Weblog Without Honor or Humanity

Marketing and sharware articles. A few good articles:

• The Online Marketer’s Secret Weapon: A Site that Works
• 
  Why do people register shareware
• Successful shareware
• Hookware

Death of Symbian OS? According to Brighthand Sony Ericcson is considering using Palm OS for its future smartphones. While the article doesn’t make a big deal out of it, this might mean that the days of Symbian OS are counted. Currently Symbian has two versions of its OS: so called Series 60 and Symbian OS 7 with UIQ user interface library. Series 60 ships in millions of phones but is not a competition to Palm or Pocket PC based smartphones (it’s used in very simple phones with smallish screens and 9-key keyboards). Symbian OS 7 is what is used in Sony Ericcson’s P800 smartphone which does compete head-to-head with PalmOne’s and Microsoft’s offerings. P800 shipped in decent quantities (around 1 million) but it faces an uphill battle. Even if it was significantly better than Palm OS or Pocket PC (it isn’t) it would have hard time catching up with Palm (and thousands of applications already available for Palm). Platform/OS business has strong networking effects i.e. the more popular it gets, the more likely it is to grow in popularity (just look at Windows). More applications attracts buyers of hardware which attracts more software developers that create even more application etc. So far Symbian OS 7 was relying on the strength of Sony Ericcson to spread itself and results so far aren’t that great - the amount of available applications is only a tiny fraction of the richness of Palm or Pocket PC world. Loosing Sony Ericcson to Palm might be the final straw that broke the Symbian’s back. Me, I’m still rooting for Danger’s HipTop.

Positive Treo 600 experience. Kevin Werbach has written about his experience using Treo 600 (after a few days of usage). He gives it thumbs up. So far most reviews of Treo 600 are very positive. I wonder if it’ll translate into sales - when previous version of Treo was launched it was also greeted with enthusiastic reviews but Handspring didn’t sell that many of them. I have already ordered upgrade of my Treo 300 to Treo 600 - awaiting shipment.

Fonts for programmers. A good programming font is monospaced and readable at small sizes (programmers like to see as much of the code as possible). Programmer Fonts is a page that links to such fonts.

A shameless rip-off, or what did you expect?
The story so far: AppRocket is a new application for Windows which is a translation (or, as others put it, “a shameless rip-off”) of a popular Mac app LaunchBar. It looks like this taking an idea implemented on a Mac and implementing it on Windows seems quite outragous to some people. I don’t see what the big deal is. It’s hard to argue with Chris Clark because he only gives scathing comments but no actual arguments explaining why exactly is it so bad. Badness is implicit. Instead I’ll try to analyze the situation from a few different angles.

But first the facts: is AppRocket a “blatant rip-off” of LaunchBar? Undoubtely so and its developers freely admit that.

Is the world at large better off with AppRocket? Yes. I’ve installed AppRocket but personally find it useless (i.e. I tried to use it but didn’t find the advantage worth the trouble of learning new habits). It is, however, safe to say that an app that proved useful and popular on a Mac will be useful for some people running Windows.

Is Objective Development the authors of LaunchBar, harmed in any way by AppRocket? Unlikely. They would be financially harmed if they had Windows version of LaunchBar but they don’t and they don’t seem to be planning to write one (given that so far they’re Mac-exclusive shop and LaunchBar is 7 years old - plenty of time to do a port if you plan to).

Is it illegal (i.e. does it infringe upon some vague intellectual property of Objective Development) to write an app that is so similar to existing app? For the sake of our industry and all the people using software, I surely hope it isn’t. So far our industry is build on one company “blatantly ripping-off” some other company. There was only one “original spread-sheet”, VisiCalc, all others, including once-king Lotus 1-2-3 and current king Excell are its blatant rip-off. Windows was a blatant rip-off of Apple which was in turn a blatant rip-off of ideas developed at Xerox. And now KDE and Gnome are blatantly ripping-off many UI concepts pioniereed in Windows. In this context “blatant rip-off” is just another word for “vigorous competition”. Do we really want a system where one company has eternal monopoly on easily-cloned concept? Do we want to be stuck with just one spread-sheet, one file manager, one operating system, one text editor, one instant-messaging system, one application launcher? I much prefer it if one company can take other company’s idea and improve upon it or implement it on a operating system on which it isn’t yet available.

Isn’t Chris a little bit hypocritical by applying different standards to different companies? He’s outraged at AppRocket’s developers but at the same time recommends Proteus, a Mac multi-network IM client. Which sounds like a “blatant rip-off” of Trillian.

255,000 Treo’s sold. According to this article Handspring has sold around 255,000 Treo. Looks like smartphones are a decent market to target.

Coding smart. Coding smart is a good article on good coding practices. It talks about well known practices like using revision control, doing code reviews, learning from existing code, using google as a research tool, Interesting ideas that were new to me (but make sense, when you think about it), are:

• keeping developement notes and debugging logs
• writing high-level structure of the code (since it’s always lost in the details of real code)
• write pseudo-code before writing real code

A million of P800s sold. According to The Register SonyEricsson sold a million of its P800 smartphone. And P900 will ship on October 26.

CodeWarrior 9.2 for Palm OS update available. Ben Combee has announced that update for CodeWarrior 9 for Palm OS (v9.2) is available. You can get it from this place (rather confusing page) and read the release notes.

Tungsten T3 review. Brighthand just published Tungsten T3 review.