Products are not platforms by default

In case you've missed great piece by Ben Thompson written after Apple's presentation.

Apps are the key to success of computing devices and they eventually gain control over the direction of development of the entire ecosystem. And that direction may not be the brightest.

Note carefully the apps that succeed on the iPhone in particular: either the apps are ad-supported (including the social networks that dominate usage) or they are a specific type of game that utilizes in-app purchasing to sell consumables to a relatively small number of digital whales.

Also, great summary of what developers need from the marketplace to make the platform shine with their apps:

• Ability to charge fair price
• Ability to generate recurring revenue
• Ability to interact with users

Must read if you have anything to do with apps.

Automatic download of Windows 10 installation files

Last week some started bashing Microsoft for pre-downloading Windows 10 installation files and thus taking up to as much as 6Gb of precious disk space.

There are two main problems cited:

• small hard drives

For someone using a 2-in-1 with 32GB of flash memory, that's a hefty chunk of their storage being clogged up with an OS that they might not want yet, if at all.

• metered Internet connections

"I know of two instances where people on metered connections went over their data cap for August because of this unwanted download."

Microsoft responded with a statement saying that

For individuals who have chosen to receive automatic updates through Windows Update, we help upgradable devices get ready for Windows 10 by downloading the files they’ll need if they decide to upgrade. When the upgrade is ready, the customer will be prompted to install Windows 10 on the device.

With that, let's stop looking for reasons for a rant and consider this from product and engineering perspective. It would not be a huge stretch to say that main driving forces there are:

• new version is superior to older releases: better UI, improved performance, lots of new features. So, the faster we can get it to more users the better
• new version it technologically more advanced: better hardware compatibility, improved security, lots of new system infrastructure for the developers to build upon. Again, the more users will have it the lower will be the support cost and the more resources can be allocated for new features

With that discussion now moves to the question of "how?" How to make the upgrade smooth and fast for most of the users.

If one has automatic download of Windows Updates enabled, pre-downloading the installation files does seem such a bad idea. Users already have part of their hard drive used by all the patches and service packs. If they did not turn this of by this time it have not bothered them. Why not save them from waiting for the update to be ready for installation, when they decide to do so?

But what if I have a device with as small as 32Gb disk drive. Well, we all can imagine what a disaster can happen when 15% (6Gb out of 32Gb) of already scarce disk space goes into a black hole. Now, let's put our engineering hat on.

I can imagine myself being a developer on Windows Update team. It would never occur to me that whenever new update becomes available I can go off use up all the available disk space for its files. I could not have foreseen this for the first release. But through all the years of Windows Update development, we, as a team, would have run into situations like this and do something smart about it.

Another thing, is that users of computers with small hard drives would try to do everything to get as much of the disk space for themselves as possible. And turning of automatic download of updates is one of the important steps to do so. Therefore, chances are these devices where not affected by this problem at all.

Same line of thinking goes for data caps on Internet connections. If you have one f those, you likely have automatic download of updates off.

What makes a great headline and a great theoretical discussion is not always a perfect match for reality.

Instagram: Open to Businesses

Thousands of businesses around the world already use Instagram as their shop window, and we’re making it easier for them to do more on the platform, from brand to direct response ads.

It's interesting that companies and products, which started and thrived on mass consumer market, eventually turn to businesses instead of consumers to turn themsleves into businesses.

OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice

Unpleasant, but true conclusion in Christian Schaller's open letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team:

So dear Apache developers, for the sake of open source and free software, please recommend people to go and download LibreOffice, the free office suite that is being actively maintained and developed and which has the best chance of giving them a great experience using free software. OpenOffice is an important part of open source history, but that is also what it is at this point in time.

At rollApp we provide access to both Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice. Both suites get more or less the same placement on our site and in the app stores, where we make them available. With all that OpenOffice applications are used almost 3 times more often than LibreOffice – that's a huge power of the brand.

In our experience LibreOffice provides greater compatibility with Microsoft Office file format and we use it as a default for opening office files on rollMyFile

PS LibreOffice development is indeed wa-a-ay more active than OpenOffice:

In the last 30 days, @libreoffice has had 4,438 commits by 106 authors compared to 8 commits by 4 authors on @ApacheOO (Source: github)

— John T. Haller (@JohnTHaller) August 18, 2015

Get Windows 7 Start menu in Windows 10

Apparently, I'm not the only one, who does not exactly like the new Start menu. There is already a tool to get Windows 7 style Start menu back.

As The Verge puts it:

If you're not a fan of Live Tiles then this might be the Start menu you're looking for. It's literally identical to Windows 7, complete with the search interface and all programs view.

Twitter as a messenger

DMs can now be longer than 140 characters:

If you’ve checked your Direct Messages today, you may have noticed that something’s missing: the limitation of 140 characters. You can now chat on (and on) in a single Direct Message, and likely still have some characters left over.

I hope that abysmal DM user experience, when you have to click a button and enter a message in a modal window, will be improved. I will take this as a promise:

We’ll begin rolling out this change today across our Android and iOS apps, on twitter.com, TweetDeck, and Twitter for Mac.

Will be interesting to see if 3rd-party apps would be updated sooner than Twitter's official clients.

Windows 10 Impressions – Start Menu

It is somewhat hard to make an impression about a new operating system without using it full-time, but I'll try.

First of all, I have to say that the system became snappier. At the very least, it feels like after I started the computer I was able to get to the Windows Explorer with the list of my files. I don't know what's happened: smarter startup sequence, less services launched during OS booting or something else, but it does the trick. With Windows 7 I many times decided not to even power on the machine to do something recalling how long it would take to get to the point, when I can start actually doing my thing.

Over the past week I've been using the laptop with all new and shiny Windows 10 as a secondary machine for some background tasks. This does not give me much data to discourse on the qualities of the OS, but there is one thing one cannot miss, when using Windows. And that is the Start menu.

While many people are happy it is back, it looks to me I'm not going to use it much. The main reason: I do not see how it is going to help me with what I would previously do via the Start menu.

New and shiny tiles. While I understand why Microsoft put them all there – to promote their built-in apps, it makes little sense to users like me, who have their apps and workflow already setup. Why would I want to see their new Mail instead of the Outlook, which is already fully configured?

Bright, all blue tiles. The problem is they all indeed are blue (at least those on the first screen), they all look the same and to figure out what is where I have to pay too much attention. It can be possible to get used to it, but it hardly will be completely comfortable ever after long use.

Shiny, flashing tiles. Twitter, feature promotion, Store, Candy Crush – all of that grabs your attention, when you open the Start menu. But how often to you click Start to check what Kim Kardashian is up for, see what's trending on the App Store or say "To hell with work! Let's play Candy Crush!" The Start menu aimed at (I supposed) helping you do your stuff now goes far enough to distract you from that.

Apps list (Start > All apps) comparing to Windows 7 also changed for the worse. All app icons appear on the same blue tiles making them almost indistinguishable. These tiles are fairly large making fewer apps appearing in the list at the same time. But the worst thing, I think, is that the list of apps is sorted alphabetically. I've seen that on fullscreen tiled apps list in Windows 8 and did not like it there already. How are you supposed to find Skype under G as "Get Skype"?

When you are looking for a system browser on freshly installed Windows 10, are you supposed to check B for Browser, I for the Internet (analogous to Mail, Photos, etc.), E for Edge or M for Microsoft Edge?

Alphabetic sorting works great for your contacts, because contacts are regular – everyone has first name and last name. App names are anything but regular and alphabet sorting make very little sense there. This hardly helps the Start menu serve its purpose.

After all, Start > Settings seems to be only useful and useable option in the entire Start menu.

VPaint – 2D vector animation package

VPaint is an experimental vector graphics and, now as of version 1.5, animation editor based on the Vector Animation Complex. The new version was presented on SIGGRAPH 2015 currently going on in Los Angeles.

Materials from this year's conference are not available yet. In the meantime, you can check out presentation from SIGGRAPH 2014, where the ideas behind VPaint 1.0, were presented.

VPaint 1.5 will soon be available on rollApp for you to try.

Platforms and apps innovation

Interesting and toughtful discussion on the latest Accidental Tech Podcast of the prospects of new innovative apps being developed for a platform, when platform "hackability" is limited. Highly recommended.

On the way to Windows 10. Day 6, the last day

This is day 6 of my way from Windows 7 to Windows 10. Well, technically that's more like the fourth day. Last two days were weekend days and I did not try to move the setup process forward. However, since I was waiting for the update to come through Windows Update, it is important that day 6 from the time I embarked on this update route and, actually, day 7 since the new version was released.

When I double-quadruple-checked the Windows Update in the morning, nothing changed: all up-to-date, no recommended updates selected. I decided to upgrade to Windows 10 without waiting in line. And so it begins:

After some downloading and waiting we are finally ready to install

Somehow the idea that you may not want to keep your files during the upgrade seems weird:

Now the setup is on full autopilot:

After the first reboot the setup tool pressingly asks to "sit back and relax". The difference between following photos is about 40 minutes.

Now some 4.5 hours later we are on the last mile. Login and check settings.

On the settings screens be careful to make sure you checked all the settings. Sometimes they are hidden behind the scroll in completely obscure way.

After all the configuration, less than 5 hours of install my way to Windows 10 has finally ended. I will never know how long it would take to get the upgrade through Windows Update, but at least I have the new system now.