Four short links: 19 November 2009

Chumby One, Gorgeous IE Debugger, Freer Than Free, and Phone-a-Friend for Government IT

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. Chumby One (Bunnie Huang) -- new Chumby product released. In addition to being about half the price of the original chumby, the new device added some features: it has an FM radio, and it has support for a rechargeable lithium ion battery (although it’s not included with the device, you have to buy one and install it yourself). There’s also a knob so you can easily/quickly adjust the volume. But I don’t think those are really the significant new features. What really gets me excited about this one is that it’s much more hackable.
2. Deep Tracing of Internet Explorer (John Resig) -- very sexy deep inspection of Internet Explorer. Finally, something IE does better than Firefox (other than exploits). dynaTrace Ajax works by sticking low-level instrumentation into Internet Explorer when it launches, capturing any activity that occurs - and I mean virtually any activity that you can imagine. (via Simon Willison)
3. Less Than Free -- begins by talking about Google giving away turn-by-turn directions on Android, and then analyses Google's "less than free" business model: Additionally, because Google has created an open source version of Android, carriers believe they have an “out” if they part ways with Google in the future. I then asked my friend, “so why would they ever use the Google (non open source) license version.” Here was the big punch line - because Google will give you ad splits on search if you use that version! That’s right; Google will pay you to use their mobile OS. I like to call this the “less than free” business model. This is a remarkable card to play. Because of its dominance in search, Google has ad rates that blow away the competition. To compete at an equally “less than free” price point, Symbian or windows mobile would need to subsidize. Double ouch!!
4. Expert Labs -- a new independent initiative to help policy makers in our government take advantage of the expertise of their fellow citizens. How does it work? Simple: 1. We ask policy makers what questions they need answered to make better decisions. 2. We help the technology community create the tools that will get those answers. 3. We prompt the scientific & research communities to provide the answers that will make our country run better. New non-profit from Anil Dash.

The War For the Web

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 61

On Friday, my latest tweet was automatically posted to my Facebook news feed, as always. But this time, Tom Scoville noticed a difference: the link in the posting was no longer active.

It turns out that a lot of other people had noticed this too. Mashable wrote about the problem on Saturday morning: Facebook Unlinks Your Twitter Links.

if you’re posting web links (Bit.ly, TinyURL) to your Twitter feed and using the Twitter Facebook app to share those updates on Facebook too, none of those links are hyperlinked. Your friends will need to copy and paste the links into a browser to make them work.

If this is a design decision on Facebook’s part, it’s an extremely odd one: we’d like to think it’s an inconvenient bug, and we have a mail in to Facebook to check. Suffice to say, the issue is site-wide: it’s not just you.

As it turns out, it wasn't just links imported from Twitter. All outbound links were temporarily disabled, unless users explicitly added them as links via an "attach" dialogue. I went to Facebook, and tried posting a link to this blog directly in my status feed, and saw the same behavior: links were no longer automatically made clickable. You can see that in the image that is the destination of the first link in this piece.

The problem was quickly fixed, with URLs in status updates automatically now linkified again. The consensus was that it was in fact a bug, but it's little surprise that people suspected otherwise, given the increasing amount of effort Facebook puts into warning people that they are leaving Facebook for the big bad unsafe Internet:

All of this is well-intentioned, I'm sure. After all, Facebook is attempting to put in place privacy controls that allow its users to manage the visibility of their information -- and the Web's expectation of universal visibility is not necessarily the best default for much of the information posted on Facebook. But let's not kid ourselves: Facebook is a new kind of web site (or an old kind redux), a world of its own, playing by different rules.

But this isn't just about Facebook.

The Apple iPhone is the hottest web access device around, and like Facebook, while it connects to the web, it plays by a different set of rules. Anyone can put up a website, or launch a new Windows or Mac OS X or Linux application, without anyone's permission. But put an app onto the iPhone? That requires Apple's blessing.

There is one glaring loophole: anyone can create a web application, which any user can save as clickable application on their phone. But these web applications have limits - there are key capabilities of the phone that are not accessible to web applications. HTML 5 can introduce all the new application-like features it wants, but they will work only for web applications, and can't access key aspects of the phone with Apple's permission. And as we saw earlier this year with Apple's rejection of the Google Voice application, Apple isn't shy about blocking applications that it considers threatening to their core business, or that of their partners.

And now, of course, we see the latest salvo in the war against the accepted rules of interoperability on the web: Rupert Murdoch's threat to take the Wall Street Journal out of the Google search index. While most people have repeated the existing wisdom that to do so would be suicide for the Journal, a few contrarian observers have noted the leverage Murdoch holds. Mark Cuban argues that Twitter now trumps search engines when it comes to breaking news. Even more provocatively, Jason Calacanis suggested, a few weeks before Murdoch's announcement, that all big media companies need to do to cut Google off at the knees would be to block Google, while cutting an exclusive deal with Bing to be found only in Microsoft's search index.

Of course, Google wouldn't take that lying down, and would likely make its own exclusive deals, leading to a showdown that would make the browser wars of the 90s seem tame.

I'm not saying that News Corp and other mainstream media publications would adopt Jason's suggested strategy, or that it would work if they did, but it is becoming clear to me that we are heading into a bloody period of competition that could be extremely unfriendly to the interoperable web as we know it today.

If you've followed my thinking about Web 2.0 from the beginning, you know that I believe we are engaged in a long term project to build an internet operating system. (Check out the program for the first O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in 2002 (pdf).) In my talks over the years, I've argued that there are two models of operating system, which I have characterized as "One Ring to Rule Them All" and "Small Pieces Loosely Joined," with the latter represented by a routing map of the Internet.

The first is the winner-takes-all world that we saw with Microsoft Windows on the PC, a world that promises simplicity and ease of use, but ends up diminishing user and developer choice as the operating system provider.

The second is an operating system that works like the Internet itself, like the web, and like open source operating systems like Linux: a world that is admittedly less polished, less controlled, but one that is profoundly generative of new innovations because anyone can bring new ideas to the market without having to ask permission of anyone.

I've outlined a few of the ways that big players like Facebook, Apple, and News Corp are potentially breaking the "small pieces loosely joined" model of the Internet. But perhaps most threatening of all are the natural monopolies created by Web 2.0 network effects.

One of the points I've made repeatedly about Web 2.0 is that it is the design of systems that get better the more people use them, and that over time, such systems have a natural tendency towards monopoly.

And so we've grown used to a world with one dominant search engine, one dominant online encyclopedia, one dominant online retailer, one dominant auction site, one dominant online classified site, and we've been readying ourselves for one dominant social network.

But what happens when a company with one of these natural monopolies uses it to gain dominance in other, adjacent areas? I've been watching with a mixture of admiration and alarm as Google has taken their dominance in search and used it to take control of other, adjacent data-driven applications. I noted this first with speech recognition, but it's had the biggest business impact so far in location-based services.

A few weeks ago, Google offered free turn-by-turn directions for Android phones. This is awesome news for consumers, who previously could get this only in dedicated GPS devices or with high-priced iPhone apps. But it's also a sign just how competitive the web is getting, and just how powerful Google is getting, because they understand that "data is the Intel Inside" of the next generation of computer applications.

Nokia paid $8 billion for NavTeq, the leading provider of such turn-by-turn directions. GPS-maker TomTom paid $3.7 billion for TeleAtlas, the #2 provider in the market. Google quietly built an equivalent service, and is now giving it away for free -- but only to their own business partners. Everyone else still has to pay high fees to NavTeq and TeleAtlas. What's more, Google upped the ante by adding in such features as Street View.

Most interestingly, this move sets the stage for the future competition between Google and Apple. (Bill Gurley's analysis is an essential read.) Apple controls access to the dominant device of the mobile web; Google controls access to one of the most important mobile applications, and so far, is making it available for free only on Android. Google's prowess is not just in search, but in mapping, speech recognition, automated translation, and other applications driven by huge, intelligent databases that only a few providers can offer. Microsoft and Nokia control comparable assets, but they too are Apple competitors, and unlike Google, their business model depends on selling access to those assets, not giving them away for free.

It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we'll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we've enjoyed for the past two decades. But I'm betting that things are going to get ugly. We're heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it's more than that, it's a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

And it's time for developers to take a stand. If you don't want a repeat of the PC era, place your bets now on open systems. Don't wait till it's too late.

P.S. One prediction: Microsoft will emerge as a champion of the open web platform, supporting interoperable web services from many independent players, much as IBM emerged as the leading enterprise backer of Linux.

I'll be speaking on this topic in my keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York on Tuesday. I'll look forward to seeing many of you there.

Four short links: 6 November 2009

Barcode Scanning, Downloadable Community Book, Gov Hack Day, Android Kludges

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Red Laser -- "impossibly accurate barcode scanning". Uses Google Product Search to identify products that you scan using the camera on the phone. I remember Rael and I talking to Jeff Bezos about this years ago, before camphones had the resolution to decode barcodes. The future is here and it's $1.99 on the App Store ... (via Ed Corkery on Twitter)
2. The Art of Community For Free Download -- Jono Bacon's O'Reilly book on community management now available for free download (still available for purchase!).
3. Gov Hack -- Australian government ran a hack day with their open data, this is their writeup.
4. Android Mythbusters -- slides for talk by Matt Porter at Embedded Linux Conference Europe. A (long) catalogue of the kludges in Android.

Games Top the Charts in the iPhone and Android App Markets

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 2

While it might be true that the number of Book apps is growing at a faster rate, Games continue to dominate the list of popular U.S. iTunes Apps. Games accounted for about a fifth of all iTunes apps over the past week^†, but the category continued to have a disproportionate share of the Top 100 charts, accounting for 52% of the Top Grossing, 56% of the Top Paid, and 50% of the Top Free apps:

Since most Book apps are actually individual e-books, the Gaming category would have a hard time keeping up with the ever increasing number of Books. Once publishers figured out how to turn their titles into iPhone apps, the number of Book apps started growing faster than Games. Nevertheless Games continue to rule the Top 100 charts.

A similar story is playing out on the Android platform: the most popular Android apps are primarily Games. (In the Android taxonomy, most Books are in the Reference category.)

Returning to the top iPhone apps, the price of the Top Grossing apps stabilized somewhat last week. Except for the top decile (rank 1 through 10) for which the median price was about $7, the median price across the other deciles was around $5.

Over the last week, the Top Paid Games were slightly more expensive than apps that made the overall Top 100 Paid list. iPhone Game developers will tell you that (visually) compelling and engaging iPhone Games are far from trivial to design and market^††. So it's no surprise that the creators of the most popular Games are starting to charge a little more for their software.

(†) Data for this post was for the week ending 11/1/2009.
(††) First, designing for such a small screen poses a major challenge. Secondly, the sheer number of Game apps (close to 20K last week) makes it hard to create something that turns into a long-running top-seller.

Navigating the Future: Take Me to Bob

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 13

Google has just announced a free turn-by-turn navigation app for Android 2.0 in the US (Radar post). Google Maps Navigation relies on Google's own mapping for routing you. As with many navigation devices you can search Business Listings. However, they are also including data not traditionally available to navigators. In the promo video Google demonstrates that you can ask to be taken to "The King Tut exhibit". GMN will determine that it's in Golden Gate Park and route you. This is "because it is connected to the internet it is using all of the latest information on the internet."

This is huge. To be able to request implicit destinations based off of realtime information is something that has never been available before. What new queries will be available to us because of this? Google has a lot of data. How much of it can be assigned a location? Lots. There are millions of KML files out on the internet. Here are some of the useful queries

"Take me to Bob Smith" - If Bob is your friend on Latitude then Google Maps Navigation can take you to him. If Bob moves then GMN could even re-route you. I wonder if they will enable the chase scenario.

"Drop me off in time for the #48 bus" - Google knows the public transit schedule. So not only can it drop you off at the nearest stop, it could drop you off at the stop that will ensure the shortest multi-modal trip.

"Show me homes under 500K in Capitol Hill" - Via Google Base, Google has real estate information (it has had neighborhood data for quite sometime).

"Take me to my next appointment" - If you use Google Calendar and you accurately fill out the location field then this is a snap.

"Take me to the nearest Winter Coat Sale" - Using Adsense for Google Maps, GMN can easily lead you to local sales.

"Take me to the bar my friends go to the most" - Using Social Graph API and the new, experimental Social Search to tap into Foursquare, GMN can determine where you friends go, aggregate their destinations and lead you to their favorite watering hole.

"Take me to the largest event" - Using a combination of Latitude and its new access to the Twitter Firehose (which will soon include location - Radar post), Google can determine where people are.

"Take me on a tour of the top 10 historical sites here" - Using Wikipedia Google can determine what the sites are and where you should be taken. Alternately, Google could take you on user-generated tour.

"Take me to the most picturesque place near here" - Several years ago Google bought Panoramio, a location-based photo site. Google can determine which place nearby has had the most photos of it taken.

"Take me on a tour of the site from Around the World in 80 Days" - Google already geoparses many of the books it scans (just see this map). This routing is quite possible.

"Take me to the EPA's protected sites" - Government data is becoming more available. This is just one possible governmental query. You could also ask to go on a tour of TARP fund recipients or Democratic donors.

Obviously not all of them will be enabled, but I bet that within a year some of them will be. What other scenarios can or should they implement?

iPhone Killers, Blackberries and Chicken Parts

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 5

There is an unfortunate tendency to confuse delivering a bunch of 'chicken parts' with producing an actual living, breathing chicken.

MG Siegler, over at TechCrunch, has written an excellent article that shines a light on the cycle from hype to disappointment that goes with being dubbed an 'iPhone Killer.'

BlackBerry Storm, Palm Pre, the G2, and now Droid have all been touted as contenders to the mobile computing crown, yet the iPhone continues to kick butt.

No less, Apple has levered its market leadership position with iPhone (and the iPod Touch) to create a halo effect on the rest of its business, generating bottom line results that are industry-defining (see analysis of Apple's Q4 results HERE).

Meanwhile, conventional wisdom, shaped by the history of Apple vs Microsoft during the PC Wars, tells us that Android is 'destined' to be bigger than the iPhone worldwide.

And to be clear, would-be iPhone slayers are indeed establishing strategic positions that have the potential to become compelling and differentiated within the mobile market. Examples include:

• Android: We are more open than Apple;


• RIM: We are more enterprise-ready;


• Palm Pre: We are more web-native;


• Android, RIM, Nokia, et al: We are a heterogeneous device platform.

But, alas, there is a fly in the ointment. Many of the above solutions are at a functional stage where they still fail to deliver a 'more than the sum of the parts' experience - at a time when Apple is clicking on all cylinders from a product innovation and new product pipeline perspective.

(continue reading)

Four short links: 21 October 2009

Battlefield Android, DIY Leukemia Hacking, Localisation, Bus Pirates

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. Raytheon Sends Android to Battlefield -- Google's OS sees deployment. Using Android software tools, Raytheon ( RTN - news - people ) engineers built a basic application for military personnel that combines maps with a buddy list. [...] Every part of RATS is tailored for use on a battlefield. A soldier could make an unmanned plane a "buddy," for instance, and track its progress on a map using his phone. He could then access streaming video from the plane, giving him a bird's eye view of the area. Soldiers could also use the buddy list to trace the locations of other members of their squad. (via Jim Stogdill)
2. The Kanzius Machine (CBS News, video) -- inventor lost the race against leukemia, but his DIY RF therapy device is being developed "for real". (via Jim Stogdill)
3. Lost in Translation -- Will Shipley shows how to handle internationalisation and localisation. In this post I'm going to explain to you what internationalization and localization are, how Apple's tools handle them by default, and the huge flaws in Apple's approach. Then I'm going to provide you with the code and tools to do localization in a much, much easier way. Then you're going to think, 'That will never work, because of blah!' and I'm going to respond, as if I can read your mind or I've already had this argument with a dozen developers, 'It already did - I used these tools in Delicious Library and Delicious Library 2 and they've won three Apple Design Awards between them. (via migurski on Delicious)
4. The Bus Pirate -- interfaces to a heap of embedded hardware. The ‘Bus Pirate’ is a universal bus interface that talks to most chips from a PC serial terminal, eliminating a ton of early prototyping effort when working with new or unknown chips (via joshua on Delicious)

Four short links: 13 August 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Under the Hood of App Inventor for Android -- regular readers know I'm a big fan of visual programming language Scratch, and apparently Google are too. They've got twelve university classes testing App Inventor for Android, a visual connect-the-bits programming environment for Android. University classes probably because one of the co-creators is Hal Abelson, coauthor of the definitive programming textbook. Also found online: the PR-type announcement, a Professor using it, and @AppInv (nothing juicy on Twitter--it looks like might be a channel for tech support for the students). (via Hacker News)
2. Google Web Optimizer Case Study (Four Hour Work Week) -- GWO manages A/B tests for you, with a lot of statistical analysis. It's a fascinating read to see how these should be done. Every equation may halve the readership of a book, but every table of numbers and relevancy analysis doubles the value of a post like this. (via Hacker News)
3. Opening Up The BBC's Natural History Archive -- the BBC are releasing programme segments and a whole lot of metadata around their programming. Audio and video segmented, tagged with DBpedia terms, and aggregated into a URI structure based on natural history concepts: species, habitats, adaptations, etc. Gorgeous!
4. Yahoo! Term Extraction API to Close -- Internally, both services share a backend data source that is closing down, so the publicly-facing YDN services will be closing as well. I think it's the most significant casualty of Y! outsourcing search to MSFT, as this API was used by a lot of projects. (via Simon Willison)

Four short links: 13 July 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. IDEO's Human Centered Design Toolkit -- methodology and toolkit for inspiring new solutions to difficult challenges within communities of need. Full PDF of manual and cards available for free download.
2. Bentham and the Privacy of the Grave -- [M]uch of what Bentham meant to address in the context of his Panoptic structures we now take for granted. In Bentham’s lifetime, Parliamentary deliberations were confidential. Bentham’s arguments forced them into the sunlight. Legal decisions and statute books were accessible only to lawyers and judges. Bentham’s arguments led to codification of the law, and increasingly accessible legal rules. Bentham was far ahead of his time — the first modern information theorist. The idea that all actions of government would be presumptively available for public review did not become part of U.S. law until the passage of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 1967. As we speak, it appears the English parliament is only now learning Bentham’s message about publicity. Bentham was an early transparency advocate, economist, and character. I first read of him in the excellent A Brief History of Economics: Artful Approaches to the Dismal Science. (via carlmalamud on Twitter)
3. Curated Twitter Feed for Projecting Over Speakers -- Guardian developed it for their "Activate Summit" and it's since been used in two other events. They've open sourced it.
4. Android Market Problems -- take heed, all ye who would build "the iPhone App Store of ...", it's not easy to deliver a great customer experience.

Apple, the Boomer Tablet and the Matrix

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 47

I have written here, here and here about Apple’s inevitable assault on the Tablet market. What I hadn’t factored until recently is how symbiotic such a device would be for Baby Boomers.

Why Baby Boomers? Well, for the same two reasons that this demographic is unlikely to embrace the palm-sized iPhone en masse.

One, such a bookish-sized tablet device – I’ll call it the Boomer Tablet – would be tailor-made for home Wi-Fi setups, thereby obviating the mobile access costs associated with iPhone, a significant barrier for a generation that is programmed to keep mobile bills within a tight spending range.

Two, because a larger-form factor device would offer Boomers a bigger viewing screen and “lifestyle” settings, like fatter keys and a more forgiving keyboard to ease input, and wizard-like shortcuts to simplify recurring tasks.

This is key, because with the onset of age, Boomers’ motor skills have become less precise; their vision has become poorer; and their eyes get tired easier.

As such, the premise of them plugging away on tiny keys and peering into the tiny screen of a mobile device like iPhone/iPod touch is a non-starter.

By contrast, the Boomer Tablet offers a superior input, viewing and playback environment for accessing your iTunes library, personal media, syndicated content services, iPhone Apps and presumably, Mac Apps; something that the 70M+ Baby Boomers in the US who are aged 53-73 would likely find compelling.

Moreover, if Apple put a video camera in the device – not a stretch since they are doing it in the iPhone GS – it could make video conferencing and VOIP ubiquitous in a relatively short time (Skype already has a client for the iPhone/iPod touch). What better way to stay connected to distant loved ones?

As alluded to above, it seems logical that the Boomer Tablet would either run legacy Macintosh applications in an unmodified fashion, or perhaps support a new kind of ‘port-able’ Mac App built around the Cocoa programming framework and powered by Apple’s forthcoming OS X upgrade, Snow Leopard.

What I am envisioning is a runtime layer designed to offer formal convergence and partitioning paths between iPhone and Mac systems, enabling application builders to make runtime design tradeoffs relative to a coming Hardware Matrix of Apple device form-factors, a topic which I will get to in a bit.

Contenders to the Boomer Tablet Throne

Before I ponder the Hardware Matrix, let's first look at the contenders to the Boomer Tablet market segment. It really underscores the richness and fertile nature of this market, while providing a window into the strategies of three really great companies (if interested, check out my post ‘Built to Thrive - The Standard Bearers’ on Google, Apple and Amazon):

Amazon Kindle Wireless Reading Device: Amazon has built a physical device that is focused on doing one job really well – reading e-books. Moreover, Kindle leverages their strong position with print publishers, and of note, Amazon has shown device-neutrality by coming out with a software-only version of the Kindle. (I am currently reading ‘Married to the Mouse’ on my iPod touch. It delivers a solid user experience.)

This Switzerland-like positioning suggests that in the long run, the hardware version of Kindle may be more about Amazon jump-starting the e-book market than aspiring to be a hardware player.

That said, Amazon certainly has the assets (Marketplace, Media Relationships, Cloud Services, Associates) and market credibility if they ever wanted to position themselves as the more open alternative to the iPhone Platform.

Google Android Netbook: In Android, Google has built an open source OS, Middleware stack and SDK for building next-generation mobile devices.

Moreover, Google has a decent track record of cultivating ecosystems through open APIs, product evolution and stick-to-itiveness.

While a primary thrust of Android is outflanking the iPhone gauntlet, a logical fork is the high volume, low-margin Netbook segment, where Google assets like Search, Maps, Apps, Analytics and the forthcoming Wave unified messaging platform could leverage their Chrome browser to collapse the boundaries between desktop, web and mobile realms.

Moreover, as an open platform, Android has the potential to nurture a hobbyist device market around robotics, information devices and kit builders (see my post on Maker Faire for more detail on this topic).

iPhone/iPod touch: The numbers speak for themselves (40M devices, 1B downloads, 50K apps). But, beyond the numbers, iPhone Platform is a game-changing system from a development, distribution, monetization and user perspective, a conclusion supported by my own direct experience – having written 20+ articles on the iPhone Platform; owning an iPod touch; talking to a ton of iPhone App developers; building an iPhone optimized web application (Twiddeo.com) and working with another iPhone based startup (SquareConnect).

As noted earlier, the main downside to the current iPhone/iPod touch, relative to the Boomer segment is the relatively small form-factor.

Needless to say, a bigger form-factor would obviate these limitations, while having the built in leverage of the iPhone Ecosystem.

The Hardware Matrix: LCD v. HCD

Take this one to the bank: the Hardware Matrix is coming.

What is the Matrix? Envision a world where the Mac, Apple TV, iPhone, iPod touch, Boomer Tablet and iPhone Nano (rumored), respectively, all leverage a common SDK, plug into the App Store and integrate with Mobile Me (in addition to iTunes), and you understand that this implies all sorts of hardware abstraction decisions.

No less, this implies Apple partitioning the platform that supports these form-factors between device-specific functions, open Mac-like layers (i.e., download apps from anywhere, build any kind of apps), and managed/closed iPhone-like runtime layers (App Store is THE marketplace with a singular SDK, formal APIs, and Apple GOVERNANCE policies).

Simply put, the Matrix presents a potential hornet's nest of technical, user experience and ecosystem decision, and as such this is Apple’s biggest Achilles heel in the next few quarters; namely, how they execute forking (and no less important, de-forking) between form-factors.

Connecting the dots, I believe that Snow Leopard is the conduit OS where these things converge, but that's a total guess, based on the assumption that derivative form-factors are a given; that App Store and iPhone SDK are the best practices approach with the biggest developer ecosystem; and that Apple's best way to win in the Mobile Broadband Era is by making their products work together in a more than the sum of the parts fashion around a common Mac OS X.

And as Cocoa has won out as the programming and human interface model for Apple going forward, they have to already be preparing for this fork.

Why not then grease the skids for all of those iPhone App developers to suddenly wake up one morning and realize that they can sell into the Mac market with very little extra work? Wouldn’t that be a nice upside surprise?

At the same time, you can see how realization of this path brings with it all sorts of lowest common denominator vs. highest common divisor trade-offs, which is why it’s such an Achilles Heel; albeit one with tremendous upside.

Case in point, a recent post by The Silicon Alley Insider looks at how hardware differences between 3G and 3GS will potentially splinter the App Store.

This is why I would say to anyone who wonders why Apple hasn’t jumped into the Tablet/Netbook market yet that it’s because there is a LOT of work to get it right in terms of navigating the Matrix, let alone getting the user experience right.

As to the end game, John Gruber of Daring Fireball described it best in his 'WWDC 2009 Wrap-Up':

The technical keynote has for as long as I can remember been titled "Mac OS X State of the Union." This year the title changed to "Core OS State of the Union."

Hence the symbiosis: Apple now has two full-fledged developer platforms, Mac OS X and iPhone OS, derived from one core system…But look at their vectors — their relative rates of growth — and ponder how much longer until WWDC begins to feel like an iPhone developer conference with a Mac developer track. My answer: next year.

With Apple, once exclusively the Mac Company, the only constant is change.

Related Posts

1. Start in the Middle: The "Jobs,""Outcomes" and "Constraints" Innovation Model
2. Apple, TV and the Smart Connected Living Room
3. iPhones, App Stores and Ecosystems
4. Is the iPhone Platform Destined to Disrupt the Packaged Software Industry?
5. Analysis: Apple WWDC Keynote - Punishing the Wizard, Part Two

Scripting Comes to Android

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 12

Google is bringing scripts to Android. The Android Scripting Environment (ASE) will make development accessible and easy for devs who don't want to build a full-fledge application. As Google provides these details:

Scripts can be run interactively in a terminal, started as a long running service, or started via Locale. Python, Lua and BeanShell are currently supported, and we're planning to add Ruby and JavaScript support, as well.

These scripts can:

Handle intents
Start activities
Make phone calls
Send text messages
Scan bar codes
Poll location and sensor data
Use text-to-speech (TTS)
And more

The ASE will greatly increase the customizability of Android phones. This is one of the more interesting developments I have seen for mobile apps. I hope that the Market supports trading scripts. The ASE is not in the Market yet, but you can download it from its project page.

Via Hacker News

Update: Via Matt Cutts, a 6 line Python script that scans book barcodes:

import android
droid = android.Android()
code = droid.scanBarcode()
isbn = int(code['result']['SCAN_RESULT'])
url = “http://books.google.com?q=%d” % isbn
droid.startActivity(’android.intent.action.VIEW’, url)

ASE is going to be very powerful.

Four short links: 31 Mar 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

Web traffic, web design, hacker spaces, and feature spaces:

1. iPhone and Android Make Up 50% of Google's SmartPhone Traffic Worldwide -- Matt Gross found this interesting tidbit in a TechCrunchIT story.
2. Refining Data Tables -- Luke Wroblewski gives some seriously good tips for designing usable tables in web pages. After forms, data tables are likely the next most ubiquitous interface element designers create when constructing Web applications. Users often need to add, edit, delete, search for, and browse through lists of people, places, or things within Web applications. As a result, the design of tables plays a crucial role in such an application’s overall usefulness and usability. But just like the design of forms, there’s more than one way to design tabular data. (via migurski's delicious stream)
3. Hacker Spaces (Wired) -- "It's almost a Fight Club for nerds," says Nick Bilton of his hacker space, NYC Resistor in Brooklyn, New York. is the must-have quote, but the guts of the article is "In our society there's a real dearth of community," Altman says. "The internet is a way for people to key in to that need, but it's so inadequate. [At hacker spaces], people get a little taste of that community and they just want more."
4. Related Document Discovery Without Algebra -- latent semantic analysis has some scary math, but If the feature space (e.g. the terms/concepts associated to your documents) is small enough, and you make sure synonymy is not a problem, you can do without algebra. One such case is that of your blog postings and their tags. Includes Ruby code. (via joshua's delicious stream)

Four short links: 30 Mar 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

A great free book, dead newspaper dig, movie Torrent wakeup, and money from free:

1. Digital Foundations with Adobe Illustrator -- CC-licensed book that gets you started using Adobe Illustrator. I'm loving it, and I have the artistic ability of a particularly philistine rock. See also their advice to authors on how to negotiate a Creative Commons license. (via bjepson's delicious stream)
2. How to Become a Death Of Newspapers Blogger -- tongue-in-cheek dig at the recent imminent deaths of newspapers being predicted. Point taken about how unproductive these are: The point's not to fix anything. It's to describe the problem more dramatically than the next guy. If Steve Outing says newspapers have a "death spiral" and Clay Shirky predicts "a bloodbath," the point goes to Shirky. Basically, imagine a group of people watching a building burn down and bickering amongst themselves about whether it's a conflagration or an inferno. It's like that, but with consulting fees. (via migurski's delicious stream)
3. BarTor, Android BitTorrent with a Twist -- take a picture of a DVD's barcode, it looks up the movie, and sends the torrent file to your desktop to be automatically downloaded. NetFlix should have a legit form of this. If iTunes Movie Store had it, you could have racks of "DVDs" in stores that you could browse and snap to "buy" (giving a cut to the store). This feels monumental.
4. Survey of Free Business Models Online -- an interesting breakdown of ways to make money from "free" on the web. (via glynn moody)

Four short links: 26 Jan 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

Pledges, phone, fake brains, and real brains. All here on your Monday dose of four short links:

1. Ada Lovelace Day - Suw Charman has kicked off a day of blogging about women in technology in honour of one of the greatest, Ada Lovelace. Of course, you should also feel free to blog about women in technology on days that aren't 24 March.
2. Get Multitouch Support on Your T-Mobile G1 Today - developer Luke Hutchison added multitouch support to his phone's operating system. It doesn't suddenly make the phone's apps work like an iPhone's but it's a hell of a testament to the utility of an open source operating system.
3. OCR and Neural Nets in Javascript - jQuery creator, John Resig, analyzes the Greasemonkey script that uses a neural network to solve one site's captchas. As John points out, the site's captchas aren't distorted, but it's nonetheless a sexy hack.
4. WSJ Recommends Four Books on Irrational Decision Making - the four books are Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Judgement Under Uncertainty, How We Know What Isn't So, and Predictably Irrational. (via Mind Hacks blog)

Apple Drops iPhone NDA

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 11

Apple has dropped the NDA covering the iPhone SDK. Developers will now be able to discuss how they develop for the iPhone. This was one of the biggest complaints developers (and technical publishers) had about developing for the platform. Apple posted the following message.

We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software.

We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.

However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released.

Thanks to everyone who provided us constructive feedback on this matter.

This is great news. I look forward to the many online tutorials, events (like our own iPhoneLive) and books (like the Prag's) that will bloom.

I am sure that the developer excitement around open-source and not-NDA'd Android was a factor in the decision making. Hopefully, Apple will listen to more constructive feedback (such as the latest Engadget Cares essay) and start letting apps of all type, even those that compete with their own, be released on the iPhone platform.

(Image courtesy of Jonathan Roher)

Apple's restrictions mean more jailbreaking & Android adoption

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 2

When Apple announced the iPhone SDK last year I said:

[...] Jobs makes it clear that the platform won't be completely open. While he says that this is to balance the benefits of an open platform with user security protection, it's unclear where Apple will draw those lines. Will there be a Skype client? Third-party media apps?

It would have been better if Apple had announced [the details] when it released the iPhone. I'm hopeful that Apple will now embrace the existing iPhone developer community, and won't use “security” as a way to keep potential competitors off its platform.

Almost a year later Apple is using their control of the App store to block innovative developers from reaching their customers. The most recent example is the "Podcaster" iPhone app which allows you to download and manage podcasts on the iPhone directly, without having to boot your computer to sync in iTunes.

According to the developer, Apple blocked this application from the App store, saying:

Since Podcaster assists in the distribution of podcasts, it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes.

If you want to build a platform, you have to compete fairly with the developers on your platform (if you must to compete at all). By restricting developers, Apple is stifling innovation and their long-term growth. Frustrated customers and developers who "think different" are Jailbreaking their iPhones and getting excited about Google's Android.

Remember: Successful platforms create more value than they capture.

Update: Apple is apparently responding to the backlash by prohibiting discussion of the Apple's rejection letters with an NDA.

Microsoft Missing the Boat on Mobile?

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 19

Yesterday's Microsoft Watch had an incisive article about Microsoft's failure to compete in the mobile phone marketplace. Echoing my own assertions that Microsoft's obsessive focus on competition with Google in search is a massive distraction, while open mobile is Google's most strategic initiative, Joe Wilcox notes:

Microsoft must change its priorities. The company has wasted too much time chasing Google in search. The search wars are over, and Google won. Microsoft must accept this. Where Microsoft should have been pushing hard is the device category where search will be the killer application: the cell phone.

Instead, Windows Mobile has fallen way behind competing products. Windows Mobile is a mess. The user interface is too complicated, and there are few—I say no—capabilities that distinguish it from other mobile operating systems....

It's time for Microsoft to launch a mobile Manhattan Project, something on the scale of Internet Explorer in 1996. If Microsoft cedes the mobile market to Apple and Google, the PC will be the software giant's final—and declining—legacy...

The mobile market has dramatically changed over the last 12-15 months. But Windows Mobile hasn't moved with it. Apple's iPhone is exciting and has raised end user expectations about mobile user interfaces. Apple's iPhone platform has huge potential to woo developers, too, mainly because of the App store.

Now along comes Google, carrying two nuclear missiles: Android and Chrome. Both are immediate problems for Microsoft. Let me be absolutely clear: Chrome is not a Web browser, it's an application runtime. Chrome is really Google Gears with a browser facade. Sure, Chrome is based on Webkit and has browser legacy, but the product's core capabilities—and Google's objectives for them—is running Web applications. Chrome is a development platform, but in the cloud instead of on the PC.

Implicit in the argument is that while both Google and Microsoft are subsidizing their mobile initiatives with cash from their core businesses, in Google's case, succeeding on mobile is aligned with and strengthens their core revenue stream in search, while in Microsoft's, it competes and undercuts their core revenue in operating systems. This becomes clear when Joe turns his mind to lightweight laptops:

Microsoft's problem isn't just mobile phones. The next-generation PCs aren't big, they're small. Yesterday I was looking at the pink MSI Wind Netbook and thought it would be a perfect Web application computer. "Net" is in the name for a reason.

Microsoft's Windows Vista is a fiasco that just keeps on giving trouble. I'm not one of the Vista haters, but that doesn't mean I don't recognize its foibles. The biggest: Vista demands too much hardware at a time when the market has shifted to lower-powered notebooks and now netbooks and ultra-low-cost PCs. The latter two really can't run Windows Vista, which is why Microsoft has licensed Windows XP Home for them.

Microsoft had to do something. The company couldn't abandon the emerging netbook and ultra-low-cost PC markets to Linux, so it licensed Windows XP Home for these devices. Now Google comes along with Chrome, which is more application runtime than Web browser. Chrome should run just fine on netbooks running XP Home, even with the resources consumed by each tab operating as a single process.

What do you bet that Microsoft comes up with a new "improved" release of XP Home that has features deliberately designed to block Chrome? This is, after all, what they did against Netscape in 1996, with Windows NT Workstation allowing no more than 10 TCP/IP connections so that it couldn't be used with Netscape web servers.

But this kind of backward-looking, defensive competition doesn't do more than buy you time. Yes, Microsoft killed Netscape, but they missed the deeper, stronger competition that would come from true web applications like Google. The future is not like the past, and any strategy that is designed to protect the past will eventually fail.

What's so ironic is that if Microsoft started thinking about the user again, instead of thinking about protecting their business, they could do great things. There are many problems yet to be solved in online software, but they won't be solved without bold leaps into the future.

Developer Interest in the iPhone, Android, and Symbian

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 22

With several hundred applications now available in the iTunes App store, I decided to consider alternate ways of gauging interest in the platform. Using MarkMail, one can quickly scan thousands of mailing lists and restrict the results to those related to software development. Based on the number of posts to (MarkMail) mailing lists, Linux-based alternatives generate considerably more email chatter than the iPhone:

Staying with the previous metric (posts to mailing lists), there does seem to be growing interest in the iPhone among developers. Since the launch of Android (November 2007), the number of iPhone related messages has grown at a faster rate than those for its competitors:

Other online tools suggest growth in the number of job postings that mention the iPhone. But while a majority of the most recent iPhone related job postings were posted by Apple (making the recent growth in job postings less impressive), Android jobs postings came mostly from outside Google.

For now the launch of the iPhone puts the spotlight on Apple's App store and platform. The reality is that the mobile landscape is evolving rapidly and with Android yet to launch, the previous numbers will change dramatically over the next months. We will continue to monitor developer interest in the different mobile platforms using a variety of indicators.

Yet another option lurks, one already familiar to web developers and users. At last weekend's Foo camp, I attended a session on the mobile web and left convinced that with access to the right hooks into mobile devices, web developers can deliver equally cool apps through mobile browsers. Which mobile platform are you most excited about?