As of today, Home Zone will no longer be available on our website and support for it will be discontinued. There were two issues with the application, only one of which could have been addressed by me.
First, Home Zone hasn’t seen an update for around nine months now, and Leopard support was still pretty bad. The interface sucked and everything was pretty unpolished (that’s why I called it a beta). There had been plans to improve all of that, and none of that would have been a big problem (except for the time required), but it came different. The reason why Home Zone has been neglected is that there are technical issues with both WiFi and Bluetooth technologies, which prevented my vision of Home Zone come true.
Home Zone’s WiFi ability was that it could detect which WiFi networks were nearby and perform certain actions when networks appeared or disappeared. Your WiFi card doesn’t automatically get notified when a new network appears, though. Detecting WiFi networks involves a scan, which takes about one or two seconds, and which is the reason why available networks don’t appear immediately in your Airport menu item when you open it. Now if you want to notice a new network in time, you have to constantly perform such scans in the background, which is also called polling. Programmers hate polling (I’m simplifying, but it’s true in our case as it is in most cases), because it’s always a trade-off between hogging resources (scanning more often) and noticing a change way too late (scanning less often). If you are not currently connected to a network, scanning hurts nobody. This is why Mac OS X can pop up a list of available networks when you open your notebook somewhere. But if you are connected to a network, performing a scan for WiFi networks blocks all traffic for a second or two, just as long as it takes for the scan to complete. This means a pretty nasty hiccup when browsing a website, for example, or listening to streaming radio. Now when Home Zone does that every 30 seconds in the background (or even more frequently), you will very soon be pretty pissed about it, just as you were with a longer scan interval of like 10 minutes, which would mean that it could take up to 10 minutes for Home Zone to adapt to a change of WiFi networks. Sorry WiFi, you’re out.
We face a similar problem with Bluetooth. The Bluetooth chip in your Mac doesn’t automatically sense when a Bluetooth device comes near. Again, you have to scan, and this time it’s even worse. Frequent scanning simply drains the battery of the mobile devices, because they always have to respond to the inquiry, and Bluetooth is expensive, battery-wise. Yes, I’m here. I’m here. I’m still here. Still here. Everyone would get bored of that in no time, and phones are no exception. This doesn’t only apply to your phone, but also to the phones of your coworkers and generally every Bluetooth device in range. We very much value our phones’ battery life, so what can we do? Increase the scan interval? No. This would mean, again, that it might take 10 minutes after you’ve left your desk with your phone in your pocket for well-earned lunch until the screen finally gets locked by Home Zone. It could’ve easily done that by itself in that time. In addition to that, Home Zone’s scanning might knock off headsets connected to phones which only support older versions of the Bluetooth standard, etc. and you don’t want that either. Bluetooth, join WiFi in the corner of the useless.
To improve scan performance, Home Zone might be able to skip a Bluetooth scan here and there and behave intelligently, but all in all you still end in the same dilemma. I finally decided that it wouldn’t be worth it to use cheaper indicators like plugged in USB devices or reachable IP addresses, as they are all lame in comparison, and you wouldn’t want to write such an application without proper WiFi and Bluetooth support. The aforementioned issues make it impossible to write an application with WiFi and Bluetooth support though, an application that is a true Mac application, that is beautiful and just works, without having a negative impact on anything else. I don’t want to require users to understand the scan interval tradeoff and configure it to their needs or manually enter IP addresses. Who the heck knows what an IP address is?
So, I’m very sad to see Home Zone go, but I’d rather focus my attention on other interesting Mac and iPhone projects like AppFresh or Trip Planner.
