Author: mike

Categories
Health monitoring

Nike Move no substitute for Nike Fuelband

My Nike Fuelband died yet again (which is definitely the subject of a future story), and this time they didn’t have replacements immediately in stock, so I’ve been band-less while Nike was inspecting my returned device and issuing a voucher. The good news is that my replacement is going to be the Fuelband SE model, which has more functionality, and presumably a better switch; I cannot complain about Nike’s Customer Service in the least.

The not-so-good news is that Nike Move, an M7-enabled iOS app, makes for a very poor substitute. For one thing, while it collects NikeFuel, their secret-sauce proprietary substitute for steps, calories, etc., it does not seem to integrate with the Nikeplus.com website. As a result, I can’t sync Fuel points I earned while my device was AWOL. The Nike Move app is integrated with Game Center, rather than Nike’s own gamified site. It’s also not integrated with HealthKit, even though NikeFuel is unique among the measurements captured in Apple’s Health app, the only proprietary measurement there.

Nike has some fabulous real estate in the HealthKit ecosystem, and none of their apps seem to take advantage of it yet. The Fuelband app is still not integrated with Health, though it is superbly integrated with the NikePlus site.

The other thing about Nike Move is that it is very poor at actually using the M7 co-processor. The app seems to need to be running to capture data, and even then it has days where it just forgets to get any. Runkeeper’s Breeze app, Lose It!, and Withings HealthMate app, are all capable of going back as far as the max 7 days of M7 data and calculating the steps. They don’t resolve the M7 events to exactly the same numbers, but they don’t miss any, either.

It seems like Nike is waiting for its next move in the tentative months before the Apple Watch comes out. Perhaps their developers are knee deep in WatchKit, but the shortcomings in Nike Move are a big missed opportunity to keep their mindshare in health monitoring alive.

Categories
iOS development iPhone Mobile News

Mobile Links for week ending April 5, 2014

An analysis of apps in the Apple App store by price, ratings, etc. Some interesting insights, including that 60% of the apps in the app store have no ratings.

WWDC 2014 tickets will be offered via a lottery You have until 10am PDT April 7 to register for a chance to attend, and people will be notified that evening. Given the limited size of the conference, which has maxed out at 5000 attendees to maintain a 5 attendees-per-Apple-engineer ratio, this is my first chance to go in years.

This analysis of Apple’s Arm processor micro architecture suggests that there is a lot of untapped power that iOS apps aren’t using yet.

This new tool provides a quick way to generate code to animate iOS transitions.

With Amazon’s new Fire TV and a rumored new offering from Google soon, this may very well be the year that iOS apps move to the Apple TV. The LA Times compares the current crop of TV boxes here.

Clearly the streaming media race is heating up: Amazon is rumored to be going after Spotify with a new streaming subscription service soon.

Speaking of Spotify, their newest version on iOS is beautifully designed, and very in-line with the iOS 7 aesthetic, with a content-forward look-and-feel. I haven’t had time to completely explore it, but really like what I see so far.

Microsoft has announced Cortana, their answer to Siri and Google Now. While the reference to the character from Halo probably resonates with the Xbox crowd, it seems like an obscure choice to pick for an already underdog mobile platform. I had no idea who Cortana was myself, having never played Halo. The interesting thing about the feature is that it’s powered by Bing — this may be the time for Bing to actually shine, the Bing team has some great technology that has been largely ignored, but maybe mobile is the right venue.
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Categories
Blog Internet Marketing social media user experience UX

Transforming social media into CRM

This new service, Reamaze, provides small businesses with a social-media based CRM solution. Great idea, and another example of leveling the playing field between small businesses and their huge enterprise competitors. Social media can be very time-consuming for smaller businesses, but done right is a very cost-effective channel for customer service.

Categories
Mobile News user experience UX

New BlackBerry OS gesture-based, see new users try it out

People trying BlackBerry 10 for the first time. Sounds like there’s a learning curve for the completely-gesture-based system.  Wonder how easy to use it will be once you’ve learned it.  Swiping from the bezel onto the screen has become a common enough gesture on mobile that people may get it quickly.

Categories
Mobile News

Is a less expensive iPhone in the works? Why Apple might do this.

We’ve heard this rumor before, usually in the WSJ:   Apple is planning to introduce a lower-cost iPhone so they can expand their market share, particularly in the Third World.  This one also has the questionable stamp of approval of Digitimes, who usually get these things wrong.

It hasn’t made much sense in the past.  iPhones have been selling briskly, about as fast as Apple can make them, and the high margin has kept Apple at the top of the heap in profits from mobile.   Why would Apple need to sweeten the deal, so to speak, by shaving hundreds of dollars off of their margin? Apple has traditionally not been concerned with market share over profit margin.  Furthermore, it’s not clear what compromises in the design could lower the cost without compromising user experience, other than the outer shell, a small portion of the manufacturing cost.

There are some recent shifts that may make this a good move now, however:

Apple wants to accelerate uptake of its new Lightning connector. Apple is obviously serious about transitioning its devices to Lightning as quickly as possible; it’s introduction of a 4th-generation Retina iPad with a spec bump and Lightning risked alienating a lot of the folks who had bought the iPad 3, but they did it anyway.  All of their iPod products have also been updated to eliminate the old connector.  This movement to Lightning is being slowed down by the continued offering the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4s as lower-cost models, committing Apple and its OEMs to another 2 years of supporting and offering accessories for the old, tired iPod connector.

T-Mobile is eliminating device subsidies, and planning to offer the iPhone for the first time. A lower-priced iPhone makes sense here, as T-Mobile customers are not likely to be as enthusiastic about paying $649 for the iPhone 5 out of their own pockets.   Furthermore, a new iPhone model with a less expensive $199/$299 price point, different materials, etc.  would serve the need without necessarily cannibalizing sales of the fancier subsidized model at other carriers.    Other US Carriers are waiting to see the results of T-Mobile’s experiment , so whatever move Apple makes here will need to anticipate a future where people are paying out-of-pocket for their own phones.?  IMHO, Apple could get away with a slightly higher price point for the non-subsidized phone, but they are going to have to reduce the premium paid for their product in this market — an iPhone selling at twice the price of an unlocked Galaxy Nexus 4 would be a non-starter for many people.

The iPhone 4 is kind of off the table for T-Mobile, because it doesn’t support LTE,  though T-Mobile does say that they already have 1.9 million iPhones on their network.

Apple could get a lot of mileage out of retrofitting the iPhone 4S with Lightning and using a polycarbonate back, preferably in colors. It would be a hoot to see Bondi Blue and some of the other iMac colors make a return.    At the right price point, this could be a serious switcher device to lure back people burned by the lackluster Android phones on T-Mobile.   However, it’s not clear where Apple can cut the corners on its newer devices to even hit a price point like $199, given estimates for the build cost of the iPhone 5 at around $200.

Some of the other speculation, like larger screens, makes very little sense given the needs of the developer ecosystem.   It’s going to be at least another year or two before developers switch their apps to the new iOS6-only method of automatically managing app screen layout, because the technology does not gracefully extend to iOS 5.  Given that many apps (including my own) have not been updated for the new iPhone 5 screen size even now, this isn’t realistic.

Categories
Blog iOS development

How to turn off iOS autolayout for iOS5 compatibility.

Got caught by one of the gotchas in keeping things compatible between iOS6 and iOS5 devices.

While both iOS5 and iOS6 support UI Storyboarding (you have to forego this feature if you want your app to run on iOS 4.0 as well),  iOS 5 does not support the new auto layout feature in iOS 6.   Autolayout (which I hope to talk more about soon) has some very powerful features for making sure your screen layout works in different orientations, on the taller iPhone 6 screen, etc.

If you try running a program with autolayout enabled, iOS 5 will crash your app, as the OS doesn’t recognize the UIConstraint selectors needed to draw the screen.  This is also a backward compatibility issue on Mac OS X — Lion uses autolayout, but Snow Leopard doesn’t.

Turns out, however, that when you create a new project in Xcode 4.3 and up,  autolayout is enabled by default.  However, there is a setting that lets you turn that off.

This site has a good tutorial of what to do, complete with screenshots.

This is one of the issues iOS (and Android, for that matter) developers constantly have to think about — which new features do I use, and which do I have to forgo in order to support older devices?   In my case, I will be running this program eventually on an iPad, and my 1st gen iPad is stuck at 5.1, so no autolayout on this project.