intermorphic.com Blog

Well, as you may have noticed, our forum is still down. A very unsatisfactory state of affairs, we know, and we are very apologetic about this. We have had it confirmed on the phpBB Support Forum that the problem is indeed something that Yahoo Web Hosting has to fix – we cannot fix it ourselves.

It is now 18 days the forum has been down, and we believe we have been very patient with Yahoo. In order to further escalate matters we have again emailed Guy Yalif, Head of Yahoo Web Hosting, this time copying Jerry Yang, CEO Yahoo. We can only hope that this will somehow help get this resolved soon. So, please bear with us as we try to get this fixed!

We reported to Yahoo on 13th August that our Yahoo hosted forum had gone down – we just got an error message when we tried to access it (error message still there). We had done nothing that would cause this problem as we had not modified our SQL database in any way. We did notice that at around the same time, however, that all the file permissions on our website had somehow changed, which Yahoo denied was anything to do with them (as far as we know, the only way for the to be changed would otherwise be by us, but we did not change them). We only noticed this as we tried to update some pages but were not able to overwrite the existing files with their replacement.

Anyhow, back to the forum problem, Yahoo finally confirmed on 20th August (after a lot of chasing, some with no reply) that they had had other forum owners complain about similar problems to ours, and were putting technical resource into solving it.

It is now 23rd August and our forum is still down, and we have no further update from Yahoo as to when this will be fixed.

If you are thinking of using Yahoo to host your forum, think very carefully about it. We are a UK company, so the only way to contact Yahoo support is either an International telefone call (there is only a US number to call), or via email. The thing about this is that the Webhosting service is not a free service, it is something you pay for….

When you email them, they have a contact system where you are given a case number. They say you should get a reply within around 24hours or so. That would be OK, but there is often a real communication problem, and they do not seem to understand the questions asked (this is very very patchy) and sometimes it is days before you get a reply, often one that does not help at all. Also, they can really only handle one problem or question in each email, which is a problem in itself because things are often interrelated. It all means that you end up having an exchange of emails (and thus delays) that stretch on for days and days and days and turn into weeks.

There is no point in giving specifics here, as this is not meant to be a rant. It is just pure frustration with Yahoo Web Hosting. We just want our forum back online!

As of 20th August Yahoo Web Hosting have now confirmed to us by email that our forum problem is also an issue for a number of their other customers. The good news is that this means they are at last now devoting some technical resource to fix it.

We are deeply apologetic for this outage, and no-one is more frustrated by this situation than us. Thanks for your continued patience – hopefully it will be up again soon.

It appears Yahoo have done something to our forum, and we are now trying to get them to fix whatever it is they have done. We hope to get it up soon, but this is realistically not likely to be until the 14th Aug at the earliest. We apologise for this and appreciate your patience!

NB: We have had other problems with Yahoo web hosting the last week when our website file permissions seemed to be changed for no reason, meaning we could not update the website. Very odd indeed, and has never happened before.

We are really sorry to report this, as we really wanted to get the Mixtikl mobile music creativity system running on iPhone / iPod touch (see Create Digital Music).

There is no intrinsic reason why Mixtikl and its integrated Noatikl generative music engine and Partikl DLS MIDI synth, softsynth, sampler and fx network shouldn’t run very nicely on the iPhone / iPod touch. But, as with porting to any Device/OS, there are many issues to consider ranging from technical to commercial, and Pete’s blog touches on some of the technical issues behind our decision.

After further investigation, however, it turns out that it was not only the technical side that turned out to be a show stopper for us. It was the terms in the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement (and as a European developer it took nearly 3 months for us to reach a stage where we got to see them).

Because of NDA restrictions we are not allowed to talk about anything in that long agreement. There was one particular clause that, for us, was a total show stopper (and goodness knows why Apple have that requirement) and another that, depending on interpretation, would also be a total showstopper for us. There were plenty more to really think really hard about, too along the lines of risk vs reward vs control vs who benefits etc.

We were (and still are) very excited by the potential of our software running on these Apple devices, and we love Apple products and all our other software products run on Mac OS X (and Windows XP of course).

So, we have decided not to press ahead with development until Apple can:
- relax a number of (as we see it) overly restrictive terms in the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement
- allow apps to share/exchange data/files between themselves and an attached PC/Mac

Will Apple care that a small developer like us chooses to stay away from the party for now? Surely not!

Will Apple change anything and open things up more because we can’t contine? Surely not, cos there will be plenty of other developers that will develop for it!

Will anyone notice our apps are not available on iPhone, and will anyone care? Some people may notice and care, yes, because we know we create products for a niche audience; however, those people may now need to find other devices to use them on (sorry folks!).

Finally, is this sour grapes on our part? Most definitely not, we still hope to come back to it some time in the future.

So, now that the road ahead is clear for the present at least, we will be turning our attention to Mixtikl for S60 after we complete our work on Mixtikl for Windows Mobile.

Pete & Tim