Category Archives: Online Industry

Netflix Bug & the New Xbox Experience

Posted on November 26, 2008 | Leave a comment

For those that have been playing around with the New Xbox Experience (NXE, or just “the new Xbox Live update”) that came out last Wednesday, you more than likely jetted over to the Netflix integration to see what it’s all about.  Arguably one of the most anticipated features of the NXE is the ability for Netflix subscribers to stream on-demand movies to their Xbox systems in HD with surround sound.

I was no exception, and when I got onto the internal beta for testing the NXE, the Netflix integration was one of the first things I tried.  It worked like a charm, but after playing with it a bit I did notice one odd thing.

First, the NXE allows you to see, on screen, a listing of all the movies in your Netflix “instant view queue”.  It does not allow you to add more movies, or adjust movie settings.  That’s all work left to do via the traditional webpage interface of Netflix.  The Xbox is more of a “read only” type UI.

That said, what you’re presented with is a listing of all the box tops of movies in your Netflix queue that can also be viewed online.  Netflix had offered this service (online viewing) for some time, but previously the only options for viewing were [1] on your PC or [2] on your TV using a Roku built set-top box.

On the Netflix web UI, there are two queues.  One is your main movie request queue (the movies that are going to be mailed to you) and one is an instant view queue.  Typically, as you add movies to your queue for mailing, they will get automatically added to your instant view queue if they can be.  In addition, you can see all the instant viewable movies in your main queue as they have little “play” buttons next to their names.

Now that we have context, I can explain the bug I tripped upon.  I noticed that the movies listed in my Xbox were not all the movies that I expected to be able to instant view.  At first I assumed this might be a bug with the Xbox code, but after poking around in my Netflix account on the Netflix website, I found the same bug there.  My main queue had 15 movies in it that were available for instant playing (play buttons next to them), while my instant view queue had only 12.  It appeared that the NXE was using Netflix’s instant queue view as it’s primary listing of movies available to it, and that queue (which is maintained by Netflix, not Microsoft) was not correct.

Intrigued, I rung up Netflix support to see what to do about it.  The cheerful customer support rep thought about my problem for a bit and came back with “yeah, I think I’ve seen that before… mostly with really old queue entries, sometimes they just don’t seem to get automatically bumped over into the instant view queue”.

Indeed, the two items that weren’t showing up had been in my queue “forever” and that could very well have been their common thread.  Regardless, Netflix recommend I either [1] remove the movies from my queue and re-add them or [2] go to the details page for each missing movie, and choose the “add to instant queue” (it pops up when you mouse over the play button) directly.

Both workaround methods worked for me, and once they were in the instant queue online, they immediately appeared on my Xbox.

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Posted in Technology, Online Industry, Xbox

Feature Request: Better "Send to Phone" Directions

Posted on March 15, 2008 | Leave a comment

Most of the major map/direction sites online have the ability to “send to phone” locations and addresses that you’ve plotted while on their site.  In addition, Google and Microsoft’s sites both have native client mapping applications for smartphone platforms such as Windows Mobile and Blackberry (and of course the iPhone comes with a Google Map program out of the box).

However, I find it surprising that no one has tried to glue these two features together to greater effect.  Today, the “send to phone ” feature typically is implemented by just dumping a text only flavor of the address or light weight directions to the phone via SMS or MMS messaging.  This is nice, but if I already have the vendor’s mapping client on my device, it could be so much more.

When I have a set of directions or just a set of locations, or annotated locations (both google and live allow this now) – I should be able to send this “package” to a phone via MMS or similar and then “load” the attachment into the local native map client.  This is effectively the method that Facebook’s application for the Blackberry uses to get notifications of your friend’s updates, etc.

Such functionality would allow for one to start mapping out locations on maps.google.com at home; say you’re are researching locations you’ll need for this evening’s outing.  You have a handful of locations you’re going to want later in the evening.  You’ve mapped these out, and now you want to have them with you for later reference in the evening.  You click “Send to Phone”.  Next you can open your mapping application on your smartphone and viola!  The location pins you sent to your phone, with their popup information, are already on the screen.

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Posted in Gadgets, Technology, Online Industry

Java: A Looser in my Browser

Posted on October 21, 2007 | 1 Comment

I was checking out a new startup noticed in the never ending stream of same reported by TechCrunch.  Its name is Fuser, I was intrigued.  I headed over to the site and blamo, ran into the reason I would never return.  Java.

I was a Java programmer for ages (or at least what passes for “ages” in the computer business).  I started out coding in pre-Java 1.0 and my god was it a rocky road.  As the platform matured, it became clear what it was good at and what it wasn’t.

It was, and is, a reasonable choice for server side coding (especially when multi- platform support is a concern).  Where it isn’t a success is the client side.  Browser applets were miserable to develop, rarely worked, and required client side code (the JVM) that wasn’t available by default in all platforms – I’m looking at you Windows – and was non-trivial for users to install.  In the late 90′s (and even early 2000′s) Java was really still only viable client choice for many in-browser UI scenarios, but it was avoided by most developers I knew at all costs.

I remember working very hard to make rudimentary DHTML (that’s a precursor to your AJAX, for you hip kids of today) behaviors work.  All to avoid needing a heavy handed UI in Java.  Now, the technology palette available to the web UI developer is amazingly rich: AJAX, Flash/Apollo, Silverlight are just the front runners in a very busy space.

With this new options available to any web developer that bothers to learn one of these newer (they’re really not even “new” anymore) technologies, the interaction options inside the browser are almost limitless.  So, in this new age, why oh why do people bother to still use Java Applets?

For the most part, they’ve become a rare oddity.  I almost never come across one unless you’re on some backwater real estate site (this industry seems to have been sold a bill of goods by some vendor for showing 360 picture views and walk through’s in an Applet), or some crusty old web application that is hasn’t been updated in a decade.

As such, after my more recent Windows rebuilds (and certainly now that some of my boxes are on Vista) there is no longer a JVM on my personal machines.  If you bother to use Java on your site, I – more often than not – will just depart it as soon as I realize your technology requirement, never to return again.

The Java Applet era is over, any web developer that doesn’t get that is in trouble.

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Posted in Online Industry, Coding

This News is Rotten, Please Throw it Out

Posted on October 8, 2007 | 1 Comment

As I’ve blogged about before, I have fallen in love with Google Reader.  It has just the right amount of flexibility for my news reading needs.  Where others had failed me (including the very powerful, but still constraining – for me - FeedDemon) Google Reader seems to have succeeded.  Of course that doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty of room for improvement.

In one such area, I cannot believe that I’m the only user out there that has problems.  I basically have two types of feeds that I subscribe to, one type are infrequent posted or very high value feeds, where I want to read (or at least see and decide not to read) each post that comes from the feed.  The other type are true “news” feeds.  These may be “real” news like the New York Times and TechCrunch, or idle chatter feeds like Valleywag.  Nonetheless, this 2nd type of feed is not well serviced today.

These feeds generate a huge amount of daily traffic.  On the days where I can keep up with it (I do have a day job) I’m not sure I want to.  However, if I actually step away from using Reader for a day or two, the backlog on these feeds can be crushing.  What I want to see for such feeds is the concept of decay.

Said another way, feeds that are highly time sensitive should have the option of aging out in my reader.  I don’t like seeing that Techcrunch has 251 unread items (it stresses me out, this same stress is why I cannot use feed readers that overload the concept of email – more inboxes to triage is the last thing I want).  In reality, I only really care about the last 24 to 36 hours of posts from such a site.  Any older unread posts should age out of my unread information.

Of course, as I note, I don’t want this behavior for all feeds I own.  Instead, the decay of posts should be a per-feed setting (or maybe/also per-folder, if you’re an “organize feeds into folders” type of person). 

Extra points if metadata could be saved to note if something was unread, read, or unread and aged out for later historical search filtering.

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Posted in Technology, Online Industry

Outlook Calendar Sharing for the Masses

Posted on September 9, 2007 | 1 Comment

One feature key feature in the Outlook + Exchange pairing is calendar free/busy.  This is the ability, when scheduling a meeting, to see the available times that the various invitees are free.  Unfortunately, until recently there haven’t been very many good options for allowing non-Exchange users of Outlook to do the same1.  I’ve been dying to find a reliable solution to the sharing of calendars in this way so that my wife and I can see each other’s schedules (especially valuable when we’re in different time zones and trying to connect with each other).

With Outlook 2007 there are now finally a couple of options.  Outlook now supports publishing calendars (and updating them automatically) via WebDAV.  Anyone who’s a Mac user out there, already knows that iCal has been supporting this for some time.  This allows one to publish their calendar to any web server that supports WebDAV.

Additionally, Outlook also supports publishing and sharing calendars via the free Office Online (not to be confused with Office Live – don’t ask) service.  However, when I tried to publish a restricted (read: password protected) calendar on the service it failed multiple times (in various ways).  I eventually gave up2.

Instead, I went back to just using the WebDAV support in Outlook.  Here are the steps I took to share my work calendar with my wife:

  1. Setup an Apache + WebDAV server on my home machine (actually on my Mac Mini) and configure it to require basic authentication for any DAV actions.
  2. Go to my work Outlook, calendar view, and right click on the icon for my main calendar in the left side task pane.  Choose “Publish to Internet” > “Publish to WebDAV Server”.
  3. In the “Location” field fill out the URL to your DAV-enabled directory on the server.  In “Detail” set the information you want to share (I want my wife to see everything on my calendar – I have no secrets from her <grin>, so I chose “Full Details”).
  4. In the “Advanced” button/dialog, ensure that “Automatic Uploads” are chosen.  Also, you can include details on items marked as private here if you want.
  5. Hit “OK” and Outlook will start trying to upload the calendar data to the server.  Assuming you have your server’s DAV directory password protected, you will be prompted with a Windows username/password authentication dialog.  Fill this out and don’t forget to tell it to remember the credentials with the checkbox.
  6. You’ll be asked if you want to “send” this published invite information to anyone.  Say “yes” as, even if you don’t want to send anything, this is the easiest way to the get the full URL that Outlook published the calendar to.  This will open an email compose window with a URL of the calendar in question in the header.  Copy down the URL and close/cancel the message.

And here are the steps required to allow my wife’s machine to read my published calendar:

  1. Go to Outlook and choose the “Tools” menu > “Account Settings”.
  2. In the Account Settings dialog, go to the “Internet Calendars” tab.
  3. Choose “New”.
  4. Enter the URL you wrote down from step 6 above (it should begin with webcal://).
  5. Choose “Add”.
  6. You’ll be prompted with the same Windows username/password dialog that you were when you published the calendar on the other box.  Fill in the appropriate information and presto, you can now see the calendar (it appears on the left task/calendar pane under “Other Calendars”).

As an added bonus, as I noted above, any of my Mac machines can use iCal to read these calendars too.  It’s a “nice to have” for me (my Macs are not my primary boxes), but cool nonetheless.

 

1 Yes, it is true, there are some Internet calendaring options out there.  Windows Live Calendar + Outlook Connector should allow you to get your calendars and share them with others (if you’re a paying Hotmail Plus customer).  However, I found this solution was awfully fragile and, historically, had little success with it.  I have high hopes for the future WL Calendar releases.  Other options like Google Calendar do allow users to publish their calendars out, but don’t allow them to use Outlook as their primary repository/editing method.

2 The Office Online sharing service also, if  you choose to restrict your calendar access, uses Microsoft Passport (now Windows Live ID) to authenticate users.  This is something I was hoping to avoid having to use.

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Posted in Technology, Online Industry