Marc Palmer

This morning I released a new Grails plugin that lets you manage beta-invites to your app and similar.

More information here.

I sent a wide-ranging complaint letter to The Co-Op after hitting saturation point with the continued problems with their online business banking, a catalogue of mistakes and inefficiencies making international payments, and continuing frustrations with the idiotic personal banking chip reader and antiquated personal banking site.

You know, little things. My complaint was very much supportive of the banks ideals and its original market-leading position on online banking.

Anyway the response has finally come. To paraphrase:

• They say they have improved resourcing in the Foreign Services department (for business)
• They apologised for the mistake with my international payment and gave me £50. OK, but this doesn’t cover the time spent dealing with their antiquated systems.
• On the requirement for obsolete fax machines for international payments: “We currently action foreign transfers from written instructions to ensure there is no misinterpretation of the customer request”. This is laughably inconsistent! The whole problem with my international payment (which was faxed) was exactly this – a misinterpretation. Furthermore they go on to state that if you use their premium “Financial Director” online app, you can make international payments without a fax.
• They say the new business online banking, which is being very positively received they say (compared to existing, any site that worked every day would be well received) will be fully rolled out to all customers by August/Sept (I was griping they said Q2 2010 in response to Radio 4 Money Box).
• The security token for the new business banking is a PIN-driven code generator that “fits on a keyring” (i.e. easily stolen) and does not require a card, unlike the one used for personal banking. It will be used for logging in, and also for “some operations” like creating a new beneficiary.
• They rejected my criticism of the telephone banking as inherently insecure because “this is normal within the industry”. This was in reference to the false sense of security created by the need for pin generators etc. They seem confused here and have misunderstood the point that the full account number, sort code and full 4-digit PIN must be given over the phone to access their automated service. Add another handset to someone’s phone line, use your mobile to record the eavesdropped DTMF tones and you’re away.
• Finally, they assure me that they are investing in an “innovative new banking system” for personal banking. No specific timescales, but “the Bank is committed to this development”.

Let’s not hold our breath. New business banking has been in development for years, only just rolling out. Timescales given out for it last year, still not met revised dates.

There have been lots of iPad reviews, so I’ll try not to go over the same old stuff. Suffice to say it is very good, but I’m still learning how to use it – i.e. how it fits into my life. Will I really do diagrams on it, will I read e-books for long periods, will I write code?(?!).

A quick summary after 2 days intermittent use.

• It is a little too heavy at first. I suspect my arms will get used to it, or I will learn to hold it the right way – we never thought people would write essays with their thumbs on mobile phones. This is no doubt related to battery weight. I’d rather have the battery life – but a few 100g less would stop this being something people mention. Hardback books are heavy.
• The photos app is an instant winner. All they need now is selection of which you want to order prints for and ordering prints direct from iPad using iTunes account. Oh, and they do need wireless smart syncing of photos from MobileMe, Flickr etc. So you can publish from your other Mac/PCs and the ipad syncs them over the wire in the background.
• Typing is much much better than I thought it would be. With practice I can be as fast or faster than on a regular Apple keyboard I’m sure. I just need to get used to the slightly differently layout and tactile differences. So much so I could consider writing code on it. There are already some HTML editors for iPad.
• It would be really nice to set an App to be used as the lock screen, not a wallpaper. Eg set Weather HD or Guardian Eyewitness, Calendar month view, or the built in picture frame app – to come up when you press the lock button.
• I actually like some of the iPhone apps at 2x zoom. Most iPad native apps seem to be taking the fonts a little too small, and losing the benefits of larger font clarity / greater distance from the eyes that iPad screen should be affording you.
• Some apps definitely need further optimisation. E.g. Omnigraffle is not a bad first stab but there is no justification I can see for the UI being so laggy when dragging a single rectangle around the screen on a trivial diagram. Calculating the guides cannot be that intensive! Art authority is nice but the image quality of the marble UI backgrounds is really nasty, and the UI is rather sluggish with no indication it is busy at times.
• A little gripping surface around the edges would make you less scared when carrying it without a case. The front surface is very slippery, the back isn’t.
• I find it hard to find apps in home screen – they are too far apart and with an image background, it is hard for icons to stand out visually – I often have to resort to using search to find apps! This is reason enough to not have the option to set custom wallpaper… or at least it should be default reduce the intensity of wallpapers by 50%
• I miss the magazine rack metaphor from NewsRack for iPad. Seems much better fit for iPad than iPhone, I hope it comes back
• The lameness of many apps is more obvious on iPad than on iPhone. You’re more happy to “make do” on iPhone but the bar is being set higher on iPad by very good UIs e.g. Penultimate, Elements, Weather HD, Virtuoso HD piano. Omnigraffle is a good first stab but feels too awkward still.
• iBooks better become like iPod app and allow third party PDFs/ePub files to install easily w/o buying from iBooks store. All other e-book readers I can find seem completely lacking the Apple polish – slow, unintuitive touch interactions etc.
• Smaller text sizes on webpages will be much more readable when they eventually upgrade the display to higher dpi. It might be a year or two though…

I can’t vouch for Pages, Numbers, Keynote or iBooks yet – they aren’t available in the UK app store (which you can only access from iTunes currently anyway).

The Weceem CMS plugin for Grails uses the Blueprint CSS framework, jQuery and jQuery UI Javascript libraries. As the Grails plugin marketplace continues to mature, other plugins will have more polished user interfaces or reusable tags that require certain libraries.

This raises an ugly prospect: a new resource dependency problem. Only unlike java dependency problems this is worse as you end up with multiple copies of resources in your app, even if they are the same version because plugins will typically bundle the resources themselves. Your app may add some of these too and your site becomes slow to load or experiences failures related to clashing library versions.

There is however a staggeringly simple solution to this: lightweight Grails plugins that contain the resources.

Thanks to Grails’ automatic dependency resolution we (the grails community) can just create plugins to wrap up each such library and then we just make any apps or plugins that require them depend on them by installing the library plugin or adding it to the dependsOn clause of other plugins.

An important caveat here is that the library plugins need to use version numbers matching the version of the library they encapsulate. Then if you want jQuery 1.4.2 you depend on/install grails-jquery version 1.4.2 or higher. The grails-jquery plugin authors have already done this.

These plugins should implement a simple tag called “resources” in an appropriate namespace e.g. or .

I strongly believe that such plugins should NOT include other tags or more heavyweight tags wrapping up library features – do that in another plugin e.g. “grails-jquery-tools”.

This approach does provide new challenges for optimizing static content – minifying JS and CSS and including only required modules from a larger library remains awkward as it is today with non-dependency solutions.

Ultimately I think we need smarter solutions than those currently in use to solve this. I have some ideas forming…

I hope to be proven wrong, but I fear that the ongoing Co-operative Bank Business Online Banking fiasco is going to degenerate even further.

The co-op bank have published a short video screencast demoing their new system, presumably to make us believe they might actually come up with something usable any time soon. The new system is already overdue, pushed back to Q2 2010 which we are already into.

Why am I whining again about this? Well if you watch the video pay attention to some of the details.

First – you need a code generator device just to LOG IN. Yes that’s right. You need a CUSTOMER ID, and a USER ID (hey I’m a small business, there’s only me!), and a generated passcode from those crappy machines that need your card and PIN entry. This mechanisms is supposed to make you more secure – but the way Co-op use it on their personal banking is a complete nightmare. You can’t even transfer a few quid to one of your own accounts, pay a bill (already set up) or amend an existing standing order without having to grab a registered debit card AND the code generator device. It makes the entire process extremely slow and awkward. What about people who work on the move? This is not user friendly at all. Using it to log in is a nightmare.

Second – notice how the transaction display in the video is a complete usability cock up. It shows 3-4 lines of balances without scrolling, despite there being much more screen space. It has a horizontal scroll bar all the time, because there are too many columns shown. Even with this, there’s not enough space given to the name of the account and it wraps after only a few characters. All this can be fixed quite easily but the point is it betrays a complete lack of understanding of usability.

On the plus side, I do notice from the navigation menus shown that there appears to be an ability to search for transactions, although you’ll forgive me if I don’t hold out much hope for the actual implementation of this being any good.

There’s however no mention of an international payments option, which presumably – and rather insanely in 2010 – still requires a FAX sent to their offices, on “headed notepaper” to be acceptable. I know, I had to do this last week. It is so antiquated and so foolish. FAX is inherently insecure, and you could easily fax all your bank details to the wrong person if you get the number wrong. Add to that the hilarious false assumption that “headed notepaper” is of any valid use in judging authenticity at all. They don’t know what my headed notepaper looks like. In fact I don’t have any. I sent it with a default template from iWork. And yet if it doesn’t look like “headed notepaper” they won’t accept it.

Laughable. Wake up banks! We don’t user typewriters, telex or fax any more, even if you do in your antiquated businesses.