David Emery Online

Bitch Bitch, Moan Moan

I am fed up with people whining.

Whenever something is announced, or released or whatever there is always a very vocal collection of people saying that it’s rubbish.

Why can’t people just like things?

Of course, lots of people do – they’re just a lot quieter then the grumpy ones. It’s fair enough I suppose; lord knows I’ve complained and moaned a lot here – it’s a lot easier to write about bad stuff.

This post was prompted by the internet-wide disappointment over the Mac Mini and iPod HiFi announcement. Apple watching could now be entered into the olympics I think, but really – were people really thinking we were going to get a touch screen iPod, a new iBook, and more?

I think the Mac Mini’s great.

Sure, the graphics aren’t so hot, and the price is slightly higher, but you still get a lot of bang for your buck.

So, everybody – stop whining, start liking.

Stupid User Disease

Today, you get a proclamation:

If you are not a computer or operating system manufacturer, there is no point aiming your software at the lowest common denominator.

If you make software, don’t aim at really basic users – really basic users don’t install software. This, however, doesn’t stop your software being simple – even power users benefit from having less features, they just whine more.

One piece of software I’ve noticed do this to it’s detriment is Camino – a very nice browser for Mac OS X, based on the same engine as Firefox, but with a proper OS X look and feel. It’s a great piece of work, but not something I ever use, as it lacks the features I find essential in a browser. To be fair on them, there’s only so much you can do, and some of the features are coming up (like session saving, for example), but reading on their forums you can see that many features that would be very useful – like tab previews, a la OmniWeb – are written off as being to complicated for their target audience.

But how are this mythical target audience going to find Camino to download? Do the even download...

Think, Think, Think

A tricky little problem for you all to ponder over:

How do you prevent piracy in something you give away all the source code to?

For example, say you’re selling a web app. It’s not a hosted service – people run it on their own servers – it’s written in php, and it costs money. You can’t just put in a serial number check like you would in a desktop app, as any enterprising hacker would just remove it from the code!

One option would be to do what Mint does (according to these notes from the Carson Future of web apps summit ) – have no protection, and guilt trip people into not pirating.

Guilt as a method will only work for so long, I think, and simply doesn’t scale in the long run (if it even works at all).

Another possible option would be to have some form of remote licensing, with the app phoning home to a licensing server (possibly with a check sum of the app?) in order to run. To prevent the hackers just commenting this code out, the licensing server could contain part of the app, so any attempt at hacking would render the app unusable. This...

...And you shall receive

Ask (not Ask Jeeves anymore) have just launched a new version of their search site, and it’s a big improvement. Other then dropping Jeeves, they’re really simplified their home page, with a nice ajax based tool panel and simplified look.

Their basic search pages are a lot nicer too – admittedly they look like a red Google, but they have some nice features such as roll-over site previews and less ads then you see on Google. Their newer maps app is still very poor, though.

In general – other then the maps section – ask.com feels a lot more up to date then Google does these days, with sprinklings of javascript all over the place, but I really don’t think it’ll be enough – Google have too much mind share these days (of course, people said that about Alta Vista too…).

What will be interesting is if Ask’s developments, along with Yahoo’s and MSN’s, will provoke Google into doing something new and interesting with their search – they’ve certainly got the resources…

Rise and Fall

So Google have sort of launched Google Pages. I say sort of as you can’t actually sign up to use it anymore – it was only open for about half a day as far as I can tell.

Google Pages is Google’s foray into the personal publishing space, excluding their Blogger service, but it is a very poor one. Yes, it allows you to create very simple pages without knowing any html, but you also don’t get any layout or presentational control bar choosing from preset themes and layouts. Other then a sprinkling of AJAX, it all feels very old fashioned, and I really don’t get who there target audience is (the myspace crowd won’t go for it as it has no social linking and no rich media; small business won’t go for something with a googlepage.com domain; parents and home users will want to upload more then just pictures…).

I glossed over Blogger briefly above, but it strikes me very odd that the additional functionality wasn’t added to Blogger in some way – the blog based metaphor doesn’t work for everybody, but they already have all this infrastructure in place that they’re just building again for Google Pages.

It’s a shame;...

Player

At work we’ve just launched a new mini-site for The National. Of interest to the web geek crowd is the javascript audio player I’ve developed – no Flash was used in the making of the audio player, it’s all pure javascript. It does some reasonably clever things including moving from one track to the next, looping round to the beginning of the track list and also now playing artwork (which isn’t used on The National site, but can be seen on the Too Pure listen page ).

Also of note on the Too Pure listen page is the new Too Pure widget, which is a widget-ised version of the same code. It also does some quite clever things using AJAX, allowing us to keep the track listing on the server and update the widget with new songs without needing the user to download the widget again.

Nifty…

Second Wave

... And now there’s a nasty Safari exploit too. Check out this post on the Unsanity blog for more info and a fix – the fix uses APE however, which I think has much more chance of hosing your system then this exploit has (as no actual malware using this has been seen in the wild). APE has a very spotty reputation in some circles – I’ve never had a problem with it – so if you’re more paranoid about the exploit then APE then go right ahead, but I’m waiting for an Apple fix myself.

As mentioned in the article, this is no mere Safari bug. While Safari does the wrong thing in this case – which can easily be fixed – there’s still the wider issue of Launch Services weirdness. Launch Services is the part of Mac OS X that determines what app should launch a document when you open it, and seems to have all sorts of wonky thinking built into it (Launch Services was also behind the Earlier Mac OS X exploit which had a similar effect – letting malware run on your computer without you telling it to).

This exploit also shares some similarities...

Incoming

I’m worried.

Not very worried, but still…

In the last week or so there’s been a minor outbreak of mac trojans – not viruses, as first reported, as they don’t replicate and spread themselves. In fact, these 2 known trojans (I think it’s 2 – it’s very hard to find any reliable sources on the matter) don’t seem to do anything bad at all – again they are all hype, and no real substance.

The concept, though, is fine and while these ones don’t do anything, it’s only a matter of time until there are ones that do. As far as I can tell, their currently isn’t any mac anti-virus software I’d consider running on any of my macs, and I still don’t really believe that anti-virus software would help too much (by the time the av makers have got a patch out, it’s probably too late).

I’m sure we won’t have as many problems in the long run as our windows friends, but I much prefer having none at all.

Oh well.

Upgrade Curves

David Heinemeier Hansson’s comment on my post on Campfire got me thinking about pricing models for the new breed of web services (yes, all that Web 2.0 nonsense…)

While I’m not the biggest fan of Campfire, I can see that from 37signals point of view it makes a lot of sense financially. The basic free version (which interestingly is pitched as a “30 day free trial”, as opposed to the simple “free” versions of Backpack and Basecamp) isn’t really hugely useful – it’s limited to 4 users at a time, and I guess you loose all your logs when your 1 month is up. With the 4 user limit, I really can’t see too many people using it over standard IM programs. However, it works as a really good demo for the non-free versions – which have much higher participant limits, which I could see could be very useful in a collaborative business setting.

I can well believe David’s comment that Campfire has their highest upgrade rate out of all their products – the upgrade curve is just right. Indeed, for some of their other products I think they may have pitched it slightly too low – I’m a...

Too Pure

On Wednesday we launched the new Too Pure records site. I’m really proud of it – it’s essentially all my own work (bar the logo illustration), and it’s one of the few sites that I really haven’t had to make any compromises on; the original design is identical to the finished site. Also, it validates as xhtml strict – which is a nice bonus.