I’m right there with folks crying foul when Apple does wrong, but I don’t buy this one. Apple’s “bastardization” of the ePub format helps push the format forward, just like Opera and Mozilla’s modifications to HTML yielded HTML 5, Microsoft’s modifications led to OpenXML and practically everybody’s Wi-Fi implementations led to 802.11n. I’m not saying it’s on as grand a scope as that, but I do think it’s a small part of that same sort of momentum. All Apple did was add some extra CSS tricks that weren’t present in the ePub standard and then tweaked the MIME type so the files identify themselves as being slightly different than standard ePub files. If nobody built on top of open standards like this, then nobody would use open standards because they would develop uselessly slowly.

And while e-ink displays are indeed better for reading than LCD’s, I take issue with the headaches-because-of-refresh claim. There is no refresh on LCD’s, just per-pixel changes when the image changes. Tablet LCD’s are the same as your desktop display, which folks read on all day long without issue.

I still prefer a tree-killing paper book to both, though!

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The automotive lineup for CES 2012 next week includes the debut of the Ford Evos concept car, a sensor-rich vehicle that is designed to connect to the cloud, all for the benefit of user experience. What a great approach! Why aren’t all occupiable spaces, including cars, designed like this? Let’s look at the car concept. What do the cloud and sensors bring to driving experience? In short, it could make driving as forward-thinking as an iPhone. The concept car features include connectivity with entertainment and content; energy management based on environment and locality; parental controls; and smartphone integration. Other auto companies are working on similar ”cloud connected” and sensor-rich concept cars, and it’s hard to knock any of them for taking another five years — the estimated time to get real vehicles into showrooms — to perfect the technology. I can’t wait!

That said, during this five-year span, countless buildings, schools, Starbucks, Walmarts, etc. will be built without the forward-thinking technology frameworks for really enhanced user experiences. There are sensors, sure – like temperature management, which can effect productivity by gigantic numbers. But why is it not pervasive and evident, in ways that people can really notice and appreciate? Is it cost? Is it the building process? Is it the profit model? Maybe it’s all of these, but if there is meaningful benefit to user experience, shouldn’t the architect be thinking about technology frameworks – the way they think about new exotic building materials that only they have access to? It should be noted that it isn’t only architects that can leverage these tools and frameworks – retail marketers, advertisers, product managers, and property owners can reap benefits.  But architects have more opportunity to thread infrastructural thinking into the program and design of the space.  (I have spent much of my career working in both architecture and technology, which is why I pick on architects.)

What could an architect do with a rich technology infrastructure like the Evos concept? I’m open to suggestions, but the answer is likely a combination of the internet of things (sensors and other hardware), my digital self (i.e. Facebook, Linkedin, and particularly smartphones, which are broadcasting all the time), a robust web-services community, and great user experience design.

Here are some things that it’s not: The Jetsons, where everything has a robotic arm. It’s also not exactly “responsive architecture,” at least the physical part where buildings deform to meet changing conditions or provide some interactivity. And it’s not a marketing element, like lobby displays, although the best ones, like the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, are beautiful and certainly benefit user experience.

If not robotic arms for better services, then what? We can use tech infrastructure to augment and improve the delivery of services. A great example is the gate redesign work that’s happening at some of the major airports. Why should the airport gate look like a bus station and serve terrible food anymore? OTG Management, an innovative airport food and beverage operator, has revolutionized the gate holding area by making major restaurant improvements (actually good food) and extending that enhanced experience throughout the terminal with food delivery service via iPad-based menus and ordering systems, along with charging stations and comfortable seating. Now travelers are able to relax and dine from any seat.

Also, instead of deforming a building physically, perhaps we can deform it digitally. Shopkick allows a retailer to install a small transmitter that can communicate with local phones. Shoppers can pull out their mobile devices and get rewards and offers based on their digital and physical histories. Invisible to those that don’t want it, but a new experience for hardcore shoppers.

Instead of “screensaver” signage for effect — again, some are beautiful — perhaps we can conform the content to the viewer base. Techstars startup Immersive Labs is developing an outdoor advertising technology that uses cameras (as sensors) and facial recognition to tailor content to viewers, as in Minority Report. Not everyone wants “billboards” at their school or hotel, but this same capability is a fantastic tool for user experience design.

These aren’t the end-all, be-all examples but useful data points. There are many. For instance, Walmart Labs is making lots of social and mobile aquisitions – Grapple and Small Society, and I haven’t seen the new master store…but then again, I don’t get to Walmart much living in Manhattan.

For most users, this sense of super connectivity could be disturbing. As mentioned above, it’s going to be up to the designer, particularly the user experience designer, to turn this potential nightmare into a pleasant dream. User trust is essential – see Toby’s article on 5 Practices for Securing User Confidence for more.

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While providing no new features or benefits, the app now requires “Read Sensitive Log Data”, which allows the application to access general information about what the user is doing with the device.  This could include personal or private information. But who knows what info they’re pulling or why? …LinkedIn doesn’t tell us.

With the growing spotlight on data and privacy issues, consumers are moving away from blind trust and more towards vigilance.  Like the public’s rejection of Path Intelligence’s tracking of cell phones in the mall, users are uninstalling the LinkedIn app and flaming it in their reviews.  Mobile app developers and firms like Path Intelligence could learn a few lessons from the browser cookie. While Path’s system and LinkedIn’s app take user information and offer no explicit benefits to the customer, cookies provide a more personalized, user-friendly web experience because of the data.  And they can be disabled. Privacy is a two way street. People are willing to give up some personal information to a trusted partner with the understanding that they’ll get something in return—and their information won’t be abused.

LinkedIn’s rating is dropping like a rock because they took their users for granted and figured they would install any update and accept any permission, even if there was no tangible benefit.  They have also failed to respond to the community’s feedback. It’s been over a week and they have yet to change the description of the app.

To fix this debacle, LinkedIn needs to jump in immediately and update their description with a solid explanation as to why they need these new permissions, and put it in user focused terms. However, rolling it back altogether would show a greater interest in protecting the privacy of their customers (who are, in essence, their products).

This is a lesson to all app developers, but especially those dealing with social features: The users are starting to pay attention. You need to treat your community with respect. Take only what you need and give more than you take… or get ready for the backlash.

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To test deployments of PHP apps in a phar archive, we generated a very basic Yii Framework-based web application for testing: a “yii/” directory with the Yii Framework files and a “webapp/” directory with the web application files (e.g. “index.php” and “protected/”). We also protected the “yii/” directory with an “.htaccess” file and deleted some runtime data to save up space in the phar archive we wanted to build.

We modified our configuration to serve phar files with the PHP module and whitelisted phar files in the Suhosin PHP extension configuration. We generated a testing “index.phar” archive and put it in the DocumentRoot along with a bootstrap “index.php” file with the following content:

<?php
include ‘phar://index.phar/webapp/index.php’;
__HALT_COMPILER();

An error occurred when the application loaded in the browser: realpath() was not able to determine the location of the “protected/runtime/” directory in the web application. This function seems to be having issues when used inside phar archives and there was no point in storing runtime or user data inside of it.  So we needed a real directory outside the phar file for that. We then overrode realpath() in the bootstrap file with the “runkit” PHP extension.

In the overridden function, we expunged the “phar://” and the “index.phar/webapp/” path components and returned the results when the Yii Framework was trying to determine its runtime directory. If a path was beginning with “phar://” we simply returned it, and if none of those conditions were met, we simply returned the value returned by the original realpath() we made a copy of in the bootstrap file. To correctly display css files stored in the phar archive, we also used “mod_rewrite” to redirect requests to “/index.phar/webapp/css/”. We created the “protected/runtime/” and “assets/” directories outside the phar archive in the DocumentRoot, and we protected the newly created “webapp/protected/” directory with an “.htaccess” file.

We also noticed that captcha images were not being displayed because a needed “ttf” font that ships with the Yii Framework was not found at runtime: dirname() was not able to return/determine the whereabouts of the directory inside the phar archive where that font was. We overrode dirname() to extract that file at runtime from the “index.phar” archive into a temporary location, if not already there; the overridden dirname() was coded to return this new path, or the value returned by the original dirname() function in all the other cases.

As you can see, there are a lot of overrides required just to make a simple application work. We’ve stopped our work on phar archive deployment because managing all of these overrides is unworkable. We also have no assurances that the overrides will be appropriate for a more complicated application.

We’re going to try some other experiments to get closer to our goal of a single file deployment for our applications. Our next experiments will be around automation the creation of tarballs with custom code to deploy them appropriately.

Is anyone else using phar archives to package their applications? We’d be curious to know if anyone else has had better luck. Any comments and ideas are welcome!

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Bought something at the Apple Store on West 14th Street yesterday and tried the new Apple Store app for self checkout. Launch the app and it recognizes you’re in a store (GPS? SSID? Geo-fencing?). A special interface appears within the app, you click the EasyPay button and take a pic of the barcode on whatever you’re purchasing. Pay with your Apple ID (same as iTunes account) by typing your password. Your receipt appears on screen so a sales rep can give you a “paid” sticker.

Pretty slick. Apple’s got something incredibly powerful with their Apple ID system tied to customer credit card info, and they’re one of the only big players in the space that has both physical and online stores. Amazon’s got this down (duh) but not so much for offline purchasing. Facebook and Google are trying to figure out how to monetize offline purchases too, but seems like they’re playing catch up here.

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If you replaced your runbook with a puppet recipe, spun up a dev environment for breakfast, moved your production infrastructure to AWS, and have a few Arduinos on your desk… we want to talk to you.

Who are we? Just some geeks building the next. next thing and having a blast along the way. We work on dozens of projects every year, using the latest tools and inventing them when they don’t exist yet. We’re super busy creating new infrastructures for our clients, supporting our developers, and working on our own R&D. Your networking, database, storage, cloud, and hardware hacking chops will be challenged and honed.  Since DevOps is an emerging discipline, we’re writing the playbook as we move along.  So we’re looking for someone who lives and breathes this stuff– not necessarily the person with the most experience.

If your interested in joining our team, send us your resume or LinkedIn profile. (GitHub account and OSS contributions will also get our attention!)

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Charlie: I’m not a developer, but from the perspective of a web end user I’d be happy to experience less Flash in my day to day browsing.  Does this lend some validation to Steve’s “Thought on Flash”? http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

Nick: I’ve been Flash averse since 1997.  Just sayin’

Michael W:  I’ve noticed that all of the Flash haters I know (not naming names!) are all Mac faithful and honed their hate ages ago. Still relatively new to the mac world myself, I found flash to be an annoyance when using Safari, and since then, realized it’s only in Safari I had those problems. Having moved on from Safari to Chrome, I have no need for extensions such as ClickToFlash (a thousand thanks to Ivan for that little beauty.) It certainly felt like it had been poorly executed there, but anywhere else I’ve used it, be it Chrome, Firefox, on both Mac and PC, on a handful of Android phones, I don’t see what all the fuss is about. Trying to load a page as simple as a Gothamist post in Safari chugged and made my (at the time) shiny new laptop moan and seemingly beg to be put out of it’s misery. ClickToFlash eased that pain since it would only load flash objects after I approved them, but I don’t see the same problem with other browsers/OSs/etc.

Applying a general troubleshooting logic to the situation, if you’re only having a problem with an app or plugin (Flash) in a specific instance (in Safari) and it works fine the rest of the time, it’s not the problem with the app or plugin…

Sure HTML5 is the future, it’s open, but give it enough time, everyone will look back at HTML5 with the same ire they are giving Flash right now when the next big leap comes forth. Just because the new hotness is here doesn’t mean the old one was never worth anything. Without Flash, we’d have no Home Star Runner, TROGDOR!, Super Mario Twins, NewGrounds, LineRider, Youtube, etc.

I for one am glad to have The Burninator in my life.  <Nostalgia>

Dan: Maybe Flash haters all live in thatched-roof cottages….

Will: I’ve disliked Flash since the days my computer still had a floppy drive. Slow and resource-consuming while rarely adding any useful functionality to whatever site it’s maligned.  While I have ethical qualms with how Steve Jobs leveraged iOS’ success against Flash, I think the ultimate goal of replacing a bad, proprietary technology with an open one is a good one. Now if only Adobe had a competitor so that they’d be motivated to fix the plethora of bugs in their products.

Ivan: Well, not for nothing but the development of Flash for OS X lagged behind the Windows version for years. Any institutional dislike for Flash has been taught to Mac users by Adobe themselves. Heck, I don’t think Adobe even bothered to match versions between the OSs until Apple started being vocal about not wanting Flash on iOS.

Otherwise, flash video was great for the Mac because we finally didn’t have to worry about having a WMV codec installed. That said, I’m glad we got away from it for obvious reasons.  I can’t say why Safari doesn’t work as well with Flash now, except to note that Safari isn’t the most plugin-friendly browser out there. I’m not big on them myself, so it’s no loss to me.

Nick (again):  To be clear, I was a Mac hating Windows douche until around 2002.  And I too loved Homestarrunner et al, and accept the necessity of Flash in very specific instances which are becoming less and less frequent.  The problem is, aside from the resource hogging bloated piece of dung arguments that everyone is tired of, Flash is completely over- and inappropriately-used in the vast majority of instances. And often ugly.

And I really hate ugly and unnecessary things.

Colin: It’s really weird to watch the rebirth of everything again “isn’t it amazing I can do x with HTML5?!” yeah, it is super cool, but it was cool in flash in 1999 too.  it was the coolest thing ever, then it got old and crusty and a pain in the ass to deal with…. like a lot of people I know

Thanks flash, on to the next, next thing.

Will (again): I haven’t used Safari in five or six years but still find I have to use Flashblock in Firefox and Chrome to keep runaway Flash apps from maxing out one of my cores when I’m not paying attention. Before its redesign, I found trying to load a MySpace Music page to be a guaranteed way to crush any and all browsers because of the obscene amount of Flash.  I see no reason why we’ll look back on HTML5 the same way. Its implementation is determined by the browsers, which are varied and competitive. (Also, I find HTML5 rendering engines already perform better than Flash ever has.) Flash, on the other hand, has only one implementation developed by one company that until recently had no competition. It took the largest mobile platform out there blacklisting it to make Adobe even start looking at improving its performance.

Michael W (again): To Nick’s point, Flash got out of control in regards to bad design because they made it so damn easy for anyone to pick up a (likely pirated) copy and start banging out animations within a couple hours. Suddenly Geocities exploded with wizz! bang! websites that had 7,392,103,134 things flying around. Same thing happened with animated gifs…

http://www.myspaceantics.com/images/myspace-comments/words/juicy-lips-blacks.gif

Chris R: I just hope that in all this opinionated side choosing, people realize that it is really about poor code from developers using the technologies. You’ll still see a bunch of crappy resource hogging crap using HTML5 technologies as well.  I prefer to just say, I like properly written software…I don’t care if you use AS3, HTML5 tech, C++, etc.

Ivan:  Damn it, where’s the Like button?

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So developers are excited – now what?

The truth is I don’t really know. So far, a lot of what I have seen in Node falls under the heading of “cute.” “Check out this chat room I wrote with 100 lines of code,” or “Check out this cool thing I did with web sockets.” I’m not picking on Node, so save your hate mail. In fact, I developed a “cute” project in Node myself with web sockets for remote control of Youtube videos (which also had a chat component). I had a lot of fun and the project was done in two days. I felt the power and ease of Node and could see how great it could be, but that is a long way from the types of complex applications I have written in PHP or Ruby. This makes me wonder what it would be like to build something like an enterprise caliber CMS using Node. Could I do it? Sure! Would I want to? No way! At least not now – and the answer has less to do with Node and more to do with tools/frameworks. Let’s face it, as modern developers we rely a lot on tools and the useful abstractions offered by our frameworks of choice. While Node does have a few promising MVC frameworks like Express and Grasshopper, they are still pretty green and can’t yet provide developers with same kind of productivity increases that other modern frameworks like Rails or Yii (my PHP framework of choice) offer. As long as this remains the case, it seems likely that Node will remain in the “cute” zone. Sure, a lot of cool projects will be done in Node, but it won’t be making the kind of huge unifying impact it seems capable of.

In a lot of ways, Node has already done the hard part. It’s easy to use and understand, it’s execution time is fast, and perhaps most amazingly, both PHP and Ruby developers agree that Node is a really cool idea. The challenge for Node is to take advantage of the excitement in the developer community, and bring them out of the diaspora to a centralized community website that doesn’t suck. Then use that community to get behind a MVC framework, with the goal of providing the kinds of tools PHP and Ruby developers need to be productive. Do this without just copying functionality and take advantage of Javascript as both a frontend and backend language, thus creating something that only Node can provide. When that happens few will doubt that Node is the future!

– Evan Frohlich

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And then it all began to change, and for me, it began with Exchange. Exchange 2007 was the last version I deployed, and the last version my own email account was connected to. I’ve been a Google Apps user for two years now, and I’ve also helped transit some of our clients over to Google Apps also.  My personal transition away from a Microsoft-centric working experience started with email, and has continued on through the rest of what I do. I feel like I’m boarding the Google boat and there are just a few bags left on the MS dock.

Google Apps has been offering full-featured email and collaboration services for a while now. An Exchange server can be replaced in a cost-effective fashion, providing shared calendars, spam filtering, message archiving, chat services, access anywhere from a web browser, and almost no mailbox size limits– starting at $50 per mailbox per year. And while you can certainly use Outlook, Apple Mail and iCal to connect to Google, you can use nothing but your web browser if you want and have full functionality. About the only major feature of Exchange not replicated in Google Apps is Public Folders. But then again, Microsoft isn’t providing for that either going forward.

Replacing email servers is one thing, but replacing those desktop applications is another story altogether. Microsoft has held a monopoly on workstation software and business productivity applications for years. The fact is, Windows and Office work well enough for the majority of users out there. They’re easy to use and familiar. A real challenger has to offer a better way of doing something the average user is already doing. And Cloud computing’s Software As A Service  is finally maturing to that point.

Speaking as a heavy Microsoft user, I’ve personally been anchored to Windows and Office, primarily by Visio and Project.  Microsoft Word is still critical for final document drafts and printing, since the offerings on Google Apps just aren’t there yet in terms of refinement and features. But it’s just a matter of time. The recent addition of Smartsheet to our toolkit has now removed our reliance on Microsoft Project except for our very largest initiatives. And we are eagerly awaiting the evolution of Google Drawings to allow us to build the type of schematics we’re creating with Visio.

Microsoft of course has its own Cloud offering, Office 365, and naturally it’s tied into licensing of their existing products. They have a tiered licensing model that’s much more complex than Google’s. But it’s also a much deeper system than Google Apps.  It goes without saying that Google has no legacy revenue streams to drag into the 21st century. Even so, any company can make a migration decision based on what functionality works best for them, but it’s nice to be able to start fresh at a very aggressive price-point.

For further comparison, since Google Apps is platform agnostic, Mac users don’t draw the short straw yet again when it comes to software and collaboration with their Windows brethren. For remote users in a company that’s migrated to Google Apps, all they need is an Internet connection and a web browser, and they will have exactly the same experience as they have sitting in their office. While the individual feature-set of Google Apps isn’t as elegant or robust as Microsoft Office or Office 365, Google Apps is radically simpler in that you get full access to it’s features with just a web browser. This makes it a serious competitor for today’s geographically diverse, small to mid size business.

Regarding remote workers, smartphones deserve a mention. I used a Blackberry for years, but opted for a Droid recently. You probably knew this was coming, but Google Apps on the Droid takes only minutes to configure, and works smoothly. Google Apps functionality includes: Gmail, Calendar and Contact sync, Push support, Google Docs,  Enterprise Admin controls, and 2-way verification for extra security. This feature set is available for almost all platforms, including Windows:  http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/mobile.html

By contrast, Office 365 applications for iPhone and Android are not coming anytime soon. Mobile access is limited unless you’re using Windows Phone, which let’s be honest, almost nobody is.

Handheld prevalence as per end-of-year 2010:

Android #1 – 33.3 milllion

Symbian #2 – 31 million

Apple #3 – 16.2 million

RIM #4 – 14.6 – million

MS #5 – 3.1 million

Source: http://on.mash.to/rG6bfd

As I write this, I have my email, shared documents, and a Project Plan open on my Windows workstation and on my Linux laptop. I use these applications every single day. My documents appear and function identically across these two computers. My email appears and functions identically. The Gannt chart appears and functions identically. On my Droid phone I have read and write access to my calendar, documents, and email. With the exception of Visio and Word, I can be anywhere with an Internet connection, on a borrowed computer running OSX, Linux or Windows and be fully functional. The last of my bags on the dock contain Word and Visio. I can’t leave them behind just yet, but I’m waiting. I want to get going.

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I think that the real issue may be more that no one knows what to do with Hadoop, not how fast it is or which version is better. I mean really, who cares if your HDFS implementation is like 10% faster when you can just spin up 10% more Elastic MapReduce instances.

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