All posts by onlyconnect

hp, microsoft, mobile, windows

HP goes Android: what does that say about Windows 8?

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Here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona HP has announced a 7” Android tablet which will be available in April.

I took a quick look at the Mobile Focus event today. The back of the device is more interesting, showing logos for HP and for Beats Audio.

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From the front you would be pushed to distinguish it from, say, Google’s Nexus 7. Black screen, runs Android.

I asked the guy on the stand what is distinctive about HP’s little Android slate in a crowded market. He said it had above average build quality, above average sound thanks to Beats Audio (you can find this discussed here), and support for HP’s printing system.

Not much, in other words; but the more interesting question is why HP is doing this. One reason is price. This will be a relatively cheap device, substantially less than any of HP’s windows machines, and without it HP would have little to no presence in the consumer tablet market.

Why not a Windows RT or Windows 8 device? That is the heart of it, and more interesting than the slate itself. HP is not giving up on Windows tablets, but it is positioning them more as business machines whereas the new slate is a consumer device.

The problem is that Microsoft has so far failed to make Windows 8 viable for this kind of market. It is too expensive, too peculiar, and there are too few worthwhile apps. That, and the Windows Runtime platform is not yet good enough, as developers at the sharp end discover. This means that HP has little choice but to go Android.

The form factor is also a problem. 7” seems to be beyond Windows Phone 8 territory, but too small for Windows 8 or RT bearing in mind the desktop and Office aspect. It is an awkward gap in the Windows offering.

The impression I got from several vendors at the show is that Microsoft is on the right lines with Windows 8, but the first release is disappointing on the tablet side.

What if HP starts to experiment with Android tablets that can be used like laptops, with neat keyboard cases and office-style applications? In the end the market will decide on the balance between Android and Windows, with the signs currently that Microsoft will struggle to gain momentum in the consumer tablet market.

google, search

Reflecting on Google’s power: a case for regulation?

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Via Martin Belam’s blog I came across this account of how the well-known flower vendor Interflora has, it is claimed, been penalised by Google for violation of its webmaster guidelines on paid links:

Searching for the terms [Flowers], [florist], [flower delivery], [flowers online] and hundreds of other related search terms yielded the interflora.co.uk domain in first place – until yesterday afternoon.  Now the website does not even appear for its own brand name.

Possibly by no coincidence, an official Google post reminds us of the rules:

We do take this issue very seriously, so we recommend you avoid selling (and buying) links that pass PageRank in order to prevent loss of trust, lower PageRank in the Google Toolbar, lower rankings, or in an extreme case, removal from Google’s search results.

I find this troubling. Here are a few statements (some may be contentious) that taken together will, I hope, express why.

1. Google has a market-dominating position in search, certainly in the UK. With good reason, users wishing to visit Interflora’s site are more likely to type “interflora” into a search engine, probably Google, then to type the URL directly. The combined address bar and search box in most browsers encourages this. Many users probably do not appreciate the difference. Of course they might also type “order flowers” into the box, delegating to Google the responsibility for finding suitable sites.

2. In consequence of 1, Google has direct and immediate power over the amount of business that will be achieved by a company trading online. In some cases that might be make-or-break, in some cases not, but it is a significant influence.

3. A further consequence is that Google’s search and ranking algorithms form an incentive to businesses to do all they can to climb higher in the search ranking. Since this appears to be influenced by incoming links (though probably less so than it once was) Google’s algorithms attempt to judge which incoming links are meaningful and which are not. Paid links fall into into the latter category, hence the guidelines which prohibit them.

4. Despite (3) above, the internet is infested with paid links and link exchanges. Even running a small site like mine, I get thousands of paid link and link exchange requests every year. The implication is that Google is not all that good at ignoring and/or penalising them, otherwise the activity would cease.

5. Worth noting: web site owners are free to accept paid links and vendors are free to buy them. They are not doing wrong. The only disincentives are first, whether you want to fill your site with worthless links, and second, whether you will be penalised by Google for doing so.

6. Google’s process for determining whether or not a particular web destination is down-ranked is not transparent. This is for good reasons, insofar as a transparent process would arguably be easier to game. On the other hand, this also means that a business which is penalised has no recourse other than to plead with Google, unless it felt inclined to experiment with legal action (prohibitively expensive and uncertain for most).

7. In fact there is another option, which is to advertise with Google, a form of paid link which the search giant is happy to accept. It seems to me obvious that this form of advertising is designed to look similar to unpaid search results, despite some small effort to distinguish them with small print and a light background colour change:

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It is not clear to me that this intermingling of paid and organic results is in the user’s best interests.

8. It is also obvious that advertising in this form is more important in cases where a business is absent from organic search results. It follows that Google has a direct incentive to penalise businesses by downranking them, since it has the potential to bring more advertising business. Please do not misunderstand: I am not accusing Google of doing this and have no reason to believe that it does.

9. Users of Google will be grateful that it attempts to improve the value of its search results by reducing the influence of meaningless incoming links. On the other hand, I find it difficult to understand why a user who typed “interflora” into Google would not want to see the official site at the top of the list, since it is a legitimate business and not in any sense malicious. Of course they do in fact see this, judging from my own experiment minutes ago, but it is an advertisement and not an organic link. The top organic link is not Interflora’s own site.

10. Pause for thought: what would be the effect on Google’s business if it put ads below organic search results rather than above?

11. The only rationale for (9) above is that Google considers it worth inconveniencing its users (presuming you do not accept that it simply wants to sell more ads) for the sake of the higher objective of penalising sites which, in its view, breach its guidelines.

12. We all have a choice whether to use Google or not; but this choice is not one that fixes the problem. The problem, rather, is the choice which our customers or potential customers make, over which we have no control.

13. It is a company’s duty to maximize returns to its shareholders. Making a profit is not wrong, and Google is entitled to design its search algorithms and web site as it wishes. None of the above is intended to imply that Google is doing wrong.

14. Despite (13) above, the combination of this concentration of power in a single business entity, the lack of transparency in its procedures, and the difficulty smaller businesses (in other words, almost everyone else) have in fixing issues, is something I find troubling.

15. It is also worth noting that the power of a dominant search engine goes beyond SEO (Search Engine Optimization). There is a long-standing debate over how easy it should be to find sites which offer illegal music downloads, for example. Another recent case I encountered showed how Google can make it hard to find a business in the real as well as the online world. I also note the influence of search engines on education, as the first destination of students and pupils looking for answers, and on human knowledge in general.

These issues are both complex and important. Should Google be regulated? Should all search engines be regulated? I do not know the answer, but believe that the question merits wider discussion. In this instance, it is not obvious to me that the free unregulated market will achieve the best outcome.

development, microsoft, mobile

Windows Runtime flaws spoil new Windows Store (Metro) apps

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The Windows Runtime, the new touch-friendly platform in Windows 8. It solves many problems. Not only is it tablet-friendly, but apps are sandboxed for security, and easy to deploy. No setup hassles, just one-click (or tap) install or uninstall. It also supports three types of development covering most tastes: native C++, .NET Framework, or HTML and JavaScript. In order to ensure responsive apps, Microsoft made many of the APIs asynchronous, so that users would not have the frustration of a frozen user interface or spinning hourglass during long operations.

At least, that is the theory. When I came to write my own simple app though, I was surprised how fiddly it was, and that something trivial like displaying a tweet including a working hyperlink turned out to involve Run elements, a ContentControl, a converter class and so on. Even then, I could not get the mouse cursor to turn to a hand icon when hovering over the link.

This hands-on experience gives me sympathy with others struggling to implement more complex projects. Some have posted about their experiences. Here is Frank Krueger, who has ported his neat iCircuit electronic circuit simulator from iOS and Android to Windows RT:

You would be shocked to see some of the crazy bits of code I had to put in because the Win8 platform, while very rich, is also very generic and doesn’t help you at all to build standard apps (document based, tools, etc.) That is to say, Cocoa is a very mature platform designed to make apps feature-rich and consistent while also making the developer’s life easy. WinRT on the other hand gives you rectangles and a blog post that says “good luck”.

He lists a number of problems, including having to reboot Windows constantly while testing the Share Charm; having to disable media elements in he app because of 500ms delays, no control over buffer sizes, and playback issues; and graphics issues:

I want to do real-time 2D vector drawing. Direct2D is perfect for this. But WinRT puts all sorts of limitations on onscreen rendering, most notably: you can only have 1 DirectX swap chain (view) per window. That means I can’t use Direct2D for rendering the scope which means the scope is slower than it needs to be. Dear Microsoft, go spend a few minutes and see how beautifully CocoaTouch and OpenGL work together on iOS. You might get inspired.

Next up is Media Monkey, a popular Windows media player which has been ported to the Windows Runtime platform. I was pleased to see this, as it lets me play FLAC music files on Surface RT. It is not very stable yet though, and I have had difficulty getting it to index the collection of FLAC files which I have on a network-connected drive.

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What I found most interesting though were comments about the difficulty of displaying lists beyond a trivial size. One user complained:

When I first started MM scanning my music library, I was seeing the Album list grouped into sections headed up by the Alphabet letters. However, as more Albums got added, the heading letters vanished – and I now have an unbroken list of Albums – a great wodge that is very tiresome to navigate through by scrolling.

to which the Czech developer replied:

It’s a big problem, but not in MediaMonkey, but in system itself. Disabling groups is only crashes prevention because of system limitation :-(. Because of this we cannot use semantic zoom as well.

This has caused me to wonder whether part of the reason for the small number of excellent Windows Store apps is the difficulty developers have in getting them to work right. If so, that is a sad state of affairs for Microsoft’s shiny new platform.

In fairness, this is version 1.0, and the best hope is that a significant update to the platform will come before too long with improved controls, performance and features.

.net, development, professional, software development

Cross-platform frameworks ordered by percentage of shared code

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Following my piece on different approaches to building the user interface in cross-platform frameworks, twitter user Sam Hogarth pointed me to the PropertyCross project. This implements a non-trivial application in 8 different cross-platform tools, covering Android, iOS and Windows Phone. Note that only four of the frameworks support Windows Phone.

Using the pie charts presented for each framework, I was able to order them by percentage of shared code as follows:

1= Adobe AIR (100%), JQTouch (100%) , RhoMobile (100%), Sencha Touch (100%)

5. Appcelerator Titanium (around 90%)

6. JQuery Mobile (around 80%)

7. Xamarin (around 40%)

8. Native (0%)

A couple of notes. Of the 100% frameworks, three do not support Windows Phone, and the one which does (Rhomobile) seems to be a bit broken on Windows Phone, judging by the screenshots. The Property Details and Favourites pages do not render properly.

You would get more code sharing with Xamarin if you only supported two rather than three platforms. That is logical: since it does not abstract the GUI.

In most cases (not Rhomobile) it is striking how different Windows Phone appears versus iOS and Android, even with jQuery Mobile which uses HTML5.

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.net, embarcadero, mobile, software development

Xamarin vs Titanium vs FireMonkey: should cross-platform tools abstract the GUI?

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Cross-platform development is a big deal, and will continue to be so until a day comes when everyone uses the same platform. Android? HTML? WebKit? iOS? Windows? Maybe one day, but for now the world is multi-platform, and unless you can afford to ignore all platforms but one, or to develop independent projects for each platform, some kind of cross-platform approach makes sense, especially in mobile.

Sometimes I hear it said that there are essentially two approaches to cross-platform mobile apps. You can either use an embedded browser control and write a web app wrapped as a native app, as in Adobe PhoneGap/Cordova or the similar approach taken by Sencha, or you can use a cross-platform tool that creates native apps, such as Xamarin Studio, Appcelerator Titanium, or Embarcardero FireMonkey.

Within the second category though, there is diversity. In particular, they vary concerning the extent to which they abstract the user interface.

Here is the trade-off. If you design your cross-platform framework to include user interface widgets, like labels, buttons, grids and menus, then you can have your application work almost the same way on every platform. You can also have tools that build the user interface once for all the platforms. This is a big win in terms of coding effort. If the framework is well implemented, it will still adopt some of the characteristics native to each platform so that it looks more or less native.

Some tools do this by drawing their own controls. Embarcadero FireMonkey is in this category. Another approach is to use native controls where possible (in other words, to call the API that shows a button, rather than drawing the button with the graphics API), but to use custom drawing where necessary, even sometimes implementing a control from one platform on another. The downside is that because those controls are not in fact native, there will be some differences, perhaps obvious, perhaps subtle. Martin Fowler at ThoughtWorks refers to this as the uncanny valley and argues against emulated controls.

Further, if you are sharing the UI design across all platforms, it is hard to make your design feel equally right in all cases. It might be better to take the approach adopted by most games, using a design that is distinctive to your app and make a virtue of its consistency across platforms, even though it does not have the native look and feel on any platform.

Xamarin Studio on the other hand makes no attempt to provide a shared GUI framework:

We don’t try to provide a user interface abstraction layer that works across all the platforms. We think that’s a bad approach that leads to lowest common denominator user interfaces.*

CEO Nat Friedman told me. He is right; but the downside is the effort involved in maintaining two or more user interface designs for your app.

This is an old debate. One of the reasons IBM created Eclipse was a disagreement with Sun over the best way to design a cross-platform user interface framework. Sun’s Swing framework, derived from Netscape’s Internet Foundation Classes first released in 1996, takes the custom-drawn approach, which is why Swing apps always look like Swing apps (even if you apply the “Windows” look and feel). A team from IBM, some originally from Object Technology International which was a company acquired by IBM, believed it was better to wrap native controls with a Java abstraction layer, created SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) to do that, and used it to build Eclipse.

Personally I am wary of toolkits which rely heavily on custom-drawn controls rather than native controls, though I see their value. On the other hand, Xamarin Studio is so far in the other direction that it removes some of the benefit of a cross-platform framework.

My prediction is that Xamarin will come up with its own GUI abstraction framework in future, along the lines of SWT. It is a compromise; but one which delivers a lot of value to developers who want to create cross-platform apps with the maximum amount of shared code.

*I have never understood this use of the term “lowest common demominator”. The LCD in maths is the lowest number into which a specific group of numbers divide exactly, so it is an elegant thing. In cross-platform what you should strive for is the highest common intersection: to make available all the features common to each platform.

Update: in April 2014 Xamarin announced Xamarin Forms, a GUI framework which wraps native controls in a XAML implementation (XAML is the presentation language also used by Microsoft, for WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone and Windows Runtime (Windows 8) apps. There is a quick hands-on here.

.net, microsoft, mobile, mono, open source, professional, software development, windows

Xamarin 2.0 and Xamarin Studio announced, build for OSX, iOS and Android with C#

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Xamarin has announced significant updates to its developer platform. Xamarin is the company formed around 18 months ago, when Novell discontinued its investment in Mono, a cross-platform implementation of C# and the .NET Framework. Its focus is on mobile platforms, in particular iOS and Android, though there is also support for the Mac. On Windows and Windows Phone, the presumption is that developers will continue to use Microsoft’s .NET Framework.

“If you look at what you can develop with C#, there’s about 1.2 billion Windows machines out there, but there’s now about a billion Android and iOS devices. Together we can make C# a universal language for application development and reach 2.2 billion devices,” Xamarin co-founder and CEO Nat Friedman told me.

“There’s a wonderful built-in audience of C# developers, millions of them, who need a bridge to mobile. We can help them take their existing skills and tools, and even code they’ve already written, and bring them to mainstream mobile platforms like iOS and Android.”

The key announcements:

  • Xamarin Studio is  an updated version of MonoDevelop, the Mono IDE. It runs on Mac and Windows.#
  • You can now develop iOS apps in Visual Studio for the first time
  • MonoTouch, the framework for iOS, has been renamed Xamarin.iOS
  • Mono for Android is now called Xamarin.Android
  • A new component store has pre-built components for download, some free, some commercial.
  • Xamarin now offers a free Starter edition, and pricing plans for independent developers, smaller businesses, and enterprises. Indie is $299 per platform per year, Business is $999 per platform/year, and Enterprise $1800 platform/year.

The Starter edition is not much use. It has a limited app size, and even the sample project I downloaded, an Employee Directory, exceeded that size and I had to register for a trial.

Xamarin’s philosophy is to share non-visual code, but to create a user interface that is native for each platform. This is a compromise in terms of the effort involved in supporting multiple platforms, but ensures a native experience on each device. “That’s fundamental to our platform,” says Friedman. “We tell our developers to separate the UI layer from the rest of the app. That allows them to share all the non-UI code across platforms, but to deliver a fully native UI, even though the whole app is written in C#. That’s what users demand now, people want native experiences.”

“We’ve been building tools that essentially project the underlying iOS APIs or Java [Android] APIs into C#”, explains co-founder Miguel de Icaza. “What it means is that people need to build a new UI for each platform.” He adds that Microsoft platform developers should be used to this, as Microsoft itself has several similar but incompatible .NET platforms. “There’s the one on Silverlight, the one on WPF, the one on Windows RT, and the one on the phone, it’s four,” he says. “Developers have had to resort to putting their logic into shared libraries, and build a per-platform UI. We’re reusing that knowledge.”

The ability to develop for iOS in Visual Studio is new. “It’s our most-requested feature of all time.” said Friedman.

I downloaded Xamarin Studio, which in my case was around 1.3GB including an updated Android SDK.

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The IDE itself is clean and fast, and very much code-centric. It lacks the bloat of Visual Studio, though you will miss many of the features of Microsoft’s IDE.

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I build the sample Employee Directory app and deployed it to an Android emulator which I use for Nexus 7 development. Deploying the runtime components took a long time, but after waiting patiently the app launched successfully.

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If you want to do iOS development you will need a Mac of course. Although you can code on Windows, if you then the code is pushed over the the Mac side for compilation and debugging. In order to use Visual Studio, one option is to run Windows in a virtual machine on a Mac, as I have done with reasonable success using Embarcadero’s cross-platform tools.

Xamarin says it is growing fast. There have been 230,000 downloads of its tools, increasing by around 700 per day, and over 12,000 paying customers.

Despite Xamarin’s roots in the open source world (and Mono is still open source), a quick look at the pricing table shows that this is a fully commercial offering and priced accordingly. Presuming customers keep on subscribing, that is a good thing, ensuring the future of the platform; but it is not so good for the smallest developers who might otherwise give it a try.

microsoft, mobile, windows

Windows Phone 7.8 Live Tiles are buggy, say users

When Microsoft announced Windows Phone 8, one disappointment was that existing phones would not be upgraded to the new mobile operating system. In mitigation, Microsoft promised Windows Phone 7.8 instead, an upgrade to Windows Phone 7.5 that implements the most visible feature of WP8, a new Start screen with more flexible live tiles that can be sized small and other new features.

Some users are now receiving 7.8 upgrades, but the news is not all good. According to reports on the Windows Phone Central forum, many users find that the Live Tiles are not refreshing correctly after the upgrade.

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The idea of Live Tiles is that they refresh in the background with the latest data, such as news alerts or incoming emails.

Developers Heathcliff writes in detail about the problem. He describes three methods to update a Live Tile. The basic ShellTile.Update method works OK, he says. However, if you use an external URL to update a tile, using ShellTileSchedule.Start, it “behaves erratically” and may trigger a problem that drains your battery and makes excessive use of your data connection. Finally, HttpNotificationChannel.BindToShellTile, which uses Microsoft’s notification servers, does not seem to work at all.

On WP 7.5 this method just works as expected. I actually hope I did something wrong here. Or else I don’t understand how this could ever get past the Microsoft Quality Assurance department.

he says.

Finally, users also complain of slower performance after the update, which makes starting apps more laggy.

If Microsoft has put more effort into its new Windows Phone 8 operating system than into an update for existing user, that is understandable, but short-sighted. Those existing users are the best possible evangelists for the platform as well as potential repeat customers; and Windows Phone with its tiny 2.6 per cent global market share, according to IDC, needs all the help it can get.

That said, with decent new WP8 phones like the Nokia 620 available cheaply (O2 in the UK offered this for £120 pay as you go earlier this week), existing Windows Phone 7 users who want to stay up to date are better off buying a new device.

internet, mobile, open source, Web

Browser monoculture draws nearer as Opera adopts WebKit, Google Chromium

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Browser company Opera is abandoning development of its own browser engine and adopting WebKit.

To provide a leading browser on Android and iOS, this year Opera will make a gradual transition to the WebKit engine, as well as Chromium, for most of its upcoming versions of browsers for smartphones and computers.

Note that Opera is not only adopting WebKit but also the Google-sponsored Chromium engine, which is the open source portion of the Google Chrome browser.

What are the implications?

The obvious one, from Opera’s perspective, is that the work involved in keeping a browser engine up to date is large and the benefit, small, given that WebKit and Chromium are both capable and also close to de facto standards in mobile.

This last point is key though. If everyone uses WebKit, then instead of the W3C being the authority on which web standards are supported, then the WebKit community becomes that authority. In the case of Chromium, that means Google in particular.

On the desktop Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox both have substantial market share, but in mobile both iOS and Android, which dominate, use WebKit-derived browsers. BlackBerry is also using WebKit in its new BlackBerry 10 OS.

There is already a debate about web pages and applications which make use of webkit-specific tags, which often implies a degraded experience for users of other browsers, even if those other browsers support the same features. A year agao, Daniel Glazman, co-chairman of the W3C CSS working group, wrote a strongly-worded post on this issue:

Without your help, without a strong reaction, this can lead to one thing only and we’re dangerously not far from there: other browsers will start supporting/implementing themselves the -webkit-* prefix, turning one single implementation into a new world-wide standard. It will turn a market share into a de facto standard, a single implementation into a world-wide monopoly. Again. It will kill our standardization process. That’s not a question of if, that’s a question of when.

Therefore, Opera’s decision is probably bad for open web standards; though web developers may not mind since one fewer browser variation to worry about makes their life easier.

People commonly raise the spectre of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 and the way it effectively froze web standards for several years, thanks to its dominance. Might WebKit’s dominance repeat this? It is doubtful, since the IE6 problem would not have been so great, except that Microsoft decided it would rather promote its own platform (Windows) rather than the web platform. The WebKit community will not do that.

On the other hand, for rivals like Microsoft and Mozilla this is a concern. Something as important as web standards should ideally be vendor-neutral, so that big companies do not use standards as a means of promoting their own platforms and making other platforms work less well. In practice, it is rare that standards are truly vendor-neutral; the big vendors dominate standards groups like the W3C for exactly this reason. That said, it would be true to say that the W3C is more vendor-neutral than WebKit or Chromium.

Leaving all that aside, another question is what value Opera can add if it is building on the same core as Google and Apple. That is a matter I hope to clarify at the Mobile World Congress later this month.

concert reviews, kraftwerk, music

Kraftwerk at Tate Modern, London. Computer world. 11 February 2013

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Yesterday I journeyed to London to hear Kraftwerk perform Computer World at the Tate Modern.

A cold night, and I was glad to reach the warmth of the Tate Modern. We picked up our green armbands, and 3D spectacles, were instructed that no re-admittance was possible, and move on into the concert foyer where vaguely Germanic sausages, bread, chips and mustard was on sale, along with cans of flavourless beer.

It feels like a lot of attention has been paid to the total experience. The 3D glasses are packed in an envelope specific for the evening. The programme is only a sheet of A4, but it is informative and intriguing.

“A vision of bright hopes and dark fears of the booming microchip revolution, Computer World is a serenely beautiful and almost seamless collage of sensual melodies and liquid beatscapes,” it says.

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We move on into the concert space. Black pillows are handed out; essential if you plan to sit on the cold concrete floor. The hall is not huge, but it is exceptionally high. It is a relatively small crowd, and not entirely composed of middle-aged men as you might expect. The iPad-using guy next to us is 29, he says.

The concert starts at 9.00pm sharp. Everyone stands; forget the pillows then. Four men stand behind desks and barely move; the sounds of Numbers fill the hall, and 3D images pass across the screen.

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The images are integral to the show. The effect is more that of an animated slideshow than a film, with many loops and repeats. The images are iconic; watching the show is like walking round an art gallery, with one carefully composed image following another.

Lead man and co-founder Ralf Hütter is on the left and does vocals; I am not sure you can call it singing. What are the others doing? Are they playing real or virtual keyboards? Running programs? Tapping out percussion? It is all part of the mystery.

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Next it is Pocket Calculator. I love this song. “I am adding. And subtracting.” it says. It is about delight in technology. It is about doing things that would otherwise be impossible. It is about dehumanisation, no more pen and ink, columns of numbers, mistakes and crossings out, but just a few keys to press.

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We no longer have pocket calculators so the whole thing is decidedly retro. Can you be simultaneously retro and futuristic? Apparently you can. The main car in Autobahn is a VW Beetle.

Autobahn as it happens comes rather quickly, after around 23 minutes according to my watch. That’s odd, since Computer World the album is over 34 minutes.

We did not get the whole of Computer World and I want my money back.

Well, maybe not. The concert was stunning and I would not have missed it for anything. But I was surprised.

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Autobahn seemed to go on endlessly, which is as it should be of course. Then the VW took the exit slip and it was over.

Radioactivity. This song has been updated and now features Fukushima alongside other nuclear incidents like Chernobyl.

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This is a disturbing song. “Radioactivity is in the air for you and me … contaminated population” The jolly melody is at odds with the subject matter, but it works; does it represent the PR machine?

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Trans Europe Express. The train song is perfect for Kraftwerk. The train rushes towards us. Travel. Communication. Engineering. Cold steel. Kraftwerk.

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Two songs which are particularly striking live are The Robots and the Man Machine. The Robots come first.  This is where the band performing in front of the visuals works so well. What is more true, that the robots are human-like, or that the band is robot-like?

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Are we, in fact, machines ourselves, making the whole question moot?

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I have skipped over a few, songs in fact which touch on the more human side of Kraftwerk’s art. After Space Lab, The Model is performed to a backdrop of black and white glamour girls, retro, unreachable.

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Neon Lights is a short, refreshing interlude. The melody is stark and beautiful. If Hutter ever sings, he sings here.

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A note on the sound quality. In general, good, and not ear-splittingly loud for which I am grateful. It did get louder as the concert progressed, and I felt there were times when it distorted; but improved again towards the end.

There was true chest-shaking bass at times, something you had to be there to feel.

Tour de France is rather good. We see human endeavour, more black and white footage for the retro feel, and followed by Vitamins, making a point perhaps.

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Vitamins give rise to some strange 3D effects. Giant pills seem to float out over the audience, but as they fall, they fall behind the band, breaking the illusion.

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The Techno Pop section is the last in the concert. There is Boom Book Tschak, and another song I think, then Musique Non Stop, just as the concert is in fact stopping. The musicians leave the stage one by one, until only Hutter is left.

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He moves to the right of the stage, he bows, “See you tomorrow”. Unfortunately I will not. Then he is gone.

No encore. It is not the Kraftwerk way.

That was Kraftwerk. Repetitive, yes. Perplexing, yes. Beautiful, yes. Unique, yes.

Everything is ambiguous. Perhaps we are participating in an elaborate joke. It does not matter. Wonderful.

Setlist

Numbers
Pocket Calculator
Computer Love
It’s more fun to compute
Autobahn
Radioactivity
Trans Europe Express
The Robots
Spacelab
Metropolis
The Model
Neon Lights
Man Machine
Tour de France
Vitamin
Planet of Visions
Boing Boom Tschak
Techno Pop
Musique Non Stop

microsoft, windows

Windows 8: Forget Surface Pro, what matters is the app platform

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Microsoft has launched Surface Pro, its own-brand Windows 8 tablet, causing the usual agitation.

  • The 128GB model is sold out online, but has it sold well, or did Microsoft only make a few?
  • Is it too expensive for the spec?
  • Is the battery life too poor?
  • Can you type properly with it on your lap?

All reasonable questions, but to me rather unimportant.

When Microsoft “reimagined” Windows, its goal was to establish its operating system as a new tablet platform. Otherwise, there would have been no sense in upsetting millions of Windows users who were broadly happy with Windows 7, by imposing a new touch-friendly, blocky, mainly single-tasking platform on top of the old familiar Windows.

How is it doing so far? Not well. The reviews for Surface Pro are a symptom of this. It is being treated mainly as an Ultrabook with a detachable keyboard rather than as a tablet. That is a shame, since Surface (RT and Pro) is designed to be tablet-first, with the keyboard cleverly designed into the cover to mitigate the difficulty of using touch alone when you have to use desktop apps.

There are several reasons why Surface is seen as a kind of laptop rather than as a tablet.

First, Microsoft has so far failed to change the way Windows is perceived. People buy Windows devices to run Windows apps, by which they mean Microsoft Office, Skyrim, Foobar2000, and/or their corporate apps written in Visual Basic or C#. The existence of the new Windows Runtime platform is incidental and mainly annoying, since it can get in the way if you only want to run Windows.

This could soon change if there were numerous compelling apps on the new platform; but there are not, and that is reason number two. Which Windows Store apps are better (presuming you have a tablet) than their desktop equivalent, or which are great apps that have no desktop equivalent? It is a short list. Personally I would name the Wordament game, Maps, and the Weather app as examples; and yes, I know how lame that sounds.

Microsoft slipped up badly by spending so little effort on the built-in apps, especially Mail, but also Music and others. The result is that users spend little time in the new user interface (I am guessing but have anecdotal evidence). The further result is that the platform is unattractive to developers, despite the size of the Windows market.

Take a look at the MetroStore Scanner  and you can see that around two hundred apps are added most days (green is updates rather than additions).

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That in itself does not tell us much. Just one hundred great new apps would be fantastic news for the platform. But no, they are mostly trivial and/or poor and/or repetitive and/or uninteresting.

Why are developers not building more and better apps? That indeed is the question. The main reason of course is that size of the market, not in terms of the numbers of Windows 8 users out there, but in terms of likely sales or adoption.

This is circular though. Good apps will increase the size of the market. So what else?

My views on this changed when I sat down to build my own app, simple though it is. This was harder than I expected, and there is still a z-order bug which I have not got round to fixing. A core question though is this: does the platform help developers to build apps that delight the user? In this respect it is not yet good enough. The kind of app you will build if you follow all the guidelines will be genuinely touch-friendly, but look a bit blocky and spaced out too much. There is also the problem of the disappearing menu bar and the fact that users do not always discover options hidden in the Charms bar. It is too easy to build apps that are not good enough. I regard the poor quality of apps like Mail as evidence of this.

Put another way, it is not yet a platform that inspires developers and makes them want to support it, despite its immaturity.

Windows 8 is not going well then; but I do not write it off. Better apps surely will appear. Further, Microsoft’s next go at this, whether it is called Blue or Windows 8.5 or Windows 9, should be better as the team fix annoyances and add compelling features.

As yet though, there is no sign of Microsoft averting the march of Windows towards being a business-oriented, desktop platform occupying an ever-smaller niche in a world of mobile and browser apps. If I were CEO Steve Ballmer, I would find that a concern.