Glimpse of the future of content distribution

I've recently been testing a few new programs, specifically, Vienna, Xcast, Zudeo (which, since the download was labelled Azureus 3.0, I assume to be the successor to the latter) and Democracy.

I noticed that they fall along an interesting continuum, where Vienna is a fairly traditional, although nicely executed, newsreader, Xcast is more of a content manager (1), and Democracy - while managing podcasts, screencasts, and locally downloaded video (but not very well) - is really a content distribution tool. Finally, Zudeo makes no shame of its content distribution nature, and features both official and independent films and trailers, rated and ranked by viewers.


(1) Xcast is, and the author sort-of-admits this, somewhat similar to iTunes in its usage, and integrates with it very nicely, really just adding a few nice features to better manage your subscribed casts, and simultaneously manage ordinary RSS without "enclosures" (but I prefer NetNewsWire for this, the only shareware app for OS X so far that I have actually purchased). The quotation marks here indicate that I feel the word is misused in so far as the user is not interested in the cage, but in the animal, and imho it should really be called "inclusion" if anything, c.f. "encased in amber".

State of the virtual machines

Looks like the market is being flooded not only with a host of compatibility layers, but increasing number of true virtualisation applications, or rather, hybrids between the two.

To drop some keywords, we have Rosetta, Wine and its various Crossover derivatives, VirtualPC, PearPC, qemu and Q, VirtualBox, Xen, Parallels and VMWare. Clearly a lucrative market.

I have been interested recently in the increase of usability, including true drag and drop in products by Parallels and VMWare (1), free-floating windows (called Coherence in the Parallels product for Mac), and I would like to see the window manager being fully replaced with the native one, which even Parallels does not seem to have managed yet, judging by the screenshots (but it can be done using WindowBlinds in Windows - $19 on top of the $79 for Parallels Desktop; VMWare pricing not known yet). Arguably, there is some benefit in having a slightly different window border style for Windows windows (ha!) in order to identify them quickly (and here).

But I have also been interested in seeing how little people seem to expect in terms of hardware support or clarification thereof. For instance, I've always been dismayed that there was no equivalent of VNC that would also transmit audio. Similarly, with Windows Vista being the first consumer OS going to market with true voice recognition (OS X 10.4 "Tiger" has a matching algorithm that matches up your voice with any of a small number of known commands, useful but not the real McCoy) - the killer feature in my opinion - it is not clear whether this will work in any of the existing virtualisation products!


(1) VMWare, iirc, has yet to release a product with their announced drag and drop functionality, but for Parallels it is available in a beta version, with hints of a release in the very near future; both on the Mac, not sure about other OSes.

List: BitTorrent clients for Mac OS X

Delicious:

• BitRocket
• Transmission
• Xtorrent

Different:

• Bits on Wheels

Mighty and cross-platform:

• Azureus
  

Few frills:

• BitTorrent
• Tomato Torrent

Added feature, untested:

• Acquisition
• LimeWire
  
• Opera

New laws for new interfaces

While tablet PCs are not new - in fact, Acer was recently quoted as saying the tablet PC platform had failed and would not see revival in their lineup - Apple may well be able to establish touchscreens more firmly beyond the stylus. However, Apple also stands to lose one of the most frequently quoted and patent-protected benefits of its interface - the placement of the application menu along the screen edge. With finger-tapping on a screen, there is no longer any special significance to the screen edge, so while Apple has resisted changing its interface even as screens grew larger, conveniently favouring the widescreen format (where the upper edge of the screen would always be a little closer, although plans to make the Mac a movie platform would have also influenced that decision), it may soon find itself on an open playing field. Ladies and gentlemen, it's the season of big buttons. (Oh, and someone calm down the trekkies when they get into Fitts of joy!)

Apple wishlist

After a few folks around the net have come up with similar ideas, there is no incentive for me to remain silent, so I'll give a quick run-down of what I would like to see from Apple:

• Cinema displays with multi-touch technology and inbuilt cameras. The window of opportunity is small, because purely projector-based technologies are catching up (you've seen the pictures on the web), but seeing that the iPhone has been in development for two and a half years already, I wouldn't rule it out that they have a head start on putting the technology into cinema displays.
• Voice recognition in Leopard: Vista has it (can't wait to play with it), so Apple is under pressure. I've no doubt Jobs knows how to beat Microsoft. Remember how he had the Mac talking to him in the keynote where he introduced the Macintosh? I want a repeat run, but for real this time. You just put ELIZA on the other end, and there you go! (I'm sure they can find something that beats ELIZA if they shop around...)
  
• Ultraportable and professional laptop (i.e. in the MacBook Pro line): Apple needs to compete in this segment. First off, some have suggested that this would be a slate. I seriously doubt that this would satisfy the needs of the market; even if voice recognition could be used to enter text (and you'll realise that this is an entirely new challenge that you need to retrain yourself for once you try it), this has privacy and nuisance issues when travelling, which is what an ultraportable is really for. I'd also like to see the battery life compete with Lenovo and Sony.
  

Oh, and people who say that Apple is under pressure to license Mac OS X to everybody else have a poor understanding of Apple's business model. (Mac OS X is what sells Macs - take a few minutes to convince yourself that this is the case. Apple earn their pennies with hardware sales.) The rumour that OS X could be licensed is as old as that of the Marklar project, and it won't happen until there is a Linux distro that works as nicely with peripherals as OS X, especially in the areas of bluetooth and, to some extent, 802.11 (although power users have this working in combination with kismet). It'll be two years at least.

Phrases that tell you you're wrong

If you ever hear yourself saying one of these, it's a good bet you need to reconsider the way you live your life.

• Do you know who I am?
• I'm not normally like this.
• It's all in good humour.

Hmm...

List of GNOME CD burning programs

I may have given this list before, but it has once again grown, so here goes...

• Coaster - web page defunct
  
• GnomeToaster aka gtoaster
• Graveman
• GnomeBaker
• Serpentine
• Bonfire aka Brasero

Bonfire is the new Sauron's ring on the block. The screenshots look good. I wish them well.

Apple, Sony and ultra-portables

Following initial problems with their Intel laptop line-up, it seems Apple's firmware is settling down and the laptops are ready for productive use. And yet the lower end of the range, the MacBook, fails to impress me - too heavy, short battery life. And no genuinely small model, like the 12" iBook used to be. Or a Sony VAIO TX3. One of which I happen to have just purchased, and boy, does it make me wonder why Apple hasn't approached Sony with either a bid for their laptop division, or an offer to license OS X for their machines. The design would fit within the Apple portfolio perfectly. If Sony have any business sense, they'll take the OS X option for even part of their range - say the TX3 and X505. Admittedly, the X505 strays a little further from Apple's style than the TX3, but it has the slimness and could undoubtedly be given the aluminium/brushed metal finish.

I'm concerned that Steve Jobs' xenophobia might be hindering his achieving great things in the technology sector, as seems to otherwise be his mission. But then, Apple's strategy has always been to re-invent the wheel, especially in software.

On the other hand, it might be Sony still dreaming they'll achieve the firm grip on the technology and entertainment industries that they've always wanted and Apple has now finally achieved. There is so much to learn from Apple: small number of different models, simple price structure, and an appealing, easy to navigate website. Just for starters.

Firefox needs text recovery

This is the one feature that is sorely missing in an app that several years into its development, remains unstable. How many times have you lost a forum post or email you were composing because Firefox crashed? Sure, you can first compose it in a text editor and then copy it over, but that's not how things are meant to be, is it?

So what we need is what every unstable word processing app now has: document recovery (Vim 6 also has this, in spite of being stable) for text fields. My suggestion would be to present it as a scrapbook, the way clipboard managers usually work.

Apple not embracing Web 2.0?

While I was originally fascinated with how Apple was using iTunes with its unrivalled Music Store to push sales of its iPod, and simultaneously giving a push to its "Mac" computer hardware brand (which consumer surveys show is preceived as separate from the iPod brand, so the marketing idea was not entirely efficient), it is also interesting to see that Apple is not making any inroads into consumer content creation, other than allowing upload of podcast details onto its Music Store (but again, market research shows low penetration for podcasts). So far, Apple is enticing us with rich media for sale and free download (as in the case of many video podcasts) through Music Store, but Azureus will have content creation abilities that could well take away revenue from Apple, and even youtube.com and Google Video, Apple's other competitors in the rich media avenue. Part of the problem here is that while the quality of Apple's offerings exceeds that of Web 2.0 competitors, entertainment is being commoditised by cheap video hardware, software and free hosting, and there is no doubt that the resolution of freely available video content will catch up with Apple.

However, there are programmes that are inherently onerous to produce, and these will continue to generate revenue. Central to this market are nature documentaries filmed at remote locations. Second best, I would say are documentaries that require intense research, especially into material that is not readily available to the general public (Vatican library?).

At the same time, voices are growing for Apple to develop its other web-based service, .Mac.

I have further, unpublished comments on this topic.

A week of shutdowns

This week started with me hearing that eBay were changing their pricing structure so that they could charge more on average from their professional sellers. Some sellers then staged a boycott, but, hey, what can you do if you've built your existence on top of somebody else's business who could pull the rug from underneath you, and you'd be flat on your bum? If eBay had no competition, that would be a silly thing to do. However, there's still Amazon and other trading and swapping sites to choose from. It just so happens that eBay is being used by a lot of customers, but the next "disruptive technology" (i.e. a better website) is just around the corner.

This reminded me that some senators in the US are advocating privatisation of their domestic internet (as I understand it). Reeks of corruption and is unlikely to go ahead in my opinion, but it could leave a lot of web businesses stranded if they had to pay considerable amounts to get their data packets through, as some critics fear. May the decision makers listen to Sir Tim.

The conclusion to the story might be that the world works better if at least some basic services are being provided by the (nation) state, such as garbage collection and the internet. It's even possible that the economy would benefit from a tax-funded eBay equivalent.

Understanding the success of Ubuntu

There seems to be a lot of debate on how Ubuntu was able to solve Debian's usability problems, and whether Ubuntu's success is ultimately a good thing. Take this essay from an apparent Debian fan. What most people fail to fully take in is that Ubuntu is a (self-confessed) dictatorship, whereas Debian's government structure stops just short of anarchy. Strong, visionary leadership simply beats doing things by committee. That's all there is to it.

Trivial patent from Apple

If someone can explain to me how this patent that Apple is reported to have filed is not invalidated by prior art in the shape of buttons that light up when pressed or released (used in military applications for many decades) and touchscreens, I promise to be most attentive. :)

Office suite disk sizes

All figures for win32:

• Abiword + Gnumeric - 87MB
  
• OpenOffice 2.0 - 203MB
• WordPerfect Office X3 Trial - 395MB
  
• MS Office 2003 (including InfoPath and Publisher) - 664MB
• MS Office 2007 beta (recommended install) - 1505MB
  
• MS Office 2007 beta (exluding Outlook) - 1448MB
• MS Office 2007 beta (excluding InfoPath, Publisher and Visio Viewer) - 1317MB
  
• MS Office 2007 beta (excluding Outlook, InfoPath, Publisher and Visio Viewer) - 1259MB
  
• MS Office 2007 beta (full install) - 1641MB
  

Unselecting all the templates, clipart, etc. shaves off another 20MB - fairly insignificant! Unselecting everything leaves 751MB, which presumably is composed of shared application libraries - maybe this is the engine that draws the new widgets - ribbon etc.? I just can't help thinking Office 2007 will give an entirely new meaning to bloatware. Someone said in the PC Pro issue that I got the beta from that Microsoft had specified not to include OpenOffice.org on the same CD. The columnist felt that this was a mistake because MS Office would win in a direct comparison of features. In a direct comparison of bloat, OpenOffice.org wins hands down. Note that OpenOffice.org dates back to October 2005, yet still has a smaller footprint than the version of MS Office released in November 2003. I hope I'll have time to check out memory consumption.

Conflict from the OLPC mesh

The One Laptop Per Child project is receiving much criticism in recent days (also see a waffly article in PC Pro, August 2006 issue). I'm personally concerned about two things.

I just had the first look at the mockups of the Sugar interface on the laptop.org wiki, and many of the screenshots show browser windows displaying Red Hat promotional material - hardly suitable for educating children! I strongly believe these links must be omitted from the final version. Obviously, information is required, but not inundated with PR speak and graphics.

The second concern is about the mesh - this is an idea that I independently had a little while ago, of making direct links between mobile devices to make masts redundant. I imagined this would be useful if using a mobile in the countryside, so long as a chain of capable mobile devices was available trailing back to civilisation, where masts as well as a denser, more reliable mesh would be available. The OLPC project is intending to use this principle to give internet access to their hand-crank recharged laptops. As far as I understand at this point, the mesh goes down when the computer is switched off; trivially, it definitely goes down when the battery runs out. So what if the kids in the next village don't keep their laptops cranked, and you end up losing the link? This can either lead to the mesh collapsing over time (because if I've little hope of getting a link, I won't crank my machine) or to conflict between villages. Not that learning conflict resolution is a bad thing, but this should be addressed by the organisers when the laptops are introduced. If you sell these as a wonder pill, and then the link keeps going down, people will be hugely disappointed and toss these laptops aside. Back to carpet-weaving you go, Chaitanya!

Comment and ratings control

Many websites, from user forums to commercial sites with ratings systems, have this problem: how to vet the content users are putting on their sites to avoid being involved in libel suits. However, my experience of several forums would suggest that policing structures quickly evolve, whose main means of punishment is intellectual disgracing (often expressed as "RTFM" or "Google is your friend").

I have also wondered whether online shops such as Amazon manipulate their reviews. Again, it seems they don't, in order not to cause such rumours among their customers, although IP-range and cookie based action could circumvent the problem of people checking their own reviews still exist. Note that I am merely pointing out the technical possibility of this - Amazon has enough negative reviews on some items to suggest it's not greasing its wheels.

It does strike me that in some sinister "brave new world" (just read William Gibson), content transmission will be policed by the control freaks hired by forums and other websites to suppress the undesirable. To the best of my layperson knowledge, there is no legal requirement for private companies to give accounts of such content censorship. I do wonder, though, whether Amazon's terms and conditions have anything to say on the matter. Perhaps we should request this.

Online rating systems: better based on cash

One may wonder why Amazon has various rating systems built in (one is customer reviews, another is "did you find this review helpful?", and finally, there's one for rating sellers), whereas blogger.com and Wikipedia do not. Even eBay has a rudimentary one.

You might also wonder book authors and electronics manufacturers don't spam the amazon rating system somehow. Even Wikipedia gets spammed. In the case of eBay, this is fairly clear: to rate, you have to pay. You could sell your friends stuff and they would up your rating, but you would still have to pay the eBay fee. Similarly for Amazon sellers: without a sale, you don't get to judge the seller.

Basically, the only way to be safe from spam is to force the rater to surrender cash. A possible alternative is to get his credit card details (although any one person may have more than one credit card), and a third alternative is to keep track of IP addresses (with internet cafes and dynamic IPs, this is a weak one, though). Email addresses, obviously, forget it.

Open source, stability and release cycles

Windows releases every, erm..., six years. Mac OS X releases nearly once a year. Ubuntu Linux releases every half year. Fedora Core is now releasing every seven to nine months.

My experience with both Fedora Core in the first three releases, and Ubuntu up until now, is that system updates break things. The final release has always undergone such thorough testing as to work really well, but it seems that the updates following are sent through relatively unfiltered from the upstream projects, and this is typically where things break. OS X has much less frequent updates, and these are generally better tested, and rarely break things (never for me).

The problem arises as much from the fact that servers need first and foremost to be secure (whereas desktop systems need first and foremost to be useable) as it does from the fact that desktop systems have more complex package dependencies. I hope that the software industry can get to the point where desktop systems need only be upgraded sporadically, and where the upgrades are thoroughly tested. This should be just as possible for Linux to achieve as it evidently is for OS X.

Closed source and reinventing the wheel

It's not great news to anyone that closed source code leads to permanent reinventing of the wheel. Nonetheless, I am impressed by the number of programs out there, especially on the Mac platform, that all do the same thing in only slightly different ways. There are at least a half dozen each of RSS readers, notebooks (think OneNote), launchers and web browsers for Aqua/Cocoa. I've no doubt there is a lot of innovation going on and that there are advantages to the approach in that it enforces having completely separate projects, each with complete freedom to develop (after all, some basic components, such as html rendering, are usually provided by the OS, meaning developers need merely wrap a GUI around it). However, it does strike me that the creators are often unaware of other people's existing creations. This does not usually happen with open source, as first versions are released early, and newcomers tend to join the fastest-developing projects, so that even competing lead developers sometimes abandon their projects and join their prior rivals. Nonetheless, as we see with jukebox applications, projects periodically replace each other as something better gets developed from scratch (for an example, see how Amarok is taking over from XMMS - with several others waiting in the wing for their chance - or how gnome is replacing KDE as the main Linux distributors' favourite). I have yet to see this approach stifle innovation, although it has to be said that OS X remains the most technologically advanced environment.

Google Earth will not go South

Anyone ever tried to surf Antarctica using Google Earth? I was disappointed to find that the satellite pictures are apparently organised to converge on the poles, leading to Antarctica being displayed in slices, besides the low resolution. I hope this will be improved.