Personally, I'm 100% convinced that .net is doing fine and will do fine for years to come. We just have to realize though where .net (and Java, for that matter) are used: Inside Enterprises. There is not a single day where I don't see someone pulling off some amazing stuff on Twitter, usually built in JavaScript, CoffeeScript or Ruby. Looking at people pulling off amazing stuff in .net is always a big undertaking though, because there are pretty much no big non-Microsoft .net projects that are "hip". I think FubuMVC, Caliburn.Micro and Bouncy Castle are the only three that I could mention off-hand. But then again, I see amazing stuff done in .net almost every day, except that no one else outside of my work environment will ever see it. Talking to other .net developers in other companies usually yields similar experiences - people are pulling off some seriously fantastic stuff, but it will never ever leave the company it was created in. The open source environment in .net has improved since I blogged about it 4 years ago, but it is still only a fraction of what node.js or ruby has. Just look at the list of most watched C# projects on GitHub or CodePlex and think how long ago some .net project really made headlines.

That doesn't mean it's a bad environment to work in, quite the opposite actually. If you look at popular libraries for node.js or ruby, you will often find that the BCL or Microsoft's .net Libraries already have something built-in, and it's usually rock solid and fast. You will find Microsoft supplying the big features that everyone uses or will use - LINQ, LINQ 2 Sql, Dynamics, TPL, Async/Await, ASP.net MVC are just a few I can think of. Combine the "No one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft" mentality in big enterprises with the fact that the vast majority of software development is done in enterprises, and you see why this attitude exists and why Microsoft has to deliver.

There is no denying that Microsoft had quite a few blunders, of course. WPF, EF and Workflow were downright garbage in .net 3.x, WCF is overly complex for simple scenarios and Velocity... let's just say that I've never heard anyone say anything good about it, and looking at it's API I doubt I'll have good things to say about it. Then, there are signs of the more than 10 year legacy that .net already has, together with the desire for backwards compatibility. System.Configuration is horrible because you cannot just create a Configuration object from a string or any other mechanism, that thing is hard wired to look at a file on your hard drive, which makes it really inflexible for modern, multi-tenant deployments. Have you tried parsing JSON in .net? How many different JSON Libraries/Deserializers do we have as part of the Framework? And how many did Silverlight add? And yet, people mostly prefer the Newtonsoft JSON.net. Have you worked with the ASP.net Provider Model, specifically Membership Providers? Only a mother could love the API of that thing. And speaking of ASP.net, have you ever tried catching an "Attachment too large" error? The error that gets thrown twice, once in IIS before it reaches your app and then in ASP.net itself without a clear way to associate it with the request?

I could go on and on and on about things that are seriously broken in .net, and I haven't even started about testability yet (there is a very good reason for products like TypeMock to exist). It is still overall a great experience, but it is frustrating that we can't do much about the shortcomings of it. To work around the stupid file handling and Configuration madness in ASP.net, we would need a whole different web server since we can't just patch IIS or the ASP.net core components thanks to their closed source nature. Of course, running Mono on nginx is a way to work around this, but enterprises won't approve of such a setup and if it breaks, your behind may be on the line.

I've often experimented with different setups, only to realize that I really like C#. I like its static nature which usually gives good, understandable compiler errors rather than cryptic runtime errors (face it, rails can be a pain to debug). I like that I can mix in dynamics for non-critical things like view models. I like that the Microsoft-provided libraries are mostly good. I like that we can buy support and that there are tons of resources about most topics, since everyone uses pretty much the same stack. I like that they keep backwards compatibility so sacred, even if it means that there is a lot of obsolete stuff in the API (like System.Collections.ArrayList - there is no reason whatsoever to use it. If you need a container for multiple types, fall back to List<object>.

On the other hand, it can be a really frustrating experience when you run against a wall that you can't climb because of its closed source nature and Microsofts reluctance to fix things (Take WPF in .net 3.5 as an example: Things were reported but not fixed. Then 4.0 comes out with Visual Studio, they run into the same problem (e.g., the scrolling popup menus) and HotFix it. That was the moment I've given up on WPF forever) until a major release, if ever. Sometimes it is a really tough sell to use other non-microsoft components like RabbitMQ instead of MSMQ (Search for MSMQ on MSDN and look on the big highlighted article - to me, that's proof that Microsoft doesn't care about their own message queue anymore), or NServiceBus, or a sane ORM instead of Entity Framework.

Most applications start out as simple CRUD applications, and it is usually a lot quicker to start them in node or rails. However, simple CRUD applications usually evolve into more sophisticated pieces, requiring more business logic and safeguards in different places, and here I must say that .net shines - in the long run, its strengths play out well.

However, I really think that we can do better in the web world, much better. Chad Myers had an interesting posting, and even though it was ripped to pieces by Rob Connery, it still holds a lot of truth. Web Applications are unnecessarily complex. I will write a follow up posting with some thoughts about this.

My conclusion would be that .net is overall doing perfectly well. It is used by tons of companies for very important apps, but it was never aimed to be a "hip" language. Microsoft is deeply rooted in the Enterprise, they are pretty much the exact opposite of Apple. That doesn't mean that they do a worse job at it, it just means you won't see as much about it since enterprises like to keep their "secrets" internal and err on the side of safety/secrecy. I have no doubt that there will be .net jobs for the next decade and beyond, while some other language will come and go.

The implementation is currently not optimized for speed, this is something I'll tackle soon. (Update: Done, CopyTo and Contains should be much faster) Implementing a circular buffer is relatively simple, but it makes my head spin with off-by-one errors that you encounter when you have to deal with an array that's split at an arbitrary point. It is definitely a nice exercise for a Code Kata though and may teach you a thing or two about Enumerators.

It is not possible to remove items (I don't need that functionality yet for my purposes), I might look into it in the future. The Enumerator works as expected, it starts with the oldest element and returns all elements until the most recently inserted one. Modifying the collection while enumerating throws an Exception, and thread safety is the same as with a List<T>, which means "none at all".

Example usage:

var buffer = new CircularBuffer<int>(3);
buffer.Add(1);
buffer.Add(2);
buffer.Add(3);
buffer.Add(4);
// buffer now holds [2,3,4]

The question is, what is the Fire? The general consensus is that it's an Android Tablet and thus in competition with the iPad. Well, if you are in the market for a tablet and you actually have the money to spend, then get the iPad as it easily beats the Kindle Fire as a tablet in every possible comparison. I also have an iPad 1 and thought that speed would be comparable since the iPad 1 has a 1x1 GHz CPU compared to the 2x1 GHz CPU in the Fire, but even with that the iPad runs circles around it.

So it's certainly not a Tablet. What is it? A Kindle? A big iPod Touch device? Something completely different? Let's ignore any comparison at the moment and instead just look at what features it offers and most importantly, how well are these features implemented.

Browsing stuff

The Fire has a carousel as it's home screen, with favorite apps underneath it if held in portrait mode. If I had one word to describe it: train wreck. Okay, that's two. Anyway, the carousel displays recently used content - apps, videos, books - in a cover flow-type view that allows you to flip through it. How often have you used Cover Flow on an iOS or Mac OS X? Exactly, me neither. Carousels look nice on still images for the press, but in real world use they are about as useful as tag clouds - not at all. Are you someone who flips through all your stuff just to find something random to do? I do that for music, but I wouldn't shuffle between my music, video, books and games and then decide if I'd rather read a book or watch a movie. Especially since it doesn't shuffle through your entire collection but only recent stuff. It's not very useful as a list of favorite stuff because things change positions and the latest app is always in front even if you never use it again. Also, the carousel is extremely sensitive. Touch something, move your finger only slightly and the carousel will scroll in that direction. Opening stuff through it is a game of luck and patience if you just want to casually flip through stuff.

The Carousel is broken and I do not see any way to fix it. The usual grid view of applications is infinitely better and I can only hope for Amazon to kill the Carousel and replace it with a normal bookshelf of manually placed items. This also solves the problems of many applications not playing well with it (e.g., when viewing videos through the Gallery app, the Carousel does not list the video but the Gallery app. Videos watched through Amazon's streaming services do show up perfectly fine though).

Speaking of a bookshelf: This is the view used when you tab the "Books" or "Apps" or one of the other tabs, and it's much better. Problem: The search bar is not displayed on these tabs,

Books

Since this is a Kindle, books are the natural fit for it. They appear in a Bookshelf (like iBooks on iOS) and 12 are displayed on the screen at once as a grid. Alternatively, there is a list view which shows 9 at a time. They can be sorted by Author, Title and Recent usage. They can not be categorized, which I find braindead. The eInk Kindles support putting books into categories, and I admit it doesn't work too well (The eInk Kindles are not responsive enough to make management of more than 2 pages of books really good). But a device like the Fire would have fantastic opportunities to categorize books into collections, sync those categorizations into the cloud and back to the eInk Kindles. A lost opportunity right there.

When reading, you can select the font size, margins, color (Black-on-White, White-on-Black (I like that one) and Sepia (which is a gimmick, just like on iBooks)) and font. As a book reader, the Fire is really nice. The display is not eInk though, so there is considerably more eye strain and because the device is heavier than a normal Kindle it isn't as convenient to hold for hours.

Still, as a book reader it is a competent device, but Amazon missed opportunities here to make it an epic experience. I have a Kindle 4 as well, and that one will stay my primary eReader.

Music

The Fire plays Music locally or from your Cloud Drive. Let me briefly talk about the latter: Amazon's MP3 Uploader either never received a UX pass or Amazon's UX people are idiots. Also, there is a limit of 100 MB for tracks, which means that some of my live songs cannot be uploaded (Sorry, but Transatlantic's The Whirlwind is a single 79 minute track on both Live Albums). Once music is in the cloud however, it plays well.

When browsing all Songs, you get a long list. if the list is really long, then a slider appears that can be dragged. This is common in the UI and works very well. There is no bookmark for individual letters though like the iPod has, however starting letters are displayed when using the slider. There is no search though (apart from the global search).

One thing that Amazon does right and Apple does wrong since forever: Songs a sorted properly. The song "A View from the End of the World" is listed near the top, because it starts with an A. "The Whirlwind" is sorted between S and U because it starts with a T. Apple for some braindead reason sorts these two songs under "V" and "W" respectively, because apparently articles aren't part of the song name. I'll sort "Apple" under P from now on for the same reason.

Another thing the iPod supports that I would have loved to see on the Fire: Chapter support. I have several AAC Audio files that have chapters, for example live concerts, DJ mixes and Audio Books. No chapter support on the Fire, it's one 80 Minute song while the iPod also treats it like an 80 Minute song, but tapping the Playlist view shows me individual chapters.

Video

Here's one of the two reasons to buy a device like the Fire over an eInk Reader. Video is available through Amazon's streaming library (which includes a lot of really good content, a lot of it free to stream if you are a prime customer) which has gems like Super Troopers or Star Trek DS9. The screen is fantastic, and the overall picture quality of the things I watched was great, a lot better than the stuff on iTunes.

There are no subtitles though, a feature I only saw on Netflix on a PC yet though. Speaking of Netflix: There is an official, free Netflix app in the Marketplace and it works well. It is not Kindle Fire optimized though, which means that watched movies do not show on the Carousel. Also, the status bar is always visible, something I talk about in the "Apps" section below. I hope they come up with an optimized app.

So streaming is awesome, how about on-device playback? Well... Not so awesome. I copied some video to the device and first looked around where to play them. Naturally I checked the "Videos" tab, but this is solely dedicated to Amazon-bought/streamed videos. There is an App on the device called "Gallery" that works as a photo and video player, and it sucks. It's clearly a third party app because it behaves nothing like the Books or Music part. It supports only non-HD MP4, at least none of my other videos played. Of course, videos don't show up in the Carousel either.

Apps

Okay, so this thing runs Android which means that a ton of apps are available, right? Well, yes and no. Yes, there are many apps but if you expect a consistent experience or good functionality you might be surprised.

I'm looking at my App Screen right now and I see 5 different icon styles. Some icons are smaller than the rest. Some have round edges, others are square. Some have a border as part of the image, some have gloss, some are neither. Many struggle with one unique thing the Fire does: There is ALWAYS a status bar (because there is no physical home button) which is either 40 pixels high when expanded or 20 when collapsed. The 20 pixels are always there and can obstruct the view. For example, imagine watching a movie on Netflix and the bar is always there, which sucks when watching dark movies. Some games have the UI partially hidden. Sure, it's only 20px but it's not a great experience.

One thing that really surprised my is the absence of an official Twitter client. There is one for the Android, but it's not compatible with the Fire. There is an icon "Facebook" in the Apps section which is a glorious, fantastic... browser bookmark. Yes, you read that right, it's a friggin bookmark that launches the browser on the mobile Facebook site. Okay, fair enough, let's just delete it... Oh, you can't.

Crapware is something every Smart Phone owner knows. Apps installed by the device manufacturer or carrier that cannot be deleted and are generally useless. The iPhone has them, Android phones have them, and the Kindle Fire has them as well. An undeletable Facebook bookmark and an Office App that has WAY too many permissions on the system, and possibly some others. This sucks.

Amazon doesn't use the Google AppStore since they have their own. This is nice, but it means you miss out on some Apps like Firefox Mobile, They do a reasonably good job to filter out Apps that don't work on the device, so every App you buy or download at least starts. However, not all are really great yet.

The Fire comes with a Comixology app which is clearly rushed but overall works really well. The guided read feature works perfectly and I'm really happy with it. The reason I say it is clearly rushed is because a) it has a few crash bugs. Using the slider when scrolling a large list always crashes it. The other reason is b) Navigation is buggy I select Category > Fantasy and a Comic, then hit back. I would expect to get back to the Fantasy Category, ideally at the same scrolling level I was. Nope, I'm brought back to wherever I was before. I'm pretty sure they'll update the App though, it seems they had to hit the date and got all the core functionality working.

Also, usability is inconsistent. The Fire Status bar offers a "Back" and a "Menu" buttons, and Apps haven't consistently found out what to use them for yet. Some apps have their own menu as part of the app, other use the status bar.

Nice however is that the Amazon AppStore offers a free app each day. Yesterday it was Bejeweled 2, before it was a nice 16-bit RPG. Today it's a crap email app. I also give Amazon a lot of credit for clearly showing what permissions an App wants, so if you see a seemingly harmless app requiring access to contacts and messages you know it's a scam and can avoid it. It's a bit sad that this is needed (never had fear for downloading iOS apps), but that's the downside of a mostly open AppStore. And of course just like on Apples AppStore, there are thousands of garbage and scam apps out there (e.g. Apps that are named very similar to popular games but that are just hints and tips for $1, and of course the amount of stupid apps we used to have on J2ME mobile phones like an X-Ray scanner.)

Browsing the Web

One of the big features if the Fire is Silk, their cloud based web browser that sends all pages through Amazon's servers where they reprocess it to make the tablet experience snappier. Essentially Opera Mini. I see this being awesome on 3G connections, but I don't see the point in using it over WiFi.

Well, turns out that browsing WITH Silk is actually slower than without it, so I've disabled it. It is a full browser, and pages display properly. Scrolling is slow though, there is a noticable lag between swiping your finger and the page moving. The browser supports Flash and it works just as well as on every single other mobile device in existence, or in other words: It's sluggish and drains your battery extremely fast. Luckily, Plugins can be disabled in the browser.

You can browse the web, but I find that even my old iPod Touch 2G had a better experience because it was snappier.

Responsiveness, Polish and Stability

I only briefly mentioned performance and stability before. Stability issues is something that affects all devices (I have stopped counting the times my iPod touch crashed or behaved strangely when it's off, you double tap the home button and press "Next Track" on the iPod controls or unlocked it quickly.) and so far the only app that crashed on my was the Comixology app.

However, performance is a big, big issue. The UI is very sluggish, everything takes a moment to react. Not long, but long enough to notice it. Sometimes it's downright unresponsive though and I have to hit a button or swipe my finger multiple times before it reacts. This thing has better hardware than my iPad 1 (twice the RAM, a second CPU core and a much better graphics chip) and doesn't even come close to it.

There is a lot of polish missing as well. For example, you open the Amazon Store app and get a login screen that looks extremely ugly. It's not centered, it's a dark screen with an input box and submit button in the top left corner. Also, there is a Notification that says that "One Click Purchase for Mobile has been activated". Apart from the fact that it is there since 2 days and doesn't go away, I don't actually have 1 click purchasing enabled.

Conclusion

Hard to make one. If this were a $500 tablet then it would already be on it's way back. It doesn't stand a chance against the iPad and I think it even loses to my old iPod Touch 2G. But it's not a $500 tablet, it is a $200 Kindle. It has really decent hardware and a gorgeous display. As outlined above, the hardware is much better than what the iPad 1 had. So with a few updates, the Kindle has potential to be great.

But that's the problem: Potential isn't enough. WebOS had potential. The Motorola Xoom had potential. The Nokia N9 had potential. None of them made anything with that potential. I absolutely HATE reviewers that give good grades for something that "could be cool in the future" because people have to pay their cash NOW. If I could get a device and only pay for it once it unleashes its full potential I would be a happy customer.

Let's talk about what it does right now:

• It is a good book and PDF reader, although the normal Kindles are still lightyears ahead thanks to eInk and less weight
• It is a good video player for Amazon's Streaming Library with a gorgeous display
• It is an average but usable video player for Netflix if you don't mind the status bar
• It is a below-average video player for your own videos on the device
• It is a good music player for local and cloud drive content, if you manage to get your music onto the cloud drive
• It is usable as an all-around device for scribbles, note taking, and games. However, most applications feel strange and foreign on the device, so the experience with Apps is rarely ever fantastic
• It is lighter than the iPad 2, but feels heavier (possibly because it is smaller).
• It runs many but not all third party Android Apps if you get the APK and the App is compatible

I'm certainly keeping mine because I am happy enough with the stuff that it does do, and because I can develop my own apps for it in Java, vs. Objective-C. I'm a .net developer and since Java is just a crappier version of C# it's a lot easier to learn than Objective-C with the weird Interface Builder, 1970's header files and manual synthesizing of properties.

However, I would NOT recommend it to non-technical people. It's just not polished enough, not friendly enough for people that just want to get up and running quick. And I would NOT recommend it to ANYONE looking for a full blown tablet. Hate Apple all you want, but the iPad is still the only tablet on the entire market that actually works and thus the only tablet I can recomment, but it is also a lot more expensive than the Fire.

Potential and Outlook

Okay, that was my conclusion about the device as it is right now. Let's speak about potential. As I said above, the hardware is pretty decent, better than the iPad 1. So if stuff is slow and sluggish, it means that the software sucks, and software can be updated and fixed. I do not want to speculate if Amazon rushed the Fire for the holiday season, because I think it would have been a problem even with 6 months more development time.

One thing Amazon could not avoid is the horrible Android App situation. Thanks to the fracturing of the platform across a million different devices and the lack of a central authority, Apps are not consistent at all. They could have gone with their own OS, but that would mean no apps and a long battle to get developers. Using Android was the right choice.

I think they need to get away from the Android branding though and away from Android apps. They need Developers develop Kindle Fire Apps. Yeah, sure, under the covers it's all Android, but I don't want generic apps that suck on every device (Steve Jobs described a similar situation fittingly with "Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features."). Instead, I want Apps that are fully optimized for the Kindle Fire. I don't care if they run on other devices. Amazon made great efforts to hide the Android core and they customized it heavily. It shouldn't matter that it's "only" Android 2.3.3, because it shouldn't matter that it's Android. Amazon should try to clearly separate themselves and get Developers behind their platform while leveraging the other Android apps.

Jeff Bezos has proven that he is in for the long run in projects, and that they are good about iterating. The Kindle 1 to Kindle 2 upgrade was massive and made a good product into the best one on the market. The Fire is an average product, but it is one that could be equally great. There is no competition in sight, since all other Android devices have the same problem and no one behind them with the patience and money to make things better. In theory, Windows 8 could become interesting if Microsoft resists the temptation to offer Desktop apps on it ("But the people want MS Office on their tablets!" - "No, they don't. They say they want it, but then never use it because desktop apps aren't usable on a tablet.").

Still, as an early adopter I think that owners of a first generation Fire will get a product that is at best remembered like the Kindle 1: A market opener, but a slightly crappy device in hindsight.

Now, I made a smart choice: Instead of using Microsoft Word or other, similar inadequate applications to write the manuscript, I use Scrivener. It saves its data in what seems like a static file at first glance:

However, upon closer inspection it's really a folder with a lot of TXT, RTF and XML files, which is perfect:

Why is it perfect? Because it plays well with git, that's why. I have a nice little private repository on GitHub, and because I'm essentially tracking individual textual files I get nice diffs:

Sure, RTF can get a little problematic to read in a diff, but it's better than the binary formats. And yes, Word's file format maybe zipped XML, but you can't just version individual XML files within the docx archive.

With GitHub, my novel is backed up and accessible from almost any computer I want, and if I don't have a computer with Scrivener nearby I can just log in to GitHub and read/copy parts of the Novel. I haven't tried Inline Editing and I don't think it's gonna work since Scrivener stores a checksum of each file, but there is definitely some idea for growth.

Let's start with a simple filter: I want Prime Eligible, sold by Amazon.com, $15 or less, 4+* rated earphones:

Easy, is it? Well, not for Amazon:

Look, I know the economy is bad and the US Dollar sucks, but if we just look at the numbers, then 22.50 is bigger than 15, is it?

Oh, wait, actually it is listed as less than $15 because one of your third party sellers of Amazon's Marketplace has it:

Amazon, why do you have a filter for "Seller: Amazon.com" only to ignore it then? But let's look at the $13.69 offer:

Wow, so you got some shitty seller with 50% positive ratings that charges $15 for shipping a product that weighs a mere ounces from Texas to California and you think that this offer is so good it should be in my search results for "Prime Eligible" (=NO shipping Costs) and "Seller: Amazon.com" (=NO third party vendors)?

Inflating shipping costs to undercut the competition on the product price while still making a decent profit is the oldest trick in the book, even eBay reacted to it and is now sorting their auctions by "Price + Shipping Cost", and yet your crappy search isn't smart enough to do that?

If you need an Engineer to fix your shitty search in his spare time, drop me an email and I'm sure we can arrange a little side-contract for less than a $100k. And don't tell me that's not worth it, after all you're the company that came up with the "Milliseconds equals money" equation - and if each millisecond is costing you a truckload of money, how much money is your shitty broken search costing you?

I don't think I played any Single-Player DLC, possibly with the exception of Gears of War 2: Road to Ruin and the Dragon Age DLC when I bought the Platinum Edition.

The reason is quite simple: DLC is too small. When I play a game, I want to really dive in and be immersed, live through the story, see my characters succeed and fail. After I'm done with the campaign, I'll detach myself from the game again and move on. Picking up the game later means I have to get my mind back into it, remember all the events, characters and little nuances that immersed me the first time around.

Most DLC is over before I'm really back in the mood. A lot of DLC is poorly integrated into the story line and feels tacked on.

Please, don't charge me $8 for an hour of game play.

I want $30 expansions that have a full, fleshed out story line, like Dragon Age: Awakening. Or a $50 sequel. But please, no more Bring down the Sky or Operation: Anchorage.

(Of course, this only applies to Single-Player/Story content. Feel free to sell as many mods, skins and weapon textures for $8 as you want, people buy them)

This happens when you drag a folder into another folder, which already contains a folder with that name.

If you are a Windows user, you know what happens next: The folder contents will be merged, which is usually what you expect.

What happens when you click "Replace" here? Well, Apple is at least honest, because it will do exactly what it says: It Replaces the folder. Your old folder is gone.

The braindead thing? The old folder doesn't go into the Trash Can. If you delete a file in either Windows or Mac OS X, it goes into the trash can, so you can restore it. If you Replace a folder in Mac OS X Finder, the old folder is permanently gone.

With all due respect for the fine work the software engineers did in the past decade and a half: Whoever is responsible for thins function needs to be punched in the face, preferably once for every single folder that users - who are expecting a OS that values user friendliness to perform better - permanently lost.

What's even worse: There isn't even an option to merge. Really guys? "The world's most advanced desktop operating system" does not even have a function to merge two folders through its primary file management tool?

(PS: For a similarly dangerous function, try moving a folder over the network and briefly interrupt the connection. Chances are good that the folder gets deleted from the source since it was moved, but doesn't fully arrive at the destination because the connection got interrupted. Yes, the worlds most popular desktop UNIX fails miserably at basic network functionality.)

Update: Turns out that OS X Lion finally learned to merge, but only when copying stuff. If you are moving folders within the same Volume, move is the default. Holding down the option key allows you to merge:

This is arguably a lot better than any previous OS X Version. Still, it's way inferior to Windows 95 which happily merges on move (saves me the cleanup afterwards) and can also merge a subfolder with it's parent folder, something else OS X can't do:

This isn't needed that often, but useful when extracting a zip file yields a folder/folder/files structure.

Now, I don't have a problem with them charging now, it's their right. And $2 really isn't much, I bought it immediately since I use growlnotify a lot.

What is prompting me to write this blog posting: I wonder what this means for third party app developers?

When Growl was free (1.2.2 still is), it was a no-brainer to implement it in your App. You could tell your user to download it, or you just snuck it in with your apps (much to the dismay of the developers, who had to put up a notice on their web site). Now, your users have to make an additional $2 purchase regardless if your app is free or paid. And due to the way the Mac AppStore works, you can't just decide to pay the $2 for your users and bundle Growl with your app - even if you include a $2 git certificate, your users now need an iTunes account.

Now, in an ideal world where every user has an iTunes/App Store account this isn't an issue, but I still wonder if this decision will lead to everyone reinventing the wheel and adding their own notification system again? (Or forking/distributing Growl 1.2.2 for all of eternity or until a Mac OS X version that doesn't support it comes up).

Again, I don't want to speak ill of developers who created an amazing piece of software and now charge a minimal amount for it. I just wonder if this may cause issues for us Third Party app developers?

In an ideal world, Tim Cook will announce that Mac OS X 10.8 comes bundled with Growl, that all Apple Apps support it, that GNTP becomes an integral part for distributed notifications, that it integrates into iOS' notifications system etc. pp. Your move, Apple.

Now, Amazon finally has an option to remove the ads. Log in to your Amazon Account and select "Manage your Kindle", then "Manage your Devices".

There should be a column for "Special Offers" in which you can remove the ads (the column will only be there when you have a Kindle with ads).

Obviously, Amazon will charge the difference ($30 for the basic Kindle 4) and within a minute or two your Kindle will happily proclaim that Special Offers have been removed (provided it's connected to WiFi).

I have no idea if it works for the Kindle 3 as well.

I also heard that the display was improved a lot from Kindle 2 to Kindle 3 and from what I've heard the Kindle 4 uses the same screen as the 3. I don't have a Kindle 3 to compare against, but it's definitely an improvement over the 2.

Hardware wise, it feels that it's the same in terms of CPU: Downloading stuff from the archive still results in annoying screen refreshes and micro-hanging. Opening the on-screen keyboard results in a noticeable delay. Flipping pages or just rapidly moving through the Keyboard shows the high latency of the screen. No change, but if the Kindle Touch has the same hardware, it just fuels my belief that a touchscreen e-Ink isn't a great experience.

It is still possible to take notes and highlight text passages. The On Screen Keyboard is not stellar, but it's okay. I used the Keyboard on my Kindle 2 exactly 1 time so far, to buy a book from the Amazon store. I usually buy books from my Mac, and I never feel the urge to take notes. Realized how much I like 3G actually. Open Amazon on any web browser and use the "Send to my Kindle" option on checkout. Would definitely pay the extra price, if 3G were offered.

There is no Headphone jack anymore, and no Text-To-Speech anymore. It wasn't great anyway, so I don't care. But if you're vision impaired and actually used that feature, you might want to know. Capacity reduction (2 instead of 4 GB) doesn't matter, bought books are tiny, PDFs suck just as much as they did on the old Kindle, and no audio features means no music. Novels are usually around 1-2 MB, some tech books can reach 5-10 MB, and the (free) Oxford english Dictionary is 25 MB. My 31 books take up 155 MB, with about 80 MB for the mentioned Oxford Dictionary and two other, similar Dictionaries. Battery runtime was apparently reduced, but we're still talking about a month according to Amazon (down from 2 months), a claim that is not only verified true, but also just means that it went from "So long you don't have to worry" to "Still long enough that you won't have to worry".

Does not come with a USB Power Brick, only with a USB Cable. Judging from the coating and looks, I assume it's the same horrible Cable Amazon ships with all Kindles. Expect the cable to literally fall into pieces and disintegrate in a year or so. Threrefore, don't buy these crap Kindle-branded cables as replacement when yours disintegrates (that's a "when", not an "if") but get a plain standard Micro-B USB Cable, ironically sold by Amazon under their own brand as well.

Physical Prev/Next buttons on both sides like on the Kindle 3. They work well and have a nice touch, but I prefer the bigger ones on the Kindle 2. No more holes for book cover hinges - I liked those, but now the official Kindle covers seem to have a hard plastic shell, which is nice. $60 for a lighted cover to cover a $80 device does not look so nice, so I've passed on that. I love how the light is mounted though, much better than the Kindle 3 lighted cover which looked a bit makeshift.

Ads are annoying. I thought it wouldn't bother me much, but I spend a lot of time on the Home Screen and I have 4 pages of books already. I'm only losing one row (9 vs. 10 Books per page) but it just somehow feels I'm losing a lot of space. If Amazon would offer an option to pay the $30 difference to remove ads, I'd seriously consider it. Ads themselves are not annoying and only show up on the home screen and screen saver, not during reading. So if you are cost concious, buying the ad-supported Kindle isn't a bad thing. (Edit: You can upgrade the firmware to an ad-free one directly through Amazon)

If you don't own a Kindle but like to read books and don't mind that you can't resell individual books, the Kindle 4 is a more than decent reader and a better reading experience than any Tablet will offer, including the upcoming Kindle Fire.

For size comparison, Kindle 4 lying on Kindle 2. Screen size is about the same.

Today, Amazon announced three new Kindles, including an Android Tablet, the Kindle Fire.

Let me first say something about another new Kindle, the Kindle Touch: I don’t like it. At all. It seems like the worst of all worlds. It has a multi-touch screen, but no apps or anything, it’s the standard Kindle OS. On the other hand, it does not seem to have physical back/forward buttons. These are a killer feature for me on the eInk because I like to hold the Kindle, rest my thumb on/near the Next Button and just press it. That works so well on the Kindle 2 and 3 and I don’t see the point for not having it. The only real point I see is that selecting a bunch of text is easier (maybe for snippets?), but I think I’d rather go with the Keyboard Kindle 3. Both are equally priced anyway, at $189 for the 3G and $139 for the WiFi Model. I think this is like the iPod Nano: A gimmick

The other new Model is the low-end Kindle priced at $109, a full $30 less than the previous entry-level WiFi Kindle. I think it’s a fantastic product: It’s small and lightweight. It does not have a keyboard, but I don’t take notes anyway on my Kindle, it’s purely a reader that requires three buttons: Select book, Next Page, Prev Page. I think this one will be a massive success, if you can live without 3G.

The existing Kindle Keyboard and Kindle DX are just like they were before: The DX is still overpriced after the last Kindle 3 price cut ages ago, but great if your eyes aren’t that good anymore. The Kindle Keyboard is still a solid device to take notes or make annotations.

Now, the big new announcement is the Kindle Fire, a $200 Android Tablet featuring a Dual Core CPU, multi-touch 7” screen, full color display. It’s essentially a BlackBerry Playbook which doesn’t mean a bad thing – the hardware on that was solid, only the OS sucked. But really, the hardware is for us geeks, the end user is more interested in what this device offers, and this can be summarized with “Books, Netflix, Angry Birds, a Web Browser”.

As I said before, I love my iPad. I use it in the morning to browse the web or when lying on the couch to draw some stuff. However, the iPad is big and heavy, so I don’t usually carry it with me. The Kindle Fire addresses both problems: It’s smaller (7” vs. 10”) and lighter (413 vs. 680 grams).

Amazon is quick to say it’s not an iPad Killer, and they might be right. It’s far more likely that it will kill everything else, because why buy a $400+ Android Tablet that’s not as good as the iPad anyway? The $200 price tag is a killer for pretty much every other 7” Android Tablet, and possibly for a lot of 10” ones as well. I don’t think it will affect the iPad too much, because it not only has a strong established customer base, but also stand out features like 3G, more capacity and a 10” display.

I think it’s a safe bet to assume the price is heavily subsidized – $200 simply sounds to good to be true. Part of the money comes from Kindle books – no 30% commission fee to Apple like they would have on the iPad (if they wouldn’t have created Cloud Reader), and Amazon was once a book seller anyway. Another source of potential income is more interesting: Their Silk Web Browser.

The description reads interesting: Instead of making a ton of HTTP Requests (for JS, CSS, Images), your request will be handled through Amazon (acting as a proxy server), and they send one big chunk of data. Also, they can improve the reading experience by parsing the page and adding page indexes. It’s a bit like Opera Mini on steroids.

Now, this is a great thing to have on a 3G connection. However, the Fire does not have 3G (not surprising, I doubt carriers would be willing to make that commitment at that price). It has WiFi. So why do that? Just to add Page Indexes? This could be done on the device itself, it has a Dual Core Processor after all.

It doesn’t take much imagination and only a little bit of Paranoia to realize what this Feature does: By proxying all traffic through Amazon, they can analyze it and use it for advertising purposes. Essentially what Google is doing with GMail and AdWords.

I could whine about possible privacy concerns, but I think it’s an acceptable tradeoff if you are aware of it. You get a really nice, dirt cheap tablet and in exchange let Amazon monitor your Internet traffic. For people with Google and Facebook accounts, it’s not much difference anyway. I just hope that the amount of compatibility problems will be small, but since it’s an Android Tablet I am 100% sure you can just download a Firefox build for it at some point.

As usual, the Kindles come in a price reduced versions with Advertising on the Screensaver. That makes the new entry level Kindle a $79 device, which is a killer price for it. In fact, I ordered that just today with overnight shipping because it seems like a decent travel device, lighter and smaller than my Kindle 2 at the expense of 3G. I also preordered the Kindle Fire Tablet – if it turns out to be a dud, it’s still a dirt cheap, $200 Linux Computer with multi-touch screen, for which someone will make alternative distributions.

But really, I think we’re going to see a massive price war and the death of a lot of “Me Too” $400+ Android Tablets. And it fires the rumors of Amazon buying Netflix. And it should scare the hell out of Google. In any case, good times lay ahead.

I'm a Linq2Sql user. I like it's relatively easy setup and good flexibility, and it has a really good query generator. However, I'm running into some issues with Unit Testing it, because you can't really emulate all the features that it has (EntityRefs with a composite Key or fields that are DbGenerated are a nightmare). Since it is a one-off technology for SQL Server, it doesn't work with any other database (not even SQL Compact 4, which sucks as it would be the perfect Unit Test drop in).

Some people are saying that OR/Ms are an anti-pattern, to which Ayende had an interesting reply. I don't fully agree with any of them. I think that OR/M is solving two different problems, one that it shouldn't solve.

The first problem is getting data from and to the database - the second problem is the mapping of the result to objects. The second problem is a good one, the first one is not a problem and thus doesn't require a solution.

Somehow, people seem to frown SQL, as if it were some evil or outdated concept. You know what? SQL is the language of your database, so you better learn it. Oh sure, it's nice to chain a gazillion Where/Select/ToDictionary/GroupBy calls together and don't have to worry about coming up with the SQL yourself. It's not so nice that the chance to produce a SELECT N+1 is pretty high. When was the last time you looked at the SQL that your OR/M generates and optimized it?

Speaking of optimizations: When was the last time your DBA improved your OR/M Code? Most DBAs I know speak one language very well, and that's the SQL Dialect of their database. They know these hidden tricks and tweaks, they can tweak the query plan and come up with ways to speed up your queries, thus lowering the load and therefore the cost of the system. I don't know many DBAs who would look at a piece of C# code and suggest moving the select outside of the foreach loop in order to turn a SELECT N+1 into a single select. They know the difference between the different JOIN Types (I use LEFT JOIN 99.99% of the time - who knows if there are better ways?) and are able to suggest putting in a READ UNCOMMITTED into a query that is okay to retreive slightly stale data. When was the last time you tweaked the TABLE LOCK setting on your OR/M query?

Granted, most developers don't seem to have access to DBA people and thus have to wear a DBA hat quite often. But you know what? If you have to know about DB stuff anyway, you can as well learn SQL. Even though you may not get everything highly optimized, in the moment a DBA looks at it and optimizes stuff you just have to change your query and call it a day. Maybe you two decide to create a Stored Procedure instead, in which case your SELECT becomes an EXEC - big deal, not.

Yes, I am aware that some queries can get pretty harsh. I have a query with 14 subselects (mainly because it has to do paging on the database) and I am glad that I can write it in Linq2Sql, creating an IQueryable and passing it through a dozen methods that apply more Where clauses based on some ridiculously huge filter class a user passes in. Not having to generate that through StringBuilders or other stuff is a great thing.

But you know what? That query is the one anomaly in a sea of standard CRUD queries. I can write those CRUD queries in my sleep, blindfolded. And I can look at them and immediately understand what this thing is doing. I can read up the T-SQL manual, run it in SQL Management Studio while the SQL profiler is running, look at the Execution plan, tweak the query, put it on Stack Overflow to get some input - I am talking to the DB in a language it understands and have no limitations in how I tweak it.

Really, all I want is the Mapping. I want to write a (parameterized) SQL query, but I don't want to do the ExecuteReader/foreach loop crap, because that's stupid work. I want to be able to insert a Parent Row and it's child rows in one go, without having to use client-side generated GUIDs for the primary key so that I can add it to the child rows. I love the EntitySet/EntityRef stuff in Linq2Sql, and that's what I want. Create an Object and it's children, put it in the database and not worry about capturing the @@IDENTITY and populating it on the children. I don't want an OR/M, I want an Object Mapper.

Luckily, there seems to be a small (but truly existing) movement into it, Dapper and Massive being two of the better known ones. Massive uses the new dynamic functionality in .net 4, a technology that could revolutionize OR/Ms once they start embracing it (rather than trying to stick to their Java roots or stay compatible with .net 2.0). I don't fully like how I have to create "empty" classes and it seems that it doesn't do "real" SQL but rather a DSL that looks like SQL. That would kinda suck.

Dapper is currently used as the OR/M for Stack Overflow, It's very bare bones (doesn't manage your connection, no UPDATE helpers), has some not-so-nice syntax quirks (Having to pass IsAnsi = true when querying a non-unicode - but that's an edge case I'd argue) and although I have not yet had a chance to use it, if Jeff Atwood is willing to use it on the thing that puts food on his table and rock band songs onto his Xbox, I'd assume it's stable.

Granted, one can argue that you're not paying your developers to write code that can be written faster in an OR/M, a claim I'd like to dispute when looking at the total lifetime of an application including maintenance, but if you want a catchy, quotable sentence: Traditional OR/M is like WebForms. It's rapid at first, does stuff just well, may even have a fancy GUI to drag/drop your tables. But just like WebForms limits you tweaking the genrated markup or core functionality ("I need my Data Grid to render the headers in a <thead> so that the jQuery TableSorter plugin works") and sometimes requires some hacks ("I know, I just put some javascript that wraps the generated table header rows into a <thead>"), an OR/M will put up some walls that you can't climb as well.

I think it's time for an OR/M that is to other OR/Ms what ASP.net MVC is to ASP.net WebForms: A Framework that allows and requires us to get deep into the guts, but does not limit the tweaking we can do, while still handling a lot of the stupid work, and I think it's great to see projects move into that direction. Just as MVC and WebForms both sit on top of an ASP.net core stack, ADO.net serves as a rock solid foundation for multiple philosophies of OR/M systems that can happily co-exist and serve both the people able and willing to write SQL and the people who'd rather spend money on an OR/M, profiling tools, and maintenance costs.

This book is specialized and concise. As you might see from the image, it comes it an well under 100 Pages and covers exactly one topic.

I have only very limited time compared to the amount of technology that’s out there. The Web is evolving so fast, it’s hard to keep up with new developments. Information is scattered in blog posts, and it’s often hard to just find a cohesive front-to-back tutorial. Also, even though I own both a Kindle and an iPad, I prefer my books to be on dead trees.

Tech Books are often massive, 500 to 1000 page compendiums, and there are cases when it’s necessary. If you read the .net Specification, the C# Language Specification or David Flanagan’s excellent JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, it’s hard to get these under 500 pages, and that’s okay because they are compendiums about an entire language.

However, way too often I see books that have a lot of text but very little information. One of my Pet Peeves is the Introduction and Installation section. Many Web Books start with a 50 page history of the Internet, from CERN to HTML5, how the internet has revolutionized the world and what great things lie in front of us. Sorry, if I really want to know about the history of the Internet, I hit up Wikipedia, just like the book author likely did when researching. The only interesting piece of History is the motivation behind a technology, answered by asking two questions: What Problem did the creator of a technology run into, and how is this technology attempting to solve it?

Same for the installation Section. I don’t need a 20 Page installation that’s outdated anyway when the book comes out, Give us the official Project Website and maybe a few gotchas, but we can take it from there.

Being able to read a book in an evening is a huge win because it already plants knowledge into our brain about what’s available. I might not have immediate need for a technology, but knowing what and how it does stuff means that the next time I run into a technical problem, I might think “Hey, I can use X to solve that!”.

The HTML5 Filesystem API book does just that. It has a small Intro and dives right into code examples. The API is simple, yet does introduce new objects into JavaScript. There is no example application per se (One could think that building an Address Book with uploadable Photos would be cool), presumably because it would take the focus away from the core. The code builds on top of each other though, from the creation of a file system to adding, deleting, uploading and remote getting files.

In fact, this book is good for another point: Tech Books are usually behind the applications they release. When a technology comes out, the early books are usually garbage, based on Beta/Prerelease versions with code examples that are slightly broken because RTM changed stuff. They don’t have many real world usage scenarios, often cover too much too shallow. This is even worse when the technology is an update (e.g., ASP.net MVC 3) and the early books are just previously released books (e.g., for ASP.net MVC 2) updated with some new features rather than redoing the entire book front to end with the new technology in mind.

The later books are usually too late – by the time they come out, the successor technology has already been announced, and people gained knowledge through blog posting, cursing at how bad the technology is documented.

Tech Books remind me a lot of Waterfall development, in that they simply take way too long to come to the market and don’t meet the needs of the customers. Writing a 500+ page tome simply takes time.

The agile version of that is what the above book demonstrates: The technology it’s discussing isn’t even out yet and may change, a fact that’s clearly stated in the book. However, because it’s only 80 or so pages, it’s quick to write and gives the reader enough knowledge about all aspects of the API, so that eventual changes should be fairly trivial to do (Eric also includes the link to the W3C Spec, so you can stay up to date). But even if they completely throw away and redo the API, it only wasted a small amount of my time – and my money. The book is $20 (cheaper on Amazon right now), so it’s not a massive investment at all, especially if I would calculate the time it would take me to scour through scattered blog postings as billable time.

Another great example is The Node Beginner Book. It’s cheap ($5), comes in at about 60 pages, is cohesive and available right now (compared to some books that are scheduled to come out in 4 months or more). CoffeeScript: Accelerated JavaScript Development is another excellent one. I heard that the Nuget folks are considering a book as well, and I would love to just get a book that covers how Nuget works internally, how the Server was written and how to interact with the Visual Studio plugin. Sure, I can look at the source code, but again, a concise and cohesive overview with samples and a reference part is all that’s really needed.

Some other books I would totally buy: Model Binding and Validation in ASP.net MVC 3/4, RESTFul WCF Applications, Ways to send data from the Server to a browser (From COMET and setInterval/JSONP crutches to Web Sockets and Server Side Events), Writing an ORM from Scratch.

I’ve been backing a Kickstarter project promising a unique stylus for the iPad: The Adonit Jot. Since I wanted to brush up my camera skills anyway, I decided to make a small video review.

Doing this I realized that a) iMovie is a really basic program (might look into iMovie Pro aka. FCP X) and b) I need to work on my accent.

To give away the conclusion: I really like it. Wish it had a pen clip though.

You can find their website at http://adonit.net/

Safari remembering the last open tab

I'm a web developer, and as such it's normal to have 10-15 tabs open in each of the 3 major browsers of each platform (Safari/Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox). I don't close these tabs, I just exit the application (Cmd+Q on a Mac) and expect to be greeted with a fresh and empty window when I restart the browser.

However, Safari remembers the last tabs depite me setting up as to open new windows with an empty page. Turns out that there is a system-wide settings that makes applications remember their last state. It's in System Preferences > General: "Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps".

For me, this option is nonsense. If I want to retain the state of an App, I don't close it. I can easily put my Mac into Hibernate mode if I want to turn it off without shutting it down.

Edit: Thanks to Matt Isenhower for showing a way to disable it per app:

defaults write com.apple.Preview NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -int 0

Disable Auto-correct

One feature I love in iOS is the autocorrect feature, since typing on a touchscreen keyboard is tedious and error prone. However, on a Desktop machine with a real keyboard it's infuriating as auto-correct tries to correct some words that simply aren't wrong. On a Desktop, I expect spell checking to draw squiggly lines, not to auto-correct.

In Safari (and possibly other apps), go to Edit > Spelling and Grammar and untick "Correct Spelling Automatically".

For some strange reason, that option was greyed out (and ticked) on my MacBook Pro. As a Plan B, disable it system wide in System Preferences > Language & Text > Text.

No article about auto-correct without a link to Damn you, Auto Correct!

Proper Color Scheme for the Terminal

Let's face it, the Mac OS X Terminal colors are ugly. As a developer, I spend a lot of time in the Terminal and use many apps/scripts that make use of ANSI Colors. Also, I use vim a lot. The default scheme:

Up until Lion, we needed a hack to change the font colors (SIMBL + TerminalColours). In Lion, Apple finally allows us to customize them. So grab the IR_Black theme for Lion for a really nice color scheme.

Bonus Tip: The theme is also available for TextMate.

Make Home, End and Del work in the terminal

I use a normal Keyboard on my Mac, specifically the Microsoft 4000. However, pressing HOME or END in the Terminal doesn't do anything, but I expect those keys to go to the beginning/end of a line.

In the Terminal preferences, open the Keyboard tab, select HOME and for the string to send, press CTRL+A. It should show up as \005. For END, press CTRL+E which shows up as \005.

For Del to work, press CTRL+ALT+D which shows up as \004.