If you’ve wondered why I go to Burning Man, perhaps this will answer your questions.
Where else do you see technology and industrial equipment bent to the purpose of art in such a harsh environment?
Category: Blog
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Facebook Messenger a disappointment on iPad
The new Facebook Messenger app looks like a nice streamlined UI to Facebook IM, one that uses location and push notifications to provide an alternative to both IM and texting.
However, they dropped the ball when it comes to the iPad. The app is built as an iPhone-only app, which means it appears on the iPad in a little window that you can pixel double up to full-screen size. Yuck.
One wonders why they didn’t at minimum build it as a Universal app, which lets the UI scale up to full screen using the full resolution of the device. This takes literally 5 minutes to implement in Xcode. The ideal solution, however, would be to use the iPad split view, which would show your list of chat buddies on the left, and your conversation thread on the right. This is a bit more work to implement, but still easy to do for an iOS developer with any iPad experience.
Facebook seems to have the opinion that the proper way to use their service is through the iPad web browser, and that certainly works, but having the ability to take advantage of push notifications and all the other native goodies and access your conversations with a couple of pokes would be a better way to exploit the immediacy of the iPad interface.
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Waiting for Steve
Headed to the WWDC keynote line shortly. Even this year, when there appears to be no large hardware announcement lined up, nobody is taking chances. Macrumors reported 30 people in line 11pm last night.
The WWDC hall makes it obvious what the focus is this year: Lion plus iOS plus iCloud. With emphasis on the plus, I suspect. Much speculation abounds about all of these, but from the conference schedule so far, there seems to be a push to unify interfaces between iOS and Lion above and beyond what we’ve been told so far. Things that used to be presented on separate tracks, like UI design, etc. now are joint iOS/Lion sessions.
The Mac App Store already seems to be pulling developers from iPhone into iOS proper now, so it looks like they are dissolving the walls between the platforms. One dead giveaway is that they appear to be changing the UI layout system to something that will be much more resolution-independent.
There are some 32 sessions scheduled that are TBA, which means they are about stuff that will be announced in the keynote. Some of those sessions are scheduled to be given more than once due to room capacity and scheduling conflicts.
Stuff I’m hoping for:
- a killer update to Apple’s HTML5 authoring tools — iAd Composer and Dashcode have a lot already, let’s get them unified into something that will really kill Flash.
- a framework for syncing apps between mobile devices, desktop, etc. using the cloud.
- Apps on Apple TV.
- Better notifications on iOS 5, along with some sort of home-screen capability
Anyway, off to brave the cold.
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Hey, You! Get offa that cloud!
For some reason, when it rains in Los Angeles, AT&T Internet services get wacky. Sometimes an old twisted pair gets saturated in someone’s building, sometimes a substation gets flooded, and sometimes the issue seems to originate well past the Central Office.
It’s almost as if a router or DNS server somewhere in AT&T’s Los Angeles center is sitting in a room with a leaky roof. Or maybe the deluge of rain causes so many people to stay home and cruise the net that the system can’t handle it.
Whatever the cause, any big rainstorm seems to disrupt the network at least temporarily. This weekend, my speed alternated between its normal 6MB and nothing. It wasn’t an issue with my line, I still had VOIP dial tone, which suggests that the connection to the Central Office down the road was good and that my local wiring station was also untouched by rain. It was maddening, not being able to use the Internet on the sort of rainy day best left to staying home.
And it underscored the down side of Google’s Chrome OS. If the Internet’s so-called cloud is taking a back seat to real rain-saturated clouds, where does that leave you? With no software stored locally on your machine, that’s where.
That slick little Chrome laptop that Google is sending out to journalists would be a sleek, minimalist black brick if not for the Verizon wireless service. Verizon’s coverage is very good in many parts of LA, but not everywhere.
As it was, some of the cloud-based services I’ve started to rely on, like Evernote, were not reachable. Fortunately, Evernote will sync when the connection is restored, which is quite a benefit. I couldn’t even go to the local coffee shop and use their wi-fi, it was down there as well. My local Starbucks probably would have had the same issue, being an AT&T hotspot. My only working internet device was my iPhone; AT&T’s 3G service was working well, ironically.
Generally these central office issues get straightened out, though not always automatically. AT&T routes around the failures, but the UVerse modems don’t always get the message. A manual reboot often will set them right, as it did this weekend. If it doesn’t, then you have a maddening wait for phone support, first level, then finally second level, where someone can do a trace and realize that a router still is trying to hit the wet machine (or whatever the problem is), and reset it.
If the problem is more local, things get amusing, and lengthy. A downed line between the local DSLAM and your building could take days to resolve, a ruined line in your house or condo wiring even longer. The folks at AT&T who sell Uverse and the folks at AT&T that repair lines are literally from different companies under the AT&T umbrella, and there can be a lot of finger-pointing on the road to repair.
So, all you companies that keep pressuring me to switch to paperless billing, and all you folks that have your head in the Cloud, keep in mind that when it rains, it pours. At least my mailman has an umbrella.
Blackberry announced their Tablet today:
Of course, it connects seamlessly to all the BlackBerry web services, has a webkit browser, multitasking, etc. Not sure what the connectivity is, rumor had it as something that tethered to a Blackberry handset rather than having its own cell radio. Definitely aimed at Enterprise market. No pricing announced yet,
More info on Engadget.com, including some pics from the RIM conference.
The demo video is fairly interesting, they appear to have cribbed a lot of UI concepts from Palm’s WebOS. All in all, it looks like a good offering; if you look at it as sort of an accessory to one’s Blackberry, it could get a lot of traction amongst Enterprise customers, even if the Blackberry app store doesn’t expand dramatically.
As a comparison, here’s the 7 inch Galaxy Tab:
This Official Samsung Galaxy Tab Video Demo Is A Nine Minute, Must-Watch Snooze Fest
They have borrowed liberally from iOS user inferface concepts, and the device does appear to be very responsive. What they don’t talk about is the price. Of course, there are a lot of questions about app availability as well, most Android Market apps will need rewriting to use the unique screen size, and it’s not clear it will have Android Market.
This video of a prototype HP Windows 7 tablet does not bode well for Microsoft at all:
Based on how sluggish the UI is, how many buttons the device requires to support Windows (a Ctrl-Alt-Del key? Really?), and the obvious lack of touch integration in the OS ( you have to press a button to make the keyboard appear for text input) this device is too little, too late.
Personally, I don’t think the 7 inch devices will prove to be a big hit. You are talking about a device that’s bigger than a phone, but smaller than a paperback book. While it can support the split-view type interfaces we’re seeing on the iPad and in Sencha, they’re still kind of small for displaying a lot of information. The larger screen of the iPad is just a lot more real estate for displaying information, and given the limitations of the touchscreen input resolution, gives you a fairly precise pointing mechanism at a low price point.
I don’t buy the rumors that Apple is going to introduce a 7 inch iPad, their decisions for the size and form factor for the first-gen device were not arbitrary. At its current size, the iPad’s screen is small enough to be a portable device (think replacement for a clipboard), but large enough to display lots of information and allow for very immersive UI interactivity.
Prcing is going to be an issue for all of these. With the current benchmark being $499 for the entry level iPad, there just isn’t a lot of room for price competition, especially since analysts believe that Apple could drop the price by $100 or more and still turn a profit. Right now, the phone-call-enabled European version of the Galaxy Tab is said to be priced at 700 or 800 Euros, or 679 British pounds. With contract, this is going to be lower, but who wants to commit to a multiyear contract for a device that is more of an accessory than a primary device like a laptop?
Hope that HP unveils their WebOS tablet soon, I assume it will hit much closer to the mark than the Slate, which appears to have been cancelled for a very good reason.
Insightful piece about Android’s “openness.” The promise of Android as an alternative to Apple’s approach is severely diluted by the same device manufacturers and carriers that were holding the smartphone market back in the first place.
It’s important to remember that Android was never conceived solely as a consumer phone OS, it’s an OS for mobile device OEMs to use in building their devices. As such, the device manufacturers have ample motivation to bolt custom user interfaces and features onto the core OS, since everyone starts with the same core Android OS. For their part, the carriers are back to their old tricks of disabling the features they’d prefer to monetize, and promoting their own app stores. Only Verizon allows Skype on Android, for example. AT&T only lets you use the Android Market for apps, no side-loading or alternate sources.
Mind you, in the days when the carriers had total control of the app market, fewer than 3 percent of phone users ever bought games, personalization content, or apps for their phones. In contrast, over 30% of iPhone users buy apps for their phones. By detaching app purchases from the phone bill and providing superior merchandising for apps, Apple was able to develop a real marketplace for mobile software. The old ‘carrier deck’ was a terrible place for discoverability, was tightly controlled by people who were very tone deaf to the brands offering apps and games, and the pricing model ensured that anyone purchasing apps would get a nasty surprise when their phone bill arrived.
App restrictions aren’t the only place where the carriers are flexing their newfound muscle in the Android world. You are also at the mercy of the carrier to see whether your Android 1.5 phone will be upgradable to 2.2; if the carrier decides they’d rather upsell you to their newer phones and a new contract (with stingier data allocations), you are out of luck.
The real revolution of the iPhone was to do an end run around the chokehold that carriers had on the functionality of a phone. It was unheard of to have a phone that was completely disconnected from the carrier deck for on-handset purchasing. Apps that used the Internet seemed expressly designed to ding you with additional data charges, and things like VOIP were strictly off limits. It was also nearly unheard-of to be able to easily update the phone firmware and receive new device functionality on an older phone. The latest crop of Android phones is selling ‘openness,’ but the real goal is to put the genie back into the bottle, and more of your money into the carriers’ pockets.