The response has been overwhelmingly positive. I've known for some time now that we've got a winner on our hands, because every single person we've shown it to was absolutely blown away. But I was still surprised at all the great questions, responses, and users salivating over it. I'm very proud to be a part of this, and can't wait to put it into your hands.

I've only heard one negative thing: we're pulling resources away from our existing products. Here's why that isn't true.

I created Feedback in that time. Of course, the decision to create a new system was not mine, but I had the skills and the time. Shortly after that was done, Geoff challenged me to prototype the ability to use REAL Studio to produce a web application. It all continued from there.

I was not working on the IDE, the language, or the framework when this was started. Sure, I've had some support from the other engineers - maybe a total of a day or two of their time. That's not much. In fact, I've already added a lot to the IDE - such as the new layout editor - fixed bugs, etc.

Of course, it could be argued that my time could be added 100% to the existing product. That's a valid point, but I believe we're making the best move for the company overall.

But then something bad happened. My 3GS went through the wash. Knowing the next model was coming, and a new 3GS would be expensive without a subsidy, I downgraded back to the first gen.

I've found myself in a predicament though. My iPhone is giving me more problems by the day. The battery cannot last a full day (and lasts only about half an hour if I play any games on it), I have "No Service" around the end of the day (a restart solves that), and now it takes about 30 seconds to place a call. Not to mention it is unbelievably slow, especially when compared to my wife's iPhone 4.

I need to replace this beast. I'm torn between waiting for the white model, or purchasing a black one. I greatly prefer the white, and I know if I purchase a black, the white will become available shortly after. It always works that way. But it won't be soon enough to return the black.

So I have a favor to ask. If anybody is upgrading from a 3GS to a 4 that would be willing to donate their phone, please drop me a line. I'll return it to you once I get my white model if you prefer.

It's a long shot, sure. But it certainly can't hurt to put the request out there.

This is nothing new. What is new is Steam on Mac. With its recent release, this argument has been revived. Again. I'd like to take a second to point out a simple fact:

PCs suck at games too!

Here's the key fact. A PC you buy off the shelf is no better at playing Portal than a Mac is. Both standard Macs and PCs include low-power discrete video cards, or run on integrated cards alone. This is nothing new! If you want to play games on a PC, you put in a powerful video card. If you want to play games on a Mac, you put in a powerful video card.

The problem is that Macs don't have the expansion options that PCs do. PC components almost always adhere to similar standards, so parts are interchangeable. Nearly every PC has at least one PCIe slot suitable for a video card. Macs don't.

So for the record: Macs suck at gaming about as much as PCs do. But you can upgrade the PC, making it suitable for gaming.

Oh, and I'm a PC gamer. Screw the Xbox, my PC can run circles around it. I'm primarily a Mac user though.

Microsoft announced yesterday that Internet Explorer 9 will support only H.264 video in the HTML5 video tag.

All of the sudden, H.264 looks like it'll win the war. Microsoft doesn't traditionally pick the winning technology (if you need an example, Microsoft sided with HD-DVD years ago) but in this case, they're siding with Apple who usually does win technology wars.

That means there is no "one format to rule them all."

As it stands today, you can use H.264 natively on Safari+Chrome and play that same H.264 file using a Flash player on Firefox+Opera+IE. It is a little extra work, but it is acceptable. Microsoft supporting H.264 means that you can use the same technique, but your video will play natively in Internet Explorer.

This is significant, because now the largest names in the industry are supporting a single format. Firefox and Opera will see significant pressure to adopt H.264. When that happens, Flash will become irrelevant.

The most common use of Flash right now is to deliver video. Video on the web is mess, and Flash makes it easy. But it has problems, as I outlined in my last entry. When web developers can support native video on all platforms - even iPhone OS - I guarantee they will abandon Flash as soon as possible. Developers don't enjoy using Flash to deliver video, they just do it because it is necessary.

Flash is also very popular for advertisements. But if users don't need to have Flash enabled to play video any more, how many do you think will block it? Many. And ads won't play on the iPhone at all. Do you think advertisers will keep supporting it? Not likely.

I predict Microsoft's announcement will really hurt Flash in the long run. It will put Flash back to where it around the Flash 4/5 era. Flash has its uses, it won't go away completely, but it'll certainly get knocked down a few pegs.

Apple is instead pushing for rich content powered by HTML5. HTML5 is a remarkable step forward for the web, although as usual, Internet Explorer isn't keeping pace with the rest of the industry. Most of the things developers are using Flash for can be done with HTML5 instead, but without browser plugins.

When it was new, Flash was fun and exciting. We knew it was unoptimized, but we expected that to be fixed. We said "hey, this is a great first start, it should have nowhere to go but up." And it did. It grew wildly, but not because it was good. Flash was never properly optimized, with its developers assuming more powerful computers would offset their laziness.

Playing video on the web is mess. You need to send a file to a particular browser plugin, but you don't know if the plugin exists on the user's computer. There was no sure-fire way to play video. Then Flash added support for video playback, and everybody jumped on board. It was an easy way to author video that would play on nearly any device without worrying about the details. Sure, it has the worst playback controls available, the quality generally sucks, and it eats up all a computer's resources - but it was easy for web developers.

Flash still isn't optimized. It still destroys batteries. For good reason, Apple has kept it off of their mobile devices. They've bet on HTML5, which has a new video tag allowing the browser to properly decide what to do, rather than rely on the website to declare the plugin to handle the video.

At first glance, this seems like the right move. Until you look at the HTML5 video spec.

Apple and Google are going with H.264 encoded video. Mozilla and Opera are going with Ogg. Chrome supports both, and is the most complete as usual. Internet Explorer says "Eff You" to the world, and doesn't support anything natively.

So developers still must encode video twice. HTML5 was suppose to make developers lives easier, and the brains behind it completely screwed the pooch on this one.

Now, Apple may still "win" though. Because since iPhone OS does not support Flash, developers must encode twice, or leave iPhone in the cold. If you've got to encode twice, you might as well encode twice for HTML5 capability and at least give users of real browsers (as in, not IE) their battery life back. For IE users, Flash can play H.264 video, so developers can just have a Flash player run the files they'll already use for Apple software.

But wait, there's more! H.264 comes with hefty licensing fees. Oh, balls. Well, back to drawing board. Flash, you may suck big ones, but you're still simpler than this HTML5 mess we've got ourselves into.

1. The iPad is not a fit-in-your-pocket mobile device. You'll still need your phone. In fact, you still might want your iPhone. Being able to pull out your iPhone to look up quick contact or contact information is very useful in the middle of a conversation. Having to dig your iPad out of your bag for something so trivial isn't ideal.
2. If you're reading my blog, the iPad is not your full-time computer. The iPad fills the market the MacBook Air was trying to fill, but failed to. It is a secondary computer to a more powerful full-time computer. You'll still want your main computer to do "real" work. Sure, the iPad will cover most work-related tasks, but software development, graphic design, etc. just won't be covered.
3. On the other hand, if you are one of the people Google Chrome OS is targeting then maybe the iPad can be your full time computer. You can use a physical keyboard for heavy typing, work with e-mail and office files, as well as just about anything else the average user would need.

Also, digital download services bother me, because I don't physically have a copy of the product. When I want to install a game, I really don't want to wait hours to download it.

I recently started playing Left 4 Dead 2, which requires Steam as well. This time around, however, my impression of it has completely changed. The reason behind the change is Left 4 Dead 2 makes excellent use of Steam and the community features. It is easily compared to Xbox Live, but less awful. Here's a few cool features:

1. Steam will automatically download updates for Steam-powered games.
2. Steam Cloud keeps my settings synced between computers.
3. I can make physical backups of the games I download.
4. Steam sells a lot more than just Valve games. In fact, most new games are available on Steam.
5. Valve Anti-Cheat is better than PunkBuster.
6. By pressing shift-tab, I can bring up an overlay which includes friend information, and even a web browser. I can do this in any game, even non-steam games. The ability to bring up a browser in-game is very handy, especially in games such as Borderlands.

I could keep going. Overall, I think Steam is pretty cool.

First the good news. IE9 brings significant improvements to JavaScript performance. This is fantastic since IE8 cannot keep up. I've actually disabled some features on the REAL web site when using Internet Explorer because it just is not fast enough.

The bad news is that Microsoft is continuing to threaten standards. Rather than supporting the proposed cross-platform WebGL, Microsoft intends to support their own Windows-only Direct2D. Once again, developers will need to choose which side they're on. It is nothing new either. In the IE6 days, developers needed to choose to do things right and support everything except IE6, or do them simple and wrong to support IE6. This will be even worse, because a developer looking to do 3D will have no choice than two write two sets of code, or choose to support only IE9 or standards browsers.

Does it surprise me? Yes and no. It surprises me because it seemed as if Microsoft was interested in making a good browser. It does not surprise me because Microsoft gets everything else wrong, so why would this have been different.

OpenSearch Support
If you use any OpenSearch enabled browser, such as Firefox or Internet Explorer, you can visit http://feedback.realsoftware.com/ and your search field will light up with the ability to search our Feedback database. If you add it as a permanent search provider, you'll be able to search Feedback from your browser. The results will still launch Feedback and display the results there, but it can be handy if you are on our forums or read the mailing lists using a webmail app.

iSeek Site
For the few and far between users of iSeek, I've prepared this search site that will allow you to search Feedback from your menubar.

Alternate Theme
Feedback uses three different themes to render its content. On the Mac, either Aqua or Graphite is used according to the user's system preferences, and on Windows & Linux, a more neutral theme is used. Currently, only the action bar is rendered differently, but that could change in the future.

You're not completely confined by your OS though. If you want to use the neutral theme on Mac, fire up terminal and type

defaults write com.realsoftware.feedback "Use Neutral Color Scheme" -bool YES

And reset it by using the same command, but replace YES for NO. On Windows and Linux, it's a little trickier. On Windows, you need to edit the registry. The path is HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\REALSoftware\Feedback and add a value for "Use Neutral Color Scheme" = 0 to enable Aqua.

Linux uses an XML file in ~/.realsoftware/Feedback/Preferences.xml which you can add a key to:

<element><key>Use Neutral Color Scheme</key><value type="8">0</value></element>

I've been working on this system for a long time, since about mid-March if I recall correctly. It's so nice to finally see it live. I'm so proud to have contributed this to REAL Software, since it is such a crucial part of the company. Sure, I've worked on critical parts of the company for about a year now (new website backend, new servers, new order system), but there is something special about this. That other stuff is all very important, probably more than the feedback system, but this is an app that our customers will use frequently.

We've already been getting many compliments about the design of the app, and I do plan to do a post-mortem type article on the company blog. It does surprise me though, because although I find the UI simple, it's certainly not ground-breaking in my opinion. Or I just have high standards.

Early in the development process, we discussed a very critical choice: web-based or desktop-based. The discussion was heavily weighted towards web-based, and I could certainly do it, but I saw an opportunity to do something special. By creating a desktop app, it could be designed to show-off some of the abilities of REALbasic (not that the IDE does not already do that) and it allows us an unprecedented level of integration with our products and our user's systems.

Since it was being developed on the desktop, the argument was made that this should be completely integrated into REALbasic. While an interesting thought, that posed a couple problems:

1. If REALbasic crashes, that system has a lot of functionality that needs to work inside an application that has already had an exception and locked up. There is a lot of potential for lost information there.
2. If there is a minor bug in the feedback system, it could not be fixed until the next release of REALbasic. That's a significant problem for a new system. Keeping it separate allows us to push updates (yes, it has an auto-update system) to our users without them downloading the entire REALbasic package.
3. What about our other products? Should a customer really be expected to launch REALbasic just to report a bug about our website or REAL Server? No.

So development on the app began from the ground up. Code was developed to handle preferences correctly on each platform, open source projects were utilized to provide animation, client-to-server communication and CoreFoundation support, and the source list and automatic updates were provided by code I had laying around and needed a good testing route. Right off the bat, many of the core systems of the application were falling into place.

Another big source of debate is the app's client-to-server communication method. This app does not speak to our database directly. An abstraction layer was implemented on the server to provide security and ease development. During the beta process, many bugs were fixed simply by updating server-side code. Using a straight SQL connection could not have done that. If we needed to move databases, upgrade servers, etc then we would need to issue an update to app. Instead, we could switch the database backend entirely without the app ever complaining. There's no database login details in the app, nor does it even know where the database is. That provides a significant amount of security. This abstraction layer also allows the activity viewer to work. You'll notice that the app almost never locks up or appears unresponsive. That's another thing an SQL connection could not have provided. There is still some debate that the app should be speaking directly to our REAL Server, but I stand by my position that this abstraction layer is not only very useful, but very important.

We quickly realized people would be asking for some of this functionality in REALbasic. It'll happen. I don't know when, and I don't know what, but we are aware of some gaps in the REALbasic framework that the code from this app can fill.

We have big plans for this tool. Remember, this is the 1.0.0 release. There is plenty of room to grow. Of course, I can't say what ideas are floating around, but I will say it will keep evolving.

Lastly, although I did all the development work on the app, the entire team provided lots useful feedback, suggestions, requirements, etc. I can't take all the credit.

HIToolbar was a challenge because I was fairly new to declares, and the model required by the OS does not fit with REALbasic's method of doing things at all (this very point has caused some lengthy discussions about the REALbasic toolbar as well).

I've taken on another challenge: OSCAR. OSCAR is the protocol used by AIM and ICQ, so the module will naturally allow the developer to quickly build an AIM client like iChat, Adium, or Pidgin. I've already got it logging in and retrieving the user's buddy list.

While I considered proposing to have the code built into REALbasic, I think it's just far too much of a niche to warrant building into the framework. Its seriously a niche market, I might get one or two developers using it at best. But I'm not doing it because there is a need in the market, I'm doing it because it is difficult.

But the honeymoon is over.

Enter Disney, a company which lost its touch many years ago. Aside from a couple lucky hits, Disney produces nothing but utter trash. Disney is only kept alive by it's forced-popular teen "sensations" and most Pixar movies. They produce a large handful of movies each year, most of which receive some of the worst reviews possible.

Future "Marvel" movies will likely follow a simple formula: Marvel's compelling hero + Disney's hefty dose of racism + dull screenplay with no real conflict = more Disney. Just like Microsoft's acquisition of Bungie and Rare, Disney will turn Marvel's intellectual property into an abomination.

Luckily, Iron Man 2 is already deep into production, so we'll likely get that one mostly unaltered. But Wolverine 2, Magneto, Deadpool, Green Lantern, Captain America, and Avengers... too bad. Though in all honesty, who on Earth cares about Green Lantern and Captain America?

Voice Control is seriously sub-par. Dialing works well, but playing music never works. I say "play music by Chemical Brothers" it repeats "playing music by York" - wtf? I have never got it to play the music I've asked for.

Launching apps and generally using the phone is noticeably faster. Compass does not seem very precise. The camera is outstanding. Overall, I'm impressed.

Now for the bad. We were giving my original iPhone to my wife until we can swing the cash to get her a 3GS as well. She is upgrading from a very nice Sony Ericsson S500i. I was under the impression this would require AT&T assistance. Upon bringing it in, we were told to just plug it into iTunes like I did on launch day.

We did that. After wiping it, it presented her with the typical setup steps. After all was done, it retained my phone number (not hers) and never provisioned the SIM card. In fact, her phone was still usable. That's when I realized it never asked us for that info. Hmmm....

Upon looking around online, the solution is to put her SIM in the iPhone. Odd, I was [incorrectly] under the impression the iPhone used specially shaped SIM cards to prevent this sort of thing. Upon doing so, I wiped it again and we got the screens necessary to add the data plan and transfer her number. Fantastic.

Her voicemail didn't work though. We hit the button, it calls some line and claims she don't have a voicemail box. After struggling for a while, I found an AT&T support article which says to hold 1 on the keypad until voicemail is called, setup a password and greeting, then hang up. In a few moments, a dialog is presented asking for that password. After all this, visual voicemail was working.

Lastly, her contacts got double-synced. One from her computer and one from MobileMe. Despite turning them both off, nothing would clear her contacts from the phone. The solution here is to remove the MobileMe account, then re-add it. Upon doing so, it'll ask if you want to merge the data already in the phone with the data on MobileMe. Choose yes, and it'll correctly nuke the extra records. Disable the contacts syncing in iTunes as well, unless you want the same thing to happen again. Why on Earth does iTunes now allow you to do this?

Overall, my upgrade was smooth. Her upgrade was 4 hours of frustration.