It's 2011, seemingly "the year of Social". We have Facetime, Google+ Hangouts/Huddles, Facebook video chat, Twitter and iMessage built into iOS, Messenger built into WP7. It sounds like we're making great progress in improving the way we can communicate with our friends. Super!

I really like Google+. I use it a lot. However I think they really screwed up a few things with their launch:

• Restricted invite-only launch (you can't be social without your friends)
• No apps for iOS/WP7 at launch
• No tablet apps at launch
• When iOS app finally launched, won't even install on iPad/iPod Touch (for seemingly no reason)
• No access to huddles in web app/desktop/iPad
• Google Talk and Huddles are not the same...?

Anyway, getting back on track... Not having access to Huddles on my iPad, my iPod Touch, my Windows Phone or my desktop got me thinking about the state of instant messaging... I wondered whether any of the networks actually work on all popular mobile platforms... There are third party client for most networks on most platforms, however they almost always require you hand over the login details to an account that controls far more than just chat. This is completely unacceptable in 2011, the year Sony got ripped to shreds by hackers.

I posted earlier on Google+ that I found it quite incredible that in 2011 nobody had bothered to make their platforms support all instant messaging networks, or that no instant messaging networks had bothered to make sure their network was available on all platforms. Is it so difficult to comprehend that I might want to organise a night out with a group of friends via instant messaging? Google+ Huddles seem to have been designed specifically for this sort of thing, yet you'll see in the table below that it fails, badly.

I created a table to compare the various instant messaging options across platforms. There are a few basic requirements that must be met for a network/platform combination to be considered fulfilled.

• Access must not require handing over a password that controls more than just chat to anyone other than the owner of the network, or the device/OS.
• Access must be "native" to the platform (eg. no iPhone apps on iPad).
• Must be true "instant messaging" that gives useful alerts/push notification (eg. Email notification does not count).

Here are my findings so far. If you spot a mistake, please let me know and I'll update accordingly.

Edit: Added Skype, GTalk on Android Tablet, G+ stuff on iPod Touch.

Network	Win	Mac OS	Web	iPad	iPhone	iPod	Android Tablet	Android Phone	Windows Phone	Blackberry	Num Platforms
Messenger											7
Skype											7
Facebook*											6*
GTalk	*										4*
iMessage											3
G+ Huddle											3
G+ Hangout											1
AIM											3
BBM											1

Items marked * do not support group chat :o(

To me, this is a pretty poor show. Out of 10 popular platforms, not one service is available across them all with built-in/first-party apps (third party apps excluded on security grounds). Messenger and Skype seem to come closest with support on 7 platforms, though Messenger has no support for tablets - you know, those things that are massive this year :-( It's particularly annoying for me to have Messenger on my Windows Phone and have to respond to messages on a tiny on-screen keyboard with my iPad sat next to me doing nothing!

I think the most shocking stat here is that Google have launched Google+ as a social network and have not only introduced two new chat/messaging protocols, but the support for them across platforms is pretty poor. (Please don't give me shit about it being "preview". If my mum can join, it's public. Putting a preview/beta on something is not an excuse for poor support. If it's not ready, don't start shouting about it and letting us all pile in).

When I set my Mac Mini for iPhone development, I was told to backup a key file (.p12) because if I lost it and needed to reinstall, I wouldn't be able to deploy to my iPhone (yikes!). I backed it up as suggested, and made sure I had copies of it all over my Mac, PC and the interwebs.

With a clean install of Snow Leopard, it was time to import this keyfile and make sure everything still worked. As instructed in the docs, I double-clicked on the .p12 file and was asked for the password. I entered it and got the following message:

An error has occurred. Unable to import an item. The contents of an item cannot be retrieved.

Oh, shit.

I tried multiple times to import, and even imported other keys I'd exported before it. I'm 100% sure I was putting the password in correctly. No joy, just lots of errors. Although the key appeared in the list (after apparently failing), Xcode refused to recognise it and I'm unable to deploy to my iPhone. This was looking pretty bad...

Google to the rescue!

After a bit of searching, I came across a post from someone having the same issue, and a workaround. Importing via the terminal apparently works. I gave this a shot, and all is good. I can now deploy to my iPhone again. Thanks Dave K!

Just in case you're reading this with the same problem and the link above is now broken, here's a copy of the solution:

Work-around provided by Dave K.

You can use the 'security' command line tool:
security import priv_key.p12 -k ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain
security import pub_key.pem -k ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain

I'm shaking my head with shame. I never thought this day would come. I'm writing a blog post... from a Mac!

Those that know me will probably know I'm a massive Microsoft fanboy. I love .NET, XNA, WPF, Visual Studio, Vista and all the other things that come from Redmond. I don't like Apple.

Last year I bought an iPhone. I just couldn't help myself. I've had many Windows Mobile devices from iPaqs to XDAs and they suck. Big time. The iPhone came along and it just wiped the floor with anything out there, so I had to get one. I love it!

Months on, and I've released an Xbox game called Jungle Blocks using XNA. The whole process was pretty awesome. I got to write it in Visual Studio using C# and for very little money my game was out there being played by other people. They were paying money to play my game. That was a cool feeling!

Then my mind started to wonder... Maybe I should dabble in iPhone development? I could release iJungle Blocks! (Ok, maybe I won't call it that). In a lot of ways the App Store seems to work very similar to XNA and the Indie Games and since I'd already filled in all the forms and got an ITIN I figured I didn't have much to lose trying.

Well, except my pride. It turns out that Mr Jobs doesn't want you making money from his iPhone if you don't have his computer. You can only develop for the iPhone on a Mac (legally). This was a bummer. Macs stink. They won't do .NET and they certainly don't do Visual Studio. It was time to do some research!

I started browsing the web and speaking to a few people to find out what coding on a Mac would be. This is what I found out:

• The cheapest new Intel Mac is £500
• Xcode (the Mac IDE) is crap. It does not have all the features of Visual Studio 2008 :(
• Objective-C is verbose and long-winded. There is no Garbage Collection!
• All my friends will laugh and point if I buy a Mac

Things were looking grim, but I decided to go nuts. This week, I bought a Mac Mini. After a few hours I discovered a few more things:

• Mac keyboards suck. Thankfully my Microsoft Keyboard/mouse works :)
• I can't type " @ or #. They're just mapped wrong.
• The Mouse on a Mac starts slow and then accelerates veryquickly. It's a pain in the ass.
• Alt+Tab is Windows+Tab. Ctrl+C is Windows+C. etc. This is madness!
• The Home and End keys don't work as expected. Neither do Ctrl+Left or Ctrl+Right.

I got Xcode installed and started playing around to see how bad this thing was. After a few nights of wrestling with Xcode, Objective-C, Cocoa-Touch and Mac OSX here's what I've found out:

• Xcode is not crap. There's still time, but Xcode is not frustrating the hell out of me like I thought it would. It's not all that bad. Nowhere near as bad as some of the crap I've had to use (I'm looking at you, FlexBuilder). I might just get on with it!
• Microsoft have Mac drivers for my Microsoft Keyboard and mouse. They not only fix the crazy mouse acceleration, it includes a proper mapping to fix " @ and #!
• Even on the highest setting, the mouse still moves too slow on a Mac. The max setting on a Mac doesn't come close to the Max setting on a PC.
• Cocoa-Touch is actually really nice :)
• There is no nice fix for Alt+Tab. I can swap Windows/Alt keys, but then Copy/Paste becomes Alt+C/Alt+V instead of Windows+C/Windows+V.
• These is seemingly no fix for Home/End/Ctrl+Left/Ctrl+Right

So far, things are not as bad as I imagined. And the Mac does have some nice stuff. But will it tempt me away from the lovely world of Visual Studio and C#? Unlikely. It's not as bad as I expected it to be, but it's just not the same experience as developing on a PC.