Compromise: pull and background

I have a deep-seated desire for multi-tasking on the iPhone (and now the iPad). I understand their reasons for not including it and I understand the tradeoffs of performance, stability and user experience. I don’t want to be bothered using an app to micromanage device resources – that smacks too much of using Mac OS … Continue reading “Compromise: pull and background”

I have a deep-seated desire for multi-tasking on the iPhone (and now the iPad). I understand their reasons for not including it and I understand the tradeoffs of performance, stability and user experience. I don’t want to be bothered using an app to micromanage device resources – that smacks too much of using Mac OS 9.

Mac OS 9 About This Computer

And that’s the world you live in with Android and Windows Mobile multitasking. The resources on a mobile device are sufficiently limited that you are forced to manage your apps to maintain the best performance. That’s obviously something that Apple wished to avoid.

Windows Mobile task managertaskmanager_menu

In my entirely unscientific survey (which consists of standing about with other geeks and moaning about how we wish there was some multitasking on iPhone), I have come to consider the compromises.

Ahhhh, Push It!
Salt-N-Pepa pre-empted the Apple faithful with the refrain “Push it” when anyone considered multitasking to be necessary. This was meant to be the first compromise – notifications could be pushed from the ‘cloud’ (the new word for ‘server on the internet’) to specific installed apps on the iPhone which gave a semblance of being able to interact with more than one application at a time. You could set notifications based on receiving messages on Twitter, a server being down or anything that can be reported (for example, a GPS with sender sending a Push notification that your car alarm has activated). But – push is one way and limited in scope so rather than just demanding multi-tasking, wouldn’t it be better to consider other compromises?

Push notification

Pull
If we can push to an iPhone, what about the server setting up a pull mechanism? Essentially it’s a push designed to ‘get’ data rather than just ‘set’ data. That would mean you could have a service running in the cloud which pings your phone for a location update or a state change in a document and updates the server copy. You could obviously set the frequency, you set the amount and quality of data to be pulled and Apple can provide a simple interface. Heck – build it into MobileMe or demand a MobileMe subscription for it – I have MobileMe anyway and they use part of this already for the “Find my iPhone” feature. So – why not extend this and open a Pull API for iPhone and iPad?

MobileMe Find My iPhone

Pull puts intelligence in the cloud. It makes you want to run server-based applications which will hold your calendar, pull in your location, intelligently warn you when you’re going to be late. Pull makes a difference by putting apps in the cloud.

Background
The more I think about it, the more I realise that I don’t need true multitasking on a phone or a tablet. iPhone (and by extension iPad) are fast enough that there’s no significant delay in launching apps at all. But I do want some apps to be ‘backgrounded’ when certain events occur rather than quitting. I might want to run Spotify on my iPhone (I currently don’t use it) while browsing the web. At the moment I can’t do this – but if Spotify could be identified as a Backgrounded app so that when I hit the Home button, it goes into the background rather than quitting (a little like the Voice Memos app) and only quits properly when something would directly conflict (like an incoming phone call) or when I tell it to quit by holding down a button sequence (the system in place to quit a running app is hold down the Sleep button and then hold down the Home button). There has to be a simple way to do it and, frankly, it’s a pain that Apple can do it with iPod, Phone calls and Voice Memo and third party developers can’t.

Backgrounded phone call

Even just having one backgrounded app would be great – especially when you’re in the middle of something like a multiplayer game – the ability to send a ‘pause’ to the other player because you’ve got a phone call rather than just kicking you out of the game! Backgrounding apps should be a toggle you enable in Settings. Apps that I would background right now would be relatively few but I would consider:

  • iSSH – for keeping alive the connections I’ve made to servers while I check something on the web (thanks to MartyMc for the inspiration on that.) Losing the SSH connection can be a pain. This will become more important on larger screen devices like iPad.
  • ‘TrafficMob’ – an as-yet unwritten app which just runs in the background on your phone, uses your GPS and records your position every 30 seconds. It then uploads this data to a server which plots the points on a map, crowdsources the lot of them and shows you when and where the traffic snarl ups are.
  • Skype – this is obvious. Skype is powerful for me because I talk to people all around the world. I can’t currently just leave it running on my iPhone because then I can’t do anything else and it’s annoying when a call comes in on cellular while I’m in Skype as it takes precedence. This needs a real backgrounding option.

And if something does come in, some notification or call or anything – give me the choice to continue what I’m doing rather than divert my attention.

NOVA with overlaid Push Notification

I’m sure that the talented software engineers and designers at Apple have gone through dozens of permutations trying to find the right one. I just hope that something like this makes it into iPhone OS 4. They’ve already got the UI down, it’s now the engineering challenge of making it work.

Ten Apps I Want…

Ten Apps that I’d like to see on the iPhone. I’m also suggesting names for these. To be honest, I’d like to pull together a team to build them but that seems to be a lot more difficult than I’d hoped. If anyone wants to call me and work with me to pull together funding, … Continue reading “Ten Apps I Want…”

Ten Apps that I’d like to see on the iPhone. I’m also suggesting names for these. To be honest, I’d like to pull together a team to build them but that seems to be a lot more difficult than I’d hoped. If anyone wants to call me and work with me to pull together funding, then you know where to get me.

  1. MeetFreak/TrendSeek
    Helps people find each other by abusing Twitter trends and trying to suck Location Data in there. This is a lot easier now that Twitter is supporting GeoTags. So, let us see a map of trends? People are talking about #RED, where are they talking about it? Let us see every tweet with the Trend on a map that we can see. Then you’re more likely to be able to congregate with people
  2. Multitool
    Uses the five tabs along the bottom to give you a view of
    1) IMAP account
    2) Web Browser
    3) Twitter
    4) Mapper
    5) Converter/Calculator
    Redirects all http:// and mailto: seen inside the app, to the app and not outside so doesn’t launch Safari or Mail. A lot of this is kinda redundant when we have decent clients for much of this inside Safari. But some offline caching is a big deal for those of us who tend not to be inside the city centres where you can get decent 3G.
  3. Screen shot 2009-12-01 at 11.32.12

  4. Verifriend, Reputato
    This is an online reputation profiler. Yes, it’s going to be a popularity contest but essentially it all depends on trust. Adding your rating to someone is not something to be done lightly. In some ways it needs to be a trust engine – and it can be as simple as giving a trust rating to a new friend based on the trust ratings that others have provided. There needs to be some sort of anonymity (maybe like the reviews process on iTunes you only get a rating when a certain number of reviews have been processed) but unlike FaceBook it should provide that extra level of security.
  5. Screen shot 2009-12-01 at 11.30.26

  6. Director
    Allows me to text directions to someone who asks me on the street. In plain text. Or Bluetooth them. Or even just email them. Or something. Or magic them straight into their brain. Any of these things would be fine. Just so I don’t have to try to explain the directions to someone.
  7. REDACTED
    This one was so good, someone asked me to take it down. 🙂 Suffice to say it was AR related.
  8. Tweet16
    Twitter lists are all very well but they don’t solve th problem I have. I follow about 1000 people but there’s probably less than 150 or so (that magic Dunbar number) whom I regularly interact with. There’s probably only 10% of those whom I really want to pay attention to. I’d like a Twitter client that shows me my timeline, my mentions, my DMs and finally, my Tweet16 – 16 people from whom I see all of their public messages rather than not seeing the ones who are at people I don’t follow.
  9. Plannity
    So, I fill in all of this information into my calendar and that includes times and dates and, most crucially, locations of my meetings. Why hasn’t there been a social app that runs via Exchange/Outlook, on iPhone, iCal and other formats which takes this location information, munges it up with my social network and allows me to see when I can grab lunch with friends or when I’m in the same town as someone I like. I think that Tripit is meant to do this and today I read about Plancast which promises to do something about this. But this is a hot topic, guys. Location is the big thing for 2009/2010.
  10. Echelon (or TwitterBug)
    I mentioned this a week ago – a cool idea for Twitter and other social networks which again uses location. So – get this – all of your messages are geotagged, or if not now, a lot of them will be. So, Echelon ‘listens’ in for anything said in an area rather than things said about trends or by your friends. The default set is seeing tweets which are in your immediate area – the killer part though is being able to drop a ‘bug’ (for bug, read ‘pin’) on a map and be able to sample the Tweets going through that area and the surrounding radius. So, in effect, you’ve dropped a Twitter Bug somewhere and you’re able to listen in. The Freemium version could monitor one location, the PayFor version could monitor several. ( ECHELON is a name used in global media and in popular culture to describe a signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection and analysis network operated on behalf of the five signatory states to the UK-USA Security Agreement (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States)
  11. photo

  12. The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception
    Perfect for the Sandbagger or Spook among us, this is a recently published book derived from an official manual. As most of them are small pictorial sessions, they’re ripe for viewing on the iPhone, turning the iPhone into the ultimate tradecraft manual. You can see clips from the book on Gizmodo. So scan it, make it searchable so you can quickly flick through and find the perfect tradecraft for the perfect moment.
  13. Pollenator
    For public debates, a simple push notification which opens the app and gives you a simple couple of choices accompanied with text, audio or video. Push one, it’s recorded (with time, place, ID, IMEI and whatever other data you have collected and after a certain amount of time, the poll times out. Poll answers should be “Yes”, “No” or “Whatever”. If you choose to ignore or “Whatever” it, then you’re counted as an abstention. I’d love to see this app running and see visualisations of what it could bring in terms of demographics, location and other meta data. I sat with Stuart and Phil (and with PJ on the end of a Skype call) one evening and we mocked up some stuff for this based on Stuarts idea of “Pirates versus Ninjas”. But the actual implementation could have led to entirely other applications.
  14. Polls widget from Google Wave
    Polls widget from Google Wave

I’d love to see all of these on my iPhone. Id love to talk more about these apps to people who are interested. I’d love even more to be involved in the group/company/whatever that was going to make some of these.

Please comment if they inspired you or if you’re working on something similar.

XCake Belfast November

XCake, the local developer group for folk who use XCode had an interesting meeting last night. It was held in the very impressive University of Ulster Belfast campus and was catered for with cake and traybakes by Digital Circle. The first presentation lasted about an hour and detailed the developments in the OneAPI, a GSMA … Continue reading “XCake Belfast November”

XCake, the local developer group for folk who use XCode had an interesting meeting last night. It was held in the very impressive University of Ulster Belfast campus and was catered for with cake and traybakes by Digital Circle.

IMG_0649

The first presentation lasted about an hour and detailed the developments in the OneAPI, a GSMA Reference model for interoperability of network services for telecommunications operators. That’s the long way of saying it’s an easy way for developers to get access to call control, SMS and location services from cell networks. We had three clever folk (Seamus, Richard and Michael) from Aepona who very ably demonstrated the services and answered developer questions. More usefully, however, they were asking the developers about their opinions regarding the use of SOAP and JSON. This is all above me – but it was entertaining to hear the opinions (which were essentially: making XML for SOAP isn’t an issue for most developers but JSON is lighter and simpler).

After that we had a short discussion about our future meeting with Translink, the developments we’ve had with accessing their data and the renewed enthusiasm considering that the Ordnance Survey in Great Britain is opening up it’s 1:10000 map dataset to the public. I hope you’ll join me in encouraging the Ordnance Survey in Northern Ireland to do the same. For what it’s worth, we also have our baleful eye cast in the direction of the Postcodes held by the Royal Mail. At the end of the day if there was government money (our taxes) used to pay for datasets, then I’m determined not to pay for them again.

And we finished with a discussion of future events:

  • An Intro to InterfaceBuilder
  • NimbleKit, PhoneGap and Titanium: do they do what they say or is it all bollocks?
  • Developing for iPhone without InterfaceBuilder
  • Unit Testing for iPhone

We’re kinda unaware of other developer-related events in Belfast but we did mention that Monday night is Demo Night at MobileMondayBelfast.

LocoMail: looks like ass

Recently when travelling, I wanted some way to record my location and found that most of the apps out there were designed for hikers or people on trail bikes. I just wanted something simple. So I figured – an app that grabs your location and with the click of a button, pastes it into an … Continue reading “LocoMail: looks like ass”

Recently when travelling, I wanted some way to record my location and found that most of the apps out there were designed for hikers or people on trail bikes. I just wanted something simple.

So I figured – an app that grabs your location and with the click of a button, pastes it into an email and allows you to send it to anyone. On launch the app will grab your location and populate the locations beside the two labels. It’ll also open a webview in the opper half to your location in Google Maps.

picture-2

Yes, it looks like ass.

It’s evident I need to put away Interface Builder and start using pen and paper. Jamie Neely of FRONT explains a little about why you should dump the computer and use pen and paper at a University of Ulster Masterclass they presented earlier this week – he’s applying it to information architecture but it’s the same with design.

I’m going to evolve this app and ‘show my working’ and code on the blog in the ‘code’ category.

iPhone developers: demand outstrips supply

Raven Zachary on the Inside iPhone O’Reilly Blog writes: I love talking with entrepreneurs and people passionate about their ideas. It’s one of the things I look forward to most in my week. Unfortunately, we are at a phase in the growth of the iPhone ecosystem where there is a significant gap between individuals with … Continue reading “iPhone developers: demand outstrips supply”

Raven Zachary on the Inside iPhone O’Reilly Blog writes:

I love talking with entrepreneurs and people passionate about their ideas. It’s one of the things I look forward to most in my week. Unfortunately, we are at a phase in the growth of the iPhone ecosystem where there is a significant gap between individuals with the ideas and those who are actually capable of turning the ideas into iPhone applications. This gap is almost entirely financial in nature. The demand for iPhone developers exceeds the supply and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

This is a good thing. We have a situation where it is realised that while ideas do have merit, they are worthless without execution and unless you have the ability to execute it, or the money to have that execution funded, then your idea has only merit going for it.

This is why I think xCake, though not fully formed, has some amazing potential as a way to increase the iPhone development skills in the province. The problem being that I don’t know anyone locally who has the expertise and the time to do justice to it. Stuart Gibson and I are meeting weekly and setting homeworks to improve our iPhone/Cocoa development knowledge but it’s not something that’s going to happen overnight.

How long does it take to become a Mac/iPhone developer? I’ve seen a lot of iPhone developers out there who have ten years of developing on the Mac and some with more (based on being developers for Mac OS 9 and/or OpenSTEP). It takes time.

The First Five

Today I installed 5 iPhone apps on top of iPhone OS 2.0 which was made available early through an Apple ‘phobos’ link. There’s a good chance it’s final but it’s refreshing to have something new to play with. Alas, it actually makes me want an iPhone 3G even more. Remote: Use your iPhone as a … Continue reading “The First Five”

Today I installed 5 iPhone apps on top of iPhone OS 2.0 which was made available early through an Apple ‘phobos’ link. There’s a good chance it’s final but it’s refreshing to have something new to play with. Alas, it actually makes me want an iPhone 3G even more.

Remote: Use your iPhone as a remote for your iTunes. You need to be on the same WiFi network as your iTunes-bearing Mac or PC but it allows you to select song or playlist, select multiple speakers (on AirTunes) and play or pause or whatever. It’s free. So why the hell not (and it means that during a party you can leave your precious Mac hidden away so you can control what plays from your phone and prevent guests from futzing with it. Perfick!)

AIM: it’s AOL Instant Messenger. On your iPhone. And I’m uninstalling it. It’s buggy as hell. Please. Someone. Make. A. Good. Instant. Messenger. Application.

Exposure: if you use Flickr, it’s going to be hard to justify not using Flickr Premium, the £5.99 version of this free app. But for me this is going to be uninstalled. I don’t use Flickr. And the ‘photos near me’ thing is, frankly, creeping me out. Brrr. It’s amazing what ConnectedFlow has done and again, Fraser Speirs proves that he’s a master of providing what’s interesting to photographers. He’s now a master of social photography. But this ain’t for me.

Super Monkey Ball: More than anything else, this is the best technology demo I’ve seen for the iPhone. I’m not fussed on Super Monkey Ball as a game in itself but this is a thing of beauty. I think the kids will love it. The thing that surprised me more than the amazing visuals was the speed of it. The graphics scroll really smoothly and when it gets up to speed, it’s simply breathtaking. It’s a steal at £5.99.

Twitterific: It’s beautiful. The scrolling is slow and jerky but other than that, this is even better than the desktop version in my opinion. Craig, if you read this, I love it. Now, fix the scrolling.

So, those were my first five. I was expecting some other apps to be up there and it’s a shame they’re missing. I reckon as the weeks go by we’re probably going to see heaps more.

Ones I’m considering?

South Park ImaginationLand?

EverNote?

Any you think are fabulous?

Why the App Store makes things different

Ewan from SMSTextNews about the problems enterpreneurs face when approaching the mobile market …don’t bother… …your concept is good but the market is shite. … Pick any one person of the street and they’ll tell you they phone people and they text people. If you’re really lucky, you’ll pick someone who’s actually ‘used Google’ on … Continue reading “Why the App Store makes things different”

Ewan from SMSTextNews about the problems enterpreneurs face when approaching the mobile market

…don’t bother… …your concept is good but the market is shite.

Pick any one person of the street and they’ll tell you they phone people and they text people. If you’re really lucky, you’ll pick someone who’s actually ‘used Google’ on their mobile. Or, if you’re exceptionally lucky, you’ll find a teenager who’s used Facebook Mobile.

There are some shining lights. Apple’s iPhone Application Store is leading the way there. Finally there’s an outlet for Graham and his Gardening idea. He can easily develop, deploy and monetise his offerings. What’s more, his audience can, thanks to Apple’s end-to-end deep thought, probably learn to use Graham’s service in a few moments.

But what of the LG users? The Samsung users? The Orange users…

I want to buy this man a drink.

This is why I’m excited about the iPhone and the App Store. It’s not about whether the N95 has better features, the experience is still shite. It’s not about whether you’ve got the latest HTC Touch Diamond, it’s about whether you can do anything other than what is provided. Sure – the feature phones can view Youtube and live TV and get you the weather and WinMo phones can get a huge range of software (and all with individually crap UIs) but how many people buying the HTC Touch Diamond are going to get them. It’s part smartphone and part fashion accessory.

The iPhone did well because it was the first time I’d ever seen a browsing experience which acuurately reflected browsing. My previous phones were rubbish at this because they pushed their mobile-optimised and totally standardised mobile portals at me. I didn’t want to see Sport, News or Flirt online so their portals were pretty much useless to me. And getting off their portal was an absolute pain.

I see a goodly amount of traffic on blogs and twitter from people with N95s asking their friends whether they’re going to ‘upgrade’ to an iPhone and then backslapping each other when they agree not to. Well done, guys, you’ve just placed yourself as the Windows-using Beige Box owners.

It’s fine for the techno-literate to struggle their way through Symbian but it’s just not right for other people who end up thinking that their phone can’t do more. I consider myself to be pretty geeky but only ever downloaded one app to my SonyEricsson K800i and then, once downloaded, I never ran it properly or paid for it because the UI was so awful I just deleted it minutes later. My SO has never downloaded anything to her phone (but if she goes ahead with the Touch Diamond, then she’ll expect it to be as easy as her iPhone).

Consider the experience. Looking for an application? Let’s say two apps. One being a game and the other a personal accounts manager. Where does the novice user go? Let’s look at this as a novice.

On the iPhone, you just click the AppStore button and look.

Nice and easy…

On my SonyEricsson, I have to know to go to somewhere like Handango. I have to know what OS I have. I have to know what device I have, which brings a click-through to see all devices if it’s not recent. And the K800i isn’t listed on Handango. Turns out it’s not Symbian. But it has games and email…gahhhhh

The experience for ‘more modern’ phones is not much different. You have to know too much!

What does a deadline look like…

This, apparently There’s been a lot of chatter on Twitter regarding the 7th July deadline for app submissions to the opening day of the App Store for iPhone. Based on what I could see, I’ve seen twenty or so applications just within my Twitter streams. Looking forward to Friday. Related posts: iPhone vs Android: software … Continue reading “What does a deadline look like…”

This, apparently

There’s been a lot of chatter on Twitter regarding the 7th July deadline for app submissions to the opening day of the App Store for iPhone.

Based on what I could see, I’ve seen twenty or so applications just within my Twitter streams. Looking forward to Friday.

Objectograph Retro iPhone

While I think this app is ool – I’m very unlikely to buy it. Objectograph have ‘skinned’ the iPhone to provide a rotary dial which is probably only something appreciated by people of my age. What this does show is that numbers can be generated by software and handed off to the phone application without … Continue reading “Objectograph Retro iPhone”

While I think this app is ool – I’m very unlikely to buy it.

Objectograph have ‘skinned’ the iPhone to provide a rotary dial which is probably only something appreciated by people of my age. What this does show is that numbers can be generated by software and handed off to the phone application without an implicit verification process. This has implications for untrusted software – it would be a nasty surprise if an application loaded on the phone first detected whether there had been any movement (accelerometers?) in a certain number of minutes and then dialled a premium rate number? And all triggered by a push notification to attempt to activate every hour?

Is your app going to be a money spinner on the AppStore?

From waffle.wootest.net I seriously hope Gruber did not mean what he said, or that I am reading meaning into it where there is none. My app ThisService, which I wrote principally for him by request, has to date made less than $100 through donations. Is John suggesting that it is junk, or that junk that … Continue reading “Is your app going to be a money spinner on the AppStore?”

From waffle.wootest.net

I seriously hope Gruber did not mean what he said, or that I am reading meaning into it where there is none. My app ThisService, which I wrote principally for him by request, has to date made less than $100 through donations. Is John suggesting that it is junk, or that junk that is free should be accepted?

I think the point here is being missed by all and sundry. If you’re seeing your app as a money making venture as opposed to free, then you’re going to need to use the App Store and that means accepting terms and conditions. It’s not just Apple who has a limit on the size of cheque they will send – Google does it too with AdWords.

The point is – if you’re looking to make a couple of hundred dollars out of the App Store then you are approaching it wrong. The App Store will have a few very specialist applications that may sell a couple of hundred copies but that’s because they’re in a very specific niche. And if they price them at a dollar then yeah, it’s going to take that number of sales before a cheque is printed.

Did anyone seriously think that Apple would send you a cheque for $0.70 every month because some user decided to buy it that month?

That’s not Apple being mean or giving indie developers a raw deal – it’s just the combination of ‘rules’ plus stupid pricing. And this storm in a teacup is typical of Mac user hysteria.

And the DRM rant?

Well, some people want to protect their wares from being copied. Go figure. You’ll get fights on both sides of that issue. If you don’t like it, release for the JailBreak community.