Heavy web dev: TechCrunch is a 2MB page.

One of the blogs I read all the time is TechCrunch: it covers the high-tech startup scene.

http://www.techcrunch.com/

You could argue that it's more than a blog since it's a full-fledged business with multiple partner sites and paid writers, but I still think of it as a blog because if its focus on immediacy. Everything is reported fast and off-the-cuff, with even the more ponderous, essay-like posts obviously written in haste.

As I was looking at it today I started wondering how big, in terms of data size and bandwidth, a site like that is. The answer: almost two megabytes for the home page.

Folks, that is a lot. Yahoo's front page, which also takes a long time to load and is also full of Flash adverts, clocks in at 445K today. The chart view on Google Finance, which has light ads but very heavy (and feature-rich) Flash, is 680K.

I'm not trying to pick on TechCrunch here: the fact is that the acceptable size of any web page has grown phenomenally in the last year or so. As an iPhone user and a Web developer I find the trend worrisome.

Of course you want to make the page as rich as possible for the user, and of course you want to maximize your ad revenue. But you have to balance that against a fundamental aspect of usability: if the page takes too long to load, or puts too great a burden on low-power devices, you are leaving a lot of potential users out in the cold.

For my part, I plan to take page size and load time very seriously in my next Web project. I doubt I'll be able to hit my Web 1.0 gold standard of 15K per page, since a decent JavaScript toolkit and a bit of Google Analytics already breaks the 100K barrier, but it's still an important consideration.

(As for TechCrunch specifically, they're very good about publishing a full RSS feed. I read that on my phone most of the time, and read the site a bit during the day since there are often embedded videos and links to other heavyweight sites that aren't as usable on a mobile device.)

Hungarian iPhone data cost

It seems the iPhone is finally available in Hungary.

The bad news is that the local T-Mobile goonery thinks it's a good idea to bleed the heavy users for data charges.

This is so short-sighted it's comical: you have the one and only revolutionary convergence device in your stores, and you're trying to make an extra buck (Forint) on any unsuspecting schmuck who uses it as intended.

Being more than fair, let's look at the option with the most data, which will cost you about $90 plus tax, more or less what you would pay in America.

That gives you 4GB "data traffic" included in the price -- so we should probably assume that includes all data, Web and Mail and app and SMS and GPS and whatever else might touch the network, in both directions. Go over that and it's 0.1 HUF per 10 kilobytes.

Honestly, I think I wouldn't hit the 4GB border in a month, and I probably use my iPhone on the 3G or Edge network a bit more than average for a late-30s professional but probably a lot less than a teenager would (WiFi doesn't count towards the limit).

So how much money is that really? Let's assume you use 6GB per month, which would seem to be 50% more than T-Mobile thinks the average user would (giving them the benefit of the doubt here on ethics, even at the risk of credulity).

Let's assume they think a GB is 1000 x 1000 KB, which is incorrect but almost certainly the calculation they'd use. That means your extra 2GB are an extra 4,000MB or an extra 4,000,000 kilobytes which is 400000 10KB chunks at 0.1 HUF per.

OK, now you owe the Germans 40,000 HUF. That's about $200.00 US, a bit more than tripling your bill. For exceeding the limit by half in one month at today's (favorable) dollar rate.

This is exactly what smells bad about the arrangement. T-Mobile says 4GB is fine -- but that burns fast if you're much into YouTube, and if their prices were honest they'd be spotting you the equivalent of $400.

We know that's not the case. We know, in fact, that this is a regressive price structure directly aimed at teenagers whose parents will bail them out the first time, much to T-Mobile's benefit.

Make no mistake: business users like me won't get caught by this ruse. We're unlikely to get close to the limit, we're likely to pay attention to the contract, and we can write it off and correct the course if we go a little bit over. But the kids are not going to be so attentive, and they're also vastly more likely to spend a lot of time on YouTube and other data-intensive applications; and further, they're most likely to opt for the $50/mo plan which only gives them 2GB before the evil kicks in. That means a user in the above scenario could see a $500 monthly bill when they expected to pay $50.

This cost structure is a direct and aggressive attempt to exploit the naive and young among T-Mobile's new customer base. To take advantage of those who want to bring the future into their pockets, and who want to pay T-Mobile a hundred bucks a month for the privelege.

Shame on you, Hamid Akhavan. You had a chance to take the moral high ground, and you're fucking your customers instead. Specifically, you're fucking your customers with families..

Google Analytics log-in fails in Safari, succeeds in Firefox.

Gentil Hugel - a pleasant white wine from Alsace.

Lately I've been drinking some tasty and inexpensive white wine from Alsace, which you might remember as the place Tomi Ungerer comes from.

This is called Gentil "Hugel" - by itself a fun multilingual mix, like Alsace/Elsaß itself. A link where links do well:

http://www.hugel.com/en/

The web site is actually pretty charming, with things like pictures of the hotel in Macau where they went to (presumably) sell wine.

Anyhow, this wine was imported by Frederick Wildman & Sons - a pretty reliable importer, in my experience. The single bit of marketing copy that really struck me as true (from the hugel.com site) is the description of the wine as grapey.

Yes, it's very grapey. It tastes like Autumn. I recommend it. I paid twelve bucks US.

Bank of America Online is down down down...

I'm sure it's just a minor, temporary glitch, but in these scary times it's unsettling when your online banking is unavailable without any explanation.  At least the ATM worked... um, five hours ago...

Fun surfing: Alltop Design News

I more or less randomly stopped over at http://design.alltop.com/ tonight and found lots of good design links to surf through. All of it very high-bandwidth stuff, but cool. I'm not sure what to make of alltop per se - besides better aesthetics, I don't quite get what they give me that the likes of Google and a couple good blogs don't already - but there you have it, variety is the life of spice.

fail@me.com

I've been a loyal mac.com customer for years.

I recognized the Mobile Me rollout as a travesty from the start, but as a software engineer I knew what the problem was: technically oblivious upper management had forced the release of half-baked software over the authors' objections.

So far I've held on as a loyal customer, and I have no plans to leave. For me, the price is easily worth it -- if the software works. And I genuinely believe Steve Jobs was caught off guard by the rank incompetence of his web-app management, and has cracked the whip unambiguously.

I'm not going anywhere in 2008. But hey, Steve: you promised it would get good this year, and it's already September, and:

• Mail I've handled on my iPhone or on me.com still doesn't "push" to my Mac 12 hours later.
• The "reply" function on me.com routinely throws the web-app into a bad state ("action not allowed").
• Sync from my Mac to me.com to the iPhone is basically nonexistent.

Message from me to me.com: I still love you and I believe in you, even if you made a catastrophically bad call on SproutCore. But if you don't make it work@me.com by January, I'm out. Sure, you might still keep my money, since $100 for non-mail sync and not changing my email address seems like a good deal to an old fogey like me, but still: I'll find my escape hatch and sing its praises to the world, and that would be sad.

You were never exactly the best, but you always cared. Please, me dot mac dot mobile sprout dot oops dot com, pleeease don't fail.