will NOT make any money by asking for donations. At most you will make a few people feel good about themselves for donating a dollar or two.

5. Advertising

With this model you treat your software as a means to generate traffic to your website and you try to turn that traffic into money either through selling another product, or through sponsorships.

Unless you get a ton of traffic, this model likely won’t make you enough money to pay for your webhosting plan.

To me (as a software developer), the most exciting thing about the iPad is the fact that it is integrated with the App Store. On the iPod and iPhone, the App store has proven to be a fantastic commercial success, opening a new distribution channel for software developers. There have been a few attempts to create similar type app stores for the desktop (or laptop), but none have been wildly successful. I think this is due to the culture. We are too used to downloading our software through the web browser - we don’t really see the need for an app store. If there was single app store for the desktop that allowed users to purchase /install software as easily as the iPhone app store does, I’m sure that the software industry would double or even triple in revenue in a short amount of time.

The iPad, being closely related to the iPod/iPhone in user interface makes it far more likely the at users will embrace its apps in the App store. This means that software developers who develop for the iPad will have an easy and automatic distribution channel for all of their works, where they can get paid in a simple and secure fashion. And the possibilities for application development on the iPad would appear to far exceed the possibilities of iPhone apps - nearing the level of desktop applications (or even beyond).

This simple fact is why developers will embrace the iPad. And when developers embrace a platform, historically, so too do users.

I was trying to set up server monitoring to send a text message to my cell phone when my server goes down. Since I’m on fido I first tried 0123456789@fido.ca (replace 0123456789 with my phone number), but found this to be terribly inconsistent. Sometimes I received the messages, but usually I didn’t. It didn’t seem to matter how long the messages were. This would not work.

So, since Fido is actually rogers now, I tried 0123456789@pcs.rogers.com, and found that this is very consistent. At first it prompted me to subscribe to the rogers email to sms service. Once I did that I was able to receive email. When an email comes in it tells me who it’s from. If I want to read it I reply back with the text “read”. Then it sends me the message.

This will work fine for now.

(Update an hour later some of the messages I sent to …@fido.ca are starting to trickle into my phone in no particular order….. obviously xxx@fido.ca is not a reliable way to send text messages to fido phones).