Recently my iPhone became very slow, it hardly responded anymore. I tried to fix it in several ways, but nothing helped. After searching the Internet for a while I found several potential solutions and at least 3 were helpful to me. Feel free to try yourself!

1. Reboot your iPhone on a regular basis

Especially when you are frequently installing apps from the App Store you should reboot your iPhone after the installation has finished. It seems that your phone needs to clean up some memory space. Switch your iPhone off by pressing the on/off button on top for a while to reboot.

2. Close your web pages

In general I don’t close the web pages I’ve been browsing with my Safari browser. Keeping these pages opened seems to use a lot of memory and will reduce the performance of your iPhone. Close a page by clicking the numbered icon on the right bottom, close by pressing the cross.

3. Clear the browser cache

Clearing the browser cache improved the most for me. This option is a bit more hidden. Choose the “Settings” icon on your “home” screen. Look up the “Safari” line and click.

There you will have to select “Clear Cache“. Also “Clear History” and “Clear Cookies” (be aware that you will loose some default settings) could improve the performance.

After performing the above actions my iPhone started performing better again. Hopefully it will help you as well. In case you know other improvements, please share below.

Today at the 4Developers conference in Poznan, Poland, I presented the audience my concern about the existing gap in between client’s need and the reality of the software developers. For some reason we seem not to manage to understand each other well enough. Too many projects do not deliver the result the client was hoping for. Honestly, it’s no longer a question whether or not this gap has to be closed. We just have to do it to make software more successful and clients more happy. But who’s responsible to bridge the gap? In my opinion the software developers. I will try to explain why. [Picture source: Allaboutjazz.com]

Software projects fail too often

Based on many data sources and publications we can only conclude software projects “fail” too often, meaning:

• The project is not delivered on time
• The project is not delivered within budget
• The project is not offering the requested/promised functionality

A combination of the above is happening as well of course.

It’s not easy to improve but we just have to

Neither I’m going to claim I know best how to solve the issue. Honestly I’m learning every day of the mistakes we are making ourselves. As every other software company we have both successful and improvable projects.

Nor will I tell you it’s easy to bridge the gap in between clients/users and software developers. These are people with a different background, different interests and a different focus. Both communicate, think and express themselves totally differently. You could say clients are from Mars and software developers from Venus.

But one thing is for sure. We need to bridge this gap. Business will have to talk together with IT, it should neither be a continuous fight nor competition.

Are we willing to work together as partners?

To realize excellent software solutions a developer will need very well specified requests. Based on a quick poll among the audience and my own experience I conclude too often clients are just not able to really specify their needs. At least not in terms a developer will understand.

I don’t blame them because I believe it’s almost impossible to fully define your needs in such a way that everybody will understand it.

We will have to find another way of communicating the client’s needs. At it’s best developers are defining the needs together with the client. Several “best practice” or “Agile” methods are available to support this process.

It’s important that we define what the software application has to do in terms the business understands. When using Business Driven Development it would look like this:

Discussing the needs in this way will also lead to all kind of usefull user stories which will make the developers understand the needs better. Besides discussion will lead to more creative ideas! Together you can prioritize them. While prioritizing it will also become clear that currently too many useless features are being developed. By setting the right priorities together you can also safe a lot of money.

The next step would be to start prototyping. You can do this by means of wireframes, mockups, draft GUI’s etc. The aim is to show the client/user as soon as possible what it’s all going to look like. The instant user feedback will show the developers whether or not they are still on the right track. Communication is king in this phase. Developers should be willing to except changes in business priorities during the development. A user will better understand what he really needs once he sees the first prototypes and working releases.

Honestly, the method doesn’t matter, because it’s just a method. If the willingness to improve is there from both sides and when they invest time and effort in defining the project you can choose any method that suits you best. The cooperation as partners will be the biggest gain, period!

Developers will have to start this change

Developers their life will become a lot easier if they understand the client’s needs better. Therefore, they should make the first step.

And why wouldn’t you? Just imagine that you won’t have to fix “bugs” anymore and that the amount of unexpected change requests drops? How would that feel? I know it’s scary, but please just give it a try. What can you loose? Add some funk and have more fun making better solutions, may be even the best solutions.

But this doesn’t mean it will be easy. Especially when clients think in the traditional model of sending a request and agreeing about a fixed priced, fixed date project. Both sides will have to trust each other. The business has to dare to share their ideas and needs. If it’s hard for your development team to achieve this interaction with your client just start working like this yourself. One of the team members could “act” like the client. A sales person, consultant or business analyst are in general best for this job.

We try to achieve this level of trust by having many (in)formal meetings at the start of the project. Having a drink and dinner together makes you start acting different. Several workshops together show the added value of such an investment.

If we don’t change the competition will overrule us

Having a nice and relaxed 9 to 5 (or more common in Poland an 8 to 4) job you might not be willing to bother about the above. But software doesn’t stop at 4 pm. Clients are depending on software solutions 24 hours a day. And business dynamics are hard to plan.

If you are willing to support the business better this will demand an additional investment. You will have to spend time together, probably you should learn more about the business. That will take time, after hours.

But if you don’t do this, the competition is waiting. In China and India there are many young, eager and clever software developers willing to take our jobs. Today the main issue for the client will be that it’s even harder to outsource the work to these countries. But sooner or later they will find out how to use these resources if we as Polish and European developers don’t manage to seduce our clients.

It’s not about methods, but about “funky” cooperation

Hopefully I managed to show we can not solve the current situation just by implementing a new “funky” method. There are more steps needed. I will summarize them:

1. Get to know each other: Business en IT will have to invite each other to share thoughts, to understand each other
2. Trust each other: The relationship in between Business en IT will have to be based on trust
3. Stimulate creativity: Business needs should be defined together
4. Make things understandable: Business needs have to be defined in an understandable way, as “user stories”
5. Set priorities, exclude waste: The business sets the priorities for the implementation of the features
6. Interact: Development should be more iterative and interactive based on prototyping
7. Communicate: During the development we have to communicate, communicate, communicate
8. Change is the norm: Developers have to be open to changes. Business needs will change over time

The above is a rough summary of today’s presentation at 4Developers in Poznan, Poland. Feel free to check the slides. I’m looking forward to your feedback, comments and opinions below. Thanks for your attention!

After my presentation @mesirii send me the following link where Martin Fowler and Dan North discuss bridging the gap as well.

Managing to write on four blogs is not an easy job. Especially not because my days are rather busy. That’s one of the reasons I like to write blog posts while travelling. Some time ago I installed WordPress for iPhone 2 and for some time I was really happy. Unfortunately, recently I noticed the application deletes and changes posts, content of a saved post shows up when I start changing another existing post. That’s why I decided to continue searching for the right editor for my iPhone and meanwhile I decided to look for a desktop editor as well.

Windows Live Writer became the desktop editor

Although the dedicated WordPress editor is not bad at all a desktop editor seems more convenient. Several times while travelling I didn’t manage to save my posts due to a bad Internet connection. In such a case a local draft gives a secure feeling. At least for some time I will give Windows Live Writer a try. It appears to be a convenient editor enabling me to edit multiple blogs from one application. I heard some good opinions about it and the application integrates many other applications and provides many ways to include pictures and video, meanwhile uploading them to Flickr and YouTube if you wish.

A good editor for the iPhone is hard to find

As mentioned above I used to be very happy with the WordPress for iPhone editor. I am only writing on WordPress blogs and therefore I don’t need support for any other blog types. But the issues I’m facing with this app are really annoying. From the “Making WordPress for iPhone” blog I conclude that soon a version 2.2 will be released. Hopefully this will solve my issues. The WordPress for iPhone editor offers most of the needed functionality. I also downloaded some paid editors like BlogPress and iBlogger. Also BlogWriter didn’t satisfy my needs. In my opinion they don’t manage to compete. A simple feature like the “more”-tag is even not supported. Basically this means that you only see the introduction part of your post if you decide to split them. Be aware! Saving them will delete the rest of the post. Can you please refund my money?

Guys, please release WordPress for iPhone 2.2 soon and make that my issue will be solved!

I am curious what editors you are using and would like to know your experiences. Please share!

Since I received my iPhone I became addicted and I know I am not the only one. Often I am looking around what kind of applications others are using. But probably it is high time I start sharing my favorite applications. Some of the most used applications are part of the basic iPhone installation. The others are all available in the App Store. Read further if you would like to know what candies I found in the App Store.

iPhone offers by default a lot

The default applications I use most are phone, email, calendar and messaging. I linked both my email and calendar to our Google Apps hosted e-mail environment to make that I can access my received and sent e-mail from whatever location PC, web and iPhone and to have my calendar synced everywhere. I use Safari for browsing and the iPod for listening music while travelling. The default Maps application is very useful for finding your way around the city or looking for the closest shop or restaurant. And of course I visit the App Store often.

My favorite Apps from the App Store

My close followers won’t be surprised that my favorite applications are related to social networking and photography. I will start with the last one.

1. Best Camera: I am really font of taking pictures but the time to edit them is lacking. Too often while travelling I cannot take my digital camera. The iPhone picture quality is quite acceptable, but most pictures need a boost. By coincidence I ran into the application: Best Camera. In some easy steps you can add different filters to your pictures with amazing results. You can publish them on Twitter, Facebook and by e-mail. You are also able to post your pictures on thebestcamera.com.
2. For managing my Twitter accounts I mostly use Tweetie by Atebits. In my blog post “Will Tweetie win the Twitter client battle” I already explained why I prefer this application above my next favorite iPhone App.
3. TweetDeck is my favorite Twitter client on my PC and the iPhone version has some advantages over Tweetie. I mostly use TweetDeck to have a quick overview of multiple accounts and searches, but as mentioned before I jump often back to Tweetie. For sure the Facebook integration within TweetDeck is a great additional feature.
4. Being on the way knowing that I gave my commitment to provide several posts a week on multiple blogs the WordPress tool is the perfect solution for me. This tool enables me to write (draft) blog posts whenever I am inspired. The interface is not comparable to the online rich editor, but it is sufficient if you know how to handle some html-code.
5. Facebook launched a dramatically improved client for the iPhone some time ago. As I wrote it caused that I am more and more moving from Twitter to Facebook. This application is becoming one of my most used ones.
6. LinkedIn provides a good overview of all your business contacts on your iPhone. Thanks to its recent Twitter integration LinkedIn is becoming more social network oriented. I know that hardly any of my business contacts is using Twitter and therefore this app is a good tool to check their status.
7. Gist is both a web and iPhone application to make you know more about who you know. In another blog post I already explained how Gist helps you to keep track of your social network. I predict Gist will soon become more important than for example “directories” like Plaxo.
8. To share my best images on Flickr I use the Flickr picture management tool.
9. Following the traffic on our client’s websites and the blogs we manage is very important for me. I want to have access to the basic statistics 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I use two applications to handle this WordPress Statistics and Analytics Lite. As the application names already indicate the WordPress application shows you the statistics for you either your self or online hosted WordPress blog based on the WordPress.com statistics. Analytics Lite shows me all the statistics from my Google Analytics account.
10. When travelling calling is the best way to discuss urgent matters, but in some cases I prefer to communicate through Skype. The Skype app facilitates this very well.
11. Bonus:Sometimes I just need to challenge myself in a different area. Chess Free is hard to beat till now if I force myself to play a 10 minutes game.

I am curious about your favorite iPhone apps, feel free to share them below. Feel invited to request any further details about applications I mentioned above.

[Update: Ouriel pointed me to a nice application to show your favorite iPhone apps, Appsfire.com. You can also find an overview of my favorite iPhone applications there.]

Today we had our monthly pizza meeting at the GOYELLO office in Gdansk. A big part of the team joined our discussion about current PHP trends, based on a visit of several colleagues to PHPCON, and a discussion around unit testing.

We started the evening with celebrating the “Young Entrepreneur Award” we won this week by drinking beer. It occured to be the perfect start of an energetic discussion about the do’s and don’ts of unit testing. Thanks guys! You made my picture of the day.

Queuing in front of the KFC at 4 am

Originally uploaded by Peter Horsten

The day has just started, but anyway I guess this is going to be my picture of the day today. I was really surprised seeing such a queue in front of the KFC at 4 am. On the other hand if you know the train station in Poznan you know why people want to hide somewhere.

I am curious whether we will see similar queues this Thursday when Microsoft is releasing their new operating system Windows 7. Although Windows 7 is a real improvement I don’t think you should queue for it. Why? Just read my blog post about the Windows 7 hype.

For a long time the Blackberry was the mobile device of choice for the enterprise users. Recently this is changing. Some months ago I had to choose myself between a Blackberry and an iPhone. The elegant, very intuitive and smooth interface of the iPhone occurs to attract more and more business users.To be honest I decided to choose the iPhone mainly based on cost. I could get the iPhone almost for free together with my new mobile subscription. Besides for the Blackberry I was supposed to subscribe to the Blackberry network as well.

Positively surprised by the iPhone

I did not know what to expect, but till today my iPhone never let me down and it gave me a lot of fun, apart from the battery issue, but you can solve that by reading this blog post with a lot of useful links. It supports me doing my job and it is very useful when I am traveling. Email, calendar, Twitter, Internet, navigation and blogging, just some examples of functionality I use on my iPhone. I am not going to claim that you can not do these things on the Blackberry, but it’s fact of life that more and more applications become accessible by the iPhone as well. Several application providers even tend to focus more on the iPhone than on the Blackberry.

Users love the iPhone

Users tend to prefer the iPhone and for sure this is partly because it just looks great. It is really a Mac designed gadget. Nearly half of BlackBerry and other smart phone users would choose the iPhone for their next purchase, according to a report released by the end of June 2009. A global survey, conducted by US analysis firm Crowd Science, showed four out of 10 smart phone users would switch to the iPhone whereas only 14 per cent of non-BlackBerry smart phone users would move to BlackBerry.

For a huge part this has to do with the great look and feel, but not only. It occurs that most iPhone users use it for both business and private purposes. By doing this it perfectly serves the current trend of the shifting division in between private and business life.

IT departments prefer the Blackberry

Contrary to the users, IT departments prefer the security of the Blackberry and for some time they were absolutely right. The security management was not well organized on the iPhone. But lately this has changed. Just upgrade all the iPhones to OS 3.0 and you have a full feature set of security tools available. The article: “Can you manage an iPhone like a BlackBerry?“ describes this in a nice way. The iPhone is on the good way.

Application providers increasingly support the iPhone

The future success for the business usage of the iPhone highly depends on the amount of business applications that will be accessible through the iPhone. A big advantage of the iPhone is that it is rather easy to develop nice looking, very intuitive interfaces for all kinds of applications. The iPhone app store already offers numerous business and personal efficiency applications. Recently also several professional business applications decided to chose the iPhone as the prefered mobile interface for their applications. For example Alfresco, the open source alternative for Enterprice Content Management, has an integration environment for the iPhone available. Recently also Autonomy, one of the leading document management systems for lawyers, started offering iPhone access.

iPhone offers both business and fun

In my opinion the main differentiator for the iPhone is the very fact that it combines business and fun in one. Our lives are no longer strictly separated and while traveling it is great to have some fun, meanwhile being productive with business things. Answering your email while listening to some great music is combining these two in a perfect way. That makes the iPhone successful combined with more and more business support from solution providers.

Personally I don’t treat myself to be a geek and I am not that much into gadgets. At least I thought so  up to yesterday. The last 24 hours or even less have been real fun for the iPhone world. Last night we could install TweetDeck, the leading Twitter client, on the iPhone and today the whole world was waiting for OS 3.0. The long awaited new OS for the iPhone. Unfortunately my iPhone failed to upgrade, partly due to a too heavy load on the iTunes servers, but mainly because of an Internet Explorer setting!

Upgrading to OS 3.0 seems not to be a big deal according to the Apple website, but in my case it did not go that smooth.

WARNING: Better switch your simlock off!

I advise to unlock your SIM card before upgrading. This means that you have to make that your iPhone does not need a pin code to get access to the mobile network. If you do not know how to do this no big deal, I will describe the warning you get below.

Connect your iPhone to your laptop with the USB cable. Start your iTunes if it doesn’t start out of itself. And then you need to press the “Check for update” button. Downloading the new OS takes quite a while as does the installation.

During the installation the following error message appeared indicating that I had to unlock my SIM card. In such a case you will have to unplug your iPhone from your USB cable and wait a while to let the iPhone finish its processes. It will indicate a bit later that you will have to enter your pin to unblock your SIM card.

Then the waiting started again. What will happen? First of all don’t forget to press “OK” after reconnecting.

Unfortunately in my case the installation did not manage to finish. Reconnecting resulted in the following error screen.

A reset and holding down the home key seemed to work. I got reconnected to my iTunes. But then the iTunes connection timed out. It seemed the servers were too heavy loaded. On Twitter it is visible that more people were facing this issue. Meanwhile the iPhone support website was also down for some time.

Fix found

For some people it seemed to be sufficient to wait and to press ok from time to time. Others report that disconnecting and reconnecting the phone helped (it seems better not to try this last one). For me this did not work out Although a reset of the phone made it connect to iTunes again. By coincidence and thanks to Twitter I found a fix, the Apple site is still silent about the issue. It seems that the iPhone cannot be authenticated. You need to switch off a setting in IE and restart iTunes. See below.

The fix is to go into Internet Explorer, go to advanced options, scroll down to security and UNCHECK “Check for server certificate revocation”. Restart iTunes and close IE and you should be fine.

After performing this change, I was able to finish the installation and the iPhone rebooted itself and displayed the activation pop-up. Another manual sync action was needed to get all my previous applications back, although it looked like I lost them. They were placed on the 3rd page …..

So now I can finally start exploring all the new features that you can see below as well.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1uYVTk-_WE

They already managed ages ago! So why don’t we manage to realize something as simple as a web application? That’s more or less how I started my yesterday evening’s presentation at the 3Camp meeting in Gdańsk. Ages ago people managed to fulfill miraculous projects with hardly any tools. Today we can choose from a wide range of tools, but still we do not manage to run a project according to the client’s needs. What goes wrong?

A quick poll showed that fortunately most of the developers, I guess about 60%, claimed to use at least some procedures or ways of working that could be called “project management”. On the other hand this still means that we can gain a lot. In my opinion you shouldn’t start any project without a minimum amount of project management rules and tools involved.

Usage of basic project management rules will directly improve your project

Defining your project, dividing tasks and preparing a time line make that you continuously will be aware whether the project is going well and when a release can be expected. It enables you to answer questions of clients and management and if somebody interupts you and will try to add some functionality at least you will be able to show the impact of this change for the deadline, budget, scope or quality of the project. Because what ever change will be introduced, this will always have to influence something. As we all know clients and managers will always try the opposite. In general more needs to be delivered cheaper and quicker and the quality level should be the same. It might be clear that in my opinion this is a mission impossible.

Choose the best of both worlds

To be honest that above is not new and far from “Web 2.0″. This is common sense that we also learned ages ago. A lot of this common sense is grouped in “best practices” like the Prince2 project management approach. But knowing Prince2 doesn’t mean that you are a good project manager. Managing projects is something you need to learn by doing. And while doing you need to find out what best practices are the most applicable to your situation. For sure an approach like Prince2 can support today’s projects. The main disadvantage might be the rather static and control focused approach. Therefore, I advice to combine Prince2 with a more Agile approach, by combining the best of both worlds.

The business case within Prince2 is f.e. something I really would like everybody to use. Because too often people want to build or realize something without really knowing and understanding why. Recently I found out that a simple question: “How are you going to earn money with it?” very often couldn’t be answered. In such a case you have to think twice before you start the project.

Tooling has increased dramatically

The main difference in between “old” and “new”  ways of managing projects is probably the amount of tools available today to support you in managing your projects. Some years ago one of the main tools was Microsoft Project. Probably this is still a widely accepted standard, but today a lot more online services are available that support collaboration in between the team and the client.

Especially these tools make that today a lot more people are working together in a dramatically different way than we did several years ago. Working remotely is a lot easier. Teams spread over the whole world manage to cooperate by means of these tools.

Relatively cheap or even free ways of communication like VoIP and Skype make that people can easily discuss with each other on a daily basis to make that everything is clear. All kind of web based ticketing systems enable people to work on the right things and it shares the needed information with the whole team. Integration servers build the new release enabling daily releases if needed. Information can easily be shared through f.e. blogs or Twitter accounts and documents can be shared through a central document sharing platform. In fact you are able to work where ever you like.

For sure this new collaboration approach demands another type of project manager. The project manager 2.0! Feel free to check my presentation at Slideshare. In case of any questions feel free to contact me. Please share your opinion below or discuss online on Twitter: @PetersOpinion