For the past 3 years I’ve got to September and I’ve been incapable of writing anything that vaguely resembles a song, let alone a decent one. Music comes fine but all lyrical inspiration vanishes. Usually around the end of November it starts coming back to me and I can start writing again. This year it’s managed to come back it a bit early, partially because I’ve wrote about this seasonal writer’s block. Here are the lyrics:

Red leaves in the air
A cold wind starts blowing
Half the trees are bare
And the other half are going
And I sit here not knowing
What to write cause my minds not showing itself to me

Night draws in early now
Walk home in the darkness
But I can’t make a sound
The thoughts no longer trust
Sit rotting in the dust
The feeling now is lost on the breeze

And the dreams are now deserting
While the plans have started migrating
Nothing wants to reveal itself to me
With this autumn disease
The ideas have left me
Gone off home and they have let me
Fend for myself
With this autumn disease

Jack Frost is calling round
A chill runs through my body
I’m wanting warmer grounds
To thaw my sluggish memory
To remember something new to me
To find that tune that’s elusive for me

And the dreams are now deserting
While the plans have started migrating
Nothing wants to reveal itself to me
With this autumn disease
The ideas have left me
Gone off home and they have let me
Fend for myself
With this autumn disease

Inspiration’s gone trick or treating
Don’t know which but it’s not telling
It’s letting me struggle with
My autumn disease
Guy Fawkes is contemplating
Whether he wants to say anything
To push me in the right directions
Overcome this lack of creativity
December is sat there waiting
For the time to come for celebrating
So it can give me back what September took from me
With this autumn disease

So yeah… thought I’d do a bit of an odd song to go with a bit of an odd chord sequence I came up with:

Flying high up to the sky to catch me some stars
Swimming in a sea of clouds, I turn around there’s a plane coming for me
Nobody see me as I pass right through
Up through the aisle and rest in row number two

It’s not easy being a ghost
It’s awful lonely, don’t you know?
It’s not really my ideal occupation
No pay, no holiday just float away for eternity

People seem to have misconceptions from previous meetings with people like me
They think that I’m some scary monster, I say “hello” and they run screaming from me
It’s not that I’m that unlikeable
If you got to know me, I’m actually quite delightful

It’s not easy being a ghost
It’s awful lonely, don’t you know?
It’s not really my ideal occupation
No pay, no holiday just float away for eternity

I try to lie and say that I am still living
I don’t know why people seem to see right through me
I’m cold inside, I’m cold outside
Cause I got not body warming me

I look on longingly at you all stuffing your face
With crisps and burgers and chocolate and, man I’m hungry
You have no idea how good you have in your little
Little blood filled living machines

It’s not easy being a ghost
It’s awful lonely, don’t you know?
It’s not really my ideal occupation
No pay, no holiday just float away
It’s not easy being a ghost
It’s awful lonely, don’t you know?
It’s not really my ideal occupation
No pay, no holiday just float away for eternity

Yes, it is a new song. This is the first new song I’ve managed to come up with since the start of June and no I don’t know exactly what it’s about. It just sounds good to me:

Welcome to another day, yesterday I died, yesterday I cried and cried
Welcome to another place, on the other side, don’t know when I got here or why?

When the morning sun hits my weary eyes, I see through all the darkened mystic far out stary skies, and can’t believe my eyes

Welcome to another story, read between the lines, read between signs of the times
Welcome to another mountain, one you have to climb, to see all around you shine

When the morning sun hits my weary eyes, I see through all the darkened mystic far out stary skies, and can’t believe my eyes, my eyes, I can’t believe my eyes

Welcome to another day, today I’ll survive, I’ll live to fight another day and die

As you can probably tell I’m in a song writing mood these past few weeks. Don’t worry, it’ll soon pass. Anyway, this is one I wrote last night after watching The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. I don’t read a huge amount myself, though I think my parents read the book to me when I was younger… I knew the basic story at least. Either way, watching the movie gave me some sense of inspiration and so I ended up writing this song about the movie/book:

You’re lost, all alone in a world not your own
And walking a untrodden path
No matter how far it seems to the stars
It will seem like no time will have past

The cold journey through the forest of white
Through darkness will take you to light

When your fighting a battle that you cannot win
And the journey is far but you’ve yet to begin
Just hold on to the hope that you’ll soon reach the end
And be strong, be strong

You’re trust it was strong, but is it now gone
When you family parted their ways
Losing your friends you thought would be there till the end
Slowly you’re losing your faith

The cold journey through the forest of white
Through darkness will take you to light

When your fighting a battle that you cannot win
And the journey is far but you’ve yet to begin
Just hold on to the hope that you’ll soon reach the end
And be strong, be strong

The winter approaches, but you’re safe in the sun
It won’t go away for the night
When you could go home while the battle rages on
You know it’s not easy but right, you stay and fight

Through darkness will take you to light

When your fighting a battle that you cannot win
And the journey is far but you’ve yet to begin
Just hold on to the hope that you’ll soon reach the end
And be strong, be strong

Here’s a new song I’ve just written. You can’t tell from the lyrics but it has an unusual (for me) piano accompaniment. I’m also proud that I managed to use the word pizzaz in a song:

Are you the one who finds this funny
Why must you be the one to choose
I question your taking of my money
You question what you’ve got lose

Is this a way to secure glory
The easy road to fortune and fame

You’re no singer, but you’re a good actor
You’re no athlete, but you’re always on the run
You’re no author, but you like to make up stories
You’d lie and steal and cheat if you had to
On the road to riches

What’s the plan today to make some cash
Are you going to pull the wool over my eyes
Your scheme has got the flash and pizzaz
But will it give you the prize

Is this the way you’re going to earn your millions
The easy road to fortune and fame

You’re no singer, but you’re a good actor
You’re no athlete, but you’re always on the run
You’re no author, but you like to make up stories
You’d lie and steal and cheat if you had to
On the road to riches

Who are you hiding from this time?
And why must you always hide behind me?
Do you see me as your safety line?
Or do you see a profit in me?

Is this the last chance saloon
Will you see this road leads to nowhere

You’re no singer, but you’re a good actor
You’re no athlete, but you’re always on the run
You’re no author, but you like to make up stories
You’d lie and steal and cheat if you had to
On the road to riches

Will you see the error in you ways?
Or will you still see money?
Take the next exit and move to another way

You’re no singer, but you’re a good actor
You’re no athlete, but you’re always on the run
You’re no author, but you like to make up stories
You’d lie and steal and cheat if you had to
On the road to riches
On the road to riches

Well I said I’d start posting lyrics to songs as I write them. Here’s one I’ve just written today about being trapped in a dull monotonous life:

6am, a darkened room
I want to stay here but it’s not my place to choose
Through the darkness I hear the sound of you
Razor blade shaves off the face
That stayed with me through yesterday
I start afresh to live the same day through

And I listen to the sound of the waking day
Caught up in madness that takes me away
I cannot see and I cannot feel the world around me
So I just listen, listen

7am, I’m on the move
The animals walk, two by two
Over hills and underground tubes
Turn on the radio, listen to the song
I’m travelling far but the journey’s not long
Trapped inside an audio cocoon

And I listen to the sound of the waking day
Caught up in madness that takes me away
I cannot see and I cannot feel the world around me
So I just listen, listen

9am, I’m in my room
It’s grey outside, in here it’s blue
Paper mountains just for men in suits
12pm, it’s time for lunch
March away with the usual bunch
Eat our fill then head back to the gloom

And I listen to the sound of the busy day
Caught up in madness that takes me away
I cannot see and I cannot feel the world around me
So I just listen, listen

3pm, a coffee break
The magic potion to keep us awake
It’s the only way to keep us sane
And at 5pm, I’m back on the move
The radios on, it’s a different tune
I’ve heard it before but that long ago
A time before all that I could hear

Was the sound of the busy day
Caught up in madness that takes me away
I cannot see and I cannot feel the world around me
So I just listen, listen

Trapped inside this loop of time
Over and over I live my lie
I struggle through, never knowing who
I thought that I would be
When I was so young, it seems so long ago
I thought that I would never let go
Of my dreams that I held so dear

But I still listen to the sound of the dying day
Trying to drown out the madness that takes me away
So that I can see and I can feel the world around me

10pm, a darkened room
I want to stay here but it’s not my place to choose
Through the darkness I hear the sound of you

Minim 1.1 is out and all is well. As you may have noticed there has been a price change. Minim now costs €20 instead of the previous $25. So why change the price and the currency? Well, I live in the UK, therefore I earn in pounds. At this current moment in time the conversion rate is £1 to $2.01. That means that for every $25 sale I get I would be getting around £12.47. Now this is a problem when it costs more to live in the UK. Seeing your income slowly falling is not a good thing. Back in January 2006 the conversion rate was £1 to $1.77. This would have got me around £14.12 for each $25 sale. So you may be asking why am I bothered about a £1.65 difference. Well, say I aimed to earn £15,000 a year. At £14.12 I would have to sell 1063 copies a year but at £12.47 I’d have to sell 1203 copies a year. That’s 140 more copies a year need selling in order to earn the same amount of money.

Now lets compare this to the Euro. Back in January 2006 £1 was around €1.46. This would have given me £13.70 on a €20 sale meaning I’d need to sell 1095 copies. Look at the rate now and it’s £1 to around €1.47, meaning that I could have got £13.61 a sale and would have had to have sold 1103 copies to earn my £15,000. So in the same time time frame that has caused me to have to sell 140 more copies of Minim by sticking with the dollar, I just have to sell 8 more copies by selling in euros.

Of course, this is simplifying it a bit, assuming that the exchange rate for last year was the same and this year was the same, but if we look at the most and least I would get per copy over the last 16 months you see that the € is a far more stable bet (note, these are using monthly average rates from x-rates.com):

Euro
Highest - £13.88 a copy (April 06)
Lowest - £13.25 a copy (January 07)
Difference: 63p

Dollar
Highest - £14.37 a copy (March 06)
Lowest - £12.63 a copy (April 07)
Difference: £1.75

The fluctuation in my income with the dollar would have been almost 3 times that of the euro. When you’re trying to earn a living selling in a foreign currency then fluctuations are a bad thing.

I’ve been having a rather interesting discussion with someone going by the name of Penguin Pete. He wrote a rather interesting blog post last month talking about how Ubuntu is making ground because it is similar to Windows and that makes it appealing to people who are leaving Windows. This does make sense, I certainly think that Ubuntu is one of the most promising Linux distro’s. Pete then makes a rather true comment about how users leaving Windows are going somewhere and that that somewhere is going to be the next desktop revolution.

Now many Linux users believe that Linux is that somewhere. While I agree that Linux is making quite a lot of ground in the desktop market, and rightly so, I don’t feel that Linux is where the next desktop revolution is currently taking place. As I have previously showed both Linux and the Mac are gaining market share in the desktop space, at the expense of Windows. In the past 2 years Linux and OS X have almost doubled in market share. The only thing that is putting the Mac ahead is that it had over 10 times the market share of Linux on the desktop 2 years ago, so doubling that is a far bigger gain that doubling Linux’s market share.

Obviously, this makes me believe that the Mac is the next desktop revolution. But why is Linux not making more ground than it is? Well the first obvious reason is one that many Linux users know about. Next to nobody ships a desktop with Linux on. Dell has announced they are going to start shipping Linux on their desktops, which is a huge boost for Linux. That alone could be worth half a percentage of market share. Now that may sound small, but as it stands, just offering Linux is not going to be enough.

One reason Apple is gaining market share is because it now has a very compelling product. With Ubuntu there is now a compelling Linux distro for the every day user. Another major reason Apple is gaining market share is that it has a huge mind share. Apple is one of the most recognisable brands in the world today. It spends millions of dollars a year on advertising and produces some of the most memorable advertising campaigns around. Linux has nothing like this. If you were to tell someone about a Mac then they’d know Apple at least from iTunes or the iPod. If you were to tell someone about Linux you aren’t sure if you’ll get a good conversation or a blank stare. Now that there is the compelling product there, it needs to be advertised. It would be great to see adverts for Ubuntu on TV. Just to get the word out to everyone that there is another choice out there if you don’t want Windows other than the Mac.

Now comes the reason for Apple’s success that ended up setting Penguin Pete and I at odds: Commercial Software. I believe that Linux cannot gain serious amounts of market share until it embraces closed source (whether partly or completely closed source) commercial software. Now odds are that Microsoft Office is never going to make it to Linux until Linux already has a serious amount of market share (I’m talking 5%+). However, other big software vendors have little to lose by also releasing their software for Linux. Adobe for instance, has no serious ties to either Windows or the Mac that would be damaged by a Linux version of any of their apps. Now you can tell me the merits of packages like GIMP but the fact remains that it is apps like Photoshop that rule the roost. You are going to have a far easier time embracing them than competing with them.

The other reason I believe embracing closed source commercial software would be a good thing is that it would allow indie developers to spring up on Linux. Now in a way there are indie developers and small teams on Linux developing software. The problem is that many of the apps put out by these are side projects to their day jobs. They just can’t make any money from it. Open source does not encourage small teams. Look at any open source software company out there and you’ll see that they all have 100s of employees. Look at the majority of the software companies on the Mac and they have between 1 and 25 employees.

Now you may think that this is irrelevant. Pete seemed to take this point as me not liking open source as it will endanger my job. As a Mac developer I’m pretty sure that open source will help my job, not endanger it in anyway. Hell, this week I hope to have the source for some shared components in my apps online. Why would I be open sourcing some of my code if it would damage me? However, by being able to make money from these apps, developers can make it into a full time job and in turn dedicate their time to their applications. This will allow the countless small projects out there on Linux to instantly become compelling products to entice users (and in turn more developers) to the platform. One of the reasons the Mac survives is that it has a huge collection of high quality software at cheap prices that in some cases can rival the big boys on other platforms eg OmniGraffle on the Mac vs Visio on the PC.

Now before I get ripped apart let me make one thing clear. I’m not saying give up on open source and just have closed source. I’m saying have closed source and open source together. The reason the Mac is so strong is that Apple has combined open source and closed source well. The kernel of OS X is open source, Safari’s rendering engine is open source, with Leopard the Calendar Server will be open source. Apple also embraces a lot of open source products. Apache, PHP, Ruby on Rails etc However, it also has it’s closed source software sitting on top of that. Despite what some may think, this really is a good thing.

One strong criticism of several open source projects is that they can become very bloated. One of the greatest things about open source compared to closed source is that if you want a feature in an application you can add it. However, this can become a problem. People have different ideas about what features they want, how they should work etc. This can lead to major problems with features being added because one or two people want them, increasing the complexity of the application and this then puts off new users.

Of course these problems can easily be overcome with strong leadership. Look at the most accessible open source applications out there, they all have a central core of people who check everything. They have the vision. Unfortunately with open source this can be hard to maintain. As your project grows you have to increase the central core in order to cope, this in turn dilutes the vision down. While major changes will still be seen, minor changes may pass undetected. One of the hardest parts of software development isn’t where you should add that major new feature or not, it’s minor things such as whether or not you should offer a checkbox for such and such a setting. And it is these minor changes that can slowly lead to bloat.

This is where closed source has a huge advantage, the vision is constant, the core’s growth is more likely to be at the pace the developer wants, not that which the development needs. The idea is to open source those components that don’t get massively effected by this bloat. Take Safari for example. A user doesn’t care if Webkit supports CSS3 or HTML5, all they see of Webkit is the web page being rendered. Safari itself however does matter to the user and this is the closed source part. The only people that care a huge amount about Webkit are developers/power users, which is the way it should be as these are also the only people that are able to significantly contribute to Webkit.

That isn’t to say that open source can’t rival a piece of closed source in terms of not falling into the bloat trap if it needs to. Using the Mac for another example, let’s look at Firefox. Firefox is a very good browser, fast, powerful and flexible. It also has a terrible UI on the Mac (to be fair though this is more a case of it being cross platform than being open source). Mac users demand high quality UIs, and so Camino was born. It can do far less than Firefox but it is a far better competitor to Safari than Firefox as far as a user is concerned.

And to finish off, I’ll point out Firefox as being the shining example of open source. Firefox has completely torn down IE and made huge gains. One of the reasons for this is the HUGE amount of press coverage it has received. Linux just hasn’t had this exposure, and I believe that this is one of the keys to Linux gaining share on the desktop.

If you read some comments about the news that Leopard is delayed until October you’d think the world is about to come to an end. That Apple is about to pack up shop on the Mac and focus solely on the iPhone and iPod. Of course this is complete bollocks. To say that Apple doesn’t care about OS X and cares more about the likes of the iPhone and AppleTV is a completely idiotic statement. The iPhone and AppleTV run OS X. Hell, the iPhone is going to run Leopard. What has taken a back seat are the Mac OS X features. I’d be willing to bet that any changes to the kernel will be pretty much done and tested in the beta they’re going to be handing out at WWDC. The same with Core Animation and any other part of OS X that is being used in the iPhone.

Yes, the Mac isn’t the centre of the world for Apple any more, but diversity is a good thing. The new centre of the world isn’t the Mac or the iPod or the iPhone. The centre of the world for Apple is OS X. The Mac runs it, the iPhone runs it, the Apple TV runs it and I’d not bet against future versions of the iPod running it. OS X is what allows the ecosystem of products Apple has to work so well, both on their own and with each other. When you’re selling over 1.5 million units a quarter, making billions of dollars, rapidly gaining users and running a large advertising campaign, you are not giving up on something. As anyone who runs any company making any sort of product can tell you, sometime certain products take priority over others. You only have a certain number of resources, you have to learn how to distribute them between all your projects.

Paul Graham has written a good article on the “death” of Microsoft. He argues that Microsoft, while going nowhere soon, is a shell of it’s former self and just doesn’t scare people any more, partly because of the new kid on the block who also has lots of money: Google (for football fans out there, this is akin to Manchester United and Chelsea).

However, this isn’t the point of this post. There is one small thing that he mentions, almost in passing, in his article and it is something I strongly disagree with:

“everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop.”

He links to a site called Snipshot, which is a very cool site, allowing you to edit pictures online. However, it is about as close to an online Photoshop as Blogger is to an online Word. There seems to be a slightly delusional section of web developers who seem to believe that in a few years time all of our applications and data will be online, while our computers run little more than a browser. Of course this is complete bull.

The most obvious reason for this not happening is network speed and latency. If we were to take local networking, with gigabit ethernet, this allows for around 125MB/second of data transfer. Sounds OK, larger than most office files. Internet is slower, even with broadband, many people are just getting to around 2MBit. This is less than 1MB/second. Now for something like email or word processing or spreadsheets these speeds are ok. For the most part you’re sending and receiving text. However, when you start moving above this you have problems.

Images that are several MB in size can be transferred over the network, which for a local gigabit ethernet is fine, but for the internet just isn’t going to happen. Snipshot claims you can “edit big pictures” up to 10MB or 25 megapixels. Now for what it does, that’s great, but to compete with Photoshop that’s pitiful. You need to be able to deal with several image files that are 100s of MB in size all at the same time a web application just isn’t capable. Things get worse when we move up to video. For video you could be dealing with GB/second of data needing processing.

Latency also limits how these applications work. If I click a button in Photoshop the data has to travel within my computer before it gets to my screen. On a web app the data would have to go back to the server to be processed before returning to your desktop. Now if the server is in the US and you are in Europe, then you are talking a few 1000 miles vs a few centimetres. Data can travel fast, but it’s still limited by the speed of light within the material it’s flowing.

Of course there are other reasons. Many web APIs (I’d be willing to say all web APIs) are nowhere near the level of completeness than desktop APIs are at. There are things you can do with desktop APIs that just aren’t feasible on the web. Take something like CoreAnimation in Leopard, I would absolutely love to see a web version of it, but it just isn’t going to happen. This leads to another point, in that desktop APIs integrate with the OS and in turn the computer, much more closely.

One of the most obvious reasons is simply the fact that nobody is ever on the internet all the time. What if I want to read an email I was sent yesterday, but my network is down? If I use a desktop email client that’s easy, but if I use a web client then I’m out of luck. Local copies of data are vital, and there is some data people would rather stayed local.

So why, with such obvious arguments against it, do people still take the position that the web will remove the desktop. Well, simply put, web developers rely on one thing on a desktop, a browser. This, and the increasingly powerful APIs available to them, makes them believe that all a user will ever need on a desktop is also just a browser. You see the case for desktop apps making web apps irrelevant nearly nowhere. The argument doesn’t exist.

This is likely because many desktop developers understand the role the internet has to play with their applications. They don’t have to write a single piece of code that does anything to do with the internet, but the chances are there are software update systems, online help systems, websites to sell the software, activation systems etc. Look at any piece of desktop software today and it is somehow linked to the internet. The reverse just isn’t true for all web apps.

So what is the future, well the future is that the web won’t win. Web apps aren’t there to compete with and wipe out desktop apps, they’re there to compliment them and enhance them. The prime example of this is with email. If I’m at my computer I can just download my email into Mail.app. If I’m not I can log into my webmail to view it. If anything this is the perfect set up for a web app/desktop app eco system. The desktop app is more powerful and the web app is more accessible. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just fooling themselves and building them up for severe disappointment down the line