However. (You knew that was coming.) However, many links on the main page are non-functional, by which I mean they push you straight through to their paid-for service sign-up form.

The “tricky” part is that before you press them it is difficult to know which links actually work and which ones just ask for money.

There are a number of other tricks that some sites have. Another favourite is the interstitial screen, forcing you to view adverts before you can do what you actually want to do.

But it’s not just that I find it obnoxious. I don’t have data but I do have a nice anecdote that shows that it doesn’t really work.

During the dot.com boom I helped build a website. The launch went pretty well but the client decided that they wanted to push a secondary product, one with great margins but where customers really needed to be vetted. (I don’t want to get into specifics but it was a financial product.) The marketing people said that a pop-up would be the right thing to do.

We balked at the idea. At the time, pop-ups were the scourge of the Internet. They were used on all the least reputable sites. Technically adept users closed them without looking; the less fortunate were conned into either filling their screen with pointless adverts or visiting website they had no interest in. Pop-up blocked were a few years away.

In short, we felt that at best there was a reputational risk. Unfortunately we couldn’t come up with numbers to show that it was financially a bad idea, plus it was actually pretty cheap to implement. So they asked us to go ahead with it, over our objections.

As I recall it didn’t last very long.

After go-live there was a substantial up-tick in the number of people applying for this secondary product. However, there was actually a drop in the number of people who were accepted. That’s to say that it attracted exactly the wrong kind of person, which is bad enough, but there was also a cost associated with each rejected application.

Moving back to 2009, I think the problem with pushing your paid products too hard is that you actually make your free version less appealing. And, frankly, if your free version is a pain to use I’m certainly not going to pay for the full version just to make the evil bits go away.

To be clear, I have nothing against the so-called “freemium” business model. It can work really well. Flickr, for example, seems to have the balance about right: the site is useful even if you don’t pay for it with the extras useful for regular users. And paying LWN readers can get their content a week ahead of other people.

In short, if your paid extras are genuinely useful you don’t need to be obnoxious, you don’t need lots of “dead” links or interstitial adverts. And making your free version painful is most certainly not the answer.

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1. So, you got a bad review?
2. What Price?
3. Net Neutrality, Privacy and Hypocrisy

I forget the exact dates of both events but they were fifteen and ten years ago. Back in 1994 I first installed Linux on my 386SX-based PC. At this point in time my exposure to Unix had been only on “big” computers, the Sun (Solaris) and HP (HP-UX) machines in the Universities labs. It seemed incredible that you could even get something approaching a full version of Unix running on my little home computer.

I guess it would seem pretty primitive if I were to look at it now. I seem to recall that they’d only just got X working on it and it didn’t work at all on my 386. But still, it ran and I could log in multiple times using virtual terminals. It even multi-tasked, something that Windows 3.1, the operating system in the other partition, couldn’t really do with any reliability. Despite the limitations, it was good enough to help me finish my final year project without having to make the half hour, hilly walk to the labs every day.

Five years after that I got my first mobile (cell) phone. It was an Ericsson flip phone, long before they teamed up with Sony. It was pretty small (even by modern standards) but they had achieved this by providing only a single line LCD display and stubby aerial that caught on the inside of your pocket when you pulled it out when receiving a call. Still, this was better than the Motorolas of the time which often allowed you to remove the battery when you intended to flip them open to answer a call.

At this point mobile phones were becoming popular but were far from ubiquitous. My Ericsson was tied to one2one, a network that no longer exists as a seperate entity (it’s now part of T-Mobile). Friends told me that this was a bad idea as they had poor coverage but I never really had a problem. When I did eventually move it was when they declared that I was on an “illegal” tariff and doubled my monthly fees. I’d called because I wanted to upgrade, to spend more money with them, but this was not what I’d had in mind!

As an aside, I continue to be fascinated by the farce that is the US cell phone industry. Ten years ago UK networks talked about coverage and dropped calls but it’s pretty much been a non-issue for a while now¹. Both still seem to be big problems (or selling points) in the States and yet Americans pay more than almost anywhere else for their service. The bizarre thing is that many of the most tech-savvy people actually defend the telcos.

But back to the main narrative.

It’s kind of odd to think that we’ve now pretty much come full circle. What was considered “big” in 1994, Unix, has now filtered down to the decedents of that Ericsson mobile phone. Pretty much all of the “cool” phones released in the last few years have a Unix core, the iPhone, the various Android handsets, the Pré.

I’m not sure that ten or fifteen years ago I would have predicted that you would be able to get Unix on a phone, but Moore’s Law was well known so it wouldn’t have been an outlandish idea. But what comes next? Unix (and Linux especially) already span the whole range from tiny, embedded systems right through to super computers.

Where do we go from here?

1. Orange have just started advertising about their 3G coverage, but this the first I’ve seen for a long time. I’m not even sure if it’s generally accepted that there’s a reception problem with the other carriers. I’ve been on most of the networks over the years and I’ve not seen dramatic differences.

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2. Dreadful Thoughts
3. The Bourne Confusion

I wasn’t sure whether I should upgrade initially. I have been stung before by being an early adopter. Mac OS X 10.4 was a nightmare on my iMac G5. The big ticket new features such as Dashboard and Spotlight worked just fine¹. What didn’t work were little thing like, oh, networking. Eight times out of ten it couldn’t connect to my AirPort Base station. This made almost everything, including downloading patches to fix this very problem, a compete and utter pain. I think it took until 10.4.3 before everything worked reliably.

I waited several months before making the leap to 10.5 for this very reason. But Leopard at least had some neat new features (and the lame new look of the dock) to try to tempt me over. Snow Leopard, by design, has few user-facing enhancements to make it worth the risk.

Of course I’m not a typical end user. The reason I moved from Windows to the Mac back in 2001 was because of its Unix underpinnings:

MacOS X is based on a BSD Unix kernel (called Darwin and available under an Open Source licence) and has an enhanced Macintosh user interface grafted on top. This is truly the key. You have the complex internals available from a command-line when you need it and a state of the art GUI when you just need a word processor.

And now that I’m an iPhone developer I have a vested interest in using the best tools available for the platform, and they were only available for Snow Leopard. Also a lure where the new APIs (Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL) and language enhancements (blocks). I’ve not done much Macintosh development but these were exactly the kind of things that would potentially get me started.

All this is a long way of saying that, despite the risks, I took the plunge anyway.

And…

Well, so far it’s pretty much been a non-event.

Yes, it’s quicker. Most noticeably in starting up, shutting down, Time Machine and in Mail. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of nice little things — and I’m still finding new ones — but it’s mostly been entirely seamless, almost an invisible upgrade. And I mean that in a good way.

Yes, all my programs still work. I’d read reports that PhotoShop Elements didn’t work under Snow Leopard. I can report that it takes a considerable amount of time to start up and frequently beach-balls afterwards. Or, put another way, it works just as well as it did under 10.5.

I’d also seen scare-stories about old versions of Microsoft Office and other PPC applications that need Rosetta to run but, again, I’ve not seen any problems². Even lower level software like my screen calibration program and film scanner software are fine.

I have two negatives so far, both fairly minor in the grand scheme of things.

The first affects Yummy and Yummy Browser and that’s the fact that the new version of Xcode only supports developing for iPhone OS 3.x³. Luckily there are very few users on 2.x but it’s still a little disappointing that I have had to make the move.

Secondly, it’s my printer. There is no longer a HP-supplied driver for my 2002-era DeskJet. Luckily Apple includes GutenPrint with Snow Leopard and there’s a bundled driver that recognises it. So on the plus-side I don’t have to go out and buy a new printer as I feared I might have to. On the down side the quality is just not there. While it was never a match for any contemporary photo printer, it was more than adequate for my needs. With GutenPrint, text is readable but there’s noticeable banding. I’m not sure I’d use it any more for “official” letters, though maybe I’m just being a snob. Photos have the same issue with banding but have the added distraction of some coarse dappling as a substitute for the more subtle colours.

No significant upgrade is going to be entirely problem-free but overall I’m happy with it. It’s about as easy as it could be and, despite Apple’s claim of no new features, there are certainly tangible benefits to making the leap.

1. Some would argue with that statement. Personally I never had any serious problems with Spotlight.
2. To be fair, I moved to Office 2008 around the same time.
3. It’s true that you can build for older releases but there’s no way to test it in the simulator. I’m not willing to release software that I’ve not been able to test.

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1. Dreadful Thoughts
2. Dreadful Conclusions
3. Growing Up in Public

This turned out not to be entirely correct.

After sitting through over a week of her spelling out each and every step in excruciating detail — much of which I don’t think she really understood — I spent three days writing a shell script to automate over ninety percent of the process. I don’t mean a quick, shoddy hack either. I spent the time to gold-plate it. It was a work of art. I set it up so that you only needed to copy the one file and allowed for the user forgetting to switch FTP into binary mode¹.

In the end, my three days of work reduced the week long process to about an hour, and most of that was waiting for the file to transfer over the network.

I say all this not to show off. I think any engineer would have thought to do this. I note the extra refinements so you realise that it could have been done in much less than three days had I not wanted to practice my Unix-fu.

Result: I was heavily criticised for not following the proscribed process. I pointed out that my new scheme was quicker, easier and less error-prone. They countered that I had been unprofessional to begin a “development project without authorisation.”

What does “professionalism” mean to you?

Sometimes, I think, it’s used as an excuse to do or not do something in a particular way. “That’s not professional” is kind of a cop-out. In this case I can only assume that the real reason was that they wanted to bill a week of my time to the client for each installation. Of course they couldn’t say that.

Since then, every time I hear the phrase “that’s not professional” I try to drill down and find the real, underlying reason. I’m hoping that one of these days I won’t be disappointed with what I find. It hasn’t happened yet.

1. I basically appended a tar’d and uuencoded file to the end of the shell script which it knew how to extract and decode.

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2. Installing Oracle on Redhat 7
3. Blessed is the Tool Maker

But I digress. This post was inspired by B getting an iPhone and asking which apps she should get. I’ve never actually compiled a list, so here goes…

First, the context. I’m not one of those people who downloads pretty much everything. I’m a long way from having the maximum allocation of 148 apps and I can be pretty ruthless at pruning applications that I don’t use. That means that every application below is something that I actually use and not just like.

Yummy. Okay, so I’m not actually including this in the five. I do genuinely use it every day but I think bias and modesty precludes me from saying it’s one of the best apps on my phone. Still, if you want a delicious.com client it’s the one to get.

In alphabetical order:

Byline. I live in London and spend over an hour a day on the underground, so the ability to read my Google Reader feeds quickly, efficiently and off-line are incredibly useful. The ability to download and read complete web-pages is also great. What’s not so good is the aesthetics (faux wood panelling?!), the time it takes to sync and the fact that some options don’t do the same thing as the web version.

Enjoy Daily Sudoku. I went though a lot of the Sudoku apps, including a couple of paid ones, but this is the one that I use. It’s simple, keeps out of the way and downloads new puzzles from the internet on demand. The layout of the number buttons and the way you can “pencil” on guesses just kind of jells with the way I work.

Instapaper. This is an interesting one. I’d vaguely heard of it but had never tried it until a number of users requested that I add Instapaper support to Yummy. And now that I’ve tried it, I’m hooked. The basic premise is that you tag web pages and Instapaper downloads a text-only version for off-line reading. It makes something that I’m sure is not as easy as it looks very easy and convenient.

Tube Deluxe. I basically bought this as a “thank you” for the immensely useful “TubeStatus” app by the same developer. It lets you know what problems are reported on the various London Underground lines. The extra features in the full version — the map, the departure board and the “locate” function — are less used than the core, free functionality but that does not detract from a very useful app.

TwitterFon. I hear great things about Tweetie but, frankly, as long as there is TwitterFon, which is both free and Open Source, chances are I’m not going to make the switch. TwitterFon is faster and looks cleaner than most of the other Twitter apps I’ve tried. Some functionality is fairly well buried but the options I used every day are well thought out.

If there’s a theme here it’s simple and off-line. And by “simple,” I don’t mean lacking in features. I mean probably doing hard stuff behind the scenes but without exposing that to the user.

And off-line is something that is often forgotten. Yummy, for example, is far more complex than it might have been because I made a huge effort not to lose changes if there is no network connection available. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect the same of other developers.

In the end, these are all applications that I use at least daily. I can’t make a higher recommendation than that.

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3. Growing Up in Public

“How hard can it be? It’s only a button!”

Those two, tiny sentences hide a lot. Let me explain.

I’m mainly technical. I have been in the industry for over ten years now, did a computer science degree and spent many hours when I should have been revising for my German GCSE programming my Sinclair Spectrum. This means that when someone says “It’s only a button” I instinctively cringe. I may not know the details but I’ve seen enough “simple” buttons with days worth of work behind them that I’ve learned to be cautious.

Of course, not only technical skills are required for most modern applications. Even a relatively small iPhone utility, such as Yummy, needed some time in front of Adobe Illustrator for the icon. Needless to say, that time wasn’t mine.

I am a keen photographer and I have read The Non-Designer’s Design Book but when it comes to art and design I leave the implementation to other people.

Naturally I have opinions. I may, as a “customer,” have constraints. It has to be a particular size or colour, the shape must evoke a certain feeling or imagery. I probably even have a budget. I instinctively like or dislike designs.

But what I don’t profess to know is the design process or how long it should take, and that’s the problem with the “how hard can it be” quote from above.

“W” was from another discipline, couldn’t imagine what might be hard technically and made a commitment to the client based on that hunch. Unfortunately while their part would only take a few hours, it turned out that there were several weeks of technical work to make that button operate.

Of course I don’t want to come down too hard on “W,” as this is both a fairly extreme case and something that we all do to some extent. Things that we don’t understand almost always seem easier than they are in reality. The trick, insofar as there is one, is acknowledge that it does happen and consult with someone who does understand it before making commitments.

1. In fact I had a number of choices, and that’s the point. However this, as you’ll see, is an extreme case and is the first I remember.

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The dialogue continued for a while, with A not happy to have to learn something new and B not happy to become A’s lackey.

The traditional twist in a story like this is to say that in fact I was Colleague B. Only I wasn’t. And no, I wasn’t A either. But the whole conversation put my teeth on edge.

This is a supposedly smart and experienced guy but he shows a complete unwillingness to both learn something new and to be self-sufficient.

This is whatever is the complete opposite of a winning combination is called.

I have regularly come across both traits in my working life. Most often you get the Java programmer who is only interested in Java. These are usually career programmers, people who are in the industry because it pays the bills and little more. There is nothing wrong with that of course. Do people ever get passionate about accountancy? Actually, probably some do, but my point is that to most it’s a job.

However that kind of outlook is limiting. Lapsing into cliché for a second: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This isn’t a problem most of the time. Usually getting the job done is enough. But for the really interesting problems a little Lisp or functional programming or the dining philosophers can make all the difference.

My colleague didn’t even want to learn more about PowerPoint which, given his position, pretty much should have been his job.

But an unwillingness to learn new stuff would have been fine had he been able to work unaided. Unfortunately he needed pretty much constant support. Everything from PowerPoint to making a cup of tea required someone else’s help. Naturally, it wasn’t an inability to make tea rather he was unwilling to do so.

The key here is that it’s not about ability. In your first few weeks in a job there are going to be lots of things that you need to ask about, lots of things that you need help with. But what I really hate to see is an unwillingness to learn, a lack of intellectual curiosity and no desire to be self-sufficient.

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For a version 1.0 product, Yummy seemed solid to me. It was fast, coped will all my bookmarks and had the ability to add, edit and delete entries. I didn’t think that this would remain as a unique feature for as long as it has, but hey, that’s a bonus.

Within a few days I had exceeded what I had expected to sell and received positive feedback on the iTunes store. But not long after that I also received my first bug report.

This turned out to be an odd one. It crashed early on while starting up and downloading all the bookmarks for the first time. My first guess — incorrect as it turned out — was that it was running out of memory. It took some investigation with the help of a very kind end-user to discover that… Delicious allows technically invalid URLs. By that I mean both that they don’t follow web standards and, worse, that it’s not even possible to open them in Mobile Safari.

I don’t feel so bad about not spotting that one during testing, although I should have put in more error handling to spot various “impossible” events and make sure that it didn’t crash. The reason I mention it is to give an idea of the kind of things that happen in “real life.”

But my biggest mistake has been assuming that I am a typical user of Delicious. I thought a few hundred bookmarks was a lot but I now realise that I was wrong. I have some users with over a thousand bookmarks and have read about another with nearly ten times that¹.

The exact number of bookmarks that you can store depends on a number of variables, such as the length of the URL, title and notes, the number of tags, the iPhone operating system² and a bunch of other details outside my control. Looking at the reviews on iTunes I believe a few people had more than whatever that limit is. Unfortunately the error handling was lacking, resulting in Yummy crashing rather than an inconvenient but understandable error message³.

Version 1.0.2 was actually a big release in terms of the amount of code changed, if not in terms of visible functionality (which is why it was such a small change in the version number). Under the hood, though, I dramatically increased the number of bookmarks that Yummy could handle. However it was starting to become clear that the internal architecture was holding me back. Further increasing the number of usable bookmarks would be hard, if not impossible, without seriously degrading performance and some new features that I wanted to add would end up in a nasty tangle of unmaintainable code.

I decided to take a step back and fix the structure of the code. For much of the time since the last formal release, Yummy has been, metaphorically speaking, in pieces on the floor. Most of those pieces have now been polished and reassembled, and it’s now working well enough that I have replaced the copy of 1.0.2 that I have been using day-to-day on my own iPhone with the development version.

This is a long way of saying that there is a new version coming. There will be a number of great new features but many of the big changes are behind the scenes. I sincerely hope that you don’t notice them.

1. I confess to being a little sceptical about some claims. At some points it becomes a bit of a pissing competition.
2. Upgrading from version 2.0 to 2.1 tipped at least one user over the edge, and many developers do not get previews of new versions.
3. I’ve not got to the bottom of this one yet. It seems that, sometimes, you can only spot a bad memory allocation by noting that an otherwise mandatory field is missing.

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As luck would have it, I got a “free trial” of Google AdWords and thought I would give that a try. Results have been… well, not exactly what I was expecting.

The way AdWords works is that you give it a bunch of search terms and when someone enters those terms you go into an auction with other advertisers with the same terms. You can set a maximum bid and a maximum per day. I confess that these are not values that I have played around much with; I stuck with the defaults. You then get charged when someone clicks on your advert, not just when it’s put in front of someone.

It turns out that with my choice of words I was averaging £0.33 per click. If we assume that every click results in a sale then I would say that this is on the high side of acceptable. Yummy retails for £1.19 in the UK, with Apple getting 30% and the tax man another chunk.

However that’s not necessarily a good assumption. In fact, I have no real idea of how good or bad it is. Using Google Analytics and AdWords’ built-in statistics I can see how many people visited Yummy’s website and I can see how many people clicked the link to the App Store. What I can’t see is the number of people who clicked on the ad that ended up buying a copy.

But the cost of attracting customers and the inability to track the effectiveness of the campaign was nothing compared with my frustration in penning a suitable advert. I started with the following text:

Delicious on your iPhone
Search and edit your delicious.com
bookmarks in one app on your iPhone

Sure, I’m not going to make a living as a copywriter any time soon, but given the space constraints I didn’t think it was too bad.

However after a couple of days my campaign was suspended because I’d used a trademark in my text. Now I’m no expert on trademarks, but I really don’t see the problem here. I’m not trying to sell dodgy iPhones; I’m not passing myself off as Apple; and I’m not selling a competitor, indeed all Yummy users are already Apple customers.

Writing about an application that runs on an iPhone without mentioning Apple or iPhone is not easy. I ended up with:

Delicious.com on the move
Search, add, edit and delete your
Delicious bookmarks in one iApp

They have not suspend that yet, but I think it’s a substantially less compelling advert.

So overall, it was certainly worth a try — I had nothing to lose — but for the price-point of Yummy I don’t think it’s worth paying for AdWords once my trial funds expire.

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Having said that, some things have not changed. The vast majority of books on the shelves of your local retailer are very specific. Publishers seem to eschew broad, generally useful texts in preference for yet another beginners guide to Microsoft Word or C++ (or, more likely, Visual C++ 2005 Special Easter Edition SP2). I do not understand this. Sure, there’s a genuine need for “how to” books for specific technologies but is it not more useful to learn how to solve problems in general rather than how to solve a particular problem with a particular product?

Worse, most are not even particularly well written. Deadlines are so strict that authors have to write quickly rather than accurately or well. Ultimately the drive to be the first publisher with the definitive guide on Word 2007 (August Edition) trumps all. One that galls me is that most programming language books assume that you are learning to program from scratch. Is C++ really likely to be your first language? I think not.

The other continuing trend is the size of them. Is it necessary for every book to be a thousand pages long and be stuffed with screen-shots? None of my favourites are like this.

As with the last list, I have not just focused on your typical “computer science” text, if anything I have shied away from them. Hopefully if you go pick up a copy of all these books you’ll find them all to be both useful and entertaining to read.

Additionally, I find most of them to be books that are worth returning to, if not as a reference guide then as something that increased experience make each read make more sense.

So, let’s get to the point. What are my favourite computer books, and why?

1. Code Complete. If you’re writing or designing software you need this book. As I said last time, it “is one of those books that does the job so well it has no obvious competition. It describes the complete coding process right from low level design through to unit testing and, while most people would have been very prescriptive, McConnell outlines the pros and cons of each approach.” Now on its second edition, it is still, as far as I know, without peer.
2. The Mythical Man Month. People never seem to learn. Managers still seem to add more staff to already late projects. Brookes said all this, and a lot more, in this book way back in the seventies.
3. Accidental Empires. Robert X Cringely’s history of the early PC industry is a fascinating and entertainingly written anecdote-fest. He claims neither to be complete nor objective, yet seems to cover all the bases. Since most people these days deal predominantly with x86 architecture machines I think everyone should know the heritage and how we got from Bletchley Park to an iMac. (But without the iMac as it was written years before Apple returned to form.)
4. Professional Software Development. When I first bought this I was a little annoyed. It’s actually the second edition of McConnell’s “After the Goldrush,” just coming with a different name! I’m not sure that I would have bought it had I known, but I would have missed out. This is the only book of the eight here that talks about the industry as a whole, and how we should move away from the typical, and surprisingly common, “code and fix” development. He talks about certifications; architects; heavyweight methodologies; personality types; and a whole lot more. I can’t say that I agree with every last sentence, but it’s well worth reading just to get a perspective.
5. Peopleware. It’s amazing to think that it took until the 1980’s before the human elements of writing software were seriously considered. Even now most Computer Science seems to concentrate on the more technical aspects. This book was probably the first to discuss the “human factors” of software development and is still the best that I’ve read.
6. Programming Perl¹. I include this book at least partially because I wanted to show that it was possible to have a densely technical book that was also well thought out and entertaining. The structure is superb and I can’t think of any other programming tomes that have made me laugh out loud.
7. In the beginning was the command line…² I think that this is an interesting book for two reasons. Firstly it describes the reason why Unix is as it is better than any other. Secondly, it explains the various major operating systems (and some minor or — now — non-existent ones) in approachable analogies rather than dense jargon.
8. Conceptual Blockbusting. There are few other professions where your output is almost entirely brainpower. A computer program is really little more than a slightly less ephemeral rendition of pure thought. So if you can’t think your way out of a particular problem you’re in trouble! This book makes you more aware of your own intellectual processes and outlines different ways of approaching problems. Invaluable.

As you may have noticed, many of these books are the same as last time! Does this indicate that I’ve been reading less? A little perhaps, but I’d like to think that it’s because by picking books not related to specific versions of particular technologies I’m increasing my odds of finding the classics.

What do you think? Any other good choices that I missed?

1. This link is to the third edition. I currently only have the second.
2. You can also download it from Neal Stephenson’s website.

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