Cool, I didn’t know you could just grab entire articles from the IntarWeb and publish them wholesale without even giving an attribution link!

That’s what Rixstep has done?

Scott Anguish, one of the nicest guys on the Intarweb is more than a little upset because Rixstep has repeatedly refused to remove his content which has been ripped of wholesale. What’s worse…

Scott writes

My copyright has been violated by his reproduction. Yes, the DMCA would allow me to get it taken down, and I am exploring that route. But given his track record, I see no way to stop him from doing this. He’s published incorrect and horrible stuff about me, Aaron Hillegass, and others, before.

It is imperative (and the reason I temporarily pulled things down) that long-time readers of Stepwise know RIX stole this.. I do not approve of his doing so. His use does not fall under fair-use, or commentary. He’s simple theft.

I’ve worked 13+ years on supporting developers by maintaining Stepwise (which truly is a labor of love) and I don’t want this theft and misrepresentation to damage that effort.

Rixstep gets traffic by stealing content, misrepresenting the opinions of the authors and doing the whole “keeping it real” thing in the face of millions of new Apple converts.

I must say it’s an interesting marketing step, calling Apple’s customers idiot fanboys while trying to flog them a replacement file manager. It really motivates me to buy it.

Scott Anguish is a pillar of the NeXTStep community. Anything that offends him and, in his own words “makes him sick” should motivate everyone interested in the Mac and especially Cocoa.

iPhone is not available to business accounts in the US and iTunes balks at registering the iPhone to a non-residential address in the UK so it’s certainly not aimed at the Corporate Road Warrior but as I’ve blogged a lot recently, there certainly a lot of buzz about the iPhone and not just from consumers, but from big business. SAP as previously discussed is bringing their product to the iPhone because their own people want it (and as we now know, the SAP client is being developed using a pre-release iPhone SDK here in Belfast).

Avaya, one of the big names in modern telephony, has also signed up to the iPhone and therefore lent it some serious credibility in the Enterprise.

Avaya one-X Mobile for iPhone will allow users to have access to visual voicemail, corporate directories, and VIP lists, all via an “enterprise-secure” environment, and allow the iPhone to be used for both incoming and outgoing calls while maintaining users’ office identity.

Click for the flash demo (which, of course, you can’t view on an iPhone).

Nortel, (never the visionary) hasn’t leapt onto the bandwagon for either Contivity or their IP phone products. But then they’ve been hot on air and cold on “actually doing anything other than loudly collaborating with Microsoft”.

Good oh!

Okay.

The 10/20/30 Rule - It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

The Lessig Method - the functional opposite of the 10/20/30 rule and best illustrated by the man himself (scroll to the bottom for video).

In both cases the focus of the presentation is to capture attention though they use drastically different approaches. Pick one of them.

Essentially you want to avoid this:

From Seth Godin’s Blog. Used without permission

I think it’s tragic that I’ve seen powerpoint slides in $BIG_CORP that may have beaten this one to the title of “Worst Powerpoint Slide Ever”.

[Chris Brogan’s 100 topics]

Joel writes about in house software:

That’s the second reason these jobs suck: as soon as your program gets good enough, you have to stop working on it. Once the core functionality is there, the main problem is solved, there is absolutely no return-on-investment, no business reason to make the software any better. So all of these in house programs look like a dog’s breakfast: because it’s just not worth a penny to make them look nice.

which is essentially why most Enterprise software sucks.

On my Newton, I downloaded maybe 20 apps. I bought two over the wire. I even bought one in a retail package.

On my Palm vX, I bought two apps. A Paris City Guide and a VT100 Terminal app.

On my other phones and devices between then and now I’ve downloaded two apps. One was a Telnet/SSH client for my SonyEricsson K800i which was so bad that I never used it and certainly never bought it.

The other was yesterday when I bought and downloaded Sonic the Hedgehog for my 5G iPod (the one I have donated to the kids, secure in a iFrogz Tadpole wrap).

I’m beginning to think that, based on my experience, the third party application market on Phones and PDAs might be a bit of a sham. I’ve spent hundreds of pounds on software for my Mac so I’m not averse to spending a bit of cash when something catches my eye.

The logic remains. I’ve only bought software for 3 devices. My Newton, my Palm vX and my iPod. Not one purchase for any of my phones in the past.

I think this is what will make the big difference in the PDA market. I think we’ll see an explosion of sales for the iPhone in third party applications even with the premium Apple will demand for signing.

RoughlyDrafted visits the news that the iPhone is already beating the stuffing out of competitors in mobile phone operating system usage.

With iPhone demonstrating considerably better statistics in terms of market share, it must be absolutely galling to some:

The most recent market share numbers are particularly embarrassing for Microsoft, especially after CEO Steve Ballmer announced in January that Apple wouldn’t capture more than two to three percent of the market and described his own Windows Mobile platform as having or soon acquiring 60 to 80% of the smartphone market.

Ever seen Minority Report? In the film, Tom Cruise plays a cop who, through the assistance of precognitive sun-loungers, can solve murders before they happen. The precogs are pale, bald and skinny. What we missed in the film was they had a not-quite-so-good brother called Steve. He was bald, pale and kinda avocado-shaped. His predictions were pretty much 100% wrong so they kept him in a different room where he could play with his own poo.

Windows Mobile isn’t going anywhere soon, up or down in marketshare but it’s another market outside Windows for x86 markets where Microsoft is being beaten senseless with a large rubber anatomical facsimile. They’re losing money hand over fist in the games consoles. By 2005 they’d lost over $4 BILLION. They’re also going to have to pay out another BILLION or so replacing XBox 360 consoles. And they’re congratulating themselves that in Sept 2007 they got better sales figures than the Wii. Yup, 5% better despite the release of HALO 3. Brilliant, lads. You’ve chewed through more than 5 billion dollars and you’ve just edged past the Wii…for one month. I can’t wait to see your next trick.

It should also be an embarrassment for Benjamin Gray of Forrester Research, who just released another report insisting that IT departments shun the iPhone and limit their support to platforms that are dead, dying, or obscure in North America, such as the Palm OS, Linux, and Symbian.

Quite. But I’ve covered the Forrester report previously.

The rest of the article is very well written so go read.

Another gem regards why Apple didn’t run with Symbian.

It turns out that just like the original Mac System, Symbian is hamstrung by the compromises they took on in order to get decent performance on old hardware. Now, as the hardware has matured, the system remains archaic and though Symbain claims a large market share, it’s firmly divided into three separate binary-incompatible camps, a Japanese version, a version from Nokia and a third from Sony-Ericsson. Despite the investment they have, they are only licensees of the software and therefore it’s unlikely there’s going to be an overhaul of the system to bring it up to date.

A Symbian developer explains, “Nokia is more or less stuck with Symbian since it doesn’t have the competence nor the time to make a new OS from the ground up. Its only alternative, in practice, is to go Linux, which it is of course experimenting with, but it’s still not an easy path to go.

This sort of explains where Nokia are going with the Nokia 770/N800/N810 platform. Sure, it doesn’t include mobile phone features but it’s going to give them a solid developer base when they get round to releasing later hardware especially since they have promised a WiMAX version sometime in 2008. Preparing for the VoIP onslaught - oh you better believe it?

iPhone’s OSX is just starting out, less than 6 months in the public domain and it’s making big waves. There may be some ups and downs in the near future but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was followed by an Apple TV SDK sometime later.

As Guy said earlier:

“Symbian, Palm and Windows Mobile can have third party development, so they are better”

David’s retort was

“iPhone is beating the stuffing out of them without an SDK. What do you reckon will happen in February when it’s available?”

Just a quick update on what I’ve been working on for Infurious recently.

Since finishing up on configuring Jabber I’ve been developing our website with the specific aim of allowing customers to download our products and purchase licenses for them.

For this I’ve returned to CakePHP and been tinkering with the PHP portion of the AquaticPrime framework which Aidan has implemented in our upcoming application, Rickshaw.

Other highlights have been working with the PayPal Sandbox and writing a component which generates “Buy Now” buttons for our apps and then handles the Instant Payment Notification and Payment Data Transfer callbacks once the transaction has been completed.

My current task is generating the license details, emailing the details to the customer and finally bunging a copy into our database for future reference and backup purposes…

It beats making minor configuration changes for the world's largest financial institution any day!

I downloaded the cool CTU ringtone for iPhone inspired by “24″ and eagerly loaded it onto my iPhone.

Of course….no-one rang me all day so I didn’t get to quickly take the call, stand up in the middle of the training course and say “National Emergency, I gotta take this!” What is that all about?

Mood: Sad

Intuit recently issued an update for QuickBooks which, due to some fuckedupness deletes the entire desktop folder. That’s pretty serious shit right there.

RixStep, the whiner of the week, was caught by this bug but blames Apple. I’m not sure how “unsafe” code written by Intuit really qualifies as being Apple’s fault considering that the Intuit developers must, at some point, have tested their code on a Mac OS X system. Sure - there are bound to be bugs in Mac OS X - every system has them - but this is what testing is for. We can all justify the release of unsafe code but deleting the entire desktop folder? Not acceptable. I’ve seen this kind of problem before, in the olden days when Bungie was an independent company they released Myth 2 which had the possibility of wiping out large amounts of your Windows install. Eep. Bungie released a fix pronto and said sorry.

Rixstep, however, points the finger at Apple and not at Intuit. Oddly.

His reasons:

Steve Jobs came back to Cupertino triumphant. Not only did he get to finally run his own company but he came with the world’s most fantastic system in his suitcase. A system the Grade A Idiots already ensconced in Cupertino have done their best to destroy.

Did anyone else miss the NeXT takeover of Apple in 1997?

The greybeards at Apple responsible for the bugs that he complains about are actually NeXT greybeards. It’s nothing to do with KoolAid. It’s nothing to do with Apple’s head honchos and their file system APIs. It’s absolutely 100% to do with the “world’s most fantastic system”. Where do people get this kind of hyperbole? That a CEO waltzes in with an entire management team and a new operatiing system in return for $400 million. And it’s still the fault of the OLD guys at Apple when there’s a bug and a problem? Catch a grip. Apple is NeXT. The same fusty old NeXTies who built the world’s most fantastic system are the same fusty old buggers making Mac OS X. Blaming it on a nebulous “Apple” is just fairy tales designed to help you sleep at night. You seriously think there are areas of Mac OS X that Jobs doesn’t make his presence felt at? Do yu think for a second that once this bug affected Mac users that there wasn’t a high level meeting to find someone to go and explain how it was Intuit’s fault? At risk of certain death from their Steve Vader leader?

The solution is, of course, is that if you don’t like it go back to using OpenStep.

Unless of course it wasn’t actually the world’s most fantastic system….to be honest, the post reads like the inane ranting of a stalker.

The Rixstep blog spends most of it’s time complaining about Mac OS X. But mostly it’s a damn good read. It would be nice to see a post about why, if Mac OS X is so broken, Rixstep’s writers continue to use it.

Rxstep takes issue with lackingareas of Mac OS X. The lack of an Advanced button and the lack of supported GUI theming.

OS X has no advanced button. There’s no way for professionals - for developers and admins - to get beyond the confines of the tilded user home area and see what’s really going on in the file system or the network using tools available from Apple.

Professionals assigned OS X have no recourse except to take to the command line - and this with a company renowned (infamous) for how it’s eschewed the command line all these years.

The problem here is the definition of “Advanced”. Are we talking about the mythical pwer user? Mac Professionals? Mac OS X SysAdmins? Seasoned UNIX Hackers? Fusty old NeXTStep types? How do you even begin to cater for all of these groups?

You do what Apple did. You create an interface that is simple, subtle and shallow for the 80% of users and for the remaining 20% you expose the command line and create kick ass developer tools. My frustration with Windows is that the GUI tools are simply stupid with windows that cannot be resized in table view dialogs and theres no obvious way to expose that information in the command line (like I’m going to relearn DOS in 2007!) My frustration with Linux is that it’s engineered piecemeal and feels disconnected - one minute I’m safe in GUI-land and the next minute I’m in advanced GUI designed by the developer who didn’t think to ask anyone if it looked like ass.

It’s obvious OS X users want the opportunity to customise the look and feel of their systems; not being permitted to do so ‘legally’ means they will resort to ‘illegal’ approaches. And history shows they’ll use these illegal approaches if that’s all that’s available.

It’s obvious to me, as someone who meets a lot of Mac users and Mac OS X installs, that theming is a 20% solution. The tools are there for people who want them. And the providers of these tools provide the warranty (i.e. nothing).

It’s frustrating enough trying to explain to someone who’s 70% blind how to do this or click that when the dock can be moved to three sides of the screen. If they could move the top menu as well it would be an absolute nightmare.

It’s not that I disagree with the sentiment. I just think there’s bigger fish to fry than “Advanced” buttons and themes. They need to work on the bugs, they need to fix security holes. Maybe theming will become important in 2037?

Apple is trying to be all things to all people. Whereas Linux GUI interfaces attempt to cater to small subsections of the population with the unhelpful suggestion that you can change the Window Manager to suit. That’s not a solution for anyone other than the 0.2% of the population which can be bothered. Similarly the Windows interface is designed for Windows users and the absolute horlicks they made with the almost simultaneous release of Office 2007 and Vista and the completely different UI paradigms for both. Ribbons? What’s that you say?

Apple’s approach is not going to please everyone but that’s why they ship the extra tools. It’s why the BSD subsystem is no longer optional. Previous to Mac OS X 10.0 shipping there was debate about whether Apple would ship the system with Terminal.app or whetherit would be a developer-only option. Apple is walking the fine line betwene providing a UI that my mum can use and providing a UI for the Alpha Geeks.