iphone

New Adventures

It’s been a while since I posted my last article on this blog, but what is really weird is that I have not mentioned yet what has been bothering my days and nights for the past 8 months.

In January this year, the first Startup Weekend was organized in Betagroup Coworking, Brussels. At first I didn’t want to attend, because I thought it was silly to hope you could do anything meaningful in merely 2 days. But Leo insisted, and 2 days before the event, I finally made up my mind. I was working on HuddleKit back then but I wanted to propose a simple idea for the event, something powerful and effective enough to be quick to implement. I had discovered AirBnB a few weeks before, and the whole collaborative consumption trend with it. Around a lunch at Vivansa‘s HQ, Said started thinking out loud about how difficult it was for small companies to adapt their office size as they grow, and how companies could mutualize their office space. We started dreaming about what a concept like AirBnB’s would mean applied to office space, how it could enrich business relationships. And then it struck me: 2 years ago, I published a post entitled “Let’s Solve Problems“, that ended like this.

Now I don’t know how or when, but this could very well become a major breakthrough in my personal and professional life somehow.

Well, guess what. The same day, I registered kodesk.com, and four days later, Kodesk won the grand prize of the jury and the leanest startup prize of the first Startup Weekend Brussels. After that, it was pretty obvious to me: I stopped working on HuddleKit and all my other pet projects, I progressively decreased my involvement with Vivansa and I started working almost full-time on Kodesk. In May this year, Frederic joined me in this adventure and we invested our own money in it. In late May, we released the first version of Kodesk and let’s just say that beyond visibility and publicity, the first results are not all as satisfactory as we expected. Now I’m certainly not complaining: we know that we are on the right track, our vision is crystal clear, we have a lot of support and it’s very rare for startups to get it right the first time. It’s even more rare for ventures that try to change common beliefs and evolve an entire culture.

But today it becomes obvious that building the right product and finding a profitable business model is going to take some time. And until we do, it’s going to be very hard to raise any external investment. Now we don’t want this financial constraint to remove all the fun from the adventure of creating our dream business from scratch, so today I am making a new move.

I love technology. I’m a geek and I am proud of it. My friends find it very useful and my passion for technology has allowed me to develop quite a reputation. Now it is time to earn some money with this passion and reputation, and to use that money to fund this groundbreaking business I’m building. So starting today, I am going to provide businesses of all sizes with three main services: technology watch, training and iPhone/iPad development, because those are the three things I love the most and I am really good at.  If you want more information, I created this page to promote my services. And if you know any company or individual who could be interested in my services, please feel free to pass my information along.

By Sébastien, ago

Mac Runtimes, What a Mess!

First of all, let’s make things clear: I’ve been a very satisfied Mac user for the past 4 years or so, but I’m also a Java and a Flex developer, which means I have interests in all three of those technologies. And yes, I’m also a big fan of Steve Jobs, but despite all expectations, I try to be lucid about him and some of his weirdest choices/decisions/open letters ;o).

The problem I have at the moment is that, in the name of sensationalism, a lot of blogs post with titles like “Macs won’t have Flash anymore”, or “Java is dead on the Mac”, as if it was just an evil continuation of the “no Flash on iPhone/iPad” fuss that started at the beginning of this year. Now it’s certainly a great way to draw attention to those sites who only live thanks to advertisement, and hence number of visits. But let’s try to reestablish a few realities here.

First off, let’s talk about what everybody has at the back of their head when they think about Apple and runtimes: iOS. Yes, iOS doesn’t support any alternative runtime. In fact, besides Javascript, iOS doesn’t support any virtual machine. Flash and Java work on virtual machines and they’re not supported on iOS. There are 2 major reasons for that. The first one is performance, because a virtual machine, that is a software execution environment on top of a hardware one, will never be as performant as the native one. Despite all the optimization efforts that Adobe has done with Flash on mobiles, first experiences on Android tend to confirm that there’s still work to be done. Even though they have improved a lot in the past 3 years thanks to the iPhone impulse, mobile devices still run with very limited hardware capacities. And they still haven’t reached the point where they have a lot of free resources to spare, like personal computers have. So the official reason makes sense. But of course the less official reason is also important for Apple: iPhone’s number one sales argument is apps. When you think about it, it’s almost funny because when the first iPhone came out without an SDK, everybody complained about it, and then Steve Jobs answered that there was no use for a SDK. And obviously at that time, Apple was already working very hard on the App Store and the iPhone SDK. But when you know you have something huge in the pipeline, something that will make your device even more frightening to the competition, what is the best thing to say to the competition? “Don’t worry, this is just another one of our silly shiny gadgets that will just convince our existing fans”. And then a mere 18 months later, Apple comes out with not only an excellent SDK, but a whole new sales and distribution channel, and a marketing strategy that is based solely on all the apps your can install. I’m sure that there must have been a couple of WTF-moments at Nokia, RIM and others. So when your whole marketing strategy relies on your controlled and polished SDK and distribution channel, you have absolutely no interest in letting others in, be it J2ME crap (I’ve done J2ME development too, iark!) or the more threatening Adobe AIR. So let’s deal with it: no virtual machines on iOS, and whether we like it or not, it makes sense.

So are recent news just a continuation of that? Is Steve Jobs trying to eliminate all competition on the Mac too. NO! He’s not! It’s a completely different story!

Let’s start with Flash on the Macbook Air. Yes, the new Macbook Air doesn’t have Flash pre-installed. Actually, Safari does not have the Flash plugin preinstalled anymore. But nothing prevents you from installing it yourself. As nothing prevents you from installing Firefox and its Flash plugin as well. On iOS, it’s not pre-installed, and you can’t install it yourself. On MacOSX, from now on, it won’t be pre-installed but you will still be able to install it yourself. Huge difference! The Flash community has complained enough about the outdated version of the pre-installed Flash plugin. Of course Apple will not change their systems every time Adobe fixes a security or performance bug. So the best way to avoid any remanent hole, is to allow no hole at all by default. And if you need Flash, you just install the latest version and you’re good to go. That’s for the official reason. But as always there is… one more thing! One of the main marketing arguments for Flash is that, unlike any other cross-platform runtime, it’s installed on a crushing majority of machines, somewhere above 95% of them. But that is partly thanks to those integration deals that make Flash ship with every new PC or Mac, independently of the popularity of Flash as a development platform. Apple’s bet is that with the advent of HTML5, users will use the Flash plugin less and less often. But if they pre-install it, this drop in usage won’t reflect on Adobe’s marketing. Once again, whether we like it or not, it makes perfect sense for Apple. And it even makes sense to me: even if I’m a big Flash advocate, even if I think the HTML5 fuss is just oversold, I think Adobe has been a little too slow to react lately, as if they were resting on their dominance of the cross-platform runtime market. So everything that makes them fight harder to build a better development and runtime environment is good. And I’m sure they will fight. They just need to invest more in it. Mobile Flex development only in early 2012 (and that’s the first estimates, the ones that are always wrong) will just be too late for the show. So that’s it: no Flash plugin preinstalled in Macs means no Mac shipping with outdated security holes built-in and no built-in popularity bias either, which is good for competition. But nothing will prevent your from installing Flash yourself.

Let’s talk about Java now. When you read the news, you tend to feel like Apple’s war on competition is nothing personal against Adobe, that  it’s targeted at everyone else, that Java will be Steve’s next victim. But that’s just so untrue! First off, contrary to what happens with Flash, Apple never said that they would ship Macs without Java built-in. They just said that it would enter a pure maintenance phase and that they would stop supporting it… themselves! But once again, they won’t prevent anyone else to take over support for Java on the Mac. In fact, that’s probably why they took this decision: there was a time when Apple had their own interests in Java, when there was a Java-Cocoa bridge in the development environment, when Java was even a great way to make the Mac ecosystem richer, because a lot of developers would write their desktop applications in Java to support all platforms with a single code base. But of course, with the deprecation of Java-Cocoa bridge and the advent of the iPhone and what it means in terms of popularity for Objective-C and Cocoa native environment, Apple’s stake in Java has decreased dramatically. So much so that today, those who have the most interest in Java on the Mac are… those who support Java developers. And since Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison are known to be big friends, I’m sure Oracle and Apple are perfectly clear with who is going to take over. Maybe the community can help with Soy Latte and OpenJDK, but I can’t believe that Oracle won’t step up themselves, given the overwhelming Mac install base amongst java devs. And still, whatever the solution, Apple won’t prevent any one else to support Java and offer a Mac installation package for it.

So Flash and Java are not dead on the Mac! At least not based on existing statements and choices from Apple. But we can’t know what Steve has in mind, and I can’t help worrying about the end game of all this. Given the huge success of iOS, which makes perfect sense in the mobile world, I’m really afraid that Steve Jobs won’t know where to stop and will want to reproduce the same model on desktop. And I certainly don’t want that. I’m not ready for it yet. And I think a lot of people are not ready either, so if Apple moves too fast in this direction, they could loose a lot of customers in the process, especially if Steve Jobs starts this transition and then leaves this for others to deal with. But we’re not there yet. So please bloggers, keep your heads cold and please avoid feeding fear, uncertainty and doubt.

By Sébastien, ago

WWDC 2010 Review

Still one session to attend about closures in Objective-C, and I’ll call it a week. A little bit of shopping this afternoon in order to spend my last dollars and I’ll be ready for take-off tomorrow afternoon. So it’s time for a little summary of this week.

Overall, it was my first WWDC and I’m very glad I did it, but I probably won’t do it again. San Francisco is definitely a very nice city, and seeing Steve in live, even from very far away in the audience was an interesting experience. I also learnt a few very interesting things and psychologically a conference like this always has the same side-effect on me: first I’m depressed and humbled by all the ambient intelligence, but then it motivates me a lot to move forward, learn and do something about it. So it has definitely been a very positive experience.

Now was it worth the budget I put in it? (more…)

By Sébastien, ago

Grails/BlazeDS/Flex/iPhone Full Stack Part 2/3

In the previous episode, we built a simple Grails backend for the todolist application. In this installment, we will create a simple Flex 4 front-end for this backend.

The following assumes that you have already installed Flash Builder 4 (formerly known as Flex Builder), either in standalone mode or as an Eclipse plug-in.

(more…)

By Sébastien, ago

Grails/BlazeDS/Flex/iPhone Full Stack Part1/3

A couple of years ago, I published an article on this blog entitled “Flex, Spring and BlazeDS: the full stack!” and this article became very popular. Actually it broke my daily visits record. Today I’m gonna try to break this record again.

In the last couple of years, I’ve worked a lot with Flex and Spring. But in my eternal quest for productivity and user experience, I discovered Grails. Based on the same ideas as Ruby on Rails or Django, it combines a dynamic language – Groovy – with the power of “convention over configuration” to make it possible to create web applications in no time, thus allowing you to spend more time on your user experience.

Of course it’s not the only thing that has changed since then. Flex 4 is now finally out in the open. BlazeDS 4 too. And Flash Builder is finally productive enough for me to use it… in combination with IntelliJ IDEA of course.

All those evolutions in my toolset needed to be integrated, so I ended up building a Grails plugin to do just that: Grails BlazeDS plugin. And since this plugin could not be officially released without a proper demonstration, here we are.

I prepared this tutorial for a BeJUG talk I gave last week. So I want to thank Stephan Janssen and the BeJUG for inviting me… and for staying with me without throwing vegetables at me, given all the failures I had during the live coding session. For those of you who were there: I clearly identified PermGen space as the guilty part responsible for all these blank screens. In fact, since Grails migrated from Jetty to Tomcat as their runtime server, default java memory settings are not enough anymore, so I always configure my projects for that, but of course, in live, I forgot…

Anyway. I’m going to publish this tutorial in three episodes, each one of them being accompanied by its very own screencast on Vimeo (damn Youtube and their 10-minute limit!). But I’ll also publish the tutorial transcript right here for those who want to go faster.

Important note: this tutorial covers the following set of technologies in the specified versions:

In particular, it seems that Grails 1.3 that was just released a couple of days ago breaks Grails BlazeDS plugin. I’ll update both my plugin and this tutorial when I can make them all work together again.

(more…)

By Sébastien, ago

The Real Reasons Behind the Flash Debate

In my humble opinion, the main reason why the debate around Flash versus HTML5 (and Adobe versus Apple) has gone haywire during the past few weeks is that everyone is lying about their true motives (like in any apparently inextricable conflict):

  • Apple doesn’t want Flash on its closed devices like the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPhone because Flash would be an alternate content channel that would hinder Apple’s very lucrative iTunes business. And of course they won’t admit it because it would mean that they put business strategy before innovation.
  • Adobe has some technical issues with Flash because the codebase is very old and costs a lot to maintain. And they won’t admit it because it would make Flash look weak and unreliable on the long term.
  • Most HTML5 proponents started as amateur web developers, tinkering for years with poor technologies like HTML, CSS and Javascript, building entire businesses around their capacity to figure out all this mess out of trial and error.
  • Flash developers (including yours truly) have invested a lot of time, money and effort in tools, training and experience with the Flash platform, and are not so enthusiastic about throwing all of that down the garbage for yet another fashion tech. But of course we won’t admit that because we’re afraid to look like dinosaurs who refuse to evolve.

And since everybody uses pretexts, everyone will use every contradiction and approximation possible to maintain their cover. Like I said, wars work the same way: ideology hides facts. It motivates your troops to fight the other side until they’re dead, because the big guys, the ones who know about the real reasons simply can’t find a peaceful solution that would allow everyone to win.

It reminds me of a European civil servant who asked me this simple question once when I started a mission for the European Parliament: “Why do you think the European Union was created?” Naively I answered “so that one day we can be on equal foot with the United States.” “Wrong!” he said. “That’s not what Shuman and its friends had in mind. After World War II, they realized that the true source of the conflict between France and Germany, and by extension between their respective allies, was the repartition of natural resources in general, and most notably at this time, coal. But it’s hard to get people to fight for that kind of cause, so powers had to disguise it with ideology so that people would feel invested and do terrible things in the name of it. And they understood that if they didn’t cure the real sickness instead of fighting the symptoms like they had done after World War I, they could not prevent it from happening again. That’s the real reason why CECA was created, and then CEE, then EU. It was not a matter of power, it was a matter of peace.”

And that answer struck me because the same pattern repeats itself over and over again in a lot of contexts. Behind decades of war between Israel and Palestine, there’s a fight for water. Behind the war in Irak, there was a fight for gas. Behind the war for the future of web technologies, there’s a fight for customers. And the conflict is even more violent as it happens on 2 different levels: company-wise between Apple and Adobe, and community-wise between Flash developers and HTML developers.

The good news is that there’s a way for everyone to win peacefully once we reveal the real issues. There are enough customers for everyone. It’s not a zero-sum fight. The other side doesn’t have to lose so that we can win. The question is: will we be strong enough to reject the ideology and find a common ground at the community-level? Or will we let the big guys at Adobe and Apple hide behind ideology and use us as cannon fodder.

By Sébastien, ago

Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt

I have hesitated for a long time… a few hours that is. But given my geek reputation (of which I’m still proud by the way), I could just not avoid it: I have to say something about the iPad. Of course I was following the keynote live yesterday with a bunch of geeks in Café Numérique, in Brussels. And of course I was very excited about it. Now instead of writing long sentences about what I like and don’t like about it, I’ll just go over my impressions quickly:

  • I don’t really like the name, but iSlate would have been worst and Macbook Touch was clearly not adapted
  • I love the device itself, and yes I’m gonna get one as soon as it’s released. I’m planning a trip to WWDC in June and hopefully I can bring one back
  • it really is yet another game changer. Apple did with the iPad to the Tablet PC segment what they did with the iPhone to the smartphone segment: bypass the professional market, make it a general public appliance. Brilliant!
  • it will create a whole new market for new applications on the App Store, I can think of a few ones myself
  • I don’t care that it doesn’t have multi-tasking, I’ve never needed it and reactivity is too important for me
  • demonstrations in a couch, what a great communication symbol!
  • I don’t care about the batteries being sealed, so long as it gets me more battery-life
  • I hope there will be an Apple Care on this one
  • Absence of SMS and phone capabilities: it’s not a phone anyway
  • No front camera: who really uses video-conference in the general public anyway? Video-conference in a couch? Come on!
  • The price tag is just awesome. The top one is cheaper than my 3GS
  • I’m so glad I didn’t get a Kindle DX or a Nook as I intended to. By the way, even though e-ink is more comfortable to use, I think the generic aspect of the device and the availability of the iBooks store are going to marginalize specialize eBook readers
  • Stop it with the “giant iPhone” complaint. And laptops are mini-desktops, so what?

Now in parallel to all those impressions, I couldn’t help to see those floating images in my head, of websites with big blank areas and a blue logo, I could even hear those blank areas whisper in my ears: “No Flash support…. ouuuuuuuuhh… No Flash support”. Yes, I know, I’m going nuts. My first thought was “how are you going to explain your daughter that she cannot use the iPad to access her favourite color painting site with her fingers because there’s no Flash?” For such a general public family appliance, it just doesn’t make sense.

But then I started reading blog posts and comments about the announcement, and the frustration turned into anger. Anger against Apple and Adobe who can’t seem to find a common ground on this issue. But more importantly angry against all those self-proclaimed death prophets, all those open standard ayatollahs claiming that they don’t care about Flash since Flash is dead anyway, and Flash is closed and proprietary, and Adobe is all evil, and HTML5 is going to rule the world. And it kind of woke up the Flex developer beast in me, I turned all green, I tore my shirt apart, going all…

FUCK HTML5 !!!

And then I started punching around.

First off, Flash has evolved a lot in the past few years: Flash is not just used for ads anymore. It powers the vast majority of videos on the web, plus a lot of multimedia websites that we love and use everyday (Deezer for example, Google Finance, etc.)

Second, Flash is not completely open, but it is far less closed than what a lot of people know: Tamarin, the Flash virtual machine, the basis of the Flash plugin, has been donated as Open Source to the Mozilla foundation 3 years ago, SWF (Flash file format), AMF (Flash remoting protocol), RTMP (Flash realtime communication protocol) are all open specifications that allow anyone to write their own Flash plugin (with a licence, but still) or generator. Plus Adobe has gone a long way in opening up its tools and processes for the Flash platform as a whole by open sourcing the Flex SDK, creating the Open Screen Project, and I could go on and on. I’ve met some of the openness evangelists inside Adobe and I can tell you that they’re doing a great job opening up what used to be a very protective and old-school company. And it’s just the beginning.

Third: being an open standard is not a f***ing feature for Steve’s sake! If using committee standards means I have to wait for 10 years before any evolution becomes available (how long has W3C been working on HTML5? how long before it is finalized), if it means going back in time on problems we thought had been solved for good (like the video codec hell coming back from the dead), if it means having to spend hours tweaking my web applications so that they look and behave the same in all browsers, then I don’t give a sh*t about open standards. Where is the added value?

Fourth, I can already hear you yell at me about the last argument: “we just can’t let one (evil) company have so much control about a web technology!”. And still that’s exactly what Sun has been doing with another omnipresent web technology: Java. And very few people ever complained about it. And what about Google with Android? The truth is that, from a developer standpoint, having one company orchestrating the evolution of such a huge technology is very good: it guarantees a certain level of consistency, so that we don’t have to deal with compatibility issues between different implementations. It’s also a good point for stability, knowing that you will always have backwards compatibility and professional support on the long term, and that you can invest safely in the technology. And of course it’s excellent for efficiency, because they don’t have to waste time on endless arguments about who’s got the bigger video codec or whatever, so it evolves fast.

So that’s it. I hate HTML, Javascript and CSS, I do it when I have to, but it’s not development, it’s tinkering. And I hate all those people spreading FUD about Flash without knowing what they’re talking about. And I love the Flash platform, and what Adobe is doing with it. I just hope Adobe and Apple will eventually reach an agreement to bring Flash to the iPhone and iPad. And I hope Adobe will do some PR to fix their image because there’s a big problem there.

Just my 2 cents…

By Sébastien, ago

Here Comes Grails APNs Plugin

That’s it. I’ve released my first Grails plugin ever. Woooo! Champagne!

If you follow my Twitter feed, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been playing a lot with Apple Push Notification service lately (APNs for friends). Indeed, ConferenceGuide still requires a data connection, which can be problematic on a lot of events because they’re usually abroad (and roaming fees are waaaaaay too expensive), and even when you do have a data connection, it’s usually pretty slow… at best. That’s probably why one of the most requested features for ConferenceGuide is Offline Mode.

But getting all the data directly from the server does have at least one advantage: you’re always up-to-date. And experience has shown that sh** happens: sometimes sessions are cancelled at the last minute, or a global sound mixer reboots out of nowhere, thus shifting all sessions by 15 minutes. Those of you who were at Devoxx last November know what I’m talking about. So I needed a way to combine the best of both worlds: being able to browse schedule and speaker information without a data connection, and still get updates whenever something changes and I can find a wifi hotspot or something.

The first part of the solution is the local database. The second part involves sending push notifications. The problem with the latter is that the API provided by Apple is pretty low-level and the documentation is rather scarce. And it’s understandable because they expose a service that should be usable by any server technology, whether it is Java, .Net, PHP, Rails, etc. Fortunately, Java has a huge community and a great Open Source spirit, so it wasn’t long before a few projects were created to build an abstraction layer on top of APNs API. The simplest and most documented one I found is java-apns by Mahmood Ali. But ConferenceGuide server is not plain Java. It’s Grails 1.1 (I haven’t taken the risk to migrate to 1.2 yet). So I wanted to ease the integration of java-apns into any Grails application. And voilà! Grails APNs Plugin.

Special thanks to Burt Beckwith for helping me get started, and Mahmood Ali for developing java-apns!

By Sébastien, ago

Conference Guide Available

Conference Guide Icon

Woohooo! Exciting times! It’s confirmed, I will be at Devoxx the whole week, and my Conference Guide iPhone application has just been approved. For your information, it only covers Devoxx 2009 for now, but it’s meant to be generic and I will add more information for other conferences soon: TEDxBrussels, JFokus, etc. The application is free for a limited period of time, so go ahead and install it!

More features for the iPhone application are coming, maybe not for Devoxx (the Apple review process makes things really slow), as well as other mobile clients. An Android client is already in the pipe, and if you are a Palm Pre or Symbian developer, feel free to contact me. I can give you access to the same public API I’m using for the iPhone version.

Finally, if you are a conference organizer and you want your event information to be available on mobile platforms without having to develop your own applications, feel free to contact me as well.

And by the way, if you are a company, and you are thinking about developing your own iPhone application, whether it is for marketing purposes, to sell content or to improve the productivity of your salesforce, I’m your guy. And I can do much more than just iPhone development ;o)

By Sébastien, ago

Digital Marketing First… Oh my!

I was at Digital Marketing First today. I was invited by Alexandre Colleau from Belgium-iPhone to participate in a panel discussion about iPhone application development. But the presentation was only at 2PM so I decided to walk around the booths before. And I was very disappointed. After hearing someone from eMakina claiming that you can take your blood pressure just by touching the screen of your iPhone, and seen many email marketing vendors claim that email marketing is the future… well, I was disappointed. And then there was the panel.

The discussion itself was pretty interesting in itself. 9 iPhone developers, from hobbyists to professional, from App Store applications to pure B2B stuff, from highly-successful to eternally rejected VOIP apps… very interesting. But what was really astounding for me was after the presentation: people from the audience litterally jumped on us, asking for business cards, asking questions, talking to us about their projects. Luckily for me, I had prepared a bunch of cards, because I secretly hoped that this participation would lead me to a few project opportunities. But I sincerely didn’t expect the demand for iPhone developers to be so high.

So yes guys: I do iPhone development too! In fact I love it, even better than anything else. It’s fun, innovative, and solves real problems. And even better than that, since I do java development too, I can help you design your whole infrastructure. Ain’t that awesome? And even more: if you need a desktop client that is cross-platform and allows you to reproduce some of the functionalities of your iPhone application, I can do that too.

Anyways. I had the opportunity to talk with very interesting people about very interesting projects and it should lead to a few very interesting freelance missions. What a productive day! And a big thank you to Alexandre Colleau!

By Sébastien, ago