I was very glad to hear a few weeks ago when Google announced IMAP access for Gmail, the main reason being that this will mean my iPhone view of my email is much more closely tied to the Gmail application’s view of my mail. They’ve even done some clever stuff like using IMAP folders to simulate some of the Gmail experience (e.g. to remove a mail from inbox, but leave it available in the ‘all mail’ view, delete it from your IMAP inbox and it still appears in an ‘All Mail’ IMAP folder.)

The problem for me was that the ‘use IMAP’ option wasn’t appearing in my Gmail account. I waited, waited some more, fired off an email to some friends at Google, still waited, and still no IMAP access. What gives? Well today I found what gave. After trawling some help pages (help pages, who reads them anyway?) I found out that Gmail IMAP is only available if you set the ‘Global display language’ in your account’s settings to ‘English (US)’. I looked and sure enough it was set to ‘English (UK)’ - changing it to the american setting turned on IMAP access immediately.

I’ve now had some amount of 3 days to play with Leopard, the new version of Apple’s OS X operating system, after lining up outside the SoHo store on Friday night - yeah, I’m a fanboy. Here are some first impressions (and consider I purely use OS X at home, not at work (yet )

New Finder - Yep, I like it overall. The new ‘path bar’ feature is good, but why it won’t let me copy a UNIX equivalent I don’t know. The metaphor still needs a little thinking - it’s not a total hierarchy (I can’t click on the category headings) and sometimes I end up in places I can’t navigate to. No biggies, but a couple of times I’ve gone ‘huh?’

Network shares work a little differently - a couple of times also causing ‘huh?’s - including Airport Extreme disks no longer turn up on the desktop. You can make all network shares appear on the desktop in a preferences window but I just did that on my machine and saw a bug.

I’m not really fussed about the quick look / cover flow stuff but I guess if I was using it more for work that might be useful.

Dock/Menu Bar - Meh. I don’t hate it like some do but it’s not rocking my world. The new ’stacks’ feature is ok, I’ve started using it, but I’m not sure how big a deal it is. The download stack is useful because I’m trying Safari (see below). I’m fine with the coloured menu bar, the interesting thing is on my oldish G4 mac mini it’s solid grey as opposed to the translucent look on my Core 2 Duo iMac.

Safari - I’m giving Safari 3 a go. This is partly because Camino doesn’t quite work as I want sometimes and Firefox has lost the plot somewhere on memory usage / stability (at least on a Mac).

Safari 3 is definitely quick, and I like how downloads automatically go in the download stack and in the case of .dmg’s / .zip’s do the ‘right thing’ without you asking. (e.g. I just downloaded an app in a .zip - it appeared unzipped in the download stack and I could then drag it straight into the Applications stack - nice.)

Safari seems to spawn too many windows when I just want tabs, but there’s a ‘Merge All Windows’ option (but alas no keyboard shortcut.) 2 features / plugins I missed from Firefox were subscribing RSS feeds to Google Reader and del.icio.us time savers but I’m using this and this to mitigate that.

Time Machine - it’s definitely easy to use but is lacking features and needs work. First of all you can’t backup to network shares right now (which was a big reason I bought an Airport Extreme in the first place *sigh*), and also I think they need to be more sensible with large file support (e.g. at the moment if you use Entourage or VMware by default you’re going to backing up new multi-GB files every hour - whoops!) In fact, it needs better support generally of exclusions / inclusions.

Terminal - finally has tabs, plus ‘close window on exit’ and ‘turn off the annoying bell’ in the preference pane. OK, maybe these new 2 aren’t new but tabs is a biggie.

Spotlight - Yes, it’s usable now (at least on my iMac). It works across a network easily and seems to (a) pick new items up quickly and (b) search quickly. Nice work.

Front Row - Despite rumors going around the web last week, Front Row does work even if you don’t have an in-built IR receiver. I plugged a Mantra TR1 into my G4 Mac Mini a couple of weeks ago and Front Row works with it (I’m having some IR issues generally, but that’s not Front Row’s fault)

Overall - there’s no immediate ‘wow’ about using Leopard but it gives the impression a lot has improved under the covers. Despite my angst with the lack on network hard-disk support for Time Machine, and the angst I would have if I wanted to develop in Java 6 (come on Apple - pull your finger out on that one), I still think the $199 to upgrade both my Macs was money well spent. But I’m a fan-boy, I would say that, right?

I’m still using Textdrive (Joyent as they are now) to host this site and have recently upgraded to version 2.3 of Wordpress. Shoot me an email if you see any problems with RSS, etc.

Last Friday saw me on an early flight from New York to Austin, Texas, for the (first?) alt.net conference. This was a ‘not organised by Microsoft’ open space format weekend event for people with background in, or a desire to see more, .NET development done in a ‘way’ that may not necessarily fit the norms as suggested by .NET’s own documentation or Microsoft’s knowledge base as a whole.

This ‘way’ covered technical, people and project practices that would all be very familiar to people who’ve worked on eXtreme Programming (XP) / agile projects although this conference didn’t want to use the tag of XP or any other methodology. More specifically, we were interested in the use of lightweight development environment tools (CruiseControl.NET, NAnt, Subversion), test / behaviour driven development, domain driven design, open source technologies, lightweight frameworks (over heavyweight servers), reflective adaptable teams, etc. Basically, anything we can use to deliver cheaper, more effective, less buggy software faster to the customers of our teams without the constraints of ‘one size fits all’ prescriptive solutions or so called ‘best practices’.

Really, it was all about discussing pragmatic options for software development in the context of .NET projects.

So with all that loftyness out of the way, what really happened? The mixture of the attendees was about half consultant / mover-shaker / open source leader and half people primarily coming to learn while also having their own opinions. Almost everyone present had a blog which led to plenty of egos to go around. There were also several things I took away:

For software languages and methodologies to grow and improve our craft they need a passionate community of talented individuals with a common purpose. Although I think the purpose could be honed somewhat, it’s clear to me that this little part of the .NET world has the other 2 bases covered and as such, even without thinking about Microsoft, is an exciting place to be…

… but representatives of Microsoft were also present, and not just junior engineers with too much time on their hands. Representing were Scott Guthrie (I didn’t know much about him before but he’s an awesome guy who heads up a big chunk of Microsoft’s developer tool division. I was hugely impressed with his intelligence, ability to know in small detail what all his teams are doing, and his humility), Simon Guest (who’s been around the agile world for a few years now), Scott Hanselman (recent MS hire but all round clever chap who ‘gets’ doing the ‘right thing’), Jim ‘NUnit’ ‘xUnit.NET’ Newkirk, Brad Wilson, Howard Dierking (MSDN editor-in-chief) and some others I’ve forgotten.

Considering some of the conversation that went before this conference, I was impressed that these guys even came, yet alone how well they got into the spirit of the conference as much as they did. They actively sought feedback, constructive criticism and were willing to give their own opinions even when it didn’t fit the ‘normally heard’ MS company line.

But the biggest thing to me was Scott Guthrie announcing and demonstrating a new web MVC framework for ASP.NET. MS rarely (if ever) announce ANYTHING publicly outside of a finely tuned MS marketting event and here was Scott showing off something that would normally have been a star of Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference (PDC) at what could be thought to be a “rebel’s” private meeting. This was a risky move with the opportunity for a big payoff, but it worked for the following reasons:

• As I’ve already said, Scott is an intelligent, nice guy and had the respect of the audience

• This was not pushed in a ‘marketing’ way. It felt like ‘this is something interesting we’ve been trying out in the garage for the last few months and we’d like to get your opinion on it’

• Most importantly it is a FANTASTIC product. It’s a simple, clean, extensible web framework that pleases the most vehement of TDDers while still providing fall-back options for fans of existing ASP.NET . I’ve never heard anyone from MS use the word ‘testability’ when talking about a new framework but Scott did and I think some of the design decisions (e.g. the choice to explicitly hand-off the rendering the view from within the controller) could actually teach some supposed existing ‘TDD-friendly’ web frameworks a lesson or two.

• And finally I don’t often blow my own trumpet, but I’m going to now. Nearly 3 years ago I blogged how I’d dumped using the heavyweight ASP.NET web forms library for CruiseControl.NET and instead opted to write my own web framework with testability in mind. The design that I had - a small front-controller routing to page-specific sub-controllers (or ‘actions’ as I called them) which themselves delegated explicitly to view renderers - is not a million miles away from what this new framework does. Don’t get me wrong, the MS library is much richer and better than mine (and I hope that before long someone will rip out my custom framework from CCNet and replace it with the MS version), but it’s nice when in some way someone validates your decision to buck the trend by making something like your innovation the new trend.

I hope this new framework from MS is sign of things to come. The combination of C# 3, the new LINQ libraries and a bunch of libraries all setup for TDD and extension (rather than replacement) where necessary with open source ‘mini libraries’ could make .NET a compelling development platform.

Of course, not everything was great. The biggest problem (to me) was the lack of diversity. Of 100ish people only one attendee was female and the overwhelming demographic was 25 to 40 year old white middle class male (yes, me included.) I know this smacks of our industry as a whole but it’s pretty appalling.

But overall I’m glad I went (despite the fact that instead of a .NET developer these days I manage a team of Java developers.) The obligatory Texas BBQ and Tex-Mex just added to the occasion…

More, with links, here and here.

Today I read a good little piece (via Garrett Smith) on open plan / open space offices (i.e. no individual offices). A particular gem came towards the end (emphasis mine):

Frankly, whether people will admit it or not, most of the time you end up in an environment with a private office for status reasons, not business reasons, and status is not a particularly compelling argument for a specific office configuration. In fact, status has the downside of causing people in the company to work toward status instead of working toward results.

Many people call out the fact that in open plan environments concentration can be hard, and I recognise that to an extent. However I think once you get used to working in such environments concentration is perfectly feasible, and the benefits of ad-hoc communication far outweigh the negatives.

I also find the ’status symbol’ factor of an office unnecessary and somewhat offensive. Seniority already earns good compensation, responsibility and challenge; adding ‘perks’ such as an office just creates a them-and-us barrier that belongs in the feudal system of the middle ages. However, even worse is when people are told they ‘have’ to take an office in order to advance their career (and yes I do know a guy that that happened to.)

The best addition I can make to this area from my own experience was the ThoughtWorks office in London. This was a total open-plan office (at least while I worked there), from the CEO down, with lots of meeting rooms of various sizes and also break-out (non enclosed) areas for informal discussion. Even the HR people (who probably most need an office by function since they are the ones having the most legitimately closed-door meetings) used the communal shared office pool. And when one wasn’t available, well that was a good chance for 2 people to go and get a coffee together, stretch their legs and talk privately on the way.

Sometimes it’s the simple things in life that make me happy…

I have both an Ubuntu and Windows desktop at work and wanted to use the ‘Windows-L’ keyboard shortcut to lock my screen on Ubuntu just as it already does on Windows.

Turns out it’s very simple.

alt.net conference writeup to come just when I get around to it.

Thanks to the web 2.0 goodness of Yahoo Pipes, I’ve setup an aggregation of XP / Agile blogs of people based in NYC. You can see it at http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=nBxJoGVb3BGBtu7ty6ky6g

If you’re an XP / Agilist based in NYC and would like your blog added to the collective then drop me a line.

I’m not doing much coding at the moment, and none of it in .NET, but that’s not stopping me going to the alt.net conference in Austin, TX, for the first weekend in October.

What is alt.net? It’s tricky to say. Fellow XTC-NYC’er Dave Laribee coined the term in April and talking to him at d.b.a. last week I’m not sure whether he thinks it’s much to do with .NET development at all, it’s more about a group of people approaching software development with a common context (that’s the .NET part) trying to move their craft forward. Whether that progress is using .NET, Ruby, Java or a million monkeys with abacusses (abaci?) isn’t really important.

As such, I’m looking forward to the conference. Apart from anything else it will be a good chance to visit the People’s Republic and find me some good bbq’ed ribs.

Let me get this straight from the get-go : I’m not expecting or desiring sympathy.

For those that haven’t yet heard, the iPhone got a $200 price reduction today. That means my iPhone I bought a week after it came out a smidgen under 2 months ago cost 50% more than if I’d bought it today. I admit it, I’ve been had by the mighty Steve.

Yes, I know this is what can happen when you’re an early adopter, and I don’t think there’s anything legally or morally wrong with what’s happened. Frankly, if I’m willing to shell out 600 greenbacks for a little gadget when there’s people in the world starving I don’t have a moral leg to stand on anyway. And besides, I’ve been ‘lucky’ - I’ve bought 5 or so pieces of Apple hardware now and this is the only one [1] where I’ve been caught by unfortunate-timing-of-apple-purchase-osis.

What is the point is that a friend of mine, who isn’t an apple fan-boy, and isn’t (that much of) a geek, and frankly has better things to do than watch every apple-event live blog like I do, and who bought their iPhone 3 weeks ago, just got quite royally rumbled. Will they, or a few hundred thousand other people here or there be a little bit sceptical when it comes to next buying new Apple hardware?

So a marketing blunder on Apple’s part? I think so, but they just made nearly $200 million bucks out of it, so quite a lucrative one.

[1] Oh, apart from when the gigabit-ethernet Apple Extreme came out a month after I got my 100Mb version, but that’s a minor quibble. My 2G iPod, G4 Mac Mini and 24″ iMac all had very healthy ’still in the apple store at the same price’ shelf lives.

Update

OK, looks like Apple think this was a blunder too. At least they have the balls to acknowledge and do something about it.

Today I presented a session at the Agile 2007 conference on Continuous Integration. I’ve given this presentation a couple of times, but it was still a bit tricky getting the slides, demo and time for Q&A into 90 minutes. The slides are here.

There are a whole bunch of CI people here, and another couple of CI sessions tomorrow, so even though I’ve never made it to CITCON I feel I’ve had a mini one here.