Or, how Volkswagen software feels like a fresh breath of air from the 80s.

I recently bought a used 2016 Passat GTE plug-in hybrid. The car is extremely pleasant to drive and I absolutely love driving using the electric mode. Looks like we get around 45km on electricity, which has actually covered most of our drives so far, making the trips cheap and ecological. On the longer 100km drive to the countryside home, the fuel consumption was 3.2l/100 km, which is a massive improvement over the previous car. I got the car with a half full tank and I haven’t filled it yet, and it looks like I won’t be visiting the gas station any time soon. This part of the experience is making me have little doubts my next car will be a full electric one – I’m just waiting for the family size ones to become a bit more affordable. On to the point of this writeup…

The modern Volkswagens come with a bunch of online services and the on board entertainment system is full of features accessed using a touchscreen, including a navigation system. I wanted to see what these are like and update the software, and that’s when the user experience went downhill.

Looking at the software in the car and how it behaves, it’s very quickly obvious that the GTE is still made in the era of component contract suppliers. What Volkswagen has done is looking at what components and systems are available on the market that can be added to a bullet list of features in the car and then used very fancy superglue to attach these things together, resulting in a whole where the individual components don’t work in concert in a manner that creates a cohesive user experience. What’s probably making this worse is, Volkswagen, as many other car manufacturers, has decided to add incremental monetisation on their cars in form of multiple subscription service layers required to use the features in the car. Or… some features of the car, where systems that’d benefit the most from being controllable by an app, such as the winter heating system, are not supporting remote controls at all. And some services such as getting a hardware health report that tells you whether you should go to a repair shop that absolutely should be free, are behind a subscription.

Car Net and We Connect

The online services of VW are split to two parts: Car Net and We Connect. As a comsumer, I have absolutely no idea why they use the double branding. Apparently Car Net is the low level connection layer underneath used by the consumer facing We Connect system. You need to create an account to the We Connect portal and then activate Car Net on your car to link your account and the car. To actually use the system, you then need to subscribe to additional service packages. I picked the basic package and thought I was done, but for some reason the car did not get online despite me activating the car multiple times and the car telling me the service activation was successful.

Calling the support number, I found the eSim in the car was disabled due to the service contract having lapsed and the car would no work until the sim is reactivated, which would take 2-3 business days. This makes sense, but… absolutely none of the VW services, on the phone, car or the web portal indicate this is the case, even when I was purchasing a time-based subscription to the car. The least I’d expect is the WV portal informing me I need to contact support to reactivate the data connection before subscribing to services that cannot be used without the data connection. And this is not the only thing that’s confusing about this:

• The car seems to sometimes have trouble connecting online, causing the We Connect app and portal to show wrong information. A the same time, the app does not tell when the last update from the car was received, so it’s impossible to tell if information is up to date.
• Conversely, there is no clear indicator on whether the data edited in the app has been synchronised successfully into the car. Or possibly the user interface is again confusing. The app allows me to edit something called Destinations and add places of interest into the app and then indicates the data is being sent to the car. But sure as hell, these destinations do not appear anywhere in the car user interface.
• The car had a bunch of configuration left from the previous owner, including their home address in the POI data and charging locations. Interestingly this data wasn’t editable before the service activation and eSim was working, so people with a used VW might be stuck with previous’ owner’s data visible on their navigation systems with no clear way how to get rid of it.
• The We Connect mobile app lists services that are available to me, but that list does not actually correspond to the services from my subscription.
• The car is randomly telling me Car Net could not be activated and that I need to manage my subscription using the service registration UI in the car. For example, when I connect the car to wifi and try to update the car software using the online update feature, I get told Car Net is not active and a service needs enabling. On accessing the services menu on the car, none of the services indicates it’s related to software updates, in addition to the in-car menu not actually including a feature to activate the listed services – everything is just listed as deactivated.
• The car has a factory-installed Webasto winter heating system, the state of which is not visible or controllable in the App. This is the likely the most interesting single feature for remote controlling the car.
• The charging system has a bunch of controls for locations and timers, but I’ve yet to find any documentation from VW on what the purpose of these is and what’s the best way to manage the car’s battery. Marketing material about these features being present is obviously easily available.
• No directly related to Car Net, but annoying: the in-car software doesn’t allow users to set the virtual keyboard layout and user interface language separately. In order to be able to enter Finnish road names, you have to run the entire interface in Finnish or Swedish. Guess the market for people who moved in from aboard who want to use English (or some other language) in Finland is pretty small.

Navigation updates

The car navigation system came with the original maps from 2016 and it was immediately obvious those needed updating. Googling if this is possible I was pleasantly surprised the GTE seems to include free map updates for life, which is great. What wasn’t so great was needing to know what entertainment system I had in the car. Here’s the user interface for picking the system I have:

Yes. It’s really that small. And yes, those look pretty damn similar. No, there is no guide online how to identify your system. I found the PDF documents for both systems on how to update the maps and the Pro document helpfully pointed out the car’s system menu has information on what maps are installed on the device so you know what map package to search on their site. Here’s that screen:

Guess once if any of those number sequences are on the Volkswagen website or if googling them tells anything useful. I did learn though the device part number refers to the navigation head unit and it’s available as a used part for €3k, but not if this is Media or Pro.

Interlude: that Update software button is maybe possibly for updating the car firmware. I don’t really know, as the in-car UI doesn’t tell me what it’s for and Volkswagen hasn’t made software downloads available for end users. The Online download button is the one mentioned above, which first requires I connect the car to a wifi network, which subsequently tells me either that Car Net activation has failed or that I don’t have a service activated that’s used for online updates, but I still don’t know what data / software this actually updates.

The update process uses an SD card to install the software. The Media version of the navigation says you must use an SD card from Volkswagen, while Pro says any class 10 SD card is fine. More googling ensued to find what people are saying on support forums, but looks like everyone is equally confused about this and I couldn’t find conclusive information on whether Media requires the manufacturer’s card or not. What users were saying though is, the official Volkswagen repair shops will absolutely not update the maps for you.

I decided to try downloading both update packages, with the assumption that the car would tell me if it’s finding the software on the card or not. At this point I had to give up the process for a few days to get back to home with fast Internet, as downloading the 20GB+ packages over 4G was taking too long.

To make things easy for consumers, someone in the Volkswagen team has decided to use the 7zip format for the package compression. Decompressor for this format is not installed by default on any operating system, so it beats me why someone decided this is a good idea. Is someone in the services team a 7zip fan? Did a manager in the services team or Volkswagen get a kickback from a 7zip software maker? Downloading the decompressor is not hard, but why would you want to add this step to the update process?

The update instructions did mention something curious though. Both recommended using an app called Discover Care to copy the map data onto the card and instructed me to go to navigation.com to download it. Navigation.com is a site run by Here Maps, presumably from whom Volkswagen has licensed the maps from. On the site, the flow seems to have an intuitive start where you first pick your car manufacturer:

Oops, no car brands from VAG, the corporation that owns Volkswagen in sight. No other sections on the site that mention DiscoverCare. Site FAQs make no mention of the software or Volkswagen. Did the their licensing deal run out or did they change the deal? Has Here stopped supporting Discover Care? Why is Volkswagen guiding users to the site when the software is clearly not available for download?

I did eventually get hold of Here support and they confirmed the deal to give support to VW customers has run out years ago. Maybe VW could update their documentation accordingly and ping Here to add a FAQ on their site to point users to the right place for updates going forward?

I found the software on an external site, downloaded and run it, but it says an update is available and sends me to a Volkswagen software update site… which doesn’t list DiscoverCare as a downloadable. Looks like I’m stuck trying the update without the software.

The Discover Media PDF wasn’t clear on how long the update takes to read the files. The Pro document warns the update might take up to 4 hours to run. And here’s a kicker – the car must be on during the update (obviously), but this also means the car must be unlocked and plugged onto the charger for up to 4 hours to ensure it won’t run out of battery during the update process. Don’t have a charging port in a locked garage? Good luck! Wanna update during a drive? Doesn’t look like that works too well, as the system locks up while updating.

Thus I can’t really do the update in the city, but do have such facilities in the countryside. Next weekend I decided to try the Media update file set first. This seemed to work, as the entertainment system did indeed tell me it’s loading the update. Guess what? There is no progress bar, just a little spinner telling something is being worked on. After six hours of randomly dropping in to check the progress was still going on I decided to cancel the process and read some more. It didn’t take me too long to figure out I have the Pro navigation and one of it’s features seems to be that if you start the update with the wrong dataset, instead of telling you the data is wrong, it’ll just show you the progress indicator infinitely.

So, I quickly formatted the SD card, put the Pro update on it, and started the update. Around 4 hours of spinner later that still didn’t tell me if the update is actually progressing, the car showed an error message that some data is not available and the update failed. Good news is, I know what the system is now and re-reading the instructions, the update maybe failed due to me having had a single empty folder on the SD card in addition to the actual data. The next step is to try to update again, with a super duper carefully formatted SD card.

I don’t know if anyone from Volkswagen will read this, but I have a couple suggestions.

• Please have someone read through your customer documentation and check if software you’re telling people to download is actually available.
• Change the in-car system menus to tell users that the systems are in that specific car, using the same system names as you’re using toward customers, instead of cryptic part numbers. Having the part numbers in addition to the human readable data is obviously fine!
• For software update processes, 1) Have the operating system check the file suitability first and inform user if the file set is correct without taking hours in copying data first and for God’s sake don’t go into an infinite loop on progress indicators, 2) implement an actual progress indicator with a timer showing the expected duration of the update.
• For online services, tell users if the car is online before you allow subscribing to services that require connectivity and in the in-car menus, clearly list out what each of the updating features actually attempt to update.
• if you want to have people download compressed packages, consider using a compressor that actually comes by default on common operating systems.
• Figure out some way to give support for all of your software and services. Right now it looks like the online services has excellent support, but for example the navigation services don’t have any documented means for support. Local dealers don’t really care about aftermarket support and refer customers to the licensed repair shops, who in turn don’t care support navigation. Did I find a black hole in the support process? I bet I’m not the only one in this pit.
• Please review the service packages you’re offering to your customers and as an experiment, check what they’d look like if you re-structured them for best customer value. As is, the services look like Volkswagen is just trying to extract added value from me with no consideration for customer retention; VW made the money when the car was sold, so why care about what happens after? What you really want to do is what Tesla is doing, which is building retention by giving excellent aftermarket service. Requiring me to pay to 79€ a year to get access to a report on the car hardware health is the polar opposite of Tesla sending an over the air update to their fleet that improves the range and acceleration of their cars and exposes VW as a greedy corporation incapable of user-centered thinking. With the car supporting Android Auto and CarPlay, the biggest thing you’re really teaching me is, it doesn’t really matter what my next car brand is in terms of software, as the software I really want to use is in my pocket and not running in the car’s computer.

Update: I went to double-check the PDFs that from VW that I’ve read. Looks like part of what’s happening is, VW is currently hosting both documents that are up to date regarding DiscoverCar (but have all the other issues discussed above) and the old documents that refer to nonexistent software. The old documents haven’t been excluded from search engines, so if you use Google to find instructions for the software updates, Google points the user to the old documents. And given the PDF lives on the Volkswagen website, it’s impossible for an end-user to tell the document is not up to date. Perhaps VW should consider its operations in the context of the entire Web?

Update 2: I found the issue that blocked the update. 1) The user interface in the VW dashboard is pretty damn badly designed – if you insert an SD card and the expected files are not found on it… the dash will give you the “Searching for updates” spinner message forever. You never ever get a message telling you the updater isn’t finding the files. 2) If you follow the VW instructions exactly, unzipping files to the SD card creates a folder on the SD that’s named according to the ZIP file, instead of unzipping the contents of the files to the disk root. The updater in the car doesn’t look into this subfolder, vs expects files to be in the disk root. After again waiting for the spinner to disappear for around 4 hours, I moved the files from the folder to the disk root, re-ran the updater and 5 minutes later the UI changed and told me it found data on the disk.

Small note to anyone with a Asus P5QL based computer (and possibly other Asus boards as well). If your machine is running unusually slowly during BIOS boot, plug your keyboard and mouse to a different USB port. The wankers at ASUS have mapped part of the USB ports to IRQs that overlap the SATA controller, causing IRQ conflicts, which in turn wrecks your machine. In case of the P5QL Pro board, the two ports you must not use are the ones next to the ethernet port. Freakishly bad engineering, I must say.

Looking at everything I know about the iPad, there’s a piece missing from the puzzle: will iPad require a computer host to work to the full extent? Is it Apple’s vision that a host will be required in the future?

I’m fairly sure Apple is working hard already the break iPad free from the USB syncing. After all, as long a you need a computer in addition to an iPad, it’s just an accessory to a computer, and not a computing device in it’s own right. iPhone is an amazing device, but downright crippled unless you plug the USB onto your computer (of which you can only use one at a time as the lord and master of the phone) pretty often.

About a year ago, I saw a video (from the CEO of Finnish Microsoft, no less) that depicted Microsoft’s vision of where they want to be with data synchronization. The video depicted a building site where a happy construction manager managed the project on a tablet device. The dude then went on to have the tablet accidentally crushed by a bulldozer, but, no worry! He just borrowed another tablet, signed in with his Live account and lo and behold, his desktop appeared as it was, with all data intact.

I think that’s where Apple would like to be with iPad.

No going home to synchronize the device with your computer after purchase.

The way it should work is, you walk into the Apple Store, pick up your iPad, sign in with your Apple ID, and start listening to your music collection. Or editing your iWork documents and checking your email. It’s that simple.

If there’s a reason Apple bought Lala, or invest a billion bucks in a data warehouse in N.C., I think that’s the reason.

And I hope it is, since that’s the only way they can make iPad the mom and pap computer people are touting all over the web. I have a couple relatives I wouldn’t mind switch over to use the iPad, but if they need to maintain a computer in addition to the pad, that’s a lost cause. Cupertino, I hope you agree.

So, iPad.

I’m definitely getting one immediately, and I can see the family ending up with two pretty quick after first device, if it works like I expect. One for me, one for home. Some observations, some of which I can’t remember reading elsewhere. For other analysis on the device, I recommend reading Daring Fireball.

Kids

My daughter (1.5 years old) knows how to use the iPhone, as the pointing metaphor used in touch interfaces is the natural thing for her to do. I know she’ll be able to use iPad immediately, and will absolutely love it.

Having said that, the biggest deterrent for content she likes will be the lack of Flash support on the device. Ideally this will mean there’ll be a gold rush for kid content on the device, but I’m not sure devs will realize this. Time will show.

Flash

Aside from not having access to Poisson Rouge, the only Flash-based products that I can think of right now that I’ll be missing are Habbo, and the video service from the Finnish National Broadcasting company YLE. Youtube now supports HTML5 video and seems to have an awesome native app, so they’re covered.

Vast majority of Flash in the web is just poorly written ads, and I’m more than happy that the device doesn’t run that crap. In fact, I have both an ad blocker as well as Click2Flash installed, and I’ve noticed there’s no more than one or two Flash objects that I bump to daily, which I actively want to see.

So, I personally can’t see lack of Flash as such a huge blocker. Time to be glad I’m not addicted to Farmville, I guess.

Charging

The charger outputs 10 watts. The battery has 10 hour lifespan at 25 watt-hour capacity. The interesting bit here is that charging the battery from empty to 100% will take 2.5 hours, or one quarter of the time you can use the device for in one charge.

This is a very, very long charge time compared to laptops. For the sake of reference, the 15″ MacBook Pro has a 7 houts of life on 73-watt-hour batter, chargeable with a 85 watt charger, for about an hour’s charge time.

What this will end up meaning is that if you’re an active user of iPad and forget to put the device to charge in the evening, you’re screwed the next day if you don’t get an extended charging break.

Oh, and, you can forget about charging the device using the USB port on the computer. AFAIK Apple adheres to the 500 miliwatt spec on USB, meaning the charge time over regular USB would be 50 hours, so that’s not an option.

Interestingly Apple doesn’t disclose the wattage of the iPhone battery.

iPad Camera Connection Kit

Apple didn’t particularly highlight the fact that they’ll be selling an USB adapter and a memory card reader that allows you to download images from your camera to the device. This capability might not sound that huge, but if performance of the adapter is good, this is a killer feature for many people in itself.

Again, for a sake of reference, the Jobo GIGA Vu image tank with 40GB capacity is selling on Amazon for $460. If you get the features of this device by bundling the iPad with an adapter that costs a few bucks, the Jobo guys are screwed.

The one thing I can’t verify is if I can tag photos I’ve downloaded. I’m really, really hoping Apple has given me meta-data editing capabilities in the device or at least enabled development of such apps, as I believe the touchscreen will allow for very efficient data entry. I totally hate the UI for meta-data editing in all photo management interfaces I’ve seen this far, and I have almost 100k images waiting for tagging.

Elgato released an EyeTV application update (3.2) and an iPhone application about a week ago. I’ve been trying it out a bit, so here’s a mini-review.

The promise of the new app is that you can watch live TV (and your recordings) on your iPhone anywhere. This is pretty cool and is definitely something I’d have used, especially when I was abroad, had this been available earlier.

The way the app works is that it connects back to your home Mac and streams the video from the Mac to your iPhone over the Internet. If you watch live TV, your mac transcodes the stream to h.264 on the fly and sends it to the phone. If you have the Elgato Turbo h.264 HD USB stick, the encoding uses the stick, and is supposedly much faster. I have the stick and haven’t tried how slow it’d be without the stick, so I have no idea what the difference really is.

Now, how does it work in practice? Unfortunately, not very well. The problems and gripes I’ve encountered this far are:

• The video quality on the phone is sometimes ok, sometimes just terrible. I can’t see myself ever watching anything that looks as bad as this. Most of the video is just pixelated jumble. I converted a nature documentary over and when viewing the clip, it took me several seconds to recognize the blob square blocks on my screen was a whale. Here’s a screenshot from the app showing a frame where you might be able to recognize something (see all the nice tropical fish? This is pretty far from the original HD production.):

• Occasionally, but often enough to be annoying, the application complains it doesn’t support the video format of the stream from the EyeTV app. Restarting the EyeTV application on the Mac seems to fix this, but this is exactly the workaround that I can’t do when I want to watch something on the phone.
• The problems that haunt dual-tuner EyeTV setups rise to another level with the iPhone app. The issues seem to stem from EyeTV not checking what each tuner is doing when it needs a channel for recording. Typically this means that if you’re watching something on EyeTV, instead of using the idle tuner for recording a show, it chooses to record the show on the tuner you were using to watch TV on. With the iPhone app, if you’re watching something on the TV and a family member wants to watch TV, EyeTV seems to always hijack the tuner that’s being used for watching (and not the idle tuner) and changes the channel to whatever was selected on the iPhone. And I bet scheduling recordings using the iPhone app breaks the dual-tuner scheduling in new interesting ways, as if the existing breakage isn’t bad enough.
• If you want to watch a recording, you have to pre-convert it. No, even if you can watch live TV, you cannot transcode recordings on the fly. The rationale for this that was given on the Elgato forums is that the dev team wanted the recordings to support fast forward (which can apparently only be supported if the video is pre-converted?) but I still don’t see this as a sensible requirement. Converting my whole library of ~800 GB of recordings is not feasible due to the amount of time and storage space required so effectively I can’t watch my recordings. To make things worse, you can’t even request a recording to be converted from the app – you have to do this by clicking a checkbox in the EyeTV app on the Mac.
• No support for video over 3G. Even if the connection is fast enough. I can’t see the sense in this, given I get much better quality video from YouTube over 3G than what the Elgato app gives me over WLAN. Further, my 3G downstream speed is most of the time guaranteed to be faster than my home ADSL’s upstream speed, so this just doesn’t make any sense. 
• The application doesn’t work as a remote. I’d have assumed this is the very first thing they’d implemented, but, sadly, this is not the case. I’d have shelled the 3.99 just for the remote without the blink of an eye, and instead the dev team seems to have seen fit to develop something that’s taken them at least 10x the effort, and doesn’t really work.
• DVB subtitling isn’t supported. This isn’t surprising since the only support EyeTV has for DVB subtitling is that you can watch it when viewing TV. Exporting clips that have subtitles? No go. This means I can’t watch about a thirds of the content I’d be interested in using the app, since those programs are in languages where I need the subtitles.
• None of the views in the app that show you tons of items, such as the list of recordings or the tv guide, have search.

So… My verdict for the 1.0 release is – it just doesn’t work. There’s one thing that does (maybe) work and it’s that you can schedule recordings when you’re not at the Mac. This is very valuable if it does indeed work, but I’m assuming you can’t manage things like recording schedule conflicts or being out of recording space using iPhone, so I’m assuming this will be only 50% usable. I’m sure the first fixed version will be much improved but I’m not holding my breath on some aspects listed above, since those issues have been unaddressed for years.

Edit: added a picture. And, having to add a couple kind words: the app looks very polished and clearly a lot of work has been put into it. Most my problems with the application seem to be in the Elgato core technologies, which need fixing, and not in the iPhone app as such.

At 2.4 million watchers in YouTube, I think someone in Samsung’s marketing knows how to do their job. Maybe it’s just my inner nerd but this made me wish I could afford some SSD’s. :D

The Finnish national broadcasting company YLE recently broadcasted Rip! A remix manifesto. What an excellent, inspirational film! I think everyone on the planet should see this film before it’s too late. In the spirit of the film, the makers have put the entire film online to be viewed and remixed.

Intro embedded here – view it now and check the rest on the websites linked above.

It seems that EU is about to vote on directives that might change some Internet access policies quite fundamentally. Most of the changes sound like things that have already been shot down local legislation level, so the lobbying corporations are now trying to pass the legislation through as directives.

Perhaps the scariest part of the proposal is that it gives ISPs open rights to change Internet connections to whitelist content available to users. Yes, not blacklisting inappropriate content, but whitelist a pre-defined set of services you’re allowed to use. If this goes through and becomes the norm, we can kiss the Internet goodbye, especially given that the text in the directives that tries to guarantee citizens’ right to create and distribute content have apparently been removed.

Some people are calling this trying to change the whole of Internet into operating on the classic TV broadcast model, where ISPs will start to offer you content packages similar to TV channel packages, where you have to pre-order websites you want to access. Sounds pretty scary.

There’s more information available here, and I recommend you write and call your MEP, contact information of whom is available here. I’m ashamed to see the Finnish MEPs are in favor of the legislation, so time to contact them.

Atlassian software has a great deal available for 5 days – you can get a 5 person license to Jira and Confluence for $5!

I have experience of both products and think Jira is a grea issue tracker, and Confluence is a great enterprise wiki product. Both have their weak points (maybe biggest one being the fact the software is so flexible you can really shoot yourself in the foot by taking the customization too far), but I don’t think there’s better products in their class in the market. Even better, Atlassian folks are very pleasant to deal with and they’re one of the most open companies in their communication to the customers, which I respect a great deal.

Best of all, the money made with the offer goes to charity! So, go get your licenses now!

It seems some (most?) people traveling to GDC from abroad haven’t actually heard about ESTA, or Electronic System for Travel Authorization. It’s a new system where people travelling to US need to register on the web as incoming visitors prior to travel. There’s some scaremongering on the site that if you don’t do this 72 hours before flying in, it cannot be guaranteed that you’ll be let onto the plane.

So, if you haven’t already done it, go sign up for ESTA right now. Have your passport handy, you’ll need your passport number and issuance dates.

And even though this effectively duplicates one of the paper forms you’ve filled on the plane in the past, you still need to fill it in, even with this system in place. Getting into US is starting to be an interesting challenge! I wonder what’s the next change. :)