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.

Now that the iPhone 3.0 software is introduced, its time to start dreaming about what the next hardware might bring. My assumption at this point is that Apple is going to refresh the hardware every summer, and that if they do a good enough job that I (and tons of other suckers) are just going to buy the new one every year like clockwork.

So given that I’m overall pretty happy with my iPhone, certainly more happy than I have been with any phone 9 months into ownership, what are the top things I would improve?

• 64GB storage. 32GB seems like an easy bet given that there is an iPod Touch with it, but with USB drives out in the market with 64GB, is a 64GB option too much to ask? The fear is it would push the price point out to $399 (64GB USB drives are still a bit more than $100 right now). My 16GB has done pretty well so far, but I’m starting to push on its limits.
• Better wireless circuitry. Of course its hard to tell how much is AT&T, how much is the phone hardware, and how much is software issues, but it certainly feels like I occasionally have a harder time connecting, especially for data connections than makes sense.
• Better GPS. It seems like the micro GPS chips have been improving rapidly and having a GPS chip that syncs faster would be very nice.
• Better camera. I find myself taking a surprising number of photos using my phone now since I always forget my camera. Its actually not that bad for a “paste a quick snap on Facebook” scenario, but 4-5MP and less grainy would be really nice.
• Standard USB port for charging. This one I assume I’m not going to get unless the pressure from the EU forces them into it, but being able to use a standard micro-USB port to charge the thing would be great.

Given that you pay almost $1000/year for service, Apple really does have a good business model on their hands if they can come out with an incrementally better device every summer for $299. Just with normal wear it can make sense to get a new one every year or two and Apple needs to keep pushing just enough improvements to get people into the new model. The 3g refresh last summer appears to have done the trick for most people, and frankly if they can do 3 out of the 5 things above, it will be a pretty easy decision for me.

Some progress finally-The New York Times is reporting that the NY Attorney General is investigating the A.I.G. contracts with employees-

“In his letter, sent to Edward M. Liddy, A.I.G.’s government-appointed chief executive, Mr. Cuomo said that he has investigated the insurance company’s compensation plan since last fall. The attorney general is seeking the list of employees who will receive these bonuses, as well as their job information and performances. Mr. Cuomo said that the company had failed to heed a previous request for this list.

He is also demanding the contracts guaranteeing these bonuses and the names of individuals who developed and negotiated the agreements.”

Innovative new TV remote control featured on CNET.

Various blogs are all in an uproar over the Kindle iPhone app and whether this is a good idea or not. I’m going to come down on the “very good idea” side and say that this makes me more likely to get a Kindle (and more importantly invest in the Kindle eco-system by buying some content).

The big issue for me is the profusion of devices. I don’t want to carry around a phone, a music player, a book reader and a laptop. One of the things I really like about my iPhone is that it acts as a good music player so I can just carry one device.

Having said that the form factor of a given device isn’t perfect for every situation. I downloaded the Kindle app to my phone and tried it out and it was very well done (I got the sample first chapter of the new Neil Stephenson book), but it seemed like it would be a painful way to read a whole book. The key thing is that the iPhone app and device both sync the same books and can share the place you left off reading + bookmarks. So if I were to buy a Kindle device I’d end up of course getting content for it, but if I left it behind I could still do a little light reading from anywhere which is a really cool scenario.

The other angle behind giving away the software of course is that Amazon is presumably more motivated by getting people to invest in their content than in selling the actual devices. Apple has done an amazing job getting their device COGS down so that they make a profit off $199 iPhones, but Amazon is much newer to the hardware space and were at least implying that they can’t sell for much more than the $359 without losing money. But it doesn’t take that many $10 digital books to turn into real money and if their free iPhone app gets you to spend a bunch of money and locks you into your Amazon digital library, they win too. From that perspective it would make sense for them to make a PC version too- if I could read real books on a normal Windows tablet that would probably push me over the edge for sure.