I had posted recently about my issues with the programs deluge and azureus. Deluge, I managed to fix by following the instructions in their faq. Oddly enough, despite how helpful that it was, I felt that it was misplaced.
Why should I, the user, have to go to the faq to find out why the free program has stopped working? Even a simple dialog, "Configuration files corrupted, please see our faq for answers." would have saved myself a few hours of messing with options, uninstalling, reinstalling, etc.
At the very least, deluge works... some of the time.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Meebo publishes application API
So, one of my favourite websites, Meebo, has launched an application api. What this means is that you can now piggyback on Meebo's massive userbase, to launch your application for multiple people to interact.
When facebook released their api, I wasn't much interested. There have been some interesting apps, but I don't see the use, the... benefit of all that work. We can't harvest data, we can't use ads, we don't make money from them.
However, Meebo is quite different. The app is opened up in a new IFrame, and you can use either flash or javascript. Just host it on your website, and your good to go. The best part: if meebo makes more than $200/month in ad revenue from ads placed around your app, you get 50% of it. That, to me, is a huge incentive.
Due to their tight control of the platform- they test your app before releasing it- this does ensure that any maliciously coded apps do not get as far as one would think. They also insist that the app not iterfere with proper meebo operation. This is a good thing. They are setting limits for the apps, and providing an excellent incentive. Together, those will fuel a lot of innovation and great ideas.
Now if only I had a great idea of my own...
When facebook released their api, I wasn't much interested. There have been some interesting apps, but I don't see the use, the... benefit of all that work. We can't harvest data, we can't use ads, we don't make money from them.
However, Meebo is quite different. The app is opened up in a new IFrame, and you can use either flash or javascript. Just host it on your website, and your good to go. The best part: if meebo makes more than $200/month in ad revenue from ads placed around your app, you get 50% of it. That, to me, is a huge incentive.
Due to their tight control of the platform- they test your app before releasing it- this does ensure that any maliciously coded apps do not get as far as one would think. They also insist that the app not iterfere with proper meebo operation. This is a good thing. They are setting limits for the apps, and providing an excellent incentive. Together, those will fuel a lot of innovation and great ideas.
Now if only I had a great idea of my own...
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Considerations of Errors
I've been having some issues(again) with bittorrent programs. I only have these issues on Linux it seems(Ubuntu specifically). However, its the way they blow up that illustrates one of the key sources of bugs in code: error handling.
In the first place, there is Deluge, primarily a python bittorrent client. A very nice one... but it fails in a pretty mundane way. Right now, it will not add nor remove any more torrents. Rather frustrating when I wanted to download the Open Disc. I finally found what had happened. It appears that when I upgraded from Ubuntu 7.06 to Ubuntu 7.01, that deluge's behaviour breaks. It was quite silent on any errors in fact, because they were not handled. And here's the kicker, it will still have errors even after uninstalling, and reinstalling deluge.
The reason for this behaviour is that something the developers did not think could happen did, and therefore, unpredictable behaviour happened. Because they did not have anything in place in case there was an error they did not envision, the program is literally unusable. So, there goes my favourite torrent program.
I turn then, to Azureus... and it crashes too! This one was likely out of the reach of the developers of Azureus... as I believe it is an issue with Java itself. However, I'm still annoyed at the lack of good bittorrent programs for Linux. Well, good and stable programs.
The lesson though, is communicate with your users what happened. No matter the mistake, the bug, whatever, the users should still see something telling them something went wrong, instead of seeing the program start and behave wrongly. That is bad behavior.
In the first place, there is Deluge, primarily a python bittorrent client. A very nice one... but it fails in a pretty mundane way. Right now, it will not add nor remove any more torrents. Rather frustrating when I wanted to download the Open Disc. I finally found what had happened. It appears that when I upgraded from Ubuntu 7.06 to Ubuntu 7.01, that deluge's behaviour breaks. It was quite silent on any errors in fact, because they were not handled. And here's the kicker, it will still have errors even after uninstalling, and reinstalling deluge.
The reason for this behaviour is that something the developers did not think could happen did, and therefore, unpredictable behaviour happened. Because they did not have anything in place in case there was an error they did not envision, the program is literally unusable. So, there goes my favourite torrent program.
I turn then, to Azureus... and it crashes too! This one was likely out of the reach of the developers of Azureus... as I believe it is an issue with Java itself. However, I'm still annoyed at the lack of good bittorrent programs for Linux. Well, good and stable programs.
The lesson though, is communicate with your users what happened. No matter the mistake, the bug, whatever, the users should still see something telling them something went wrong, instead of seeing the program start and behave wrongly. That is bad behavior.
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