Jean-Jacques Halans ‹› Afterhours

So we got to use the shiny new Jira 4 at work last week. It’s all a bit more polished, more ajaxy. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s more productive.
But with anything new, there’s always a learning curve, an adjustment in your personal workflow, and maybe in a short while I’ll be more productive, who knows. But one thing that irked me immediately was the contrast of the new screens. Text and labels are in different shades of grey, links in a blue shade. It looks like there had a fog descended over my screen, a veil, a summer’s smog. I was almost squinting.
I filed a Jira to improve contrast on our Jira version, but didn’t wait for IT to solve this.
I popped up Firebug (which Jira doesn’t like, as it shows me a warning message things may run slow), and looked under the hood. I pointed it to the grey labels and text, and changed its colours to black, the links to a darker shade of blue. I dropped this all into a Greasemonkey script, which also runs as an extension in Chrome, and all was good (at least better) again.

For your reference, this is the CSS I changed:

body { color: #000 !important;}
.property-list .name { color: #000 !important;font-weight: bold !important}
.mod-header h3 { color: #000 !important;}
ul.item-details dl dt { color: #000 !important;}
a,a:link,a:visited { text-decoration: underline !important; color:#036 !important;}
a { text-decoration: underline !important;}
dt.tt_text { color: #000 !important;}
.item-header ul.breadcrumbs a, .item-header ul.breadcrumbs a:link, .item-header ul.breadcrumbs a:visited {text-decoration: none !important}
h2#issue_header_summary a, h2#issue_header_summary a:link, h2#issue_header_summary a:visited {text-decoration: none !important}
.item-header ul.breadcrumbs li:nth-last-child(1) {font-weight: bold !important; font-size:1.1em;}
#main-nav a, #main-nav a:link, #main-nav a:visited{font-weight: bold !important; color: #fff !important;}
#main-nav li.selected a, #main-nav li.selected a:link, #main-nav li.selected a:visited, #main-nav li.dd-allocated a:hover{font-weight: bold !important; color: #036 !important;}
#main-nav li.active a, #main-nav li.active a:link, #main-nav li.active a:visited, #main-nav li.active a:hover{font-weight: bold !important; color: #036 !important;}
#createItem a, #createItem a:link, #createItem a:visited { font-weight: bold !important; color: #fff !important;}
#main-nav li.dropdown-item a, #main-nav li.dropdown-item a:link, #main-nav li.dropdown-item a:visited {color:#036 !important;}
.ops-menus a, .ops-menus a:link, .ops-menus a:visited, .ops-menus a:hover, .ops-menus a:active { text-decoration: none !important;}

It’s not perfect, but it works for me. You might find it useful too.

With Wired finally arriving on the iPad this week, and the first Australian newspaper app (The Australian) published right on time for the iPad release down under, I thought I’d do a quick overview of old world media apps I’ve been playing with.

Time Inc: is close to the original magazine, but optimized for iPad reading, with additional video and picture content. I love the full screen pictorials. A single, simple navigation system of an horizontal page scrubber with section navigation. In-app purchases (finally), but still waiting for a subscription service.

NYT Editor’s Choice: Good readability, extra photos and a bit of video, though it’s a “lite” version of what will be the real thing.

Wall Street Journal: great scan-ability, good readability, extra video and images, left to right navigation inside category, top to bottom between categories, click the article box to get the full article, section navigation. But before you can read the latest edition, you need to wait for it to download in full. When you register, you get some great subscription offers through email, like up to 60% off the regular subscription price.

The Australian: at a right price for a monthly subscription. Left to right navigation between sections, but the top navigation with drop downs is too “webby”. The biggest drawback is that the text on the section pages and article indexes is too small, both for reading and scan-ability. And the article pages are single column, which makes the text flow to wide (in landscape) to read comfortably. The text should really be in narrower columns, like in the paper edition (and NYT and WSJ apps). Feels like a rushed job, lots of room for improvement.

Financial Times: Doesn’t load the whole edition at once (“Live Edition”), only when you navigate to a section. Tab at the top to get a section scrubber (which is customizable – nice), a news + quote search box, and the option to download the full edition for offline reading, which is a nice difference to the other newspapers (most of them require you to wait for a download before you can start reading). Left to right navigates between sections, up and down navigates inside a section, tab to get into article, left to right to switch between articles. Great scan-ability and readability. Section front pages are often more than a single screen long, which means you get more preview text per article (though, yes you have to scroll down to scan a section). You get three free full articles within 30 days (else limited to first paragraph).

Popular Science: it all looks cool, but in the end the navigation is a bit un-intuitive. Swiping left to right, two finger swipes left to right, two finger swipe up, tab left and right… too steep a learning curve. In-app purchase.

Wired: best magazine so far. Great content, close to the original, but with a lot of extra media: video, voice, music (two minutes to full tracks), 3D interactive elements. Though I wish some of the pictures could be enlarged to full screen. It does result in a large download (500+MB), not helped by the included “premium” video ads. Great navigation aids (an index, horizontal scrubber, and a zoomed out overview of the magazine), remembers where you are in individual articles. Switching between portrait and landscape mode reshuffles the content brilliantly. And it’s cheaper than the imported, paper version (though in the US it’s the same price). (this guy doesn’t like it)

Zinio (also available as a desktop app): offers many popular magazines (National Geographic, Cosmo, Rolling Stone,… Mags from US, UK, NZ, AU, France,…). Magazines are partially optimized for the iPad. As in many articles the text is too small, you can often (but not for every article) switch to a text-only version of the article, which also allows you to enlarge the font. The pictures do look good, often you can zoom in by pinching for more details. There are some photo navigation features and low resolution video. You navigate through a page overview or a textual table of contents. The app is a bit buggy, but holds plenty of potential. Individual magazines as well as subscriptions are reasonably priced, but payment is through the browser (not through iTunes) with an account at Zinio, which actually gave me a nasty server error page. And when it does work, it asks for your credit card details over clear text HTTP! Please don’t!

GQ: cheap individual editions (US$2.99, for new, US$1.99 for back issues), but lots of adverts. In horizontal mode you see the magazine similarly as the paper edition (too small to read, but pinch to zoom in). Turn it into portrait, and you browse the articles through a full screen picture page, and tab it to get into the article, which is pretty nice. The article itself is split into a top photo section which can be minimized, and the article. Navigation through a horizontal scrubber or a popup index. In-app purchase.

APC: feels like a PDF magazine. Forces user to rotate for some articles. Only a page scrubber for navigation, though section front pages allow you to jump right into an article. Some articles have a slideshow but without captions. Lots of adverts and classifieds (I guess the same ones as in the printed edition).

One of the biggest drawbacks of media apps on the iPad is the fact that they all behave differently, with different user interactions. I guess this will be temporary until a common interaction language is agreed upon. We do start to see some common navigation elements, like the horizontal page scrubber. But for now, mostly no rules, a wild wild west, which is both interesting and frustrating.

PS: I’d also like a night time reading option, with white on black/grey text (like the option in Stanza and Borders), because the iPad is a wee bit too bright in a dimmed room.

It’s been over a week of spending time with the iPad, so here’s the obligatory one-week review.

Carrying it around killed my manbag/murse, I think. I didn’t notice it before. I do sometimes carry my SLR and lenses in it too so that might have contributed too. But it does fit really nicely, without any bulk, into any reasonable sized bag, though it’s weight at about 700g is considerable. But it is a joy to use, like the iPhone is. It is not however, just a big iPod Touch, it feels totally different, more capable. Quoting someone on Twitter:

“Saying the iPad is just a bigger iPod Touch, is like saying a swimming pool is just a big bathtub.”

I get through at least two days of usage, with 30+% battery charge left. So I charge every other day, though I have to wipe it clean every day… Not that I am dirty, fingerprints are just more noticeable on the big screen compared to the iPhone.

I love iBooks as an ePub book reader (mainly O’Reilly ePub books), as a bookstore, I can’t find anything I want. For me iBooks works. I don’t get eye strain or anything. It’s a lot more comfortable than reading on a regular desktop screen. And the size of the screen makes a lot more sense than my Kindle 2. GoodReader for PDFs is pretty good, though not very intuitive. It contains a lot of functionality which isn’t apparent at first.

Though would it be enough to get an iPad just to read ebooks, in stead of a Kindle DX? You do get more functionality with the iPad for about the same price, for sure. Mail is great (though it is at times slow to sync). Safari is great, just to be able to surf a bit from the couch, reading at arms length, while glancing at whatever’s on the TV. Maps is great, though buggy, as it kind of locked up on me twice, where I couldn’t zoom in anymore.

There isn’t any great Twitter app yet. I’ve tried Twittelator, TweetDeck and Twitterriffic and they all lack something. One of them I can’t even seem to click any links in tweets (or did I miss something – Edit: yeah missed that you have to turn Tweetdeck into portrait to get to click links). So I hope my favorite iPhone Twitter app, Tweetie (now owned by Twitter themselves), gets ported to the iPad soon.

The newspaper apps are not yet there I think, with much room for improvement. Magazines are experimenting and all the different interactions don’t make it any easier to read e-magazines (double swipe up here, tab there, double tab right side,…). I am interested in getting a subscription on a newspaper and some magazines (Wired, where are you?), if the price is right, not too much adverts and it offers something more than the dead tree version does. Time magazine for example, requires you to download a separate app every week, in stead of downloading a new edition inside the existing app, which is just plain silly. With this model, you can’t get subscriptions either. It is priced at US$5 which I believe is the same as the printed US version, but you do get extra video and additional pictures, but then again you can find those online at their site too. (Edit: To be fair, I just noticed on their app description that in-app purchases and subscriptions will be made available in coming months)

Lots of apps are just gimmicky. The Elements app is pretty cool (and heavy at 1.7GB), but I don’t really need a periodic table. The iWork apps are cool, but each have there own limitations (Keynote not supporting notes for example). Sketchbook Pro is a pretty cool art app, especially for the price. Scrabble (using additional iPhones/Touches) is pretty cool. And so on… But I haven’t found THE killer app yet, the one app that would make you buy an iPad just to be able to use that app. But then again it is early days. And I can’t really say there is a killer app for the iPhone either. It’s just the combination of different apps, and the ease of use.

The iPod app is a bit limited, or at least it feels that way, missing Coverflow, no iTunes LP/Extra support, and some other things I thought were different or missing.

File management is the biggest drawback. You can’t just mount it as an external disk, drop files onto it, and use those in any app. The iPad doesn’t have a system explorer app to browse its disk. So file management all happens through iTunes, and only for apps that support it. You can however use apps like AirSharing and GoodReader to wirelessly (over WiFi) transfer files, and then open these files (PDFs, Word docs, Excel docs,…) into the iWork apps (for example), in which case they get copied to those apps folder and imported into the app, where you end up with a duplicate file. Having said that, it hasn’t impacted me that much just yet, so it’s biggest drawback isn’t a biggy at all (for me).

On a side note, the optional VGA cable only works for Keynote and video (or any app that supports video out). You can’t just demo everything on the iPad through the VGA cable as you would on a laptop (Steve must have had a special build of the iPad OS), which is a bit disappointing.

It’s a lot easier to criticize the things that are wrong, as they often jump out, than it is to emphasize what is right. Because when things just work, you don’t notice that, as it should. And I believe that is the case with the iPad too. Despite these niggles, I still love it, and I’m sure it will grow on me further (though we’re still in our honeymoon period, and my wife is already a little bit jealous :).

PS: In case you’re wondering, I still wrote this post on my desktop pc, though WordPress has a decent iPad app.

When you read the blogosphere, with the introduction of iPhone OS 4 and it’s new T&C (which blocks cross compiled iPhone apps), it looks like we’re in for a next stage in the war between Apple and Adobe’s Flash. No doubt the particular clause in question is against Adobe. But why?

I went to the Adobe Refresh Roadshow event in February, where they showed off Flash CS5 and its capability to create iPhone apps. It was all very rudimentary. You couldn’t actually create an app that feels like a real iPhone app as there were no UI elements available, no common iPhone interaction,… unless you created those yourself.And as they said, it was all very early days.

What struck me immediately was the fact they did not mention XCode at all. The demo was given on OSX, so XCode could have been installed, and it could have used it to compile the iPhone app. But Adobe Creative Suite sells both on Mac and Windows, and I’m pretty sure they want to sell it on both platforms. It would be the nr 1 reason to upgrade.

So after the event, I asked one of the presenters over Twitter if there was a need for XCode and if it would also work on Windows:

I leave it to you to draw your conclusions on what Adobe is doing (or how it is doing it). I think this could be easily solved if Adobe takes out the iPhone compilation out of it’s main product, and sell it as an extension for the Mac version, which then would require XCode and would compile a Flash created XCode project, like Titanium creates and compiles an XCode project.

Shouldn’t Apple and Adobe get together and talk this out over a coffee (too)?

How wrong was I. In The Rebirth of the LP I wrote that I was expecting great things for the iTunes LP on the iPad. Well, I’ve got my iPad, and it doesn’t take the iTunes LP files. You can buy them in the iTunes store on the iPad, but they are downloaded once you go back to your desktop pc in iTunes there. Bummer.

Still, I expect this to be fixed in an update of the OS, or maybe in iPhone OS 4 for iPad later in the year…

This is the collation of last week’s interesting APWG mailthread on getting “Londoned”, when your GMail/Facebook/… account is compromised and all your contacts get a message like:

Hello!
I’m sorry I didn’t inform you about my traveling… am presently in London, United Kingdom on short vacation and as i write to you now.. its unbelievable am stuck here,got mugged at gun point on my way to the hotel and my money,credit cards,phone and other valuable things were taken off me at gun point, thanking Almighty God for save keeping my passport., i really need your urgent assistance quickly ? I JUST NEED SOME FEW HUNDREDS $$$ TO SORT OUT MY HOTEL BILLS AND i promise to refund it back to you once i get home cause i still have some cash in my account but i cant access any here right now ,already canceled all my cards immediately after the muggers took my things off me!!! still at the public internet library where am making use of the free internet access, i will forever be grateful if you can help me,Waiting to hear from you quickly cos my flight leaves in few hrs but need to sort the hotel bills and please save me from been embarrassed.

Thanks.
<your name>

Names and places change of course.

The advice given:

1. When your email account is compromised, assume all your accounts are compromised. Most often the way to get back a lost password is through your email account.
2. Try to reset as many passwords as you can PLUS reset the password reset questions. If possible give an unlikely answer (but one you can remember). If you get the option to set up your own question, use an unlikely question.
3. Get in touch with the abuse@ teams at any accounts where you know of compromise. Facebook is familiar with these scams and can undo a lot of the messages being send around.
4. Contact your close friends and family to notify them of what happened (mere acquaintances probably won’t send money), since you’d feel foolish if one was conned.
5. If the password was weak, assume it was guessed. Make sure your new password is a lot stronger (test it at this online Microsoft Password Checker).
6. But if the password was strong then it may have been stolen from somewhere else it was used; so you will need to address that. Try to use unique passwords for different services. Your Facebook password should not be the same as your email password for example.
7. If the password was strong and uniquely used, then you need to look for a keylogger somewhere it was used. Think of every machine you logged in from: at home, at work, some pc at an internet cafe? Then reset the passwords from a secure machine! Make sure your update your anti-virus, and run a virus scan (and preferably use a couple of anti-malware scanners too).
8. Time is of the essence. The scammers will try to get as many people to pay up in as short a timeframe as possible. Often they will sell your account information to specialised organisations. And they will try to move the conversation to another email account.

Google then posted an article on how they try to detect suspicious account activity and allow you to deal with it.

A follow-up message might look like:

OMG!!! l’m  so glad to hear back from you.  £950 GBP will cover all my expenses including my taxi fee to the airport, I promise to refund it to you as soon as I arrive home. You can wire it to my name  via a western union agent near you for security reasons cos the name  written below is whats on my passport and that can be a mode of identification to pick up the cash at a western union down the road here  (faster and more secured).

Here are the details you need to get it to me:

Name:<your name>
Address: 5 Irving Street, London WC2H 7AT
Country:United Kingdom.

I still have my passport so I can use it as identification get back to me with transfer details and the confirmation number # to pick up the money with my passport also scan receipt you will receive from the western union canter let me know if you are leaving to WU now.

The value is usually chosen to be below floor limits where strong identification (like a passport) is needed, and as it is sent via Western Union, the address is meaningless, as the money can be picked up at any outlet in the UK.

Hope it may help anyone who fell victim.

As tweeted earlier, I’ve managed to loose 5kg in 6 weeks. That last kilo was a bit harder, taking me two weeks, but I managed to get my first target of the year.

Next target is another 5kg, which I should be able to reach by April.

So, as a couple of people have asked, how did I do it? Fitness daily? The carrot diet? The beer diet? Shakes?
Common sense, really. I was eating warm lunch, and another warm dinner, and that really got my weight spiralling upwards. Now, dinner is salad. Mind you, still with dressing, and tasty ingredients (I’m not a rabbit after all).

Nothing much else has changed: I don’t go to fitness, I walk 20 minutes twice every day (to work), I eat foodcourt lunches (beef rendang, asian noodles, sandwiches, pasta,…), have coffee in the morning, once a week a banana bread for breakfast  (I used to have three a week, which was pretty bad), a piece of dark chocolate in the evening, a glass of wine (or two :) in the evening,…

And a royal salad for dinner, with ingredients like:

• recurring: lettuce (iceberg, or curly), tomato, cucumber, carrots, pepitas, sunflower seeds
• variation: hard cheese cubes, mozzarella, herring, avocado, mandarins, mango, apple and bacon, chicken fillet, steak or wagyu burger (yum! but red meat max once a week)…
• and a dash of dressing (balsamic, 1000 island, a dash of mayo,…)

And just by changing our dinner, I lost 5kg in 6 weeks, and it looks like (and I hope) I can still loose more, though I wonder when I’ll hit the ceiling (and I’d need to get more physical activity to loose more).

Remember the LP? I’m not really talking about the actual vinyl, but the cardboard cover it was encased by. Some artist aspired it to be a work of art, something that extended the music, in an analogue world. I remember my dad having a Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers LP with a real zipper attached to it. Some LPs would fold open. You could hold them, reading or singing along to the lyrics while listening. I used to have the New Order Blue Monday floppy disk LP, some fancy Cure LPs, Primus,…

Then the CD replaced the LP, at less than a quarter of the size. Which means the booklets shrank too. Publishers started adding extra content onto the cd itself, hybrid cds with video. Now we have mp3 downloads, with hardly any cover art. Sometimes we’d get an extra pdf booklet, which I think is pretty sad mostly. Or the web itself on the official artist’s website (if you can find it) offers additional content, videos, lyrics,…

Then Apple quietly introduced iTunes LP and iTunes Extra last year with the new iTunes 9, but only with a limited number of titles, mostly older releases, repackaged with some video, lyrics. I haven’t seen that list grow either for the last 4 months. No new releases with LP content. Then end of November ’09 Apple quietly published the TuneKit API, for publishers to developer iTunes LPs. If you look at the technology, it’s as open as it gets: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, packaged in a webarchive with .itlp extension (just rename to zip and open up). It works both on Mac and Windows iTunes, and on the Apple TV. But currently not on the iPhone or iPod touch. It is supposed to be similar to the CMX (Connected Media Experience) format supported by 4 major music companies, but they still need to deliver any actual media content (which is supposed to be the second quarter of 2010).

Up until now the submission (by music and movie publishers only) has been manual and limited. When you look at the iTunes LP page now, it says:

“Automatic, electronic submission of your iTunes LP or Extra is scheduled for the first quarter of 2010.”

Cue, the Apple iPad! Although missing from Steve’s presentation, it seems obvious that music publishers will be offering lots more iTunes LPs by the time the iPad is released (at least that’s what Apple is preparing for based on the above comment). It provides music publishers with extra revenue for music and video. And it provides Apple with another media segment to be sold to eager consumers (like me) using their hardware. Apple has control of the whole ecosystem: selling hardware, developing the format, selling the media. A hard act to follow by media companies, although at one point in time Sony was probably one of the few global companies to be able to offer a similar ecosystem of hardware, movies, music and games. But by now it may be a little too late. All they can do is try to catch up.

This also offers another great opportunity for web developers. You can actually publish your “iTunes LP” anywhere, have people download it on their iPad, which opens iTunes and shows your media/app (pure speculation at this time of course)! In time, the TuneKit API might be should be updated with a JavaScript touch API (like PastryKit?). If they don’t, you can always add it yourself! As for now I haven’t played around that much just yet. I’m not sure if it can load external content into an iTunes LP to get updated content.

Flux 2, a web development IDE for the Mac, comes with an iTunes LP and iTunes Extra template to get you started!

Of course you can do all this with a website. But the iTunes LP offers something to distribute, use offline. It might be just one more trick up your sleeve.