With every third “new” native app crashing on my phone after a few minutes of use now that I’ve upgraded from 1.1.4 to 2.0, I’m not in a huge rush to jump from the web apps that I like and use to native ones.

Doing it right doesn’t mean rushing to the market place

I don’t honestly know why folks have been a bit anxious that Brightkite hasn’t yet released a native iPhone app. Maybe it’s like when the holiday season rolls around and you’re the only Jewish kid on the block… you see all of the other kids get a ton of stuff at once, and you have to wait through a day of sweaters, boxes of pencils and other gifts that don’t stimulate your holiday fantasies until you get that Red Ryder BB Gun you’ve been pining for. And what happens when another kid gets it before you do? They shoot some other kid’s eye out… totally blowing your chances at getting one for yourself.

Yes there are quite a few other location-based networks out there, but most of them focus on a typical social-networking model (or twitter) and add location like it’s salad dressing on iceburg lettuce. To me, Brightkite just tastes like a whole different kind of salad.

It seems like most people just don’t want to have to type in the address of where they are, and since FireEagle’s API allow’s digestion of data much easier than sharing it’s data with other services, there hasn’t really been an automated way to geolocate these services from raw geodata to a physical address. One thing I did as soon as I started using Brightkite to make mobile checkins easier, is to create a placemark of addresses or businesses I visit frequently, so when I just type in the name of the placemark, everything comes up in a jiffy.

Here’s a short explanation as to why they didn’t have an app ready to roar on the 10th (or 11th) of this month:

1. We don’t have a 3G iPhone to test on yet. More specifically, we’d like to see how well the GPS in the new phones works.
2. We don’t want to release something that’s not rock-solid. And by rock-solid, we don’t mean crashing, but rock-solid from a usability standpoint. The app should be as easy to use as possible. We have some very ambitious goals concerning the user interface, but getting it just right takes time and we’re just not quite there yet.

Not having a copy of the device you’re developing for is a great reason to hold off releasing software. But what’s special here is their second point… They are really stressing usability, they care about not only if the software is going to function, but really how each user is going to interact with it’s interface.

In the meantime they thought they’d release their API and add a new feature to keep people (and developers) happy.

So who’s maybe jumped the gun here?

Everyone’s favorite giant corporation! This is a great example of a native app that I’ve installed, then abandoned for the web app is Facebook’s… The other day Facebook released an update to their already released native app for the iPhone, and though people seem really happy with the update, I’ve honestly failed to notice any significant changes (though they must be there…. somewhere) and have gone back to using their web app over at iphone.facebook.com since it allows me to respond to friend and even requests unlike the native app. Though the UI of the native app is relatively snappy, it doesn’t have nearly all of the functionality of their existing web app, it still requires full connectivity to use, and isn’t much more that a bookmark to a dumbed-down version of their previous offering.

So is it worth it to go native?

John Allsop also just wrote a long and interesting piece comparing native apps to webapps over at web directions south. Though he didn’t really look into anything but the free apps, the article does have some good points, especially regarding how to monetize your efforts (as a developer or company), and what it really takes to make a couple of bucks off your hard work.

Let’s say you sell your App for $1.95. You’ll need to sell 25,000 copies to make $50KUSD. Hang on, Apple takes about 30% so you’ll need to sell 30% more. That’s 36,500 copies. If you look at a typical conversion rate of say 3% of downloads to sales (in my experience, good Mac apps can get that kind of conversion), if this were a desktop shareware app, you’d need to have 1.2 million downloads. That’s more than 10% of the entire projected iPhone user base for the end of 2008 interested in your app.

OK, let’s think about higher price points - at $5, you need to sell 14,000 copies to make $50KUSD, with a theoretical download of 476,000 demo copies. Up this to $10, and we are looking at 7,000 sales, and 233,000 demo downloads. And that’s for a single developer. Double this for 2 developers, triple it for a team of three, and so on.

Now, let’s compare the “sell the app” business model with the increasingly common “subscribing to a service” model. Let’s say we only have customers paying $5 a month. They are already paying $60 a year! So to make our $50KUSD, we’ll need around 1000 customers (about 14% of the number of sales of a $10 app). And I’ve factored in about 12% costs here (transaction and hosting costs, based on personal experience).

Facebook fails on a semicolon, originally uploaded by naterkane.

A simple semicolon caused Facebook to fail on me this evening. Mobile Safari claimed no errors since this was something going wrong on the server.

I was really surprised that this error wasn’t handled very elegantly or deliver any kind of meaningful message that could have possibly empowered an unsophisticated user. If I was provided a link I could click to send an email to support with any data they might be able to work with I would have felt less stuck, but instead I had to just quit Mobile Safari and try hitting the same page again a few minutes later. Once I did that everything was kosher, but until I created that new session, nothing changed when I went to visit this one friend’s profile.

These things happen, and I’m not trying to be a hater, but since Facebook have stepped up and provided such an excellent iPhone UI, I was just expecting to be impressed, and not feel lost, with how they would handle an error if one would arise.

Some folks are just never satisfied. Maybe it’s because they’re professional critics who don’t do much else other than voice their opinion for a living, or maybe they’re just cranky people in general, but I’m just sick and tired of people bitching and writing useless articles about Twitter. All this bitching is just noise, data and information pollution, and most importantly… not productive.

I think people are putting a silly amount of weight on this company and it’s service. If anyone builds a component of their business that relies on ANY webservice they don’t control to the point that that service is mission-critical, then they’re optimistic (which is admirable) and an idiot (which is not admirable).

They’re having scaling issues, the end.

Almost every service that I’ve come across in 12 years that didn’t start with some supermegacorp style backing has had scaling issues. People used to just deal with it. Circa 96′-97′ (pre Microsoft) Hotmail used to be (and still is IMO) a super slow piece of garbage, yet people still use it.

If the folks that I see that claim to be so dependent on Twitter that they feel the need to fill Technorati with tons of useless complaint posts, they should either stop bitching and maybe invest in the company, donate money to them, send them pizza, go to work for them to fix things and make things how they want them to be, OR just build another service themselves. They even use someone else’s service for their status blog now themselves.

I’m sorry, but I’m really tired of all of the useless noise about this service being unavailable. If only people were this vocal about stuff that matters more to more people we’d be in a different world. Like a extremely large percentage of personal computers and laptops shipping with a broken & POS operating system. Or Hillary Clinton just generally being an idiot and getting in the way of a candidate who can kick McCain’s ass… anyway, you get the point.

The real point is this…

Twitter doesn’t have a revenue model that user have to “deal” with.
Twitter doesn’t have a sketchy policy regarding the content that is posted through it’s service
Twitter was initially engineered for SMS
Twitter has a decent API that many people have built neat tools and services with, some of which are even useful!
Twitter has changed the way many people communicate with one another… “@” now has two purposes on the web, cool.
Twitter doesn’t edit or censor content that passes through their system. (unless it’s actually damaging or abusive to a specific person… read here and here)
Twitter is I18n friendly.
Twitter is free.

The Backstory

What can I say that no one else has said before? Deliberately having avoided Vista like the plague for the past year, I’ve continued to hack at one project after another with my “trusty” 17″ HP laptop. When i purchased this puppy a year and a half ago, it was a purchase out of necessity. I was commuting 2.5 hours each way every day from my home in upstate new york to my office, which at the time, was in manhattan. The work days were long, very long, and since I was finding myself taking work home with me almost every night and weekend, I needed a portable solution. Long story short, I bought the HP because I couldn’t afford the (twice as expensive and seemingly comparable, non-intel) macbook at the time. The HP came with XP Media Center edition, which was basically just a few bundled apps that I never planned on using, and a glossy look to the task bar and window chrome, whatever.

When I brought the box home I was surprised to find out that despite the fact that this was a brand-new-in-box laptop, there were not any installation cds or dvds that came in the box. I flipped through the “getting started” manual, which came in the form of a semi-large two sided poster, to find out that on one of the two hard drives there was a partition for software recovery. And why did they do this? I can only guess to prevent this fancy Media Center edition from being distributed. And when contacted HP about having them send me an XP Media Center disk, they said none were available, and this version of XP I had was only available as an OEM install… aka: disks didn’t exist. The searching I did for a box copy at the time reinforced what they told me. So here I was, pseudo-proud owner of a brand new laptop, with no way to re-install the OS that it came with (and I had paid for) without completely setting it back to showroom fresh and wiping all my data.

From then till now

Some time during the first few months I suddenly lost my ability to access the “Add/Remove Programs” app, and kept getting a Run DLL as an app error that forced me to close the window. Googling provided no solutions, so I grabbed myself a copy of Cleanse Uninstaller, an ugly but effective app that let me get rid of anything I no longer wanted. Stuff like Adobe CS2, random betas of browsers, all of those really stupid bundled applications, etc.

Next to quit on me was the slick little media buttons above my keyboard, which I now know can be fixed by unplugging the power supply, removing the battery, and holding the power button down for a couple seconds to expend all of the electricity in the chipset. Ok cool, sure, no problem.

Then print-screen started taking these awesome 2 color screenshots that were incredibly lovely large images of all black with a sprinkling of white in there so you know it was doing something. Then the heat-sync got clogged with dust (pics of the rebuild here), etc, etc, etc. You get the point.

A new beginning?

With the news of XP Service Pack 3 hitting the streets, I was hoping that many of the stupid little things that just make my time spent on this laptop less than enjoyable could now be corrected. But… I stand corrected and end this post, typing on the trusty OSX machine that sits under my desk, with the following screenshot.

Twitter just accidentally turned Japanese, originally uploaded by naterkane.

after updating my settings, i started turning japanese.

Ning is a pretty neat idea… on paper.

It’s a site where you can “roll your own” social networking site targeted at any weird or random idea you can come up. There’s enough random stuff out there, and this is the only proof I need.

In the age of there being so many of those already, it seems like putting the creation of a network site into anyone’s hands seems like it’s ripe for over-saturation and misuse unuse.

As I’ve been tooling around with Kenny Miller’s Interlinky network on Ning, I’ve started to think to myself… “what’s the point of having 83475345 redundant web relationships?”

Living in New York, it’s easy to find social industry events most nights of the week, there are tons of social groups that exist offline, besides all of the ones you can find on meetup.com. But what do we actually do with all of this networking? When we get together face to face to do stuff drink, we sometimes end up making friends who we talk about work with. Sometimes we make friends who we don’t have to talk about work with (but can). And even sometimes a business contact is made and/or a business relationship is formed. Most of the time, it’s just social silliness, high-school style, minus the big grass field and the paranoia about the cops coming at any moment.

Some social services do make sense cents

LinkedIn is an example of one of those few sites out there that does actually serve a purpose. I have use it to reconnect with ex-coworkers from 10 years ago, and other people have used it to get in touch with me about hiring me or NaterKane (the business) for interactive work. Since LinkedIn is all about business, work, your professional reputation and trust… folks don’t tend to add others as contacts who they don’t know, or haven’t already worked with.

Many of the other big sites however, have little if no quality control.

I actually wish that facebook kept their business model around targeting college kids. I know the world would be different, however I wouldn’t have to deal with people throwing virtual sheep at me for no reason (thanks to the assholes who write useless and what I consider abusive software over at Slide.com) or the unsolicited Vampire/Zombie/Seamonsterboogieman invites reminiscent of those Underworld movies.

The other day I just switched from using Google’s urchin.js to their slightly shinier ga.js, which I was very happy to see produces less javascript warnings than it’s predecessor. There’s now only six warnings from the Google folks, which still isn’t anything to be excited about.

Coincidently my buddy Florian just pointed me to Clicky, a pretty cool analytics suite put together by Sean and Noah over at Roxr Software Ltd.. After taking a look at Clicky’s claims, I’m now thinging about giving Cicky a run for it’s money. And by money I mean either free, or the great price of about $2 a month for their “Premium” account. And who in this world needs and can use good analytics software and can’t afford a lousy two bucks?

Taking on the Medium Dogs

Clicky claims to crush some of the other popular non-enterprise level players: Google Analytics, SiteMeter, StatCounter, Mint and FeedBurner. I’m just wondering really how valuable some of the features are.

Don’t get me wrong, most of these features are pretty badass. But is “Clean, simple, straight forward” a feature that you can really claim you have over your competition? Um.. not really. Additionally they offer “View popular data in a TagCloud instead of boring tables and charts”, and though I don’t think that’s really much of a feature, tagclouds don’t really do it for me anyway, so whatever.

I wish I had enough traffic here that making the decision to choose one analytics software package over enough was important. So for me this is what matters most…

Filesize

Clicky comes in at approx 2k, and Google’s ga.js comes in at 8k. ‘Nuff said.

Well written javascript

Since I try my best to write all of my javascript so it passes JSLint w/o issues, I expect the same out of my libraries. On a related note I’ve started using the supercool DOMAssistant over Prototype for a number of my client projects, but that’s for another post.

As I mentioned before. Google is now only giving me 6 warnings. Three for closeurs that don’t return anything and three for referencing undefined properties. I get only one from Clicky, and it’s only because they used a ternary operator, which is something I do myself, no biggie.

Javascript-less-ness

Here’s the kicker… does it work without javascript being available to the client? Yes!

It seems to me that it’s a pretty smart idea to use the old school “load an image if javascript doesn’t work” technique. If someone decides to access your content through an interface that doesn’t support javascript, whether it be for a security policy, a mobile device, whatever, I’ll know! And be able to still get basic tracking/stat information. Good job guys.

Name Taken?

Back in 2005 Damien Katz wrote a little javascript link tracking library called Clicky, though I’m not sure if it has anything to do with the folks at Roxr Software Ltd.

When I was younger I did alot of talking and thinking and reading and exploring and all the typical stuff college kids do to find themselves. But unlike most college kids, I did most of this work to define my principles when I was in elementary and middle school.

Today i got an email from a guy who saw my profile on Facebook and asked me why I am agnostic. Typically I don’t discuss anything that personal with anyone who I am not close with, but I decided to indulge him.

I’m not reposting my response to him to start a debate or conversation with anyone, it’s just simply because it’s my personal, subjective truth. And I think it says a little bit about who I am as a friend, a developer and a man.

i’m agnostic because i feel that it is self-righteous for a person to claim they know the truth about anything beyond scientific understanding and reasoning.

i do understand that all definitions of g-d have been a tool used by man to explain nature as well as an instrument in teaching morality and healthy ways to live.

all of our moderrn understandings and beliefs (within the past 5000+ years) about what g-d is (or could be) are taught through documents that were written (and rewritten as they saw fit) by men. (archeological record of the practice of hinduism has been traced back more than 10,000 (and in one case approx 30,000) years).

these modern beliefs can’t possibly negate and be “more true than” the beliefs of those who lived before these modern beliefs existed.

and since proclaiming that there isn’t a g-d or any other external higher being is equally self righteous, i am agnostic.

This post which was originally written just after the FOWD NYC conference somehow got eaten by the wordpress monster… I have just now found it and decided to repost

So I’d really like to head down to Miami at the end of February for FOWA. IMHO web applications are more interesting that “web design” these days anyway. I have some friends down in Miami that I never get to see. I also generally like to run around and not work for a few days and be social with other geeks, attractive female designers who are too young for me to talk to, and friends 10 years older than me who usually can’t guess my age if they don’t know it already. (oops, did I just give something away?)

I’ve decided to make this year (2007-2008) the time for me to spend more of my personal money than I’d care to, to attend a number of conferences. This decision was made in August when I quit my job at Ultra16 and lept back into the world of consulting. So far I’ve hit the Ajax Experience (a very expensive social event with tons of smart people and good information, and catering) and the Future of Web Design (a $200 social event that was a bit of a mess, followed be Media Temple sponsored drunkenness which was great fun). I am considering FOWA, Web Directions North (a great chance to get some “better than Vermont” snowboarding in this winter, and I already have tickets to SXSW Interactive.

I was a little disappointed in the FOWD conference. I’ve been thinking about it and I’ve decided to tell you guys why. The following may read as a rant, or a bit of a slam. If it offends anyone, then I suggest they respond by organizing a conference that isn’t thousands of dollars and is also worth attending for more than just having a chance to socialize.

the future of conference formats

A one day conference with one room and one stage sounds to me like more of an overbooked mid-90’s style rock festival than a web conference. An enoromous room with tons of echo just adds to the sentiment.
Many of the speakers at FOWD either ran short or long. The notables I think were Josh Davis‘ dirty mouth (bravo), Jon Snook and the guys from VIRB who’s names I can’t recall at the moment Ryan Sims & D Keith Robinson. There was a bit more “evangelizing” than I think anyone needed. I can’t believe people actually work as corporate technology evangelists. I have alot of respect for folks like Jon Resig, Kevin Hoyt, etc. But isn’t having the word “evangelist” on a business card a little creepy? Sorry for the sidetrack…

It seems that a split format with some longer and some shorter sessions happening in parallel and in smaller spaces would have made FOWD a much more enjoyable and possibly more educational experience.

The food available was also pretty bad as well. It wasn’t very expensive, however there were ZERO vegetarian options that I could find, so I ended up having to go hike a couple of avenues just to find food that I could eat anywhere near the Javits Center where it was held. Thank goodness we were in New York.

This article seals the deal. Well, until I have enough extra cash laying around to get a macbook pro, I’m definately not going to be throwing any money at the purchase of anyone’s operating system.

Vista, both with and without SP1, performed notably slower than XP with SP3 in the test, taking over 80 seconds to complete the test, compared to the beta SP3-enhanced XP’s 35 seconds.

…

Microsoft admits that the launch has not gone as well as the company would have liked. “Frankly, the world wasn’t 100 percent ready for Windows Vista,” …

http://www.news.com/2100-1016_3-6220201.html

On a side note, I wonder if I might be able to install Panther on my old G3 iMac without it running slower than it already does and then throwing and complete and utter hissy fit, probably not.