Billibala

Macworld Mobile – FAIL

Went to the Macworld Mobile conference at Mobile Asia Congress  today. It’s bit crappy honestly.

A bunch of unenthusiastic crowd, unpassionated crew, weird session schedule, poorly arranged refreshment bar… No breakfast, no lunch, no after party (you pay extra USD $195 for after party). There’s refreshment in the tea break. But there’s only 1 break in the whole freaking afternoon. You can’t take the coffee or snack into the conference hall either. WTF?!

You don’t get a break in between sessions either. There’s 1 lunch break and 1 tea break. People literally sit the whole morning and afternoon. You can imagine how much speaker/audience interactions happen in this arrangement.

So, this conference experience part is just one word – fail.

Let’s ignore all these. Just focus on the content…

Bottom line is… if the talks are not inspiring, they’d better be funny. If not, at least, be useful. I think I wasted one whole day suffering from poor organization and unthoughtful curation of the organizer.

I do like the design and Japanese social media talks. The speakers highlighted their unique personal perspective. The technical talks? I would classify them as elementary technical talk. It’s like collage lecture.

Is it the organizer requesting speakers doing elementary level stuff? I don’t know. Most talks are about stuff that already exists in documentation. In another words, it doesn’t make any different if you are not coming today. You can read everything from the fucking manual.

Who’s gonna pay for a conference where the contents have no depth?

Well, I did. But I won’t pay again. If I could, I wanna get my time back. No need to refund.

Who needs to pay to listen to introductory materials?

Those who first learn the technologies presented today are probably bogus developers who go to the conference to escape from company’s work. Even if they genuinely come to learn, is there any difference if they just read the fucking manual?

Expo organizer is not developer. They are event organizer focusing on event logistic. They are little from ignorant to iOS technologies and indie culture. It seems to me that they just organize the event to the job done. I don’t feel a single bit that this conference is related to iPhone developer culture. I feel a huge disconnect between audience expectation and what the organizers offer.

No wonder Steve Jobs is out of this Macworld Expo thing. This expo model doesn’t work.

I enjoy conference trip. I have been to WWDC 4 times. Every now and then, I had a WWDC moment. Why?

WWDC is mainly a technical conference similar to the Macworld Mobile too. But there are 2 main differences.

First, contents covered are usually about the next generation OS, new technologies or in-depth sharing. Second, the conference attracts great crowd. You can find the most well known indies and developers and talk to them.

Can you replace that with documentation or sample code?

There’s a reason why people spend money and time to conference. It’s the conference experience. If you are not crafting the best experience for developers, screw you. Just don’t organize it. Or, just say, “This conference feature mainly introductory materials and is not tide to developer culture at all”

My message to IDG or whoever running Macworld Mobile…

“Go attend SecondConf, NSConference, 360|iDev, iPhoneDevCon or any indie conference with good feedback! Ask yourself why people in those conferences enjoy being there so much! ”

Until then, this is my last Macworld Mobile event.

My advice to you as host of CocoaHeads Hong Kong – save the money for any of the indie conferences I mentioned above.

Clip It! in Mac App Store?

Been busy with projects lately… didn’t get much time following indies thoughts on the Mac App Store.

There’s been a lot of discussion in various places – the MacSB list, many podcasts and some indie developers blog.

I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not. The 70/30 split between developer and Apple is pretty steep. In exchange to that, developers get exposed to millions of iTunes users and get Apple handles all distribution/credit card transaction stuff.

The response from those big name indies are pretty positive. Omnigroup and Real Mac Software had both publicly announced their support to Mac App Store. Smaller developers like Pixelmator and Kevin Hoctor and many others expressed positive outlook to the MAS too.

Well… I’ll join the party too. Just got Clip It! compilable and working under the latest XCode (3.2.5) for MAS submission. Now, eagerly waiting the door opens…

Business Insider interview with Zappos Tony Hsieh

Business Insider did an exclusive interview with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh.

Do you ever wanna remove a cookie?

Randomly browsing NYTimes and encountered this article – New Web Code Draws Concern Over Privacy Risks about privacy concern with HTML5.

The article mentioned about a new cookie type called evercookie. Don’t know visiting the site will trigger the forever cookie. But if you think that “Delete Cookie” really means deleting a cookie… you could be wrong.

Samy – the developer of evercookie described the way this cookie is implemented. Below is the screen capture of the evercookie page:

This guy is ingenious! Can you imagine using RGB value in PNGs created by canvas tag as cookie? Geez…

Basically, any features in browser which allow scripter to write some “clues” can be used as cookie identifier. The mechanism described in the list above are all legitimate features available in modern browser. Seems like we have no way to get away from tracking if a site owner determines to track us.

Does that mean we have no choice but to give up privacy?

Adam Curry on TWiST

Adam Curry is the guy behind “Big App Show” – bigappshow.com. He’s also a veteran of the internet and successful entrepreneur. Follow his interview with Jason and you will know the success of Big App Show is no luck nor coincidence.

My workstation is on steroid – new Dell U2211 assistive display

Been spending money to expand my workstation lately. Purchased a mid-2010 Mac Pro last month. This month I added a new 21.5″ Dell U2211 LCD display to my existing 3+ year old Dell 2407WFP.

The two displays work amazingly well. There’s little color mismatch even I haven’t calibrated the displays yet. Both displays are set to use “Apple RGB” color profile where I find it looks most natural to me. I am planning to get a Colormunki Create later this fall so that I can be more sure about color. Its support web site says it works with Mac OS X Snow Leopard with dual displays.

The new display (U2211) is of decent build quality. It comes with all necessary cables (DVI, VGA, power cord and USB).

Image quality is very good too. Well, I mean, it’s the quality you would expect from a IPS panel. Plus, you get good detail of color level control through the display’s own control menu.

One problem I notice is the physical size of its base. It’s disproportionally hugh.

The screen measures roughly 20″ x 14″. But the base itself takes up roughly 7 x 11 sq in of my desk space! Not sure if they just use the same base in the whole ultrasharp display series. If you have small desk, you should take this into consideration before you make the purchase.

I also find the aspect ratio a bit odd for productivity application. 16:9 is a little too narrow especially when you run word processor and spreadsheet applications. This is more a general issue towards all 16:9 widescreen displays. I prefer 16:10 aspect ratio.

Well, my ideal setup is still Apple display. However, the current LED Cinema Display doesn’t seem to be designed for me who need to work with source code and photoshop files for hours. I love the integrated iSight, 2.1 speaker, cables and the sleek design. I just hate one thing… and that one thing is significant enough to keep me from buying it. It is the glossy surface. Can’t really stand to see my face and stuff behind me overlapping tiny Objective-C source code on the screen.

At HKD$1650, this U2211 panel is definitely recommended as a main or secondary monitor. You may have to take screen aspect ratio into account. If you do plan to use the display for productivity app in its normal (horizontal) orientation, you should, generally, look for 16:10 display or a 27″ display which gives you more vertical pixels to work with.

Finger 2.0 for iOS4

Wrapping development work of Finger 2.0 this evening… (or morning). Finally submitted it to Apple for review.

It’s a long over due upgrade for existing user. Finger 2.0 provides support:

• Native iPad support
• iPhone 4 hi-res UI
• Copy and paste

We have updated the underlying network protocol in Finger to make it more robust for Mac user as well.

It’s late now… will make a official announcement in Finger’s site.

Eric Schmidt on Colbert Report

Eric Schmidt was in The Colbert Report earlier this week and mentioned about Hong Kong in the conversation

“Basically, there’s Hong Kong and mainland China. One country and two systems. We like the Hong Kong system better.”

Keep going Hong Kong people! Take advantage of our flavored system and do some good to people in China and in the world!

How to add my order? My comGateway story as an end user

comGateway is a freight forwarding service. You can manage your freight completely through the web interface. (well, you can call it freight forwarding 2.0) I have registered an account for quite awhile but only recently I use their service to send some items I ordered from amazon and owc.

The overall experience is pleasant. But, as a first-time user (and someone who has never used any freight forward service in his life), certain part of the system does look odd to me. I’ll explain that in a moment.

Let me walk you through my scenario here:

As a novice user, I first checked the How It Works section of the site. The content there is pretty easy to understand to me. I think I grabbed the idea in less than 1 minute.

Then, I registered the service and never bother it again… (that’s about 6 months ago)

A month ago, I saw the promotion of OWC SSD drive – 40GB for only 99 USD. That’s freaking awesome. I wanna add a 2nd hard drive to my MacBook Pro for quite a while. I ordered the hard drive from owc and, separately, ordered a hacker drive tray from MCE – the OptiBay for late 2008 MacBook Pro. The ordering process of these two separate sites both went well. (got delivery problem later on with MCE though)

Here’s the problem. After ordering the stuff, I was supposed to enter the order information to Comgateway. But how? Well, I know I have to enter the info to them because the How It Works section told me to (step 2 of How it works). But there’s no mention (nor reference link) telling me how.

My very first reaction was panic. “My stuff is shipping there! Where the hell will it go if they don’t know I am sending items to them? Will they dump it?” Luckily, I’m a software developer. I quickly switch my mental state from panic to “read the f—ing manual”. Skimming to the right side of the screen, you will see some help items. The most relevant one to me is the first item under “Help: Orders”. It says “My Orders”.

That didn’t render useful to me. The information following that link says:

“We list both your BuyForMe and DIY orders here. For BuyForMe orders, click on the order number to view the details of your order with us. For DIY orders, please refer to the invoice sent to you by the merchant.”

Cool, that didn’t help. I was looking for “the f—ing add order button”. The help there is f—ing telling me nothing. What’s can I do next? I decided to click the “How it works” link at the top of the navigation as I thought I might have missed something when I first read it.

Going through point 1, 2…. Damn, it’s the same crap I read before. I didn’t seem to have missed anything critical from the text.

I told myself one last try… There’s a Quick Start Guide callout on the right column of the site. I would give one last shot. Things looked better this time. I found a section called “Place your order”

It says…

“If you want to shop online in the U.S., we make everything possible, easy and economical.

You can start by typing the store you want to visit into the bar above. If you want some inspiration follow the links in Start Shopping…”

After reading this, I still couldn’t get it. I was trying to find where exactly is the “add order” button. The help says, “You can start by typing the store you want to visit into the bar above“. In the first glance, that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the “add order” button that I was looking for. Where’s that f—ing “bar above“? Where’s my f—ing “add order” button?

Ok… I calm down myself a bit. And saw the screen capture on the help page with the bar… Though the image in the screen shot was not the same as the bar actually on the page, I gave a try.

Turns out you have to enter the URL of the site which you do the shopping to the “I want to shop at:” text box in the home page. comGateway will then prompt a “add new order” window along side the a new browser window opening up the site you entered previously.

In my case, since I’d ordered the items from those sites. I had to stupidly enter the URL those two sites which I shopped so as to get the “add new order” window to enter the order information. Sounds so dumb.

I am not quite sure why they do not put a “Add order” button in the order management interface. This seems to be the most straightforward way to user. I guess they probably wanna keep track of where exactly people shop and keep its “shopping panel” on the screen so that user can use other value added service accessible from that panel making user feels like comGateway is part of the shopping experience.

My personally unbiased recommendation would be “put the damn add order button in my order management page”! But, if business strategy is put into consideration, they may probably wanna keep the current paradigm. In that case, I Comgateway should refine the “I want to shop at” address bar more. Their way of doing thing is totally strange to newcomer. The help instruction should be more specific as well. Don’t put “You can start by typing the store you want to visit into the bar above”. That sounds vague and optional. Make it more definitive and motivate people to type things there.

Seriously, I’ve got so close to give up! See how many steps I went through:

I was originally looking for the “Add Order” button (maybe because I am a geek… I always think of Add/Edit/Select/Delete when I see a table interface). After trying out several help file (which probably wasted me 30 min), started feel that things may not work the way I want. Experiment a bit on the “unique” paradigm to finally get it!

This scenario is particular problematic to me, maybe, because my first problem is “where is the add order button?”. My whole journey was all about finding the “Add” button. However, the system doesn’t work the way I think and I had to change the problem from “where is the add button” to “how to add an order”. That’s when I started to experiment the “I want to shop at” address bar which subsequently led me to solve my problem.

Also, go to a website using an “address” bar in another site is definitely strange to any user. Who the hell will think they should go to Amazon to shop not by entering the URL to your browser’s own address? (instead, enter the address in their site)

Hm… not sure how many users have got deterred by this? Time for them to check the funneling stats in Google Analytics

Apple Asia online store hell

This is my story trying to order a Mac Pro from Apple Asia Online Store.

I ordered a Mac Pro from Apple’s online store. There’s an interest-free 12 months installment payment option available in Hong Kong store. But the thing is, you have to call the sales hotline to arrange that.

They sent me the installment application form on 31 August. Filled it, emailed it and wait… Days passed and I hear nothing from Apple acknowledging that they received the form or whatever…

Since this Monday (6 Sept), I’ve been calling Apple Asia (900-908-988) to check my order status. But I got either busy tone or a recorded voice saying the number is busy.

Today (10 Sept), over 7 business days since I placed the order, I finally get in touch with the customer service. (well, after waiting 1 hour plus in line) The response from Apple is… they didn’t receive my application.

WTF?!

Since when Apple Asia becomes i-Cable?

If you don’t have the resources to process those installment application, don’t offer that to your customer, Apple.