Google Voice (sort-of) available in Canada

Posted on August 27, 2010 by davidmegginson

I installed the Google Chat Voice plugin today, and found that I was able to make free Google Voice calls from Canada to both a US and a Canadian POTS number. I’m still unable to register for Google Voice at google.com/voice, and I cannot use the Google Voice app on my Android phone, but at least I can initiate a call from inside GMail on my laptop now.

Does this mean that Google is about to roll out full Google Voice support for Canada, or just that they forgot to plug a hole in the code that that’s supposed to prevent non-US accounts from using the service?

Google Voice on my Android phone would be fantastic, because I could make unlimited North American phone calls on (say) a 6 GB, $30/month data plan instead of paying the world’s highest cell phone bills for (limited) voice and long distance. I’m sure Rogers and other mobile carriers won’t be happy about that, but I hope their lobbyists can’t stop it.

Posted in General | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

RIP Java, 1995-2010

Posted on August 13, 2010 by davidmegginson

Java is dead.

A lot of developers have thought they were too hip for Java, but I still liked it. I implemented SAX in Java first of all, and have developed software in Java and encouraged my enterprise customers to use it for many years, sometimes in 9-figure projects at Fortune-500 companies — it’s a great, mature platform, with a lot of tools for managing large projects and development teams, and it has unit-testing and IDE support that is second to none.

But now, Oracle (which recently bought Sun) has decided to sue Google for using Java in Android, even though (a) Sun long ago open sourced Java, and (b) Google built its own VM anyway. I very much hope that Oracle will suffer the same humiliating, crushing, well-deserved defeat that the SCO group suffered when it went after Linux with its own bogus law suits, but it will take years for that to happen. The Android and Blackberry mobile operating systems will be fine, and Java (of a sort) will live on there (though I still recommend web apps instead of phone apps), but the days of Java and Eclipse in the enterprise are finished.

In the meantime, there are lots of open alternatives to Java, and the litigation risks of using Java have suddenly become far too high. In my consulting work, I’ll reluctantly have to advise customers not to use Java for any new projects, and to consider migrating older projects to a different platform. If you’re a big company or government, you just can’t afford the risk that Oracle will come after you, too.

I’m sorry the end was so sudden and messy, but still, it was a great 15 years. Thanks to James Gosling and all the other people in the Java community for the memories and opportunities.

Posted in General | Tagged , , | 13 Comments

Mobile users want fresh data

Posted on August 9, 2010 by davidmegginson

Summary: Mobile web users’ needs differ by more than UI features (small touch screen): they may check information more often, and expect it to be fresher.

Last night, I finally got around to installing Google Analytics on ourairports.mobi, the mobile version (for pre-smartphones) of ourairports.com, and this morning, I got my first stats: all of 3 visits yesterday (vs. 1,677 for the non-mobile site).

I expect that number to climb when the site is collecting stats for a complete 24-hour day, but already, I’ve noticed a significant difference in use:

Site Visits Page views Pages/visit
Mobile 3 93 31.00
Desktop 1,677 4,748 2.83

Of course, the mobile sample is too small to be statistically significant, but it still made me think about how a mobile user will use the site:

  • A desktop user at home may check information for an airport once while planning a flight (as pilot or airline passenger).
  • A mobile user, at or on the way to the airport, will keep checking for changes (new weather forecast, NOTAMs, etc.), constantly updating the same few pages.

A closer look at the analytics confirms that hypothesis, with a small number of airports updated multiple times (there were four pageviews for Sunbury Airfield in Australia, for example).

Further hypothesis: timely data is important for all web users, but it may be disproportionately important for mobile users. If this is true, it’s probably worth spending less time trying to make your mobile site (or app) look like a fourth-year graphic design college project, and more time making sure that it has the best, and most recent information.

I’ll watch the analytics for ourairports.mobi over the next month to see if this trend continues.

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Evil or misunderstood? Google and net neutrality

Posted on August 8, 2010 by davidmegginson

So what happened last week?  Did Google backtrack after getting caught trying to be evil about net neutrality and the mobile internet, or were they a victim of a misunderstanding (gleefully amplified by blood-thirsty Apple and RIM supporters)?

Net neutrality is a crucial issue for those of us who care about open information.  We believe that the Internet is a public thoroughfare, where every information provider has the same access.  Competing web sites shouldn’t have their traffic slowed down because Google or Microsoft paid more money to Verizon, Rogers, or Bell, any more than you should have to pull to the side of the road to let someone in a more expensive car pass you.

Carriers in search of a business plan

For obvious reasons, the Internet providers don’t see it that way. They’ve ended up stuck in the rut of commodity service, with the inevitable race to the bottom for price, and are desperate to find some new revenue.  The mobile Internet providers are a little better off because they can at least lock customers into three-year contracts by giving them subsidized smartphones, but it’s still clear that someone like Verizon would be thrilled be able to take a big bag of money from Google in exchange for letting Google sites load a little faster than anyone else’s.

It turns out, though, that that’s not what Google was trying to do.

Neutral in what sense?

The Google-Verizon kerfuffle draws attention to a different, and trickier part of the debate.  What if, instead of discriminating by provider (Google vs Facebook), carriers discriminated by traffic type? In other words, what if streaming audio and video got priority handling to avoid jerky playback, while e-mail was delayed an extra 2-4 seconds? All streaming video would get the same treatment, whether it comes from YouTube or a student’s dorm-room start-up, and all e-mail would get the same treatment, whether it’s from IBM or a LOL cats fan list.

According to Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, this is what Verizon and Google were talking about all along: not favouring one provider over another, but favouring one content type over another.

Is it still evil?

I expect that many people who support net neutrality for providers won’t feel so strongly about net neutrality for content types, because it doesn’t have the same appearance of unfairness.

Going back to the thoroughfare analogy, we have sidewalks where only pedestrians are allowed, paths where only cyclists are allowed, crossings that pedestrians aren’t allowed to use, and superhighways where only motor vehicles are allowed. Buses and carpoolers are sometimes allowed to use a faster lane, trucks are sometimes required to stay in the slower lanes, and so on.  Why can’t we have different lanes for different kinds of network traffic, too?

Net neutrality makes sense for content types, too

There are, however, four compelling arguments in favour of net neutrality by content type as well as provider:

  1. Pandora’s Box — it seems straight-forward enough to give streaming video priority over email, but how far might carriers take it? Will carriers throttle IM during the next G8 summit to make it harder for protesters to organize? Will government regulators prefer content types that are more popular among the old than the young?
  2. Business/content-type alignment — as the owner of the world’s top video site, Google has a strong interest in making video on the mobile web faster, even if it means that its competitors’ videos are faster too. This kind of thing could turn evil fast — imagine Adobe and Apple in a bidding war to determine whether Flash should be delivered faster or slower than other content types, or the recording industry lobbying to throttle bittorrent so much that it becomes useless.
  3. Innovation — the Internet already existed when HTML and HTTP arrived on the scene 20 years ago. If the net hadn’t been neutral then, perhaps priority would have gone to important existing protocols like telnet and FTP, and HTTP (and HTML) might have been slow enough to turn off early adopters. We don’t know what The Next Big Thing will be, but we do know that regulators respond slowly to change. Why shut the door on innovation?
  4. Routing around censorship — seriously, how long will it take a few enterprising developers to realize that they can build an “accelerated download” app that allows other traffic to masquerade as video (or whatever has top priority). Seconds? Less? You can make anything look like anything else on the Internet, and everyone thinks that his/her traffic is most important.

It’s OK to be wrong sometimes

Google is a company that embraces failure, which, perhaps, is why it has so many successes: Google puts products out early, lets us play with them, then feeds the ones that succeed (e.g. Gmail) and kills the ones that don’t (e.g. Wave).

Perhaps Google is willing to try the same thing with ideas — they’re not necessarily evil for suggesting dropping net neutrality for content types, but they are wrong. Let’s treat the whole thing as a failed project and move on, concentrating on making the net (mobile or desktop) faster for all providers, and all content types.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Balisage 2010 Silent Auction

Posted on August 1, 2010 by davidmegginson

Balisage Silent Auction Poster

The Balisage 2010 conference runs next week in beautiful Montreal, focusing on XML and other markup technologies. I cannot make it this year, unfortunately, but I gave some help (far too little) to Sam Wilmott to organize the silent auction.

The Balisage silent auction will raise money to help students and other young, up-and-coming markup stars to defray the cost of attending the conference: the auction includes O’Reilly books, various enterprise software licenses, and geeky memorabilia. We’re encouraging participants to splurge, and try to outdo each-other by overpaying for things. Most of us can’t afford to blow $20-50M on a bizjet, but we can certainly drop $50 on a $25 O’Reilly book and then brag about it to our friends.

Montreal strip club

Think of it this way — Montreal, with its Vegas-of-the-North attitude towards sin, offers far less savoury places to stick a few $20 bills. Why not put them somewhere that you won’t have to lie about when you get home?

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The past, future, and present of mobile apps

Posted on May 16, 2010 by davidmegginson

Nexus One

Now that I’ve had a few weeks to play with my Nexus One, I’m starting to grok the gut-level experience of living with a smart phone. I understand why people download apps, how it feels to have the Internet with me everywhere, and what it’s like to experience the web by touch on a screen that’s only a few centimetres square.

Past

Device-specific apps are sweet and shiny at first, but after a couple of weeks, it becomes obvious that many of them are the encore of the floppy-based PC shareware world of the 1980s and early 1990s (SEND $5 TO GET RID OF THE ANNOYING ADS! ONLY $10 FOR THE FULL VERSION!).

Discovering an interesting app through Apple’s or Android’s market (or taking a picture of a barcode on your computer screen) is surprisingly awkward compared to just following a link from one web site to another, and as we’ve learned from the postal service, the telegraph, the telephone, email, and the web, connectivity always wins in the end.

Future

Web apps run everywhere and connect to each-other seamlessly, and HTML5 allows a well-written web app to do almost everything a closed, device-specific app can do on a smart phone — many of the mobile web sites I’ve used (hello, Google!) are as good as or better than the corresponding device-specific apps. There are some things, though, that make mobile web apps stand apart:

  • The built-in buttons on your smartphone are tied to the browser, not to the app, so the Android menu or search button (for example) brings up a browser menu or search box, not an app one.
  • For good security reasons, a web app will probably never have as much access to the filesystem and device hardware as a closed device-specific app (do you want a malicious web app to be able to turn on your video camera when you’re browsing in bed? do you ever consider that when you give a downloaded app access to your camera?).
  • While HTML5 supports notifications, you have to actually be on the web page to receive them. That can be fixed by allowing the browser to launch web pages automatically on start/restart, but it’s still more awkward than an autostart app.
  • Web app processes need to be managed from inside the browser, not from a device-wide process manager.
  • As far as I know, there’s no way for a web app to install its own icon on the device home screen — the user has to install it manually (though it’s pretty easy).

I don’t consider most of these to be a big deal, but they do point to the fact that no matter how much extra functionality HTML5 provides, web apps have a different world view: they’re nodes in a huge network, not standalone silos.

Present

I’ll probably have to continue to use a device-specific app for anything related to playing music or capturing photos/video for a while longer, and I’ll hang onto the Android WiFi analyzer I’m running on my phone. Android has a lot of the same apps that show up in iPhone commercials (like Urban Spoon), but while they’re pretty, they’re limited in the end — there’s way more out there on the web than there will ever be an an app store.

If you’re an person or organization that wants to interact with people on mobile devices, you have two choices:

  1. You can develop and maintain separate apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Palm, and any other smart-phone OS’s that may come along, and let the phone vendors be gatekeepers between you and your users.
  2. You can run a single mobile web app on your own server, one that’s only a click away from any other web site that links to it.

The first option lets you force an icon onto the users desktop, but the direct development costs and opportunity costs of losing inbound links and search-engine love just seem too high.

Posted in General | Tagged , | 10 Comments

The thing about creativity …

Posted on January 29, 2010 by davidmegginson

Steve Jobs with iPad

I left this comment on Simon St-Laurent’s interesting and thoughtful post How dare Apple … (which, in turn, was partly a response to Tim Bray’s post Nothing Creative).

I don’t believe that most things, including the iPad, are obviously right or wrong, but I do have serious concerns that go beyond simply not being able to code on an iPad (at least, until there’s an app for that). I’m copying my comment here to give it a more permanent home. If I hadn’t posted this yet, I’d edit it to tone down the emotional language 10% or so, but still, it’s a fair reflection of my thoughts and concerns, not about the iPad itself (it’s just another consumer device), but about the way people are starting to talk and think about issues that are very important to me, like software freedom:

The thing about creativity is that it responds poorly to central planning and central control. I have no problem with the fact that the iPad isn’t developer-friendly — I can buy a Netbook with twice the power for half the price and code on it (and, BTW, that netbook makes just as simple a consumer device).

My problem is the idea that a single Apple politburo controls everything that can appear on the device. Is that the future? Even in the bad old days of TV, before cable, there were 3 1/2 US networks to choose from, not just one – you had to watch TV outside the US to see just how bad things could get with a single, government-controlled broadcaster (I grew up in Canada, but close enough to watch the US stations, thank god).

Apple’s obsession with central control goes beyond software to hardware. There must be some kind of port for the optional keyboard to plug into, but no way it’s going to be USB or Firewire, because that might let someone use an *unplanned* creative device on the iPad, someone creative daring not to give Apple its cut (and veto). If I build something clever for creative people using a USB interface, it will work with desktop towers, notebooks, netbooks, and even some small portable devices, but *not* with the iPad.

Apple has some smart people working there, but they won’t always have the best ideas, and Apple has thrown up too many barriers to other people with smart ideas. The best apps in the future are going to come from a couple of students coding in a dorm room, and they might just be so annoyed by Apple censorship that they defect to a freer platform. It’s sad that things have gotten to the point that even Windows is a freer platform than Apple.

Posted in General | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

What's the value of a life?

Posted on January 17, 2010 by davidmegginson

What’s your life worth to you? “Priceless” is the obvious answer, but in reality, you put a price on your life all the time.

Safety vs. money

Here’s a simple example: let’s say that you want to go on a two-hour scheduled flight, and that the odds of you dying on the flight come out to about 1 in 1 million (it’s actually lower, but let’s keep the math simple). Your ticket costs $400 with taxes.

Now, I start an airline that adds all kinds of extra safety features and procedures, and over the years, it proves itself twice as safe as the average, so your odds of dying are only 1 in 2 million. However, your ticket would cost $600 with taxes on my airline.

Will you buy the more expensive ticket? If not, then you’ve decided that your life is worth less than $200 million dollars (for every million people who paid the extra $200, one would be saved from death, in the unlikely event that I managed to get the simple math right) — a big number, still, but no longer “priceless”. Decide how much extra you would pay for the ticket ($5? $10? $50?) and multiply by 1 million — that’s what your life’s worth to you.

Safety vs. time and pleasure

Of course, time is as much of a commodity as money. How much time do you save by flying between cities instead of taking the train, or driving across town instead of taking the bus? How much extra risk of death did you assume by making that choice? Again, you can do the math, and decide what value (in saved time) you put on your life. Ditto for your hobbies — downhill skiing is more dangerous than playing Wii, but you’ve decided that the value of your life is less than the extra enjoyment divided by the extra risk of dying (where risk is < 1.0).

It’s perfectly normal

Risk taking is normal for humans, and most of the time we don’t actually do the math — we just make a snap judgement of the value of our lives and the effects of our choices based on instinct. This matters, though, because we (where “we” = American, Canadian, British, Australian, etc) are now electing governments that promise to spend more money to make us safer, and much of that money ends up going into blowing up central Asian villages, spying on our communications, and groping us at airports.

Valuing lives

Is it helping? If we’d spent the same amount of money building better flu clinics, fast intercity trains or even better-lit intersections, could we have saved more lives in our own countries? If we’d invested even one percent of that money into sewers, clean water or earthquake-resistant hospitals for the developing world, how many lives could we have saved there?

Putting a dollar value on a life isn’t a crass, corporate, conservative thing — it’s a way of deciding where to spend money most effectively. If I could save one life for every $2 million spent on road improvements, and one life for every $200 million spent on improved airport security, where should I spend that money?

Where are people dying?

Let’s end with fatality numbers for the U.S. in 2001, the worst year for terrorism on U.S. soil:

Influenza and pneumonia: 63,730

Traffic accidents: 42,196

Terrorist attacks: 2,973

If you’d had billions of dollars to spend to save lives nine years ago, where would you have spent it first? Where would you spend it now? That depends not only on the overall numbers, of course, but the amount you have to spend to save each life. I’m not sure we know that, but I suspect that it’s much higher for anti-terrorism efforts than for basic road or healthcare improvements.

Posted in General | 3 Comments

One app store to rule them all …

Posted on January 10, 2010 by davidmegginson

During my university studies, I first encountered the idea of the Myth of Progress — in 19th and 20th centuries a lot of people assumed that the world generally gets better each generation (aside from occasional blips like depressions or world wars), with less bigotry, better medicine, new technology, etc., but there’s no guarantee that any next generation will build on and improve the accomplishments of the previous one, and history’s movement may be more akin to a random walk.

Case in point: in the information technology world, the greatest accomplishment of the most talented coders and business people in GenX was replacing the Baby Boomers’ nasty old platform-dependent shrink-wrapped computer applications with open web applications that could run anywhere, from a Windows desktop to a Linux cell phone. Write once, run all over the place on any hardware/OS you want. GMail instead of Eudora. Wikipedia instead of Encarta. Cool, eh?

So GenY comes along and says “hey: instead of encouraging people to browse the web with open standards, let’s build proprietary applications that run on only one type of mobile phone. And we’ll allow only one store to sell those applications for each type of phone, and every proprietary, platform-specific app will have to be preapproved and precensored by the phone manufacturer, who will extort^H^H^H^H^H^H be gladly offered a cut of sales.” Even Microsoft in its monopolistic hey-day — before it became the toothless lion it is today — never had the balls to try anything like that with Windows apps.

Who, ten years ago, would have predicted an IT catastrophe like this after so much progress and hope? It’s enough to make a person cry. Let’s encourage those GenY’ers who taken up the torch and continue to work on the dream of an open web.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

A farewell to tabs

Posted on August 5, 2009 by davidmegginson

I’ve used tabbed layouts in web sites for a while without thinking much about it. I find them less obtrusive than menus, and have always believed that the idiom was familiar to nearly all users because of desktop applications. Here’s an example of the tabbed interface at OurAirports as of 5 August, 2009:

OurAirports tabs, 2009-08-05

The “Airport” tab has bold text, and a white background that runs smoothly into the rest of the page, while the other tabs have a light-blue background, blue text, and a line at the bottom separating them from the page — that should make it obvious to everyone that “Airport” represents the current page, while the others represent alternative pages that you can view by clicking on them.

Right?

Err, maybe not. Even though it doesn’t look linky, the active tab is still, by a lucky coincidence, a link, so I was able to track it using the Google Analytics Site Overlay out-link tracker (note that it’s not actually a click tracker, even if it looks like one). I have over 40,000 airport pages like this, so I can’t check every one, but the few dozen I looked at all told the same, sad story…

People don’t get tabbed interfaces

On most airport pages, the majority of user clicks were on the active “Airport” tab. In other words, people go to the page, see the word “Airport” in bold in a prominent position, and click on it. They don’t notice that it’s the active tab — maybe they don’t know that it’s a tab at all. They just figure that it must have more information about the airport they’re looking at.

For example, on the Heathrow Airport page over the past month, Google Analytics tracked 17 outlinks to the same page (via the active “Airport” tab), 5 to airport arrivals, 4 to airport departures, and 0-2 for every other link.

Once they click on what I thought they’d recognize as the active airport tab, the same page just reloads. Blech. I assume that’s when they get sick of the site, and go back to their Google search results to find a better page about the airport.

Tabs encourage information clutter

So the tabbed interface just leads to confusion and frustration from many of the visitors to my web site. But there’s another problem evident from the the outlink stats: tabs encourage a designer to present too many options in too many contexts. The tabs are all visible on every page they cover, but most of the time, they represent information that the users don’t actually need, and there’s no clear visual cue that some of the tabs (e.g. arrivals and departures) are a lot more interesting than others (e.g. the airport page’s change history).

Here, for example, are the last month’s outlink counts for each of the tabs on the Myrtle Beach International Airport page:

Tab # followed
Airport 33
Arrivals 36
Departures 12
Pilot info 0
Visitors 4
Nearby airports 7
Nearby members 1
Changes 0
Edit 0

For reasons I don’t understand, this was the most-visited airport page on OurAirports last month, with 371 pageviews (300 uniques). It’s a little atypical, in that the active tab is not the most clicked (though it’s still unacceptably high), but otherwise, it shows the picture well. The “Pilot info” tab has existed for only a few days, so we can leave it out, but in general, it’s clear that the main thing accomplished by the tabs is showing a lot of links at the top of every page that no one actually wants to use. I suspect that even the four clicks on the “Visitors” tab were accidental — instead of trying to see what OurAirports members have visited the airport, people were probably just looking for visitor information.

How to redesign?

So if (a) tabs aren’t actually intuitive for most of my visitors, and (b) they fail to distinguish useful/popular information from more esoteric information, then they have to go. It’s going to take me a while to redesign the site, but what I think I’ll do is highlight the 3-5 most useful actions for each type of page in a side bar beside the map, like this:

Show me…

  • arrivals or departures
  • visitor comments
  • pilot information
  • nearby airports
  • points of interest
  • more…

A list like this, as opposed to tabs, provides a clear call to action for a page visitor, providing more detailed options in language that will make sense to them. It highlights useful information they might have missed in a tab (e.g. pilot info) or a section lower on the page (e.g. Visitor comments), and hides stuff they rarely need in a menu that appears only on demand, when they click “More…”.

Farewell, tabs. Even if you weren’t helpful, you were fun to design with CSS and rounded-corner images.

Posted in General | Tagged | 11 Comments