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Who are you benefiting? The company or the customer?

Apple has a reputation for doing their own thing, often in the face of accepted assumptions. But when the changes a company makes detract from the benefits customers have grown to rely on, who benefits?

Apple’s latest iTunes update removed some of the key features of the app – managing apps on your devices, to name one – in favor of pushing their music and media services. But by eliminating this feature from the desktop version of iTunes, they have eliminated the key lock-in for using iTunes at all. There are plenty of apps – free or paid – that will use their API to sync music and movies to the your phone. But nothing really served that extra role of managing which apps you have on which devices, and keeping them all up to date with the latest versions.

Code First Database Smells (I think…)

I’ve been a database developer (among other skills) for most of my professional career.  My first real code was an automated data update tool in Lotus 1-2-3 for a distributed phone directory database.   I went on to cut my developer baby teeth in FoxPro, then grew up using Microsoft SQL.  When I think about a new application, I think about the database early, if not actually first.  So I have some biases…

I’ve used Code First principals when learning Ruby with a MongoDB database on the project, but I was too wrapped up in the newness to think about the impacts.   Now I’m working through a course on MVC in ASP.Net, using Visual Studio and MS SQL, so I’m on familiar ground.   And although the instructor gave reasoned arguments for why Code First is a good practice in his experience, as a database guy my first impression is that there are some smells.

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