Just got a letter, from a source that will remain nameless… It was addressed to “Ben BLAUNITEDKINGDOMOPF”. Sounds like someone needs to rethink exactly what parts of the address field get auto-completion…

SSH is undoubtedly a useful tool and the iPhone and iPod Touch are great portable ways of connecting to networks; put both together you can be a sysadmin on the move! So what are the options for this? The Apple AppStore currently has two SSH clients, SSH and iSSH, and I took both out for a spin.

SSH

First up is SSH, marketing at $3.99 (£2.39). Opening the program greets you with a screen where you can type in an address to connect to in the form user@hostname:port (the address is added to a list on the first screen so you don’t have to type it next time). Once this has been entered you’re presented with a password entry screen, although you have to press the password entry box to get a keyboard.

If this is successful you get a retro green monospace on black terminal, with a white command line bar at its bottom. This white command line is the only way you can send commands over ssh, you press it to bring up a keyboard with which you type your command and press ‘Send’. This command is then echoed to the terminal and executed. Basic shell commands work well, but once you want to use some basic programs such as less, more or man problems start to show.

Navigation is the main problem with these programs through this client, I’m used to using the arrow and return keys to navigate them (I know there are other ways, but these are the ones I remember). The client has no emulation of arrow keys, so we lose that form of navigation and there is no return key on the keyboard. After looking up some of the other navigation commands available for these programs I was able to navigate them quite successfully, but the process of touch command bar->type command->send for every bit of navigation felt very tedious.

Another basic command I tried and expected to work was top, but alas SSH fails again and produced this output:

which is hardly usable. You can try and scroll the output, using screen swipes, but each time top refreshes your scrolling is lost.

As arrow keys are not implemented command line history is harder, meaning you have to type in commands to access your history, which is annoying and slow if you are using SSH’s input method.

The client allows you to use control commands using the ^ key, so Ctrl-C becomes ^c. This works and is functional, but to reach the ^ key you have to go through two keyboards, which is annoying. Why can’t there be a Ctrl button on the screen ready for me to use whichever keyboard I’m in?

iSSH

Disappointed with SSH I went on to try iSSH (marketing at $4.99 or £2.99). When you start it up for the first time you must add a connection configuration. This is a form where you fill in a name for the configuration, the hostname and at your choice a username and command to execute on connection.

There is no option for which port to connect to, you are stuck with port 22. With a configuration now saved I could choose to connect to it. This dropped me into a terminal where ssh asked me for a password, the bottom half of the screen is filled with a keyboard which types directly into the console. The terminal used is much better than the one SSH used, it has a gray monospace font on a black background, and it supports colours which makes using such a small screen more bearable.

There is a bar above the terminal which contains buttons for the Ctrl, Shift, F# and Tab keys (which can be used in combination), along with Exit. This allows you to use niceties such as tab complete on the command line, a great time saver when using the iPhone’s user input.

Seeing that SSH had been so abysmal when I tried to run top I tried to run top on iSSH, which produced this result:

Hurrah! top is usable using iSSH. Running more, less and man was also successful using iSSH, which gives access to arrow keys through swiping the left 2/3 of the screen, and the keyboard has a return key (the right 1/3 of the screen is reserved for scrolling). This means you can also use the arrow key emulation to scroll the command line history.

Tilting the device the appropriate way will change the display from portrait to landscape. In landscape mode you have the option of hiding the keyboard using a button on the top bar. This is rather useful if you wish to read a file using less; you can invoke less then hide the keyboard giving the whole screen to the file which you can navigate using the emulated arrow keys.

Conclusion

Comparison chart of both clients:

In terms of functionality iSSH beats SSH hands down, there is only one feature the latter has the former does not: port selection. For some users, this will be essential, and they will use SSH and put up with the bad user experience. For everyone else, there is iSSH, which makes ssh usable on the iPhone.

The new iPhone SDK requires that developers upgrade to OS X Leopard, which is a nice excuse for most of us to drop 100 bucks on a new operating system that does, err, exactly what the old one did. I am sure I’ll come across some amazing new feature that I couldn’t live without soon enough… Obviously there is the addition of TimeMachine, but funnily enough I was already doing backups.

One thing I was expecting was a seamless upgrade. I was sorely disappointed. The first complaint from the Leopard Installer DVD was that my disk had the wrong partition map. I upgraded my macbook’s hard drive a year or so ago, and apparently had selected APM instead of GUID when I installed. To fix that, I followed the instructions at http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2007102511133285 which took several hours (LOTS of copying data to/from external drives). This involved the use of an excellent program called Super Duper which I am happy to report does Just Work.

The next complaint was harder to resolve. The verification process failed half-way through installing. Skipping the verification resulted in a failed install (not on my main drive, on my backup!). Googling revealed that apparently this problem was not uncommon, and was related to after-market RAM upgrades (that’s me) - though doing a full RAM soak test revealed no problems at all. I eventually managed to install the thing by restoring the DVD onto a partition on my external drive, and then booting from that.

The iPhone SDK was, fortunately, easier to install!

I have just been playing around with Stylizer, a Windows CSS editor. Why, you may ask, is the CTO of a mobile software company messing around with CSS editors? A very good question. Someone was extolling the virtues of this program on the Business of Software forum, and how everyone should take a look at the first-run experience. I went to the website, which is simple, clean, and attractive, and downloaded the program, which instantly launches into the tutorial.

Stylizer’s tutorial is well implemented, and compelling. I am no expert on CSS, and not much more knowledgable about CSS than I was when I started the tutorial, but I know a bit more about how to use Stylizer, and I agree that it is easy to use. Right up to the point where it asked me to hold down my left mouse button and then click with the right while the left button was still down.

Now, not only did I have to read that twice to work out what I needed to do, I could not actually do it. I use an Apple Mighty Mouse, and it is simply not possible to press any two buttons simultaneously, unless you press very hard enough (i.e. hard enough to break it).

Up to this point, all the shortcuts had been with the keyboard, so I didn’t quite see why we were suddenly using the mouse, particularly in a click combination that is hardly standard. In the case of Stylizer, it is simple enough just to achieve the desired action (insert a new rule) using the Insert key, but I am left asking myself why someone found it necessary to come up wth a completely non-standard action to implement a common action. In the same thought, I realise that Apple disabled simultaneous button clicks on the Mighty Mouse precisely to prevent people coming up with complex, non-standard UIs. More power to them.

Airsource woke up this morning to Nokia’s announcement to make Symbian an Open Source platform, and with it all the concrete platforms like S60, UIQ, and so forth. While Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and NTT DoCoMo are all mentioned in the press release, it seems to me that they had little choice but to jump on board. From an Airsource perspective, S60 pretty much meant Nokia - and now Nokia will mean S60. At the very least, that might make our sales presentations easier.

This announcement is good news in two ways for Airsource’s business. Firstly, from a commercial perspective, it removes some of the cloud of doubt about what Android means for the market. Android did not exactly threaten the future of S60, the established leader in the convergent devices market , but it did cast some doubt on the subject. How would an open source competitor affect the market? Businesses, of course, hate doubt, and while S60 was ahead of Android on pretty much everything apart from source access, the playing field there has now been made more level. Obviously a $1500 charge (annual) for source access is not free, but it is vastly cheaper than the old fee to become a Symbian Platinum Partner.

Secondly, from a technical perspective, access to the underlying platform code helps the developer produce more stable products, faster. Some areas of code are always technically more complex and more poorly documented than others, such as MTMs. Access to source code will significantly ease development on the really cool stuff.

We at Airsource look forward to seeing more developments.

The Cambridge CAMRA Beer Festival has arrived in town again.

An annual event in Cambridge, the Beer Festival features hundreds of brews from all over the UK and Europe. The key message is that the best beer is “Real Ale”; not stuffed with preservatives and artificially carbonated but the genuine, hand-crafted article.

As a team bonding training exercise, the Airsource team went along to learn more about Real Ale and to sample a few ounces of the amber brew. The work was strictly investigative and rigorously scientific.

The main hall features food and, obviously, large quantities of beer.

A few hints for those unaccustomed to the beer festival;

• Work a half-pint at a time
• The cheese stall is brilliant
• Leave the more potent brews for later in the evening

Inside the Cambridge Beer Festival compound.

My vote for the best beer experienced this year is “Comrade Bill Bartrams Egalitarian Anti Imperialist Soviet Stout” which is very much worth your time and energy.

As part of our scientific study, obviously some beer needs to be consumed.

I stayed at the Yotel in Heathrow Terminal 4 the other day. I had an 11am flight to the US, and decided that instead of a 6am start from Cambridge, it made much more sense to stay literally 50m away from the British Airways checkin desk. This made me an accidental, but much appreciated, beneficiary of the T5 shambles - BA are keeping a lot of their long-haul flights in T4 until the new terminal has properly bedded down.

I arrived at the Yotel’s reception, aka “galley” at about 10pm. After a slight modification to my booking, I headed off to my “cabin” (there’s a bit of a shipping theme), gained access with the ubiquitous card lock, and then headed straight for the shower. Two seconds later I realised that there was a window in my room, facing directly onto the corridor! I promptly closed the blind, but I really don’t see the point of this window. Why would I want to be able to see onto the corridor - and vice versa?

The Yotel concept is that you get a small room - about seven square metres - comprising an electrically folding bed (think business class seats) which is actually pretty comfy, a bathroom, a tv, and so forth. There’s even a desk and chair, both of which fold away. Except the desk didn’t. It got stuck half-way down.

Fortunately it didn’t obstruct the bed, but it did mean once the bed was extended, the only path from bathroom to door was to climb over the bed.
Careful readers will be wondering where your baggage goes. Yotel have thought of that - the bed is pretty high off the floor, and there’s storage space underneath it. There’s also somewhere to hang a suit up.

The desk has power points and a network connection just above it, though I have to report that the network connection didn’t work. For the technically minded, it assigned an IP address, but failed to pass any packets. Rather than try and fix Yotel’s network for them, I just went outside (too much metal inside to get a signal) and made a phone call instead, over a pleasant pint at Weatherspoons.

Apart from the desk and the network connection, I was pretty pleased with the room. There was some building work inside Heathrow that night, but earplugs (available from reception) completely blotted that out - and if you sleep in a standard airport hotel you just get to hear planes and traffic in any case. I slept well (almost too well, I missed my watch alarm, but had set up a backup wakeup call on the TV, which I recommend, because it turned the lights on as well), the shower was good, and it was a 1 minute walk to check-in in the morning.

Does it have some issues? Yes. Would I stay again? Yes.

I’ve just been taking a look at Device Atlas, which in its own words is the “world’s most comprehensive database of mobile device information”. I had high hopes, but unfortunately it appears to be rehash of the kind of information which is readily available, without anything more useful. I appreciate that this database is not designed for my sole delectation, but I surely can’t be alone in wanting to get a list of devices running S60 FP1 which have a camera? Not only does the Device Atlas apparently not allow any sort of search, it doesn’t tell me what operating system a phone runs, what JSRs it has, or allow any kind of user commenting (e.g. “HTTPS is broken on this device”).

My favourite part of the site is in the FAQ, where it says “Can I have a job? Yes, we’re hiring world class staff for the DeviceAtlas project. Call us.” Errr, call who? There’s no phone number. Click on “Contact” on the nav bar at the bottom of the screen. Still no phone number. I presume you’re supposed to call dotMobi (one more click away) rather than Device Atlas, but that’s far from clear. Also in the FAQ, we read that “We intend this to be the single largest, most comprehensive, and accurate device database on the planet”. A worthy goal - but Device Atlas has a long way to go to reach it.

When we set up Airsource, we set it up as a BREW consultancy. We rapidly sold a number of BREW projects, and built on the expertise we had acquired while at QUALCOMM. In the process, however, we inevitably found ourselves working on other software platforms, particularly on Series 60, which now accounts for about half of Airsource’s work. Series 60 and BREW are often held up as competitors, though in practice I would argue quite strongly that they target very different markets.

A BREW phone, such as the Motorola V3M has a primary display is 176×220, it has 23MB of memory, and a processor clocked at perhaps 40MHz. A Nokia E65 costs nearly twice as much, has twice as many pixels, can store five times as much, and runs fives times faster. Pundits will immediately point out that the V3M is a pretty slow example of a BREW phone. That’s certainly true, but the V3 series accounts for a very significant fraction of the US market for BREW phones. The Nokia E65 is similarly chosen for comparison as an example of a popular Series 60 v3 phone.

Comparing the two is pointless. The BREW phone is clearly a much lighter-weight platform, targetted primarily at games. The Symbian phone has considerably more memory, more storage, faster CPU, and generally faster network data transfer. It is also significantly harder to program for - in the same way that coding for a Windows XP PC requires rather more knowledge than writing a program in BBC BASIC did. A Symbian phone is simply more capable than a BREW one, and consequently the APIs are richer, and the learning curve steeper.

That’s not to say that that Airsource’s clients do not want to target their application at both BREW and at Symbian. They absolutely do. But the Symbian application will always have more functionality and tighter device integration than the BREW application, in the same way that a dedicated BREW application will have more functionality and tighter device integration than a web-based application. Clients come to us because they want to get the most out of the phone, and to do things that are non-trivial, whether that be linking into the messaging menu of a Symbian phone, porting a multi-process application to BREW, or simply writing an application that Just Works.

What this means is that while the mobile market is certainly split into markets that may not directly compete with every other platform, they form an overlapping whole that represents the mobile space. Companies want to get their application “on mobile”, and by that, they mean on the maximum number of phones, with users who will spend money, for as little cost as possible. Choice of platform, like Symbian, or BREW, is therefore just a business decision, not a technical one.

It’s 5:30am and the annual wireless industry hoe-down (now in it’s second day) is taking place in Barcelona. In order to avoid the rush, crowds and expensive Easyjet flights, I’m flying out a day late and looking forward to see what’s in store for the industry during this coming year.

Stansted is gradually becoming a nice airport…

The wireless industry seems to have a “pulse” - there are a flurry of handset releases around Easter and a blizzard of handsets released around Christmas. This release cycle feeds back into the software development industry, so if you work back from handset release dates you can get a picture of what your year will look like. Subtract 4-8 weeks for handset field testing and another few weeks for certification and you can see that you have certain dead spots, at least during the months of January and August.

Certainly what we discovered last year was that we experienced a real “dead spot” during the time of 3GSM (the precursor to MWC). The reason for this seems to be that everyone is either getting ready for or coming down from the conference. Someone pointed out to me, though, that rather than dreading the dead spots you need to enjoy them because in this industry they don’t last for very long.

What are we looking forward to this year? What is coming down the pipeline in the industry that may change the way we all do business? The big ticket items;

• No more Motorola
• Good flat rate data tariffs
• The iPhone SDK
• An Android handset

Motorola has received a good kicking of late, and despite defining the early years of mobile and having the smallest and grooviest handsets a few years ago, they seem to have lost their way. An ex-Motorolan myself, I can say that they have some truly awesome engineers on staff but there is a distinct lack of leadership and vision in the middle and upper ranks. So what’s to happen to them? The most likely scenario I can see is that they are bought up by a far-Eastern manufaturer and quietly sink into oblivion. Maybe Google can buy them and use their handset wisdom to seed the market with Android. Yeah, not likely. So I think Motorola’s handset business is history, and judging by their dribble of handset releases at MWC it’s looking like it won’t be long before the mobile phone pioneer has to make a quiet exit.

Good flat rate data tariffs may be on the way as well. The EU Commissioner Viviane Reading has cracked the whip on data roaming charges and maybe this will spur the lumbering operators into action to set up flat rate tariffs that are affordable and reasonable for all. Cheap data access will be a spur to the small, hungry handset software development community and will transform the landscape. All it takes is one…

It’s unlikely we’ll hear much about the iPhone SDK before the end of Feb. As a newcomer to the industry, Apple forges it’s own path. I’m not, for example, expecting to see much activity from them at MWC. They want to control their own coverage very carefully and orchestrate their own events. Maybe they will have a sideline event of some kind. But I’m not expecting much activity.

My colleague Teanlorg has already given us some analysis of Android and the challenges that await Google on the device. Reports suggest some early device prototypes are creeping out at MWC so I will keep my eyes peeled for them. If a device is in prototype form now, though, this suggests that an end-of-year launch is still a possibility. But if we haven’t seen anything more solid by mid-year we could be waiting until well into 2009 before anything emerges.

There’s a lot to look forward to this year in the mobile world. New platforms, old players fading out and hopefully cheaper network access to come. I’ll be bringing you more from the show and surrounding events over the coming days.