Angelo DiNardi

So lately I’ve been getting contacted a lot about MailWrangler. I have no idea why all of a sudden there’s renewed interest from users and journalists. I haven’t had time to respond to most people, sadly, but I’ll address some things here for everyone.

First off, chances are good I’ll never release MailWrangler. Originally the app was supposed to be my little entrance into iPhone development. I needed something simple to get acquainted with design, development, and distribution of iPhone apps. It was basically my “Hello, World” app. Of course, as the story goes, Apple rejected my app after taking way too long to review. By this point I’m already getting ready to head back to school where my time was only going to get harder to put into an app.

I’m not really mad at Apple, nor do I want to really make this a big deal. Its their App Store and they can make any rules they want. We knew the iPhone was a pretty closed system when we bought them and developers knew the App Store was going to be a pretty controlled place. We can’t say we didn’t see this coming; it’s Apple.

So where does that leave me? I don’t have much motivation to update MailWrangler to the latest SDK version (right now it compiles but won’t run… something changed) so I can’t even resubmit it. The app was just a little thing I threw together in a weekend, nothing big or special. Although I think it would be useful to have, even I don’t need it more than once every so often — the built-in mail app works well enough for my needs. Also, because of my issues with the App Store, it’s hard to put in effort on something that could just be rejected again. There’s plenty of stories out there and more all the time of people continuing to be rejected or ignored by Apple’s review process. It just isn’t worth my time to keep dealing with it.

Short story? I probably won’t be getting around to doing anything with MailWrangler again for a while. While I bet there’s a good chance I could get it approved eventually, it just isn’t worth my time right now (I’d rather spend it finishing out school so I can graduate in May, and enjoying those last months of college). And although I could release it via Cydia or other similar system — there’s a significantly smaller audience and I would still need to update the app to even work. Then there’s support and maintenance. Again, for me right now it isn’t worth it.

I think I’ll stick to web applications.

So a couple of weeks ago I decided to finally get some of my code out to the world. I’ve recently gotten pretty excited about using git for version control. Of course, GitHub is *awesome* so I posted my code there. You can take a look at: github.com/adinardi.

Two of my projects are available under the MIT license. First is the javascript library I’ve been working on for a while. It’s pretty basic, but includes all the good stuff like event handling, async requests, basic table generation & management, and a js bootstrapper. I plan on doing work on it here and there. The conventions I use in it are a bit of a mix of things I’ve done in the past and on first look can be pretty strange. I’d like to do an article on it at some point and why I did what I did with it.

The other project is the previous incarnation of the CSH touchscreen software. We were running opera 8 on some old touchscreens and this javascript was running on them. It’s not really useful to anyone except in an academic sense. I wrote most of it in about two nights or so in the Spring of 2008. I’d like to think it has a *decent* design and implementation. It isn’t some of my best work, but definitely ranks up there. It uses the JSCore library.

Now I just need to go back through more of my code I have around and get some more out there. I’ve worked on a lot of things — little of which most people can see. That’s what happens when you do a lot of work for companies — most people will never see it, and I’ll never see it again. *sigh*

So since we CSH sys admins are getting rid of old stuff we’ve got laying around (anyone want a Sun E3000 server?) I grabbed one of the Sun Netra T1 150’s we had. It’s a nice little machine (1U of solid metal) with a 440Mhz UltraSPARC-IIi processor and 1 Gig of RAM. So I figured what the hell, let’s install Solaris on this thing, it is a SPARC!

Now you have to understand, this thing only had the following connections to the world:

• 2x Serial Console ports
• 2x Ethernet (10/100)
• External SCSI
• 120v Power
• 2x SCSI hard drives

Yeah. Makes it a little hard to get anything installed. I ended up first trying to do a network install of Solaris 10 from a Ubuntu linux machine I have. An evening of failure later and I still can’t get the Netra to net boot. I had done this before, by the way. I set up a “Jumpstart” server for CSH before to install these Netras years ago when we got them. It was running Solaris 10 since Solaris has nice tools for setting up a net install server. 

I said to myself, “Self, why the hell don’t you just use a Solaris machine to install this other solaris machine!?” Realize though, CSH has gotten rid of most of it’s Solaris machines — since it’s arcane and a general pain to administer compared to Linux or even FreeBSD. So I picked Tonka, the CSH web server, to give this a quick test from. I ran the server setup script and in about 10 minutes I had my netra net installing from it. It was late and the version of Solaris that the disk image on Tonka was of was a few years old so I decided to kill it and try again the next day with a newer image.

So today I said to myself, “Self, don’t risk doing something stupid on Tonka, install Solaris 10 x86 on a VM and net install from that on to the Netra.” I wasn’t going to argue with myself so that’s what I did. It took me all afternoon to install Solaris since apparently VirtualBox on my Windows7 machine (it has a lot of RAM) and my Linux desktop machine didn’t want to actually do bridged networking or actually run the solaris install. Enough wasted time, and I just did the install on my MacBook Pro (4 gigs of RAM is nice for VMs). I set up a net install server on the VM and installed the Netra.

So now I have a Netra running Solaris 10 with an amazing 9+4 gigs of disk space. I’m still deciding what to do with it. Right now, I’m generally just figuring out how to actually set up a Solaris machine from scratch. I know enough to generally administrate Solaris when I have to, but it would be good to know more.

I might get around to posting some more of my Solaris explorations down the road. Since this thing has ZFS I might look in to an external SCSI caddy and use it as a backup server. It’s a thought.

I found this post (http://leavingcorporate.com/2008/12/30/i-have-a-startup-midwest-vs-bay-area/) interesting. It’s two conversations about this guy and his startup. One with someone in the Bay Area and one with someone in the Midwest. There’s reasons I’m planning on heading out to the Bay Area. This is definitely one.

It seems like every time you just want to do some silly maintenance task you end up screwing something up royally well. A few weeks ago I accidentally fsck’d the running ext3 filesystem on this server, ignored the warning message it spit out, and killed the filesystem. That’s what I get for mistyping the /dev device and ignoring warnings. The problem with the fsck warning is that it was really easy to bypass. Given, that’s what I expect from a UNIX-ish system. 

There’s still plenty of things broken here and on the server as a whole. It’ll all be back eventually. Note to self: when the backup server fails, replace it sooner rather than never.

So in July I wrote a small iPhone app called MailWrangler. Basically this app enabled a user to add their GMail accounts (standard and Google Apps For Your Domain) which they could load and switch between them quickly. It embedded Webkit in to the app and logged you in to the accounts automagically. Normally to check multiple Gmail accounts in mobile Safari you would have to log in and out of all of the accounts, typing the username and password for each. Using just the Apple Mail application you aren’t able to see threaded views, your google contacts, archive (quickly), star, etc without going through the hassles that are present when using Gmail’s IMAP on the iPhone. There’s a similar app for the Mac desktop called MailPlane.

I submitted my application on July 17th. On August 29th I finally heard back from Apple:

… Your application duplicates the functionality of the built-in iPhone application Mail without providing sufficient differentiation or added functionality, which will lead to user confusion. …

This is an interesting claim since although handing email, my app is simply directly loading and showing Gmail inside of an application. How you can confuse Gmail with Mail.app I’m not sure.

There was another issue:

… There is also no way to edit an account once it has been added. …

I agree that this should work. Currently you have to delete and re-add the account. You don’t lose anything since all the account info stores is a username and password. I felt for a first release this would be fine (how often do you change your gmail password?). The number of apps with this specific issue and other issues that apps have which are in the store, mine seems to be on par or ahead of the game. If you’re going to have rules about this, enforce them across the board. The number of shitty apps in the store is off the charts and yet mine that actually works is getting blocked.

What did I pay to be able to do again? Oh right, deal with Apple’s messy bureaucracy. I guess I should just write another flashlight or glowstick application to actually get published. That’s the only apps Apple seems to want in the store.

This was a bit of a pain to find via Google tonight so I figured I’d link to it and help others find it.

Tonight I was doing a bit of Javascript work and in the interface I was building had a couple of elements using CSS floating. They were all contained together inside of another DIV. Issue was that I had other things after the container in the layout that should have been block level and gone below it. Trouble was that the floating items were floating around this later item. I needed a way to “contain” the float elements without modifying any surrounding elements to account for them.

I finally dug up the Clearing Floats page on quirksmode.org. In the end setting “overflow: hidden” and “width: 100%” on the containing DIV took care of “containing” the floats to just that DIV. Awesome.

Did I mention I love quirksmode.org? Honestly. It’s one of the best JS resources there is.

Plaxo: once a nice, simple, useful service gone the way of craptastic social networking. Maybe I’m not like most people but I don’t need EVERY SINGLE ONE of my web services to be a social network. I don’t want connections and invitations and sharing. I got plaxo to solve a need: having my contacts when I’m away from my main machine via the web. Secondary was as a backup if something happened to that machine. It worked and did the job well.

They had a method of syncing your contact with the person’s actual contact info if they had the service. Ok. That’s reasonably useful. And it was on the sidelines. Storage of contacts was still first and foremost. Then they started adding things like calendaring and connections. A mini-feed kinda thing that’s just as useless as facebook’s. And on and on. Pretty soon the contacts storage was on the sideline and the rest of their social features were in front. When I got a connection request from someone I knew that was it — I didn’t like the service anymore. I haven’t really used it in months because it was more annoying every time I logged in.

So since I just got MobileMe and everything seems to be working better (not perfect yet — but generally usable) and I have the iPhone with my contacts synced to MobileMe and my computer I decided to rid myself of Plaxo. MobileMe’s address book app is just like using the OS X address book, simple and useful. It stores contacts — nothing more, nothing less. It does it’s job just fine.

Thanks for trying, Plaxo. Like everything else you had a good service then screwed it up with social crap. I may build and use web apps for pretty much everything if I can, but I never caught on to the social thing. I want simple, useful services and that seems to be the thing slowly becoming more rare on the web. Of course, that’s probably a big reason I love Apple products. They do what they’re supposed to do well, and not much more. And that’s fine with me. If it fits my need I’ll use it and if not I’ll find something else that does. 

So in an interesting turn of events I bought an iPhone 3G on Friday. Got in line at the Stanford Mall Apple Store at 6:15am. I was out the door of the Apple Store with a new iPhone at about 9:30am. I was around the 40th person in line, give or take a few. I’d say it was a pretty good morning (Yeah they couldn’t activate me in store and it took me a while once I got back with it… ).

I was also interesting in MobileMe (because I like synchronization and push) so I bought it with the iPhone for about 30% off. Although it’s been through some rough times.. and still isn’t *perfect* yet.. it definitely works when it does. I’m sure it’ll improve once things settle down and Apple fixes whatever issues are plaguing it.

So this leads me to LifeSync. The point was to sync my Google Calendar to iCal. Well now I don’t need to. I’m using MobileMe as both online calendar application and the sync tool between my Mac and iPhone. Although I don’t need it myself anymore I’ll definitely try my best to make sure it keeps functioning for those that will continue to use it.

Back to playing with iPhone applications.

After a lot of reflection while looking at the ocean I decided to release LifeSync for free starting today. I realized much of the reason it wasn’t out yet was the need for a “perfect” 1.0 release version and setting up all the licensing and billing stuff. It is simply too much for only having a few hours here and there to do work on it. Releasing it free means a) it’s not perfect and since you’re not paying that’s a little bit more acceptable, and b) I’ll have more time to fix issues rather than deal with licensing and billing issues.

It really comes down to the fact that I can’t take people’s money without having a really great product. I think LifeSync does the job well (I use it constantly for my own calendars) but it isn’t the best. But for a FREE product — I think it is a great value.

So spread the word, there’s a FREE OS X Google Calendar & Apple’s iCal synchronizer available. You can get your copy at http://lifesync.thetr.net. If you think it’s worth it, feel free to donate something to me via the Donate button on the LifeSync pages!