I’ve updated the API usage analysis for the AllPeers source tree as part of the Mozpad API project. The main update is that mozI* interfaces are now counted in addition to nsI* interfaces. The next step is to get other Mozilla-based projects to run the script and send me their results. I would really appreciate it if anyone reading this who is working on a large Mozilla project could run the script in their source tree root (make sure you don’t have other files like patches in the same tree that might pollute the statistics) and send me the results. Please specify if you want the data to be anonymous or if we can cite your project. I’m planning to nag people about this so why not be proactive? You’ll sleep more soundly, I promise.
While we gather the data, I’m planning to devote some time to the Mozpad documentation project.
As someone who unlocked his iPhone (living, as I do, in the Czech Republic), I’ve been observing carefully the brouhaha surrounding Apple’s statement that unlocked phones might be “bricked” by the next firmware update. A CNet blog entry is typical of the commentary spewed forth by the chattering classes. As I’ve noted, every hype wave has an equal and opposite antihype backlash, and the iPhone is about as hyped as a story can be without somehow involving Paris Hilton. Some degree of bellyaching was inevitable.
Nonetheless, Don Reisinger , the author of the piece, misses the point entirely. Apple isn’t being a mean jerk just because it likes to stomp on its customers and make them cry. Ask yourself why Apple locked up the iPhone in the first place. How could a company that is so obviously consumer ubersavvy be so consumer unfriendly? The reason is simple: Apple locked up the iPhone so it wouldn’t have to check the compatibility of a zillion third-party applications every time it updated the firmware. (Note to self: use more bold face and you might become an A-list blogger like Marc Andreessen.)
So now Apple is in a bind. It didn’t want to have to deal with all this crap, but a bunch of hackers went ahead and cracked the phone, and now it has two choices. Either it can try to test all the infinite permutations of apps that people might have illicitly installed (the same process that caused Vista to arrive years late while still sucking) or issue a statement that warns people that the next firmware update might break their phones. You can’t really blame them for choosing the latter.
I will blame Apple for getting a bit fat and arrogant lately. Like that talented and self-absorbed friend who stopped talking to us once they finally hit the big time (confirming what their ego always believed), Apple is following in the footsteps of Microsoft, Netscape, Google and every other technology superstar in getting more difficult to deal with the higher its star climbs. Don absolutely has a point that it is losing out to the likes of Amazon in negotiations with the music majors because it’s gotten just a little too big for its britches. This is hardly the end of the world, however, for Apple or for us. A bit of serious competition is exactly what the doctor ordered to bring them back to earth.
To my surprise, I just realized that we never explicitly announced our new auto-download feature here. P2P sharing has a lot of advantages, but it also has one major drawback: people can only download files from you if you are online. We’ve always attenuated this somewhat by keeping track of who you’ve shared with and using them as alternative sources. As of version 0.70, we have another way to address this: auto-download.
You can turn on auto-download for a whole group or for a specific contact by right-clicking on them in the Navigator and choosing “Auto-Download”, or by left-clicking on them to open their page and clicking the Auto-Download link there. If you selected a single contact, you need to uncheck “Use Group Setting” before changing other settings. If you like, you can restrict auto-download to specific file types or limit the size of files that are automatically downloaded.
I keep auto-download turned on for my family, and it’s proven extremely useful since they’re all in distant timezones. It’s great to wake up in the morning and find that your files are already there, even if the person who shared them is offline.
We’re going to keep on working to give you the best of the P2P and centralized hosting worlds. We hope that you find auto-download to be a worthwhile step in that direction.
Robert Scoble lists some plausible rules of etiquette for Twitter users, then goes on to explain how he gleefully breaks them. The key takeaway for me is not that we should contort ourselves to the requirements of a specific service. At the same time, I’ve absolutely unsubscribed from people on Twitter because they were filling up my feed and obscuring more important people (like my family and close friends). What Twitter needs is much better filtering options. Facebook is slightly better in this regard but still very far from adequate. Ideally, we’d have some sort of horizontal filtering system that takes all your “social feeds” and lets you indicate which information you’re interested in seeing.
When the iPhone was released, there was plenty of bellyaching about the lack of an SDK for third-party apps. Then Apple stepped up and announced that the “SDK” for the new device would be the Safari web browser, combined with Web 2.0 techniques (i.e. gobs of JavaScript on the client). Some hailed this as a visionary idea while others griped (somewhat paradoxically) that “web apps are not applications”. The situation became muddier when rogue developers quickly released a user interface toolkit and a package manager that makes it braindead simple to install native (albeit unauthorized) OS X apps designed for the iPhone.
I’ve been plugging the idea of web apps as the future of applications for a while, with a particular emphasis on WebRunner. So naturally I’ve been intrigued by Apple’s decision to make the web their official SDK. Having got my hot little hands on one, however, I’m disappointed by the current lack of features that would make this direction viable. As far as I can see, you can’t even add an app to the pretty grid of colorful icons that serves as the iPhone’s main menu. Besides integration with the underlying OS, there are many other gaps if the browser is to serve as an application platform: offline storage, Flash, more sophisticated web forms, etc. (Mike Shaver had a great overview of future web browser features at Mozilla 24.)
When Apple announced Safari for Windows I hypothesized that this would allow them to roll out exactly these kinds of proprietary browser-as-a-platform features. I still think that the use of web apps as the standard iPhone development paradigm is brilliant, but the current offering is totally inadequate. I predict that Apple will start to announce fancy new features for Safari or (hopefully) jump on board of existing efforts like XUL, Flex, Google Gears and the like.
I have just come across this screen capture showing AllPeers in Flock. Obviously this means that BitTorrent is now available in Flock via AllPeers. If anybody has more information on this please let us know.
The good folks from the Media in Transition conference have put the video of my presentation online. The title of the talk was “Building Media Distribution Apps”, touching on the trade-offs between various distribution techniques (e.g. streaming vs. downloads) and the new generation of rich internet application platforms (including XULRunner and WebRunner).
There is also a short video of an interview I gave after the talk.
UPDATE: I should have mentioned that the slides that go with the presentation can be found here.
Cedric and I are staying in San Francisco and heading to Stanford tomorrow for Mozilla 24. If anyone’s staying in the city and wants a ride in our sporty Corolla rental, we can fit two or three people. Leave a comment here in that case so we know you’re coming. We’re staying in the Best Western Americana on 7th street near Mission, and I guess we’ll be heading off at 10ish.
I already wrote about our Social BitTorrent functionality, so I’m not going to go on about it again. Suffice to say that the ability to share torrent files privately while you download them has the potential to revolutionize the way people use BitTorrent.
Version 0.70 is now live on our website, which we’ve completely redone to make it more attractive and easier to navigate. There’s a great article about the new version on internetnews.com. It’s gotten a tiny bit of Digg love in the past couple of hours, so if you’re a Digg member as well as a Peer Pressure reader, why not take a minute to digg it?
There’s been some discussion on mozilla.dev.platform about whether that newsgroup should be used for newbie questions and other platform user support issues. Some platform developers are understandably concerned that this type of traffic will obscure internal communication.
We set up Mozpad exactly for application developers using the Mozilla platform, and we have a newsgroup (mozilla.community.mozpad) which could be used for this purpose. Personally I’d be thrilled to see this happen since it would be a significant contribution to the community. The main issue is that there aren’t nearly as many people subscribed to m.c.mozpad (I’m guessing) so the chance of getting an intelligent answer is not as high.
Gavin Sharp suggested to me that mozilla.development.extensions would be the right place for questions about using the platform. Gavin’s proposal is certainly sensible, particularly since it apparently corresponds to the status quo. But I still think that the “extensions” name is potentially confusing to newcomers, that the target audiences don’t overlap completely and that there would be value in a group specifically devoted to users of XULRunner and WebRunner.
Whatever the case might be, don’t hesitate to point people to m.c.mozpad if they have platform questions, even if this isn’t considered to be the “official” destination.
At work I listen to music almost constantly, for reasons I’m sure anyone who shares an office with a Frenchman will intuitively grasp. And I’ve been annoyed by every approach I’ve tried to plugging in my headphones. For ages I used a long extension cord, which was constantly falling off my desk and dragging my head with it. Since I got my Mac Book Pro I’ve been plugging my iPod headphones into it, but the cord is so short that my head movement is severely restricted.
So I decided to get some wireless headphones. Cursory research revealed that there isn’t any way to use normal stereo bluetooth headphones with a Mac and get reasonable sound quality (without using a separate bluetooth dongle, which is one more fiddly little gadget to lose or forget while I’m traveling). This requires a standard called A2DP that (amazingly) is not supported in Mac OS X Tiger. (I guess it will be in Leopard.) Luckily I discovered a program called a2dpcast by Tim Hewett which lets you stream via A2DP. I’m using the brand new version which creates a new audio output source called Stereo Bluetooth Headset right in the audio preferences (scroll to the end of the comments in the provided link for installation info). It’s working flawlessly for me so far.
Thanks, Tim!
Shhhhhhhh!
We wanted to keep our BitTorrent implementation as simple as possible, so we’ve avoided a long list of obscure options in our preferences dialog. At the same time, we know that power users like to pimp their software. (In fact most of us are power users here at AllPeers and we like to pimp our software.) So we’ve implemented a growing list of “hidden” options that you can modify in about:config. The current list is available on our developer site.
Note that this is a living page and subject to change at any time. I’m sure that we’ll be adding many more options in the future, and that some of these will turn out to be so important that they’ll float up into the user interface at some point.
TechCrunch has a write-up about our upcoming 0.70 “Social BitTorrent” release, of which we’re giving their readers a sneak preview. The release includes a complete BitTorrent client inside Firefox. This is plenty cool in its own right. Just click on a torrent file inside Firefox and it starts to download. There are some experimental BT clients for Firefox, and there’s FoxTorrent, which provides an interface inside Firefox for their external client. But I would venture to say this is the first fully functional client running inside Firefox. Big news indeed. And of course it’s all open source.
Even more exciting, from my perspective, is our “Social BitTorrent” functionality. This is what happens when you meld our existing private P2P network with standard BitTorrent. When you start downloading a torrent, you can share the whole torrent or individual files it contains with other AllPeers users. When they start to download, our BitTorrent support kicks in, so they are downloading from you and the swarm simultaneously. They therefore get twice the download speed, or a fail-safe backup if the person who shared it is offline (in which case the file still comes from the swarm) or the torrent is unavailable. As far as I know, this is a first-of-its-kind feature and adds a whole new social dimension to BitTorrent.
BitTorrent is rapidly becoming the de facto standard for distributing large files on the internet, but it’s still far too technical for most users. We hope our Social BitTorrent release will help to broaden its reach to less tech-savvy types.
Mark Finkle posted an entry on the Mozilla wiki proposing a Mozilla Developer Day in Prague in the November timeframe along the lines of the one that took place in Paris in June. Reviews for the Paris day were glowing, but I know that a lot of people couldn’t make it and that others were left wanting more. If we can drum up enough interest, I’d also like to combine the Developer Day with a Mozpad face-to-face meeting. If there’s a chance you might attend, please sign up on the wiki so we can see whether the interest level is high enough to move to the next phase of planning.
In a comment here on Peer Pressure, Al Billings asks: “Can I please have AllPeers nightlies that work in Firefox trunk builds? Pretty please? :-)” I’d like to claim that we took immediate action to address Al’s request, but actually I filed a bug for this a couple of weeks ago. I won’t hide the fact that I’d love to see more members of the Mozilla development community using AllPeers, and I know one of the main hindrances is that so many people are using trunk builds. Hopefully we’ll having something running on the trunk in the next month or so.
