Everything and the Mobile Software Universe…

[UPDATED : Added a BootCamp test to compare it to VM solutions, changed the Parallels boot time by the numbers obtained with a fresh VM with al my setup in it.]

It’s done, I’ve switched to MacOS … but I still work and still lead the Elips Studio dev team, and (for now) the product is still Windows Only.
Yes, from time to time I need a window box to get some C/C++ work done. Bootcamp (ie booting winXP on a Mac) is not the best option for me as I’ve made the switch to have my mail, docs and all under MacOS.
So I’ve looked at a virtualization solution. I begun with VMWare Fusion 2 under Lepoard 1O.5.8 it really was OK , I’ve never looked at Parallels.

Here are some benchs I’ve made to configure my first VM:
For the exact same Build environment on my new top of the line MacBook Pro, 4GB RAM, 7200 rpm 500GB HDD, 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo CPU:

• My initial dell laptop (D630 2GB memory, 2GHz CPU):  5:40
• vm 2GB split no prealoc 8:20
• vm prealoc 40g :7:40
• vm prealoc 2GB split : 7:40

=> My old PC was 25% faster than my VM … well not that good but still usable on a daily basis.

Then I’ve switched to Snow Leopard, and I’m not sure but I really felt that my fusion VM began to slow down, I wasn’t able to conduct the same test to measure this degradation, so I’ve waited for VMWare Fusion 3 and Parallels 5 to fix it.

And here we are, they are both available:

The Bench setup:

• I’ve converted my initial Fusion 2 VM to Fusion V3 and Parallels v5.
• I’m building a Makefile Based Visual Studio Project of hundreds if not
  thousands of C and C++ files (the whole ELIPS Studio runtime)
• VMs configuration : 1.8 GB RAM, max performance settings, in fullsceen mode (no unity or coherence gadgets enabled), no shared stuffs
• Reboot of the MacBook between each tests
• UPDATED: added the same bench under Bootcamp

I was shocked by the awfully long boot time of my converted VM under parallels v5, so I’ve setup another VM with only XP in it, and … it boots pretty fast, so perhaps an issue with the conversion of my VM from VMWare to Parallels. The long phase is after the login, when XP is loading my “user preferences”, I’ll look at it more closely pretty soon. UPDATED: I now use a fresh VM, as seen in the number, no issues
Beside this:

• Fusion v3 seemed to be a nice improvement with its 64bits engine but  with only 7% improvement for the build compared to v2, well this is disappointing
• Parallels v5 is just in another league, 39% faster than fusion v2 and 34% (a third!) than v3 for build…I’m faster than on my former laptop!
• … and Parallels just “feel” faster: UI is slightly more responsive as launching apps.
• UPDATED: Bootcamp: build time under bootcamp are 50% better than Fusion (so I Build twice as fast ), for Parallels we still have a 22% improvement, around 6mn, with 6 or 7 of those full build a day it is a 40mn improvement of my productivity…ok not so big, as I’m not able to do a lot of stuff under Windows (all my documents, settings, etc are under MacOS).

Conclusion:

Well beside the boot time issue in Parallels (that I’m fixing using a “from scratch” VM), due to the speed increase in Visual I really can’t go back to VMWare for now.
I’ve just bought Parallels 5, and oh, they are offering a 30$ rebate if you have a VMware Fusion License (!! yes really, this is competition…), check it here, bottom right of the page.

UPDATED: After few days of heavy use, no stability issues with Parallels, The Mac is not slowed down when not compiling (as with Fusion), so really, for me Parallels is a superior product. I’m also experiencing Bootcamp : for sure it is really faster, but not so much compared to Parallels and I loose a lot in usability. The next test I’ll conduct is … building under a Bootcamp loaded as a VM in Parallels, perhaps the best of both world?

Other reviews and articles:

• Einar Ingebrigtsen has some nice tips to tweak your parallels VM … but my benchs are simply showing that plain disc and SCSI are not really faster.
• lostWhisper has a good head to head fusion v3 vs Parallels 5 comparison also: He prefers VMWare for dev… I don’t due to the size of our projects, I’m just more productive.
• The Mac  Village Blog has a great screencast,
  really helpfull to understand the two products, at the end of the
  screencast you have a startup bench, where parallels really faster than
  Fusion for startup (again I think my numbers for startup are biased)
• ATLChris is also giving its view on the two products…and recommends Parallels 5 also

Parallels 5 really seems to be a winner for them also

There were rumors (here and here for example) about Apple using an an Intel Atom for its next generation iPhone, well they seems to be wrong: According to this New York Time article who found this out …thanks to a linked-In profile! :

Wei-han Lien, the senior manager of Apple’s chip team, dished out the morsel on LinkedIn, saying he’s busy at work crafting an ARM processor for the next-generation iPhone.

PA Semi NYT article (relayed from Electronista and TUAW)

So Apple, thanks to the 300M$ PA Semi buyout is entering the application processor design, but why? :

For a quick recap the hardware architecture of a smartphone is now pretty standard :

• a "big" cpu sporting all the applications and the high level OS: the application processor
• a 3G/2G modem chipset connected to the application processor, on which the 3G/2G protocol stack is running.
• a mix signal chip for power management and analog to digital conversions
• depending on the modem, a RF chip (connected to the antenna )
• …many various chips (wifi, Bluetooth being the most prominent)

The answer may be as simple as COST: After the phenomenal amount of money spent on 3G chipset modem development the real hardware margin are no more on wireless chipsets, but on the application processor themselves: see the very successful Texas Instrument OMAP line, the Samsung Arm line and others, versus the low margin, high risk 3G/2G chipset business of Infineon for example, or EMP, TI, etc…Qualcomm is a different story with their enormous IPR revenues, around 5% (!) of a mobile phone cost.

By making its own application processor, Apple will retain those margins for itself, while buying modem from other sources…and looking at the iPhone+iPod+whatevernewmobiledevice volumes we are talking here of perhaps hundred of millions of devices a year!  SO the savings, compared to the 300M$ buyout will be quickly amortized.

Of course the other big bonus when doing its own processor is that you can cram in it all the hardware acceleration you need for ….your software, and when your processor will be associated with only ONE OS, the possibility for optimizations (power consumption and speed)  are way above what a generic purpose processor may offer.

Any comments?

Thomas

A good UI  is nothing without talented graphical designers and interaction designers: How  the plethora of new UI technologies are helping unleashing their creativity? What are the main concepts behind those technologies?  Let’s try to find out!

UI is trendy… thank you MacOS X, Vista and iPhone!

Put the designers in the application development driver seat!

Here is a little slide about the actors involved in UI design

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Found at All About Symbian:

Red Five Labs has just announced that their Net60 product, which enables .NET applications from the Windows world to run unchanged under S60, is now available for beta testing.

.NET on S60 3rd Edition now a reality?

This is really interesting: even the battle for languages/execution environment is not settled.

For years Mobility coding was tightly coupled with assembly code, then C and in lesser extent C++. The processor of choice is the ARM family (ok some others exist, but no more in the phone industry)…this was before Java.
Basically Java (the language) is no more than a virtual processor with its own instruction set, and this virtual processor, also called a Virtual Machine, or JVM in the case of java, simply do what every processor do: it processes some assembly code describing the low level actions to be performed by the processor to execute a given program/application.

On the PC other execution engines have been developed: the first obvious one, the native one is the venerable x86 instruction set: thanks to it all the PC applications are “binary compatible”. Then Java also, and more recently … the Macromedia/Flash runtime (yes Flash is compiled in a Byte Code which defines its own instruction set). An other big contender is the .NET runtime…with you guessed what, its own instruction set.

At the end it is easy to categorized the executions engines:

• The “native” ones: the hardware executes directly the actions described in a program, compiled from source code to a machine dependent format. A native ARM application running on a ARM processor is an example, or partially for a Java program that is running on an ARM with Jazelle (some Java byte code are directly implemented in hardware)
• The “virtual” ones: Java, .NET, JavaScript/Flash (or ActionScript, not so far from JavaScript: the two languages will be merged with the next version: ActionScript 3 == JavaScript 2 == ECMAScript 4) where the source code is compiled in a machine independent binary format (often called byte code)…But how an ARM emulator running on an x86 PC may be called? you guessed, virtual.

So why bother with virtual execution engines?
Java has been built with the premise of the now famous (and defunct ) write once run everywhere, because at that time (and I really don’t know why) people were thinking that it was enough to reduce the “cross platform development issue” to the low level binary compatibility, simply allowing the code to be executed. And we know now it is not enough!

Once the binary issue was fixed, the really big next one were APIs (and to be complete the programming model) … and the nightmare begins. When we say Java we only name the Language, but not the available services, same for JavaScript, C# or ActionScript. So development platforms started to emerge CDLC J2ME .NET framework, Flash, Adobe Flex, Silverlight, Javascript+Ajax, Yahoo widgets … but after all what are GNOME, KDE, Windows, MacOS, S60, WinMob ?…yes development platforms.

The Open Source community has quickly demonstrated that binary compatibility was not that important for portability: once you have the C/C++ source code and the needed libraries plus a way to link everything, you can simply recompile for ARM/x86 or any other platform. Hum I’ve made a big assumption here: you have “a way to link everything”. And this is really a big assumption: on many platforms you don’t have any dynamic link, nor library repository or dynamic service discovery…so how to expose cleanly your beloved APIs?
This is why OSGI has been made, like COM, Corba, some .NET mechanisms, etc : all is around component based programming, encapsulating a code around what it offers (an API, some resources) and what it uses (API and resources).

Basically an execution engine has to:

• Allow Binary Compatibility: Abstracting the raw hardware, ie the processor, either using a virtual machine or a clean build environment
• Allow clean binary packaging
• Allow easy use and exposition of services/APIs

But it seems impossible for virtual engines to dissociate the language(s) and the engine: Java …well for Java, ActionScript for Flash, all the # languages for .NET. An execution engine is nothing without the associated build chain and development chain around the supported languages.
In fact this is key as all those modern languages have a strong common point: developers do not have to bother with memory handling, and as all the C/C++ coders will tell you it means around 80% less bugs, so a BIG productivity boost, but also and it is something a tier one OEM told us: it is way more easy to train and find “low cost” coders for those high level languages compared to C/C++ experts!… another development cost gain.

A virtual execution engine basically brings productivity gain and lower development cost thanks to modern languages ….. we are far far away from “write once run everywhere”

But as we have seen before it is really not enough and here comes the real development environments based on virtual execution engines :

• .NET framework platform : an .NET VM at hearth, with a big big set of APIs, this is what I would like to know what are the APIs exposed in this s60 .NET port
• Silverlight : also a .NET VM at hearth + some APIs and a nice UI framework
• J2ME: a JVM + JSR + …well different APIs for each platform
• J2SE: a JVM + a lot of APIs
• J2EE: a JVM + “server side” frameworks
• Flex : Adobe Action Script Tamarin VM + Flex APIs
• Google Android: Java VM + Google APIs,… but more interestingly also C++: as android use Interface IDL description C++/Java interworking will work (I have some posts to do about it)
• …and the list goes on

So at the end what really matters is the development environment as a whole, not simply a language (for me this is where android may be interesting). For example the Mono project (that aims to bring .NET execution with Linux) was of few interest before they ported the Windows Forms (Big set of APIs to make graphical stuff in .NET framework) and made them available in their .NET execution engine.

What I haven’t mentioned is that the development costs gain allowed by modern languages comes at a cost: Performance.
Even if Java/.NET/ActionScript JIT helped partially for CPU (Just in Time compilers: VM technology that translates virtual byte code to real machine code before execution), it is still not the case for the RAM used, and in the embedded world the Moore law doesn’t help you, it only helps to reduce silicon die size, to reduce chipset cost, so using a virtual engine actually will force you to … upsize your hardware, increasing the BOM of your phone.
And it isn’t a vague assumption: when your phone has to be produced in the 10 millions units range, using 2MB of RAM, 4MB of flash and an ARM7 based chipset helps a lot let you make money selling at low cost….we’ve spent some nights/days optimizing stuff to make it happen smoothly very recently

At OpenPlug we have built a nice execution engine, not virtual, running “native code” on ARM and x86, with an easy to use service discovery mechanism: a component platform for low cost phones. Then we have added a development environment with tools and middle to high services….we have learned big time and sometime with pain all the bricks needed for such an environment! …

A key value may be around one framework and multiple execution engine for easy adaptation with legacy software and productivity boost for certain projects/hardware, or some parts of the software.

Because once you know how to cleanly make some code running independently from the hardware, you have to offer a programming model! Implying how to share resources between your modularized pieces of code…and in that respect execution engines are of no help, you need an application framework (like OpenPlug ELIPS, or Hiker from access, Android is about that, but also S60 and Windows Mobile): it will abstract the notion of resources for your code : Screen, Keypad, Network, CPU, memory, … this is another story, for another post!

Please comment!
Thomas

Hello all…

Last week I attended the Open Source in Mobile conference in Madrid, at which I could get a demo of the “One-Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) XO device from Jeff Waugh, a prominent figure of the GNOME project.

For those of you not familiar with this project, the “One-Laptop Per Child” foundation wants to bring laptop computers to schoolchildren in developing countries. I will not here dwell on the price or success of the device, but rather focus on its software and really innovative user interface.

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Hi all

For my first post here, I have decided to just be an aggregator, i.e. spare you the hassle of browsing through all these blogposts about the most-hyped CE product ever: the iPhone… now you have it all here summarised in neat bullet points.

Kudos to Engadget Mobile for their extensive review, The Register for their numerous and humorous articles, as well as iFixit for their step-by-step reverse engineering.

Also worth noting that there is now a very extensive entry for the iPhone on Wikipedia.

In short: it’s a great device in terms of usability and design (so long as you share Apple’s tastes), but suffers quite significant shortcomings when it comes to business productivity (notably due to its poor email application) and lack of capability to have 3rd-party applications installed.

/Guilhem

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Checkout this amazing Video from : Microsoft Surface Video – Touchscreen, Multi Touch Coffee Table – Behind the Scenes – Popular Mechanics

Official Microsoft web site

Ok, it not new, but really not so far from production

Diagram by Intoaroute

Something that really buzz me about those new kind of interfaces is obviously the “home” and “personal” application and services, but I see also some possible tremendous change for the software development : with the raise of multi-core, parallel programming will be mandatory, and to leverage this horsepower, a paradigm shift is needed, to break the C/C++/C#/php/ruby, etc sequential view. And this new paradigm may be graphical programming. See this LabView/QNX article or this one at DevX:

The U.S. government, through DARPA, had previously awarded contracts to proposals for High-Productivity Computing Systems. A major premise of this thrust is that the performance of computers is outstripping our ability to harness the power through programming. It is logical to conclude that we need better methods to program them, and DARPA had funded three research languages. All three programming languages are textual X10, Chapel, and Fortress. It seems that the research has run its course, and the answer is that the breakthrough opportunities fall short of the grand hope of catching up with computers. This just makes me wonder all the more if a graphical approach will ultimately be an avenue for a programming breakthrough.

Technologies like those multi-touch screen may bring a lot to the developer ability to dig and build his system….and it is needed: look how poor are the current graphical languages in the “graphical” and above all the user interaction aspect: (below a LabView screenshot)

In its last blog entry, surfing one the wave of  button less iPhone clones, C. Enrique Ortiz  states the following,

Pictured above are the LG Prada, the Apple iPhone, the “Google Phone”, and the Meizu M8. Will Palm follow the same trend?

…

Yes, that’s right. Think about this shift from hardware to software design; the way of the future in handset design. The handset itself becomes pretty much a “generic” apparatus: connected or network-aware, with high-quality sound, and high-quality LCD with touch-screen, and totally software driven – the look and feel, the user experience, and all or most of user interactions.

C. Enrique Ortiz Mobility Weblog: The future of handset design: from hardware to software

While, as a software developer I may look at this kind of vision with envy, but intuition … and practice lead me to really challenge this view where the hardware would be completely commoditized to allow full software creativity.

Be prepared to that mobile software vendors: in real life (at least in Europe) a phone is first chosen because it is sexy/good looking! See the success of the LG Chocolate (and its Samsung carbon copy, the E900) , or the upcoming Shine or Prada phone: they are simply handsome, and my wife doesn’t bother about the so-so and flacky UI and usability flows of her E900 (ok to be honest now she has one for a few weeks, she IS complaining…but the buy decision was based on hardware look only). Do yourself a favor and check this really funny Guardian Article about the E900 and its glorified unusable UI and touch sensitive buttons (found via the always refreshingly cynical Techype)

So yes hardware design matters, that’s a fact, and am I the only one to loooove hardware buttons? I’m a long time Palm fan, used to stylus, touchscreen and so on, but to be honest, on my treo 650, I only use the keyboard and nav pad, I’ve even lost the stylus and really I don’t need it. Did you ever tried a remote control for your TV based on a touchscreen (like Phillips did some time ago)? wow, awkward, no tactile feedback, the screen is collecting all what your fingers are collecting…really poor design.

But the worst aspect of the “all touchscreen” aspect in that you always needs your two hands to do anything, even answering a call! and this is killer for me, really, cause doing every operation with one hand is something I’m now so accustomed to.

So yes the iPhone and its clones may lead to new user experience studies, but I really think that to bring a really good user experience you need to master the whole design process, from hardware to software … to network services. For sure today it is more the hardware design that leads the pack, software vendors trying to bring something new (see the last Vision Mobile Article on this one) …and Operator continuing adding some, hum, crap to the user experience (look for Orange Home Screen in google … and oh joy the first answer are “help me to get ride of the Orange Home screen” ).

So yes software vendor may have more room to innovate, but phone makers are learning fast:

• Palm is getting its software back, so under control
• SE bought UIQ…for the same reason
• Nokia has S60 and Maemo
• Moto is pushing its Linux Platform

If this is not a sign ….

What do you think?

Thomas

After reading a product description of what Abaxia is doing with its MobileTag – What is a Tag ?. I dug a little and found a really great and fast moving technology.

Did you know that nearly everything in Japan is tagged with QR Codes – two dimensional Matrix codes – these days? Okay, I guess you don’t, but believe me, you have to know about these funny codes. ^_^…Whenever you see a QR Code just take your phone out of your pocket, point with it’s camera at the QR Code and let the QR Code reading software decrypt the QR Code. That means: The QR Code reading software turns your phone into a mobile scanner for QR-Codes. Cool, right?

Robert Peloschek aka Unic0der: Free QR Code Readers for your Cellphone

CHeck this Video fora realife example:

Many formats seem to compete today, Code 2D (in French) gives some examples:

MobileTag

Data Matrix

QR Code (The most deployed, especially in Japan)

Shot Code

SemaCode

Basically you have two kinds of storage: either the data is directly embeded in the matrix (like in QR Code or Digimatrix, few KiloBytes of data) or the code is “only” a redirection to an URL where the content is stored and can be read (MobileTag is working on that principle).

What really buzz me is the concept of “physical world hyperlink”, as described by the pondering primate :

Physical World Connection Companies
When a display was added to the first mobile phone, a new media was created. Since then, Internet connection and a camera have been added that have created a new way to interact with the physical world.

Soon speech recognition will allow an additional way to browse the physical world too.

Every physical object will have a physical world hyperlink

That means every physical object will allow connection to a designated website and the mobile phone with it’s physical world browser will be able to surf the “real world”, the physical one.

The Pondering Primate: Physical World Connection Companies

(This vision seems to be shared also over at barecodemobile)

This can be strongly related to augmented reality where the “web world” is augmenting the “real world”. Even microsoft is taking the bandwagon as described in the always good Mobile Learning
Really getting an address from an advertisement right into my cellphone by taking a snapshot, or storing an appointment for a movie or a special event by taking a photo of an ad seems really valuable to me: today even with my glorified Treo with its big keyboard, I’m reluctant to loose my time entering those snippet of information.

This sounds exciting! … and for now all the generators and readers seem to be free of charge, I only wish we have more of this tagging in Europe….

Mobile Crunch is pointing Mobile complete in this article Mobile Complete: Virtual Handsets for Real World Developers. A MobileCrunch Exclusive

But others exist, like : Paca Mobile Center (with Mobile Distillery as one of its founder, check them out, the product seems great).

So this kind of business really put a definitive end to the java “right one, runs everywhere” (if it ever had a begining ), and things are even worse in the Mobile space…I’m not sure fragmentation is a bad thing after all cause it gives a lot of freedom to hardware/UI/software design … but less power to little software companies, application provider etc….but we are not in a PC world, and perhaps applications are not so releavant here…but the data (and its presentation) is!

Update: GigaOM covers it also, and add an interesting bit of info: funding comes from Motorola Ventures…

Mobile Complete,1 a 3-year old San Mateo-based startup that provides mobile application testing services, says it has raised2 a Series B investment led by Motorola Ventures. While the round size is officially undisclosed, it is rumored to be around $10 million. Previous investor Innovacom VC also participated in the round. The company says it’s using the new funds to expand its service internationally and add more mobile handsets to its testing of roster of 300+ list of handsets. Check out the company’s virtual device-testing service called Deviceanywhere.com.

GigaOM » Motorola Funds Mobile Complete