Cyril Doussin

I am doing a fair bit of travelling generally and will soon embark on an epic road trip for which a GPS will be mandatory.

I looked at various solutions and prices were often too high and buying and loading maps seamed to cumbersome. Apparently depending on which model you have and the country where you bought it you can’t load any map on it. Finding up to date Europe maps for Australian TomTom that my parents in-law own for example proved impossible.

So I naturally looked at the state of GPS apps for the iPhone, since I’ll have it with me during my trip anyway. The Navigon apps were apparently the best according to reviews. The only problem is that the AGPS received on the iPhone (I have a 3G) is below shite. Enter the TomTom iPhone mount.

I had to look for ages on the web to find info on what I really wanted to know about this product, so here it is in short:

• main thing: you don’t need the TomTom app, another app, like the Navigon works perfectly
• the mount includes a real GPS receiver which is much better than the iPhone’s
• the mount speaks instructions
• you can play iPod music at the same time and direct that into your car stereo via a (non-provided) cable. But driving instructions won’t come out of the car stereo, only out of the mount.
• you can set up the mount on the windshield or on any flat surface via a provided disc that is sticky on one side and smooth on the other side to fix the mount

Now here is what I found over the course of three days driving in the Southwest of France (countryside and cities):

• the mount tremendously increases the GPS signal you can receive. It’s awesome, gets a signal very quickly and is really precise
• the Navigon app, which I was using is awesome. Not necessarily a 100% perfect UI but definitely good enough. Driving instructions were always correct too and only a couple of very recent road changes (new roundabouts) were not represented.
• the mount’s speaker is definitely loud enough
• the mount attaches very well to the windshield

It’s also worth mentioning that the mount + a GPS app might be a bit more than buying a GPS unit by itself, but these often come preloaded with maps fir just one country.

The best advantages I see to this solution are:

• less cumbersome
• charges your iPhone while your driving
• you can leave the mount (without the phone) in sight in the car while it’s parkes, it’s less likely someone would want to steal it than a full GPS unit
• buying extra maps is cheaper than for normal GPS units
• you get software updates for free
• so cheaper in the long run, especially if you’re going to drive in a few places

So in short: TomTom car kit + Navigon app = WIN

Tom is leaving Yahoo! and taking a break. I really hope he’ll be working on awesome projects in the coming years.

He’s one of the truly remarkable, genuinely inspiring and all-round nice people I’ve had the chance to meet during my time at Yahoo! If you’re interested at all in where the web is going, keep an eye on him and go see him talk if you have the chance to.

There you go I’m all nostalgic and missing Yahoo! now… </sad puppy> :)

I don’t really understand what the fuss is about at the moment regarding iPad prices in Europe.

In the recent years Apple has had prices in Euro pretty much the same as their prices in US Dollar. The iPad is no exception, it retails in the US for $499 and here in France for €499, which is roughly $633. Looks like a rip off. Yet it’s not, let me explain.

First and foremost the most important thing to consider is the VAT, or sales tax as it is known in the US. Prices in the US do not include the sales tax (since its value depends on the state or even sometimes the city where you make a purchase) but do include it in Europe. Here in France the VAT on such products is the same as on most products: 19.6%. This means the price of the iPad before tax in France is about €417, or at today’s rate about $530. So the iPad actually sells here for a net price $100 under what most people think.

Still, that’s $30 or so more than in the US. Let’s keep looking.

Since the end of 2007 France has had a tax on hard drives. Before 2007 only CDs, DVDs and dedicated portable music devices were being taxed this way. This tax came of course from the fantastic work done by music industry lobbyists. So just because you want to have an iPad to browse the web, play games, use apps, or enjoy media that you actually bought, Apple has to pay Universal & co. some money. And not just a few pennies: the tax on an iPad is €15, or about $19. France isn’t the only one in this case, Germany has a similar tax and other european countries may well have, I’m not sure.

Steve Jobs himself gave some brief but accurate advice to anyone ignoring these two facts.

So we’re now at $11 difference, less than a movie ticket. Less than a movie ticket to get your Chinese manufactured toy shipped to Rotterdam (I assume) instead of Apple’s major market, and then dispatched all the way across many countries and delivered to your door, you lazy arse. And you don’t pay extra for that, since Apple pays for whatever UPS charges to deliver across an entire continent.

Add the numerous costs of internationalising its entire product line and retail infrastructure, from the Apple Store websites to the manuals, the support hotlines or even the software itself and you’ll realise that you’re not paying much more than anyone in the US for the privilege of acquiring your new luxurious toy when you leave nowhere near the company creating it or the companies assembling it.

The iPad and generally all Apple hardware products remain expensive, for good reasons too I believe. But complaints on how Europeans are paying much more for new products like the iPad are not justified.

I have switched this blog over to Zine.

I had stopped writing before as rolling out my own proper blogging engine with theming etc was taking too much time. And then along came Zine in all its awesomeness :) I will still spend a bit of time on a theme though.

I shall rant again here soon…

Today Project Fondue (Ed Eliot, Stuart Colville and I) is launching a new tool to create and edit favicons: the Favicon Generator.

Generating .ico files can be a bit of a pain and the Favicon Generator makes this very easy. Another great feature it provides is the ability to tweak the icons or create new ones with an editor.

The Favicon Generator is one of several projects in the works at Project Fondue.

So I left Yahoo! in December. This was a big change, and like anyone else I wasn’t totally happy to leave the Great Webdev Nation of Yahoo! London. This being said, change is good, and new stuff is now keeping me busy.

I’m currently contracting here in London, doing PHP stuff. It’s kindof good to focus on one and only site for work purposes, working with one codebase means you don’t have to re-become used to it every second day.

I’m also doing Django/Python and generally webdev related stuff on the side more than ever. I’m working with a few friends on a lot of cool little projects, which we’ll be launching over the coming weeks.

And I am also starting to plan my move to Paris which will occur in March. This is very exciting, and many more projects and adventures will take place as a result of this move.

2009 is shaping up to be a great year, hopefully as great as 2008 was!

So today is my last day working cleaning my desk at Yahoo!

I feel both really happy since I asked to leave, and at the same time very disappointed. Yahoo! is a company for which I’d be happy to work for for a very long time, but right now my priorities, where I want to take my professional life and what I want to do with my time are just not aligned with the company’s plans.

I don’t have any regret at all, it has been an experience that I would recommend to anyone. I got to work with many talented and just all round great guys, learnt a lot and had more good times than I can remember. To all those I shared the office with: thank you very much, you’ve made my life in London much better than I could imagine when I moved here almost two years ago.

I will now stay in London for a few more months before probably moving on to France at some point next year. This is the perfect opportunity to concentrate on doing what I really like, playing with the technology I find the most appropriate for what I want to do and make progress (finally) on a handful of side projects (including this site and the software powering it).

So I’m disappointed I’m not staying at Yahoo! to do cool stuff but I’m also happy. I really believe change in my life is a good thing and I can only learn from all these experiences.

On a more technical level I’ll keep doing web stuff of course, write a lot more Python, put out Django based sites, and play with many APIs. First thing will be Last.fm’s hackday, for which I have a neat little idea :)

Voici les slides de ma présentation intitulée “Enrichissement de sites web” à la journée des ateliers de Paris Web 2008.

I’ll write this in both French and English. English first. Je commence par la version Anglaise de ce billet, rendez-vous plus bas pour le billet en français. English: Holy cow, I knew Paris Web was great, but not that great. It basically was close to everything I would like a web conference to be. I had the privilege to be invited to speak and gave a technical-ish presentation on progressive enhancement at the EFREI on Saturday, the day dedicated to workshops. I am now even more convinced than before: I don’t need to be invited to Paris Web, I’ll be there at the next one, even if I happily have to pay more than 100€s (!) for the conference days and, get ready, 10€s for the workshops.

There are two big things I’m particularly happy about: the quality and professionalism of the french community, and the people.

I knew there was a vibrant french community in some specialised areas of the web industry: the Mozilla guys are quite a few and passionate; the CSS Working group co-chair and unavoidable Daniel Glazman is there; there are a few high-quality open source CMS/blog engines being developed (Spip & Dotclear for example); I had heard a bit about some of the bigger companies (eg. France Telecom & Skyrock, a big radio network) doing lots of web stuff and hiring good people, and I had visited the sites of a few freelancers (such as Marie Destandeau’s Ototoi, much to her surprise). Oh, and I knew about the Temesis guys of course, who are the uncontestable masters of web quality assessment.

But to put it simply, I am still gobsmacked by how good these and many more people I have discovered and met at Paris Web are. I had a few doubts to be honest on whether or not there was an actually big enough community of really good web people back home, as good as some of the guys I’ve met in the UK and sometimes the US. Well, there is no reason left to doubt. They’re just as good, professional and dedicated as the best guys I was really glad to get to know in the UK. This is obviously not a competition, it’s just reassuring to know there is a not-too-small group of people who are well positioned to make the web in France evolve in the right direction: to be standards driven and user centric.

And it just so happens that these are really freaking nice people too. As Marie was saying, it’s really good to see most people present, and this includes first and foremost the organisers, are just genuinely nice folks. It was also good to see some of the people I knew of and thought may be a bit too forceful or argumentative in real life are not. I seriously haven’t met any wanker there, from the organisers to the famous-ish designers to the standards and browser guys. And for the best web conference in a 60 million + people country which happens to have the reputation of being the most arrogant in the world, it’s either a feat, or a huge mistake on the part of people generalising from the outside.

Anyway, I’m just really happy right now, had an awesome four days, and really looking forward to Paris Web 2009. Thank you to all the (volunteer, it’s worth mentioning) organisers, you’ve done an awesome job. Français: Bon, alors, je ne vais pas traduire exactement la version anglaise, on va la faire un peu plus court: c’eacute;tait énorme! J’avais entendu du bien de Paris Web avant de venir, mais j’avais râté lédition de l’année derniègrave;re et donc savait pas entièrement à quoi m’attendre. Paris Web 2008 était très proche de ma conf7eacute;rence web idéale. Je reviendrai l’année prochaine, sans aucun doute, même sans être invité comme c’&eacute’tait le cas cette année, et je serai m&eacirc;me bien content de payer plus que les maigres prix des billets cette année (sérieusement, 100€s les conférences et 10€s les ateliers, c’est presque pas sérieux…).

J’en tirerai deux choses de cette édition: la qualité et le professionalisme de la communauté web française, et les gens que j’ai pu rencontrer ou découvrir.

Je savais qu’il y avais une communauté importante dans certains domaines: les gars de Mozilla; Daniel L’Icontournable; les gens qui bossent sur quelques CMS ou moteurs de blogs (Spip et Dotclear par exemple); quelques grosses companies comme FT ou Skyrock qui ont embauché pas mal de monde; et quelques freelance tels que Marie Destandeau.

Mais franchement, je suis toujours épaté par la qualité professionelle de ces gens et des autres que j’ai rencontré à Paris Web. J’avais quelques doutes pour être honnête sur le fait qu’il y ait une communauté active de gens qui savent vraiment ce qu’ils font sur le web assez grande en France. Je savais qu’il y en avait, mais pas combien et ce qu’ils faisaient exactement. C’est pas évident de l’extérieur de s’en rendre compte, on ne peut pas forcément suivre tous les blogs du monde… Et bah maintenant le doute est plus que levé Il y a un groupe bien important de personnes en France qui sont tout aussi bons, professionels et «dédiés à la cause» que les gars que j’ai pu rencontrer au Royaume Uni ou parfois aux US. C’est pas une compèt’ de toute façon, mais bons ça fait vraiment plaisir de savoir qu’il y a un nombre assez important de gens en France qui sont là pour pouvoir fair avancer le web dans la bonne direction: le rendre basé sur les standards et centré sur l’utilisateur.

Et il se trouve que tous ces gens sont non seulement très pro, mais aussi super sympa. J’ai vraiment pas rencontré de connard, des organisateurs à ceux qui sont un peu connu dans le milieu, aux gars des standards ou navigateurs. Avec la réputation qu’on se tape d’être arrogants, on pourrait s’attendre que la plus importante conférence web (oui, je compte pas Le Web, je m’intéresse pas particulièrement au web comme support marketing) dans le pays ne soit pas désuée d’abbrutis, et bah soit je les ai heureusement évités, soit notre réputation est vraiment pas si méritée que ça :)

Voilà, je suis super content, j’ai passé quatre jours fabuleux, et suis très impatient d’être à Paris Web 2009. Merci énormément à tous les organisateurs (bénévoles, il faut le dire quand même), vous avez fait un boulot remarquable. Bon, en fait c’était assez long ce billet, j’ai pas pu me retenir, désolé, j’suis content… :)

I presented at the latest Web Standards Group event in London, which was about findability this time around.

The slides of my talk “Introduction to Findabililty” are up on Slideshare and viewable below:

I might knock up an article on the topic and put it up here at some point…

The evening was great and we got good feedback which was really good, considering we didn’t really know how the topic would be received (I was particularly worried about my presentation which was completely void of any technical stuff).

I’m really looking forward to the next WSG gathering (for which I already have many ideas…). Thanks again to Stuart for putting these events together!