Abdul Qabiz on Web Technologies, Flash Platform, RIA, India

In India, Apple service doesn’t work well. As far as I know, most of Apple customers in India end up paying more to purchase the same products than someone in USA or other countries.

Why are we treated as second class citizens?

Anyway, the current Apple support process in India seems to be:-

1. Register service-request with Apple India over phone
2. Take your Apple device to nearest apple-authorised service-provider (AASP)
3. Give the case-id given by Apple India Support(in step #1 above) to AASP
4. AASP would run the diagnostic tests, if required, get the parts and fix things.

You might think, that’s a nice process and should work fine?

There are some issues in above process:-

• Apple India might not register your request and can get away by saying your hardware is overused and not covered in warranty anymore. Unless you are confident and technical enough to explain them things. Not everyone can do that.
• Not all cities have any authorised service-providers
• AASP might not be trained enough to deal things as per Apple standards.
• AASP might have broken process within their organisations, i.e. it takes them days to get details/approvals from their own headquarters and bosses.
• AASP might miss a step or two required before they can order the parts. If they do it, later Apple makes their life miserable by asking many questions. Eventually a customer suffers.

My recent experience with Apple support process has not been good. Read more…

Mrinal Wadhwa started a discussion, in Adobe India Community Champions mailing-list, to raise concerns about Adobe India’s role in Flex India community, he raised some good points.

It’s unfortunate to see how one of the Adobe evangelists took it personal and reacted publicly and made some personal attack on Mrinal.

You can check out Mrinal’s post to read what happened.

This is what I posted during discussion in the mailing-list.

My two cents after reading entire thread.

1) Adobe India works differently, the hierarchy and culture is different. More focused one engineering and marketing (to whom – God knows) than anything else. So any such event is aligned with sales and marketing needs. A lot of people who work enjoy their work but beyond that they don’t do much. A lot of them even maintain low-profile for various reasons.

2) Adobe India Evangelist team works differently compared to their counter parts in USA. In India, they report to engineering director of Flex or platforms team, which is not the case in USA, if I am right.

3) Expecting Flex team engineers to participate would be too much, it’s individual’s curiosity/passion to do that. If their managers make it as on objective/gaol, most of them would show up for sake (performance review, appraisal, etc) – we don’t want that. I have been through it and opposed the idea when my manager wanted entire team to do what we (Manish and I) were doing our own, due to our own curiosity.

I have always asked these questions (what Mrinal is asking) to myself and during discussions, but could never really understand. I have learnt that it’s better not to expect much from the Adobe India, it’s not really Adobe USA. Culture comes from top to bottom, and top management is not really anywhere close to what it’s in USA.

I like Evangelists in Adobe India, most of them are passionate and are there because they love technology and what they do. Unfortunately, when you work for a boss who got a different agenda or things, you can’t do much. As said earlier, Evangelist team reports somewhere to engineering director or someone like that, now you can imagine things.

These are some of my random, but based on my observation and experience, thoughts. No offenses meant to anyone.

I am keeping kind of low profile myself in Flex community, I realize community is doing good – there are far more developers than we had couple of years back. I also see there are far more passionate developers than before, you can judge that by seeing some regular names in lists/forums.

I am also sure, there would be far more people who are religious about Flash Platform and one can see tears coming out of their eyes while they talk about technology. As it used to happen with me

Expect the unexpected – the formula for peace of mind. Let’s talk, inpsire and act to spread the words about things we believe in and love. I have been working hard to find a smart Flash Developer for my team, yet to find. I want to contribute in my way, I would love to have people in my team contribute to SDK and other opensource projects, now that’s what I can afford to do now

Thanks

-abdul

I expressed above based on my observation and experience, might not have been put properly as I wrote it quickly. But you might get my point there.

It seems BSNL secretly changed the 3G access-point details around couple of weeks back, so my 3g connection stopped working. I looked over internet to figure out the latest configuration details, I couldn’t locate one.

I talked to BSNL 3G technical guys in Kanpur and to my surprise, most of them were also not aware of the change. Thankfully, one of the guys from BSNL Bangalore office, confirmed the latest access-point details, as shown below:

Access point name: gprsnorth.cellone.in bsnlnet

In case you are wondering, what all other changed, that’s it. JFYI! Old access-point name was gprsnorth3g.bsnlmobile.in, which doesn’t work anymore.

So if you have been unable to use BSNL 3G during last couple of weeks, perhaps new access-point name can work for you.

I am not sure, if there are different access-point name for different parts of country (north, south, east, west)?

Running a company in India is not an easy task, not because you don’t know what you are good at. One has to know a lot more to do things – laws, acts and statutory requirements. It’s easy for anyone with just technical background to make mistakes (i.e. unintentionally not being able to follow things) unless one is surrounded by people who are either domain-experts or professionals.

For last one year, I have been spending a lot of time reading about basics of accounting, acts, laws and such things. Thankfully, there are some good resources (listed below) which proved super useful to anyone like me (technical guys with hardly any background in accounting, laws, etc). I am listing some websites (forums) below, which really helped me a lot.

• citehr
• citelegal
• citeops
• caclubindia

Though I missed doing things (programming, development, flash/flex, etc), I love to do, during last one year. But I realize, as an entrepreneur, I would have to learn things sooner or later. I hope, in long term I would feel it was worth spending time (almost an year).

(If you are interested in more resource, keep looking at my delicious bookmarks.)

Anyway, let’s talk about things which are related to the subject of this post.

Towards an attempt to be more organized and productive, we started looking at various software/SaaS options for accounting, HR and Payroll. In a small company like ours, which is located in a city where it’s hard to find many good consultants and professionals in these domains, SaaS might be super useful.

At first, we thought of using and customizing some opensource software like openerp for our requirements. But we know, we don’t have domain experts in these areas (accounting, hr, payroll, etc), hence can not keep changing the software the various compliance and statutory requirements by law/government. On the other hand, the total cost (time, money, etc) of ownership for such things is lot more. We find there is more value to use professional services offered in the form of SaaS . That would allow us to focus on things, we should be i.e. innovating, doing great work, building great team and providing great services to our clients.

We are trying to move to a smart SaaS that helps with our HR and Payroll stuff. I have been playing with following websites that offer SaaS for Indian companies.

• greytip
• evetan

There are other companies but they don’t allow you to quickly signup and check out their services, before you can make a decision.

• i-Admin
• hr2payroll
• humanet
• intelliob (paycare)

I also found one interesting software (windows desktop application), it’s not expensive and actually allows most of things for small companies like ours. The only issue I see, it’s desktop based  and requires windows.

• processweaver

I was expecting Zoho might have payroll solution, it seems they are still working on it (I got a confirmation via email). Zoho seems to have HR (HRM, HRIS) stuff:

• Zoho People

After spending a lot of time during last week checking out and playing with various services/software (some listed above). I realize,  greytip is the most mature, flexible and smart solution but user-interface in greytip can be improved a lot.

On the other hand, evetan (thanks to Swaroop for pointing me to it) seems to have a simple user-interface and workflow. It can be improved a lot too while keeping the simplicity.

Hopefully, I would choose one very soon and start using it for our company. If I get some time, I would love to post a detailed comparison of these SaaS/Software (listed above).

These are some of the sites from my list, I visit quite often:

• webyantra.net
• yourstory.in
• nenonline.org
• startupdunia
• india.smetoolkit.org
• pluggd.in
• businessgyan
• livemint
• knowledge-wharton

I have more sites bookmarked in my delicious, but I want to create a list and put it here just for an exercise. It seems due to productivity tools, I hardly remember website URLs or names. So keep watching this space, you might find more links over the time.

Infibeam is like Amazon for India, I am mostly interested in books and could find most of the books on Infibeam. There are some, which I believe they would import and ship to you.

Infibeam is shipping free anywhere in India, that’s another good thing.

I have been buying books from Infibeam for sometime, so far experience has been good except one particular instance.

I ordered a book, everything went well and I was told within one or two week, book would be shipped. After waiting for a week or so, I get an email from Infibeam that since book is out of stock, they would not be able to ship it. I exchanged couple of emails with their staff, asking the reasons and how it should be – if you confirmed the order, you should deliver the book, otherwise you might loose some customers.

BTW! It has been more than a month, I believe, they are yet to refund the money for the order they could not complete

Having said all (positive and negative experience), I feel, overall, it looks good to me. That one instance is out of 10, so I am going to continue trying them

I need a Adobe Flash CS4 Professional upgrade license because some projects need to be updated. I can not order online from India. I really don’t have time to seek a resellers help on this, I know it would take weeks to get the license.

I requested a friend in USA to buy it for me, he has been trying to do that but it seems Adobe store application, which is done in Flex, throws a lot of errors. A few things, which I have reported in past, like asking for exact address (line by line). In this case, I guess, store application requires the address even when you choose Paypal as payment option?

I don’t have exact details in hand now, but I can see my friend has been having trouble buying Flash CS4 on Adobe store. I know this friend of mine, he is a developer himself and very good at things, so I know,he is doing right, I would rather say, store-application is not done well. He has recently helped me getting a FlexBuilder 3 upgrade license and he had problems even then. It took two days and various attempts, perhaps a phone call also, to get that license.

No wonder, why people blame Flash Platform for lack of usability and accessibility, most of the times it’s the developers who don’t implement things correctly and platform gets a bad name.

I have also started feeling, why can’t stores have multiple options – I might want to choose simple html interface, if I am on mobile or slow connection?

Yet another frustration and my project is delayed by now. I could have bought license earlier, if I knew the requirements earlier.
I hope someday, Adobe and Apple would realize that they can help thousand of people like me, by just enabling online purchase, even if it takes order and makes me send cheque/bank-draft to them, if not credit-card/paypal integration.

I hope someday, these companies would realize that most of people in countries like India don’t have access to real stores/resellers in their cities or states. Yes, I happen to live in a city where it’s hard to get things, I have to travel, at least twelve hours (round-trip) for even simple purchase and with no certainty, I would get the stuff at the stores, whichever is there.

I hope, these companies help to reduce the piracy in India. I hope, these companies realize they can make people do the right by being more accessible to them.

I wonder, what is holding these companies? Is it sales guys who don’t want to have an online store? Is someone getting some favors from resellers?

I don’t get, why to have a middle man in this age, when an online store can enable a lot of users, not only buy but also have faster access to things.

I can not believe it’s tax issue or things like that, it’s lack of will to do. I am sure, there are other stores running well here in India.

Technorati Tags: adobe, store, error, flash, cs4, india

After a long time, I checked out Live Documents’ website and found they have released an Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) application called “Live Presentation”.

I couldn’t resist to check it out and hence started looking at it. I am impressed, it has neat user-interface though there is a room of improvement. Overall, Live Presentations is nicely done.

Technorati tags: live+presentations, air, office+suite, offline

My macbook has started having problems now, after 29 months. It had some problems around an year back but I got it fixed at a local reseller more on personal terms than professional (via Apple Support).

Apple has great products but any great product without good service is of no use. Specially, now I am in a city where I would not find any Apple reseller or service-provider. I don’t want to travel to New Delhi or even Lucknow, there is no certainty that things would be done in time or would be done at all. I am not sure, if local service-providers are trained enough to do quality service?

Apple needs it’s own centers.

Anyway, it seems Apple is yet to grow in India. Perhaps, they would, since their products are quite competitive with other brands in India.
BTW! My macbook might qualify for battery-extension program, but Apple tech support and customer relationship deny that. They say, your macbook is too old (29 months) and battery should be replaced, oh that means I am going to pay at least 4-5 K (INR)?

BTW! I am quite impressed to see HP’s support in Kanpur, if not India. They are amazing, we have got some 4-5 HP notebooks and it’s really impressive to see how HP has been good to us. They don’t even keep our notebooks, if hardware procurement is required and it might take days, they would rather call us as soon as hardware is available and replace things on spot. That’s nice thing, they really understand how important a notebook is to it’s owner.

I was avoiding to write about Apple Service, but I couldn’t resist specially after being denied to the support I am supposed to get, even when I explained them how hard it is to get service done here.

As you know, it’s impossible to buy Adobe’s software from India, I mean using their website. I have raised this issue couples of times in past. Actually, there is no India store and you can’t even change your country to India in Adobe account details.

Anyway, this time, I wanted to buy Adobe Flexbuilder 3 upgrade for one of my team member, I don’t need it because I am very happy with VIM + Flex/AIR SDK.

I requested a friend of mine, who is in USA, to buy Flexbuilder upgrade for me, he tried many times to buy the same using his all cards and what not, no success.

This time problem is with Adobe US store application, which is done in Flex, it throws weird errors as you can see below:

Technorati tags: adobe, store, flexbuilder, upgrade, issue, error

I am available for consultancy, training and development services. Following is the rough list of things, I can provide consultancy, training or development services for:-

• ActionScript 1.0, 2.0, 3.0
• Adobe Flash/Flex
• Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR)
• Training on Adobe RIA technologies
• Architecture for RIA
• Web Application Development

• Design and Architecture
• Development for LAMP
• Integration Services for Flex/AIR with existing Web Apps

• Subversion Version Control
• Bug Tracking System (Trac, Wiki)
• Training on Development Life Cycle
• Backup Strategies
• Development Sandbox Setup for RIA development

JFYI! You can check out my linkedin profile to know more about me. I am based in India and have around ten (10) years of experience, during this period I have worked for Macromedia/Adobe, Yahoo!, Mixercast and TIS and worked as independent-consultant, freelancer, trainer and co-founder. I have been working on various technologies/platforms (some listed above).

I am a programmer who enjoys solving users’ problems whatever it takes (technology is no constrain). Having said that, I am passionate about ActionScript/Flash/Flex/AIR and Web (in general) which happen to be my core competencies.

PS: Do you think, this is a shameless sales pitch

Technorati tags: consultancy, development, services, lamp, actionscript, flash, flex, adobe, AIR, architecture,training, ria

I was at Flex User Group meeting in Bangalore. The room was full of developers, designers and managers interested in Adobe Flash Platform (Flex/Flash/AIR). I was, quietly, noticing things while various thoughts were going on in my mind.

I have been part of Flash (Platform) ecosystem for around nine years now. I remember old days of were-here, flashkit, flashcoders, flashcomm, flashlounge, indiammug, etc. I got to know some of great guys, who have inspired me in many ways.

I have seen Flash Platform evolving and probably know reasons why certain things (Royale – Flex, Central, etc) happened. It’s great to see, how businesses and developers/designers are embracing Flash Platform today. It’s great feeling that I belong to the batch who is among the oldest in my country and probably, this planet.

Those old days were fun, good to be among creative guys with amazing programming skills. We saw some great stuff (3d, chat, games, funky effects, nice apps, forms, etc) with limited capabilities of Flash 4.

It was amazing feeling, when I saw Flash 5 beta in Macromedia seminar in year 2000. I could see the expressions (wow) on everyone’s face and the excitement after seeing something – Flash 5 (amazing tool, ActionScript 1.0, XMLSocket, XML, Objects, etc).

Today is a big day, I am again witnessing something (AIR 1.0 release). I am equally excited, as I was during Flash 5 release. Honestly, I was more excited then because things were not that open, you would get to know about a product’s next version during some event or leaked information from few beta-testers, unlike today where prerelease cycles allows us to play with product/tool even before it’s released. But you get this feeling, you are part of product development, which was not there (for everyone).

I am sure, when I would look back after some years, I would feel more proud and happy for being part of an ecosystem and this community. I believe, success of Flash, Flex and AIR is result of the beliefs of thousands of developers and designers, who were always passionately involved, even in various up-down times. Times when your identity as a developer was questioned, because you were working with Flash, but hey who cares about what someone says, if you are in love with something.

It was hard to get a project or job with this skill-set, at-least in India. Even today, many companies are blind enough not to see how cool Flash Platfom is, but it’s lot easier now to convince them compared to what it used to be then.

Many religious and emotional developers, like me, who would fight or do anything to prove that Flash (meant: SWF, Player, ActionScript or technology in general) is the best. I have grown up now, probably different phase of life, I focus on products, ideas, users more now, but I am still in love with ActionScript and Flash Player.

Thanks to Macromedia/Adobe for listening and interacting us (developers/designers) in all possible ways (blogs, forums, mailing-lists, etc).
An old link (http://macromedia.com/into) still works. People talking about how Flash changed their lives, I am also somewhere in there

It was good to be at initRIA, I met many (known or new) people. The event went fine, we had some good sessions. The following list was the agenda:-

• Data Visualization in Flex – Raghunath Rao, Adobe
• Flash for Flex developers – Bhavin Padhiyar, SAP
• RIAjaxified – Rakshith, Adobe
• Designing RIAs with RC pattern – Yash Mody, TeknoPoint Multimedia
• Building Live Documents – An online Office suite leveraging RIA technologies by Sumanth Raghavendra and Adarsh Kini, InstaColl
• Optimizing Flex and AS3 – Mrinal Wadhwa, SAP
• Developing Flex RIAs with Cairngorm Microarchitecture Debabrata Acharjee, CapGemini
• Birds of a feather

We had couple of more session and some discussions (on Silverlight, AJAX etc) along with the above listed ones. I enjoyed most of the session, there is always something to learn. The most interesting session was by InstaCol guys, who showed us Live-Documents and also shared their experience with Adobe Flex.

I hope, all the slides/presentations (by everyone) would be uploaded to slideshare (preferably) or somewhere.

Around 130+ people were expected to attend (based on registration count) but it seems some fifty people showed up, which is not bad for something that was planned and organized in such a short time-span.

I feel, this is the first event, in India, which is focussed on the Flash Platform at the same time open for talks/discussions on all kind of RIA technologies. I am sure, next time (whenever it happens) we would have enough time to spread the word and developers from different RIA technology background can come up and share their views. As said, it was cool we had discussions on AJAX, Silverlight, AIR, Flex, Flash and RIA in general.

I managed to click some photographs, not really good quality due to my impatient and lazy nature since I have moved to Bangalore .Check out photographs.

Thanks to Mrinal Wadhwa of Bangalore FUG for taking the initiative and organizing the event. Thanks to Honeywell guys for a good venue with all facilities.

Technorati tags: initria

There are more seats available for initRIA event, if you have not yet registered, you can register here. You can read more details on Mrinal’s blog.

Two more days to go and I am already excited to meet everyone. I hope, I would get well by then.

Technorati tags: initria

Bangalore Flex User Group, precisely Mrinal Wadha, is organizing initRIA on Dec 16, 2007. Haven’t heard about it? Please read the details.

I hope to see good crowd and sessions there.

Technorati tags: initria, ria