What brand of freedom would you like?

Apple's restrictions and Google's openness have more in common than you might think.

There's been a ton of criticism, including from me, over Apple's restrictions on the App Store. How it restricts the freedom of developers by blocking applications users definitely want to use, or yanking apps that fail to meet a changeable standard of appropriateness or legitimacy. I originally thought I would never buy an iPhone because of that policy alone, and I felt like quite a hypocrite when I decided to buy one anyway. As many people have pointed out, the iPad, if successful, will further extend Apple's control over the code its users are able to run.

One of the main pitches for Google's Android platform, in contrast, is that it is more open, freer, more consistent with the principles that the open source world (and this blog, and I) espouse. For the code, and applications running on it, that certainly seems to be true. I can go to source.android.com and download the Android source. The Apache license applied to most of the project is very liberal in the use of that code. As a developer, I can publish applications for Android at www.android.com/market, where, Google says, "developers have complete control over when and how they make their applications available to users." How much more free could you get and still call it a platform? The Android stance is nearly 180 degrees from the iPhone's. One is free and the other is closed.

And yet, I don't think the contrast is as clear as that. Freedom means different things to different people. Hence Richard Stallman's quip, "Think free as in free speech, not free beer." While there's no question the code is much more free on Android, I think Steven Levy's point in his piece on the iPad is worth repeating:

While Apple wants to move computing to a curated environment where everything adheres to a carefully honed interface, Google believes that the operating system should be nearly invisible. Good-bye to files, client apps, and onboard storage -- Chrome OS channels users directly into the cloud ...

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News from Appland

A look at the early momentum of iPad applications

Carsonified -- a site that proclaims on its home page, "We're hugely passionate about the web" -- declared the death of the web this week in, "Bye Bye Web, Hello Apps." The post makes the case for mobile apps, especially iPhone apps, and their advantages over web apps. I certainly won't be calling web apps dead for a while, but I'm impressed by how much activity has been unleashed by the app world. Here are some stories from Appland this week.

• My friends at 37signals released their first official iPhone app this week, Highrise. It's a great little app, highlighting the best parts of mobile applications, like on-the-go voice recording, and the worst, like a lengthy install period (it took 10 minutes for me) -- which they mitigated with a built-in "shall we play a game?" to keep you entertained during the download. This is one of several cases I know of where a company with a set of third party iPhone apps has decided to go official, which to me is a sign of the increasing importance of these apps. In the Highrise case, the existing apps weren't very good at all (I'd tried them all), and the lack of a great iPhone app made the web app less useful.
• How seriously are app developers taking the iPad? Check out this preview of the iPad App Store on MacStories. I'm psyched to see OmniGraffle, for instance, on there, and a little shocked to see it priced at $49.99. It's pretty obvious that app developers are treating this as a full-fledged application platform, not just a big phone. When I first saw a preview of the iPad App Store, my thought was, "I wonder how long it will be before Microsoft Office is available here?"
• Marco Arment's preview of Instapaper on iPad was great fun to read:

  [...] then I saw the pixel-doubled version of my app in the simulator. It sucked, and it was completely unusable by my standards. I don’t think I’ll want to run any pixel-doubled apps on my iPad in practice. [...] While I could have taken the conservative option and waited until a month or two after the iPad’s release before launching Instapaper for it, an iPad without native Instapaper Pro is not a device I want to own.

  I agree with Marco about pixel-doubling; it looks so bad I don't think we should count the iPad as having 150,000 apps on day one. Widgets? Demos? Sure. But I bet a good count of how many apps are still "alive" in the App Store will be how many of their developers bother to make a universal iPhone/iPad app. Anyone who doesn't, doesn't care about the app at all.
• Speaking of bad, links to the iTunes web site -- which launches the iTunes application when you have the misfortune of landing on it -- are my nominee for the new Web Links of Great Regret (unlabeled PDF links being the past champion). Oh no, I'm on iTunes! Halp! Such a disaster. Here's some help: How-To: Stop iTunes Web Links From Opening iTunes.

The Second Netflix Challenge and Privacy Research

Okay, if you're just catching up with this story, go read this first -- Netflix's announcement that it was canceling its second Netflix Prize challenge over privacy concerns.

Next, head over to 33bits.org, blog of one of the co-authors of the paper on de-anonymizing Netflix users from the first Netflix Prize challenge data, to read the authors' open letter to Netflix about the canceled second challenge.

Data privacy researchers will be happy to work with you rather than against you. We believe that this can be a mutually beneficial collaboration. We need someone with actual data and an actual data-mining goal in order to validate our ideas. You will be able to move forward with the next competition, and just as importantly, it will enable you to become a leader in privacy-preserving data analysis. One potential outcome could be an enterprise-ready system which would be useful to any company or organization that outsources analysis of sensitive customer data.

I find that paragraph from the post particularly interesting. This seems similar to the conversations between security researchers and the companies whose products they find ways to exploit. That has often been a very hostile conversation, but it seems (speaking from the outside of the security community) to have improved over time. (For instance, check out this security research guidelines document from PayPal.) Is there a way for privacy research to head in a similar direction, so that companies view external researchers as in some way beneficial? If anything that seems like a bigger challenge to me; at least everyone usually agrees that security holes should be fixed, while most companies do not agree, publicly at least, that privacy breaches are really a problem (e.g., "Get over it.").

Code review redux (good news from GitHub)

I wrote in 2008 about Review Board, a code review package I'd tried and liked. Unfortunately our developers didn't like it as much as I did, and having learned my lesson (thanks, FogBugz), I declined to impose a tool choice on them. They chose Gerrit, instead, which is more tightly bound to Git, and has some nice features related to that (such as pushing to master from a button in the UI when the review is complete). The rest of the UI is very unpolished, but has been getting progressively better.

Code review caused some frustrations for us -- the immediacy of "code, check in, ship" was lost, and it took some time for us to get to a new running pace. The benefits, though, were very obvious: we had dramatically fewer periods of downtime or instability after introducing reviews, and the overall quality and consistency of the code went up a lot. The mutual obligations created by asking for reviews changed the social dynamic for the better. Peer pressure caused people to report that they were much more hesitant to check something in with poor test coverage or an embarrassing hack. While anything that slows the pace of development kills me, the net payoff was high. (See Cedric Beust's 2006 post, "Why code reviews are good for you," for a great discussion of code review models and tradeoffs.)

When looking for a tool we also considered GitHub:FI, the "behind the firewall" version of GitHub. It wasn't really up to par when compared with Review Board, Crucible, or Gerrit. But so many things about GitHub are so appealing that we all wanted it to work. That's why I was excited to see today's announcement from GitHub, "Introducing GitHub Compare View" -- especially this note at the bottom of the post:

Compare View is the first of many code review related features we plan to introduce this year. We'll be incorporating Compare View into other areas of the site and developing entirely new features with Compare View as a core component.

Great. That's awesome. Can't wait to see what's coming.

A Story Before Bed

I've been a fan of Jackson Fish Market's work since before they existed. My first Radar post about them talked about founder Hillel Cooperman's personal food site, Tasting Menu, which was and is amazingly detailed and hunger-inspiring. Jackson Fish has the same, or higher, quality of work -- software craftsmanship that makes each of their sites immediately identifiable and distinct, graphically full and compelling.

I'm totally gaga, though, over their new site, A Story Before Bed. This might be one of those things that parents and grandparents will flip out with happiness about while everyone else scratches their heads, but as a new parent, finding it made me feel like a special delivery had arrived expressly for my daughter.

The idea of the site is to make it easy for people far from kids they love -- grandparents in another city, parents on a business trip, soldiers in training or deployed -- to read a story to a child. But you really have to watch the demo video to see what a jewel of a product they've made. The reader's face and voice are appear, picture-in-picture style, above a full image of the book being read. As the reader goes from one page to the next, the book animates pages turning along with them. The child can go back a page or skip ahead, and the reader keeps up with them. You can try recording a reading for free, and pay only if you choose to save what you've recorded. (Note: they're currently running a sale for new books, $4.99 each instead of the standard $6.99, through December 25th.)

As a business, the site is interesting to see. They're making deals with publishers to have the full content of their books available on the site -- not just the text but all of the pictures and layout. I wish that more publishers had signed up (the site just launched), and if you're a children's book publisher reading this, get over there! But nonetheless they have a good selection of books and I find it easy to see publishers getting excited about this as a venue. This is how publishing is going to make a real move to the web -- not with DRM and lawyers but with beautiful new ideas for how to share stories.

For the future, in addition to getting more publishers turned on to this, I'd love to see them make it possible for me to send a prepaid credit to a family member so they can record a book more easily, and maybe make the registration steps easier (those CAPTCHAS are tough on some grandparents' eyes). The experience of the site, though, is so amazing today that I'm happy to get on the phone and talk a relative through all the steps.

My daughter's happy reaction at seeing relatives -- or me, when I'm traveling -- on iChat makes the webcam in my laptop worth the whole cost of the machine. We read her three books every night before bed, and the idea of one of those being by a "guest reader" from afar is wonderful. This is one of those ways of connecting people that I can't help but be excited to see. Kudos to Jackson Fish.

Peter Seibel's Coders at Work

My friend Peter Seibel's new book Coders at Work (published by Apress) went to press today. I've been reading a preview copy he sent me, and it's fantastic. The book follows the style of the earlier Apress book Founders at Work, presenting interviews with notable programmers, asking them how they work, about their careers, their thoughts on the software profession, and whatever other topics come up along the way.

The book works in part because Peter is himself an accomplished developer (his previous book, Practical Common Lisp, won a Jolt Award), making the conversations lively and topical. Beyond that, though, he chose as subjects (with help from a Digg-like voting system he wrote while planning the book), and was able to get interviews with, an incredibly interesting set of people who work on quite a wide range of software projects. Some, like Jamie Zawinski, contribute what are essentially battlefield memoirs (in Jamie's case, from the early development of Netscape); others, such as Joshua Bloch (Chief Java Architect at Google), are more contemplations on the art and science of programming. Many questions come up repeatedly -- how people got started in programming, how they fix difficult bugs, what working style they like with others, whether they've read Knuth (himself an interviewee) -- and the breadth of the answers to these core questions is fun to see. You're left feeling that you've spent several hours with a wonderful group of mentors: some that you'd rush to agree with, others that push you away from your habits and comfort.

One of the other core questions Peter asks is, what books would you recommend to help a developer learn programming? For me, this book joins my short list -- it takes you away from the limitations of learning within a single company or community, and shows you the breadth of experiences that can make someone a great developer. I'm very happy for my friend that his book came out so well, and recommend it very highly for anyone who develops software. The book is available for pre-order on Amazon.

Bravo, Snaptalent

I really liked the original Snaptalent product (sort of an AdSense for recruiting). Apparently the product didn't succeed -- I can imagine working on a recruiting product during this recession must have been frustrating. I'm even more impressed, though, with how the Snaptalent team decided to shut down the company: by posting their post-game analysis on their home page:

Its been a tough call, as we had enough capital in the bank to last for two years. The decision has primarily dictated by market conditions and opportunity cost which in aggregate would mean we probably wouldn't have been able to show the kind of results we wanted to make this a big company in this market. There are a number of reasons behind that decision and a number of lessons, which I intend to articulate here in this note.

I've written one of those notes before (when a company I was running in 2001 shut down), but I just sent it to our investors. Posting their thoughts on the company and market allows everyone to learn from their experiences. Bravo.

I look forward to seeing what they do next.

The Promise and Peril of MobileMe

Anyone tried MobileMe? Last night, I signed up for the free trial, got it syncing between my laptop and iPhone, and was incredibly impressed by how well and quickly it worked. An appointment added on one nearly instantly showed up on the other -- so much better than having to fire up iTunes to have my schedule in sync. The power of the cloud! Or whatever. You know, useful.

Then, today as I was running late for a meeting, I opened the phone app and saw "No Contacts." Uh, what? All of my contacts had been deleted from the phone. They were still on me.com and on my laptop, but what I had with me was a phone with no contacts...not useful.

I fired up the support chat window on me.com and went through a half-hour session of trying to get things working. At the end of that I gave up and am deleting my account, and hoping a manual sync (you know, with a cable and stuff) will restore my contacts.

Any similar experiences, or better? MobileMe seems like such a great idea, and one with such promise. Having it fail so completely on the very first day seems like such a miserable outcome. You can't help but be impressed with the parts that work; it is incredible engineering and design all around. That's no comfort when your data disappears, though. I'd love to hear what others have experienced; hopefully I'm an outlier. (For the record, I do have over 2,200 contacts, which I guess is a lot compared to other iPhone owners I know.)

App Growth, PalmOS vs iPhoneOS

There's a chart I've been meaning to put together for a while to explain why I'm expecting the iPhoneOS to be the dominant mobile platform for at least the next decade. I've been thinking of the role third-party applications played in helping Palm maintain its mobile platform dominance for about that same period, from 1996 to 2006. If you believe Palm apps were a primary cause of Palm's long-term success against Microsoft and other competitors -- apps which were far more awkward to install than iPhone apps, which had a far narrower range of interface or capabilities, and which for a long time didn't even have a network connection to use, and yet which still spawned the term "Palm Economy" to describe the developers making money off their sales -- then what has happened on the App Store over the past year should make the case for the iPhoneOS's dominance. Here, looky:

Over a ten-year period, the PalmOS grew to support about 29,000 apps. The App Store passed that mark about 10 months after launching, and by now has probably doubled it. Developers, developers, developers!

This NY Times article about Palm having trouble winning developers over to its new WebOS platform for the Pre seemed wistful to me considering the lead PalmOS had acquired and has now lost. I don't think that the Pre's design or keyboard -- nor, for that matter, the openness of Android, which I'd personally far prefer (here's why) -- can effectively compete with a platform that has so many developers excited about it, as iPhoneOS does. An ecosystem creates dominance, and Apple has succeeded at that in an incredibly impressive way.

I'll be interested to see if the new hardware interfaces in iPhoneOS 3.0 help Apple to build a hardware ecosystem, too. If so I may double the length of my bet.

Sources for the numbers in the chart:

• PalmOS:
• Dec. 1998 ("thousands")
• Aug. 2000
• Apr. 2001
• Jun. 2002
• Oct. 2003
• Apr. 2004
• Mar. 2006
• iPhoneOS:
• Jul. 2008
• Sep. 2008
• Mar. 2009
• Apr. 2009
• Jun. 2009

Four short posts: 12 May 2009

[Stealing Nat's "Four short" format again...]

1. I went to Google and searched for a non-location-specific term today (I can't be more specific since the search was for a birthday present for my wife, but let's pretend it was "baseball cards," since that was the general form -- a noun with nothing geographically-specific about it). On the first page of results was a list of shops in my neighborhood that sell that thing (in our pretend example, baseball card trading stores). The specificity of the local results was quite good. Now, I know full well that my IP address identifies my location all too accurately, and that Google and many other sites track that information -- and I've known that for a long time. Nonetheless, seeing my neighborhood right there in the search results made me want to never use any Google site again. Call it "uncanny valley" or "rubbing your face in it" or whatever you want -- it was just too close to home in the most literal sense. I'm off trying Yahoo Search as an alternative -- not that I have any reason to believe Yahoo treats such data any differently, but simply because having alternatives is a good thing. (For the record, I'm a noted privacy freak and I don't pretend to speak for anyone else on this topic. I know that resistance is futile. I continue to believe that there is a great divide on sensitivity about privacy -- you've either had your identity stolen or been stalked or had some great intrusion you couldn't fend off, or you haven't. I'm in the former camp and it colors the way I view and think about privacy online. It makes me indescribably sad to see how clearly I and others in my camp are losing this battle.)
2. I'd really like to end up on Wrong Tomorrow for predicting that the iPhone OS will be dominant for the next decade. Who knows? Prediction is completely impossible, which is one of the things that makes life fun. The tech industry seems particularly predictable, though, in that it just keeps acting in waves. The iPhone OS seems to be playing its cards right. Go ahead, commenters, freak out like you did the last time I said this. :)
3. I noted to a friend the other day (while encouraging him to go work there) that I measured Twitter's value by seeing Tweetie (an awesome iPhone Twitter client) ascend to one of the four apps in the bottom bar of my iPhone. Those bottom bar apps are the ones I use all the time (the others being the phone, SMS, and email apps). Tweetie replaced Safari, the web browser, which is pretty amazing as a symbolic shift. No other third-party app -- including my own company's app -- has made it into the bottom bar for me. Who says Twitter isn't valuable?
4. In contrast, using Twitter makes Facebook like watching repeats on local TV when you're home sick. I really hope the automated and out-of-control cross-posting comes to an end soon. Facebook wins for posting private messages and having inline replies; Twitter wins by letting you see the data some way other than through the official orifice (desktop clients, iPhone apps, SMS, etc). I would accept separate message streams for different types of data; or the death of Facebook in my friend group -- whatever. Unfortunately I doubt I'll get either wish.

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