Projekt by Kylom - a neat outliner and list making app, and;

Mobbler - a really simple looking but fantastic LastFM client (meaning I can WiFi play LastFM radio stations on my mobile around the house). LastFM really comes into its own for me, when it is on my mobile. Sure, for cost reasons I would not use it over my operator network, but if it could be priced right, it would be a killer service. To give this a chance of happening LastFM should really allow a user to decide the streaming quality they prefer (i.e. on mobile 64kbps would be fine).

Anyhow, I would really hope that one day we can get apps into Mixtikl that do these kind of things. But, we have to get Mixtikl out first, and there are a ton of things we would like to add down the road. Ultimately, it will all come down to what users want the most (and what we have the time and resources to build).

Do check out the apps above, they are cool!

We have just heard from Yahoo support that they have investigated our problem at the engineering level, but that they need to continue to investigate the issue.

The good news is that they told us that fixing this is now an urgent priority for their engineering team, and have told us we can expect a resolution or update within 3 days.

We are not out of the woods with this yet… But appears now we at last have their attention, so we have our fingers crossed that they can resolve this soon and we wish them the best of luck in that. We will keep you posted on developments.

I don’t yet know how they are going to make us happy again once this is fixed (AND we simply cannot afford to have this kind of long drawn out saga happen again), but lets cross one bridge at a time.

We had a reply from Guy Yalif, who it turns out is no longer Head of Yahoo Web Hosting, but is now in Yahoo advertising. He said he understands our pain, and has forwarded our message to the head of the hosting support team, as well as the new Head of Yahoo Web Hosting. He also said he would follow up with both of them, which was kind of him.

We have subsequently had another mail from Yahoo support (1 week on from last one confirming there was a problem) saying “Please assured that our engineers are still investigating the problem you reported and trying their level best to resolve the issue as soon as possible.”

Sounds promising… But, what was not given, however, was an ETA as to when this would be fixed. At least they say they are till working on it, though. We will be pressing them for an ETA.

What we still don’t understand, however, is how a company as big, powerful and resourced as Yahoo!, can still be trying to fix something that went wrong 19 days ago. Whatever it was that happened has stopped not only our forum working, but (as we were lead to believe by Yahoo) other forums, too. It must be a pretty serious problem not to be sorted by now.

You might be interested to hear of an amusing mail we got from Yahoo last week, telling us our Webhosting fee was going up and “We’re committed to providing you with world-class service, and this increase will ensure we can continue to offer the features and quality you have come to expect from Yahoo!.” We are looking forward Yahoo meeting its stated committments.

We are looking forward to getting our forum back up and running for you! Apologies again from us.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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

You can find the blog entry right here:

http://sseyod.blogspot.com/2008/07/porting-mixtikl-to-mobile-windows.html

Pete