I was really excited with the announcement of the iPhone version for Skype earlier this week. But when I tried to get it from the Canadian iTunes Store, it was nowhere to be found! Doing some search over the Internet, it appears Canada is the only country where the iPhone version of Skype is not available.

This is very surprising and I would like to get a better explanation as it is possible to download the Windows Mobile version from your site when in Canada, it is possible to purchase Skype WiFi phones in Canada and Skype works fine on notebooks / netbooks in Canada.

I can only suppose that there is a small delay for this and that Skype will be available shortly to people in Canada. Can you please let me know the reason why it is not yet available as well as when you expect Skype for iPhone to be available to Canadians?

Thank you for your quick answer.

And here is the answer I got back:

Thank you for contacting Skype Support.

We apologize for the inconvenience you’ve experienced while trying to download Skype for iPhone. Unfortunately, the Skype for iPhone application is not available for use in Canada at this time. There is an ambiguous restriction in one of the standards-based technology licenses, and we are looking into it. The issue is not related to Apple, nor is it specific to Skype.

Once again, we apologize for this inconvenience and would like to assure you that we are working on resolving this issue as soon as possible.

Thank you for your understanding and we hope you enjoy using Skype on your iPhone in the nearest future.

OK, there is hope, but let’s not be in a hurry.

Update (September 9, 2009): Skype for iPhone is now available in Canada! Next step, being able to do calls over 3G

And yes, it is about Apple. I place my order for the new iLife and iWork ’09 packages a few weeks back, selecting free shipping as an option. This usually means that my order will be combined to minimize the costs, which was fine for me. And as you certainly know, these two products (as almost all software from the Cupertino company) are packaged in boxes almost as small as a CD case (works for me).

At the time of the order, iLife was still 2 weeks away from shipping, but iWork was available. Well, a few days later after confirming my order, I received the first parcel with iWork, and followed at the end of last week with another box with iLife. But the problem is not that these where shipped separately (I was OK with that as I didn’t pay for shipping)… the problem is much more with the size of the boxes used to wrap the products. See for yourself:

Anything wrong here?

Conclusion: When making public claims about the “eco-friendly” packaging of your products, please make sure to think about the whole supply chain, including the boxes used for shipping.

	First and foremost, the iPhone is the number one device for twittering, and I’ve been a very happy user of Twitterific since it launched. Yes, I know, there are certainly other twitter clients for the iPhone, but this one does exactly what I want, works fine and has a very clean and simple interface. And because the Mac version of twitterific is also a very nice user experience, I can only recommend you get this one. The only thing really missing here is the background notification push service that Apple promised for September 2008…
	As those who have been reading my blog for a while know, I’ve been a huge fan of Remember the Milk for quite a while, and getting support for my favorite to-do lists management tool directly on the device I always have with me made me happy. Yes, you need to have a pro account of RTM, but that shouldn’t be a problem for anyone who is serious about keeping track of their tasks with this tool, and the $25 per year are well worth it to support the team behind this great solution.
	Not only are to-dos missing on the iPhone and RTM came to the rescue there, but the notepad application is really not that great (sorry of you are the developer of that app). I’ve been using Evernote for a while between my different computers, and being able to access and edit my notes from the iPhone, as well as being able to post new text, voice and photo notes is really great. And here again, the premium yearly subscription is really worth it if you are going to use this in any meaningful way.
	Keeping up-to-date with your RSS feeds can be a little hard some times. I’ve been using Google Reader for a while, and was using it happily on the iPhone through Safari. But it was lacking some features such as an off-line more (especially for the starred and annotated items) and I was looking for a native application to go through my RSS feeds. Well, Byline integrates really nicely with Google Reader and is a very nice RSS reader. Yes it is a commercial app and you can use the free mobile web version of gReader, but this one works really nicely. And if the notification service comes to life one day, this could be really nice.
	One application I’ve been using for a while on the Mac is 1Password and it has been a great tool that integrates very well with Safari and Firefox on the Apple Operating System. While they where testing an online password storage service for a while, I was missing (and still am) missing 1Password for Windows. But now that the iPhone version can synchronize the data stored with the desktop application, I am able to remember myself the username and password combination I used for that specific site… and with the encryption they use, I am really not to concerned. The only downside is that my pass-phrase on the iPhone is also rather long to protect the data stored, which can take a while when typing on the virtual keyboard.
	Another nice little utility that I found very handy is Units. Over and over again, I wonder what these inches, Fahrenheits, miles or ounces mean, having been educated with the metric system, and having a little utility on my iPhone that helps me communicate with other people in anglo-saxon countries is really helpful…
	Finally, in an effort to figure out a way to use the bandwidth I have (remember my previous post about the 6Gb data transfer limit, well, I’ve never come close to that), I started streaming audio over the 3G network. And even better, I can now listen to Couleur 3, a Swiss-French radio station streaming at 128kbps, Canada or anywhere I have a wifi connection (no, I am not going to do 3G roaming).

An now for the application I can’t wait to be available: Skype. Please, please, please, get my a true Skype application for the iPhone, ideally with voice calls over 3G. I know it is possible as there is a Windows Mobile application and there are 3G phones that have built-in Skype support.

I have quite a few more applications on my iPhone, but the ones above are those I use on a very regular basis. Other apps worth mentioning are iSSH, Jisho Touch, Last.fm, MobileFiles, MochaVNC, SimCity, Sudoku, WeatherEye, What’s On TV?, WinAdmn, WordPress and X-Plane.

And you, what are your favourite apps for the iPhone?

On the Windows front, I have also used Ecto for a while. While it works almost as well on Windows than on MacOS, except for the iPhoto integration obviously, you can feel that this is not a native application. Listening to episode 42 of Windows Weekly, I wanted to know more about the Windows Live applications from Microsoft, and especially the one to write blog posts: Windows Live Writer. And I have to say: Microsoft, great job!

Windows Live Writer seems to be compatible with almost all the blogging platforms out there. I’ve only tested it with WordPress.org (this site) and with CommunityServer.org (my other Blog about Graphics). Setting-up the accounts is really easy. In addition to enabling you to post, Live Writer will actually get a copy of the template and style of your blog, so that you can type and preview the posting as if you were live on your site. This is a really nice feature that puts your content into context. But if you really want to, you can always revert back to HTML mode

There are also more and more plug-ins that are made available to add functionality to Windows Live Writer. You can for example insert YouTube videos, maps, tags, … and much more. The only thing that I seem to be missing compared to Ecto is the capability of editing previously posted blog entries. You cannot, or at least I haven’t figured out yet how to, list the previously published and drafted entries for editing.

All in all, for a free software from Microsoft, this is really worth the download. If you are looking for a blog editor that is easy to use, compatible with your blogging platform of choice and for Windows XP or Vista, give it a try.

13949712720901ForOSX

Yesterday, version 3.0 of Parallels Desktop got released, introducing many new improvements such as 3D support (for the gamers out there) as well as even closer integration with the Mac through a method called “Coherence”. This enables users to hide the Windows desktop and have applications made for Microsoft’s operating system run side by side with those for MacOS X. From a user experience, it’s really very similar to the Classic mode on PowerPC based computers from Apple. So yes, in my mind, Windows is the new Classic after all.

In an even more interesting move, Apple chose to release the new beta version of Boot Camp yesterday. The latest version has improved drivers for Windows XP and Windows Vista. But what surprised me is the fact that both Parallels 3.0 and Boot Camp 1.3 Beta got out the same day, just a few days before WWDC. Now, how likely is it that two companies release updates to products that work together (you can use a Boot Camp partition in Parallels) on the same day? I haven’t seen any mention that Parallels requires the latest version of Boot Camp, but part from that, for those who believe in conspiracy theory and love rumors that are made out of nowhere, what if Apple and Parallels where working together for one of the top secret features of Leopard that will potentially get announced next week…

Update: There might actually be nothing between Parallels and Apple, except a big coincidence… If you have Boot Camp 1.3 Beta drivers installed on Vista, you won’t be able to use that partition in Parallels as it freezes your machine.

Technorati Tags: apple, macos, opinion, windows

Technorati Tags: email, opinion

As mentioned in my post about the Blackberry, when it comes to email, my goal is to have less than 10 messages in my inbox that still need my attention. After a few days of off-site meetings (or are you one of those who do email while in meetings?), my inbox started to fill itself up, getting me very far away from my target. Tanking time to go through it and “catch-up” with my inbox, I noticed that my average score is between 30 and 40 emails per hours: A little under 2 minutes on average per email. This includes the FYI notes that are very quick to read, those forwarded to someone else, the longer emails that need detailed answers, those that will require longer actions once the “email cleaning session” is over, and the ones that could be treated in 2 minutes or less. I was actually quite surprised how little time on average I need per email. What is your eMpH?

In this information age, another funny metric is the number of RSS feed entries you can go through per minute. Using any RSS reader, you usually are able to skim through by filtering by subject and description, and then reading the full entry if it is of interest for you. I currently subscribe to a fairly large amount of feeds, and interestingly enough, it takes my blog post per minute ratio is also at about 30 to 40, taking into account the full articles I read and those I just skim through. Is there a link?

It is really interesting to see how technology has changed the way we work in recent years. From my side, my email client has almost completely replaced the word processor, my RSS reader has replaced the various web pages I used to go every day to check the latest… both technologies have enabled to dramatically increase the number of information that can be consumed and actioned within a given period of time, but can also sometimes feel out of control. Try going on holiday for a week. The only option could well be to take an extra day just to catch-up with your inbox and voicemail… but then again, there’s always the “Select all + Delete” method, knowing that if it’s important enough and not yet sorted, the person who sent the first email will follow-up with you anyway, not that I would do that

Technorati Tags: macos, opinion, software, windows

First things first, let’s get the if out of the way: The big debate related to upgrading or not to Windows Vista is irrelevant. If you are staying in the Windows world, you will eventually move to the recently introduced version of Microsoft’s operating system… at the latest when you change your computer. The same applies to 10.5 on the Mac OS world. In both cases, if you don’t want to eventually upgrade, you will either have to keep your machine as it is, or you will be required to switch to the other camp. The only valid debate is “when”, not “if”.

From a software vendor perspective, new operating systems are almost never 100% compatible with previous versions, independently from the effort to keep backward support has been done by the OS development team. Sometimes, the changes are rather small (from Mac OS 10.3 to 10.4, assuming you don’t plan to take advantage of all the great new features introduced), but even system updates as “simple” as service packs can be rather tricky (Windows XP Service Pack 2 was a good example, as it introduced changes and turned on the firewall by default), not to mention changes to applications bundled with the OS. For example, Internet Explorer is used by many Windows applications as the HTML rendering engine… with the major changes between version 6 and 7 of IE and the fact that Microsoft has started pushing it to all the desktops through the automatic update mechanism, incompatibility can arise. Any time something has a dependency on something else, there is a risk… and to paraphrase Murphy’s law, if it can break it will

The latest operating system released is Microsoft Windows Vista. Through the introduction of the greatly expanded security features (which is a great thing), Microsoft has also set stronger rules when it comes to how an application on its OS is supposed to behave. Having a software “Designed for Windows XP” (the logo you can only get if you have your product certified by an independent testing company) does not necessarily mean it will work fine on Vista. With the new program set in place by Microsoft called “Certified for Windows Vista™”, software vendors might have to change some things that are no longer allowed, even if they still would work. Apple, with the introduction of Leopard, will also include changes to the operating system, reason why developers already have access to the beta versions of the OS.

Making sure that an application still runs on an operating system that is introduced after the software was released is not an easy thing to do and requires a lot of work from everyone involved. Microsoft and Adobe for example do not yet support Intel Macs (yes, I know, it’s a big shift) with their flagship products. Corel just announced the availability of the Certified for Windows Vista Service Pack for CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3 (it should also be applied to users on Windows 2000 and Windows XP).

There will always be the debate of how many versions back you need to support a new OS. On this one, there are no rules and it should really be dictated by who the users are, what they do and more importantly when they expect change their operating system. While older versions of a product might work, there is no way a software developer can make sure that every version ever released will be compatible with the latest OS. Check with your ISV if you have questions about their specific compatibility and support policy.

Latest new from Apple: Macs do Windows! Well, at least with a little beta software Apple released publicly that enables to dual-boot between Mac OS X 10.4 and Microsoft Windows XP and that is completely unsupported. I haven’t received my MacBook Pro (yet) so I wasn’t able to try it out, but this is just the beginning… and here is a potential future I would welcome.

The beta software Apple released early April 2006 to enable users of the Intel Macs to dual-boot Mac OS X 10.4 and Windows XP is great. But I don’t see myself using it on a regular basis, and am much more interested in the new virtualization software called Parallels. I’ve been using Virtual PC for a while on my Powerbook G4, and that’s more or less what I need, but with a click-reaction time that makes it actually useable.

I don’t see myself rebooting my computer every time I need want to use a software that only run Windows. I can only see myself doing this to get full performance for games or very specific software which need all the processor power they can get (think 3D modeling). Instead, I can see myself being able to access the Windows applications side-by-side with my Mac apps, and benefit from the Mac OS X 10.4 benefits (security, workflow and so much more). The current solution on a PowerPC Mac is called Microsoft Virtual PC, but it is way to sloooowwwwww as it has to emulate the CPU. Now that Macs run on intel processors, the new buzzword to look for is virtualization, enabling to use a virtual computer within a window at almost full speed. Having been a user of VMWare on Windows for some time to do beta software testing, I am looking forward to having that on my Mac.

Parallels is now available as a beta software to do that on the Intel Macs. Microsoft is looking at having Virtual PC as well… Q is an Open Source project to do that (based on Qemu) and VMWare is rumored to work on their solution. I can therefore only assume that the virtualization problem is only a few months away to being fully answered on Intel Macs.

But the choice between Dual-Boot and Virtualization is all about compromise. Be able to run the apps for one OS at full speed or be able to run apps for different OSs simultaniously with a performance impact. Here is the thought that I hope someone is looking at implementing: What if both the Dual-Boot solution and the Virtualization could share the same installation of Windows XP?

Yes, that’s right. Install Windows XP on a partition on the Mac using Boot-Camp (I really don’t expect Windows to be available as a pre-installed option any time soon from Apple). Full speed for Games and 3D software, here I come. But now, using a Virtualization software from within Mac OS X, I should be able to launch the same OS from within that abstraction layer, enabling me to use the Windows apps side by side with my Mac OS applications. Yes, there might be problems with WinXP Activation as it is dependent on the hardware, but I am certain this can be resolved. The idea is that you have one installation of Windows on your Mac, and use it the way best work for you for your current task… just include a bigger hard drive

And to build on that thought, consider the previous announcement of CodeWeavers about CrossOver Office (e.g. Wine) for intel Macs. Having Windows XP available on a partition will greatly help with using Wine… just like you need MacOS 9 installed on the hard drive to run Classic software on PowerPC Macintoshes. Could Windows be the the new classic of the Intel Macs with 10.5?

So here is a summary of what I need would want. Take a MacBook Pro with Mac OS 10.5 installed. Add Windows XP / Vista on a FAT32 partition, and make sure to index it with Spotlight. Now, you can either boot Windows XP / Vista at full speed (and have no access to your Mac software) for those apps that require full CPU cycles. But the preferred way would be to use Mac OS as the default operating system, launching the application you need without having to worry if it is a Mac and Win software (just like you launch a Classic, Carbon, Cocoa or Java application on a PowerPC Mac today).

Sweet, but just like with Classic, the ultimate goal is not to stick with Windows apps, it’s to provide a transition path to a better solution (from Apple’s perspective at least). So to finish up, as the preferred applications in this configuration are Cocoa based, Apple simply needs to bring back the Windows version of OpenStep (the NextStep libraries that are at the core of Cocoa) from the dead, and re-define the concept of truly universal binaries. Enabling users to run their legacy windows applications has always been one of the biggest problem for switchers, but the number of native applications is also important to consider (I’ll leave the price of the hardware out of the discussion). If software developers can come to a point where they engineer an application once and their customers are able to run it on Macs as well as Windows computers natively (sorry Linux fans)… wouldn’t that be really great. No virtual machine required (sorry Java fans). And suddenly, Apple could generate a substantial revenue from royalties (licencing of OpenStep could be on a per unit distributed basis for example) and greatly benefit from the Windows platform.

Let’s see what the future will bring. But if this is that one, the geek in me will be very happy