Consider, for one example, Amazon’s Kindle clients for iPhone OS and Mac OS X. The iPhone OS Kindle app is excellent, a worthy rival in terms of experience to Apple’s own iBooks. The Mac Kindle app is a turdthat doesn’t look, feel, or behave like a real Mac app. The iPhone OS Kindle app is a native iPhone app, written in Cocoa Touch. The Mac Kindle app was produced using the cross-platform Qt toolkit.

This was followed shortly after by a Design Dare article titled Steam Is a Port — the title itself implying that Steam is a lesser app for no other reason than being a port.

Not so.

What They Got Wrong

To say that cross-platform tools are evil because one can produce bad programs with them is like saying that paint should be banned because it might fall into the hands of the tasteless. Or taggers. So too bad for Da Vinci and Picasso.

I’ve worked with wxWidgets and I’m currently working with Qt. Both libraries will let you use native controls. Like artfully used paint, both libraries will let you create native apps that will shine bright and soar.

What They Got Right

On the other hand, both Gruber and Design Dare are correct: Kindle for Mac and Steam for Mac are, indeed, ports. They were designed for one platform first, and only afterwards ported to the Mac. This rarely works, not because it’s technically impossible, but usually because the programmers are not deeply imbued with the Mac culture to get the finer details of the interface right. Often, this is compounded by bad messages from management, e.g. “who cares… we just need a Mac version to cover all bases, wrap it up ASAP”.

BTW, this is precisely why Cedrus (where I work) offers a free iPhone to all employees. It’s also why we have an iPad in the office that each employee got to take home for a week. We are not currently developing for iPhone or iPad, but if or when the time comes, using and knowing iPhone OS will be second nature.

Epilogue

The converse is also true: one can develop awful apps that don’t feel native even on Mars, all while using the platform’s native tools. Just try to buy a song or an app on iTunes. What horror.

Qt cascading style sheets, introduced in version 4.3, lets you customize each control like you won’t believe — and shoot yourself in the foot like you won’t believe either, if you’re not careful. I’m guessing that perhaps that’s how Kindle for Mac got itself in Gruber’s crosshairs. One single setting in a widget that’s high up in the hierarchy of controls can cause a button to look non-native. The uninitiated developer can then find himself trying to “recreate” that original look and never quite getting it.

Other times, the developer gets creative with the look of the controls, but in doing so, rarely adds enough value to make up for robbing users of their familiarity with the native look-and-feel.

One exception is the scroll bar in Tweetie, a Twitter client:

It is simple, with an ever so slight gradient.  But the best part about it is the utter lack of background.  If the information fits entirely in the window, the scroll bar disappears entirely.  Beautiful.

You just can’t make this stuff up.

Gotta admit, I don’t know anything about football. Our family’s sports fanatic is Robert, my brother-in-law. As I arrived at his place, my first question was “who’s playing”. Yeah, that’s how knowledgeable I am. It turns out that sometimes ignorance is, indeed, bliss.

When the score became 24-17 in the Saints favor, I told Robert that the game was over.

Robert: “No way, all the Colts need is a touchdown”.

Me: “It doesn’t look like they will score a touchdown”.

Robert: “These are the Colts, they will score a touchdown for sure, there is plenty of time left”.

Me: “Hmmm, I don’t know, they don’t like they have the fire in the belly.”

And they didn’t score. I was able to see the likely outcome precisely because of my ignorance, and hence my lack of bias.

I won’t go on and on about how bias can affect your judgement about your own designs and user interface, except to say this: be aware of it, we all have it and it can mislead.

We moved again a couple of months ago and my commute is now a whopping 11 miles, driving under blue skies on a scenic coastal road, with the view alternating between Catalina island, beautiful beaches and imposing cliffs, often watching the sun setting on the Pacific Ocean.

It’s horrible!

Or is it? I never thought I’d say this, but I am now liking my commute. It all started when I plugged my iPhone to the car’s stereo. After a few days of listening to music, I switched to the WNYC’s Radiolab podcasts and have been enjoying them thoroughly. I just finished listening to Placebo, their best so far. In another podcast, I was pleasantly surprised that a guest speaker was one of our own SuperLab customers, Dr. Julian Keenan.

Then there are those days when I don’t feel like listening to anything. I enjoy that as well. It’s the pause that refreshes.

Commuting is not so bad after all.

“Yes honey.”

“I just cleaned the house. If you forget, the house will be full of grass dust when I come back.”

“I won’t forget.”

“Please write a note to remind yourself.”

I have a history of forgetting to do things around the house, I can’t blame her for insisting. So I wrote a note.

My outrage is this: why wasn’t GPS technology used to determine the airspeed? The on-board computer could have compared a calculated speed using GPS data to the speed readings from the pitot tubes, and automatically warned the pilot. The Airbus A330 has state of the art avionics including GPS according to their site. If free or really inexpensive iPhone apps like V-Cockpit GPS and MotionX-GPS can tell Jane and Joe how fast they are going, why can’t Airbus do so?

Further, why hasn’t America’s FAA or Europe’s EASA aviation authorities required that GPS information be used as a backup to pitot tubes? Commercial airplanes have several pitot tubes for redundancy. But if one stops working due to freezing weather over the Atlantic, then all of them are likely to stop working for the same reason. An airplane would need an alternate method of measuring speed, not more tubes. It is a crying shame that a proven technology like GPS was not used.

We programmers are used to being blamed for failures. Sometimes the blame is well deserved, like the spectacular explosion of the Ariane 5 rocket (see video). Other times, the fault is with management, like the failure of the FBI’s $170 million Virtual Case File (VCF) project. In this case, our profession could have easily saved 228 lives and hundreds of millions of euros.

What Is It?

The MiFi is a stylishly designed credit card-sized device. It connects to the cellular network much like laptop cellular cards, with a difference: the MiFi is wireless, and a router. Simply turn it on, wait about 15 seconds, and you are online. That simple. And being a router too, you can have up to five devices (laptops, iPhone, etc.) online at the same time.

The subscription cost is $40/month for up to 250MB of data or $60/month for a generous 5GB/month quota.

My Experience

The installation requires that you connect it to a computer via the supplied Micro-USB cable, resulting in a disk appearing in the Finder or Windows Explorer. The disk contains all the needed software. In my case, I had to unplug and re-plug the MiFi a couple of times before the Mac could see it (Engadget had to try a different Mac, see their review). Once installed, you’re done. Running the VZAccess Manager afterwards is optional.

The MiFi worked largely as advertised. Speeds are decent, and once installed, using it is trivial — just turn it on. I have used it in two hotels and two airports so far without a hitch. I’ve also used it with my iPhone in an area where there was no AT&T EDGE data signal.

Sleepless Nights

Once upon a time, turning a device off did what you thought it should do: cut off power so that not a single milliamp continues to flow. Not so anymore: turning a device off or on these days is like submitting a request and asking it to please, kindly do so. It may or may not. And the MiFi flat out refuses to honor your request if it’s connected to anything.

I had the MiFi connected to my MacBook to keep it charged then I closed the MacBook to get some sleep. But I kept hearing the CD-ROM spinning briefly every minute or so, indicating that the MacBook was starting up. I waited to see how long this would go on and gave up after some time. I got up, unplugged the MiFi from the MacBook and plugged it into the wall charger. The power LED light turned on. I tried to turn it off, to no avail; it kept turning on again! The MiFi will only sleep if it’s running on battery.

Another thing, really minor: I found the two green LEDs to be too bright. I mention this because reducing the unnecessary brightness is also an easy way to increase battery life.

Overall, if you are on the road for any significant length of time, the MiFi is well worth the subscription cost.

[This article was posted using the MiFi]

When It All Started

Today marks the 25th birthday of my very own Macintosh 128K. Yes sirree, after seeing a Mac for the first time, it was love at first sight. The Mac was a quantum leap and made the IBM PC look like a tiny incremental upgrade over the Superbrain computer that I had access to back home. Heck, the IBM PC even had just one processor whereas the Superbrain had two (two, I tell ya!) zippy Zilog Z80 microprocessors!

There is nothing magical about this date, February 27, 1984, except that after my encounter with a Mac two weeks earlier, this is how long it took me to borrow the money from my uncle and have it transferred from the UAE. Paid full retail price, $2,495. There was a waiting list but the sales guy, Brett Latzko, was happy to let me have the one that was on his desk. He also threw in free issues of these new magazines called Macworld and St. Mac. The latter went to magazine heaven after only a few issues.

(BTW, it’s funny how memory works. I remember the name of the sales rep but not the name of the Washington, DC store where I bought my Mac.)

Epilogue

Nine months later, my Mac and I travelled to the UAE to spend Christmas with my parents. Mom worked at Total ABK, the local operation of the French oil company. Macs in Abu Dhabi were considerably more expensive than in the U.S., so the head of Total ABK (bonjour Monsieur Naylies!) was happy to pay me full price, $2,495.

Twenty five years later, I am typing this post on a Mac.

Mitch is the guy who invented Lotus 1-2-3; he’s been around the block once or twice. The book is a worthwhile read for anyone involved in a team software development effort, or about to embark on one.

Dreaming in Code was a Christmas gift from a colleague, and I suspect that her choice of books is not coincidental. See, we’re starting work on this major new software project. I am not at liberty to disclose much about it, so I’ll call it Project Luceen for now, after my daughter’s middle name. We haven’t starting coding yet — the developers are wrapping up work on another project and I am finalizing the user interface and writing the specs. But while reading the book, the following passage on page 260 caught my attention:

“Success is a by-product of iron-willed restraint — a choice firmly made and vociferously reasserted at every challenge to limit a project’s scope. Where you find software success stories, you invariably find people who are good at saying no. [,,,] the successful programmer thrives because of, not in spite of, constraints.”

Most people think of featuritis as the constant adding of new features, from the meaningful to the superfluous. Kind of like the artist who does not know when to stop working on a painting. But it’s more than that: featuritis is not having a solidly defined set of features before development starts. This is partly what dogged SuperLab 4.0’s development. In the case of Chandler, the feature set was a moving target.

After reading the book, I went back to the specs document and swapped items 1 and 2! The screen snapshot below is of the top of the very first page — yes, even before the table of contents.