OhRyan.ca

I haven’t see a whole lot of information around the intertubes about what it’s actually like to deploy an iPhone App. Sure there are stories every other week about Apple’s ridiculously inconsistent censorship, and talk of developers not being paid. But there is not a lot of information about the actual process of getting App into the iTunes Store.

I’m going to go through a couple of different steps in the process and talk about some of the unexpected problems. I must say though, I was not very impressed. Nothing about the process is very “Apple-like.”

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Disclaimer: The following post is fictional. It does not represent an admission to any illegal activity or wrongdoing.

About 6 months ago my wife and I decided to cancel our cable and tivo subscriptions in an attempt to save some money. We weren’t quite sure how painful it would be to go without. At the time, we were probably watching 30 -40 hours per week. Which I’m guessing slightly more than the average family in our demographic – but maybe slightly less than the average “geek” household. It’s hard to come up with a good mental estimate, with tivo’s ad skipping ability you can squeeze in an extra 20-25% more TV.

Going into the experiment we were aware that Canada doesn’t really have any viable free or paid online TV watching options; Hulu and most of the content on US network websitess is blocked from Canadian IPs; until very recently iTunes only hand a handful of uninteresting Canadian TV shows available; the 3 major Canadian networks (and their specialty channel subsidiaries) only have tiny low-res video of a select few shows, not really suitable for full screen tv viewing. So, even if we had a media centre PC hooked up to the TV, there would not be a legal option for us.

I pushed to kill cable because I was fairly certain that we would be able to find illegal torrents of most of the shows we watched and would be able to watch them easily xbox 360′s xvid playback functionality. I did not expect it to be as easy as it was. At least 90% of the shows that we watch regularly – everything from House and Battlestar Galatica to Gossip Girl and the obscure (it’s only aired on a handleful of stations nation-wide) Canadian comedy Less Than Kind – were available online within 12 hours, in high definition and on a 10mpbs connection a half an hour show usually downloads in less than half an hour. Our TV watching habits remained virtually unchanged – instead of pulling up a show on Tivo, we’d load up the xbox. Over these 6 months it’s become clear to me that torrenting TV is actually better than cable TV in most ways. Standard digital cable is not HD and regular cable doesn’t air some US TV for weeks or months after it’s original release – you have to pay for to the highest tier (beyond “full cable”) to get channels like HBO-Canada and even then some shows are still unavailable.

Here’s where it gets a little more geeky.
It is totally possible to manage a torrent based xbox 360 media center by sharing a folder on any computer. I wanted to come up with a “better” solution. Both of the computers that Internet Super Mom and I use are laptops, because they’re laptops, they’re often in sleep mode and sometimes they leave the house. So it’s not entirely practical to have torrents continuous downloading and we found it annoying to make sure a laptop was on in order to stream to the xbox. Luckily, I have an under-utilized Debian web development server sitting in our Son‘s closet that is always on.  It has a LAN connection separate from it’s internet connection, so any heavy streaming between computers would not affect it’s outgoing dev related traffic.

I found two apps that made it possible to use this server as a media source for the xbox:
TorrentFlux – a PHP based bittorrent client. It supports remote login and has integrated torrent search across a number of different torrent search engines. That means, I could queue up torrents from my iPhone whenever I remember to watch the latest episode of a show. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support RSS feeds which would make keeping up to date with a season a little easier, but this isn’t a major problem.

GeeXBoX’s uShare – Is a DLNA media server for Linux, AKA it can stream stuff to your xbox. The install was a major headache, don’t ask me for help, my selective memory has erased all of the gory details. Even though it’s in alpha, it’s very stable.

Anyways, we’re back on cable.
The only reason we decided to go back to is because got a great win-back deal: 2 months free, 5 months at $20/mo. We did not re-subscribe to Tivo. It’s hard to say if we’ll stay with cable after the promo period. With the availability of torrents, the subscription is hardly worth more than $20/mo. I feel like standard-definition cable tv is going to take a serious drop in price of the next 2 – 5 years.

The strangest thing about going back to cable is that we seem to be watching less TV than ever. We are probably only actively watching around 10 – 20 hours per week. We still torrent, but because there is always “something on TV,” it seems less important to have a fresh supply of torrents. If we happen to be home while one of “our shows” is on we’ll watch it. Missing a show is not as big of a deal as it used to be – we aren’t quite as likely to torrent it as we would have been before.

Years of switch ads and John Hodgman awesomeness have finally gotten to me. I bought a 15″ MacBook Pro. I’m living the iLife. It’s my first real Apple experience since the Apple IIe, overall I’m pretty impressed, though I have this sinking feeling that I’m not using OS X to it’s fullest potential.

That said, there are a few major myths about the operating system that need to be busted.

1. It’s easier to use
For a long time, Macs (even before OS X) had the unfortunate distinction as the “dummy” computer, good for old people and computer illiterates. Because of this sterotype, I had assumed the the user-interface was somehow inherently easier to use. This is absoultely untrue.
Some things are a little easier. Installing apps is a little easier, sometimes, depending on the installer. Systems preferences is a laid out a little better than the Windows control panels, especially Vista’s. Apps integrate with the OS a little better. Spotlight is pretty awesome. But in general, things are just different, no better or worse than Windows.

A number of important apps/features are actually harder to use:

• cmd vs ctrl: The OS X equivalent of the control key – in windows (and gnome for that matter) – is command. ctrl+z in windows, translates to cmd+z in osx. The issue here is keyboard layout. The cmd key is located right next to the spacebar. This makes any shift+cmd combination extremely difficult to pull off.
• Finder Sucks!: Finder is just not a very good way to manipulate files. The main problem is the lack of an “up” button to navigate to the parent directory. Finder has a back button – “back” isn’t always “up.” Finder also has a dropdown which lists all the directories in the path, while this is a more efficient way to go navigate “up” 2 directories or more, it’s less efficient when you want to navigate up 1 directory – 2 clicks to use the dropdown vs. 1 click to use an “up” button.
  Another issue is the accordion directory interface you get in list view – 1 click opens the directory in the current view, 2 clicks opens the directory as your current view.
  The list view itself is also broken. There is no way to organize the list view to match the default windows list view. I.E. Directories at the top, files below, in alphabetical order.
  Don’t even get me started on the “save file” interface.
• Menu Bar: While I think the top of the screen is actually the correct location for things like the clock and other indicators, the menu bar paradigm does not work well with multiple displays. When I open an app on my secondary display I have to go back to the primary display everytime I want to use the app’s menus. Really does not make any sense.
• Dock: It’s kind of useless.
• Alert Boxes: Application alerts (eg. “Are you sure you want to exit”) appear at the top of the app window, as opposed to the center of the screen. This is another minor UI mistake, imho.

2. Security features are not annoying
OS X warns me the first I open a file or run an app I’ve downloaded off the internet (even if i actually downloaded the file in an archive). Enough said.

3. It doesn’t crash
In a week of use I’ve had 2 or 3 (stable) apps crash, the OS froze and needed to be powercycled once. This is not a good start.

UPDATE!:

Setupmac.com has a solution to my issue with the up button.
First, the keyboard shortcut ⌘↑ goes to the “enclosing folder.” I think this alone solves my problem!!
Second, they also have a patch to add an up button to the finder toolbar.
Link

I started using OpenDNS again for the first time since Google released Chrome.

When I ran Chrome, I noticed a curious little quirk, Chrome was ignoring OpenDNS’ shortcuts and auto typo correction. I whipped out wireshark and took at what was going on.

By default, every time you enter a character into Chrome’s toolbar it fetches results from google.com/complete/search. Since google knows about every single website, Chrome is able to decide if you’re typing a valid domain without querying DNS. That is, it’s actually redirecting you to a google search results page at the HTTP layer, before your request queries any DNS info.
While it’s not neccessarily a bad way of doing things, it is somewhat annoying. 

Luckily, google actually built a great product!
This feature is totally customizable. 

To turn it off; pull up “options” under the wrench menu, click the “under the hood tab and uncheck “show suggestions for navigation errors.”

Last week I was stuck at O’hare overnight. I noticed a bunch of large signs proclaiming “free wi-fi terminal wide.” Upon trying to connect to the internet, I discovered that these hotspots were run by boingo and only “free” for customers of certain telcos. While I feel that wifi is an amenity that should always be free, like public restrooms, Boingo was only $10/month. I had some calls to make and figured I’d probably save money by using Skype instead of my $1.95/min roaming cell phone.

After signing up for boingo, I realized that had a 3 month free promo running. So I actually only paid $2.50/month. Even better!

It was not until I came back home that I realized the genius of boingo. Turns out, boingo is actually a partner on all the major wifi networks in North America. Meaning that I can use my boingo account to log in to any Bell hotspot at Starbucks and various other random places around the city.
In case you’re not aware, Bell normally charges $8 PER HOUR!