• All the iOS devices — iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, are built around Cocoa Touch.
• Snow Leopard brought 64-bit support to the Mac mainstream for Cocoa applications. Carbon applications are clearly on the way out and have been since the release of Leopard in 2007.
• The third major release of iTunes since Leopard came out is still Carbon and still only 32-bit. (Perhaps an even greater irony is that there is a 64-bit Windows version of iTunes.)

Is this a bit of a nitpick? Probably. Does it really matter what the framework underneath iTunes is if it is being improved? Possibly not. Is iTunes a huge, vital part of Apple’s iPod/iPhone/iTunes Store infrastructure that they are naturally unwilling to make huge changes to? Absolutely.

But I really, really wanted iTunes 10 to be ‘iTunes X’ — not just another major release with some new features, but a drastic rewrite of the application (for the Mac anyway) in Cocoa. The app’s performance has been improved with recent versions, but iTunes is still the one application that ships with Macs that feels out of place — the interface is jarring and not fluid, the app frequently hangs for several seconds for no reason and there is ancient UI debris hanging around. (Those first two might be better with this release, I don’t know, but the Mac OS 9-style context menu cursor lives on.)

Ah well, maybe iTunes 11?

The upgrade from a first-generation iPod touch to an iPhone 4 is a significant one, in many ways.

If you haven’t seen the iPhone Retina Display, it genuinely is as good as the marketing suggests. No matter how close I hold the device to my eyes, I can’t make out individual pixels; the rendering of text is the best I have seen on any pixel display.

Other than the excellent additional hardware features of the iPhone, like the camera, GPS capabilities and of course, having internet access wherever I am, the other biggest upgrade is the sheer speed of the device compared to the first-gen hardware. The responsiveness of the UI on the iPhone 4 is as good as, if not better than, that of the iPad. Everything about the interface is fluid, responding immediately and directly to what you do. All the apps feel so much faster and it makes using the device a lot more natural when you aren’t waiting, even for a quarter of a second, for the next screen to load.

I’m very pleased with this as an upgrade to my mobile computing.

Disqus is one central controlling entity, if Disqus decides to do “maintenance” or they begin to have server problems, everyone using Disqus comments now has not only no way visitors may leave comments, but also no way to display previously posted comments. And if worst comes to worst and Disqus disappears (as is possible with companies) everyone is left without comments, unlike if the comments are controlled by each “webmaster”.

…

I find issue with the added near 4 second pause on every page just to display Disqus comments, Disqus handles this well, but not well enough in my opinion. Because when pages load with Disqus comments there appears a little “Loading…” message, that eventually gets replaced by the comments and the form to post comments, the problem with the way they do this is when you refresh the page it jolts, kicking the scroll down the length of the comments until Disqus has loaded where it then kicks the scroll back up the length of the comments.

I don’t have to change myself to fit the product; it fits me… There’s no right or wrong way of holding it…

Steve Jobs, on the iPhone 4, following some complaints about the signal strength dropping when people hold the sides of the device:

Just avoiding holding it in that way…

Don’t get me wrong, I’m really interested in the iPhone 4 and I think it looks like a great device.

I just couldn’t help noticing the irony in the disparity between those two statements.

The iAds feature in Apple’s iOS 4 has caused its fair share of controversy, and Apple’s privacy policy has just been updated to reflect the changes that iAds bring to the platform.

Notably, it is possible to opt out of iAds ‘cookies’, which means that the ads you see might be less relevant, but you are able to opt out from targeted advertising, which some people may be uncomfortable with (especially considering this functionality is built in across the OS and, presumably, the analytical data Apple gather from iAds would be shared across different apps).

Apple and its partners use cookies and other technologies in mobile advertising services to control the number of times you see a given ad, deliver ads that relate to your interests, and measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns. If you do not want to receive ads with this level of relevance on your mobile device, you can opt out by accessing the following link on your device: http://oo.apple.com. If you opt out, you will continue to receive the same number of mobile ads, but they may be less relevant because they will not be based on your interests. You may still see ads related to the content on a web page or in an application or based on other non-personal information. This opt-out applies only to Apple advertising services and does not affect interest-based advertising from other advertising networks.

I would encourage anyone upgrading to iOS 4 or purchasing a new iOS device to consider opting out of the iAd cookies, if they feel more comfortable knowing that the advertising is ‘dumb’ and not being targeted directly at them.

As the quote from the privacy policy says, all you have to do to opt out is visit http://oo.apple.com on each iOS 4 device where you want to opt out.

Cookie image is ‘C is for Cookie’ by amagill on Flickr. Licensed under CC-BY.

The Attraction to Centralised Commenting

Services like Disqus and IntenseDebate are marketed as being ‘better’ platforms for enabling commenting on blogs and articles. You essentially outsource the comments on your blog or website and have them handled by the service.

It is an attractive idea because you can outsource the more difficult things like handling spam comments and so on, and because it allows users to have a single identity with the commenting service and then use that single identity on many sites.

Making Commenting on the Web Proprietary

The primary reason that I do not like such services is because they seek to make commenting on the web proprietary. The web should be open. The web is open, for the most part, and I think it should remain that way.

Centralising commenting on your site is taking the control over the discussion over your content and handing that control to a third-party.

I think comments on blogs and so on should be as open and as simple as possible — enter a name and email address and just write a comment. Yes, that way of doing things is more open to absue such as the misuse of identity and spam and it doesn’t have the advantages of being able to connect comments from a single person together.

I understand that some of these commenting services do have a ‘Guest’ mode, but I still am concerned that users feel pressurised into getting an account with the service for fear of their comments otherwise being seen as potentially less valuable or somehow not as legitimate.

I don’t think you should feel obliged to sign up for yet another service just to make a comment on someone’s website. I don’t even think that you should feel obliged to sign in with something such as your Twitter or Facebook identity, just to comment on a website.

I would be more inclined to accept OpenID as an authentication means in this case, because that does seem an ideal use case for the technology, but I keep coming back to my fundamental point.

I think internet commenting should be as simple and as open a system as possible, encouraging as much discussion as possible by not making it at all difficult or at all burdensome, even despite the issues with accountability and abuse that this approach raises.

For better or for worse, the web is open. I seek to keep comments in that same spirit.

JavaScript and Cookies — Accessibility Challenges

This point is less general and more of a specific issue I have with Disqus. Other centralised commenting systems might handle this better.

Most users have JavaScript enabled in their web browser. I accept that and understand that it is pretty much a necessity for browsing the web, unless you are someone like me that is happy to use NoScript for Firefox, or manually enable and disable JavaScript in Safari.

I assert the right, however, to browse most websites with JavaScript and plugins off and I will only enable them if there is a need and I decide that I trust the site in question. Disqus, specifically, requires you to enable JavaScript just to read comments. That is to say — you must enable not just JavaScript coming directly from the target site, but a third-party site.

I understand that it might be necessary to enable JavaScript to actually post a comment, but the requirement of enabling JavaScript to just read the stream of discussion should be unnecessary from a technical standpoint and is intensely frustrating for the (admittedly small) number of users such as myself who don’t run JavaScript everywhere and anywhere all the time.

But aside from my own interests, requiring JavaScript to read comments has a profoundly negative impact on accessibility and archival of that content.

I expect the basic functionality of website to work with JavaScript off. I expect to be able to read the text of an article and read the comments and so on without having to grant that website permission to execute code on my computer. I respect that interacting with that website might require JavaScript and I consider that reasonable. But I think ‘reading’ should always work, no JavaScript required. Remember — JavaScript off is how search engines see your site.

The other issue I take specifically with Disqus is that they require you to enable third-party cookies in order to log in to the service.

I think it is disingenious and misleading to imply that your browser is broken and needs to be ‘fixed’ if third-party cookies are disabled.

I understand there might be technical reasons why this setting is a requirement to log in to Disqus, but I assert the right to browse with that cookie setting disabled and I, again, resent the notion that my browser is ‘broken’ if I have done that.

Summary

• I think commenting on websites, blogs and articles should be open and as simple as possible.
• Services such as Disqus and IntenseDebate seek to make internet commenting proprietary and threaten both the openness and simplicity that I believe in.
• Complicated, JavaScript heavy solutions like Disqus add massive complexity and reduce accessibility and do not work while respecting the browser setting choices of more technical users like myself.

I would encourage anyone with a website or a blog to make sure that their comments are under their control and that they remain as accessible as possible, readable to all visitors without having to jump through hoops.

Those of you that follow me on my personal Twitter account, @strategyoracle will probably know that I keep that account protected — i.e. only those that request to follow me and I allow can read my tweets. I do that because that is the way that I feel most comfortable using the service and it is how Twitter is most useful to me. I have tried using that account both publicly and privately, and ultimately it was more useful and more comfortable to keep it protected.

On Facebook, I have also used the privacy options to make Facebook a tool that is useful to me and that I feel comfortable with. I was able to keep most of my information inside a small group of trusted friends and in doing so, I felt comfortable using it and sharing with it.

In recent years, though, the degree of control that Facebook gives you has eroded. This EFF post demonstrates how the service and its privacy policy has changed in this respect since 2005. I have found it more and more difficult to feel comfortable using Facebook in the context of these changes.

The final straw came today.

Now, it seems that any ‘connection’ that you make — whether it be with a friend, or a page that you ‘like’, has to be public.

Facebook came up with a screen asking me to make many ‘page’ connections public, based on my interests and activities that I had previously entered. Even leaving aside the fact that it showed me interests I had previously deleted from my profile, I was horrified to learn that unchecking all of the boxes to share the information actually removed all that information from my profile! There is now apparently no way to restrict information such as my activities and interests and only show that to trusted people. It’s share all, or have nothing, when it comes to this information.

It is quite clear to me that this is now the choice:

You either use Facebook as publicly as they want you to (even as that changes in the future), or you don’t use it at all.

I choose the latter. Assuming I don’t get convinced otherwise in the next few hours, I consider it pretty likely that I will delete my Facebook account. After all, I can always create one again later.

I am hugely disappointed that it seems Facebook doesn᾿t seem to respect people who are more private by nature. I am sorry to all those who may prefer Facebook as a medium for communication and will not be able to contact me there.

UPDATE: I went ahead with the delete. I can always create an account again later and remember you can always send me an email or request to follow me on Twitter (or follow my public Twitter account too).

Over the last three years, running my own server has taught me a lot. It has given me complete freedom and control, as well as complete responsibility over my own website. The hardware, software and configuration are all my own thing — if I get it wrong, I have to fix it.

That opportunity has made me learn lots about what you need to do to get a Linux-based server on the internet and keep it running. I keep the software installation on the server as lean as possible; I don’t even install a GUI or any applications that aren’t directly related to the tasks the server has to do. I am fanatical about backing everything on the machine up as frequently as is necessary and making sure that I could rebuild the setup at any point without losing data.

There are also huge disadvantages to running my own server, particularly when it is connected to a home-grade internet connection. The upload bandwidth is very poor, which means that all visitors to the site can only get the pages as fast as I can push them out. That does mean I am forced to keep my pages a small size and to optimise them as much as possible, but it would be nice not to be so limited in what I can deliver. That also means that if my internet connection goes down, so does my site.

All in all, though, I have really enjoyed the opportunities and challenges that running my own web server from home has presented. I look forward to continuing my self-hosting arrangement for a long time to come.

While I am being nostalgic, this is a good excuse to show some cool graphs and interesting statistics from my time self hosting.

Page Loads/Unique Visitors/Returning Visitors April 2008–March 2010

As you can see, my server has handled a decent amount of traffic over the past three years!

Uptime report August 2008–April 2010

That is less than a day’s downtime since August 2008! (Only measured in 1 hour intervals, however, so take that with a pinch of salt)

The user agent you need to enter into Fluid is:

Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10

Transcript of the video

Note: this wasn’t a scripted video, I actually transcribed the audio afterwards for YouTube’s captioning support as well as a text record of the video.

Hi there, this is Peter Upfold and in this really short screencast I’m going to show you how to use Fluid on Mac OS X to create a Site Specific Browser, or SSB and access the new Gmail iPad interface, which is really quite nice.

So without any further ado, let’s get started straight away.

I’m going to go to my Applications folder and launch the Fluid application which allows me to create our SSB.

I need to enter the URL, which is mail.google.com and just give it a name, I’ll just say iPad, but you’ll probably want to give it a meaningful name.

And I’m having some problems with Fluid, so it’s actually going to do

do something a little strange here, but it’s created my new application, if I say OK. Again, I don’t know what it’s doing, you might not have the same problems as me.

I’ll just say OK, that’s created the browser and I now just need to open that up. And I have my new application here which I’ll use every time I want to access the iPad interface for Gmail.

Now, I’ve launched the application, it comes up with the Gmail login page as I expect, but it’s not actually going to use the iPad interface just yet, there’s one more tweak we need to make. And that’s just to go to the application’s menu bar here, and under User Agent, just select Other.

And in here, you just need to paste in the iPad’s browser identification, which I’ve got here. Now I’ll put this somewhere so you can copy and paste it rather than having to copy it manually off this video, but I’m just going to copy that text and paste it in the window here.

If I say OK, and if I now reload this page.

Well, actually, tell you what, I’ll quit the application and start the application back up again.

OK, now you see the login page has changed, it looks a bit more, a bit more like it would look on the iPad. If I now sign into a Gmail account.

It does actually take a little bit of time to log in, I have noticed, but if we just wait for that.

As you can see, we now have this really nice iPad interface. So, now, you can use the new Gmail iPad interface on your desktop computer anytime you want, just by creating a Site Specific Browser with Fluid. And you can just follow that process, you just create an SSB as normal for Gmail and then change the User Agent to the iPad User Agent string. So that’s pretty much it, thanks for watching, I’m Peter Upfold and goodbye.

Credit to Google Operating System for the inspiration to set this up and produce the video.

UPDATE:

There is a scrolling bug with the iPad inside Fluid, but thanks to Fabio Samji, there is an easy solution. Please see the addendum to the first video below.

The code you need to enter in the user styles section:

.BMRW0e{ overflow-y:auto !important; }

Transcript of addendum

Hi there, this is Peter Upfold with a quick addendum to my previous video about getting the Gmail iPad interface running on your Mac.

I got a great comment from Fabio Samji, I hope I’m pronouncing that right, and he just showed how you can fix the scrolling, let me just show you the problem at the moment. Now, this iPad interface works great with Fluid and a site-specific browser, but if you get to a long email or if you have long list of emails here, you can’t actually scroll very easily and it’s a bit of a problem for looking at long emails like this one.

So, thankfully, there is a solution. If we just go over to Fabio’s website here. You can see he has walked through the process of how to set this up, but there’s this little bit of code here in the user styles section of the Fluid preferences that’s actually going to fix that scrolling, so let’s apply that now.

So if I go across to my site-specific browser for Gmail and then go to the Preferences option in the application’s menu, then I just need to go to user styles and in here, you’ll see I’ve actually already set it up, but you need to add…

Let me walk you through it again, if I just remove that. You’ll need to add a new URL pattern and say mail.google.com, or actually, sorry, *mail.google.com*, so if we go and fix that.

And then inside here you just want to paste this little bit of code. I’ll put this on my website and in the YouTube video description so you can copy and paste it.

And just paste that in there.

If I then apply that.

And then, I’ll want to go ahead and reload the page, so let me close that.

Open up a new.

Again, it still seems to take a little bit of time.

And, I’ll tell you what, the scroll bars aren’t appearing, but I am now able to use the scroll wheel on my mouse to actually scroll up and down here.

So, actually I haven’t had the same result, in that the scroll bars don’t seem to be appearing. Maybe that’s intended, I don’t know.

But anyway, the point is I can now scroll through this long email just with the mouse wheel and I can view the whole email.

So thank you Fabio for commenting and pointing that out to me, and hopefully with this, the Gmail iPad interface can be even more useful, especially for looking at long emails.

So thank you very much for watching this addendum. I’m Peter Upfold and goodbye.

But do you know what? It’s OK not to like April Fools’ Day.

Often expressing the opinion that you don’t really like hoaxes or practical jokes is met with responses such as “spoilsport” or “lighten up”. They are responses that hook into our susceptibility to peer pressure.

So if, today, you don’t really want to play the April Fool game, don’t feel you have to. Don’t listen to those who may push you into liking it.

It is perfectly OK to be ‘boring’. Rumour has it that I excel at just that.