Sun, just give up. Java on iPhone will suck.

It is not surprising that Sun is making such a fuss about trying to get Java onto the iPhone / iPod Touch platform. They must be thinking "Holy crap, if iPhone and iPod touch replicate the success of iPod’s 72% mp3 player market share (excludes mp3 player phones), Java will be dead in the water on mobile". Too damn right.

The mobile handset market is completely different to the mp3 player market, where figures typically exclude the market made up of mp3 playing phones, but Apple might just pull it off.

I am a former J2ME developer of games, and now I’m a Mac user and iPhone owner. Java on iPhone/iPod Touch is a crap idea. People who think iPhone needs Java are failing to understand the Apple approach. The fact is that Sun/J2ME almost definitely needs iPhone to survive once Apple roll out cheaper mass-market handsets.

J2ME produces, much like J2SE, crappy applications on every platform. The Apple experience is about polish, about remaining uncomplicated, reliable and confidence inspiring. J2ME is about trying to average out all phones and at least get our app out there in some form no matter what compromises we have to make. This is exactly what happens in the J2ME space: "We spent $$$$$ developing our J2ME reference build, now we need to cash in by porting to as many devices as possible. Who cares what the thing ends up looking / running like, if we’re not on phone X we might miss out on 10% of the market because it’s so popular."

Now, take a look at Skype’s new Java mobile client. it looks like they haven’t done a bad job on the UI but it definitely isn’t great. The point is the UI will not fit in well with the existing phone UI and it will look different to every other J2ME app on the phone, and it therefore requires different understanding to use it. It will also probably chew your battery like there’s no tomorrow. It will also not have access to any recently invented (probably circa 2 years lag) features the phone might have – as without standard J2ME APIs which take years to approve and roll out among handsets, developers have to rely on proprietary APIs and that means yet more R+D, yet more individual ports and yet more QA.

Then you have people like Innaworks who say they can automatically port J2ME apps to iPhone. Dream on guys! You might get something running but it is going to look like crap on the device, won’t use natural UI paradigms, and will likely require certain coding conventions in the J2ME app. The problem is that executives with no clue look at offerings like this and tell their coders/porters "Hey don’t worry we can just get it all automatically converted by these guys, no need to learn Objective C!". I’ve been there in the past with "automatic" porting tools between J2ME handsets. If these things are good, and they have been on the market for years, why do all the mobile companies still have huge numbers of staff dedicated to porting and QA? How do their converters magically scale images to look good on new higher resolution displays. How do they make text align properly on the screen according to the layouts you’ve used in your reference build?

These poor quality automated ports are for people who don’t care about quality of the ported product, and that is EXACTLY the kind of application you don’t want on an iPhone.

Java – I love you on the server. On the desktop you suck a bit. On mobile… you facilitated a games industry. On iPhone… you will just let in a bunch of crappy apps and games that look crap and perform like crap, and use up loads of iPhone battery running non-native code.

Game developers in the J2ME market will not have any major difficulty getting one or two coders to do ports from scratch to iPhone with Objective C. It just means that some of the companies will need to actually use some braincells to get some decent infrastructure in their development environments, which means smart build systems, decent data structures that scale to different devices etc.

Hopefully everyone will see come June that native apps will beat J2ME apps into the ground on iPhone and iPod Touch.

Windows Vista – so wrong it hurts

I had to help a relative out with getting Skype installed on a new Windows Vista PC the other day.

It was my first experience of Vista in the flesh (I previously used Windows XP before moving to Mac), and while everything worked it definitely didn’t "just work" which is the Apple way.

It was very interesting to revisit the "Windows way" like this as an alien who now does things the "Mac way".

My task – install a USB webcam for use with Skype, and connect some new speakers, and make some test video calls with Skype.

Observations follow:

1. It takes 10 minutes+ to install drivers/whatever crap it is that comes on the CD with the webcam
2. Every time anything "happens" you get asked if you (a) really want to do it and (b) if you’re really happy for whatever it is to do whatever it is it is doing
3. The screen flickers all the time when popping up these ridiculous "Do you want to allow X or Y" messages that are supposed to make you feel more secure. The flickers might be a lame graphics card or bad driver, but to me it just looks like a very bad "lowlight the background" effect.
4. The webcam (Quickcam) always has this popup tool window that you really care nothing about and yet it appears (and hence has to be closed) whenever you use the camera via Skype
5. Even Skype for windows is tainted with "Windowsitis" and has a ridiculous three possible ways of viewing the video of a call (in call tab, in window, full screen)
6. So many tool buttons and tabs in everything. STOP IT ALREADY, PLEASE!
7. Even just resizing an IE7 window causes all the toolbars to flicker as they resize and redraw – truly pathetic and just makes you feel like you are in a second hand car rather than a new sports car (which relatively speaking this new PC is!). You get used to this crap resizing rendering on Windows – its only when you go back from mac you remember and realise what you put up with
8. Complete lack of comprehension of what Apple did with Dashboard widgets. You don’t want these on your desktop where they get covered up all the time by other windows – that’s why they appear OVER everything on Mac
9. When I plug some speakers in, I don’t need to be TOLD "Some speakers have just been plugged in"! Completely braindead, and the icon for the speaker looks like crap, all pixellated etc. Contrast with iTunes and the AirTunes/Airport Express device. This too can detect the presence of a jack plug in the socket… but you hear nothing of this UNLESS you try to play music out of the device, in which case it will say "There are no speakers connected to the AirTunes device"! Genius, or common sense? It definitely isn’t either in Microsoft’s campus.
10. In a brand new computer, with a nice 19" widescreen display, why (why oh why on Earth) does windows default to 1024×768 resolution?! Thus presenting a strangely stretched and blurry display. I had to find the monitor product code and google for the true resolution as there was no indication of supported resolutions in display settings / device manager, and then I finally put in 1440 x 900 and hurrah crystal clear display. To have great hardware and not use the natural resolution of it simply beggars belief. There is no way my father in law would have found out how to do this. All Apple hardware runs at the LCD’s natural resolution by default. You might blame it on hardware/drivers rather than Windows, perhaps that is the case, but that in itself is part of the problem. Apple is a complete solution: harmony ensues.

The latter point demonstrates most clearly the sometimes ephemeral difference between Macs and Windows PCs – it’s the epitome of the "Just works" concept. It doesn’t make sense for it to be any other way, and yet Windows achieves it because the propellerheads at Redmond can’t understand people, only machines. If they had a single truly clued up Human Interface Design expert looking at their stuff, they would not produce this rubbish. Perhaps there are many HID people there, but nobody listens?

UPDATE: I forgot to mention. 11. Why, in 2008, does Windows need to reboot after installing the driver for a USB webcam? Insanity.

My Macworld 2008 Keynote predictions

Oh well it’s all just fun and games but I have some hopes/feelings about what might come out of Steve Jobs Apple keynote at Macworld 2008.

My predictions are:

1. iTunes video rentals, as reported in the press. I hope the 24 hour limit does not apply though, it seems very lame
2. To back this up, I think there my be a new Apple TV device with built in iTunes store direct in the TV, perhaps with a new remote or other control to make web browsing/shopping more enjoyable than with a normal apple remote. I think we may see video recording direct to the apple TV too, and much bigger hard disks, with Blu-Ray drive built in and maybe true 1080p high definition support.
3. A new firmware update, as reported, for iPhone adding some new features.
4. Maybe a date for the new 3G iPhone
5. Maybe a new cinema display / Apple LCD television set to run with Apple TV
6. Maybe a new iPhone-style multi touch laptop / sub-notebook as has been much rumoured.

Let’s see what happens…

For Scott Vlaminck

Scott from refactr.com commented on my complaint about the Apple OS X weather widget being useless here in the UK and wanted to see the OS X widget showing Cardiff alongside the BBC widget showing Cardiff, and BBC showing Stroud.

Rather amusing it is too today… just how do Apple/AccuWeather whoever it is manage to get a -9C temp for Cardiff today? Ice age we don’t know about yet? Also notice how the weather conditions for Cardiff from Apple vs BBC are completely different. I know which ones I’d trust…

Come on Apple, this is embarrassing! The funny bit is that my iPhone which uses the apple widget setup for Cardiff (as previously mentioned cannot enter my actual town as a location)… and shows the weather there as Thursday 2C then 6C, 8C, 8C, 9C, 7C compared with the desktop mac’s 5C, 11C, 16C, 18C, 18C for the same period! Madness. A minimum of -11C today?

Brain death. Amazing that nobody from Apple UK has flagged this up to the US developers!