1. I want to decide what application to install
The current situation how Apple is handling the app store an treating it’s customers is not acceptable any more. I have bought a phone and own the hardware so I decide what kind of applications are on my device. If apple want to protect their users it’s ok for me but they have to find a possibility to support my need too. Just watch Json’s comment on this issue in his This week in Startups.

2. Download my pod casts directly on my iPhone
This is really what I was missing until the beginning. Where is the refresh button like in the iTunes to update all pod casts with the new content. I don’t understand why I have to go to the app store to click on the new episode by hand and get an message afterwards that says “Sorry file is too big and can’t be loaded over the 3G network”. What is the issue with big files? I have a 3Gb all inclusive package it’s no big deal to download 20Mb.

3. Mark positions in a pod cast
While listening to pod casts or books on your iPhone, and I am listening to much of them, there is no possibility to mark positions for later research. I am really missing that. While listening to something interesting there is often no time to write it down or search the web for further information. I don’ want to search several minutes in the audio file to find the correct position to get the information I was looking for.

4. Us it as a USB Storage device
What have I bought here? – was the first reaction when i tried to store files on the iPhone. I had an old iPod and never thought that using it as a USB storage device wouldn’t be possible. The WebDav applications are no real replacement because there is sometimes no open WI-FI network available to transfer the data.

5. Bluetooth Profiles
Ok, I really don’t get this – why transferring pictures or vCards form a other phone to the iPhone via Bluetooth is not supported? MMS was/is not available so how can data be transferd from a phone that does not have a mail client? In general there is no reason why they support so view profiles.

6. Customizable Tones
The notification from the calendar that reminds me of a new appointment is not even hearable in room where nobody speaks, not to mention to sit in a open space. I am not fan of the typical Nokia notification tone for an appointment but at least you can hear it.

7. Better Gmail Application
The current mail application on the phone is one of the best of mobile systems I have ever seen but for a Gmail user I really missing the possibility to assign several different labels to a message and the powerful Android client and the web client is not a real alternative.

8. Better Calendar
At leas for me the G1 calendar was really grate to work with. It would be so nice to have a week view like in Outlook or calendar in a wide screen view to see the my appointments of the whole week.

I know that most of the features are available in a jailbroken iPhone but why is Apple treating it’s customers to do that? Just see the phone as a platform and not as a device you have to protect.

I am really impressed by the functionality the system provides and how you can extend it. At the beginning I focused on the integration of third party systems like the publishing of photos and content to your blog and the communication back of the comments into your wave. I thought this may be also useful for our current issues with Social Networks to aggregate the content in one place but I have to admit that this may not be the best way to see wave and aggregate Social Networks.

When Google presented the system on the Google I/O conference they introduced it as “The new mail system” which was a really good teaser to get people excited about it, but it is not what I think wave really is. I wouldn’t see it as a protocol that finally supports the collaboration on content between people over organization and provider boarders. For Google, who treats mail with GMail and the Google Docs integration already as some kind of collaboration platform it may make sense to call it is as the new mail system but for others it may not. Wiki systems (e.g. Confluence) already tried to provide such platforms but the protocol to exchange the content between organizations to share just certain stuff and bring in information from other systems was still missing. This may really be a revolution within this area but may not be as easy as the introduction of SMTP back in the days of RFC’s because there are hundreds of companies and thousands of people who have their own products and opinions that need to come together to agree on such a new collaboration protocol as a standard for the industry.

I am really excited about the wave system and hope that I can play around with some of my friends in the near future to try out how this real time experience changes the way we collaborate in the future.

I really like the live messages and are following them them very often, especial at conferences e.g. the EclipseCon I visited a view days ago the medium is very useful. On the other hand I don’t have the time to follow the live messages all the day and special because I am living in Europe I miss moste of the messages in real time. This is really an issue because all clients I know are focosing on the live updates and fancy dynamic content that is updated nearly the same second the person is hitting the enter button on his keyboard and are not taking care about people who want to be able to read the content in a more ‘offline’ way.

I am looking for a interface that is more like gmail. It should of course support keyboard navigation and give me feedback about information I have already read. I have just downloaded Adobe Air (TweetDec is developed on it) and will try to prototype an application.

One of the main questions for me was how the Google Apps and my current Google Account interact or work together. I couldn’t really find good explenations about that on the net therefor I asked a friend who already ported a domain to the service. The way google is handling the stuff is still a little bit confusing to me but i will try to explain it.

1. You will have two Accounts that are complete independent from each other
2. Both of them can have a mailbox, a calender, a docs, chat and a sites account (maybe more in the future)
3. Google Apps services are independent from all other services of the same kind
4. You may configure your current Google account to log in with your Google Apps credentials (may be useful as described later

This are some major points you should consider if you want to use Google Apps. Now lets start the process.

1. Sign up for a new Google Apps Account @ http://www.google.com/a
2. Go to you ISP and add the specific domains for your services and configure the MX entries as described within the help
   Special the MX records will take a little bit longer to be active (my took more than one day)
3. Create your accounts for the domain (several possibilities you can even upload a config file for creating several accounts at once)

With thees steps (all are explained in detail in the help pages) the domain is configured but your not integrated with your old account and you have now at leas two mailboxes. If you want to hold them seperated this is ok but i wanted to integrate them therefor there are some more things to do.

1. Google Accounts allow you to collect mails from different other Accounts via pop3 download and you will even be able to send other addresses (e.g. your old @gmail.com) through the new account. You can set up them at the settings of your new mail account.
2. I wanted to move my calendar to the Apps account that special my family can see my appointments. Using SyncMyCal for several time now i just switched the sync settings from one of my clients to the new account. All Stuff was synchronized correct. On all other Clients i had to remove all entries befor updating the configuration to the new account otherwise it would have added all appointments several times. You can also export the calendar on you old account and import it on the new one if you don’t use synchronisation.
3. If you want to be able to log in with the new App accounts to all other services you are using from Google (e.g. Reader) you have to add the new app account to your google profile. The profile can be configured under https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageAccount

I took me nearly have of a day to configure all the accouts for my family correct, but now i have just one point to maintain and it is much easier to help because all are using the same interface.

1. Notes
   I think this was a feature that had to be added to the reader. Not being able to add content links to your shared items feed that is not available in form of an RSS feed you subscribed was just annoying. On the other hand there was Google Share i just found about 2 weeks ago. You can do the same there just there is an other RSS feed your consumers had to subscribe to. With FriendFeed this wouldn’t be tat big problem but at the moment aggregation services are rarely used.
   On the other hand i read some posts that in my opinion interpreted Notes wrong. Maybe the name is misleading.
2. Adding comments while Sharing
   I like the feature but once again there are several issues. First of all the content is added of the original post. I wonder what useful services like AidRSS are doing with that. On the other hand the GUI for adding messages is far to small. you can just read two lines
3. Change shared item content
   I really think this is going too far. You as creator now can not be sure that the content you publish is shared in the same way. Maybe someone is just changing one word an the whole message get an totally different meaning. You even wouldn’t find the difference if you are not reading the whole message. I suggest most of the user want to get the original content. Now i have to check every shared item if it has the original content because there is no information that it was edited by the persons who shares it.
   I hope they rethink this feature because in my opinion it just brings confusion and distrust.

If you have shared an commented or edited Item there is no relation to the original post in your reader. So you can’t see while you browse the feeds which items had been shared.

I think some of the ideas relate to one of my older postings “Meta RSS Feeds sharing“.

I don’t think so. An other thing I really don’t understand is why you have to use the @WebParam Annotation with the name Attribute if you want to see a parameter name different to ( par1, par2, …) in your WSDL. I mean who on earth likes that generic form of information where you have to search an api documentation again or in my case where i develop the services in parallel to the Process switch back to the service implementation to see if the first Parameter is the Address or the Packages? No IDE or program that uses the WSDL will be able to give you this information back. Thanks

The concept they use is very easy but if you take a closer look it fits perfect into an agile website world. The whole strategy is based on the concept of trains. Trains are going every two weeks to the website and have only a couple of seats left. Think about seats in the manner of complexity which makes sense to reduce the complexity of the deployment to a oversee able amount. Every team can decide which train they would like to catch. If they have decided to take one, they have to ensure that every required QA is done until departure. If they can’t finish their work – there will be an other train in two weeks. After the train started it’s way to the website there is an other QA done before the deployment goes life to the portal.
Deployment is done in three Phases. First of all the Databases are updated if they need to. The second phase deploys the new version on the application servers. important here is that no new feature is enabled while the deployment. After all servers have the new version the system starts to enable the new features. It is important that for every deployment step there must be the possibility to role back to the old state.
With this strategy one server farm after the other is switched to the new version. Internationalized versions of their platform role out the new versions normally about one to two months later. In the end this results in nearly 24/7 deployment in the production environment. For me this strategy is really impressive and I would like to see such a deployment in real.

Probably most of you know I am currently working for SENACTIVE and we are developing an Complex Event Processing System Called InTime in C#. Yesterday I had a meeting with an potential customer and he was asking what our platform target is. I said it is Windows as we are developed in C# and until now Mono does not support everything we need from the CLR. He was complaining about C# because he gave it a try a few years ago and was not satisfied and all their applications are running on Linux/UNIX. I found an interesting analogy that at least everyone that likes Winter sports can understand.

The opinions of JAVA and .net are similar to them of skiers and snowboarders. If you just try one of them you don’t like the others because they are different and you just see the bad things. If you are trying both of them you know about their advantages and disadvantages find both attractive.

It is really interesting that languages and Runtime environments still matter today or at least people are concerned about it.

The backlog was intended as a place where ideas can grow. I never have seen Stories/Features that can be developed as they are written in the Backlog. In my Opinion this happens because most of the people involved don’t have or take the the time to think about the feature that should be implemented. A short cycle to develop new features should be aimed but not for every price. There are some other aspects that need to be considered and one of is that people must understand the product they are developing.

The second issue I have seen with short Product Backlogs is that Release Planing suffers. If you do not have enough Stories in your backlog to plan for the next release you will ship everything breaks down. In this moment everybody in the Team looses the goal for the Product. I would compare it with a scene from Forrest Gump where he starts to run without any goal. This is not working in reality.

There are three lessons I have learned in the last three years in reference to the issues I mentioned above:

1. Never start any sprint without a goal
2. Never start a product development without an Release Plan
3. Try to discuss Stories/Features as soon as possible with a bigger group of people