A bunch of Twitter friends and myself - Jerome Gotangco, Dean Berris, Aileen Apolo, and Migs Paraz, put together a little podcast we generically named "Pinoy Tech Podcast", which came out last weekend:
Pinoy Tech Podcast Episode 01 - Swapping Betamax Tapes
The podcast is in a mix of English and Filipino. We hope you listen to it and give us your thoughts. 
The news was both welcome and surprising: Globe Telecom clinches the official iPhone contract in the Philippines, making the Philippines one of the first few countries in Asia to have legitimate iPhone market presence.
While the iPhone has been present in the local scene since the middle of last year, no official, legal support infrastructure existed for the phone. I know a person who had to ditch his bootleg iPhone because he couldn't have the touch screen repaired.
That said a lot of Filipinos are thoroughly thrilled with the imminent entry of the iPhone. Some, however, are not enthusiastic about getting the iPhone. Reasons vary, but one former bootleg iPhone owner complains about the whole touchscreen experience vis-a-vis text messaging:
Texting? It's a nightmare. Multitouch just makes the experience worse. If you have big hands -- big fingers good luck. I miss 'feeling' the buttons, it allows my fingers to map around the pad by themselves, the iPhone doesn't let me do this. Oww yes, it also has a very confusing SMS application that works by logging the start of every conversation root, so [sometimes (especially if you're a] newbie [on the] phone) you're actually rereading your own sent text messages.
Of course, if you're a geek of the 90s, touchscreen interfaces would not be new to you. It would be just another one of those things that jumped out of Star Trek:
On the other hand, I didn't necessarily like the idea of touch screens.
I learned how to play the piano at the age of 7, and touch-type on an actual typewriter at the age of 10. The idea of tapping into screens that gave no tactile reaction to the act of tapping and touching just felt so, alien to me. The skill also proves valuable every now and then: I write this blog post without lights in the room and with the LCD dimmed all the way down since my wife and daughter are asleep, but it doesn't matter because I don't need to look at the keyboard. I know a lot of people who would kill for a backlit keyboard in situations like this.
Thus, when the TED video of Jeff Han demonstrating typing in a displayed keyboard on a multi-touch screen (which is likewise a Star Trek-memory-evoking video), my reaction was warm, but it just did not excite me as much as it did other people. I can't imagine using an input device that would require me to look at the screen or wait for a sound just to be sure that I pressed the correct button.
As ironic as it gets, there is an episode in Star Trek: Voyager wherein the crew of the starship constructed an advanced shuttlecraft, and Lt. Tom Paris, the craft's designer, decided to go with tactile controls that he could "feel":
At Paris' behest, the pilot's station features (fully functional) buttons, levers, gauges and other anachronistic elements, instead of the standard Starfleet touch-screen. [Delta Flyer, via Wikipedia]
I first experienced the intuitiveness of tactile response in cellphones as soon as I got my first GSM phone with text messaging capabilities ten years ago. I could key-in text messages into my phone without the need to look at the keys or even the screen (when the situation warrants it) simply because the tactile response of a physical key bouncing back tells me that I pressed something.
A multi-touch screen, cool and suave as it is, will effectively render ineffective the sense of touch as a means to confirm that the action of pressing a key has indeed been performed, and thus, much like Tom Paris, I prefer controls that I could actually feel.
Don't get me wrong; I am very excited to see the iPhone in the Philippine market, and am likewise excited at the possibility of being able to develop applications for it in the future. Due diligence dictates, however, that I must literally get my hands on a demo or test unit and see if I could live with texting without feeling the cellphone buttons. That will be the crux of the process of deciding on whether to get myself an iPhone, or settle for having a separate media device (an iPod Touch, perhaps?) and a cellphone that will actually let me feel its keys.
Now, if only someone would invent a multi-touch screen that sends electromagnetic pulses when keys are tapped, thereby mimicking the feel of a tactile keyboard button...
UPDATE: In the comments below, Jeff tells me of rumors that Apple licensed "haptic feedback" technology, which is precisely what I described in that last sentence. I'll be eagerly waiting for that iPhone.
One of the main points of criticism against my rather controversial, death-threat worthy posts regarding Cebu Pacific's dismal service and the involvement of software development company Navitaire was that they found my posts too negativist and tried to bully me into suggested that I criticize more constructively.
In that case, I do hope Navitaire employees, both former and current, do open their minds and keep themselves from wanting to kill me while I attempt to provide some unsolicited advice, which I hope moves towards a more "positive" and "constructive" analysis of the system at hand.
First I want to acknowledge that some of the errors, particularly, some stray footers, have been fixed and have ceased to be an unsightly annoyance, and let it be known that the fact that errors are being mitigated is something deeply appreciated.
Second, I want to clarify a bit about my background as a software developer. I have been writing software in .NET's Microsoft technologies in both Windows forms (desktop applications) and ASP.NET (browser-based/web applications) for almost five years now. I have also dabbled in some minor web design, and have been practicing quite a bit of CSS for the past few years. These technologies are (apparently) precisely what Navitaire's Sky Sales system is made of (as evidenced by the ASP.NET/C# job postings they have in Jobstreet, and the .aspx file extension of the web pages of Sky Sales).
Let it also be clear that I am quite lazy in fixing WordPress templates and do not really care if they are XHTML compliant, as one of the commenters enjoyed the Phyrric victory of pointing out in one of the posts.
Thus I am awfully familiar with the pain of having a consistent look and feel across various browsers, and various versions of those browsers in major platforms. I too dread Internet Explorer 6.0 and its freakishly difficult quirks mode of CSS rendering. I too know that what looks good in Firefox might appear in an entirely different manner when viewed on a Mac's Safari browser. It's a gargantuan task and I recognize that.
Unfortunately someone has to do it.
A friend, who works for a major online computer retail store in the US, has seven to nine virtual machines on his workstation, each running a different type of browser, just to be able to check consistency of his work in the sites he works on.
So, while it is immensely difficult to obtain a consistent look and feel and to make sure div tags don't end up all around the page, neither is it impossible, and is achievable through some considerable effort on the part of the software developer.
However, if you really, really can't make the site work on all versions of all browsers, at least inform the customers on which browsers the site would work best. JobsDB.com did this by outright locking out people from using any browser other than Internet Explorer for their site. A javascript popup informing the user that they may experience inconsistencies in user experience with the browser they are using and it is best to use this application in Browser X version Y will at least let the customers know to expect problems and ignore them. This is called the Principle of Least Astonishment.
On the other hand, I will stand by my opinion that the disambiguation between the status of payment and reservation is utterly confusing to customers and that Navitaire will be better off simplifying this system. Sure, Navitaire software developers will accuse me of "not having common sense", but the truth is probably 90% of the users who will use the system also won't have any common sense just like me. They do not know that processing foreign credit cards, for example, takes time and is one of the reasons payment should have to be confirmed. They will not understand why you can confirm the reservation but not confirm the payment when they've already provided all necessary credit card details and requirements.
Likewise, it would totally blow up on their face if their payments are still unconfirmed on the day of their flight, as what several disgruntled passengers attested in the blog comments. If Cebu Pacific and Navitaire do not see this as a catastrophic failure, then I don't know what would qualify as failure for them.
For the record, based on comments, it is the Treasury Department of Cebu Pacific that is messing up in this part -- they are the ones approving payments for all the reservations. Why it appears that the process is manual in a supposedly automated process is beyond me.
Finally, though this should come from Cebu Pacific -- it should inform users that they are undergoing system changes at the moment and they are working on it and they are sorry. A simple, sincere apology is deeply appreciated by consumers.
In the end it's all about genuine concern for customers. My pointing out errors on Navitaire's system shouldn't be a big enough deal to merit a death threat because users see those issues every single day anyway. It wasn't as if I logged in to the system specifically to find those errors. The errors I found are horrible user experiences my non-techie wife took while trying to do her everyday work as a travel agent.
A commenter told us that Cebu Pacific will be able to finish ironing out all the issues by the end of May. I wish they do finish by that time, and maybe things will be better.
From my favorite J's in the community.
This one from Jeremy Miller:
Thoughts of ditching the warm, comfortable womb of .Net for life out on the Ruby edge are coming with much less frequency. There's some good stuff right where we're at! Heck, we might even get a performant version of Ruby on the CLR in the nearish future. C# 3.0 isn't Ruby in terms of expressiveness, but it's not chopped liver either. We're still behind the curve a little bit in terms of community activity and passion, but it's getting there. I'm happier to be in the .Net world right now than I've been in a long time. I don't have to jump to Ruby to get the community I want to be in. We can just make it right here. [Jeremy Miller]
And this one, from Jeff Atwood's Twitter.
life is too short to stay at a job where you're not doing the things you want to do. Bubble 2.0 people. Exploit for your own ends. [Jeff Atwood]
It's a great time to be a dev, people!
I'm thinking of finally putting up a legit .com website for my wife's travel agency business, and as any tech-savvy guy goes I want the site that I'll make for her to have a somewhat unique interface that will make it easier for potential clients to find hotels and resorts and so on.
Of course the Google Maps API came to mind, but my initial apprehension was that you needed to know PHP to develop apps with it. That wasn't an option since I haven't touched PHP since my first job four years ago.
So it was a pleasant surprise when I found out that you can make ASP.NET apps using the Google Maps API when I saw this article.
Unfortunately that means I no longer have an excuse to not put up that website for the missus. :p
Oren Eini aka Ayende Rahien and Adi have been battling it out on their blogs about the productivity merits of software development using Microsoft and non-proprietary/non-Microsoft OSS productivity tools.
It starts with this post where Ayende states that deliberately developing code with the "average programmer" (read: only knows the basics of ASP.NET, not aware of non-Microsoft tools) in mind is "stupid," considering the productivity lost that way.
Adi replies, saying that customers don't want cutting edge stuff, stating that companies do this precisely because it's easier to find average developers. Ayende dismisses this as the result of the NIH culture. Ayende almost looks like he followed the argument up with his own reaction to Nikola Toshev's post The Microsoft Religion.
That's where the "holy war" started, where Adi presents his idea that sticking to Microsoft is a strategy, not religion, and sticking to MS stuff early on will pay dividends later. Oren replies with a resounding "so?", and Adi pushes the argument that people stick to Microsoft not because they are the best in everything, but they are a "safe" bet.
Good reads, all of these, on the merits of sticking to and going beyond Microsoft tools.
I first came across Pageflakes while browsing the ASP.NET AJAX Showcase page. The concept was simple enough: using the ASP.NET 2.0 web parts feature combined with ASP.NET AJAX, one could drag and drop new panels, called "flakes", on tabbed pages to customize a sort of personal portal/home page.
At first I thought it was perfect for me; I've been looking for a web-based RSS aggregator, and Pageflakes does the job quite well. But what made it indispensable were a host of other flakes like:
An article on this month's issue of The Escapist Magazine talks about the dire scenarios encountered when one's meatspace (real world) identity is revealed and causes them to lose their anonimity online.
Take for example, this scenario:
It began with an impassioned, 5,000-word letter on one of China's most popular Internet bulletin boards, from a husband denouncing a student he suspected of carrying on an affair with his wife.
Immediately, hundreds joined in the attack. "Let's use our keyboard and mouse in our hands as weapons," as one person wrote, "to chop out the heads of these adulterers, to pay for the sacrifice of the husband." Within days, the hundreds had grown to thousands, and then tens of thousands, with total strangers forming teams to hunt down the student's identity and address, hounding him out of his university and causing his family to barricade themselves inside their home. [International Herald Tribune]
Goes to show how China's sexually conservative culture prevails even in the internet, in light of the crackdown on Chinese sex bloggers and porn early this year.
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