We bought 15 iPhones in San Francisco last year for all our friends.

Yep, I’m serious. The other reasons for wanting an iPhone are valid too and apply to me too. It is the mother of all shiny objects, a great tool and a nice phone and you just want one as soon as you hold one in your hands. But besides that the iPhone platform is also clearly the start of something new. And I want to be a part of that.

Early Apple computers (before the Macintosh) had serial ports and something called a Game Port. It could be used for digital and analog input and output and was very powerful. People would buy an Apple I or Apple II and hack around with these ports to build exiting stuff like printers or home automation tools. Back then it was clear to people that you could build practicably anything with these machines if you had some basic hard- and software knowledge and that was an extremely exciting prospect.

Now we have the iPhone. A lot of people are complaining about the closed character of the iPhone but I see it differently. Sure, things could improve a lot. The NDA should go and the App store should work more transparent and all that. But look at the possibilities for a moment and you will realize just how empowering this little computer is!

The early Apple computers had serial ports that let people do anything with their computers which was cool. The box itself could do a few basic things which were exciting but still fairly limited. Now look at the iPhone: developers have access to the Internet, the GPS chip and all the motion sensors. The touch, tilt and move interface is all there waiting for you to take advantage of. All you have to do is come up with an application that uses a few of these, freely available, technologies and built it.

Better yet; you don’t even have to worry about setting up an eShop, coming up with license fees, promotion, illegal copies or how to make your invention available to users. The App store handles everything for you.

So what you have is a phenomenon with unlimited possibilities, free tools to build applications, an app store that handles distribution, promotion and security and millions of eager users who can’t wait to play with your products, and pay for them too.

It is not often that a revolution takes place where you get a chance to participate. It happened, and is still happening, with the Internet and now it has just started with a new platform called the iPhone.

I just couldn’t resist becoming a part of that.

This last week I have been trying to finish the layout for the main user interface screens. And I just couldn’t finish them. I kept postponing my work, checking my mail, staring out the window and finding reasons to do other things instead. At first I thought I just had a (code)writers block but after 3 days I still didn’t feel like finishing my work.

I couldn’t even explain why I didn’t finish the design, after all, I had 90% of the screens finished and we only needed a few more pages. So yesterday Patrick and I were in the car and suddenly I blurted out ‘The design isn’t good enough. I want to start over’. Patrick looked shocked and confused and I explained to him that we were making things to complicated for users in the current design and we needed to go back to the basics of the service.

We went back to the office and decided to spend a few hours just trying to look at the whole thing with a fresh look. After 2 hours we were sweating, high on caffeine and extremely excited because of what we sketched on our whiteboard. We decided to throw away my 2 weeks work and implement a much simpler design. It reminded me of this great story which I’m going to ask you to read now:

From Folkore.org: MacPaint was good at drawing text, allowing the user to specify characters at any position, with any font, size or style. But once the text was instantiated, it just became pixels like everything else; you couldn’t go back and edit it as text. In June 1983, Bill thought he could do something about that.

Bill decided to try to turn pixels back into characters when you selected them with the text tool. He wrote a lot of elaborate code, probably as much as for any other MacPaint feature. First, he wrote assembly language routines to isolate the bounding box of each character in the selected range. Then he computed a checksum of the pixels within each bounding box, and compared them to a pre-computed table that was made for each known font, only having to perform the full, detailed comparison if the checksum matched.

Bill got his character recognition routines working well, and it seemed like magic, if you were used to the earlier MacPaint, to be able to recover and edit previously placed text. It wasn’t perfect, because it would fail to recognize a character if a single dot was out of place, but it was still very useful. Everyone loved the feature, and congratulated Bill for pulling off another miracle.

I was surprised a few days later when Bill told me that he decided to remove the character recognition feature from MacPaint. He was afraid that if he left it in, people would actually use it a lot, and MacPaint would be regarded as an inadequate word processor instead of a great drawing program. It was probably the right decision, although I didn’t think so at the time. I was amazed that he was able to detach himself from all the effort that he put into creating the discarded feature; I know that I probably wouldn’t have been able to do the same.

So why is this story so important to me? Because it shows a lot of courage to throw away your work when you realize that the final product will be better without it. And I was lucky that it was MY work that I thought we should throw away and not someone else’s. How would I have felt If I would have been happy with my work and Patrick would have suggested we throw MY work away? I would have resented the suggestion and been offended. Which I shouldn’t be. I should welcome the suggestion. That is why I think every developer should read the story about Bill Atkinson and MacWrite. Every day you should ask yourself
‘am I doing the right thing? Should I start over? Is this feature really cool or do I just like it because I CAN build it?’ and if the answer is no, you should be able to detach yourself from your work and throw it out of the window.

Like a rabbit chewing off its leg to get out of a trap…

But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the Kings of Code gathering on May 27 in Amsterdam! In fact, as one of the initiators of the event, I must be there!

Yeah, the Kings of Code gathering is an event by developers for developers with developers. There will be international speakers who will talk about the latest developments and best-practices for web development work.

A few examples:

John Resig, who founded jQuery and is a JavaScript evangelist at Mozilla. But also Nate Koechley, developer at Yahoo who knows a lot about front-end development and Nate Abele, core-developer of CakePHP, the PHP-framework loosely based on Ruby on Rails.

There will also be 8 Open Source projects presented onstage by local developers.

I look forward to meeting a lot of Kings of Code there and having a beer too at the party after the event. See you there?

If you are planning to attend do register today as the event is very popular and there are only a few tickets left…

I noticed that most real-estate websites concentrate on these two moments (buy & sell) when it comes to home owners. All these websites try to make money when people want to buy or sell their house. That means that most people rarely need them.

My upstairs neighbors just sold their house. The price they got per square meter (€4191) means that my house almost doubled in value since we bought it 7 years ago. I hadn’t thought about that until my neighbors sold their house and I recalculated the value.

So that got me thinking. Could it be possible to build a service that appeals to home owners and keeps them up-to-date on the value of their house, what similar houses in the neighborhood get sold for, what their over-allowance is and if they can’t get a better mortgage based on the value of their house and the current interest rates.

There are a few variables that make it hard to predict the value of real-estate. But I’m just suggesting that we really predict values only based on square meters. What i would propose is that we take the last known valuation (you bought the house for how much?) and take that as a the basis. Then we look at what other houses in your area get sold for and based on that we could multiply the value of your house.

My guess (but I’m not that good with math so that is why this is an OpenIdea) is that the more houses are added to the database the more precise it will be able to predict the value of a house.

There will always be exceptions and factors that will influence the price of your house positively or negatively but those could be added as we find out about them. Lets say you buy a few extra square meters of garden or you find out that your roof is leaking. In the database you could say ‘Shape of building: needs work” which we could translate into “needs work = 5% off value”. A bigger garden would be “Square meters x average garden value + total value”.

I can image that if you have the last 6 transactions of a house and the houses around it, the current interest rates and a few more variables you could give people a pretty good estimate of the value of their houses.

I registered the domain name Taxati.com for this OpenIdea. In The Netherlands a ‘taxatie’ means ‘Appraisal’.

Although the math behind the calculations will be pretty complicated in the long term the basic system should be easy to build. People should be able to input a few values and their contact data and then we could send them a weekly update on the value of their house, including a few interesting deals to re-insure, re-mortgage or maybe just sell their houses.

Who wants to help me build it?

Screenshot:

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

All these applications live in my browser. On an average day I keep 5 to 10 browsers windows open with a range of tabs in every window showing different (30+) websites. I will be blogging, checking stats, reading feeds, managing photos, calendars, addresses and email.

In the old days there used to be a few weak links in this chain. My computer could crash and my applications could lock up and become unresponsive. The days of computer crashes are a thing of the past. My computer still needs a restart now and then but in general I don’t lose data and it might happen once every 2 months. But my browser is a different story. I will be browsing 30 sites at the same time which really puts a strain on my browser. Every now and then my browser simply quits and restarts. Firefox luckily remembers some of the sites I was visiting and will offer to open these. But the information I might have entered (that blog post I was writing) will likely be gone.

I think the future of Web Applications needs more browsers. And I don’t mean another browser developer like Firefox, Opera or Safari. What I want is application specific browsers that will open independenly from my regular ‘random purpose’ browser. It’s content will be completely web-based but it will be slightly different, on the outside, from a regular browser. It won’t need an Address-Bar and back buttons. It will simply open and immediately show me Google Calendar, Google Docs and Gmail in one window. Big buttons will allow me to switch from Calendar to Docs and back. In the settings I might want to add more Tabs with other Google Applications as, and when, I need them or they become available.

When I click a link in Gmail to a website out of the Google domain a different ‘Browsing Experience’ optimized Browser will open. There I will be able to browse blogs, play games and search the web. If some Flash or Javascript applet screws up my browser it will only quit that Browser and not mess with my Google Office Browser or my WordPress browser. Different tasks need different browsers.

All the browsers would work independent from each other but will share a common technology and libraries. I could just use a Firefox, an Opera and a Safari browser next to each other. I am actually doing that right now but the experience sucks. The different shortcuts, interface and browsing experience makes it too hard to switch between browsers.

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”
– Alvin Toffler

I think I’m still young but even I am sometimes overwhelmed by new technologies and get tired at the thought of having to ‘unlearn’ my old habits and ‘relearn’ another new exciting technique. They say you are never too old to learn but you might just get too tired to invest time and energy in learning.

But, as Toffler explains, I need to keep up and persuade myself to keep evolving.

While you are over there please Digg the article and leave a comment with your Blog URL if you installed it.