Design is Philosophy -Tutorials and thoughts on WordPress, social media, Microsoft Expression, CSS and the philosophy of design

Jul 18

iPatch – The Truth About iPhone Antennagate

Jul 06

Android, My Opinion 4

Rogers treats Android as an unwanted step-child

Update: Rogers just announced that Rogers has indeed received the “draft 2.1″ software from HTC and that it will be rolled out “end of August”. First off that makes Rogers Management office look like they have no clue what’s going on and secondly it shows that they are dragging their feet. I think it’s time to start sending angry letters to Rogers to let them know how we feel about being given the runaround.

I realize this issue (cell phones and carrier behaviour) is a bit off-topic from what is generally posted on this blog, but this issue is something I’ve been mulling over for some time now and I feel it’s time to share what I’ve discovered with the world.

Last year my wife and I became the proud owners of two sparkling new HTC Magic phones from Rogers. The Magic was the newest and greatest Android powered touch-screen phones at the time and we were hugely excited to get them. The phones worked great and although the user interface felt a bit basic compared to other more refined user experiences we were happy in the knowledge that as Android phones the firmware (or Operating System) was in a near constant state of development and that in short order new firmware would be rolled out and the experience would improve.

Which is what would have happened had it not been for the fact that we are in Canada and our phones are running on the Rogers network.

Upgrade? What Upgrade?

Things started to go sour in late 2009 when Google rolled out the Android 1.6 firmware (the phones were originally running 1.5). Subsequently the hardware manufacturer HTC rolled out a new handset with the Sense user interface and all of a sudden our baseline Magics were starting to look really old and outdated. “Fret not” we were told, “Sense runs fine on the Magic and HTC will make it available in short order”. Or so we were lead to believe. Then came the crushing news that for unknown reasons Rogers had decided that the 1.6 upgrade with Sense in tow would not happen. There was no official reason given but rumours indicated that Rogers wanted to build in custom branding in the operating system but didn’t want to pay HTC to do it. Rumours, OK. I have no idea if that’s the case. The only word from Rogers was that no 1.6 would be released and the next release would be 2.0 “some time in the summer of 2010.

Regardless, the upgrade did not arrive and as we watched our European and American friends get the upgrade we, the people of the Android Nation of Canada started getting really pissed. So much so in fact a campaign was started to force Rogers to roll out the 1.6 upgrade, spearheaded by the I Want My One Point Six website. But it felt like the message was falling on deaf ears. Maybe Rogers was testing out some new noise cancelling headphones or something.

Upgrade, or else!

Then all of a sudden out of nowhere Magic owners across Canada got a weird text message saying they needed to upgrade their phones to the new Sense user interface immediately or lose data access. If I remember the message arrived on a Thursday and the cut-off point was the following Monday or Tuesday. At first it looked like a weird change of heart but then it turned out the 911 features in the Magic phones were completely screwed up and the upgrade was necessary to fix the issue.

And true to their word, a few days later all internet service was cut from the phones and we were forced to do manual upgrades. Which deleted a whole pile of data and caused major headaches for a lot of people. But in the end we got our Magics upgraded to Sense so everything was fine.

Rogers, realizing they screwed things up for a lot of people, relented by offering up one month of free data for all Magic users. Good on them.

But then people discovered that the upgrade was purely cosmetic. Even with Sense the Magics were still running 1.5. Which was weird because only months before Rogers had argued Sense could only be installed on 1.6 and that’s why we wouldn’t get it.

Something was definitely rotten in Denmark.

2.1 is coming… in the summer… or something

So the debacle continued: Magic owners kept asking Rogers why the phone was still on 1.5 and Rogers kept saying the 2.0 upgrade would come some time in the summer. Which still made no sense at all. No explanation was ever given as to why the 1.6 upgrade was not released. The problem compounded when app vendors started writing apps that only work on 1.6 and higher and the frustration grew and grew.

Then in the spring Rogers announced that they would release 2.1 “by the end of June”. That was still months after everyone and their dog who lived outside of Canada would get the upgrade, but at least it was a step in the right direction. Or so we thought.

With the end of June comes … nothing!

As June started getting into the double digits a lot of Magic owners were starting to get anxious. Not only was there no word on when 2.1 would actually be released but Google was rolling out 2.2 while we were still stuck in 1.5 land. The heat only increased when, after brushing off hundreds of requests for info, Rogers’ Twitter customer rep @RogersMary informed everyone that Rogers would receive the HTC version of 2.1 by the end of June and that the firmware would then undergo “testing” before being released. In other words there would be no end of June release of 2.1. This was further compounded when it was announced that both American and French Magic owners were getting the 2.2 release.

Things were indeed rotten. In Rogers headquarters. And that brings us to today.

Who cares about moneybags customers anyway?

Needless to say at this point we are all fed up. Not only are we still running software that is now over 1 year old and 2 generations behind (just imagine what would happen if Rogers did the same to iPhone owners. Wait, who am I kidding. That would never happen) but the complete lack of information from Rogers on the topic is mind boggling. One would think that a company that prides itself on being “committed to Android” would care enough about their customers to tell them why they are stalling the firmware releases. Or at least announce when the firmware will be released. But I guess that’s too much to ask. As of right now there is no official word on when or how 2.1 will be released other than that it will be done “once it is finished”. This in spite of HTC rolling out both 2.1 and 2.2 to other carriers in other countries.

To put it plainly, this whole situation stinks of corporate greed and negligence. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out this lack of upgrading is actually some sort of convoluted plan to get people to buy new phones. Again, just a theory.

“The information will be released when the software is released”

So, being totally fed up with this mess I called Rogers Customer Service and asked to speak to someone in charge. The Customer Service Representative told me that I was the 3rd caller in the last hour to ask about the upgrade. One would think Rogers would take that as a warning sign. But that would mean they actually care. Which as far as I can tell they don’t. But I digress.

I was passed on to Rogers Management Office and after about 15 minutes someone actually came on the line. Her name was Rokhaya. And she did not appreciate my business.

After a lengthy round of questions turned discussion turned arguments I asked her three simple questions:

When will we get information on when 2.1 will be released?
Why is there no information about the 2.1 release or why it is being delayed?
Can you confirm that Rogers has received the HTC version of 2.1 for testing?

The answers were truly astounding:

When will we get information on when 2.1 will be released?

“Right now as far as we (the employees) know we don’t have any information to release to our customers. That information will be released when the software is released”. (direct quote)

Why is there no information about the 2.1 release or why it is being delayed?

“We have no obligation to release such information to consumers. That information will be made available when the software is released”. (again, direct quote)

Can you confirm that Rogers has received the HTC version of 2.1 for testing?

Rokhaya: “I can not provide you with any such information. There is another representative here who can answer this question but he is currently on another call”

Me: “Can you get him to call me back with that information?”

Rokhaya: “He will not call you back because you are on a call with me.”

Me: “Ok, can you ask him and then call me back?”

Rokhaya: “No, I will not call you back.”

Take your consumer rights and shove them!

My conclusion after this rather surprising conversation should be that Rogers does not care about their customers. But I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume instead that this is a systemic failure in which information is not moving freely within the company. It is quite clear that someone has decided that Android, or at least the Magic, should not get first-rate service and should be treated like an unwanted step-child. Who knows why that is. It is also clear that when it comes to informing the consumer about what is going on the Rogers policy is “The consumer does not have the right to know.”

I’ll be more than happy to revise that stance if Rogers provides me with answers to the above questions, answers that should be pretty easy to obtain and just as easy to release. In fact, answering these questions will undoubtedly calm down the furore that is currently brewing over this issue on the web.

Right now Rogers is doing exactly what I tell people not to do: Ignoring customer complaints and losing control of the discussion. A simple firm date, confirmation of receipt of the HTC upgrade or even and explanation of why the upgrade is taking so long would do wonders. Because right now the best option seems to be sending the phones back and going with a different carrier.

Tagged android 2.1, canada, cell phones, rogers, upgrade

Jun 24

Pivot 5

Live Labs Pivot meets Flickr for the 12×12 Vancouver Photo Marathon

Guest post by Ole Rand-Hendriksen.

So my brother Morten came to me with this idea about making a pivot project for the 12×12 Vancouver Photo Marathon 2009 where he basically wanted to be able to sort the images in categories, photographer, gender, winners and so on. He hadn’t really looked into how pivot works, but he thought this could be something that I could probably figure out in a couple of hours or something.

I followed the links he gave me to the pivot site and some instructional demo videoes. But i didn’t really have the patience to go through them all. So I did what i normally do; which is take half a look at the specifications and then just try it out.

I started by downloading pivot from www.getpivot.com and looking at how it works, which is still a bit confusing to me because of the seadragon technology and the image sorting, but I’ll get into that later.

Then i started reading about how pivot works, and the data part is actually quite straight forward. It’s basically just xml files where each item has some properties, and in the beginning of the file, it says what kind of properties and if you should be able to use them to sort by.

The more confusing part is the deep zoom collection part, which is the part that makes all the trouble. Basically deep zoom collections aren’t dynamic at all (someone please prove me wrong), which is very anoying. Since it means that you have to host all the images locally on the server where you have the pivot collection.

And then i started to read up on how to make pivot collections. There are according to the pivot site 3 ways of making them;

by using the commandline tools
by using the excel tool
by making the tool yourself.

Since i concidder my self proficient in excel i decided to use that method on this project. So I downloaded the tool and installed it (link).

Then i went on to figure out how to get all the data I wanted from the 12×12 Vancouver Photo Marathon Flickr sets. The easiest way i could think of was to use the rss feeds and try to parse them in some way or other. I ended up using a rss parsing library for python from http://feedparser.org/ and i wrote a very simple script that went through all the set feeds and parsed them into a more usable .csv file.

The print lines were just for debuging.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import feedparser
import codecs

url = [ *list of urls*]

f = open(” *path to file* “, “w”)
for u in url:
print u
d = feedparser.parse(u)
name = d.feed.title.split(“- “)[1]
print name
num = d.feed.title.split(” “)[2]
print num
for entry in d.entries:
h = entry.links[2].href
print h
t = entry.title
print t
s = num+’, ‘+name+’, ‘+h+’, ‘+t+’\n’
u = s.encode( “utf-8″ )
print u
f.write(u)
f.close()

then i imported the data into a new excel file.

The pivot plugin for excel is a bit buggy, so you can’t really import data directly into the fields, but when you have the data in another document, you can just copy each column in where you want it. It takes some time for the previews to load though when you are working with a few hundred images that are all online, so be prepared to spend a few hours doing something else if you try.

Another bug that’s nice to be aware of, is that if you by accident make too many rows in your collection, you won’t really be able to remove it. When you’ve added all the data you want, you just push the publish pivot button, and then save it where you want to. This can also take a few hours. When it’s done, pivot will open and you can view your collection.

Since pivot utilizes Deep Zoom and Seadragon, the images are sorted into a gazillion small files that will take forever to upload to a webhotell by ftp. so make sure you are using as many connections as you can. Also it’s very annoying that deep zoom is almost completely static unless you trick seadragon by using the api like Lang Deng did for deep zoom images with his project, though i don’t know if there’s an easy way of doing something like that for deep zoom collections.

I’ve got some ideas for further pivot projects but I don’t know if they are possible to make yet.

Tagged flickr, photo marathon, pivot, seadragon

Jun 07

Expression Web, News 0

Introducing Expression Studio 4 Web Professional

As I’m packing up for a rush trip to Norway to see my dad defending his doctor’s dissertation the Microsoft Expression team is hard at work in New York City presenting the new version of my favourite web development application Expression Web 4. Now packaged as Expression Studio 4 Web Professional and bundled with Expression Design and Expression Encoder version 4 is a programmatical improvement on the already hugely successful Expression Web 3 that introduces some new and nifty features that will make your web development process even simpler.

New in Expression Web 4

There is a long list of new features in Expression Web 4 but here I’m only going to mention three – because they are the most important ones.

In-app SEO reporting

Like the name suggests Expression Web 4 provides a full SEO report for selected pages or the entire site. Gone are the days of trying to remember all the SEO rules or using 3rd party apps to make sure your site gets listed on Google and Bing. With the click of a button Expression Web 4 will give you a list of everything you forgot to add to your site, like a title tag, proper description, keywords or broken links. But more interestingly it also gives you tips, in the form of warnings, that are not so obvious. During beta testing I ran the SEO reports on some of my existing sites and got feedback like “title is too general” and “description is too general”. This might seem like weird error reporting but it’s actually vitally important if you want your site to be noticed in the search environment: To be noticed your pages need proper titles that tell the visitor what’s on them. And the descriptions have to be specific enough to stand out. There are tons of other such warnings that, if heeded, will not only increase your SEO but will also teach you to write your code in an SEO friendly way the first time around. Which is exactly why I like Expression Web so much – it teaches you through its use to do things the right way.

More SuperPreview

I’ve raved about SuperPreview – the in-app or stand-alone cross-browser compatability tester that was introduced with Expression Web 3 – before. With Expression Web 4 SuperPreview has been enhanced and improved to include more browsers (IE 6, IE 7, IE 8 Compatibility Mode, IE 8 etc), more file inputs and most importantly an online component that lets you test your pages against the Mac version of Safari. It’s the same application with onion skinning, active areas, DOM view and all that great stuff, only improved for broader functionality.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: SuperPreview by itself is reason enough to buy Expression Web.

Publish Current Page

For people like me who tend to work on multiple disjointed pages and do live updates to sites all the time the process of saving a page, going to the publishing panel and then uploading the pages to the external server is extremely cumbersome. The obvious solution to this problem would be to have a button or function that lets you publish the current or all open pages to the server right away. I requested this feature at some point in the pre-beta process of Expression Web 4 and I’m happy to say it’s now included in the app making publishing of your latest and greatest errors updates a one-click process. It may seem like a small and insignifficant upgrade but it really isn’t: After working with an early beta and going back to Expression Web 3 I kept swearing at my computer because I couldn’t just push my files straight to the server but had to go through the publishing panel. That quick one-click or shortcut process is a huge timesaver and a hugely important addition to an already excellent application.

If you have version 3, version 4 is a free upgrade

Yes, that’s right: If you already purchased Expression Web 3 or Expression Studio 3, Expression Studio 4 is a free upgrade. That means you get all the cool new stuff at no cost. Very cool.

More to come

I’m hard at work writing tutorials and other stuff (TBA) about Expression Web 4 so stay tuned to this blog for all the updates and other useful tips!

Make Web Not War 2010 – a recap

With guitarpick dogtags, military paraphranalia and a notebook with the cover text “Why the f@&#* is Microsoft doing this?” Make Web Not War set a new standard for conferences.

The first words out of my mouth as I stepped off the plane in Montreal Wednesday afternoon were “What the Fuck!” (yes, I’m a real class act). Crossing the threshold from plane interior to airport gangway was like walking into a furnace. It was, at least to me, unbearably hot and I was in a rush to get out of the plane and to a washroom to blow my nose. Five hours earlier I found myself on a WestJet flight crossing the great Canadian landscape on my way to the almost mythical French portion of Canada. In my bag, my camera, my laptop and the bare necessities. As I made my way through Trudeau International Airport on the hunt for a cab all I could think was “I hope this cold doesn’t claim my voice as its victim” interspersed with “I’m late, I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date”. The plane had taken a good 1 hour extra on its leisurely trip across the prairies, rush-hour was fast approaching and I knew that somewhere inside this Francophone metropol Angie Lim and her crack team of Microsoft event planners were waiting for my arrival.

And now for something completely different

Make Web Not War has been pushed as a conference that falls well outside the norm from the start. And with good reason. Entering the in itself fascinating location of Espace Reunion in the Outremont district I was met with military paraphranalia interspersed with glossy tech. There were gas masks, Dell laptops, ammunition cases, cammo clad couches, Beatles Rock Band and a huge green screen. I’ve been to quite a few conferences and I can tell you this is not common fare. But it set the right tone right off the bat.

This was Wednesday afternoon and the place was alight with frenzied activity. Microphones were being tested, screens hung, gear placed, names checked, I felt like I had walked right into a finely tuned machine room. The Master of Events Angie popped up to greet me but was soon pulled away to deal with a technical issue and before I knew it I was wisked away to a delightful dinner with the crew and the other speakers. Never mind the tech test – there was networking to be done.

Guitar picks and code languages

First impressions are vitally important, especially for public events like this. And the registration process often sets the tone for the entire conference. Make Web Not War was no exception, and that’s a good thing: When you are handed a dog tag chain full of colourful guitarpicks and a notebook with the cover text “Why the f@&#* is Microsoft doing this?” you know instantly this isn’t going to be yet another one of those boring conferences. Each attendee was handed a set of 5 guitarpicks, some of them doubles, and told that to get into the after party they needed to trade picks with the other attendees to get a complete set of 5 picks, each representing an open source code languages Microsoft supports.

Microsoft = Interop

The guitar picks were more than just nifty party tricks to force some interaction between the attendees: The whole point of the conference was to tell people that Microsoft is now 100% committed to interoperability. In other words you can now run open source languages, apps and software on Microsoft platforms without any problems. The web is platform agnostic and Microsoft has heard that message loud and clear. Now they want you to know they are in full support of it. Which is why they had Joël Perras, a dev for CakePHP and Lithium, as the keynote speaker, why the FTW (For The Web) contest was featured around Open Data and why they had me presenting my talk on developing WordPress sites using Microsoft applications. Like Joël said, “Interoperability is not a feature, it’s a requirement”. And we all got it.

Open communities

As usual I spent more time talking to people and soaking in the atmosphere than I did actually attending sessions at Make Web Not War. What I walked away with was a realization that the Montreal dev community is an astonishingly open one. In general I find people who work in the online realm to be cliquy to the point of isolationist, but not so in Montreal. Maybe it’s the Francophone culture, maybe it was just the overall air of the event itself, but I found more people open to frank discussions and inclusion than what I’m used to. Which was awesome. On top of that Microsoft had sent out a score of great people to further interaction. In all the sense of openness was everywhere and I was left with a feeling of inclusion, of being part of a greater community.

“Nice to finally meet you IRL”

Having put on a couple of events myself, most notably the 12×12 Vancouver Photo Marathon, I can tell you it’s no small feat. Which makes the hitch-free Make Web Not War all the more impressive. And for that mad props go out to the whole Microsoft team and in particular the aforementioned Angie Lim. I’ve dealt with her on several occasions in the past, but only by email so to me it was an added bonus to finally meet her in person. Or as Angie so geekfully put it “Nice to finally meet you IRL”. (Seriously, she is the only person who can say stuff like that without coming off like the biggest nerd ever).

Make Web Not War was filled with interaction, technology, knowledge and a sense of positive development. I left feeling like I was part of something bigger, that working with the web means I’m working with some of the brightest and most original people on the planet. And for that I am honoured.

FTW contest – going beyond the obvious

The FTW (For The Web) contest was a subset of the conference and it deserves special mention. The mandate was simple if not vague: Make an application using Open Data. It’s the kind of mandate that drives me insane, but other more focussed people were able to make some truly amazing stuff out of it. The finalists, TaxiCity – a student project from the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver created by Mohamed El Eryan, Dashan Yue, Seth Marinello, Jordan Braun, Sagar Datta, Dhruv Adhia, and Ryleigh Kostash, Find-a-Home created by Timothy Dalby, and Project Tholus created by Francois Mazerolle showed that Open Data can be used to create surprising and original applications that go way beyond the standard data feeding and map overlays we are used to seeing. The winner, Find-A-Home, was especially impressive and I can see almost endless applications for this novel yet original idea down the road. I only wish I had come up with it first.