July 17, 2010

ActiveSync & Bongo; patently a problem

Filed under: bongo,freesoftware — Alex @ 9:38 pm

This evening I completed a new bit of code which has been uploaded to the bongo-web projects; it’s a Z-Push back-end and is only barely functional at this point: however, it works well enough that on my HTC Desire phone I can set up an ActiveSync account, it authenticates and synchronises contacts into my Bongo. To make it usable for just contacts will take a little bit more work, because at the moment it’s not storing them in the Bongo-native format, and it’s difficult to test that syncing is actually working without so more clients – then after that we get to do the same dance again with the calendar (although at that point, 60% or so of the code needed would have been written).

However, even though it’s are the “barely walking” stage it is actually doing useful things, so hooray! If nothing else, I already have a system to back-up my phone contacts working, and in maybe another week or something I’ll have something pretty awesomely functional which I can take on the road. Plus there’s no reason why shared contacts/etc. won’t be sync-able, which is even more awesome.

But there is a black lining to this cloud. Z-Push, although it seems to be reasonably well-developed and commercially backed software, has a problem: ActiveSync is pretty heavily patented in the US, and it requires a license to develop software which uses the protocol. Hence Google buying a license for the protocol to cover Android 2.2 and above, where the support will be native.

This doesn’t pose much of a problem for us as a project: there’s really nothing in the back-end as designed which would be infringing on anything except good taste. However, it’s also totally useless without Z-Push, and as it stands it looks unlikely that Z-Push will be entirely “clean” for USA-based users and developers to try any time soon.

I’ve really been dabbling with this to scratch the personal itch of being able to sync contacts and events on my phone, and so far it looks like that will be straightforward. I can’t help feeling a bit guilty though…

June 26, 2010

Bongo & Roundcube

Filed under: bongo,freesoftware — Alex @ 12:38 pm

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted anything about Bongo; for much of this year there hasn’t been an awful lot to write about – we’ve all been pretty busy. However, yesterday we had a teleconference which is worth talking about.

One of the problems we’ve had is that working on a number of pieces of the system, including the backend and web front ends, has been difficult – both parts are in development, and having everything subject to change like that it pretty difficult. On top of that, the web parts we were bequeathed from Hula just don’t work well and ideally want to be restarted with a modern JS library underneath.

So, we’ve agreed to take a slightly different short-term path: initially, we’re going to ship a version of Roundcube as our mail client. Yesterday, I demonstrated some of the work that Lance and I had done to this end, which comprises a skin for Roundcube (based on the Dragonfly design and assets), and a Bongo plugin based on the PHP bindings we developed as part of the Dragonfly-NG project. As well as the standard IMAP and SMTP support, then, the plugin connects straight to Bongo and pulls through your address book – as well as your own, you can also access shared address books on the server. This all works right now and is pretty useful.

The direction we’d like to take this is to continue the development of these additional parts to make Roundcube as good a Bongo client as we can make it; including:

  • calendar access;
  • server-side rules, signatures and vacation settings;
  • anti-spam training;
  • removing dependencies we’re not interested in (SQL being the obvious one).

It will be interesting to see what extent we can do this within the existing Roundcube framework; the plugin API doesn’t seem sophisticated enough quite at this point. However, the intention is definitely not to fork the project: where we can’t do things within the plugin, we’ll need to see if we can put forward proposals which are more generally acceptable to everyone – making Bongo-specific core changes would be pretty easy, but really not the road we want to go down.

The initial version of this plugin and various other bits of code are available in the Bongo-Web project on Gna!. The intention here is that we will release this concurrently with Bongo, so the two pieces fit together well: we will also be developing an separate administration tool to sit along side this.

What this means for the future web development is unclear at this point. It’s still possible we would take forward our own client development in the future, but that isn’t something we need to think about at this point: and even if we did, it would still be advantageous to maintain good support for Roundcube users in the future.

April 25, 2010

Thunderbird: Fedora & the future

Filed under: bongo,fedora,freesoftware — Tags: , , , , — Alex @ 6:01 pm

It’s only been a couple of months since I last wrote about the future of Thunderbird, but I’ve been thinking about it again recently. The immediate issue which prompted me to write this was the disturbing news that a potentially bad crasher bug in Thunderbird has gone unfixed in Fedora even though a patch was submitted about a month ago because of sensitivity over trade marks. Although some users on the devel list appear to be dealing out their usual standard of hyperbole on this, it is an extremely difficult position to defend: who knows if the maintainer would have actually released an update by now, but the immediate problem is the mark.

The company I work for moved offices recently, and this also set me thinking about Thunderbird again as we update our e-mail systems. As well as an update breaking one of the add-ons we rely on, there are still basic features missing from this mailer which we need as a business, and doing things like adding good-looking signatures to e-mails is bizarrely difficult and user-unfriendly.

We’re also in the position of still running on Thunderbird 2. We’re there because it’s a reasonable little client, but Thunderbird 3 is not: it comes with bad defaults which need to be switched off, and the search is irritatingly difficult to manage. Every now and then I search and rather than the useful folder filter I get the craptastic separate search tab, which doesn’t work because I’ve turned off Gloda.

Thunderbird 3.1 is supposed to be an easier upgrade for Thunderbird 2 users. Two problems: first, I don’t really believe it, and second, there are now no new Thunderbird 2 releases planned. So we’re now on an unsupported product with only an upgrade to a product we’re unhappy with available.

What would moving to Thunderbird 3 involve for our organisation? Well, primarily, it’s a support issue. We’re distributed (as well as having an office), so we would need to be giving users some kind of training so they could support themselves on the new software (avoiding all the inevitable “Where has button X gone?” type support calls), and ideally we’d want some distribution mechanism so we could control the setup of Thunderbird for our users. Of course, no such stuff is readily available – you can’t even buy it from Mozilla Messaging, the business set up to develop Thunderbird. This seems unbelievable to me; we can’t be the only business who’d be willing to pay for a business-ready Thunderbird distribution.

It’s now getting to the point where we will be making decisions. I can guarantee that we will be testing Evolution on Windows, to evaluate its suitability as a cross-platform client. My misgivings about this before have again centred on commercial support and reliability: however, Evolution has a much, much better business story, a clear development roadmap and solid history of releases.

Evolution would also be an easy sell to our users with the enhanced address book and calendaring support. It doesn’t look amazingly Windows-native to me, but that’s potentially a quite small problem – the main thing is testing it’s reliable.

I would have never thought Evolution would even have been a contender on Windows, but to be honest if we’re not in a position to receive commercial support for either suite, the choice becomes a lot more interesting – and obviously for our Linux users, it’s stable and has a great integration story.

March 24, 2010

On oData

Filed under: bongo,fedora,freesoftware — Tags: , , , , — Alex @ 11:20 am

Occasionally there are things that I read about on the web which happen to fit perfectly with some need I have at the time: and “Open Data Protocol”, or just oData, is one of them. I think I got hip to this by reading Miguel’s post on oData, but looking around it has been mentioned in a few other blogs I follow.

What is oData? Put simply, it’s a bit like being able to do SQL queries over the web – for non-technical people it’s deeply disinteresting, but what it effectively promotes is an ability for web-based services to open access to their databases in a pretty straightforward and standards-compliant method.

Now, there is some commentary that this is effectively trying to subvert another set of standards, RDF, OWL & SPARQL. I have to say up-front that I don’t see the comparison particularly: they’re similar in many ways, but also quite different, and I personally think they are more complimentary than competitive. However, the people who specified oData are Microsoft – so the “anti-competitive” label is one which sticks easily. It’s a lazy criticism in my opinion, but that’s up to the commentator.

More serious is the problem Miguel raises: while there are a number of free software oData consumer libraries available already, there are limited options for producing oData services. This is a major issue. As relatively light-weight as oData is, it’s still a pretty broad specification: your service needs to be able to produce both XML and JSON, and there are particular schemas and URL structures you have to follow. I’m tempted to start to write an oData producer for PHP, but it’s likely to be a lot of effort for not much immediate gain.

Another problem I’ve seen is that authentication and authorisation is basically not mentioned at all; the nearest we get is in section 8 of the overview:

“The Open Data Protocol does not define a new scheme for authentication or authorization. Instead, implementers of OData services may opt to use the authentication and authorization technologies that fit best with their target scenario.

“The use of authentication mechanisms to prevent the insertion or editing of resources exposed by an OData service by unknown or unauthorized clients is recommended but not required.”

This is a particular problem for me, because the immediate itch I have that this could scratch would need authentication. If one oData service uses HTTP basic auth, and another uses a cookie-based system, that’s an issue – it hinders interoperability. In a way, I understand why they did it – it’s a somewhat orthogonal issue, and once you start prescribing features like that there’s no logical reason to prescribe other HTTP features like if-modified-since, but it does seem to me to be a pretty key issue. Not all data wants to be public.

All that said, I’m planning on digging deeper into oData. It’s extremely interesting, and I think of large potential value in the future – and being honest, there is nothing else like it immediately available. The JSON format alone is of huge value, since it means that browsers can access all this data immediately. There’s just a fair amount of work for it to become useable…

February 12, 2010

Making Thunderbird sustainable

Filed under: bongo,fedora,freesoftware — Alex @ 8:29 am

Tbird is a software product quite close to my heart: I think it’s important for a number of reasons, not least because it’s one of the few cross-platform mail clients that works well on Windows, and feels comfortable for use in a commercial context. Having Mozilla Foundation spin Thunderbird out to a new commercial entity didn’t fill me with cheer because they were essentially cutting it loose, and Thunderbird 3 didn’t excite me before it was released and hasn’t done since it was released.

Slightly more depressing than all of these, though, are the plans put forward for 2010. Development for 3.1 seems to be about making updates from 2.x less painful, and making some of the features better – all things which 3.0 should have been, in all honesty (upgrading from 2.x to 3.0 has put a number of people I know right off Tbird, to the point they’ve switched to something else). The plans to put Thunderbird on an economically sustainable footing also look staggeringly underdeveloped: Mozilla Messaging has been around since September 2008, and from the look of it there is still absolutely no vision about how this is going to happen. What is going to happen is a series of “experiments”, but it’s not really clear to me how you can judge the potential of a business model on that basis.

My specific worry about this is that by trying a series of experiments, they’re basically going to do a prototype-y half-assed version of each, none will work, and the whole thing will come crumbling down. This is specifically why businesses do market research: they test the market before they develop the product, rather than put effort in a direction which isn’t going to be successful. More than this, ideas for development of Thunderbird have been terribly unexciting so far: more experiments in the “web 2.0″ direction may be interesting for some people, but I struggle to see how people are going to pony up for any of this.

There has also been seemingly no effort to bring into the core the crucial Thunderbird feature which pretty much everyone clamours for: the Calendar. Yes, the plugin exists, and yes it’s pretty good. But in all honesty, there is absolutely no way on earth I would deploy that setup in a business right now with Tbird auto-updating itself, because at some point something will go wrong on update and people’s calendar plugin will stop working. So either I turn off updates, or I don’t use the plugin, and the balance doesn’t weigh in favour of the plugin.

Joe Brockmeier has written some thoughts of his own on the economic future, which involves basically setting up as a mail service for people to use Thunderbird against. I would worry it’s a little bit late in the game for that; businesses willing to pay for that kind of thing already have plenty of options available to them and it’s difficult to see how Mozilla Messaging can add significant value in that area without carrying horrendous costs.

My take: personally, I would want to see them focus on deployment and management of Thunderbird. Specifically, that means some kind of management system for Windows-based networks, whereby I can control updates, configure accounts, control user’s settings centrally, etc. That’s something critical to broad deployment of Tbird in large organisations, and doesn’t really exist right now. It would also be something worth paying for.

Whether or not enough “things worth paying for” can be created, though, is an open question. Fundamentally, there is a problem with giving away the client for free: it is a development cost, and in order to recoup that cost you have to create value in ways which wouldn’t be possible without the client. Every business model that doesn’t rely on that client being available for free as leverage doesn’t recoup the cost, it shoulders it. And that is the fundamental problem facing “open source business models”.

January 13, 2010

Why Google is really pulling out of China

Filed under: bongo,fedora,freesoftware,misc — Tags: , — Alex @ 12:18 pm

Since the news about Google demanding unfiltered search came out earlier today, I’ve speculated in a number of places that Google have broader reasons for wanting out of China, and that the issue of search – and, by extension, free speech – was not exactly #1 on their list of priorities. In particular, I mentioned on LWN my thoughts on what kind of an effect Chinese infiltration of Google Apps would have on the customer base they’re trying to build.

To reprise some of the facts in the reports;

  1. BBC News mentioned “a sophisticated and targeted” attack, but then later says that Google pointed the finger at phishing and malware scams rather than security problems.
  2. The reports are that Gmail accounts were mainly targeted, and these Gmail accounts were of known dissidents.

Now, 2) is quite believable, but 1) is not at all. Phishing and malware is nothing new, there’s not a lot you can do to stop it, and it’s certainly not sophisticated and targeted unless the Chinese Government was intercepting legitimate Google traffic. Even then, with SSL, that’s a difficult proposition.

Wikileak’s twitter account added a couple of other suspicions:

  1. “China has been quietly asking for the same access to google logfiles as US intelligence for 2-3 years now.”
  2. “Gossip from within google.cn is Shanghai office used as CN gov attack stage in US source code network.”

With this kind of affair, it’s usually instructive to consider the adage of Cui bono. Sure, Chinese intelligence probably could use more information about dissidents and would probably like log file access and things like that. Almost certainly they try to access gmail accounts too. I have little doubt that Google would have immense trouble detecting this from the more general problem of phishing, and to that extent it’s really not their problem – it’s a social engineering problem.

There is a far larger prize at stake, of course. If Google source code is under attack, which seems reasonable, this presents two major issues. The first, that Google code could be used by China: there is the issue of straight-up rip-off, which devalues Google at the very least. However, Google is already #2 and is well behind Baidu, the native search system. There is motivation to do this of course, but it’s not exactly the biggest prize on offer.

The larger prize is access to code to work out security issues. Google does not develop code in the open, and while most of it is probably secure there are doubtless issues that a determined attacker could find more easily with access to code. And, once you start getting access, you start being able to gain the stuff of real value: the information stored on Google’s systems, in Gmail, in Google Docs, in Postini, as well as the various logs and other behavioural data associated with advertising.

Put like that, Google simply cannot afford to work in China. In one sense, China is lawless: there is a certain class of “criminal” who is state-sponsored and therefore can do as they please. There is no good technological defence to this, there is only the question of whether to participate or not. And what are the potential costs of participating? Essentially, limitless. Major US and EU firms on Google Apps will not want their business information readable by the Chinese authorities. More than that, firms doing business with other firms using Google Apps will not want their information readable too.

On Facebook, I gave the example of Jaguar Land Rover as one company who use Google Apps for everything. Will they like the idea of the Chinese authorities being able to see what they’re up to? No. Even if it’s not happening, it will put the wind up them: potentially, it could destroy their business. And lets remember, there are now millions of businesses on this platform.

This highlights one danger of cloud computing: not only do you have to trust the provider, but you also have to trust that the aggregation of data in one place doesn’t become a sufficiently juicy target for someone else. And Google is a very, very juicy target.

Let me speculate further on a few potential issues in the future (none of which are problematic at this point today):

  • Google controls large amount of “dark fibre” and “private internet”. That’s a juicy target.
  • Google are putting Android into many handsets. Yum, yum, another juicy target!
  • Google maps / street map / other raw data. If, somehow, the collection of data could be controlled by another agent – well, that’s quite a useful tool to have.

This doesn’t even go into the potential issues of having hardware controlled by another agent in your data centre or in your phone, which isn’t outside the realms of practical possibility for the Chinese Government either.

Let’s be clear about this: all Governments have secret services, and the Chinese are by no means the most adept or technologically advanced. However, they may be the most dangerous and the most likely to work clandestinely. Google must know already that they have spies working for them, not just in China but in all their major offices. Most good industrial espionage is internally undetectable, because it’s acquired information out only. The Chinese spies clearly have been up to many detectable activities, which puts them in a very different class.

Update: Wired has a very good article up with more details about the attack. In short, there was a specific piece of malware targeted at Google to pull their source code out of the organisation. It doesn’t say what, but it does say that the large amounts could be sent and doesn’t say how quickly they detected in. Which is exceptionally scary. I would have thought the Windows-based attack would limit the scope of what could have been lifted, but this doesn’t explain many of the other rumours about Google’s Chinese offices, and doesn’t (on its own) explain Google’s seeming decision to withdraw. Possibly, Google were attacked in other ways too.

November 20, 2009

Fedora 12 & ChromeOS

Filed under: bongo,fedora,freesoftware — Tags: , , , , — Alex @ 10:59 am

It has been great to see Fedora 12 release this week. Apart from the major kerfuffle over PackageKit (which I understand, even if I don’t recognise the problem), it seems to have gone really well – especially since the reaction in the critical press has been surprisingly un-critical. Hardware support seems to be good, including graphics, which is slightly surprising given the huge amount of change in this area, viz.:

“So, of the four “major” distributions over the past month (Ubuntu 9.10, Mandriva 2010, openSuSE 11.2 and Fedora 12), the only one that didn’t crash, hang or otherwise misbehave on at least one of my laptop/netbook/nettop systems was Fedora.” – “Saving the ‘Best’ for Last“, J A Watson at ZDNet.

I think this is a tremendous accomplishment by the people working on this stuff, and the release team, given the short and punchy nature of this development schedule. Fedora 13 has a great base to start from, although it also has to live up to what seems to be a pretty good Fedora 12 release.

It was also interesting to see that news of Google’s Chrome OS hasn’t really overshadowed the release: yes, people are writing a bit about it, but it hasn’t really set the world alight in the same way Wave did a few weeks ago. And you know what – I think it’s because it’s really not a terribly hot idea. In fact, I would say that Fedora 12 and Gnome Shell (the preview of part of Gnome 3) is actually a better Chrome OS than Chrome  OS.

The stuff that Chrome supposedly brings to the table, I already have. My netbook unsuspends in 5 seconds flat, and it lives its life “on”. This fast boot stuff is basically worthless to me. The user experience of Chrome OS is surprisingly close to what Gnome Shell already offers; and of course I’m able to run proper applications not just web-based ones. And, actually, I think Moblin actually gets a lot of this stuff right already: particularly the deep integration between the desktop shell and web applications. If I’m honest, this just looks to me like another Google “re-invent the world and outspend the people already innovating in this area”-type project. If Google were not so fat on advertising revenue, there is no way they could make a play like this.

And, to be honest, I’m not entirely sold on the people already innovating in this area already. I’ve written before about litl’s webbook – which ChromeOS seems to be aimed squarely at. If I were litl, I would be pretty deeply worried, since a web-based OS with Ubuntu underpinnings running on custom hardware is basically a rough description of both projects. And you can bet that Google (or, their hardware partners) aren’t going to be knocking these out at $700 a pop.

I’m deeply unconvinced by this “web apps only” approach, anyway. A browser is not the be all and end all, and files exist on disk for a reason: “it’s too complex for normal people” argument just does not stack up at all. What ChromeOS, and litl and others, are doing is saying “we can make a computing experience as simple as a television”, which is fine. But then you get a computing experience just like a television, with minimal interactivity and flexibility. I mean, custom hardware is great, but one size doesn’t fit all – you have to talk to cameras, printers, mobile phones, and all manners of other gadgetry. That needs OS support. Are Google going to come up with some kind of USB-to-website system so my camera’s photos can be uploaded via flikr? In what world of UI interaction does that even make sense?

What you end up with is an emasculated system where apps don’t talk to each other or share content easily (can you insert images into Google Docs directly from flikr?). It’s entirely retrograde, and a non-compelling view of computing which limits users to various hard-coded paths of functionality. For simple stuff like sending e-mail or browsing the news online, it’s fine. For “harder” stuff like attaching a document to an e-mail: well, you’d better hope that you use Google Docs and GMail and that those apps can talk to each other. Better hope, though, you don’t have a video camera and want to edit some clips – there’s no website for that yet, so you’re stuffed, bud. And even when it arrives, it’s going to take a while to upload those hundreds of megabytes of Little Eric walking for the first time, because that ADSL connection you have with 8Mb download has only a 512K upload.

It’s clear these “computers” are only going to have a very limited appeal. And this, to me, is where Fedora (and other free OSes) shine. You can have the Moblin interface, or a proper Gnome desktop. The hardware support is great; it will work on your netbook or on your full desktop. You can make the choice to cut down and simplify the interface, and not lose the ability to run the more complicated apps.

If I were to prognosticate, I would say that litl will be around for maybe a couple of years, but not much more. ChromeOS, Moblin and the like will find their place on cheap photo-frame-like touch PCs which people will scatter around the home, but there will still be a real PC in the corner.

November 12, 2009

First attempt with Gnome Shell

Filed under: bongo,fedora,freesoftware — Tags: , — Alex @ 2:54 pm

As part of doing some testing of the upcoming Fedora 12 release, I decided to put it on my EeePC 901 netbook. I had a feeling it would be relatively well supported, and indeed the installation was extremely smooth. I was going to also test the work Peter has been doing on the Moblin packages, but instead I got detoured into Gnome-Shell: my Fedora 12 laptop runs Nouveau (no 3D for me!) and my desktop is ATi but not Fedora 12 yet.

In a word: wow. For what is supposed to be a technical preview for Gnome 3.0 which, we should remember, is about a year away, this is a remarkably polished bit of software. The simple black borders looked a bit basic in screenshots but in use the understated nature of the interface actually looks a bit classy. The Applications menu and particularly the side panel are a bit rough looking, but I don’t have the side panel turned on.

The workspace metaphor is taking me a bit of time to get used to; it’s quite similar to the Gnome 2 system but has slight differences. I’ve had a bit of trouble launching apps in the way I want, but I keep discovering new features to it (e.g., dragging and dropping the app into the workspace) which give me better ways of doing things. Not being able to access applets from the Activities page is also a bit odd, but eh.

What is particularly praiseworthy, I feel, is that even though it doesn’t appear to be designed particularly with netbooks in mind – unlike, for example, Moblin – it does seem to work really well. I’ve put the Chromium browser on there as well, to save screen real estate, and the combination is much better than the relatively-stock Ubuntu I had on before.

Although there aren’t really any new features compared to Gnome 2, everything seems to be placed in a smarter way, and in particular I could see non-technical users using these workspaces and actually “getting it”. I suspect a lot of what’s remaining is really “small scale” stuff – the polish which really makes things sing. I noticed odd problems with windows not popping up when they should occasionally, and stuff like that – or clicking a link and having it appear on a browser in another workspace with no notification. These are the small fit-and-finish pieces which make an application great, though.

November 4, 2009

Whatever happened to the Chandler project?

Filed under: bongo,freesoftware — Tags: , , — Alex @ 1:03 pm

Years ago, Mitch Kapor invested large sums of money into the OSAF – Open Source Applications Foundation – to come up with a new personal information manager called Chandler. Having burned through the $8 million they got via various means ($5M from Kapor originally), most (all?) of their developers were cut loose early in 2009 as I understand it, leaving the Chandler project – and associated projects – somewhat in limbo.

On a whim, I decided to have a look at the current state of play: turns out Chandler 1.0 is pretty much dead, and the work is now concentrating on re-architecting the software for Chandler 2.0. Having been in a similar position myself with the Bongo project – though I like to think the work we’ve done has been more evolutionary than revolutionary, except where absolutely necessary (e.g., the Hula store not being able to handle concurrency – d’oh!). The pages don’t seem to say why, although I seem to remember Chandler suffering from various pretty severe performance issues (i.e., being unusable).

It also reminds me somewhat of the situation with Mozilla Messaging and Thunderbird 3. MozMess has had a few millions injected into it, and now their developers are on a spree of embedding “search”, databases, bizarre active folder systems, and “conversation view” into Thunderbird – literally every release in version 3 I’ve been using (and I use it as my main client) has been a step backwards for me.

Clearly the injection of substantial money isn’t any particular driver of success; indeed, on the other hand, it seems to have a negative correlation on those (extremely limited) data points. However, without resources to have people develop, it’s difficult to see how to build up enough momentum to make this stuff happen. It is something of a conundrum.

litl breaks cover – what to think?

Filed under: bongo,fedora,freesoftware — Tags: , , , — Alex @ 11:36 am

So, litl has finally broken cover – I had written previously some first thoughts based on the various tid-bits that had leaked, and I thought it might be interesting to follow up on this. Sadly, it doesn’t seem that I had missed anything particularly big: this is supposed to sit like a photo frame in various places in your home, can connect up to a TV but doesn’t really do any multimedia stuff itself, doesn’t have non-wifi wireless, and doesn’t have a touchscreen. In short, it’s a big Chumby, and very similar to both that and Joggler.

I still don’t get why they went to the effort to design their own hardware. Ok, moving parts are gone – that’s good (although, it has a CF drive? Aren’t those hard drives writ small?). Aside from that, this is just a bit of a bendy netbook. One hopes they didn’t spend too much on the design of that. And the controller: well, ok, it has a wheel and a button, and the Mac-like dispensation with other stuff probably makes it reasonably easy. But infra-red: oh dear. This isn’t like the Wii wand; you need line-of-sight.

The software interface is obviously a bit different to what’s on the market at the moment, but not that far a departure from the likes of Joggler. It’s built around channels, which is a familiar concept from TV. I’m not totally sold on this: the channel concept is beginning to die a death precisely because it doesn’t work in the modern era, and it reminds me a bit of early computer UIs which were designed around physical desks and files (which is partly why we still call them “desktops”). However, I’m willing to give it a go and see if it grabs me – the proof of these puddings is always in the eating.

What slightly scares me is the use-cases set out on the website. “View photos”. “View photos on your TV!”. “Get the weather”. “Get movie listings”. “Access the web”. Etc. Oh, and “plug it into your TV”. Ok, I can see some point (although, I’m not really feeling this). But not a word on the point I made previously: battery life. Being portable and light is great if you can move it around freely. Will the battery life keep up with that? How will it work? If the litl ends up being tethered to the mains for the most part, suddenly most of the appeal I can think of has flown out of the window.

And then, the big, big disappointment: litl want $700 for this. Assuming a decent exchange rate, that’s still £450 with the best will in the world. Plus they want an extra £10 or so for the remote control, which bafflingly is an optional extra. Looking at what that would buy me in on the High Street if I went out this afternoon:

  • £250 gets a 10″ Atom-based netbook with storage built in (yes, it’s a PC)
  • £450 gets me the same netbook but with added mobile broadband, so not only can I take it everywhere around the house, I can take it around the country and still access my stuff
  • £150 buys me a Joggler, which for my money does a lot of what litl does but has a touch screen and is even more portable. It’s not as flexible or powerful I guess, but I could buy three of these for one litl and I can text mobiles directly from it.
  • £140 buys me a Chumby – less portable, less flexible, more interactive.
  • £340 wins me a Fizzbook Spin. It’s ruggedized, the screen’s more adjustable as is the webcam, it has a handle and the orientation adjustment. It also has the important touchscreen.
  • £300 also buys me various TV media centres which play photos, video, browse the web etc. Sure, it’s stuck under the TV.

In reality, how many of these are actually in competition with litl? Probably not many directly, although Joggler comes very close. It depends what you mean by “in competition”, though. I know a couple of people who leave a laptop around in their living room for accessing the web, so I vaguely understand what litl are aiming at. I’m just not sure this is on target, though, and for all the nice design it’s missing (unless I’m mistaken, which I could be) a touch screen and wireless wand – both of which I think are crucial features if you want people to either pick this up or use it from the sofa. A keyboard is entirely useless in both those scenarios.

So, I’m inevitably feeling a bit disappointed. I believe they’re missing a trick: not because they don’t have a good idea; I think it is a good idea (in most respects, anyway) and it appears to have been executed well. However, I think also that times have changed since this thing was on the drawing board. One excerpt from the “software essay” on the litl site stood out for me:

“Let’s say you have a litl at home, a litl in your weekend home, and a litl plugged into your TV.”

Wow, what an assumption to start from. Are they really aiming this device at people with a second home who can afford to drop $2000+ on three netbooks? That’s not the economic climate I see around me today.

And, I think that sums up my problem with this device. What functions it has seem to be well designed. But, it’s a complete luxury device. It’s not enabling me to do things I couldn’t do before. It’s simple, yes, but when I think about it, simple isn’t the first word that springs to mind: the first word I thought of when I saw this was “decadent”. Decadence of design, of implementation, and of product. That’s not a good thing.

Update 12:45 – there’s a pretty enlightening interview with John Chuang up now too; and the absolute last sentence is probably the most revealing: “We can have a long-term view because we’re self-funded. We know we have a great device, and right now we want to make sure we sell it to customers who are buying it for the right reasons.”

Not just decadent design of a decadent product, but now decadent marketing. Buying a product for the right reasons?! Whoa. This just smells of multi-millionaire play-thing, a la Chandler, OLPC, to name but a few.

Update 13:40 - last update I’m making on this. Engadget, who leaked the hardware first, are not impressed by the price either.

The other point I wanted to make in this post but forget: the UI is very similar to the Palm Pre, for me, or the Nokia N900. Both of which devices will be a. cheaper than this and b. much more useful to me. But then, I guess I’m just not the right sort of customer :)

Last point – it appears possible this thing runs Ubuntu under the hood. The Crunchbase listing for litl has Canonical down as an OS service provider, and there’s a PPA on launchpad for “bfallik-litl” – bfallik on twitter has not tweeted, but is friends with Peter Teichman (of Hula fame) and other known litlers.

Given Havoc Pennington, ex of Red Hat, is the Director of Operating Systems or something at litl, that’s a bit of a surprising choice for me, but I guess the OS layer is likely to be pretty thin anyway – the stuff on top is Javascript-based somehow, possibly the whole thing is running in a Mozilla window much like the Pyro Desktop.

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