Skyscript Astrology Forum

Paul wrote:I don't want to derail this thread into something overly complicated or technical, but one of the 'problems' with returning to using Gifs is that clients and marketing people would simply never allow it, indeed neither would the end user.

I wasn't suggesting that we return to Gif's. PNG was a superior format both in resolution and bandwidth which was a response to the "burn all gifs" back in the 90's. There are of course other ways to save on bandwidth by deciding what resources to allocate to the server / client sides...

Hi Jo?o,

This is a very good question.

Astraea, Herman - your concerns are actually quite common. In a way, they are reminiscent of those being expressing 15 years ago about online
shopping.

Let me address them in details and please let me know if you have any further questions or suggestions.

First, some AstroApp specific info.

1. Privacy:
1.1. AstroApp allows you to store your charts encrypted. So in the unlikely event of a security breach your clients/charts data will not be exposed (or rather will not be readable to an attacker).
1.2. AstroApp allows you to control what to show on chart images. What this means is that you can allow or prohibit displaying the chart info
on the image itself. So if you at any point decide to share this image on social media, you will be able to restrict that sharing to the image of the chart itself and never reveal the date, time, location and most importantly - the name of the client.

2. Sharing between other users. (I assume that's what you mean by attendant risks of cloud computing?)
AstroApp allows real-time data sharing and online collaboration between multiple astrologers (for instance, between a teacher and his/her students). There is a special setting that allows you to control what can be shared. By default, the sharing is disabled and all the standard rules of multi-tenant environment governance are strictly followed. So other users cannot see anything that you're doing or have been doing in the past.


And general considerations.

There is a common misconception that installable software is somehow more secure than its cloud counterparts. In reality this is true only if your desktop, tablet, smartphone, etc are physically protected at all times and are never connected to the internet.
Attending various security conferences I've seen iPads and iPhones being hacked in less than 20 seconds without any special tools or advanced techniques. Unfortunately, today's security of installable/downloadable applications for mobile devices is virtually nonexistent.
Desktops have been around for 30+ years and so their security is much more advanced. That being said, there are not that many astrology programs that encrypt and password-protect the data anyway. So anyone gaining access to your desktop (physically or via the internet) can steal the data.

A typical astrology application wouldn't even have any security requirements incorporated in its architecture.
My take on this is that clients data must be protected the same way patients data are required to be protected in regulated environments. There are many items in HIPAA, ISO, ECHR, FIPS regulations that are quite applicable to astrology software and astrology data protection (just like they're applicable to healthcare systems).


As to the point that Curtis is raising, I agree that FCC killing the net neutrality is a serious issue. But I don't think it would ever have any impact on the cloud based astrology software. The bandwidth required for astro computing is minuscule compared to video streaming or downloading high resolution pictures, software, ebooks and so on. If anything, the bandwidth required to do a typical client session with AstroApp is similar to reading a short article on sites like Reuters or CNN.

thanks,
gene

gene_v wrote:As to the point that Curtis is raising, I agree that FCC killing the net neutrality is a serious issue. But I don't think it would ever have any impact on the cloud based astrology software.

It depends what you're doing with your software. When doing animation the bandwidth would be significantly greater (something Delphic Oracle does).

I think there's two things to consider here, one is a web based app as per Gene's solution - this would require some bandwidth and streaming of data but again nothing like, say, streaming a youtube clip. I think if bandwidth problems are so great that we cannot collect a JSON file of at most a few hundred kilobytes (I can't imagine they'd be much greater than that) then astrology software will be the least of our worries.

The other thing is having native applications for each platform, which bypasses the problem completely.

Curtis

Do you think, considering increasing competition from the mobile/tablet market that you would ever consider programming Delphic Oracle for multiple platforms? I admit it may mean changing a business model for it to be profitable of course.

But the bigger worry as far as net neutrality is concerned is the gradual increase in costs imposed by web hosting providers and ISP's to pay for the high speed lanes that Comcast, Verizon, etc want. It has the potential to cause trouble for everyone on the web regardless of whether your app is web hosted or not because as these corporations increase fees at the top, each company below will attempt to pass on the costs (in B to B relationships) to businesses lower down on the food chain. Those at the bottom will not be able to pass on this cost. The danger of course is that consumers will drop the service and low level business dries up.

Paul wrote:I think there's two things to consider here, one is a web based app as per Gene's solution - this would require some bandwidth and streaming of data but again nothing like, say, streaming a youtube clip.

Don't forget animation can be similar to video. There are ways to reduce video but the issue that comes up with breaking "net neutrality" is "how much" and these corps have demonstrated that they are willing to game the system for profit.

Paul wrote:Do you think, considering increasing competition from the mobile/tablet market that you would ever consider programming Delphic Oracle for multiple platforms? I admit it may mean changing a business model for it to be profitable of course.

Change it how? When you have 14 employees you can easily ask one of them to do an iPad version of Solar Fire and stick it up on the web for free.

BTW, I don't think that it's as much increased competition as it is diffusion. The difference is that each has it's own area separate from other areas and are not in the same environment competing. Most users have multiple devices now and the habits observed on Google Analytics show that users use mobile and tablet during the day and desktop at night. So each has their own area.

There's no way that Delphic Oracle would work on a small screen so mobile iPads, Android, etc are out. Tablets are a possibility. Mobile apps are designed not as "do everything" applications like DO, but are really "mini apps". This suggests that Delphic Oracle could be broken up into about 50 mini apps each dedicated to a different subject (like the Zodiacal Releasing (Aphesis) app I did in 1997).

Thank you to all of you who responded to my question. I confess I'll be handing this information over to my husband (blush) to apply as I have next to no grip on the technical realm. This does not diminish my appreciation however for those of you who took the time and trouble to help me out.

Much appreciated!
Tara

Hi there,

(it was not my intention, but it seems we have hijacked this thread, any chance for moderators moving this discussion to another topic? Should we create a specific topic for discussing subjects for independent astrology software development?)

Astraea and Hervaro, thanks for your input! I would like very much to know if you could somehow specify which data do you have concerns for privacy. Is it your own data? Is it data for your clients (if you do professional consultations)?


Curtis, Paul and Gene: You have raised other things which are of a more technical nature.

About desktop cross-platform, there are many tools which can assist you. For instance, my skyplux beta was implemented in Qt, which is a C++ cross-platform UI toolkit. There are small differences between platforms, but you can reuse lots of code. However, it comes with a large dependency on the Qt libs which are enormous.

For Android/iOS, the things are not so stable, but a lot can be done in cross-platform ways, like writing most of your business logic in C/C++ and use JNI to send data to a Java UI in Android, or ObjectiveC for iOS. I've written a tutorial in my technical blog on how to do that with a Python interpreter which is quite cross-platform (http://techventura.wordpress.com/2014/0 ... id-series/)

The thing is not technically hard, but you would need a team of at least 3/4 good developers and up-front guarantees that it people would pay for the applications. However, it seems that the market for astrology applications is saturated (lots of programs for sale in the net, and you both having this discussion here ), and I don't know how much benefits a true cross-platform solution would bring to existing astrologers (translation: would people be willing to pay for such a solution).

Finally, about the bandwidth issue, in my skyplux web application (http://skyplux.webfactional.com/skyPlux/) the communication with the server is entirely Json-based which means very low bandwidth consumption. The chart is a base64 png image which is sent compressed. Furthermore, a new version that I would like to see deployed sends a JSON table with planet positions and uses javascript to draw an svg chart in the client's browser. Technically, it is a very efficient solution.

However, I agree with Curtis that animations would be troublesome. A brute-force technical solution could be to send the data for a chart in intervals of X minutes, and do interpolations of houses/objects in the client's browser using javascript for the "missing" positions..

But despite the current solutions, my feeling is that people still prefer desktop solutions, even more when current desktop solutions are more than enough for their current needs.

Finally, a question for Curtis and Gene, if you would not feel offended to answer: the number of costumers you have today are enough to make a living out of the software? I sincerely ask this because I'm in this limbo whether I should try to enter the mainstream commercial astrological software as an independent developer, or should I follow a different route..


Thanks,
Jo?o Ventura

jventura wrote:Astraea and Hervaro, thanks for your input! I would like very much to know if you could somehow specify which data do you have concerns for privacy. Is it your own data? Is it data for your clients (if you do professional consultations)?

For me, the issue is mainly vulnerability of my own account information in the cloud - I wouldn't get past that, to worry about client data!

I am not well-versed in computer programming, but the techs at my Mac dealership have warned me about the vulnerability to hacking and malware in the cloud environment. Maybe I have been ill-informed, either partially or in full, as Gene seems to say. I know that computing is going in the direction of the cloud and it will be inescapable at some point, but for the moment I resist it.

Astraea wrote:

jventura wrote:Astraea and Hervaro, thanks for your input! I would like very much to know if you could somehow specify which data do you have concerns for privacy. Is it your own data? Is it data for your clients (if you do professional consultations)?

For me, the issue is mainly vulnerability of my own account information in the cloud - I wouldn't get past that, to worry about client data!

Well, in case of AstroApp, no payment or any other sensitive information is ever being passed through or stored on the astroapp.com server. Such info is being handled by Paypal and credit cards companies and so there is no additional risk there. And you can decide what info to provide about yourself such as your name and email. Nothing else is required really.

As for malware concerns, I think they're referring to malicious sites that are specifically designed to trick users into downloading infected files. This has nothing to do with the cloud computing per se, rather it reiterates the point that any downloadable software may cause harm to your computer and to your mobile devices if it is infected.

thanks,
gene

Thank you, Gene - that clarifies things considerably!