I was going to write an article about how to get WebDAV up and running on osx but found this excellent walkthrough on Gigaom that basically covers it.
Setting up WebDAV on your mac gives you a quick and easy way to share files from apps such as Pages between your mac and iPad.
So instead of an article I’m recording this here for future reference.
The Nike+ Fuelband launched in the UK this week – much to my surprise. I hadn’t seen any marketing of the launch. I just happened to be on Oxford Street when a tweet arrived in my twitter stream from a friend in the queue. So I wandered over with no idea of how much it cost or to be honest really what it did. I just new it was some kind of pedometer and I remember reading that Nike had released some kind of API for it.
Well it turned out that it was bloody expensive and the API is in limited beta so I can’t access it yet. So what is is like as a product? Well it’s very well made, and packaged in an attractive box that makes it feel very premium. The in store experience was also very premium with a nice chap walking me through the store, helping me size the band and generally being very enthusiastic about the whole Nike+ experience and exercise in general. Nike have very obviously taken a lead from Apple on this retail experience and I have to say it’s a really good thing. Incidentally the LED in the London Nike Store is something to behold. Don’t know who did it but hats off to them it’s impressive. Inside the band is basically an accelerometer hidden behind a nice dot matrix display. It calculates your steps, estimates the calories burnt and then translates this into something called nike fuel which as I understand it is a common figure that enables comparison with others.
The software included is ok but feels a bit clunky but does what it needs to which is to upload the data from the band to the Nike+ website. It does this via a USB connection or – if you have an iPhone it can be done via bluetooth and the free Nike+ app.
In terms of the information that you can get from the device, well Nike doesn’t really do much with it yet. I’d like to see a sleep mode like un the Fitbit and Jawbone Up that gives an indication of sleep patterns and also I can’t believe that it’s not water proof.
Finally, the API isn’t available yet – which is a bummer as that’s what I bought the band for. I’m going to have a wee peak at what gets sent up too the Nike+ store to see if there’s anything I can do there. Also I might have a sniff at the USB connection when I get some time.
All in all though very good – not quite worth the cash but not far off.
Update 1 It’s not waterproof
Update 2 There is currently no public Nike API to access the data which is a shame but apparently it’s coming
Update 3 Nike have s far sent me two emails to encourage me to keep active that had no content. There seem to be a few bugs still to squash.
Yesterday the BBC launched the iPlayer on XBox live - this means that the iPlayer is now available on every major games console available in the UK once again showing the flexibility of creating a core framework upon which many display mechanisms can be created¹. Now i’m writing this post a little early as I haven’t had a chance to download and try the application for myself but as interesting as the Kinect is the video that appears on the NextWeb story covering the launch shows just how new gesture technology is. The user in the video is clearly having trouble with the navigation of the new iPlayer. It just doesn’t seem natural yet.
This is certainly the experience that I have had to date trying to integrate Kinect into retail environments as part of interactive experiences. That said users seem to be very forgiving at the moment because of the novelty of the technology. Once this novelty wears off they’re going to demand a more responsive experience. I’d love to see some kind of follow up from the BBC on user feedback to the interface and any learnings they glean from the Xbox launch.
¹Interestingly the BBC believe that the iPlayer is now available on over 450 devices. Of those 450 I’m guessing that 440 use a version of the HTML big player.
Instagram’s sole existence seems to be be to show me how much fun everyone else is having while I sit in a beige office staring at lines of code. One of the psychological side effects of social media is that everyone else’s life seems to be great – they’re on holidays, partying with friends, sitting on a pristine beach, out on a wonderful bike ride. I have to remind myself that it’s not true. There lives are really just as repetitive and monotonous as mine. :)
This morning the Raspberry Pi launched and immediately the servers of it’s two partner companies crumbled under the load of interested paying customers trying to buy the device. Raspberry Pi themselves had adjusted their own site into a single static HTML page in anticipation of the load and say that they had warned their partners that things were about to get busy. The fall out from this has been a huge amount of disappointed people (angrily tweeting their poor experience) and ultimately a loss of revenue for all the companies involved. This must be galling for the Raspberry Pi team (who seem to be very enthusiastic about all the coverage they’re getting despite the fact nobody can buy one at the moment).
Rightly, you would argue that it’s not in the partner companies interests to invest in infrastructure for a single product launch when their current investment up until today has happily handled their day to day traffic. Why would an organisation fund all that unused infrastructure if they didn’t use it? Thing is, in 2012 there are options that allow these businesses to scale very quickly and cheaply. There really is no excuse for outage. For example, with Amazon’s AWS services infrastructure can be brought up in minutes and through auto scaling, scale resources (both up and down) based on need – with this kind of product it is easy to plan for a short term campaign site in the cloud with very little investment.
The retail sector expects online revenues to grow exponentially over the next few years however time and time again retailers are damaging their reputation with their customers through poor ecommerce implementation, investment and planning. I would wager that no retailer would shut the doors of it’s physical stores to paying customers on the first day of their January Sales or on the day they launch their new product range? Sadly, most do this online as a result of capacity issues that make their websites unresponsive.
Excessive amounts of investment is put into product development and showing product off – photoshoots, videos, nicely designed websites but all of this is for nothing if customers can’t make a purchase. Retailers need to adopt a different mindset and bring technology closer to the core of their businesses yes the initial investment and planning may be difficult but the long term damage to brand and sales will be more difficult still.
Over the last few weeks I have been building a project using the JQuery Mobile framework. Overall it’s been a hugely interesting experience and has exposed me to the subtle differences in developing mobile web apps as opposed to platform specific binaries (i’ve dabbled before but this has been my first commercial mobile web app). JQuery Mobile is clearly in it’s early stages with many bugs (page transitions are terrible), inconsistencies and quirks. That said it reduces the overall level of effort to develop a mobile web app significantly.
JQuery Mobile tries to be a framework for all devices and as a result I was left feeling that it was trying to be a jack of all trades but ultimately ended up being a master of none. In terms of my project, despite there being a project aim of having a cross platform app, it became clear very quickly that my client was thinking in iPhone UI terms. What we ended up with was an A grade app on the iPhone and a gracefully degraded app on all others. The amount of effort involved in coaxing JQuery Mobile to feel iPhone like (and also Android like) was huge and it got me thinking. There is an opportunity for Apple or a similarly motivated third party to develop a mobile web framework that closely mimics the iPhone UI. When the iPhone was first launched I think this was the intention and while I agree with the current focus on developing the objective-c sdk’s I’d love to see a toolset to build similar quality iPhone mobile web apps and maybe the resurrection of Dashcode as the tool to do it. Similarly given Google’s investment in Web technologies I’m surprised that more effort hasn’t been put into mobile web tools by them. We’re going to see a rise in mobile web this year so it will be interesting to see if there’s any movement in this area.
I heard an interesting anecdote this morning about Spotify and the multi grammy award winning singer Adele. It turns out that Adele’s album is not available on Spotify (noticed a while ago by my Wife) not because Adele didn’t want it to be but because of the Spotify freemium business model. Adele it seems was more than happy to have her music on the service but wanted to restrict access to paying subscribers only. Understandable as she didn’t want to give her music away for free. However the Spotify business model works by attracting subscribers through a single catalogue and converting them to the service by removing ads, adding access through mobile etc. Not by giving them access to previously unaccessible content. Rdio and others apparently do have tiered catalogues (and Adele’s music) so it seems that not all streaming services are created equally.
I was pretty annoyed about this for about 10 minutes, as a paying subscriber I want access to as much artist content as possible. I’ve been converted, i’ve paid my money and it got me wondering how many other artists and labels are excluded because of this (the amount of content being removed from Spotify seems to be accelerating). On the other hand you have to admire Spotify for their commitment to their business model. They sacrificed the year’s best selling album to stick to their principals. Perhaps they’re mad or perhaps their dedication to the freemium model will see them succeed in converting subscribers where they’re competitors fail.
That said, I have a certain amount of scepticism with the detail of this whole story. Spotify definitely have the ability to limit content to their paying subscribers and frequently promote Spotify exclusives for paying subscribers giving them access to content for a period of time before it appears in the freemium catalogue. Perhaps the timescales were not long enough for Adele or perhaps she wanted a permanent exclusion, we’ll never know the detail. That said as a paying subscriber I expect Spotify to put me first and if their dedication to free, funded by my subscription is penalising me in terms of available content they’ll lose out when I evaluate the service against their competitors.
There’s a new to-do list in the iPhone store that’s creating quite a lot of chatter on the web. It’s called Clear and has been crafted by the small British development studio Realmac Software (i’m proud of any British software success). So what makes this to-do app different from all the other’s out there. Well if i’m honest not a lot. To-do apps are pretty simple at the best of times and Clear is a ‘simple’ to-do app which basically means it’s a way of creating lists and that’s it. No recurring items, no alarms, no nagging, no nothing. Just a way to create lists of things you have to do – i do this in my notebook everyday. Where it is different is in the interface, it’s simple, colourful and designed for touch and it completly breaks from the Apple HIG (Human Interface guidelines). It makes great use of sound too with Nintendo-esque pings and beeps eminating from each successful (and unsuccessful) interaction. That said at the end of the day it’s a Todo app and I think the 69p price tag shows that the developers acknowledge this.
I found myself asking why is it that out of all the excellent software that Realmac have produced (they have a Panic like attention to detail) an app as simple as Clear has created the kind of buzz it has. Unsuprisingly the answer I think is simple, it’s not really the app, it’s great PR and Marketing. In the background they have partnered with some pretty influentual people in the world of Mac development, namely Phill Ryu (behind Macheist) and David Lanham (previously of Icon Factory). These names alone will get articles on most Tech blogs out there. Not that i’m complaining, I just want to see British Software Engineering success, it just reminds me of the influence (deservedly) a small group of PR savvy people can have on an industry.
Chief evangelist for Yahoo Christian Heilmann has written an interesting post on a topic that has been rattling around in my mind now for some time – why it is most of the people who build the web don’t make that much money from it and how it is that people who don’t understand the nuts and bolts are able to see the opportunities that it provides perhaps much more clearly. In many ways the answer is obvious – business minds have unique properties that can identify opportunities that many can’t and simply being clever is not enough. However, I think the arrogance angle that Christian identifies is accurate. Success often comes from bending the rules to one’s own ends and that is a very foreign concept to the logical mind of the technologist. That’s why the porn sites, WordPress theme sites and ringtone sites exist and make their owners very wealthy. As developers we need to get better at looking for the glitch in the matrix.
I have a confession to make. As a technologist, I hate digitised music and video. It has nothing to do with quality, not having the box etc – the usual arguments that are put forward for not using digital content. For me it’s the fear of loss of content through my own poor file management and backup processes that puts me off. Also for some reason I seem to notice my changing tastes more with my digitised media collection. Most of it by today’s standards, is utter rubbish.
To be clear i’m talking about content that I rip and manage myself, that I have full responsibility over. In contrast, I have no problem with paying for a service like Spotify where they manage looking after my stuff and getting me new stuff. This is definitely the future of media consumption I think. The problem lies with me and this is why I hesitate when buying content from the iTunes store. Sure I have access to it and can download it and have pay for it etc etc. But then i’m on my own. I have to remember I have it, when I shift between computers, reindex it. I have to authorise it on whatever current machine i’m working on (often I work across more than 5 machines) and then back the damn stuff up.
In all honesty my distrust in my own ability to manage my content isn’t just limited to music and video – previous tax returns, bills, bank statements etc are all spread across my hard disk, unordered and all over the place. I rely on my bank to hold and present me the info when I need it, the HMRC to archive my Tax returns for me and my utility companies to make my bills up for me from imaginary meter readings.
I guess the point is that over time I have offloaded self organisation onto third parties with whom I have built infinite trust, perhaps and most likely completely misplaced. I don’t think i’m alone in this by a long shot but this year i’ve made a vow to myself to take control of all this information, move it to one place and manage it like an adult. Conversely perhaps this is just a sign of progress and I should just embrace the fact that while I am able to conduct this symphony of services, like an Orchestra I can never fully control every moving part.