Lot’s of photo-shopped Vista screens claiming to be pre-release views of W7, ignoring (or ignorant?) of the fact that the UI is pretty much the last thing to be done and finalized when a company develops a new OS.

Lots of talk about virtualizing old, recalcitrant 32 bit app’s that don’t’ play ball with modern requirements, some even suggesting total virtualization of 32 bit and a push to 64 bit.  But nothing concrete is coming out of Redmond on this – and why would it?

I’d love to see 32 bit app’s virtualized on Windows 7 and the link broken once and for all to all those legacy applications that continue to hamper the rest of the world from progressing and making Windows a better platform (not that all or even most 32 bit apps are guilty of this, but to many, way to many, are). 

You know - those clunky old pieces of garbage that shouldn’t have been allowed to run on Windows 95 let alone XP, Vista or W7. 

But it’s unlikely to happen.

Unlikely because the dollars, the big dollars, for MS are in the companies that still deploy those recalcitrant pieces of their own internal engineering ineptitude, and they scream (and loudly) whenever Redmond tries to bring them kicking and biting into the 21st Century.

Virtualization won’t fix this problem.  It exacerbates it.  Virtualized apps won’t be able to interact with the latest version of whatever is running on the core, the latest name for whatever constitutes COM or OLE.  They’ll be, well, virtualized. 

Apple, famously, virtualized OS9 and what are now referred to as “Classic Mac”.  But then they had to.  OS X was/is a modern OS and it can’t have some application poking stuff into any old memory address it feels like, whenever it feels like it, like Classic Mac did. 

But by the same token Apple didn’t face the same problem that MS faces.  They didn’t (and don’t) by and large have the mega-companies of the world running tens of thousands of licences of their OS and hardware to deal with.  Neither do the various flavours of *nix for that matter.

MS does.

Besides, Windows has been running protected memory since Windows NT 3.1 was released.

Legacy is the byword of Windows at Redmond and beyond.  Break these applications and they won’t buy new licenses to the latest and greatest. 

Now, as much as the Linux zealots (and some Mac) might scream: “Yeah! They’ll all switch to a *nix platform” and before they start salivating over this incredible concept, pause a moment.  These firms (and we are talking about some of the biggest in the world here) won’t be switching *to anything*.  That’s the risk of breaking their dependence on code that causes security flaws and “bugs” in Windows.  Prevent them from performing their beloved thunks or invalid and dangerous pointer operations and they’ll blithely forgo the purchase of a new OS.

In a sense it’s the same cruddy, grossly negligent reasons that led to the whole Y2K issue. 

So, you may ask, who cares about them? 

Well – MS do for starters.  That’s where the dollars are.  They are the reason MS are big.  Can’t say I want to blame them for trying to stay that way.  The industry is no longer the sole domain of the techno-geek.  Other forces drive decisions beyond hardware, software, usability or “Web 2.0”.

When Steve Ballmer bounced around the stage shouting “Developers, developers, developers…!”  like some kind of gyrating cue-ball did you really think he was talking to ISV’s?

You did?  LOL!

Nope – it’s the dev’s sitting in “Mega-Large Company Inc” in a cubicle folks.  Don’t be fooled.  MS know they make money from ISV”s., but nowhere – nowhere – near what they make from large corporates who employ dev’s to whip up nasty looking and functioning applications for internal use only. 

I say nasty because I’ve had the displeasure of seeing and debugging some of this colossal junk. 

To be fair to MS they’ve tried very hard to address this issue.  They made some tough decisions with XP and it’s service packs and again in Vista.  It’s easy to moan about how insecure Windows is compared to another OS, or how buggy a release is.  But when you have to maintain a code base that is backwardly compatible to an application that should never have been deployed in the first place (the corporate junk apps, the games that break rules to achieve *wow!* and dev’s who don’t know, or simply don’t care to know, any better) it’s virtually impossible to cover all angles. 

As a brief aside, I find it fascinating that many of the dev’s working on FOS and firing nasty comments at MS (and others) are employed writing garbage-ware that is used internally in – Insert Large Company Here - running Windows across thousands of desktops.  It’s got to be the ultimate IT irony.

Back to the issue we were discussing, how many times do the *nix developers break something in terms of app’s running on that platform – or hardware used on that platform?  All the time, but folks seem more forgiving of that (or don’t bother reading the forums to see for themselves).

How about the Mac?  Apple has been reasonable about continuing support for PPC applications (Classic Mac is gone in the latest versions of OS X) via Rosetta.  However their premiere development tool and interactive GUI designer Interface Builder includes many elements that *will not* run on pre Tiger releases.  Much of this is from their “Core” series of libraries (similar to Microsoft Foundation classes or even .Net in a sense). 

If Microsoft did this the screaming would be so loud and long it’d be incredible to behold.  Maybe UAC is a bloody nuisance, but it drives home a very important point to dev’s and to company execs that care to listen:

“We need to change what we are doing and we need to change it yesterday.  It’s unsafe, outdated and it’s holding back not only the rest of the world but this company, too.”

So what would a brave new Windows 7, that actually did virtualize the old (and I do not believe for a moment MS will actually go for virtualization), do for ISV’s?

Opportunity! 

The phrase “Web 2.0” is bandied about like “peace – man” was bandied about in the sixties and seventies.  It means about as much too.  At the same time the so called “dot com bust” is vilified like it was an outbreak of the bubonic plague (and in a sense it could be argued it was). 

But there is some truth in some of what “Web 2.0” is about and it affects the desktop as well as the web.  Like it or lump it the two are now joined at the hip.  MS is no longer the only game in town that can set trends. 

The opportunity would be multi-faceted.  Since we’re talking “what if” it’d be a shot in the arm for ISV’s. 

Releasing spanking new app’s in front of the rest of the players.  Scrubbing all the cruddy “shareware” applications hogging bandwidth on the download sites (there are good and bad “shareware” applications, don’t get me wrong, but most of what’s about is unadulterated hog swill –make no bones about that) and leaving much of the FOS Windows offerings sitting in the mud, where they belong.  It would be… 

You get the idea.

Right now one of the big questions, beyond the technical speculation, is when will MS ship?  Will it be 2010 or 2011?  Certainly won’t be 2009 as Softpedia (is there no end to their clueless-ness?) stated.  I guess we have to hope it won’t be as long as it took to ship Vista.

I for one hope MS take a long hard look at *why* some people have hopped over to the Mac.  There are valid reasons beyond eye-candy.  There are some great features on the platform and those features are very much *now*.  In fact compared to the Mac presently Windows is looking very much last century – and it doesn’t need to be like that (and simply wrapping the OS UI in a new set of skins is not the answer either). 

Windows really could be something pretty darn cool!   And safe, and less buggy…

Instead of re-skinning the interface, not that anybody at Redmond is going to listen to me, they’d be much better off getting poor old Ballmer a toupee (after removing him as CEO and promoting him to the guy who gets to jump around on the stage and shout something meaningless). 

Instead they need to *remove* the skins.  Stick with the XP type look, ditch that ugly grey on windows and dialogs, soften it down a bit – no not pinstripes, even Apple know that’s not working, and replace it with something smooth.  When I worked on Windows 3.1 I remember embracing the “new” 3D grey look and buying component libraries to match.  It was new and fresh that way compared to the boring white window/dialogs and grey buttons that was that systems default. 

But something in me is starting to yearn for the freshness of 3.1.  That was something that didn’t come up into Win 95 and beyond.  There was something clean back there that we lost. 

It needs to be recaptured.

Sure – I know MS where influenced heavily with Win 95 by the work they were doing on OS/2 (and then stopped doing).  Borland had some influence on them too (the now common place right click pop up menu) but Vista is getting to dark.  Way to dark for an OS.  Depressingly dark - this is an environment folks are supposed to work in, live in.  As anybody who has ever skinned an app and the stood back a bit will tell you – skins become ho-hum very quickly.

No – rather it needs to become simpler, more elegant.  A set of bloody standards that dev’s can emulate. 

Very few people work on mega-applications and release them and very few people use them – outside of the aforementioned large companies.  Most use simple applications.  Most don’t need every bell and whistle.  Most don’t comprehend those very bells and whistles.  Those bells and whistles should be there, but not everywhere!

Simple and elegant is more productive.  The OS needs to reflect that.

Whether MS ship in 2010 or 2011 or even 2012 (and I think that the latter is a distinct possibility) one thing is for certain.  Windows 7 needs to seriously take a step towards breaking legacy applications and MS need to spell out the reasons why.  Sure there’ll be a shock wave, but handled properly it can work, I believe, though it may affect, for a period of several years, OS license sales. 

Which, as they say, is the end of that.  I doubt anybody in MS can stomach that thought - and if they can I doubt the shareholders can.

Oh..  and the interface.  There are so many good things out there – MS can learn from Apple and various examples of the better *nix variants and the likes of the old NEXT stuff. 

Simple, clean, elegant, fresh.  I wish somebody would nail that sign above Ballmer’s and BG’s door.  Mr Job’s - there’s a task I’d like you to do…

Releasing early is something that was intrinsically avoided by most and indeed frowned upon by many, yet it has become the battle cry of the mISV (and ISV’s!).  It’s based on the premise that if you keep coding to perfection with a complete feature set you will never, or at least take a long time, to release *anything*.

Steve Jobs (Apple) famously is supposed to have said: “Artists ship”.  I think it applies to all of us. 

What’s the point if nobody sees it and it’s not out there performing its function?  Until a product is released it’s a theory, no more and vapourware at best.  Trust me - I have a Bachelor in Vapourware and doing my best to avoid a Doctorate! 

Another big no no trumpeted at us for decades, it seems, is that you shouldn’t write a product that has established competitors.  This is bunk.  It’s a generalization.  Copying what someone else has done is clearly lame, but competing with a new product is completely logical and unavoidable in almost every instance.  As always there are exceptions.

Recently I had the pleasure to try out a brand spanking new product by a new mISV.  While the developer and owner of IceTips Software is no newcomer to writing code or even being independent he’s certainly new to embracing the more recent and modern drive behind what has been called “Web 2.0” (which tends to be applied to anything and everything these days) or what I prefer to call “Bootstrapping Common Sense.” 

It would seem he’s taken on what he’s learned and applied it well.  It’s to soon for him to be a roaring success, or even a little bit successful (product is that new), but it’s a nice product and it’s very clear from the user interface and his dedication to get it right (he is lightening fast on replying to user issues, that’s experience first hand BTW) is crystal clear.

His product is a Build tool for developers.  Now – yes there are lots of established build tools out there.  I use one (so should you) already and I’ve been a happy and loyal user of it.  But Build Automator (that’s the name of the product) is actually very fresh and clean. 

It’s not jam packed with every bell and whistle that so many build tools overwhelm us with, though he has said he has some additional, and very useful, things to add in the near future, the point is he’s released! 

This artist has *shipped*! 

In an online forum I am a member of he was asked (when he announced Beta) whether or not he’d be giving away free copies to Beta testers.  He replied beautifully by stating that the product was release ready *now* and neatly side-stepped this inevitable and annoying line of questioning.  I too grow weary of folks looking for a freebie.  He’s built this to feed his family and for the pleasure of running a business (I assume).  He has the domain knowledge, code skills and design skills so why the heck not be paid for it?!!

Now – about loving it.  I said he loves it – right?  Well it’s very clear he does, beyond his fast replies to what were a few minor issues (related to my hardware).  He’s gone with the, what I feel is, smooth Office 2003 look featuring the blue gradient toolbars and menus.  I’m not saying this is the *only* way of producing a pleasing interface, it isn’t the only way.  But it’s one way and it works well with this application.

His primary application icon is professionally designed and *unique* to his program.  First impressions count and this impression was flawless. 

The installer was smooth.  The installer didn’t change associations to various files on my system without my permission or any shenanigans like that, it didn’t place an icon on my task tray, it installed the program cleanly.

The icons in the toolbar are *clean*.  They blend well, they are not the same colour of course which would not be right, and they work well together.  They are chosen with care and consideration.  They are logical for the task at hand and I’m told he’s actually replacing some of those in the next build or so – so here’s a mISV who really does take pride!

Build Automator features nice clean dialogs, with careful and considered use of white space where needed, while not totally abandoning the standard Windows grey theming on XP (runs perfectly and properly on Vista too of course).   

Program functionality is neat and tidy and seems to be well thought out and coded.  The program does what it’s supposed to do – build projects for developers.  While IceTips is yet to add all the build options for the different compilers it currently supports most common ones including Delphi, Clarion 7, Clarion#, Visual C++, Visual C#, Visual Basic.  It supports a growing number of installers (more being added soon I’m told) and other tools one would expect.  The ability to FTP a build up to your server (coming soon I’m assured) isn’t there yet, something I personally need but it’s a flying start for a very usable product.

I’m not in the habit of recommending products, but if you’re not using a build tool now, or are looking for a new one I think Build Automator is worth some time checking out.  The price is right and IceTips seem keen to be of help if you have any questions.  In the sense of checking out a nice fresh, *clean* user interface it’s essential viewing by all ISV’s as I firmly believe it’s an indication of where and what we should be trying to achieve, especially if you are in the pre-release stage or just starting your project.

IceTips and Build Automator can be found at:

http://www.buildautomator.com

He has a blog, too.  I’ve added that link to my Blog Roll but you can access it direct here:

www.buildautomator.com/blog

Take the old UniSys GIF patent.  The GIF file was embraced early on as an image format for websites. Before the so called dot com crash most sites used GIF.  UniSys got greedy, very greedy.  UniSys originally promised Compuserve that there would be no encumbrance on using GIF.  A few years later UniSys changes their mind.  After a huge outcry (and a bit of a battle with Compuserve) UniSys decided that they would only charge commercial entities for GIF.  The online world calmed down and GIF use continued, even though there were alternatives like JPEG and PNG which in many ways were superior. 

However UniSys again changed their mind in 1999.  Everybody must pay or face litigation for patent infringement.  That meant it didn’t matter if you created the GIF yourself, paid someone to do it, used a “licensed tool” to create it and/or just showed the GIF in a webpage.  Minimum license fee for non commercial use was $5000 and they did not consider websites falling under that category.

The GIF patent held by UniSys expired on June 20, 2003.  But, by and large GIF is pretty much dead now with sites embracing JPEG and more recently the superior PNG (which is free from patent encumbrance), increasingly since Microsoft fixed PNG bugs in Internet Explorer.

Fast forward to 2008.  The technically inferior (just like GIF was in its day) MP3 format is in widespread usage.  It’s probably fair to say it’s bigger than GIF (a similar statement from John Lennon regarding the Beatles once caused folks to burn their Beatles records.  I’d be happy enough if you did the same with your MP3 files.).  This sonically degenerate audio file format is used by tens of millions to listen to music – proof positive that the average person is incapable of hearing or at least recognizing and processing the full audio spectrum available to the human ear.  That’s not a criticism of the average person, it’s equally true they do not have the training or equipment or even the time to pay attention to something better. 

However the point is we are stuck with MP3.  There are several stake holders to the MP3 patent arena.  The most notable being Fraunhofer, AT&T-Bell Labs, Thomson-Brandt, CCETT and Alcatel-Lucent with most well known being the arrangement via Thompson which collects on behalf of several stake holders.  More recently Alcatel-Lucent went after Microsoft but their original win was over turned.  Alcatel-Lucent tried to argue that it has patented technology that was not part of patent covered by Microsoft’s payment to Fraunhofer/Thompson.  This whole debacle made the UniSys problems seem incredibly simple.

But here’s the point of this blog post.  Thompson used to limit the amount of money payable to them under a certain value (from memory – could be failing me here – it was around $10,000).  Now $10,000 is the *minimum* payable for royalties based on sales.  You pay separately to read, write, distribute, stream and so on and so forth.  This is totally ridiculous.

You work on a file format, make it a standard and then screw everybody who adopts it (most of the world).  But here’s the kicker.  Only part of the world is screwed.  You see if you’re in the so called “Western World” which for the purposes of definition (though not geographically correct) includes the USA, Western Europe, UK, Ireland, Canada, New Zealand and Australia then you pay and you pay big.  However.  If you’re from the “rest of the world” you pay nix, nada, nothing.  That’s because pursuing patent infringements in those countries is pretty much like playing darts in the dark.  Hence the plethora of mutli-media software (mostly DRM busting to boot) coming out of those regions – with complete and utter impunity. If you knew how many of these DRM busting programs I reject on a newsgroup I moderate you’d be amazed. 

Effectively what this crazy cost of compliance does is limit the market to players who have the bucks (who are most likely eventually to break reliance on the patent through development of their own standard anyway, like MS or Apple etc) or to those who can flaunt it with impunity.  Stifling the very people most likely to earn the patent holders a dollar.

So why not drop MP3 and code for one of the non patent enforced alternatives like OGG etc (and there are many and some better than OGG).  Simply because of market inertia.  The consumer is consuming MP3’s.  Their players play MP3 (very few support OGG or other formats) and getting the consumer to switch is and always will be a tough thing.  Especially when the problems of the format do no affect them directly, or as far as they are concerned, indirectly.  

I don’t believe software patents should be outlawed (as some suggest).  But I do believe that the way in which some patents are implemented smacks off price gouging and in any other situation would be declared illegal.  It’s about time something was done to end the price gouging, not the registration or reasonable collecting of patents.

I’m working, as I mentioned in a recent post here, on a new mISV that will work within the multi-media region.  MP3 is a big sticking point.  I’m seriously considering not supporting it directly from the software.  This is a *huge* decision to make.  While my mind is not yet made up, I have to say I’m 75% there in terms of making a decision.  I originally intended to happily pay the patent royalty to Thompson due to consumer reliance on MP3.  However the recent changes to licensing and royalties make this pretty damn hard, read to bloody expensive, for a startup.  Frankly that sucks, but one is left with only two options.  Pay and support, or don’t pay and don’t support the format.  There is a third, read the format via the WMP API from Microsoft, however Thompson’s advice is that ISV’s are not covered using that method.

If only Apple and Microsoft would have the balls to embrace an open, patent free standard like OGG (or one of the many others) and literally wipe out MP3 almost overnight.

More information can be found on the UniSys GIF patent at:

http://www.silverglass.org/rants/unisys-gif.html 

Thompson Patent at:

http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/software.html

Some folks would definitely go with the latter.  Some state that they can tell the quality of an application by virtue of the fact it has a splash screen at all.  They claim the splash screen is there to mask incompetent and ugly coding practices and to fool the user into thinking something important is actually happening. 

Yep, we’ve read those comments, perhaps pondered them, or ignored them or thought about our own applications – and shut our mouths. 

Personally I say bunk!

Yep.  It’s total absolute bunk.  It’s a maledicted generalization that may have some basis in some instances, but like all such generalizations fails with numerous exceptions.  Clearly dev’s who spout this nonsense have never had to work with loading heavy dll’s, database libraries and files or had to struggle with users who have sub standard or even over loaded CPU’s and RAM.  Even systems with modern CPU’s can (and do) fail to deliver when something like Symantec’s Internet Suite is busy guzzling CPU cycles like some kind of  neurotic, byte consuming camel – which is most of the time for that and similar “suites”.  Got two cores?  Hold the fort and baton down the mobo, your anti-virus/firewall buddy is going to splice itself into one of each thanks!

The purpose of the splash screen was originally to provide clear visual feedback to the user that something was actually happening.  The program (or the operating system) hadn’t gone to the land of Nod, the keyboard hadn’t locked up or the graphics card hadn’t frozen and normal services would be restored in…  sometime under 30 seconds.

Or was it?  Certainly we’ve used that excuse for almost two decades now.  But the splash screen became much more – quickly.  It became branding.  It branded the product right into your brain.  Who could forget the green splash screen with the sailing ship’s wheel of Netscape Navigator?  Or the jigsaw puzzles of MS Office?  Or the super arty screens of high end graphics programs.  Nor can we forget Borland’s Athena.

Microsoft has now joined Apple in stating the splash screen is a no-no in most situations for most applications. 

Though there are exceptions of course, programs that take a long time to load, for starters, oh – and of course Vista itself, which makes no bones about a startup splash when the OS is loading up into RAM – using every micro-second purely for the purpose of loading essential stuff like device drivers, utilities, services, license checks – and brand awareness.  Oops – I mean user awareness that something is happening. 

So should we splash in our own applications?  Should we follow the advice of the OS vendors (MS and Apple) and just load, fast as we can, with no indication?

Splashing on the Mac has been pretty much out since OS X was released and not always that common on OS 9 and 8 (compared to Windows where dev’s were and are clearly addicted).  However, the Mac has those cute little bouncing icons on the taskbar, a visual clue to the user that all is well in program loading land and in just a moment, all things being equal, bouncing icon will stop and program will appear.  But not on Windows, no bouncing icons there, just some cursors that many users fail to intuit. 

I’ll never forget the reaction of a supposed power user (IT trainer) when I showed him the Beta for Windows 95 (his first look, I was testing).  Some software was loading, little arrow with the hourglass combination cursor appears and he says: “Yeah – I’ll bet!”   He really couldn’t really explain what he meant to me.  From what I could tell from his babbling he thought it represented speed, not the process of multi-tasking or more specifically multi-threading.  It’s worse now too as the majority of users have never worked in a process swapping environment like Windows 16 bit let alone the single instance environment of DOS.

So edicts are fine from Microsoft, but how are they addressing intuition by the user? 

Given MS borrowed liberally (sorry for using the ”l” word to any Republican readers here <g>) from OS X for many of Vista’s graphical elements why not bouncing icons? 

It’s not that I’ve got this thing for bouncing or anything, but an indication surely isn’t to much to ask for if you’re asking dev’s to abandon their beloved branding – er – splash screens?  Particularly now that Windows supports transparent regions on forms and users can see their favorite applications splash screen, like their pirating software, I mean file sharing software, like LemonWire in the shape of a freshly cut lemon?  It’s just not fair!

So back to the question at hand, should we splash our programs on startup?

I’d love to hear what folks reading think.  Personally I think it’s horses for courses.  I don’t mind splash screens, I’ve included them in the past and probably will where I think they are needed in the future, and of course being able to turn them off for the cranky bums who don’t like them, well that’s only fair – I guess!  ?

But the post that took the cake, in terms of things people do, was submitted by Patrick McKenzie.  Patrick had met people embedding OLE documents into OLE documents into OLE documents into…   You get the picture.  The classic mirror facing a mirror paradox. 

If Alfred Hitchcock had been a computer programmer he would have taken glee in implementing this *everywhere*.   Thankfully he stuck to making movies about mirrors facing mirrors. 

So would Microsoft’s dev’s have ever considered that users would do this OLE inside OLE ad infinitum routine?  I can’t answer that.  I do know it gave me a long chuckle when I read it.  But it made me think, just because we *can* allow a user to do such a thing, and given how messy it can get (and dangerous to data) and of course the average computer users’ proclivity in doing something the developer never dreamed of, should we allow such things to happen? 

If indeed we can justify it happening in certain instances, should we not at least warn them of the potential of such techniques when they start to do it in such a manner?

IMHO. Yes!  

I believe this relates to ISV”s and mISV’s as well.  A lot of programmers (I think most of us have been guilty of this at one time or another) introduce features because “we can” rather than because “we should”. 

Having done it we don’t safe guard the user from (with the benefit of hindsight aside) obvious abuse of the feature.  We are then left with a conundrum when the feature is abused as the user blames the programmer for allowing whatever went wrong to go wrong – even if it’s due to abuse in a manner never envisioned by the designer of the feature (or coder of the feature if they are distinct persons).

We are left with two choices in this instance.  Pull the feature and cop the wrath of those who love it and *need it* or try and bug fix it so that it handles the whole problem gracefully. 

But there is, to my mind, a third option.  It’s done before the user ever becomes aware of the feature, before they even see or hear of it.  It’s incredibly easy to implement and is 100% guaranteed to be bug free and user error free.  It’s simply this:  Do you really need that darn feature in the first place or are you adding it because “you can” rather than because “you should”?  

If the answer to this is “because you can” then the feature is going to bite you, potentially later, in many instances.

I use a lot of pro audio software.  One of the big “features” these packages have is the ability to use plug-ins based on Steinberg’s VST ™ API.  This API is pretty cool, it’s got a massive market acceptance and third party support and is *the standard*.  But…  It’s a right royal pain to work with when you need more than one audio effect open at once, even if you have multiple monitors. 

But that’s not the worst part (and it’s true one can live with this).  The worst part is the attempt to model the UI of these plug-ins on real world user interfaces.  In this instance knobs.  Round knobs are cludgy and hard to use via a mouse (or even fingers on a touch screen).  Yet they are thrown in by the developers of these plug-ins time and time again, just because *they can*.  Practically a slider control – not dissimilar to the linear fader style control in the “real world” - is far easier to manipulate with a mouse.  In fact in the real world they are used on pro audio devices for *exactly that reason* - they are easier to use and more accurate even with fingers.  In a domain where minute changes to a signal can create the next “Itchycoo Park” this is simply to vital to mess up with a cludgy knob.

OK.  We could use the keyboard to do it – right?  Sure, but now we’re into the fix a feature to force it to fit territory or the “mirror within mirror” syndrome of OLE embedding discussed above.  I’m a great believer in cool interfaces and firmly believe cool sells.  But there is cool and useless and round knobs on a computer interface are not cool – they are a bloody nuisance!

For the sanity of your users and your own sanity when it comes to fixing it – ask yourself more than once if a feature is *really needed* before you throw it in because “you can”. 

Consider it from all angles and consider the potential for misuse.  It might just save you and your customers some heartache later on.

Originally I intended to make this blog something that the ISV and mISV could use to reference in relation to some of the issues faced with piracy of 2008 and potentially beyond.  I’ve simply not had the time I hoped for to compile several years of research on this into articles on a consistent basis – or any basis.  My own decision to launch a mISV and grow it applying some of the things I’ve learnt from a few folks on the BOS forums and in the past from my previous “life” in software development and marketing that took a different and I believe now to be frequently outmoded method of delivery, intent, design and more importantly *mindset*.  I would never have believed, even six month ago, how fundamentally life changing this shift in mindset actually is nor how limiting following the older tenets actually were.

But I digress.

This is to be the first article and I hope not the last, no guarantees there though as I am genuinely flat out coding and would much prefer to look at the more positive business issues in this blog rather than this rather distasteful subject.  However some folks might get some value out of the articles and if they do that’s great, if they don’t know harm done.

I do need to make it clear that there will be *nothing* mind shatteringly new here in regards to the topic of piracy.  Rather it’s a summation, not a complete treatise, on some of the issues for ISV”s to consider and this first article is just an introduction to terms purely as a “know thy enemy”.

OK.  Preliminaries out of the way.

Some definitions are in order of the kind of people and things/services we will discuss as I throw these articles together.  For the purposes of these articles I will be defining the following as:

1. Hacker:  Technically the name for a programmer, misapplied by the clueless media and the clueless masses who believe anything a journalist tells them as given.  I will not use the word “Hacker” to describe a person engaged in piracy in any form or somebody who uses their skills to cause willful damage.  Such people are:

2. Crackers:  Otherwise very intelligent people, sometimes programmers who are motivated by a variety of reasons to crack security of systems, software and data or a combination of these.  It’s a grave pity that their intellect could not be applied to software development, systems design etc, though in some cases it actually is.  Lots of grey areas in all these definitions BTW. 

Most genuine Crackers do not publish their methods widely for general consumption.  They tend to be elite and remain that way.  However there are those who do publish their results for general consumption or make it possible to follow their techniques by publishing their methods.  This is done for altruistic though I believe misguided reasons frequently, but there it is. 

Some of them despise open piracy and you will find forums (public and private) where they vent their feelings.  Some on the other hand actually support piracy, often with the “stick it to the man” mentality that is akin to the kind of otherwise intelligent people who fall for Leninism, Fascism, Maoism and other dysfunctional agendas.  Most of the serious cracking of software is initially done by these folks and it is in the context of software cracking that we are concerned with here.  It’s from these guys we get the hard to beat cracks and of course the ubiquitous Keygen.

3. Script Kiddies:  Technically folks who crack software aren’t referred to as Script Kiddies however those who do most of the scene cracking where kudos are given to the highest cracked software turnover (day, week, month etc) are probably best described as such as they use scripts/Tutorials or “Tut’s” as they prefer to call them (literacy is not a priority of these losers) to achieve their goal.  Personally I prefer the term Wanker for these guys, but if I use Wanker for them nobody is really going to know what I’m referring to. Scumbags, Scrubbers, Petty Thieves, Bogans are also terms that apply.  To say they are clueless and lame (incredible insults in their community) is probably an understatement.  Most of them couldn’t program a simple batch file let alone a simple text editor in assembly, never mind a fully functional GUI that anybody wanted.  These are the folks who will use a Tut to learn how to unpack an executable protector (insert name of your favorite protector) and think they are real “cool dudes” and “mean hackers”.   Total wankers of course but none the less dangerous to an ISV’s business.

4. Organized Crime:  There are many net orientated organized crime gangs.  One of the best known and most widely publicized is the infamous RBN (Russian Business Network).  Allegedly the head or heads have a family tie to a Russian politician who it is alleged makes them tough nuts to crack – no pun intended.   According to what is known they disappeared off the radar last November 2007, popped up in China, did a bit of damage for late December and early January and then disappeared again.  A lot of security pundits have declared this a huge victory over the RBN.  I would argue the security pundits claiming this as a victory have a few kangaroos loose in the top paddock or somehow believe that by claiming it they will achieve a clandestine advantage of their own.  Be that as it may.  Organized crime is involved in the software hacking and cracking scene and not, as many tend to suggest, so they can sell it illegally.  Sure this happens but the real value seems to really be in getting bots and Trojans into Joe and Jill Six-pack’s machine.   The number of cracks and Keygens containing Trojans and Bots is phenomenal.  After downloading thousands of these (in a dedicated old clunker machine, no way I’d even visit these websites on a good machine) for examination I found only 100 that contained no payload.  I did not test them against the software they were supposed to work against so I have no idea if the payload is transferred or not.  Scanning them with various anti-virus programs was also an eye opener as most of the big boy AV packages simply didn’t pick them or if they did failed to render them harmless.  These Bots and Trojans delivered, in many instances, correspond or are similar to those delivered by alledged organized crime gangs.  Whether this is a direct result of their influence or not is not clear - which is pretty much the case for most of these kind of things.

5. Torrent Sites:  The technology of the torrent is a wonderful thing that has many great *legal* uses.  Sadly scum and petty thieves have adopted the technology all most as if it was there own.  Enter sites, for which I refuse to help increase their Alexa ranking or Google ranking any further for by using their real name here, such as the PatheticCriminalBay in Sweden and other places make popular destinations and relative safe havens for Joe and Jill Six-pack to download software like byte addicted kleptomaniacs.  These places are next to impossible to shut down because they have weak governing systems (hello Sweden!) in relation to enforcement of copyright law and convention (even when signed up to Berne as the likes of Sweden are).  Sending cease and desist and DMCA violation notices is laughed at and publicly used to taunt inept lawyers who really don’t get it.  Only political and economic muscle can fix this, or massive DOS attacks on the offenders.  I do not support the latter option as it’s not effective.  Political and economic muscle will fix it in countries such as Sweden but the risk is incredible.  The Euro, for example, has a lot to loose from any action taken by the USA, UK, Canada, Australia etc if such action is taken in unison and it is sad, to me, that so many innocent people could get financially hurt because of such action.  Are our politicians thinking about this option?  I am.  I have no idea how many software developers become directly and actively politically involved, but this one is and it is on my own agenda and it’s something I’ve discussed with politicians with more influence than I have and who were interested in the concept (and the losses the industry faces now and into the future).

6. Download Sites:  No.  I’m not suggesting for a moment the download sites are necessarily assisting directly in piracy.  There may be a few who do it inadvertently through Google adds and such on their sites but I’m yet to confirm a single one who is actually doing it on purpose.  That is not to say there are none or none with connections.  But I have no proof of that, if you do contact me, I’d be happy to investigate in the strictest confidence.

HOWEVER.   I did use the word inadvertently and I will expand on that.  When they claim they have scanned for viruses and Trojans they are invariably telling pork pies.  I have *never* found anything wrong malware wise from a file on say Download.Com/C-Net or Tucows who I know do scan.  But I have on an incredible number of others.  BOTS, Trojans etc.  Some of it linking supposedly to legitimate software but through various techniques bypassing the real developer of the software and their real package and delivering their own nasty one.  Contact one of these download sites and don’t hold your breath for a reply.  They don’t care.  They run them for the Google add income and/or Black Hat SEO potential such sites currently bring.  Look towards Google addressing this sometime in the next few years.  Still think the SEO advantages of a download site outway the concerns you should have in relation to our responsibility to consumers and of course our own businesses?

7. Crack: Usually a piece of software (program) that patches an executable by changing original values to something else.  For example bit flipping or returning a desired result from a Boolean (like the classic IsItRegistered routines so many programmers unwittingly use).  Telling a real crack from malware is virtually impossible for most people.  Complicated further when it can be both at once and/or uses “secrets” known only to insiders in the cracking “scene”.  This hidden payload method is a favorite on peer to peer networks like Limewire and similar.

8. Keygens:  A program written to generate a working serial number for a piece of software.  More deadly than a crack a Keygen can really eat into profits when released and depending on the technology you employ (see here for information on PKV) very hard to counter-attack.

9. Serialz:  Corruption of the word “Serial” as in “Serial Number”.  A working serial number for a program.  Very popular Google search term.  Sometimes gained via a Keygen, commonly gained by purchasing a valid license by using a stolen credit card number and “released” via crack sites and torrent sites.  Probably the lamest and most identifiably illegal method used to most people, employed by many who fall into the script kiddy and scene cracking area.  Lamest of the lame in essence.  This hurts more than the software company from who the serial is illegally purchased from.  It doesn’t hurt the credit card companies – they charge the software company via a charge-back that includes a fee.  It hurts the consumer who owned the credit card as well and adds to the cost of online security.  Often users of this technique (in keeping with lame excuses used by criminals since time began) will blame the software company for making their software so darned hard to crack.  Keep this lame justification in mind when you are trying to use or employ commercial “uncrackable” software protection (if there even was such a thing) or just in making it really hard.

10. Casual Piracy: Believe it or not this remains, since the early days of software, one of the biggest piracy issues where-by the consumer hands their license key to Mary, who gives it to Joe or hands it to John or has ten friends who…    This is a tough one to beat.  I’ll talk more about this in another article, not that I have any solutions to it mind as I don’t believe there is a one size fits all solution to any of these. 

In conclusion for this article. 

What does all this mean to the consumer?  Basically use cracks or Keygens and you are pretty much guaranteeing yourself grief or handing your computers processing power over to an organized crime gang for use in other activities when you don’t even know they are doing it, even if you have anti-virus and a firewall!  It’s been estimated that the RBN could, if they chose, shut down a massive chunk of network or even a country in terms of computing infrastructure if they chose.  Reports that they’ve been selling access to their bots make one wonder just how clued most of our politicians are when it comes to security, domestic and international, crime and of course terrorism.

In the next article on this particular topic I’ll be looking at protection of executables more superficially and in a sense what it is we do wrong and how there is basically no bloody way, with current methods available, for us to fix it.   Sounds cheery huh? 

So why on Earth, or Mars or Venus would you rip the code from a component vendor’s demo, make a few cosmetic changes and expect to sell it? 

Yet that’s exactly what I saw suggested today on the BOS forum.  It’s the kind of disinformation newcomers do not need.  I blogged here recently about “If You Don’t Love It Don’t Release It”.  How the heck can you love something you have zero creative investment in and zero intellectual investment in?  You can’t.  You’re literally embracing Amateur-Ville.   The realm of the clueless and bereft of talent.  There are so many things that need writing/designing and being made available to so many markets. 

How did Andy Bryce come up with Perfect Table Plan?  Was it because a component vendor made something similar available as a demo?  Nope.  He identified a market that he could bring his talents to and developed something people wanted.  He sells software he clearly loves and from what I can see his customers love it too. 

Andy is not the only one.  There are so many great applications and some of them don’t take a lot of brain and teeth gnashing to come up with.  Patrick McKenzie and his Bingo Card Creator.  Hardly a new idea, yet Patrick’s approach is very fresh, compared to his competition, especially his marketing and after sales.   His customers seem to love it and it sells.  What more could one ask?

A very good friend of mine writes beautiful components for Delphi.  Some years back I wrote some of the demos for his ESBPCS VCL library.  They are designed purely to demonstrate using the components with, in the case of the demos I did for him, a database via the VCL.   They are rudimentary - but they belong to the developer who created them - or the developer they were assigned to (I assigned the code to ESB).   I, nor I doubt ESB, would bother chasing a looser trying to sell the simplistic demo as a product, but honestly, how could one feel anything but utter contempt for such a lame brain?

If you have to rip a demo program, mod the interface a tad and release it as a “ISV” product then I’d suggest you do not love your product (how could you with zero intellectual or creative effort invested?) or your ISV company and have complete contempt for your customers, current or potential. 

As I’ve said here before, an unloved product ultimately expires via a death of asphyxiation caused by lack of interest and lack of sales.  It even harms the efforts of other ISV’s by jading consumer’s perceptions of small software companies.

This is not to say a product must be complex or even totally original or unique.  In fact simplicity can have elegance and simple, competent and elegant sells – ask any Mac user.  But ripping a demo, modding a few UI elements and expecting to earn a dollar is in my mind immoral at worst and clueless and lame at best.

Over the years as a moderator of software forums I’ve seen a lot of lame stuff submitted for announcement.  Over and over again I’ve seen the example program from a certain Delphi how-to book consisting of a rudimentary calculator being sold for $29.95 down to $9.95.  They were kidding right?  They didn’t even have divide by zero protection coded in, had no keyboard support, just mouse, and looked like crap.  At least one of these “developers” went on to moan publicly that nobody was buying his software and he assumed piracy must be the reason.  Windows comes with a calculator 10,000 times more powerful than these ones and they reckon it was pirated?  Abject losers!

Please.  If you think you can do something worthwhile by making interface changes to a demo program offered by a component vendor – do the world a favor and get a job more suited to your talents.  Like becoming a dole bludging surfie.*

(*Dole bludging Surfie – Australian slang for an unemployed, lazy beach bum).

One of the big issues I faced doing this the last time around (it seems so long ago now) was that I was solo.  That meant I had limited amounts of time and motivation to do all the things one has to do on their own.  This time my wife is partnering with me. By profession she is a teacher, which fits well with the primary product, and she’s frankly had enough of teaching, the kids are eleven and thirteen now so she has the time to be involved.  She’s never been keen on computers but recently has completed several units in computing and this is also ongoing.  I think this is an advantage, that she can now use a computer but is still a novice.  It helps with R&D and it helps with design and testing.  It’s harder for my assumptions to slip through the alpha cycle.  Naturally this is a short term advantage as she will progress to a higher level of user in the future, as most people ultimately do.

We face a few startup problems, who doesn’t?   My illness and the fact that she has been doing home duties for many years now means cash is a commodity that is scarce.  We both need new machines, a compiler update, widgets for the compiler, domain names and hosting (we have the latter already) and all those things that come with such a venture (we are fortunate in having a relatively secure though abysmally small steady income that literally allows us to scrape by at the present time so eating and paying the mortgage kind of stuff are covered).  There’s no way I’d borrow for this as I have an allergy to debt of this nature so I need to raise capital.  Enter my car.  Even though we live in the outer suburbs I’ve sold it to finance this.  My wife has her car of course, but I’m not permitted to drive that. :-)   So it’s trains for me!

At the time of writing I have sold the car, bought a new dual core Pentium (new monitor to follow) with four Gigs of RAM and a terabyte total of HD space.  I’ve handed my old dev’ machine to my wife as initially a single core with a Gig of RAM will be just fine for her.   I’ve updated to Delphi 2007 and started buying widgets where I can to save on dev’ time.  I think this is important.  Just because you can code it doesn’t mean you should waste extra time doing it.  So I’ve begun buying widget sets (components) that I require in order to get look and feel right without having to code in minutiae.  Very happy with the first mock-ups for this reason.

But cash wise this is pretty much exhausted now so we need to raise more.  I ran an experiment on eBay over a year ago with quick and easy to develop software and discovered to my amazement it sold extremely well (enough to live off, albeit not live well).  For various reasons at the time I did not pursue it further.  We will be (we have!) developing a series of applications (twenty to start with, all with the same code base but for different purposes) with which to leverage this and gain the extra income.  The core product took eight hours to code.  Each application then takes another eight or less to snap in (reports, UI differences etc).  To my mind these are attractive looking programs, care was taken with the UI and code leveraging experience and study that I have done.  I’ll provide further details here in the coming weeks with some links.  I’ve not decided as to whether or not I will publish actual sales data or not yet. The mISV isn’t technically the eBay stuff.  That’s purely for income generation in the shorter term.  However beyond that it is my intention to be relatively transparent and frank about the process.  It’s also my hope that this blog will assist me in staying focussed.

More Soon….

They’re telling us now?  Talk about the bleeding obvious! 

Hmmm.  Couldn’t Microsoft have looked at some examples twelve years ago and got a clue from there about the potential of allowing these kind of things in the first place?  There were plenty of them - then and now.  But then nobody would ever need more than 128k of RAM - huh?  

Full story Click Here.

Maybe the next version of Windows will have something like Sudo - eh?  I can imagine the exploits the malware brigade will rush to implement already.