John Topley’s Weblog

After nearly six months of waiting, the day is finally here. All across the United States people are getting ready to put down at least five hundred Dollars in an Apple or AT&T store for the privilege of owning an Apple iPhone. Some of those people are so eager to get one that they’ve been waiting in lines since Monday. Are they mad? Quite probably. Are there more important things in the world than a new mobile phone, even if it is the first one Designed by Apple in California? Definitely. However, to dismiss the iPhone phenomenon as calculated and viral hyperbole is to miss the opportunity to revel in its glorious design and detailing. The iPhone is the finest expression yet of Steve Jobs’ great taste and Apple’s talented team of industrial designers led by Jonathan Ive.

People are excited by this phone. I’m excited by this phone dammit, even though mobile phones are one of the few gadgets that usually leave me cold, and even though I can’t even buy one in the continent where I live! The level of interest that’s been shown towards the iPhone just shows how inspired people get when someone finally goes to the trouble of doing things properly. The hardware and software fit together beautifully in a way that’s definitely not been seen before on a mobile phone.

Over the past few weeks, those of us who have been watching have learned more and more about the iPhone. Delicious little details have been revealed through adverts and informational videos posted on Apple’s website. Earlier this week, the first reviews came in and have more or less confirmed that the facts Apple have presented to us about the iPhone are all true. Undoubtedly AT&T’s EDGE network is hopeless for data transfer and everyone seems to be agreed that this is the most serious shortcoming of the iPhone. Hey, I never said it was perfect! It seems inconceivable that Apple won’t bring out a future version of the phone with 3G and that they won’t address the other shortcomings that have been widely mentioned, such as the lack of a proper SDK. Remember, this is version one of an entirely new product in an entirely new market for Apple, one that’s been years in development. They had to stop work and get it out of the door at some point.

I recently bought a Motorola RAZR which is a fine phone in many ways, deservedly popular and undoubtedly the best out of the three mobile phones that I’ve ever owned. I love the slimness of it and the one-piece keyboard that looks like it’s been machined out of metal. The battery goes on and on and on. The phone’s software is where it falls down though. It’s not terrible, I’ve found my way around it easily enough and can do everything I need to do. There are lots of little quirks though and features that I just don’t really understand. That means that I don’t feel entirely in control of it, which is not good for something I’ve paid money to own.

Let me give you an example of one of these quirks. When I’m sending a text message I press the soft key under Send To and get a list of my contacts. So far so good. Next, I scroll to the contact I want and press the same soft key which now represents Send. Only it doesn’t work because I first have to click the button in the centre of the cursor keys to select the contact before I can send them my message. In other words, the user interface for sending text messages is optimised for the send to multiple contacts use case. It works great for this, only that’s something I never do. In fact, I can’t think of a single occasion when I’ve sent a text message to more than one person at the same time.

There are some features on my RAZR whereby I haven’t a clue what they are, or if I do have an idea then I don’t know how to use them, and that means I’m afraid to find out in case I can’t undo whatever it is I just did. I’ve even looked in the instruction booklet, but that just gives you the steps needed to access the feature without telling you what it actually is. Here’s a brief list of bafflers:

• Show ID/Hide ID - whose ID?
• Add Digits - what digits am I adding and to what?
• Talk then Fax - how?
• Notepad - something to do with phone numbers
• Info Services
• Cleanup Messages - how does it choose which messages to clean up?
• DTMF: Long

—It’s enough to turn even the most ardent technophile into a technophobe! The difference with the iPhone is that if I were to somehow find one lying about then I know that I could pick it up and use all of its features straight away. Based on watching Apple’s videos, there’s not a single aspect to the phone that looks awkward or difficult to use. Everything seems obvious and natural and as it should be.

As I said before, there are no dark crevices. You get to this happy position by obsessing over the details again and again and again until they’re right and until they make sense. Sadly, only Apple seem to be doing that at the moment. They’ve even thought about the experience of buying the iPhone. You pick one up, pay for it, take it home and then activate it on your computer through iTunes. What you don’t have to do is spend twenty minutes sat with some dodgy acne-ridden youth who was the first to accost you as you stepped over the threshold and into the store. Sat bored whilst he takes you through the phone’s features and sets it up, all whilst smearing your new purchase with his sweaty fingerprints! Seriously, everyone has to earn a living but it’s great that Apple have eliminated another completely unnecessary part of the mobile phone experience along with crap usability.

Happy iPhone Day everyone. The Mobile Phone for the Rest of Us is here. Regardless of whether you’ve been queuing for days to be amongst the first to buy one, or if you’ve vowed never to go anywhere near one, its impact will be felt across the industry. Now we can all look forward to better mobile phones.

I was born too late for the Apollo era. If I could choose to observe any momentous moment in history, then I wouldn’t choose to see the invention of the wheel because we don’t know when it was invented or by whom. There probably wasn’t much to see anyway—some guy discovering that you can more easily roll a round rock than a square one. Viewing the Big Bang is out because I think even the TARDIS would struggle with the physics of being present at the creation of everything without getting sucked into it all. No, I’d choose to go back to July 1969 to witness the culmination of eight years of incredible effort with the first moon landing. I really can’t think of anything more significant that Mankind has achieved.

Sadly it looks like the closest I’m going to get is via third-party sources such as books and DVDs, although I do always enjoy seeing the Apollo 10 Command Module whenever I visit the Science Museum in London. I just stare and think about the fact that the strange-coloured small thing in front of me has actually travelled a quarter of a million miles and orbited the moon. It looks primitive when you see it for real, with its thick copper-coloured exterior and big bolts that give it the look of a piece of heavy engineering from Victorian times. That tiny cramped capsule did the job though, and how.

I just bought a DVD of the excellent From the Earth to the Moon twelve part TV series that came out in 1998. Sort of following on from Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 film, it tells the story of various aspects of the Apollo space programme, from the tragedy of the loss of the Apollo 1 crew, to the Grumman engineers who gave seven years of their lives to the development of the Lunar Module. Like the Apollo 13 film, Tom Hanks is involved too, although he only briefly appears on-screen to give an introduction to each episode. He’s obviously a space nut and From the Earth to the Moon is great viewing if you have any sort of interest in that great endeavour of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Talking of Apollo, NASA are running a story on their website about how one of their teams have been inspecting the umbilical connection that supplied electricity and oxygen etc. from the Apollo Service Module to the Command Module. They’re looking at it to improve the design of the Orion spacecraft that will replace the Space Shuttle. The article says that they had difficulty finding an intact umbilical—it was normally severed before the CM returned to Earth—but that they got a break when they came across a family’s holiday photos on the Internet that showed an intact unit at the Saturn V complex in the Kennedy Space Centre. This worries me. A lot. Don’t NASA even have a list of the Command Modules that were built and where they ended up? Why not just work through the list until you’ve inspected all the surviving CSMs that are on Earth? It’s not like these things change hands on eBay. Isn’t leaving it to a chance encounter on the Internet a bit hit and miss?! And what about the original plans? Have NASA lost those?

The proposed design of the Orion spacecraft is strikingly similar to the Apollo CSM. It’s like the Space Shuttle never happened. I guess it shows just how much the people who worked on Apollo got right forty years ago. It makes sense to stick with things that are well understood when you’re risking people’s necks by sending them a quarter of a million miles to the moon. Of course, Orion will benefit from the significant technological advances that have been made in materials, computing and other areas and will be able to carry more astronauts.

I don’t know if Americans felt like they were being heavily taxed in the 1960s, but the United States has been a rich country since the end of the Second World War and I don’t think the ordinary folks of the time were crippled by high living costs. They were almost certainly paying a pittance for fuel compared to their European counterparts and still are in fact. The Apollo project was costing about 4% of the total federal budget, which sounds like a lot until you learn that the Vietnam War was costing about 12%. Somehow we can always find money for killing people.

It’s too early to say if Project Constellation is going to be a success. NASA’s last big idea of a low-cost, reusable space plane didn’t turn out to be a resounding success in either of those two objectives. The Space Shuttle now seems to be regarded as a failure and as not really having delivered much for the money. I’m sure there are many people who are closely involved who would strongly disagree, and I’d cite the Hubble space telescope alone as being worth the cost of admission, but my perception is that people are no longer interested in the Shuttle. Perhaps the tragic loss of two crews has tainted the whole endeavour forever. It’s a shame because I remember my seven year old self being excited by the Shuttle when it first flew in 1981.

Unfortunately flying about in Earth orbit doesn’t really capture the imagination of the general public, who when it comes to space exploration, are only ever going to be observers rather than participants. Apollo had that vision thing and at one stage NASA even had plans to use the mighty Saturn V for a manned flyby of Venus. You couldn’t say NASA were lacking in ambition at the time! However, the public got bored very quickly with the moon programme after the highs of Apollo 11. It took the near-disaster of Apollo 13 to re-awaken interest and show that this stuff is far from routine or ordinary.

George W Bush is no JFK and there’s no Cold War imperative to drive the project forward through seemingly impossible barriers. I do hope it works out. It would be really exciting to watch a moon landing sometime in the 2020s. Even though it’s been done before, there are a lot of us who weren’t around to see it first time around and who feel like we’ve missed out. Sometimes I just stare up at the moon and imagine seeing the Earth at the same scale from space. Or I stretch out an arm and hold my thumb up and imagine it obscuring the Earth and the whole of the rest of humanity. It’s easy to see why Apollo 8’s “Earthrise” photo is so affecting. We should go back to the moon and not stop this time. There are still so many things to do and learn there. Then let’s go to Mars.

I just got a skeletal Ruby on Rails application running on a Java Virtual Machine using JRuby:

—This is running on Windows XP which is running in a Parallels VM which is running on my Mac. To recap: it’s Ruby on Java on Windows on Mac OS X. Who could have predicted that a few years ago! Next steps: hook up a database and try to deploy a Rails application to a servlet engine. I think this could be very useful in future!

I absolutely love this spoof commercial from the Rails Envy guys, so I make no apologies for embedding it here in case you haven’t seen it yet!

I just noticed something that Flickr got exactly right—you don’t have to give photos a title. My process for using Flickr is usually:

1. Upload a batch of photos to my account, marked as private
2. Use the Organizr (did they drop that name?) to add the photos to a new set, or an existing one
3. Go through the new photos adding any individual tags as appropriate
4. Make the photos that aren’t really bad public and try to come up with a title

It’s that very last step that I find really increases the cognitive load; so much so that I often just give lots of photos the same title. I can’t quite bring myself to have public photos with titles like IMG_0970.JPG. I got to thinking that I never had to give physical photographs a title when I put them in an album, so why should Flickr make me do so? Then I tried it, found out that I don’t have to and smiled. Expect to see lots of anonymous photos in my Flickr photostream in future.

I was recently extolling the virtues of the Mac in a guest post on my friend John’s blog and I mentioned that you can buy a five-user Mac OS X family pack for the good-value price of £139. Well blow me if Apple haven’t gone and put the price right up. From Amazon UK:

—That’s a bit steep even for the Apple faithful who are used to reaching deep into their wallets. At that price even Windows Vista Ultimate starts to look like good value!

That got your attention, didn’t it? Maybe not deal of the century, but if you’re a UK-based Rails developer then you owe it to yourself to check out the PeepCode subscription packs. Given the current weak state of the dollar it would be rude not to. I’ve just bought a ten-pack which cost the princely sum of £36.69. That’s over ten hours of properly produced video with Geoffrey Grosenbach teaching you Ruby on Rails. It’s a little known fact that over 85% of the Web is now comprised of Rails sites that Geoffrey has developed.† This boy knows his beans!

To put it into perspective, £36.69 is about the price of a decent dinner for two at ASK/Zizzi/Pizza Express/Strada/your favourite authentic Italian restaurant chain. That’s shockingly good value for money. Don’t you think it’s time you put down that Fettucine and did some Test-Driven Development?

The PeepCode videos are also available for video iPods, so whilst all the losers on the bus are filling their empty heads with County & Western songs about a man named Clint whose dog left him for another woman, you can be sitting pretty on the back seat learning all the Rails ninja moves like REST, Capistrano and RJS. If that doesn’t get you the girls then you’re on your own, squire. Please note that I’m not affiliated with PeepCode in any way, I just call it how it is.

† The actual figure may be less.

Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer have just started a great new Ruby on Rails blog named Rails Envy. They’ve got off to a flying start with tutorials on the Rails page caching mechanism and using the Ferret text search engine from within a Rails app. One to watch!

Last week I had the pleasure of attending Carson Systems‘ annual Future of Web Applications conference in London. This two day conference and day of workshops has expanded significantly since the single day conference held last February (which I wasn’t able to attend). The Carson Systems crew did their usual superb job of organising the event and of attracting a good mixture of industry heavyweights and up-and-comings as speakers. Digg founder Kevin Rose was arguably the star draw, but there were also representatives from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Adobe, to name a few household names.

The conference was made even more enjoyable for me because my good friend John Conners joined me in casting a somewhat cynical and perhaps slightly jaded eye over some of the things that we were being asked to buy into during some of the presentations. The thing about John is that he actually worked at a startup for a number of years and was involved with the Web the first time around when it was still 1.0, so he knows what he’s talking about. At various points we felt like dragons in the Dragons’ Den, exclaiming ideas as ridiculous in the style of Duncan Bannatyne. It was a real blast sharing the FOWA experience with John and comparing notes and swapping stories.

Lots of people got upset because a technical hitch meant that there wasn’t any free wi-fi in the venue, but Ryan Carson explained the reasons why and apologised for this several times. It didn’t bother me, as I was there to pay attention to what was being said up on the stage rather than writing e-mails or the multitude of other distractions that the laptop-wielding majority seemed to find to occupy themselves with. The only time it was annoying was when some of the speakers were giving live demonstrations using the Internet and appealed to the audience to lay off the Internet connection for a bit to help the demo go smoothly. Unfortunately some people were so engrossed with their laptops that they obviously didn’t hear the request, with the result that the demo was spoiled for everyone. Never mind. I’m sure next year’s event will have the most amazing connectivity of any conference, ever!

Rather than dwell on the negative, I thought I’d run down what my highlights of FOWA 2007 were. These weren’t necessarily the best presentations or the things to look out for, they’re simply what I found the most interesting.

Day One

• Simon Wardley from Fotango gave a particularly inspired and entertaining ten minute presentation covering ducks, The Spice Girls, Tony Blair, the commoditisation of services and Zimki, which is an interesting server-side JavaScript platform. Worth keeping an eye on.
• Matthew Ogle and Anil-Bawa-Cavia talked about Last.fm which I must admit I hadn’t heard of prior to the conference. It turns out it’s only the world’s largest social music platform! They presented information on the building of their platform and the growing pains of moving from four people working in a flat to thirty people working in a proper office. What I found particularly interesting and what became something of a theme for this year, was the idea of getting users to spy on themselves—so-called myware—in order to generate attention data which software can use to do something interesting. Last.fm use it to serve their users a streaming radio station that’s completely customised to that user’s taste, amongst other things. It’s intriguing.
• Werner Vogels from Amazon plugged their S3 and EC2 computing services in an effective manner, in many ways following up on Simon Wardley’s point about the commoditisation of services. The point being that you don’t have to worry about (for example) building a storage infrastructure for your web application anymore—just pay to use S3 and let an Amazon-class company take care of all that hard stuff. There was a great moment when someone asked Werner where the data is physically located if you use S3. He answered that it’s replicated across several locations and that Amazon can afford to lose two entire data centres and not be affected! If losing one data centre might be considered careless then I don’t know what losing two is…

Day Two

• Adobe’s Make Anders made a great pitch for Adobe’s various Flash-based technologies and gave an impressive demo illustrating significant speed improvements in the forthcoming Flash player.
• Simon Willison explained what OpenID is and why you should be using it. Simon’s presentation was very fast-paced. I don’t know whether it’s because he was nervous or whether he’s like that anyway. I suspect the latter. Anyway, it was a thought-provoking talk and as a result of it I’m considering adding OpenID support to AssetsGraphed.
• PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf gave a very interesting and technical presentation covering some of the security problems that plague the Internet and also how to go about profiling a web application in order to improve its performance. He covered some really useful things and I know that John enjoyed this one in particular.
• Richard Moross and Stefan Magdalinski gave a good presentation all about their online printing business, MOO. I felt that Richard was a little stilted as he paused whilst he turned the page in his notes, but overall they carried it off. What really came across was how they have executed perfectly on their great idea of printing high quality business cards featuring images from online services such as Flickr. Like Apple they understand that their customers’ satisfaction is a gestalt of the entire product experience. In other words, it’s not just the product that’s important—it’s the packaging, it’s the little touches that delight, it’s the fact that they use recyclable paper from sustainable sources and that they package their products by hand to improve the quality, whilst paying a decent wage to the people who do the packing. All of which makes you feel good about buying from them. I’ve just sent off for a pack of complimentary MOO MiniCards and plan on placing a paid order soon.

Day Three

• The third day was an optional day of workshops. John and I attended Khoi Vinh’s morning session on designing using a grid-based layout. Although I’d read about this technique on Khoi’s blog, it was still great to hear it from the man himself. I particularly enjoyed the run through of grid-based designs throughout the years and also Khoi’s ground-up reworking of a couple of pages from a certain well-known site that begins with a “Y”. The results of which looked fantastic. I’m planning on redesigning the AssetsGraphed home page using a strict grid layout at some point, so watch out for that.
• Finally we came to the last session of FOWA 2007. We opted to hear Stefan Magdalinski talk in a lot more depth about all things MOO, which he was certainly able to do in an entertaining and informative manner. Stefan is full of amusing war stories from the various ventures he’s been involved with. We learned how it’s apparently impossible to buy thousands of pounds worth of servers at list price from Dell and also how Adobe’s PDF specification possibly doesn’t support right-to-left languages such as Arabic. I can’t actually think of anything that I might have wanted to know about MOO’s technical architecture and journey from development to successful launch that wasn’t covered. It was a great talk about a great company from a great guy.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what FOWA 2008 will have in store!