Someone wiser than me once said “People decide how you must feel about something by what you do, not what you say.”

This evening I was reflecting over a workshop I once participated in on work-place behaviors. It was one of those workshops where you wondered why someone actually has to tell you some of this stuff. As is often the case, personal behaviors and styles are the key in any relationship — personal ones and work-place ones. So we included personal topics.

We were asked the question “How does your husband or wife know you love them?”

The usual responses where people talked about remembering flowers on a birthday or chocolates on some other occasion were mentioned. I never much cared for these typical answers.

I raised my hand and said, “I make sure there’s fresh fruit in the refrigerator.”

Just read this evening that Google purchased Instantiations. Here is the Instantiations web site with an official report.

http://www.instantiations.com/

Wow. Of course I know the Instantiations folks really well, having worked with many of them for years and I congratulate them. I’m guessing that Google was mostly interested in their Java tools, but I have to wonder if they appreciate the Visual Age Smalltalk product that Instantiations also produces. That’s some formidable team and product line they purchased and I wish Eric and the rest great success going forward.

UPDATE: I have part of this wrong. Google purchased the Java tools. Instantiations will remain as a Smalltalk only company.

As I’ve posted before, I was recently given an iPad. And I am very impressed with this device. The screen is fabulous and the speed is fantastic. I am fortunate enough to have an iPad 3G with 64GB memory thanks to my lovely wife, Melissa.

I originally began to use it for my regular web surfing and to watch movies. And with the really great battery life I have been seeing and high portability, the iPad is excellent for that. However I never expected the free Apple book reader application iBooks to be so compelling. I have already read 2 books and have several in process.

The other day it hit me that I have already begun to utilize books differently. For starters, Apple makes it so easy to find books and purchase them that it is difficult to resist adding several at a time to your personal library. I’m sure that’s the general idea. But here is what surprised me. First some background. I tend to, when purchasing real physical books, select hardbound over soft cover. And I also tend to treat the books with great care. I never write in my books or fold pages over.

With the iBooks app that all changed. Besides the fact that I can carry around a library of books effortlessly, I now routinely highlight and annotate sections of the ebooks. The app makes that easy and, just as importantly, highlights are simple to find because they are all indexed as you create them. Here is an example from a recent book I completed reading.

That feature alone is pretty neat.

Melissa surprised me with an early birthday gift. I came home from work today and discovered an iPad 3G 64GB waiting for me on the kitchen table.

Just started playing with it tonight. Damn this thing is fast. The display is crisp and amazing.

Yesterday, Bloomberg News published a piece by Andy Grove – the co-founder of Intel Corp. He makes a passionate and reasoned case for how the U.S.A. is making a mistake by outsourcing much, perhaps all, of our manufacturing base. Read the article here.

This excerpt hits a nerve that applies to more than just manufacturing:
Not only did we lose an untold number of jobs, we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution.

I see the same thing happening in software development. While it is thought true that less expensive developers are available offshore, that’s not necessarily the same thing as saying developing offshore is less expensive. The “chain of experience” gets lost somewhere in the translation. Never mind the literal loss during translation back and forth to English. Some of this gets resolved by training, mentoring and patience.

But who really believes that patience and longer term investment is given credible support today? Just because a developer knows the pertinent technology employed to accomplish your business goals doesn’t mean they understand what you are trying to do. That comes from years of experience.

I’m an “agile software” enthusiast, and there’s a saying often quoted in my world. “Do the simplest thing that could possibly work.” Those are sound words of advice. However. Just like anything else in life, you can carry this to the extreme that you lose sight of the real goals. Software development is all about 2 things:

1. Deliver solutions for your customer
2. Maintenance

Don’t lose sight of that 2nd one. I once worked for a very smart company president who used to say “The first order of business is to stay in business.” If you only focus on what you need right now, and don’t understand what you really need right now, you will add considerable software debt. Now I’m not talking about writing software frameworks with extensions for the future that are over-reaching. We all recognize that when we see it. What I am talking about though, is if we just focus on fixing this problem really quick so I can get onto something else, we are not doing the right thing.

As anyone who has worked in the software development world long enough knows, it’s a delicate balance.

That balance is even harder to maintain when you’ve sent all your knowledge home and asked some folks overseas to help you stay in business. The imbalances Andy Grove mentions say it all. Who’s going to stay in business, the guy with all his business knowledge contained in another company’s people?

I own and am quite happy with a 2nd generation iPhone, the iPhone 3G. The phone, since its release, has been superseded by the iPhone 3GS and now the iPhone 4.

Recently Apple made the iOS 4 system software available for the 3G and 3GS versions of the iPhone, although some features are unavailable on the older 3G model. As reported here, I upgraded my software and it went without a hitch. The new features are very nice and the price, free, is great.

Now that I’ve been using it for a week I have some concerns about this new software. I’m noticing just an overall drop in performance. It seems as if there are instances when the iPhone just stalls, sometimes for seconds, before it responds to an action: choosing from a menu or typing a key. It’s very frustrating. Also, there are more frequent crashes. Sometimes the 3rd party app I’m running will exit unexpectedly and sometimes the iPhone itself will reboot (you get a blank screen and the white Apple logo while it is restarting).

It could be that these problems may just be 3rd party apps that need a software update to work well with iOS 4. But whatever the cause it doesn’t reflect well on Apple’s iPhone. My wife, having the same model phone and also upgraded, reports the same frustrating performance issues.

I’m going to try a full restore this weekend and see if that helps. Here’s hoping this is a fairly common experience and results in a software update to resolve the problems.

Melissa and I went to see Toy Story 3 tonight. She picked a Digital-3D presentation and it was great. The movie made me laugh and feel. It was like spending time with some old friends. A very enjoyable experience.

Apple released iOS 4 (formerly iPhone OS 4) today. And like most probably all other iPhone owners I was eager to install this free update.

By the way, this is still one of the cool things I admire about the iPhone. Every year there’s a free major software update. And it’s always a worthwhile update. I just don’t remember this sort of thing when I had a Motorola Verizon phone.

Holding back my enthusiasm, I did a little research first. A little reading around the internet yielded some general advice to actually synch with a backup and then perform a full restore (wiping the phone clean and the automatically re-installing all the apps, music, photos, videos, podcasts, …) you get the idea.

It took a little while to go through a full backup and restore. I then downloaded the free update and allowed iTunes to perform the firmware upgrade on my iPhone.

The update went without a hitch. I have to admit, and I’m sure Apple intends this to be a compelling reaction, after poking around the new iOS, I want the full new hardware that iPhone 4 brings. Patience, and wait for it.

In the mean time I really dig the new Folders feature and immediately went folder crazy and reduced how many pages of iPhone apps I have installed, in favor of convenient folders. But the really cool app was the new iBooks app for the iPhone made available with iOS 4. You need to go to the App Store and do a free download to get it. I was just playing around with it – downloaded 2 free books and 2 sample book sections. iBooks on the iPhone is quite functional and easy to read. Nice software.

I’m now sending myself some PDF documents via email. The iPhone email client will allow me to save these PDF documents to the iBook reader. Can’t wait to see how that works out.

All in all, the update was painless except that it took about an hour.

Yesterday, June 15th, customers could begin to pre-order the new model of iPhone, iPhone 4, through either AT&T or Apple.

Later the same day it was announced that you could no longer order the new mobile phone anywhere. Here’s a quote I read from AT&T posted during the afternoon.

“Because of the incredible interest in iPhone 4, today was the busiest online sales day in AT&T history.”

That didn’t take long. And have you tried to find an iPad 3G anywhere?

These guys are printing gold.

It’s not just Apple’s marketing. They make great products and people know it. It’s not just marketing — it’s reputation.

I haven’t decided about getting an iPhone upgrade yet. The model I have, which is now 2 years old, still works great. There are compelling features about iPhone 4 that interest me. But I’m also unresearched into whether my data plan would really change or not. I know that it’s very likely I’ll upgrade, who are we trying to kid here? But at this point I’m undecided.

When the iPad was announced I was more ambivalent. And so I haven’t been giving it too much thought in the past. But then recently I’ve watched a few people I know, who already have one, using theirs. And I recently visited my local Apple retail store to try one out. I can understand the appeal of a tablet sized web browsing device. It’s pretty nice to see and use.

I guess it’s a good thing that there weren’t any in stock.

You may have already seen this photo passing around the Internet.

BP Irony.

Look carefully, the sign is posted at a BP gas station.