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Seattle Force.com User Group – August 2010

August 5th, 2010 No comments

Major late notice here but today is a Seattle Force.com user group. If you are are Force.com pro or a n00b looking for more information about this platform swing by.

WHO: Me, you, and some other cool peeps.

WHAT: Discuss force.com related topics, questions, and technologies

WHEN: Today, August 5, 2010 4:00PM

WHERE:
West Monroe Partners
1215 4th Ave, Suite 1010
Seattle, WA 98161

WHY: See WHO & WHAT

This month’s meeting will be an open forum for any questions and discussion topics you may have.

Categories: Technology, salesforce

Why I Can’t Buy the iPhone 4 (but really want to)

July 16th, 2010 4 comments

This phone is cool, very cool. I really want it and when the first reviews started to come out I knew this would be my next phone. Enter the antenna issue.

Shortly after launch reports started to surface that touching the little back band in the lower left corner would significantly reduce cellular reception. Worst case the iPhone would go from five bars to no service. This was concerning. When the 3G came out there were reports of yellow tinted screens but this turned out to be a non issues so I thought I would wait it out to see what happens. Yet the reports continued to roll in.

We all know what happens next and if you are reading this I don’t need to go in to detail so here is the short version.

1) Steve jobs says “don’t hold it that way”
2) Antenna issue continues to explode across web
3) Consumer reports can’t recommend phone
4) Antenna issue hits mainstream news
5) Apple hold press conference regarding antenna issue

Today Apple had their press conference. Going into the conference I was hoping for a miraculous hardware fix but I figured they would offer a free bumper. I thought I would be happy with this and probably get the phone. They did offer free cases to customers but I still can’t bring my self to buy this phone. Here is why.

Apple Doesn’t Get It
People keep referring to this issue as the ‘Death Grip’. This makes it sound like you have to squeeze the life out of this phone to see the problem. In reality it should be called the ‘Pinky Touch of Death’ as it literally takes one finger to cause this problem. See video here. Apple then went on to show the death grip effect the reception on other smart phones. Cool, I don’t disagree with their findings but I’m pretty sure not one of those phones will loose that much signal with the touch of a single finger. I know my iPhone 3G doesn’t.

Ryan Block from gdgt.com specifically asked about this issue and Apple completely beat around the bush not even coming close to answering the question.

Q: How does touching the corner with a single finger seem to cause this issue? It’s not just a grip, it can just happen by touching a single finger.

A: Your body is a pretty effective signal absorber. When you make contact with that phone, its performance in contact with you is less than it’s freespace performance. It’s a way to attenuate the signal by some amount.

Huh? This question is what the entire press conference should have revolved around.

Stats are Wack
Apple says only .55 percent of users called support complaining of reception issues. Most users probably don’t even know about the antenna issue and probably wouldn’t call support if they dropped one or two more calls then normal. They would probably blame AT&T and then go on their merry way.

Apple also says the return rate of the iPhone 4 is much less then that of the 3GS but the 30 day return period is still open. It would be interesting to see how many iPhone 3GS were returned within three weeks. If I was going to return a phone I’m pretty sure I would wait until the last week so that I gave myself enough time to try out all features of the phone. I would guess return rates increase closer to the end of the 30 day return window.

Amount of additional dropped calls of iPhone 4 over 3GS is less than 1 per 100. Ok, I am going to guess this is .999 because if was anything less they would have said less than 0.5 per one hundred. This is a totally useless stat because we don’t know how many calls are being dropped. If the 3GS drops 1 per 100 then the iPhone 4 drops 2 per 100. Uh… this could potentially be a 100% or more increase. As you can see this stat was pure marketing.

September 30th
This date is key. When asked if the free case offer will extend beyond this date Jobs said they “Will evaluate” and “I have no idea what solutions may come up”. He is the CEO of multi-billion dollar company, I’m pretty sure he has some ideas. This response indicates one thing for me. They are working on a hardware fix that may or may not make it out by September 30th. They need to flush out current inventory and that seems about the right amount of time for this to happen.

There is simply to much shady behavior by Apple regarding iPhone 4. They provided a ‘solution’ but didn’t really address the main issue (see Q&A above). It is pretty clear to most people this is a design flaw that was missed in testing due to the 3G-esque cases that were used. The testers never actually touched the phone. This problem was eventually discovered before launch but it was too late for a hardware fix and hence the bumper at launch. Is this a major design flaw, no. Does this design flaw affect everyone, no. Would it affect me, probably not.

In the end I still want this phone, bad, but I just can’t spend thousands of dollars on a phone and a service contract if it doesn’t work as well as a cheap Nokia. Apple’s attitude and response regarding this issue has also sort of rubbed me the wrong way. At the same time I understand they can’t admit a design flaw as this would destroy sales and share price.

This phone will continue to fly of the shelves but I will be eagerly awaiting the 30th of September.

Categories: Technology

Dear Apple: Please Add Image Stabilization to iPhone Video

June 21st, 2010 4 comments

There was a time long ago when home made videos where smooth and stable. The main reason for this was the size of the camera. Look at this bad boy…

vhs

While the quality of the video was horrible it was usually pretty stable and not bouncing all over the place. For starters it would literally rest on your shoulder which is a pretty solid platform. It is also physically large and therefore requires a lot more movement to cause a shaky recording. Over the years this has become more and more of a problem as cameras have become smaller and smaller.

Read more…

Categories: Technology

Seattle Force.com Developer Meeting – June 2010

May 28th, 2010 No comments

UPDATE: I’ll be demoing how to authenticate with OAuth using Force.com and how this can be used with the Twitter API.

It’s that time again for the Seattle Force.com Developer Meetup. Details below…

When: 6/3/2010 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM Pacific Daylight Time
Where: 7 Simple Machines Office
Subject: Seattle Force.com User Group Meeting – June 3
Comments: This month, our meeting will be held in a new venue. 7 Simple Machines has offered up a change in venue for us in June.

Location:
Their office is located at:
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 208
Seattle, WA 98134

http://www.7simplemachines.com/views/ContactUs.aspx

As always, bring your any ideas and questions to the meeting to discuss with everyone!

Dear Microsoft, Please sue me.

May 20th, 2010 5 comments

As you’ve probably heard Microsoft is suing salesforce.com over nine patents Microsoft holds. One would probably assume these patents are for some ultra complicated algorithm or computer process hidden within the depths of top secret Microsoft source code. Well you’d be wrong, really wrong.

Let’s take a look at just a few of the patents they are suing over.

1) System and method for providing and displaying a web page having an embedded menu
2) Method and system for stacking toolbars in a computer display

Wait, what?!?! They own a patent on a flipping web menu!?! Yes, it would appear so. So if you have ever created or implemented a menu on a web page you are infringing on a Microsoft patent. See the menu across the top of this page? Yup, I’m a rebel.

3) Aggregation of system settings into objects

I’m not patent lawyer but I’m pretty sure this one means you can’t store some type of system setting (aka text/boolean/etc) value in an object. I didn’t read through the entire patent filing but I’m guessing ‘object’ refers to a class object or database object. So if I can’t store system settings in any of these two places where on earth can I store them! Maybe Microsoft thinks there is some pixie dust magic land where settings can be stored.

4) Timing and velocity control for displaying graphical information

This is lawyer speak for a time delayed tool tip. If you put your mouse over an icon, stop, wait 300ms, and show a tool tip you are busted! So the thousands of websites that have implemented this type of functionality are infringing on a Microsoft patent.

These are just a few of the patents Microsoft is suing over and the others I didn’t list are just as ridiculous.

What is all this madness? Well, there is a lot of crack smoking going on here. First we have the US Patent office smoking crack and approving ridiculous patents like these. Secondly, we have Microsoft smoking a little something suing over these absurd patents. If they were really concerned about protecting their intellectual property they would be suing a lot more people that have implemented these types of features, but they aren’t. They are suing a company that is a direct competitor that is innovating faster and more successfully than Microsoft in the given space. It’s is clear Microsoft is using it’s size and money ($250B) to take on a smaller company like salesforce ($10B) in the courtroom rather than on the keyboard which is just sad.

Some will say, “But Jason, you are biased supporter of salesforce.com”. Yup, that is probably true, but Microsoft isn’t really suing salesforce.com. They are suing all of us. Where “us” is any web developer or smaller company that has created the functionality mentioned above.

Categories: Technology, salesforce

Seattle Force.com Developer Meeting

March 31st, 2010 No comments

There is a another force.com developer meeting for Seattle coming up this Thursday. If you are in the Seattle area and want to meetup or learn more about developing on the force.com platform please stop by.

Just a friendly reminder that this Thursday, April 1st at 4:00pm will be the our monthly meeting.

The meetings as always will be held in the West Monroe Partners office located at:

1215 4th Ave, Suite 1010
Seattle, WA 98161

This session will be an open forum so bring any questions, problems, and/or issues you have so we can discuss with the group.

If you have something cool you’d like to show off or present let me know and we can arrange for you to speak at one of the upcoming sessions.

Improve the New Salesforce UI with Greasemonkey

March 17th, 2010 8 comments

In my last post (you can read it here) I was ranting like an angry hippopotamus about the new salesforce.com UI released with Spring 10 and what I think it should look like. This follow up post will show you how to make the changes I proposed in that post a reality.

Before we work the magic and make the new UI even better I want to expand on some of my thoughts regarding the new UI. Some may say it is “change” and change is hard, you just need to get used to it. Not true. Change should never be hard. Change should be something better. It should be a measurable improvement over the previous version. A perfect example of this was the recent redesign of cnn.com. This was a massive improvement and nearly everyone everyone applauded the changes. Change was easy because it made our user experience better. I don’t hate the new salesforce UI. I don’t even not like it. There is just something about it that doesn’t feel right. I can’t place my finger on it but I think the changes I’ve made below will make a huge improvement. Blah blah blah, enough pointless blabbering, let’s get to the good stuff.

Since the original post I have had some time to get comfortable with the new UI and several of the changes I initially proposed probably aren’t needed.  My first stab at changing the UI was also a bit bold, too bold. I took my changes of the UI to the extreme to really emphasize the direction I think the new UI needs to move. In reality the changes needed are much softer. What it came down to in the end was eliminating the massive amount of white space in the record detail section and bringing back the old style page block section separators. So how do we do this? Greasemonkey to the rescue!!!!

The first ingredient of awesomesauce is to install the Greasemonkey plugin for the Firefox browser. You can download that here. Greasemonkey allows you customize websites with fancy pants JavaScript.


Read more…

Categories: Technology, Visualforce

The New Salesforce UI Should Look Like This

March 11th, 2010 19 comments

UPDATE: See the follow up post here: Improve the New Salesforce UI with Greasemonkey

The new salesforce.com UI has been rolled out to all instances as of March 6th and the feedback is starting to roll in. Based on the feedback I have heard, direct and indirect, is that there appears to be four groups of people. A few people that love it, a few people that like it, a lot of people that are undecided, and a lot of people that don’t like it. This is probably not the distribution of feedback salesforce was hoping for.

Read more…

Categories: Technology, Visualforce

Seattle Force.com Developer Group

March 3rd, 2010 No comments

Heads up that if you are a Force.com/Salesforce developer or want to learn more about force.com development in the Seattle area there is a meeting this Thursday, the 4th.

The meetings as always will be held in the West Monroe Partners office located at:

1215 4th Ave, Suite 1010

Seattle, WA 98161

When:  Thursday, March 4th, 2010

Start Time: 4:00 PM

This session will be an open forum so bring any questions, problems, and/or issues you have so we can discuss with the group. If we finish early, we can maybe grab a beer at one of the local bars downtown.

If you are interested even a little please stop by.

Categories: Apex, Technology, Visualforce

Why JavaScript Scares Me

November 11th, 2009 2 comments

If you have read this blog before you will get the vibe that I am anti javascript. This is a fair assessment as I really don’t like using javascript. I can already hear the people yelling, “JavaScript is great! It can do so many cool things”. Yes, I know, but why add more complexity if I don’t need to? Here is the story of why JavaScript scares me.

This story starts back in my sophomore year of college when I took my first “programming” class. It was basically an intro to computers (easy peasy) but about half of the class was building websites with JavaScript applications. For these assignments we were required to use notepad to build the Javascript and websites. For someone that had never really done any sort of programming this was incredibly frustrating. One wrong character and you were hosed. Oh, and don’t forget this was in the dark ages before Firefox and Firebug. Make change, save, refresh Internet Explorer (blech!), repeat, repeat, repeat. Ugh, this was so lame and left a bad taste in my mouth when it came to “programming”.

screenhunter_13-nov-10-13-33

Next up was CSE142, the intro to programming class that is supposed to weed out computer science majors. This was all java programming and we actually got to use an IDE that would show syntax errors before you compiled. This was probably the hardest class I have ever taken but it has also been the most useful class I have ever taken. After this I was feeling better about programming and things were looking up…… enter the infamous s-control.

Once out of school and at my job, after having an admin role for about six months, I decided to take a stab at updating some s-controls. What a pain. Flashbacks of javascript notepad editing flashed through my head. S-controls are so messy. I wasted hours trying to add basic functionality. Once I got it to work in one browser I realized it didn’t work in another (guess which one). This only reconfirmed my thoughts that javascript is a time suck and a pain to work with. Thankfully Apex and Visualforce were soon released and s-controls with javascript were a thing of the past.

scontrolvs

So where do I stand today? When it comes to Force.com apps I still try to keep my javascript usage to an absolute minimum. I know a lot of the Visualforce pizazz is all based on Javascript but this is script I don’t have to manage. They make sure it works, and works across all browsers.

With all of this said and done I do have a confession to make. I feel like I am having an affair with my own beliefs but I am slowly falling in love with that little bundle of joy know as the jQuery and jQuery UI JavaScript libraries. Once you get over the learning curve of understanding the basics on how to using this library it makes working with JavaScript, dare I say, almost enjoyable. I am still a bit nervous about browser compatibility and the maintenance required but jQuery is lessening these fears. So yes, I am starting to open up a little more to JavaScript and I have some blog posts planned to demo the cool things jQuery can do in tandem with the Force.com platform.

Categories: Technology, Visualforce

Hello Twitter

November 6th, 2009 3 comments

I am now on Twitter. Hello my little bird friend.

I put it off for a long time mainly because I don’t care what people are eating for lunch or what movie they just saw. At least this is what I figured most of Twitter was about (and a lot of it still is) but this view changed rather quickly just a few days ago.

My little blog here in the corner of the internet gets traffic mainly from the developer.force.com discussion boards, from links posted on other Force.com related blogs, and the occasional search engine hit (Visualforce Popup is a hot one from search engines). It’s not a lot of traffic, but it is steady. After my Dreamforce 2009 Predictions post I saw a significant spike it traffic coming from Twitter. That blog post was tweeted by two different people and I saw site traffic increase three fold. It was easy to see the benefits of Twitter. Digging into some of the tweets I discovered what is a nice little ecosystem of Force.com/Salesforce.com users that actually post, errr…tweet, about relevant topics.

I have actually had a Twitter account for about a year now but I was one in the masses that had no tweets and no followers. Okay, so I had one tweet, which ironically was about me eating some pie. I remember the post (fric!, tweet) exactly and I was trying to explain to my parents, aunts, and uncles what Twitter was. I went on to explain it’s some lame micro blogging site where people post about everything they do. So of course I made a useless post about what I was eating. Oh how naive.

My main use of  Twitter will be to take advantage of this Force.com community, follow some trends, and post (oh my goodness… tweet) about force.com topics. Heck, maybe I’ll even toss in what I’m eating once in awhile……just kidding.

Now I ask for your help. Who are some great people in the twitter community to follow? What are some good tags to follow? I’ve already got #dreamforce, #force.com, and #salesforce. Please help this Twitter noob.

Click here for my Twitter page.

Categories: Life, Technology

iPhone 3Gs

June 10th, 2009 No comments

On Monday Apple released the next iteration of the iPhone and I have to say my response can be summed up as, “eh”.

2x Speed:
A faster CPU and more RAM is a nice addition but definitely not worth the cost for current 3G owners. Faster loading web pages would be nice but at the same time I think to myself, “I can access any website in the world no matter where I am”. The fact that I can do this with my phone is still pretty cool and faster is nice but the core functionality is the same.

Video recording:
My 5 year old Samsung flip phone that cost me $29 had this… 5 years ago.

Voice control:
Is nice but I would probably never use it. Mainly because the current iPhone UI is so streamlined I can access anything I need to pretty quick. And honestly the only place that I may use this would be in my car but it is so loud (18 year old Integra with a shot suspension) I have my doubts it could clearly understand me. I also feel sort of stupid talking at a phone, ya that sounds weird, but until it has a nice female British accent, can ask my how my day is going, and can carry a conversation I’ll stick with manual inputs.

Digital Compass:
This, with out a doubt, has the most potential. It will definitely help with navigation but I think this type of technology together with GPS and the potential for ground breaking mobile applications. I plan to have separate post going into more detail.

I think for all iPhone users the most excitement will come from the new iPhone OS 3.0. Finally, from a software standpoint, this will give very little to gripe about once it is released as it address many of the open issue since the original iPhone was released. Including:

Landscape keyboard for email and web. Yes!
Copy and paste. Rarely actually needed it but will be nice.
Download movies and TV Shows. Cool, will rarely use it.
Tethering. Cool, but we all know AT&T will charge too much.
MMS. Now my Mom won’t ask why my “fancy little phone” doesn’t get the text images she sends me.

Categories: Technology