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Nice piece about the Safari 5 ‘reader’ feature from Nik Fletcher – (also, Jim Lynch’s post on the same topic is hilarious – it seems to be hard for a blogger to exercise restrain and not invoke impending doom at every turn).

Two comments on this : one, this may be Apple nagging Google a bit (less ads viewed…), but Safari’s market share is probably too small to make a dent (plus the feature is a port of Arc90’s Readability, and nobody made a fuss about that). Second, this may also be a way to tell newspaper that if they want to make a bit more money with their online content, they might want to look at selling iPad apps.

We’ll see .

Update 15th Jul. 2010 : Both John Gruber and Cédric remind me that I forgot to write about the most ironic thing in Jim Lynch’s post : his blog is the perfect example of the usefulness of the ‘reader’ feature. A post split into 3 pages where one would have been quite enough, tons of distracting blips all over… Yeah, no wonder he’s feeling attacked by this feature.

Something which occurred to me shortly after watching the now famous Google IO Android keynote. At one point, when about to demonstrate tethering, Vic Gundotra says“if you’re like me, you have a plethora of devices you carry around with you. And all those devices shouldn’t mean added complexity and yet another bill, right ?”.

OK, now, two things.

First : as far as I’m concerned, the added complexity comes from having to turn on a second device and set it up in order to get connectivity on the first. If by having an extra bill I can have that second device connect all on its own, I prefer that option. I already have several bills anyway, always will, it’s manageable.

Second : Android is meant as a competitor for the iPhone OS, therefore is meant to appeal to normal people, as in “non-geeks”. So a Google geek introducing a feature to other Google geeks at a geek conference by saying “if you’re like me…” kind of misses the mark. Yes, this is a tech conference, but that doesn’t change the fact this is supposed to be an end-user product, and if googlers use their own taste to determine their feature roadmap, they might encounter some problems.

The final irony is that this reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend a looong time ago (say 10+ years). At that time, mobile phones were dumb, had tiny b&w screens, and the whole contact/calendar stuff was either done on paper (ok you had a lousy contact list on the phones already) or on a Palm Pilot. I was carrying one of those along with my mobile, and was wondering why my friend was no longer carrying his. He answered he preferred to travel light with only a single device, rather than “looking like Luke Skywalker” (think Luke’s belt in Episode IV here). My friend’s name was Cédric.

As everybody could see, one thing obvious from Google I/O 2010 is : Google is after Apple. At least on the mobile market, and, with the announcement of Google TV, on the home appliance one too (as nascent as this one is for both of them).

It’s a bit puzzling to see these two companies at each other’s throat. They’re both supposed to be the “cool guys”. Google’s arch-enemy was Microsoft, since it wanted to be on the desktop (although so far they’re not making much progress on that front). But clearly, they both view the mobile market as a priority, and they both want the top spot. It’s hard to say which one fired first, apparently Google had intentions toward that market long ago (Android has been public for 18 months, but Google had been working on it 2.5 years before that). If we take at face value Steve’s words at the beginning of the famous keynote in 2007 when he introduced the original iPhone, Apple had been working on it for at least 2 years before that (probably more).

Anyway, watching Vic Gundotra’s Day 2 keynote, is most interesting. Consider the many quips at Apple (push notification as a palliative to lack of multitasking, tethering on the iPad, etc…). So yes, the first thing to get from that is that the two companies are no longer friends. The second thing is, Google has to position Android against iPhone OS. Even though Apple isn’t the market leader (that’s still RIM), at the moment it’s the most visible competitor and nobody expects RIM to last much longer at the top spot). Therefore they have to offer features that iPhone OS doesn’t : Flash, tethering, WiFi sync, openness, rather than features which RIM doesn’t (like, er… oh yeah, a UI which doesn’t look like it’s a decade old).

And here is the interesting part of this confrontation. Apple never adds a feature to a product unless it fits the “big picture”. It has to be integrated with the rest, to blend in. That means they often lose in the usual “feature list check” comparison. But they almost always win the “overall design” one. This way of doing is one of the reasons why they’re not leaders on the PC market, but it seems to have worked for the music player market. So I wonder what will happen next. Will Android overtake the iPhone like Windows overtook the Mac, or will the iPhone remain the iPod of smartphones ? The former seems pretty likely, given that, just like Windows, Android is available on virtually any hardware platform willing to use it. If not features, that alone should decide of the issue of this fight. It has apparently already happened in the US. Yes, this should be taken with a grain of salt, namely that with the almost-announced iPhone v4, it’s expected that sales of the iPhone 3GS are low. But I doubt it will make much of a difference in the long run : dozens of devices on many carriers, vs. a couple of devices on a single (for now?) – lousy carrier. Yes, elsewhere in the world we don’t have to suffer the scourge of AT&T – here in France the iPhone is available to all carriers (Orange, SFR, Bouyges) – but I remain sceptical that it will make a difference.

The only limiting factors I see against this is that users may still prefer Apple’s “experience” – something which operates smoothly, shielding them from security issues, and also potentially offensive content – the latter probably not so enticing to everybody, actually. Will iTunes Store elusive “adult” category finally be instated ?

Google simply can’t replicate this experience, since it has no control on how Android is used (and that’s the whole point of the thing). It doesn’t have the skills, either. Actually, just watching the keynote on YouTube is a perfect example of the difference between the two companies. The keynote is split into a bunch of 10mn long videos, which you have to chase through a rather long list of similarly-named ones, all over YouTube’s usual feature-full page. Apple’s version of this is a single Quicktime video, either directly from Apple’s homepage or in iTunes, as a podcast.

One thing worthy of note, though, is that Google’s offering of “freedom” as opposed to Apple’s walled garden is highly debatable. Yes, through an iPhone or an iPad you can only install apps that Apple has sanctioned, and you’ll never see anything Flash-based (both of these have positive sides, but that’s irrelevant here). However you do own your data. When you plug your iPhone in for sync, it’s backed up locally on the computer you’re synchronizing with. With Android the backup is done on Google’s servers. More generally, you need a Google account, and all your personal data – contacts, calendar, etc… is on Google’s system. I’m not aware of an alternative to this state of things with Android. Apple has MobileMe, but you’re under no obligation to use it.

I like Twitter, find it practical for many a thing, and use it myself. At the MIDEM 2010 it really was the lifeline of the event. But in between the ‘RT’, ‘@username’, and ‘#keyword’, there’s even less space to express anything really useful. Oh, and let’s not forget URL shorteners which add to the crypticness of the resulting message.

So, what I’d like : 512 chars (half a kilobyte, c’mon) for the message, and an metadata part where you’d add keywords and URLs. I suppose usernames can stay in the message since they wouldn’t make much sense outside of it, but keywords I doubt it. Ideally, we could mark them as keywords while typing, but the marking would be removed in the final message and the keyword would be added in the metadata. e.g. type “this is a message with a #keyword”, results in “this is a message with a keyword” along with a metadata block containing “keyword” as a, well, keyword.

Just for that I think I’ll go check what Google Buzz looks like.

A quick recap : that section enforces the use of Objective C, C or C++ for iPhone app coding. First reaction is obviously hostile (quite legitimately, IMHO).

More interesting, however, are the following short exchange between an iPhone developer and Steve Jobs himself, and John Gruber’s rethinking on the subject. It boils down to Apple not liking layers over their SDK because they feel they hinder software quality.

My personal experience very much agrees with this. Unless you’re under exceptional circumstances or requirements, you generally don’t want to add some cross-platform layer between you and the native development framework. An exception is if the framework is really too low level and calls for a higher-level one, but if Objective C was higher level, it would be a scripting language. An intermediate layer generally means that it will make simple things easier, but will make everything else (anything not directly supported by the layer, and debugging) a lot harder (especially debugging). It also means you depend on the vendor of that layer to support the last available features of the platform it wraps. And if it’s a cross-platform one, you’ll only get the lowest common denominator.

That said, while I understand Apple’s effort to maintain a globally high level of quality on the App store (they do advertise quite a lot about it), I really don’t think actively blocking these other frameworks is a reasonable move. First, it looks paranoid and bitchy. Apple can be that, more often than not, so adding more to that trait doesn’t help. But more importantly, these frameworks still may serve a useful purpose. In many cases, an application can be just “good enough”. Even if that’s hardly Apple’s style, an ugly, poorly integrated but useful and working application is better than none at all.

Another possible reason I see for this is the need to be able to easily audit applications, especially given the new multitasking features of iPhone OS 4, which have some aftertaste of cooperative multitasking.

But ultimately, I think Apple should do what Google did with Android : an official App store where what you buy is Apple-certified, and allow alternative App stores where you’re on your own. That said, I don’t know how the average user would handle that.

While I’m at it, Apple should also do the same for Mac : create an official Mac OS X app store, along with the current means of software distribution (i.e. downloads from various http sites). Think Linux distribution repository.

Edit Apr. 17th 2010 : An interesting alternative view on the topic from Steve Cheney is that by enforcing the use of XCode, Apple ensures its independence of the hardware. Indeed the transition from PowerPC to Intel went remarkably smoothly, and the fact that Apple provides the main development toolchain for OS X is a big reason why.

Edit Apr. 21st 2010 : Right now the download pages at apple.com are no longer being updated. And from the comments on this tuaw post, it seems I’m not the only one thinking that a Mac App Store is in preparation .

Edit Apr. 26th 2010 : well, it seems that no, there won’t be a Mac App Store. Can’t be clearer than that.

Following up on this post I had written about the iPhone becoming the ideal universal remote, I’ve just come across this other post about the iPad’s even bigger potential as a remote control.

Although I believe Android’s openness will make it more versatile than the iPhone platform, I’m quite curious to see where the iPad will take it.

Sooo, for once I’m going to blog about current news

Like almost every geek out there, I’ve been rather disappointed by the iPad. However, as many others have said, the iPhone had already revolutionized the way we think of computer user interface. It was obvious that it couldn’t have been a MacOS tablet. They had to adapt MacOS X to a tablet with multi-touch interface, and that is… iPhone OS.

This comment from a reddit thread sums it up quite nicely : “Why isn’t it a COMPUTER? We wanted a fucking tablet computer, not an oversized iphone – Because they’re not selling to you”. Yeah, this isn’t a geek tool. Although I have a feeling that, just like with the iPhone, many geeks will want one too.

Now it seems one of the main gripes against it is the lack of Flash. I really don’t understand why. As a chat on the topic with other friends proved to me this morning, Flash has two main uses nowadays : video, and games. Videos are on iTunes. YouTube is a native app. Other video sites already have iPhone (or more generically “mobile”) versions, like Dailymotion. And as for games… well that’s the first 3rd-party product which were shown during the presentation. And it would make sense that those people writing those fun little Flash games would be more than happy to sell them on the App Store.

Regarding Flash being used as a UI on website, now how are you going to translate that to the iPad’s UI ? The whole thing is designed to be used with your fingers as pointing devices, scrolling, etc… and by visiting a web site, you’d find yourself stuck with a UI made for a mouse&keyboard interface. How convenient.

And yes, of course, there’s the obvious reason that Apple (Jobs) is a control freak and doesn’t want anyone else to interfere with the Experience they provide to the user, that Flash is a resource hog, etc… I personally won’t miss it.

What I do miss, though, is multitasking, and it would have been really cool to have a video camera in there. And for the whole thing to be a tad more open regarding app installation, but that calls for the same answer as above : Apple’s not selling this to me. I might get one eventually (will wait for v2), but I won’t use it as a computer.

Edit : Two posts which I found seeing beyond the feature list check :
This one by Fraser Speirs (btw, thanks for your FlickrExport Aperture plugin ), and the other by John Gruber.

Now that basic (very basic) editing, recording and playback are in, I can show a quick demo of EdenX (that OS X would-be Rosegarden clone I’ve been working on). At this stage there’s really not much point in demonstrating it, given how little it does and how bad it looks (I’ve been throwing the UI together as it went). But it’s ripe for a Linux/Qt/C++ – OSX/Cocoa/ObjectiveC comparison, which is the underlining topic of this post. As such, OS X coders can stop reading. Linux coders, you might find the following interesting.

In the screencast I create two tracks, start two MIDI sources – one being MidiKeys, the other being a quickly hacked MIDI Sources and events generator (MSEG) which I wrote because I needed to test recording from several sources. Once these two programs are running, I create two additional sources from the MSEG, set one track to record from MidiKeys and the other from one of the created sources. I then start recording, send some events from the MSEG and then MidiKeys, stop recording, and do a play back at 120 bpm and then 250 bpm. Finally I save and reload the document.

In case your browser doesn’t support the video tag, you can download the mp4 here.

(nb: yes, the audio’s only on one side, thanks to a crude mini-jack cable )

Now keep in mind that even though I’ve been working on this for more than a year now, on average I’ve probably been spending about a couple of hours per week on it. As you can see by looking at the code, there’s really not much in it – around 1kloc. Although I’m now linking to two (well, one and a half – PYMIDI and the MIDI message parsing classes of SnoizeMIDI) Open Source MIDI frameworks which do help quite a bit.

But there are a few features which I’d like to highlight :

First, the track editor. As you can see from the demo, it can add, delete and edit events (yes, these buttons work, even though I don’t exercise them ). It also automatically updates when a new track is selected in the track list, and when new events are recorded. And yet, the whole code for this is roughly 30 lines long. Everything else is defined in the Interface Builder.

Second, there’s no code to define the document’s data structure, nor is there any for document persistence (save/load). It’s all done through Core Data : .

Also, here’s an example of how you fetch document elements. The :recordingTracks method returns all tracks which have a selected input source and ‘recording’ toggled on.

More generally, thanks to Key-Value Coding and Key-Value Observing, there’s practically no code anywhere to keep a widget up to date with the data it’s showing. For instance, the bpm slider is simply set to “point to” the “tempo” attribute of the document’s composition with the Interface Builder, and that’s it. Totally mundane for any seasoned OSX developer, outlandish for me as a former Linux coder.

Also, there’s no code for memory management because I’ve enabled Garbage Collection.

As a conclusion, I started EdenX as much to have a bit of fun with Cocoa (a feeling I had long lost with Linux) as to prove a point, which is that Cocoa is substantially better as a development environment than anything there is on Linux, even KDE/Qt. And there it is, there’s simply no way anyone could achieve this tiny bit of code in any reasonable amount of time on Linux, with the same amount of features, under the same constraints (i.e. a few hours per week at most). I don’t even want to think at how much code would be involved, plus the MIDI configuration hassle.

It is often said the grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence. It looked like it when I was on the Linux side. Well, having roamed on the OSX/Cocoa/Objective C side for a while now, I can tell it wasn’t an impression : the grass is indeed a whole fucking lot greener.