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iPad was revolutionnary … 2 years ago. We all marvelled about that piece of technology letting us consume digital media in a whole new different way.

2 generations later, I’m still in love with my iPad, love to read RSS on it or play chess… but I believe the iPad will never go beyond the media consumption paradigm. iOS which was one of its strength thanks to its ease-of-use is proving way too limiting to enable any actual work to be done on that device – which is a shame since this device is – at least in its latest revision – a computing monster.

In the meantime, Windows 8 is bridging the gap between tablets and computers at fast pace.

As you may know I can’t work with windows as it lacks a decent shell and I still don’t see why you need to use a mouse to do actions that require the precision of a command-line.

And yet – Windows 8 and the new generation of tablets it’s helping build are truly a leap forward from the standard set by Apple. One example is the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga, rocking a i7 processor and 13″ 1600×900 IPS display, it’s both an ultrabook and a (big) tablet.

lenovo ideapad yoga

Featuring both a touch interface, with an elegant design (I kinda like the Metro UI/UX as I grew kinda tired of Apple’s skeuomorph thing) as well as en environment where productivity apps can work decently – I love being able to use Visual Studio 11 on a “tablet”, coming with or without a keyboard, it opens up this platform to the full class of usages that people may imagine for them – lifting away the media consumption-only limitation. 

windows 8 on samsung slate review 13

Moreover, it comes with an unusual openness (coming from Microsoft) to web standards as HTML5 apps are natively supported by the platform on an equal level as native c++/c# apps.

To me this evolution means only one thing : the time of Apple is coming to an end unless they manage to give a decent openness to their system and stop putting walls everywhere (Moutain Lion is a major step backward from that prospective).

Customer Service has evolved a lot on the Internet over the last 5 years. The likes of Zappos have set a new standard over how users/customers (let’s call them users for more simplicity) expect to be interacting with an online service.At Diveboard we implemented 3 strategies over how we want to be interacting with our users :

• Open various communication channels for users to give feedback : mostly through our Facebook page or Uservoice ideabox and make sure to mark our presence there and interact actively with the users
• Process help tickets in less than 24hrs. Most of the time we answer them in less than an hour ensuring speedy issue solving
• Engage proactively with a customer upon signs that he may be experiencing troubles. This is currently done manually

Although Pascal had doubts over the last point, after a year of proactively engaging our users one thing is sure : they all LOVE it ! This has helped to solve number of issues before having to get the user through the additional hassle of opening a support ticket.

This kind of behavior has become somewhat the new standard for online services, and anything below that standard now feels unprofessional. That was my feeling for instance this week with hobbyking’s customer service. A poor zendesk interface, an average time of response of 3 days, the guy responding did not have access to my account !?!? thus requiring from me extra work to get support…. which made them basically loose me as a customer.

As with the building of your web service, the customer service is one of the most crucial side and must never be overlooked. It’s a big part of the soul of the entire system, and just as you focus on the customer when building your service you should keep him at the center throughout the whole flow… which does include customer service and keep on trying to make his life easier especially when he’s in trouble.

I got the opportunity to play with a WP7.5 phone a few days ago, and was pretty amazed by its progress.

‘ve been a believer since day one, and against all odds. I really think Microsoft is a real and serious player in the mobile OS war (as opposed to Palm, which despite the fact that they made a nice OS did not have the money to support it).

After playing with the latest 7.5 release, and notably with the Spotify app, I think it’s safe to say that WP7.5 is finally ready for prime time. Backgrounding works, the UI is smooth and responsive… Although the slide UI is a bit of a pain from a developer point of view (you have to rebuild/rethink your apps to match that experience) and the app store is still a bit empty because of that, I’m sure frameworks such as jquery mobile will soon support those kind of transitions.
Moreover I was surprised to see that finally the mobile IE is up to the task displaying html5/css3/js websites properly as their webkit couterparts already do.

I guess I’m going to give a close look at the Nokia Lumia tonight a the launch party!

Adobe has just posted on their official blog about their backing out of flash plugin on mobile. Here’s basically what they’re saying:

This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.
Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores.
These changes will allow us to increase investment in HTML5 and innovate with Flash where it can have most impact for the industry, including advanced gaming andpremium video.

Adobe has been trying really hard with Flash for mobile since almost 10 years… unsuccessfully. Since the first version on Symbian to the latest plugin on Android phones it’s become clear that the market fragmentation, the cost to port and maintain the plugin on all those platforms and the fact that the adaptation of content is not really as good as it should lead to a really small market share… definitely not wort the investment apparently ! (Especially since the iPhone will remove out of reach for Adobe).

Recently they acquired  Nitobi the editors of Phonegap. Phonegap is in my opinion the absolute best solution for creating cross-platform mobile applications nowadays – and that’s what we are using for Diveboard. It provides deep device integration while relying on the power of html5/css (and the render engine of the built-in web browsers) to ensure and easy development and port of the applications. This is definitely good enough for many applications, although it will never be as good as native, the TCO of a Phonegap mobile app is way lower than that of a native cocoa app – plus it relies on skill that web developers already have.

Kudos to Adobe for their clear-sight analysis of the situation – must have been an complicated decision internally!

This post has been on my mind for a long while, and even as I start writing it I know that this post won’t even allow me to dump a tenth of what I’ve had on my mind for a while now.

I’ve been doing or managing software projects for year now. Saw the rise of AGILE programming, saw people getting crazy about Test-Driven-Development… and yet I’ve rarely seen so much crappy software and such long development cycles in companies. Why ? Because Agile has become a method for hiding your responsibilities as a developer over a roadmap, a new way of crumpling  the whole development process where developers are empowered with everything while not given any responsibilities over the deliveries, a new way to fail project without consequencies.

AGILE is actually the less agile method I’ve ever experienced, where sprints are blind development tunnels where outside of the developers nobody can really evaluate how the project is progressing. With sprints lasting up to 2 months (I’ve seen it), and with no real ability o get anything delivered in-between, this is definitely the worst approach of all should you be a small-to-medium size company willing to deliver fast and iterate fast.

What are the real objectives for software ? In my opinion those points are a must and should always be granted

• The master branch has the current production code, and can be updated fast (after testing) should a bug be found. This is critical in my opinion : when a bug is found by a user in production : you must be able to correct it immediately ! And most of the time current methodologies just disable that from ever happening…
• No software goes to production before having been tested. An NO-UNITESTS ! Unitests are only good for testing complicated algorithms. You should focus on designing usage-based tests with scenarios following the most common user action suites. On the web, selenium is the way to go. And this is only going to enable you to limit regressions by highlighting potential side-effects of a latest code update that as a developer you may have missed.
• Deploy often. Why wait the end of a sprint to see a service update ? Some stories are fast to deliver and have limited impact on the codebase and can de done in a few hours… some require weeks of headaches… why choose your deployment speed to match the longest task development time ? Put each feature in a dedicated branch, merge them into testing when completed (for testing) and then into master for a final test run.

rsync -vrP –append filename user@server:path

and with resume that works of course….

Sounds like a classic but it’s rare enough to make me happy when it happens

Over the past few weeks, France has been in a mess regarding the policy to adopt regarding the support of start-ups. The tax privileges have been dismissed but may be on their way back (JEI), and many existing support mechanisms are being reviewed/discussed by the newly born CNN (Numeric National Counsil).That’s fine with me. But they’re not tackling one of the core subject in my opinion.

In France we have built a very scholar and elitist vision of what “Innovative” is. And it is utterly wrong. Unfortunately all the support mechanisms for start ups are built around that definition.
Innovative (n.m) = which is the outcome of ideally years of research, ideally by Ph.Ds and that may have a market application (or not)
Everyone will basically judge your project – and wether it’s innovative or not – according to this definition. For instance, Diveboard would not be innovative. Although we are creating a real-time view of the evolution of the marine species biotope by empowering scuba divers with mobile and pc tools, connecting their dive computers and crunching impressive amounts of data, it’s a social network so it’s not innovation. This is one of the reasons while I decided I won’t be spending even 1 second making a business plan or assembling a file to ask for grands and support : it would just be a waste of time.

This is the big difference between France and US and while France produces amazing tech startups that largely fails (of course and fortunately some succeed) : US focuses on market innovation. The objective is to disrupt a market, and a technology might be the tool that gives you an edge in that disruption. It’s by disrupting a market that you create opportunity, gain momentum and ultimately create a valuable business. That difference also profoundly changes the way research works in France v.s. US where in France we focus on writing papers and staying at a very theoretical level while the US researchers work around innovative use-cases and concrete real-life problems solving (MIT media lab is amazing on that regards).

As a conclusion I’d say that I don’t really expect behaviors to change, France is not really the kind of country where minds can switch to entrepreneurial and consumer oriented spirit that easily… but who knows!

Mysql2::Error: Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation '=': SELECT COUNT(*) FROM `fishes` WHERE (taxonomy_id = 13540333 AND scientific_name = 'Abyssocottus korotneffi' AND name = 'малоглазая Ñ?иÑ?околобка' )

If you get this kind of error message, calm down it’s “normal” and there’s a solution

Since Rails 3 although 100% UTF8 still uses by default the mysql gem which is NOT UTF8, you head to a big headache… the solution is simple enough though:
1) use the “mysql2″ gem
2) execute the migration script below

This was my first half-marathon ever, and while I did train a lot and regularly, I never actually took the time to try this distance before. The max I ever did in my training sessions was 15km. I did thus start the race with some level of apprehension, quite unsure of what the best way to handle the event was. I started in the 1:50:00 objective group and set my runkeeper to a 5:12 min/km objective pace.

The first 10 km where a dream, I was literally flying by all the other runners and caught up a bad 1st km (5:50) du to the slow packed start to end at an average of 5:09, ahead of my target pace. Km 10 to 15 were slightly harder though, both physically and mentally I started having some doubts and I also probably should have eaten a banana or sth at km 5 and 10. At km 15 legs felt heavy and I struggled to keep my target pace, hopefully on km 18 a glass of energy drink got me the boost I needed to finish up the race and even to sprint the last 500m, and finish up at 1:52 with a pace of 5:14, slightly behind my target pace but still quit allright.

I loved that experience, running on a new circuit with 30 000 ppl is definitely and exciting experience.