ZefHemel.com

In May, Justyna and I would fly out to Gdansk, Poland to visit her family. We would fly with Centralwings. Justyna flew with Centralwings before and her flight was canceled and flew a few days later. Now it turns out that centralwings has huge debts and is closing down lines left and right. In fact, currently it is not possible to book the flight from Amsterdam to any other destination in Poland other than Crackow. A friend from Poland, who was going to come here in April, called that her flight from Warsaw was cancelled. We are trying to figure out if ours in May is also cancelled, but it’s difficult because if you check on the website you always get a “database is too busy” page, if you call the international number it is never picked up and if you call the local numbers they either don’t answer or there huge queues.

Their slogan:

Anyway, my point is: only fly with Centralwings if you don’t really care whether you’re going or not.

ReadWriteWeb:

AOL today announced the Open Mobile Platform, which the company plans to release to developers this summer. AOL says the software development platform will help developers create applications across major mobile device operating systems including BREW, Java, Linux, RIM, Symbian, and Windows Mobile. The platform will consist of three parts: an XML-based scripting language, a device client, and an application server.

AOL’s platform differs from efforts like Google’s Android, which was demoed today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, in that it isn’t a singular phone operating system that attempts to lock users into one way of doing things. Rather, it is a software development platform for multiple operating systems that aims to make it easier for developers to deploy apps across the various mobile OS and platform options.

First of all, as someone who works in modeling/program language design, a XML-based scripting language, really? This might have been a hot idea in the ’90s, but come on, nobody wants to program in XML. Admitted, I didn’t look into this platform beyond this ReadWriteWeb post, so they could have misunderstood. But if not: XML programming languages — stupid idea. Easy to parse, but beyond that, utterly stupid.

Then, the obvious question. Do we need yet another mobile platform? We have Java, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and more recently Apple’s iPhone platform and Google’s Android. What’s the new thing that AOL brings to the table other than integrating with AOL services that I never use? According to AOL:

The AOL Open Mobile Platform will also give developers the ability to monetize their mobile applications by utilizing advertising resources, such as clickable banner ads, provided by AOL’s Platform-A.

Banner ads in mobile applications. Awesome.

You probably have not missed it. Microsoft put a hostile take-over bid of around $40 billion for Yahoo! People generally agree that a Microsoft buying Yahoo! is a crazy idea, but the bid is there. So something has to happen. Jerry Yang, the CEO of Yahoo wrote an internal memo to all employees, which, quite frankly, I found utterly stupid.

Subject: Building on our strengths
yahoos -
first off, I want to thank you for the great job youre doing staying
focused on executing our priorities. theres obviously been a lot of
talk about yahoo! in recent days and we wont let it distract us from
pursuing our transformation strategy.

roy and I have communicated about the thorough review process our
board is going through right now. the board is focused on maximizing
the value of yahoo!s tremendous assets for our shareholders. and it is
going to take the time it needs to do it right.

as weve said, no decisions have been made about microsofts proposal.
our board is thoughtfully evaluating a wide range of potential
strategic alternatives in what is a complex and evolving landscape. and
weve hired top advisors to assist through the process.

whats become clear in the past few days is how much people care
about this company. weve seen a strong show of support from our users,
advertisers, and publishers, reminding us how much they love our
products and services. and ive heard from many of you - and from other
friends and colleagues from around silicon valley and across the globe
- that we need to do whats best for yahoo! and our shareholders. i
promise you that the board is going to do that.

the microsoft interest highlights the tremendous strength of the
yahoo! brand and assets: our half billion users around the world, our
leading products and services, our open ad network, our technology, and
most of all, our amazingly talented people.

we have a lot to be excited about and theres more good news to come.
yesterday we announced a digital music partnership with rhapsody and
our acquisition of foxytunes, maker of the popular music toolbar
plugin. today we launched zimbra 5.0, a next generation e-mail and
collaboration suite thats a great milestone in our open platform and
starting point strategies. and stay tuned for exciting announcements
next week at the mobile world congress.

as we look to build on the progress weve been making, i want to make
sure you all realize how essential you are to yahoo!s success. as this
process moves forward, were going to keep you informed. your hard work
and strong commitment are more important now than ever before.

jerry

Who writes like that other than PR people? What would you feel if you received a letter like that from your biggest boss? And — I’m sorry, but I’m me and this is what I notice — what’s up with not using any capital letters, who is he, a seven-year-old? In case you hadn’t seen it in my links post, here’s John Gruber’s translation of that letter.

It looks we will find out what Yahoo!’s going to do today.

Recent announcements like that the iPhone will allow 3rd party developers develop “applications” for it using “modern web 2.0 technologies” and Adobe’s Apolle, err, AIR that brings these “modern web 2.0 technologies” to the desktop, made me wonder. Does anybody realize where we came from and that these “web 2.0 technologies” aren’t great at all, but just the best we could do — in the browser?

Let’s go back a few years. Developing web application was ok. You had HTML, CSS and if you were very fancy, a bit of Javascript. You had some form that the user could fill in and every link you clicked and button you pushed brought back a new page. It was slow and it was a bad user experience. But still, it was all running through a web browser. Everybody has a web browser and it worked no matter what operating system you were running on. It was the best we had.

Then some companies, most notably Google, came out with Gmail. They used this Javascript thing called XmlHttpRequest, which could do HTTP requests in the background. Using this approach Google with lots of rocket science managed to create something that was getting pretty close to a user experience similar to a regular desktop mailing application. This technique was later dubbed AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML, or something). Creating such application was difficult at first, but hey, people chose to build their applications in the browser so you have to do as well as you can. Now a few years later there’s loads of javascript libraries to make building AJAX applications a bit easier. But still you need a lot of knowledge of HTML, CSS, Javascript and maybe Flash and SVG and other oddballs like Comet. And what does it give you? An experience more and more approaching a desktop app experience.

More and more approaching, but never exceeding or even matching.

Let’s just face it, the enormous amounts of time that it takes now to build an interface close to a desktop-like experience could have been done in a fraction of the time using an actual, proper client application framework like Java, .NET, GTK+, Cocoa or Visual Basic. And then you could also use cool features like 3D rendering and it would all be a whole lot faster too.

But people seem to have forgotten that things like client-side Java, .NET, Cocoa, GTK+ and Visual Basic even exist and how you could often drag and drop your interfaces. The horrible AJAX development experience has become the new cool, hip, modern web 2.0 technology. An experience that “we” apparently want everywhere now. Adobe is happy to bring it to the desktop. Thanks Adobe!

And now Steve Jobs wants to bring it to the phone. Thanks Steve! “Yeah, we have this new amazing modern way of developing applications for your phone, it’s called a website!” Awesome. “It integrates great with all the iPhone features. For example you can create a “call:0123223222″ link to call somebody!” Great. Except you always need an internet connection to use it, it’s slow, you can’t create an icon for it in the menu. And… oh yeah… it’s a frickin’ website! Apparently this was done for “security reasons”. What about Java, Steve? Every frickin’ phone supports Java. It all runs in a sandbox, it’s all secure. It even runs without an internet connection and it’s responsive (yes, that has become a feature in the web 2.0 day and age). Why no Java on the iPhone, explain it to me.

Listen, I’m all for web applications in general. And I really believed in this AJAX thing, but maybe we really have to think again about this. I really wonder why Java Applets never worked. They were perfect in concept. But I guess they came too early and were too slow back then. Maybe we really need an Adobe Flex or a Microsoft Silverlight to really bring richness to the browser. AJAX will only bring us so far and admit it: Javascript, CSS and HTML suck. You don’t want to create user interface in that. At least, I don’t.

Look at this, doesn’t it look secure?

Personally, whenever I see a mention of signing or encrypting a mail message I’m like, whatever… Whenever I get an e-mail with a message digest to proof it hasn’t been changed by some evil third party I am like, pff, arrogant prick, who do you think you are assuming somebody even cares enough about you to change your e-mails? Do you honestly think I’m going to actually check this message hash or if this is done automatically that I’m going to take your mail more seriously? I don’t think so.

And honestly, if you would send business critical PGP encrypted contracts and stuff, would you really send it from Gmail? Come on.

Thankfully I hardly ever receive these “signed” e-mail messages, and if I do it’s usually from some nerd security fanatic, the kind that puts public keys on their business card to pick up girls (good luck with that).