Alex Hopmann’s Blog

It will be interesting to see how things work out with the new in-app purchases and all. I think there is a certain amount of fear that the whole app market is going to turn into a bunch of semi-scams where every app author tries to constantly squeeze more money out of people. Part of the biggest danger is that app updates which I tend to just do automatically can regress functionality.

One of my favorite casual iPhone games is FlightControl. I think it cost $0.99 and its simple, easy to pick up for a few minutes while waiting for a bus or something. I noticed a week or two ago that there was multiple levels in the game- you could switch the map and try out other environments. Now that appears to be gone- probably something that looked like a routine update removed it and I fear its going to be back later as an extra charge…

I got a new iPhone 3GS today (actually Kat got it, but is letting me have the new one while she gets my old one that isn’t eligable for an upgrade yet). They were warning that the activation is taking forever but after we were home and an hour later it still wasn’t activated.

The LA Times blog had some advice to turn the phone off and back on. I gave it a try and 2 minutes later it activated right away.

I’ve got to say, this year’s iPhone release madness was much better than the past. The lame upgrade policies (even the recently ammended ones) suck- I do expect that for my $1000 a year in service + $299 a year I should be able to get a new phone every year. But the reservation process was great and even at 3:30pm I was able to walk into the store, after a 2 minute wait someone took me in, they grabbed the box and it was all very smooth. I’m especially impressed that even on the most busy day of the year they still had things worked out enough that someone was able to notice us puzzling over the display of protective cases, approach us and helpfully suggest a few models, unbox them for us to try out and all. The Apple Store continues to the the retail gold-standard.

Uploading any files more than a few hundred K from a browser has been a problem for years. The UI available in the browser is very limited and relying on a single HTTP request that might take minutes or hours (and that you have to start over from scratch if it fails) often turns into a huge source of user frustration. There is also an extra flaw in that the TCP connection can fail before the whole file is transmitted but depending on the circumstances the server might not be able to tell if the whole file was actually received. There are a bunch of sites that use various ActiveX or Java controls but those have typically been a pain to install and/or flakey.

I just discovered that Silverlight can be used to create much more functional upload controls. Here is one for example in the Codeplex Code library. Granted, users need to have Silverlight already installed, but once they do it becomes much easier to have a good user interface, while having the actual process send chunks of the file that can be resumed if any piece fails, etc. Combine that with the Azure Blob chunked-PUT mechanism and you can build a very robust storage mechanism right in the browser. I’m looking forward to trying it out.

One last thought- it would be useful to define a standard protocol for uploading content in chunks (and yes, this is distinct from an HTTP PUT/POST with chunked encoding). Something along the lines of what the Azure Blob store does but defined as a standard that various controls and services can all interoperate.

Coding Horror has a post highly recommending the new book “Regular Expressions Cookbook”. Now, I have mixed feelings about regular expressions and get concerned when I see them since they are often overused and when misused can result in code that is very hard to understand and debug. Having said that, when used in the right situation they can be a perfect solution to otherwise complicated text parsing & validation. But the art of creating them is often a lot of voodoo, so a book that has good reference materials and examples would be very helpful. I’ll report on this one next week after I have a chance to look through it a bit.

As an old HTTP guy I often get nervous about new services. They tend to violate all sorts of key HTTP architecture concepts and just take advantage of the flexibility to do whatever.

I’ve been really happy to see that the Azure Blob storage actually gets this stuff right. They have valid REST semantics with a good URL namespace, support GET and PUT with the right kind of range headers, etag and conditional operation support. They have a smart design for uploading a large blob in multiple pieces (which works around one of the bigger flaws in the older WebDAV support), and all. Anyway, its great to see a team do all their homework and get these details right- I suspect this will really payoff over the long lifespan of a service as it fits in cleanly with rest of the web services world. (note- I’m not saying other competing products aren’t also doing these things right, I haven’t researched those details lately).

Tom’s Hardware has a write up on BPOS (the Business Productivity Online Suite) that includes the SharePoint Online stuff that I’m working on.