you don’t need to scale as big as facebook – really

Posted on July 8, 2010 by Nic Wise

Chris Sells posted this recently on twitter: Pingdom: Exploring the software behind Facebook, the world’s largest site. It’s a very interesting read. Some of the highlights:

  • Facebook serves 570 billion page views per month (according to Google Ad Planner).
  • There are more photos on Facebook than all other photo sites combined (including sites like Flickr).
  • More than 3 billion photos are uploaded every month.
  • Facebook’s systems serve 1.2 million photos per second. This doesn’t include the images served by Facebook’s CDN.
  • More than 25 billion pieces of content (status updates, comments, etc) are shared every month.
  • Facebook has more than 30,000 servers (and this number is from last year!)

Those numbers are just staggering. Astronomical. Mind-boggling. Etc.

A lot of people doing web stuff (usually the non-technical ones anyway) think they have to match these, or something similar, “just incase”. The simple answer is this:

Your website will never, ever, do 1% of 1% of 1% of these numbers. The exception to this is if you go work for Facebook, Google, Microsoft or maybe Apple. But the chances of that are statistically small.

The real trick and talent of designing and architecting software is working out what you will actually need, and designing to that, not going for some fictional “what if” number.

For example, I’ve been working on a site (with others) which has the potential to have quite spikey traffic. We have had frequent discussions about “what happens if we need to scale up etc”.

So far, we’ve been Fry’ed, as well as Palmoa’ed (is that a term?), as well as various newsletters being sent out (to the order of half a million people, usually). Our single AWS small instance didn’t even break sweat, let alone fall over.

So the question I think every architect should be asking when they design a system is this:

Does this really need to be this big? This complex? Is there a better way to do this, where we can scale out, not start big?

Sometimes, the answer is yes – you DO need to be this big, but mostly, the answer is no. Is 500K users/day a feature for first release? Or is 10K users/day good enough for first release (and put 500K/day in the second release backlog)?

Only design for huge if the data supports huge, and preferably NOT data from overly enthusiastic founders/managers/sales people.

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Paywalls – The Times starts charging

Posted on July 2, 2010 by Nic Wise

So, The Times (the UK one) has started charging for its content – the great paywall debate/debacle. To be honest, I dont blame them for doing this – someone has to pay for the content to be produced, and it should be a combination of reader and advertiser. The reader has had it free for a long, long time, and ad rates are dropping, so something has to take up the slack.

But in this case, they are bat-shit crazy.

If I want to read The Times (and I’m going to ignore the fact I find their reporting and views awful), I can wander down to the newsagent and get it for 90p. For this 90p, someone has gone and written the stories, edited and sub’ed it, laid it out, printed it, and the moved it around London on a truck (I think the printing press is close to me, but hey – doesn’t really matter, it’s still 90p in Yorkshire). Often they have thrown in a free DVD or something similar.

Now, lets say I want to read it online, which is my preferred way to do it. Someone still has to write the articles, edit and sub edit them, and in a limited way, lay them out. But there is no printing, or moving it around. And for this, I’m charged £1 per day. Sure, I can read back articles, but those really don’t cost The Times anything (it’s not zero – disk space isn’t really free – but there are so many zeros between the 0. and the first digit that it might as well be).

So, they have managed to take out half of the costs, but put the price up 10%. Impressive. Totally flawed, but impressive none the less.

There is no point in screaming “but information wants to be free” (which is actually a mis-used quote). The issue is more that I can go somewhere else (usually the Guardian) and get the same article for free. The Times has very little unique content, the same as most newspapers. It’s not even presented in a better way, tho if the front page is anything to go by, it’s fairly ad-free – and for £1/day, it better be ad-free.

Also in the mix, there is no offline option. Thats the great thing about the print edition – I can read it anywhere I have light. For The Times, it’s only at a computer (online), or on an iPad (which I can’t determine to be offline without paying £10.99, but I’m going to assume it is). Their digital editions, as a replacement for the paper ones, are totally full of fail.

So, here’s what I think they should do (and this applies to the NBR in New Zealand, too, who have done something similar):

If you are charging for content, let me sub for a month. Let me setup an account with you, and then read it where ever and when ever I like. Even if I have to register a mobile device with your website to use it, thats fine (tho a little big-brother). But I pay once – £10 a month isn’t bad – and can read it online, on my iPhone, on an iPad, on a laptop, whatever. The apps are free (maybe you get the headlines for free, like the current homepage), but the content isn’t. To get details, you need to have a login. The infrastructure is there already – use it.

If you must charge per day, let me pay £5, keep it in credit, and use it over time. For £5 I can buy a week, or have £5 different days of use. I have to log into an account to use it anyway!

It needs to be a lot cheaper than the print version, given it’s at least perceived that it’s cheaper to do the digital edition. £10/month is a good price point. I’d pay that without thinking for the Guardian. Start with, at most, 50% of your print subscription price.

I’d love to know how the NBR is going, tho I’m not sure they can or will say (Chris?). They have a mix of paid-for and free content, and from what I can find, no mobile device apps (didn’t we talk about this 18 months ago?). Is it working for them? I’d love to know.

The Financial Times and WSJ are always put up as models, but there are two reasons why those work: fairly unique content, and expense accounts. The content they have can’t be found anywhere else (or at least in a very few places), and people make money off the information they provide, so their companies can pay for it and claim it off the top line. It’s a no-brainer to pay £300 for 6 months of the FT if you are making even £150 a day off the information it contains. I suspect that this is why the NBR is working too.

Posted in general, tech | 3 Comments

Only in Japan

Posted on June 26, 2010 by Nic Wise

Only in Japan would you find extendable, disposable chopsticks.

Or in Amsterdam. Seriously.

Useful and work well, but surely all-wood ones would be as good?

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buying music – there HAS to be a better way

Posted on June 7, 2010 by Nic Wise

Leonie and I headed up to the Camden Green Fair on sunday, which was lovely. Nice and warm, nice people, interesting stuff, great music, yummy food. We bought a couple of CD’s from some of the bands there (Ginger Ninjas and Amanda Mora), and have spent most of this morning listening to the Radio station of inSpiral, which is a vegan/raw focused cafe/bar/whatever in Camden. So far, in about 2 hours, we have bought one CD off iTunes (Midnight Soul Dive – which is really nice chillout ambient), with more to follow. Finding that in iTunes pointed me to Carbon Based Lifeforms and some Shpongle remixes. Those are next on the shopping list. But I’d rather buy them from inSpiral, not iTunes. Support the locals, and all that.

There were a few other places selling music up there, but all of it was on CD, which I find quite useless. What do I do with the small bit of plastic once I’ve ripped it? I don’t really want to give it away (that would be, technically, illegal), but I don’t want to destroy it or store it either.

I think we need another mechanism for this.

How about a custom iTunes voucher? The merchant can generate as many of these as they like (either by buying them, or a charge-on-use model), and are charged a slightly discounted rate (or maybe even full price?). They can then put these codes onto cards or something similar, and sell them for whatever it was they were going to sell them for. Apple takes their usual 30% cut of the voucher price, and 70% goes back to whoever put the tracks up on iTunes (most likely the artist via some aggregator).

eg: Ginger Ninjas have their stuff up on iTunes. Because they are the artist, they get to make codes (maybe setup via the aggregator) at Apple’s cost – nothing goes back to the “artist” in this case. Lets say this is $2 (maybe the aggregator takes a cut here, I’m not sure how it works at the moment). They then put this code on a card or something, and sell them at the gig, like they would with CD’s. Maybe for $10. $8 profit in the hand. $2 upfront to “press” the tracks. If they dont sell them, they don’t get charged, as it’s zero cost to Apple.

I guess there is some risk to the purchaser (if the code doesn’t work for some reason), but with some customer service, this can be worked around.

The voucher would only be valid for purchasing that one album. Not my choice of X tracks, just that one. I know this can be done – Apple gave away cards with the iTunes Live gigs, and the only tracks you could buy were from the iTunes Live sessions. But why not allow artists to sell them too? That way it’s secure as one use codes are already done in iTunes. The artists don’t need to setup their own downloads site, and customers can get music without the annoying plastic nonsense. Plus the artist doesn’t have to pay to have CD’s pressed, artwork printed etc. Win all around.

Some of the best music we have found recently has been from opening acts – Ane Brun (opened for Peter Gabriel) and For a Minor Reflection (Sigur Ros) really come to mind – or were only for sale at the gig (Underworld, live, on my birthday!). But the CD media is in need of an update.

Might be a market there….. Anyone know if this is being done already?

Posted in general, tech | 1 Comment

ipad? thanks, but no

Posted on June 5, 2010 by Nic Wise

I finally got my hands on an iPad for a little while, after fighting a few other people off them at the Regent St Apple Store. Now, I realise I’m not a normal user. Not in the slightest. We don’t have a couch. I don’t commute. We usually watch media together, not separately. We don’t have the center-of-the-living-room TV. We are not abnormal, but we are not normal, either. But by the same token, iTunes is the center of our media world. We buy all our content thru it, it has all our music, we take that content places on iPhones.

But the iPad is just not for me. Yet. Here’s why.

Everyone else has done the hardware etc to death, so I’m not going to bother, but here’s the bits I liked:

  • Good lord, the screen is nice. It’s sharp, clear, and fairly large. I have very high hopes for the next iPhone.
  • It’s quick. It’s very, very, very quick. Ditto next iPhone.

The average:

  • It’s not light. I’m sure it was the regular version, not the 3G version, but it’s not an insubstantial device.
  • It’s big. Way too big to put in a pocket, and almost too big for me to carry around without a A4 folder type thing. I considered my A5 or A6 moleskin to be a bit big, and this is bigger.
  • The home screen is bloody awful. Nothing new there tho. Hopefully, OS4 will fix that. Putting more space between the icons feels like a lack of thought. “oh, that’ll do… close enough”

The ugly:

  • There isn’t really anything I hated about it, but nothing jumped out and said “wow, you really should just get one of these”.

So here’s my argument for not getting one (odd that it’s an argument against, not a justification for, but anyway)

I have a fairly small set of functions I need a computer for. Currently, I have 3 computers. I have a 15″ Macbook Pro (i5, 8GB, 500GB disk) which I use for day to day stuff. I have a Mac Mini which is used as a headless server for VM’s and music (2.0ghz C2D, 8GB, 320GB) and an aging iPhone 3G, which will be replaced with a 4G or whatever they call it when it comes out sans-contract.

What’s noticeable in it’s absence is a Netbook – hackintosh or otherwise. I’ve looked at them, but never felt compelled to get one.

What I use computers for – because lets face it, all of these (Macbook Pro, Mini, iPhone, iPad) are real computers.

I spend most of my day – ie, the bits I get paid for – in VMWare or something similar, usually in 2-4 Windows 2008 Server VM’s over 2 machines. I have 8GB in both my machines, and I use it all up often. An iPad is never going to replace this, not until it can run a 4GB (ram), dual-core VM at top speed, and unlike Mr Gemmell, I’m not likely to use it as a document lookup device.

I spend a lot of my down time watching or listening to media (well, some of it anyway). All of our media comes from a few sources: iTunes, iPlayer (downloaded), or our shared iTunes library on the Mac Mini. An iPad could come into play here, however a 8″ screen, compared to a 20″ monitor, isn’t going to cut it for 2 (or more) people to watch. It would be good if I was traveling a lot, but I’m not anymore. The Macbook Pro serves for both the tethered (at home) use, and is portable enough to be taken on holiday, on a plane, on work trips etc. Where the Macbook doesn’t work, the iPhone covers that space well enough, even for 2 people watching a movie on a plane.

The rest of my time, I spend reading blogs, doing email, twitter etc. This is where the iPad could really come into it’s own, except I have the iPhone for that if I’m not at my desk, and the Macbook if I am (or if I can be bothered to take it with me). I dont have an issue reading blogs/twitter/email on the small screen, thanks to Twitter iPhone, Reeder and Byline, and the Guardian app. I can type very well on the iPhone, too (and I imagine I could on the iPad, too, tho I didn’t try). If I didn’t have the iPhone, I could definitely see an iPad fitting in there, but really, I use the iPhone for this 2-3 times a week, usually on the weekend, tho it gets a lot of use for other things – uses which the iPad wouldn’t fit for (again with the “it doesn’t fit into my pocket”). I tend not to sit on the couch and surf, not least because we dont have a couch.

(ok, there is also “other” time in my life, but I’m only talking about time I spend using a computing device)

Could I use it when we are on holiday? Of course, but the iPhone also covers this well enough, and despite what Leonie says, I do like to disconnect – even if not compleatly – when I’m on holiday, so a device which is designed to be connected all the time is not going to be a good fit.

Could I use it for my commute? Well, 7 months ago I could have, but my commute it from the bedroom via the coffee machine and shower, to the lounge. So no.

So while it’s a lovely piece of hardware, it’s not for me. Pretty much all of the use cases Apple presents, and I can think of, I dont do, or if I do, I have other hardware which covers it. If I had a long commute – which I had, from East London to West London, 1 hour each way, each day, before I left the BBC – then I defiantly could. If I didn’t have an iPhone (or I was replacing it) and only had a desktop machine, I could see getting one being a good thing. If I travelled a lot for work, I could see myself getting one. If I went to a lot of meetings, I could see myself getting one.

But I dont have or do any of those. Not any more.

I could argue that if I was writing apps for it, I’d get one, and if/when I do, I most likely will. There is a good chance this will happen before Christmas, too. But until then, my uses for portable technology are covered, and covered very, very well.

Some day, in the future, I may get one. Or 2. But until then, I think I’ll stick with the gear I have, and save the £600 for a contract-free iPhone 4G.

Posted in general, tech | 13 Comments

coding and drinking

Posted on May 28, 2010 by Nic Wise

Everyone I know drinks when coding. Not alcoholic – well, ok, sometimes, usually after beer-o-clock on a friday – but usually caffeinated. However, there is only so much coffee I can take in a day: usually around 5 shots of espresso. But with summer here now, here’s a few nice variations on the normal run-of-the-mill stuff which I’ve been enjoying for a while.

Not-American Iced Tea

Thanks for my friend Tara for the basis of this – tho she makes it properly, being from the American south (I think?).

  • 6 black tea bags (just normal tea)
  • 6 green tea and lemon tea bags (or tea of your choice, I guess)
  • 6 slightly heaped teaspoons of sugar.
  • Rind of 1 lemon
  • Juice of the same lemon
  • Water. (around 1.7l)
  • 2 wine bottles

Throw the tea and sugar into a large bowl. Pour over 1.7l of boiling water. Add the lemon rind and juice. Let it steep for around 5 mins (maybe a little longer, just don’t leave it for 20 mins…). Remove the tea bags and let it cool.

Once it’s cool, pour thru a strainer to remove the lemon rind (tea strainer should work, tho it might be a little small), and then put in the wine bottles. Put in the fridge.

Makes about 1.5l of “syrup”. Don’t drink it straight! Mix about 100-150ml of the tea with 500ml of water, preferably sparkling water (to make 600ml / 1 pint total). Drink. It’s a tasty, refreshing, low-calorie (reduce the sugar if you want it lower calorie), low caffeine summer drink.

Tips:

  • If you drink a lot of sparkling water – we do – get a Soda Stream. Cheap, reusable, and easy.
  • If you can get Luzianne Tea Bags, use that. It’s designed for Iced Tea. I can’t find them in the UK tho.
  • Some say it may work well with Icelandic Vodka. But I couldn’t comment.

Monmouth Iced Espresso

Monmouth Coffee in Borough Market make a killer iced espresso in a way I’d never have thought of doing it. It’s simple, quick, easy to make, and very tasty – none of this sugar-iced-mocca-frappa-whatever-the-fuck with cream nonsense.

I’ve done this at home without the sugar syrup, but I think it’s better with it.

  • 2 or 3 large iced cubes in a small tumbler
  • 1 shot of espresso, right out of the machine
  • Sugar syrup to taste. Not sure how to make this, but Leonie does.

Put the ice in the glass, and shoot the coffee over it normally. Add sugar syrup (which will dissolve in it easily) to taste. Yum yum.

The really easy version: go to Monmouth and buy one for £1.75 :) And ask them to sort out their damn website – it’s been under construction (how 90′s!) for ages! I’ll help in exchange for coffee beans.

Enjoy!

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On The Telly – Offline iPhone client for BBC iPlayer

Posted on April 14, 2010 by Nic Wise

I’ve been playing with MonoTouch a bit of late, mostly as I wanted to learn CocoaTouch (the iPhone apis), but try and seperate myself from the language (Objective-C) vrs just how the API holds together. On The Telly is the result.

What is it?

On The Telly is a iPhone application which allows for offline viewing of BBC iPlayer content on the iPhone. iPlayer serves a h.264 stream to the iPhone, however this only works streaming over WiFi, so it’s not a lot of use if you are on a train or the tube. iPlayer does support offline viewing on other devices, but they must support DRM. As you can’t get the h.264 files off the iPhone, this is sort of redundant.

For those in the US, substitute “iPlayer” for “Hulu” – same idea, different country.

The source code for this is below. It’s really only of use to you if you want to see how it works (which is the point) as Apple prevents it being in the appstore (good old clause 3.3.1), and BBC does not license it’s content for non-personal use. But it was fun to write, and might serve as guidance for someone else building either a MonoTouch application, or even a “normal” iPhone application if they are coming from a .NET background.

Side rant: On Clause 3.3.1, I’d challenge anyone to tell the difference between this and an Objective-C-coded application except that the file size of the app is around 2meg, and if done in Objective-C it would be around 1meg, as a MonoTouch application has to include some of the Mono framework, which can’t be excluded by the compiler. Other than that, this is a non-cross platform, native iPhone app. If you know Objective-C, you’ll be able to follow allow in the code, because it’s mostly syntacticly different, not functionally. The objects created and used – UIButton, UITableViewController et al – are the same as an Objective-C app would use (not even mappings or intermediate layers – the same classes and code).

Of course, if Apple keep clause 3.3.1 in as they have it now, at least I’ll not lose any skills I’ve learned doing this.

Anyone who says it’s about multitasking is full of shit, and has not seen the APIs for multitasking. It’s about Adobe, pure and simple.

Anyway, back to the app!

The application consists of a number of tabs:

  • The download tab. This contains the shows which have been downloaded.
  • The queue tab. This has shows which have been queued for downloading
  • The Features tab. This shows the featured and highlighted shows on iPlayer
  • News and other category tabs. These show the shows in each category.

BBC limit iPlayer to disallow downloads from outside the UK, or over 3G. The app will most likely crash if you try, or say content is not available. Dont ask why you can’t download a specific show if you are on 3G (in the UK) or anywhere outside of the UK.

Feedback so far has been positive, but none of it has been from the BBC. Oh, well. It was fun to write.

Here is the source code. It needs various things in order to run:

I think the application has good examples of:

  • Background processing, keeping work off the main (UI) thread
  • Database access (sqlite) on the iPhone
  • Using WebClient to download content
  • Image manipulation on the iPhone
  • What can be done in around 20 hours work using MonoTouch. This was not a complex app to write, thanks to Paul’s work on how to download the shows, in Ruby, and tools like Linq to XML and MonoTouch.

Overall, I found MonoTouch and MonoDevelop lovely to use – except I’d love to have ReSharper available for MonoDevelop. Using .NET without ReSharper is always a little painful, even if I’m using Visual Studio!

Posted in MonoTouch, tech | 1 Comment

MonoTouch, TableViewControllers and SegmentedControl

Posted on April 8, 2010 by Nic Wise

I’ve been holding off blogging about MonoTouch recently (tho I’ve said a bit on twitter) – mostly because the “project” I’m “working” on (read: spare time, but exciting) is something I may not be able to legally release into the app store (and if not, it’ll be on github as open source). But in the meantime, I thought I’d share this little nugget.

I’ve seen, in a number of applications, the use of the SegmentedControl in the header / title of a TableViewController. Something like this, from the Guardian app:

I thought this would be hard – some kind of cloned, custom TableViewController or something. But no, the solution (well, my solution, which may not be the official one) really shows just how well thought out Cocoa and CocoaTouch is:

In your ViewDidLoad method:

this.NavigationItem.TitleView = MakeSegmentedControl();

And the MakeSegmentedControl method looks like this:


public UISegmentedControl MakeSegmentedControl()
{
UISegmentedControl seg = new UISegmentedControl(new RectangleF(0, 0, 200, 25));

seg.InsertSegment("Highlights", 0, false);
seg.InsertSegment("Popular", 1, false);
seg.SelectedSegment = 0;

seg.ControlStyle = UISegmentedControlStyle.Bar;

seg.ValueChanged += delegate(object sender, EventArgs e) {
if (seg.SelectedSegment == 0)
{
(TableView.Source as DataSource).LoadPrograms(IplayerConst.HighlightsFeedUrl);
} else {
(TableView.Source as DataSource).LoadPrograms(IplayerConst.MostPopularFeedUrl);
}
return seg;
}

And the end result looks like this:

Easy and painless.
Posted in MonoTouch, general, tech | 2 Comments

Rework – 37signals

Posted on March 23, 2010 by Nic Wise

This could be the shortest book review ever :). Just finished rework, and also listened to their podcast which talked about it.

From the founders of the trailblazing software company 37signals, here is a different kind of business book – one that explores a new reality. Today, anyone can be in business. Tools that used to be out of reach are now easily accessible. Technology that cost thousands is now just a few pounds or even free. Stuff that was impossible just a few years ago is now simple. That means anyone can start a business. And you can do it without working miserable 80-hour weeks or depleting your life savings. – Amazon page.

Rather a good book, over all. I’ve been reading their stuff for a while, so I found that not a lot of it was new. If you don’t know much about their style of running a company, this is a great way to learn it quickly. Some points / complaints etc:

  • It’s both short and long. The type is double spaced, and every 3rd page is a drawing. A lot of pages have 30-50% white space, as the next “chapter” is on the following page, or it’s a drawing. It feels like they (the publisher) were scratching to make it big enough to put on the shelves (which they mention in the podcast).
  • I like the drawings, but I found myself turning the page so often that it almost broke the flow of the book.
  • They mention that the book was edited down (by them) from around 35K works to around 15K words, or something like that, and it really feels like it’s the short version. Thats not a bad thing, as you get a lot of information in a short space of time, but it did feel like the publisher was stretching the book out. Could have had the same words in 200 pages. I get why they did it, but I don’t like it.
  • The content is fantastic. I must prefer their method of, ya know, actually making a profit to the sillicon valley, venture-funded, who-need-to-make-money-we-have-VCs model.
  • Having just kicked the drawings, I like them, both in style and content. Reworking the layout would make it work a lot better for me – eg smaller drawings at the top of pages, not taking a whole page. Something like that. Might make them feel less like fillers.
  • I suspect the ideal medium for this is audiobook (as read by DHH and JF, please!) or ebook.

All up, well worth the £6 (go amazon!) and 3 nights to read.

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Windows Phone 7 Series: prediction

Posted on March 18, 2010 by Nic Wise

Now, I could be totally wrong here, however, but there is a very good chance this thing will kick arse.

Why, you ask?

Very simple. The application development model, having had a brief play with the CTP version, make XCode and Cocoa look like it just walked in from 1995. The iPhone has 120K apps or so (depending on what they have removed this week), with a development model that most of the developers using it had to learn, from scratch, and for those used to a modern language, is backward, antiquated and alien. Thats one hell of a learning curve for most developers. And by modern I mean Ruby, Python, Java, C# et al – basiclaly something invented in and for a date starting with 20.

Obj-C only makes sense if you know Obj-C, C or C++. If you only know one of the above languages, it’s has the potential to confuse the shit out of you – and leak memory all over your nice new carpet.

Contrast that with WP7. It uses .NET and Silverlight/WPF. There are a lot of people who have to adapt to a small change in the API – those who know Silverlight already – and a massive, orc-ish horde who just need to learn a bit of Silverlight over the top of their up-to-8-years of .NET. VS.NET still owns XCode for ease of use and productivity, especially VS.NET 2010. C# and the .NET managed environment kicks Obj-C and Cocoa all over the park* for getting things done. I came to this realisation when I used CocoaTouch and found that I could, using the .NET (mono) libraries, in about 4 lines of code, what took around 50 in Cocoa. (connect to URL, parse a model out of the resulting XML).

Aside from initial market share (WP7: zero. iPhone: lots) and rabid fanboi’s (‘cos, ya know, it’s not cool to like Microsoft anymore), I don’t see where the iPhone has a development advantage over WP7. And these days, it is all about the apps. WP7 will ship with the same basic features as the iphone, in a very similar package. It’s the apps that make a difference.

Throw in what happens when you can use a single technology (Silverlight, .NET, c#) to write you mobile app (WP7), back end (Azure or self-hosted), desktop and web (Silverlight or WPF). Right now, with the iPhone, I have to use Obj-C/Cocoa for Mac and iPhone, something else for Windows, and something else for backend/web (Rails? Flash? whatever else). With WP7, I can stay within the same universe, or I can move out of it as I like. If I’m a single person or small team, I know which way I’d be going.

We’ll see, I guess. I think Microsoft has one bit covered – the development story – now lets see if they can solve the other story: make consumers want it. Thats the hard bit.

Note to Microsoft: subsidise phones via MSDN. Get the devices into developers hands cheaply, and not tied to the useless US carriers. Not just at PDC or TechEd, but for anyone with an MSDN subscription, ActionPack, MS Partner status etc.

Side note: I wonder if there is a “market” for a Silverlight-style markup for CocoaTouch. Same idea – build the object tree as XML, parse it down to code/objects at compile or runtime. But using UILabel et all. Could be the best of both worlds. Same business logic, replace the views and some of the controllers, and have an app which works over both platforms. Actually, maybe thats what a XIB is….

*unless you have been using Obj-C for a long, long time. This is obviously not going to apply to the likes of Mr Gemmell and co, or anyone else with a few years of experience invested in iPhone apps.

Posted in general, tech | 6 Comments