Category Archives: General Tech Stuff

Craig Hockenberry is a smart guy. He’s been around for a while, and has an impressive track record in the Mac software world. I don’t, but that’s not going to stop me from arguing with him about background apps on the iPhone. His argument has two parts.

Part 1 (here) essentially says that gackground apps will kill the battery life and usability of the iPhone by allowing application developers to willy-nilly make network connections, thus keeping the device radios on more than needed (or wanted).

Part 2 (here) says that even if we could magically solve the problems he describes in part 1, the user experience on the device would quickly get out of hand.

Why don’t I agree with part 1? I have experienced just the opposite with Windows Mobile. There’s a great deal of institutional knowledge around exactly these two problems in the Windows Mobile world. I get better battery life with my Treo 750 running Windows Mobile 6 than I do with my iPhone, despite the fact that the Treo has an HSDPA radio. This is despite the fact that I run a number of always-on apps on my Treo, including Communicator Mobile and Outlook Mobile with Direct Push enabled. If you take a look at the Direct Push protocol, you’ll see that it’s designed to keep a connection alive while still allowing the radio to go dormant when there’s not actually any information to transfer. The same thing is true of the UC AJAX protocol that Communicator Mobile uses. This is not a new idea, and Microsoft’s not the first to implement it. Craig’s argument– that ill-behaved or poorly written applications will kill your battery faster than Eliot Spitzer’s political career– is true. However, that’s not necessarily an argument in favor of blocking background applications. Let people ship background applications, then let the market decide which ones should survive based on their performance. (Note to Craig and others: remember, when we get that Exchange ActiveSync support we’ve all been jonesing for… it’s a persistent network connection!)

I give Craig’s arguments in part 2 a little more credence. The iPhone offers a lovely UI, as pleasant to look at and touch as any other well-designed, well-engineered artifact (whether a Glock, an engine block, or a summer frock.) It is a bit painful to think of having all sorts of buzzing, boinging, and screen flashing horning in on SJ’s Zen-like user experience. However, Apple has already solved this problem, at least in part: look at the way that the SMS, phone, and e-mail applications notify users of available data by using a number superimposed on the application icon. This paradigm works well for some sorts of applications. For others, the solution isn’t to ban applications from posting notifications– Craig rightly points out that several different notification-brokering APIs exist on the desktop Mac platform. So where’s the API for the iPhone? Where’s the mobile equivalent of Growl, or (better yet) a supported framework from Apple? That’s essentially what WM has, and it allows application developers to post notifications that the user can control. My Treo makes one distinct sound for a new SMS, one for a new e-mail (well, actually, two: for high-priority e-mails, Voice Command reads me the subject line), and one for a device or calendar alarm. Simple, powerful, and easy to customize. Given how good a job Apple has done with almost every other aspect of the iPhone UI, it sure seems like a problem they could solve if they wanted to.

I’m personally very disappointed by Apple’s decision not to allow background apps. I was planning on using UC AJAX to build an OCS client for the iPhone, but I probably won’t bother if there’s no way to background applications; a foreground-only IM client would be pretty worthless. I do have a few other projects in mind, though…

Finally, they admit it: Microsoft licenses Exchange ActiveSync to Apple for use in the iPhone. (For a play-by-play of the announcement, see Engadget.) This is great news for both Apple and the Exchange team, but much less so for the Windows Mobile team. I suspect that they have a few aces up their sleeve, though. First is SCMDM, which ups the ante for mobile device management by adding Group Policy Object support for Windows Mobile devices. When you can domain-join a mobile device and push policy to it using the same tools you use for desktops and servers, that’s the dream scenario for managed enterprises. The iPhone software update won’t support SCMDM’s policy extensions, and I’m betting that it won’t implement 100% of the Exchange 2007 version of Exchange ActiveSync policies either. Of course, the Windows Mobile team has their own set of surprises planned for their next release. We’ll have to wait and see.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, iPhone, Windows Mobile

While working on the UC Metro project, we ran into a really odd situation, and I wanted to blog about it so that hopefully others can avoid the problem.
We created a sample application using WPF. The test machine we were using had UAC turned off because we also had to run some debugging tools that wouldn’t run with UAC. Our sample application worked great, but when we turned on UAC it would require elevation, and then fail. We couldn’t figure out why, so Mike Jensen (one of our super smart programmers) created a new project with the same name and started subtracting files, one by one. Same problem.
Then Mike decided to try changing the project name, which had previously been “WpfDispatchBaseApplication”. Voila! It worked perfectly with UAC on. It turns out that there are some magic words that will trigger a UAC elevation prompt if Vista sees them in the application name. See here for an example: “update” is one of the magic terms. This is by design, and you can fix it in two ways: include an application manifest, or don’t use any magic words. We decided that “Litware Service Call Manager” better reflected what the sample app was actually doing, so we stuck with it, but from now on we’ll use manifests… even for our samples.

I frequently need to paste unformatted text into Word, and it has long irked me that there’s no easy single-keystroke way to do this. However, Michel Bintener has a great solution:

…place the following AppleScript into ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Word Script Menu Items and assign it an easy-to-remember shortcut (I named mine “Paste without formatting\cV”; that way, I only need to hit Ctrl+V to paste the clipboard contents in plain text):

tell application "Microsoft Word"

paste special (text object of selection) data type paste text

end tell

It turns out that there are some server products that Microsoft won’t support on Windows Server 2008. The full list is in KB 948680. No real surprises (OK, I admit to being a little surprised that OCS 2007 was on the list). Guess all those sites running Host Integration Server are out of luck….

W00t. Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 were released to manufacturing today.

Microsoft’s Amir Haque has a great summary of the new features in Entourage 2008– it’s in two parts here and here. IMHO part 2 is more interesting because it focuses on Exchange integration. In fact, until I read this I didn’t know that Entourage 2008 supported message classification or managed folders on Exchange 2007.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, Mac OS X

Well, first off, it makes me sad how much I suck at playing drums, but that’s another topic entirely.

All five of us have been enjoying rocking out with Rock Band. I’ve particularly enjoyed letting the boys hear some rock tracks that predate their birth (interestingly, they loved the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again“, which of course came out when I was 3). I’m about halfway done with the track list on medium guitar, and I’ve started making a few forays into “hard”. Unfortunately, the strum bar on our guitar failed this afternoon, just as I was trying to master “Enter Sandman“. Fortunately, EA has a great cross-shipping warranty service, so we should have a new guitar in-house by midweek. In the meantime…

I have often been accused of having little to no personal style, and my blog is now in the same boat. This is a combination of my upgrade to Movable Type 4.0 and some oddities of my hosting environment. I’ll fix it eventually. Thanks for not piling on.

I just got Visual Studio Team System set up so I can work with some projects that our team in Redmond has been building. However, I was stumped when it came time to fire up Team Explorer– it isn’t installed by default. However, a quick application of google-fu led me to this article, which explains that you get Team Explorer from the Team Foundation Server distribution. Of course that’s where you’d look; how silly of me to think that there might be a big fat “TEAM EXPLORER” link somewhere in the cavernous VSTS installer.

Want to make your iPhone’s mail client fall over dead? Try opening a Word 2007 attachment. Works every time.

Technorati Tags: iPhone