UIKit: A Fresh Start

Having (like zillions of others) just downloaded and started playing with the iPhone SDK this past week, I’m pretty impressed with UIKit. Being a frameworks/API guy myself, I can fully appreciate they way it’s put together. It’s very easy to do the simpler things and if you want to get down and dirty, you still can. I also really like the fact that it’s fully CG-based (no NSGraphicsContext nonsense), and the best part of all to me: top-left graphics origin! Yes, it’s the simple things in life.

I guess above all this demonstrates that by starting over, they’ve been able to take all the stuff they’ve learned over the past however many years of AppKit and were able to make a much more consistent and coherent set of APIs that demonstrate all those years of learning what works and what doesn’t. This makes UIKit a winner to me. Clean, concise. I’m soooo glad they started over. But of course, it was the right choice anyway considering the device constraints and just how different it is from a desktop environment. They certainly needed something smaller and more tuned to the iPhone. Good call.

The jury’s still out on Objective-C 2.0 for me, though. It has a lot of nice new features, but the syntax is still all wacky. The property syntax is a little heavy for my tastes. Almost too much control via the attributes. But at least you can finally use dot notation to get at your data. The thing is: I know I could come up with a way to annotate things and make the syntax more in line with other things out there (C#, etc.) while still preserving the great things about the runtime. I also still seriously wish you could get your constructors called if you put an object in as a member of an Obj-C class. That still seriously irks me. I’d love to hear the reason that can’t be made to work.

My nitpicking aside, I think there’s going to be a ton of iPhone apps coming out. And certainly all that use of Obj-C and their MVC model will likely help Apple get more traction for Mac OS X apps too. Once you’re in that door, the skills transfer so easily. I’m sure it wasn’t the primary intention of coming out with a phone, but it’s definitely a beautiful secondary effect.

Silverlight and Yahoo!

Wow. Someone just mentioned Silverlight in something I just read, and it got me thinking about how Microsoft would have a huge network to use it as a de facto standard if this MS/Yahoo! thing really pans out.

I have to say, after going to MIX last year, I was thoroughly impressed by Silverlight, to the point where I thought that Flash was in trouble if they can get some momentum going. Their tool set is very well done, and their ability to separate the design from the business logic to allow some parallelism is pretty amazing. In short, it’s one of the few MS technologies I think they’ve really gotten right. Of course, I haven’t used it personally, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

So if MS/Yahoo! happens, I could certainly see us starting to use Silverlight more and more. I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing.

This is Just Plain Nuts

I shouldn’t give this guy more airtime than he deserves. But give this a read:

Apple iPhone Doomed To Failure

He tells you it’s doomed, but I never really see him explain exactly why. Because it’s Microsoft? I don’t think so. Wasn’t Vista supposed to take over the world? What happened there? I can’t tell you the number of meetings where directors or VPs would ask us “how are we going to deal with Vista?”. They did this because they believed the media, not to mention they just were kind of knee-jerk reactionaries. In the end, it wasn’t much of anything to worry about. Don’t get me wrong, I like Vista much better compared to XP, but it certainly didn’t have the impact Microsoft was hoping for.

It seems to me that while Microsoft is definitely getting better at their UI, they never quite match the level of quality that Apple puts out. Take a look at the Windows Mobile 7 info and mocks here It doesn’t look too bad actually, but some screens are still too cluttered. In general, with Microsoft designs, they look good at first, but they wear on you quickly. For whatever reason, Apple’s designs tend to stay attractive for a lot longer. And user interaction on Apple products is always consistently better as well.

Apple also has such a lasting effect on the markets it enters these days, and some it doesn’t. Remember when the iMac came out? So many copycat machines and designs were influenced by it. Not just computers, but everything: wastebaskets, etc. Everything starting coming in tons of colors. Then the iPod arrived which really took off when the store came into being (again, Apple was the first to even try selling music online) and now the iPhone. Already LG has to tout a touchsreen that looks remarkably like the iPhone. I’m sure they started on that the second Apple announced. The point though is that Apple changes the game with many of the things they do. For example, the iPhone has visual voice mail. The most amazing thing about that fact to me is that they managed to make AT&T budge. Wow. Meanwhile, the rest of the word is still pressing 7 to delete. Enjoy. ¹

The point is, now that the iPhone is out, the bar is raised: people are now going to expect phones to be that cool and slick to use. Anything else is just kind of ordinary at this point. I bought and played with a Nokia N95 recently, and while it was feature-rich (some features put the iPhone to shame), it just wasn’t very pleasant to work with from a UI perspective. I just sold it on eBay because it just felt like a step backwards in ease-of-use.

While the first article I linked to sounds like an Apple-hater, I might be sounding like an Apple-lover. That might be partially true, but there are plenty of things I don’t like about the iPhone, or wish it had. It’s just that for my usage the positives far outweigh the negatives.

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1. Oh, and the visual interface that’s on the Treo 700w for voicemail is just graphics buttons for the touch tones. So you’re still pressing 7! ↩

Issues in 1.1.3 iPhone Update?

Since downloading 1.1.3 for my iPhone the second the servers came back on release day, my phone has been experiencing some oddness. In particular it really seems like there’s some sort of memory corruption issue going on. I say that because I’ve experienced the following in the past few days:

• The button to hang up a call was completely missing after one phone call. It was as if the image resource couldn’t be loaded.
• The Edge symbol was a solid white square once
• I tried to click the arrow next to someone’s name on the recent calls list and it wouldn’t respond. I then noticed that the lock icon was displayed at the top of my screen. I tried to lock and unlock the phone, but it was stuck for a while. Finally it came back.
• Today my phone rang but the screen was black. The home and top buttons did nothing.

This is certainly all odd behavior and it sounds like something might have broken. 1.1.2 was running fine for me.

I need to stop the complaining

Since my last eBay post, I’ve finally found an option which seems to stop most of the bad people from being able to bid on my items. Since then I’ve been able to sell 3 or 4 things without incident (including my camera). I’ve also noticed they’ve created a new streamlined version of their seller form, which is a welcome addition. Of course, I still needed to use the older form so I could make sure those options I just mentioned were set. The issue with simpler interfaces is you never know what the default settings are going to be.

But in general, I’ve looked back at my blog and found a few posts of me just complaining about whatever corporate entity was ticking me off at the moment. I’m going to stop that (even though they are bastards ) and start just posting normal, hopefully helpful blog entries. I’ve always said I’d like to post simple code snippets and helpful factoids like that. Time to start. Um, soon.

eBay May Collapse Under Its Own Weight

I recently tried to sell a camera on eBay. Twice.

Both times it was removed after it closed. Both times I received an email that stated:

The results of the following listing(s) have been cancelled due to bidding activity that took place without the account owner’s authorization:

OK, I get that. Someone got phished and that means the winning bid was invalid, not to mention outlandish (in this case, over 2x the value of the camera). But they pull the entire listing and if you try to go to it, it’s ‘invalid’. At the very least, I should be able to see my own listing after the fact so I could at least try selling the item to one of the other legitimate buyers. But nope. Instead now that item doesn’t come up which has the added side-effect of making me look bad, when in fact I did nothing wrong except try to sell my camera. (more…)

More DOM Fun

As per my last post, I’ve been working up a storm to redo our Konfabulator DOM. We did in fact end up coming up with a whole new way of exposing our objects into JavaScript. It’s so much nicer than anything we had in the past, though it does involve the use of a custom tool to help us generate the glue. But the end result is absolutely great. We’re able to whip up classes in no time now. Too bad we’re whipping up the same classes we had and not new ones At the same time, I’ve been fixing layering issues in our code. Too much lower level stuff knew about too much higher level stuff. Some people seem to think this is OK. I however do not.

I’ve been finding that as I progress in my coding life, I’ve become more and more of a purist. I think most of my design purity stems from my life at Apple, to be honest. We had to completely re-layer most of our stuff for the transition to Mac OS X (it was part of the whole design). This and many other things have stuck with me as I’ve moved on from there. I like abstractions and the ability to separate pieces of code so that I can mix and match them later (and invariably, the need will arise). I’ve been developing various tenets and axioms as I go which perhaps someday I can compile and put up here.

Bringing the original Konfabulator hair tangle into this new, clean architecture has been a long time coming. But once complete, it can be used for far more than just Widgets in theory. And it can be used in far more scenarios than just embedded inside Yahoo! Widgets. That’s why you design layered and pure from the beginning: flexibility.

Messenger for the Web

So if you haven’t seen recently, Yahoo! now has a version of Messenger that runs in a web browser. I’m actually running it in another tab as I write this. I can’t figure out if this is genius or insanity yet, but I’m leaning towards the latter.

The plus side is simple: server-side history (which I hope works on the client version too), and the ability to IM from anywhere without having to install software. It’s perfect for interweb kiosks, etc.

But damn, it’s a web page and that makes it… oh I don’t know… large. And now, I have a messaging pending, so the tab is displaying the message like a marquee, scrolling across. Annoying. It should just probably change into a different title that indicates there’s a message unread.

The jury’s still out on this one. It definitely will be useful at times, no doubt, but I don’t know if it’s what I want to run 100% of the time.

It’s been a while…

I’ve been away from blogville lately, and it’s not from lack of caring. I’ve been incredibly busy on our imminent Yahoo! Widgets 4 release. It’s going to be pretty kick-ass if I do say so myself. Does it do everything I’d like it to? No. Will it in the future? You betcha!

But this post isn’t about that. Or anything much really. Just a sign that I’m still here. I was actually just looking through the Flickr ‘Interestingness’ photos on their site, and I have to say, there are some amazing pictures on there. I mean, I have a really good camera and all, but it’s not the equipment that matters. It’s the eye. Some pictures on there just stop me in my tracks. Amazing.

If you don’t know Flickr by now, you really should.

Area Poster

’nuff said.