Mike Industries

Today marks the launch of my second blog, and first new one in over four years: A House By The Park. Please head over and have a look-see!

Why a second blog when I only post to Mike Industries a few times a month? Well, I’m building a house, together with Build LLC.

The first thing I noticed after deciding to build a house is that there aren’t any well-written, well-designed, detail-oriented blogs about building a house from the perspective of someone who has never done it before. There are a number of books on the subject, several of which I’ve purchased and zero of which I’ve opened, as well as random articles and photos from people at various points in their construction, but nowhere could I find a start-to-finish, real-time chronology of the entire process. That ends today.

Ahousebythepark.com will cover searching for the right property, dealing with real estate agents, interviewing and choosing an architect, making your way through the design and build process, and probably a thousand other things… all with the goal of helping future custom home builders better prepare for their own projects. I’ve backdated a bunch of entries before pushing the site live so there are already 26 posts to thumb through.

Somebody told me once that every human being should go through the home building process once in their lifetime. I don’t know if I agree with that, but if you feel you may ever decide to build a home for yourself, I invite you to subscribe to A House By The Park’s RSS feed and follow passively until something strikes your interest. I can’t guarantee the same highly intellectual nuggets of thought that fill the pages of Mike Industries, but I will try to write with the same level of detail and accuracy. For instance, I’m making my entire spreadsheet of expenses available online and within the blog posts themselves so readers can get a specific idea of what everything costs (Yay EditGrid! Separate post on this coming soon).

Finally, please feel free to link to or write about A House By The Park on your own site or other places of interest. Every little link helps. I estimate there are somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 subscribers to Mike Industries so there are always great comments here, but on launch day, A House By The Park will have zero. Writing stuff is no fun until intelligent discussion and/or controversy ensues.

So that’s the pitch. Head on over, the water’s warm. I’ve even published a top-to-bottom complete chronology page to get you all caught up from the beginning without having to jump from page to page.

Given how pathetic the new iPhone 3G’s battery life is, and given that Apple recommends you essentially castrate your device in order to get more hours out of it, I have an idea for an app that would make the castration process both quicker and easily reversible:

An app that sits on your home screen and does nothing but turn a set of things on and off.

The app doesn’t even need to launch. Press it once and Bluetooth, Wifi, 3G, Location Services, and Push email all turn on. Press it again and they all turn off. Simple. Perhaps there are even three states to the button where the middle state is configurable.

With the above app, the process of going from power-sucking battery-hog to power-conserving battery-miser would take one-click.

Without the above app, here’s what it takes:

1. Click on Settings
2. Click on wifi
3. Slide wifi slider to off
4. Click on Settings Back button
5. Click on Fetch New Data
6. Slide Push slider to off
7. Click on Settings Back button
8. Click on General
9. Slide Location Services slider to off
10. Click on Bluetooth
11. Slide Bluetooth slider to off
12. Click on General Back button
13. Click on Network
14. Slide Enable 3G slider to off
15. Click Home button to get back to main screen

15 steps! That is crazy.

I wouldn’t even might having my iPhone in conserve mode 90% of the time if it were easy to switch out on demand, but it isn’t. I’m not sure if iPhone developers have access to system settings like this, but if they do, this would make a great app. If not, it would also make a great app… Apple!

Photo by Sunny in L.A.

A full month after the release of the iPhone 3G, I still see lines of people outside of Apple Stores around Seattle waiting to get their hands on one. Although the new, lengthy activation process is a waste of time for customers, it sure is good advertising for Apple. Having lines out front of your store tends to make passers by curious, and curiosity often leads to attraction.

After two weeks with my iPhone 3G, however, I must admit that I’m not as happy as I was with the original iPhone. In fact, if my original iPhone didn’t have an annoyingly quiet earpiece and speakerphone (should have gotten it replaced during the one year warranty period), I probably would have returned the 3G model or not even upgraded to it in the first place.

Now, granted the original iPhone set probably the highest bar for any electronic device I’ve ever owned, but here is what is maddening about the 3G version:

1. Battery, battery, battery. When Steve Jobs mentioned a year ago that battery life was keeping Apple from releasing a 3G version, he wasn’t kidding. Unfortunately, they released one anyway, and now even people like me who use a measly 5-20 minutes of talk time a day can barely go sunup to sundown on a single charge. It’s crippling and it’s frankly embarrassing, in my opinion.
2. In order to mitigate the battery life issue, I have now turned off Location Services, Push email, wifi, and Bluetooth, as well as dimming the screen. It’s kind of like buying a Porsche and replacing the engine with a Hyundai to get better gas mileage. Pretty ridiculous.
3. The 3G AT&T plans are more expensive, which sucks, but at least one can rationalize the data part by remembering that you are getting faster speeds. However, what explains 1500 text messages going from $6 to $15 a month??? Text messages? Ten cents a message as part of a plan is highway robbery. And considering most people won’t hit 1500 on the dot, it often times ends up being much more per message than that. Ok, it’s actually a penny a message.
4. The shape of the phone has changed ever so subtly such that I can’t even use my original iPhone dock with it. Apple doesn’t include a dock with the iPhone 3G and charges $30 for their new “compatible” dock. This is an especially low blow.
5. In my mind, neither the white model nor the black model look as nice as the old silver model and I don’t consider plastic an upgrade over metal.
6. Location Services takes quite a long time to triangulate your location and often doesn’t work. I guess since I was forced to turn it off, I shouldn’t really care anyway.
7. I live near downtown Seattle and a good portion of the time, I’m still on Edge.
8. There’s a $18 “upgrade” fee for no apparent reason to switch phones.

In the end, I’d be willing to overlook every item on that list if it weren’t for the battery life issue. I’m not opposed to charging my phone every single night but when you have to think about charging it even during the day, that’s just poor product planning. I’d gladly accept an extra few millimeters in thickness if it meant a 50% bigger battery.

So in closing, I would say that if you already have a first generation iPhone you’re happy with, by all means stick with it. When the iPhone 3G Rev B comes out in several months and sports an acceptable battery, you’ll be happy you’re not stuck with the “old” 3G model.

Don’t fall into the early adopter trap with this particular product release. Sometimes we Apple fanboys are such a captive audience that we ignore the flaws of the items we purchase. And by sometimes, I of course mean always.

True or false: Most major news organizations (e.g. The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, ESPN, etc) would be better off running their entire online publishing operations through a modified blogging platform (e.g. WordPress, Movable Type, Newsvine, or a home-grown solution) than through an enterprise CMS.

In other words, in five years, will mainstream news sites essentially be collections of individual writer blogs tied together mainly with section indexes and cross-linking?

I have this problem. When I bring my laptop from home to work or to any other location, my computing needs change. At home, I have an unrestrictive wireless connection that I can do anything I want on. At work, I have an 802.11x protected connection which runs through a proxy and doesn’t let me do things like download IMAP mail freely or run a multi-protocol IM client. Additionally, I have a different printer at home than at work. And on and on and on.

It’s really not that big of a deal to manually “change locations” via the Apple Menu, but I’ve always wanted a way for my laptop to just sense where I’m at and do the right thing automatically. A few days ago, a colleague at work, Paul Oremland, told me about a utility called Marco Polo which does just that. It’s really great. Now when I walk into the office and open my laptop, my location is switched automatically, certain applications are magically launched, and my printer is set to the correct device.

The application is great in that you can have it trigger off a whole host of conditions, such as wireless networks in the area, USB devices that may be attached, and even ambient light! You can even use fuzzy logic to combine these conditions and take action when they are all present.

The folks that developed Marco Polo call it “context aware computing”. I like it.

You can download Marco Polo for free here (oh and it’s open source). Happy location switching!

We’ll never see another Steve Jobs event like MacWorld 2007, when the original iPhone was unveiled, but boy did today’s announcements turn up the heat in the mobile space.

$199 for a better version of what has been almost unanimously hailed as the greatest mobile phone ever built.

$199.

And a year from now, it’ll be $99. That’s like an iPod Shuffle.

At the risk of sounding like a fanboy of the highest order, how on *earth* could the average customer justify purchasing any other mobile device at this point? If you can still get a free phone somewhere and that suits you, then great. But for the person thinking of spending between $99 and $799 on a Nokia, Motorola, Palm, or Sony, how can you even think about those alternatives given where the iPhone just went? The quality/feature/usability gap is so large that even a hatred for AT&T can’t keep people away now.

This sounds overly simplistic, but I really do think Apple just split the mobile world into two choices: settle for a free phone or buy an iPhone. There just aren’t many reasons to do anything else.

Even our Director of Technology and our CTO (both PC people) are both getting iPhones on July 11th… both having previously harangued the rest of the Newsvine staff for our incessant iPhone claqueury. When Apple critics turn that quickly, and without any prodding, you know a very important inflection point has been hit.

As for MobileMe, I was six months early in my call here, but most of the details are on target. Concurrent Exchange/Non-Exchange workflows, over-the-air syncing of everything that’s important to you, and finally a legitimate reason to pay a $99 subscription fee. I’m ecstatic to begin using this. It looks fantastic. Although the one thing I’m still not clear on is whether or not Apple Mail on my laptop will also be an Exchange client.

As a developer and designer, I’ve always hated “the mobile space” because I just viewed it as a really uninteresting transitional phase between regular cell phones and full-immersion goggles; but seeing how the form factor, UI, and engineering of the iPhone has transformed and freed the mobile experience is nothing short of astounding. Even more unbelievable is that Apple did it on their very first model.

Thousands of Nokias. Thousands of Motorolas. Hundreds of Sonys. And a single Apple buries them all.

So word came out today that apparently Adobe Creative Suite 4 is right around the corner. Greeeeeaaaaat.

There are only three things I want from this new release:

1. A new install/update process that doesn’t feel like Adobe is rewriting every line of code on my entire hard drive. This includes the congruent request that Adobe not launch and quit five different “agents” sequentially in order to accomplish the above.

2. A new codebase that doesn’t feel like it’s chewing up every last bit of processing power on my new enough 2.4 GHz iMac with maxxed out RAM. Unless Adobe has signed my machine up as a node in the SETI project without telling me, I don’t understand why something as simple as the Save-To-Web command should invoke ten seconds of beachballs.

3. The long-needed “I-Work-On-The-Web-So-Turn-Off-All-This-Color-Profiling-Crap-Until-I-Say-Otherwise” button.

Chances of any of that being in the next release? I say slim. But I hope I’m wrong. My opinion is that over the last few years, Adobe Creative Suite has become the Microsoft Office for right-brained people. They simply ran out of really useful things that people needed so they just piled on things people didn’t.

Personally, I’m about one more disappointing release away from giving something like Pixelmator a shot.

A few months ago, I silently moved Mike Industries from the aging Movable Type platform to the quicker-developing WordPress platform. I didn’t even plan to change platforms, but after more than a week of trying unsuccessfully to move from Movable Type 3.0 to Movable Type 4.0, this blog was in such a state of disarray under the covers that I began to wonder if switching to WordPress would be quicker altogether.

You see, Movable Type is a platform designed to be static, and only through hackerations with .htaccess files and “bootstrap loaders” can you simulate a truly dynamic publishing system. Part of my move to version 4.0 was designed to use these new dynamic abilities, but in the end, it mucked up so much of my (admittedly custom) setup that I just wanted out completely.

WordPress, in contrast to Movable Type, is designed from the ground up to be dynamic, and through smart caching, it can be made to scale like a static site. This is much the same as how we designed Newsvine to be. As a designer and developer, it just feels a lot cleaner.

So after many years with Movable Type, more than a week of MT 4.0 upgrade attempts, and much assistance from MT’s good shepherd Anil Dash, I called the whole thing off and plotted a WordPress migration instead. Less than two days later, Mike Industries was live on WordPress with only a handful of edge-case issues to resolve (mostly related to inline javascript and php, mime-types, and other custom things I do around here).

Three months in, and now on the newly released WordPress 2.5 (great job on the interface, Happy Cog!), I couldn’t be happier to have made the switch. WordPress certainly isn’t perfect, and if I was starting from scratch, I might have chosen ExpressionEngine instead, but it sure is nice to be on a platform where if I don’t like something, I can just write a few lines of PHP or download a plug-in to address my needs.

Speaking of plug-ins, I’ve already written one of my own that I will release in a few days, but these are the ones I’ve had to install so far (shocking that some of these are even necessary, but oh well):

• Raw HTML - Best plug-in ever. Allows you to wrap PHP/HTML/JS/etc codeblocks in special comments which prevent WordPress from reformatting or encoding them (shocking this is necessary, but a very welcome plug-in)
• Domain Mirror - So that I can use subdomains like “mobile.mikeindustries.com”
• Mint Bird Feeder - So that I can use run my feed through Mint redirects
• Periods in Titles - So that I can use periods in my URLs
• Ping/Track/Comment Count - So I can separate comments from trackbacks from pings
• Subscribe to Comments - So users can receive e-mail notifications when there are new comments
• TextControl - To control how WordPress encodes and adds linebreaks
• WP-Cache - To reduce load on the database and increase scalability

So anyway, that’s about it for now. If you’re on a publishing platform that you don’t love but you’ve got too much inertia to convert to another, take it from me: spend the few days necessary and get it done… it’s not that hard… and I’ve got custom stuff all over the place.

Gelaskin by Giselle Silvestri

So I watched the iPhone event today and I’ve read as many blogs as I can on the subject, but I still haven’t seen any information about whether all of the great enterprise capabilities to be released in June will also make their way into Apple’s desktop e-mail client. I think the iPhone SDK, the games, and all of the other stuff announced today were great, but as I’ve said before, there’s really not a whole lot I need to do on my iPhone today that I can’t already, except for interact with Exchange.

I predicted in December that Apple would take a dual path strategy towards supporting both open-standard enterprise protocols like IMAP/iCalendar and proprietary Exchange protocols, and it appears this is now coming to fruition, but in all of the announcements today, there was no mention of the desktop version of Mail.app.

To those of us using Macs in an Exchange environment, this is kind of a big deal. Yeah there’s Entourage 2008 which can tunnel into certain Exchange functions via Outlook Web Access protocols, and there’s Mail.app’s crippled Exchange-Over-IMAP capability, but seeing as OS X lives both on the desktop and in the iPhone, why shouldn’t the desktop version of Apple Mail get all of this great new ActiveSync Exchange stuff too? Currently, the only way I’m able to sync all of my devices, calendars, contacts, and email together, whether it be Mac, Exchange, or iPhone is by using Entourage as a conduit into .Mac and then propagating everything out this way. I’ve been doing this since early in the Office 2008 beta and it works *just* well enough to be useful, but it’s very hacky and seemingly dangerous at times (like when entire calendars get duplicated or deleted).

Anyone heard anything on the Mail.app Enterprise support front? In all the fuss about the iPhone today, this pretty important side issue got zero airtime.

I gave a talk today at an all-company meeting over at MSNBC on the subject of “news ecosystems” — the main point being that in order to produce the best news experiences in the world, you need to think of your audience as much more than just a passive sponge for your content. Passive news consumers can turn into active news participants if you give them the right environment.

This month, we launched a feature on Newsvine called “The NBC Nightly News Discussion Club” (available at nightly.newsvine.com). In concert with MSNBC’s new video player, the Discussion Club is the first and only example of a network news agency making every single segment of their 6pm national news broadcast available for instant viewing and discussion online. So if you’re watching the news and you see a segment you want to talk about with other people, you’re no longer limited to whoever else happens to be on the couch. There’s now a universe of people to discuss it with online.

It would be interesting enough if that was the end of it. However, we’ve also included the ability for users to submit questions to Brian Williams and have them answered in video form, right on the site. The first example is below:

So what we have so far is:

News agency broadcasts the news -> audience discusses the content -> audience shoots back questions to the anchor -> anchor answers (select) questions right on the site

Maybe I’m biased because this is partly my baby, but I just think that is super cool, and super significant.

I also think it’s great that Brian — probably the most recognized face in U.S. National news — answers all questions off the cuff, with no teleprompter, and with a level of frankness you don’t often see on national news broadcasts. In responding to one of the questions, he even mentions his political affiliation (independent), which is rare for news personalities to do.