Mobile – Page 6 – ɔimoɈɒ

PvZ

What can I say. It’s an amazingly fun game. It sold $1 million in 9 days. Nearly 500 5-star reviews on the UK iTunes store. Nearly 5000 5-star ratings on the US iTunes store. Get it at the App Store. The gameplay is simple. It’s a relatively mundane tower-defence formula. But what I like is … Continue reading “PvZ”

What can I say. It’s an amazingly fun game. It sold $1 million in 9 days.
Nearly 500 5-star reviews on the UK iTunes store. Nearly 5000 5-star ratings on the US iTunes store.

Get it at the App Store.

The gameplay is simple. It’s a relatively mundane tower-defence formula. But what I like is not just the quirky graphics or the fun subject matter. It’s simply the massive variations on plants, zombies or even arenas. You’re on the front yard, or the back yard with the pool, on the roof, there’s daytime, nighttime and fog – the whole idea is to mix it up.

The Multitask Myth

For years and years we’ve been buying new computers with faster and faster processors in an attempt to get to the supposed nirvana of all actions taking place in an instant and never having to wait for anything. Of course that dream died and now we’re frantically adding additional cores to the devices we use … Continue reading “The Multitask Myth”

Multiple cores don’t, however, make it easier for humans to use computers. My father has a lot of difficulty managing his open windows on Mac OS X (due to being partially sighted) and will probably never work out how to switch applications properly.

There must be another way.

While I think that Apple hasn’t done it 100% right, I do think the future of modern computing devices is going to be in providing good task control. We have to remember that there already is a movement towards single-taking. For example: Writeroom – distraction-free writing software (which was extensively copied for other platforms.).

In watching users at work, it seems that actual tasks are the things people manage to fit into a work day in between checking their email and Facebook status. If you can’t run more than one app, is there an argument that productivity might rise?

Some folk may believe this is Apple Apologism at it’s worst – and they’re partially right. But Writeroom shows there is precedent. I’m excited about the potential for elegant apps which would be cramped on an iPhone but which would be able to flourish on the additional screen space on an iPad. All said, I expect a form of multi-tasking to appear with iPhone OS 4.0 – perhaps a combination hosted service with push/pull – but something nonetheless.

Legacy

The width of our modern cars, Hummers notwithstanding, is descended from the width of Roman chariots. Now while this has been debated as coincidence by some, the fact remains that rutted roads would have been very awkward to drive on if your car had a signficant width difference. Some people go so far as to claim this development was by edict – but it’s much easier to understand the mechanics of the situation. These things were more than coincidence – they were common sense. They didn’t happen by edict, they happened because their developers had a challenge and had real world problems to deal with.

In Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not A Gadget”, he treats us to another example. Victorian railroad tunnels were re-used for the modern London Underground system. Sadly the tunnels are sufficiently narrow that while they can accommodate the trains, they can’t accommodate an air-conditioning system without a serious amount of rework. Which means consumers end up with a hot and stuffy travel experience in one of the greatest cities in the world.

I’m told, but can’t find a reference, for the 20 kg (40 lb) weight limit on carry on items being due to stagecoach limits?

I see this in computing. In 1984, everyone thought that the Macintosh was a step too far. Computers had black and white (or green) interfaces. And twenty-six years later, we’re all using more or less the same interface. While it would be easy to blame the market leader for a lack of innovation (and even easier to point at them as a cause of stagnancy in the computing industry as a whole). We’ve not come a long way from 1984. We have files, we have a single mouse pointer. Yes, our computers are bigger, faster and more colourful but we still poke with a single finger at our files and and pictures. Our computers can do a lot more – but these things are tasks – we don’t see much of the operating system when we’re playing a game nor when we operate a word processor. The Operating System becomes simply a way to access these tasks and for the most part we only perform one task at a time. We don’t write a novel while we’re playing a game. We don’t tend to design elegant infographics while we’re also mixing a sequence of music to accompany that infographic. We do one thing at a time.

Where this breaks down is in the simple mechanics of tasks versus ‘apps’. I keep most of my music on my iPhone and play this while tapping out emails and tweets. However if I want to use a service like Spotify, then I have some problems. Spotify is an “app” on the iPhone and only one “app” can run at a time which means I can listen to music from Spotify or I can write email, but not both. For me, that’s not a pain but it is why I suggested ‘backgrounding‘. I’m not too worried about Spotify because I don’t use it – but I can see more of this in the future – where there is a need to hook into a service in the background and there will be a solution in place.

The resistance to task-based interfaces is perplexing though – especially from the crowd who lauded the appearance of Wizards – software designed to make certain tasks easier – not designed to help productivity itself but rather to overcome the increasing complexity of computer operating systems. So let’s envisage a product representing the next stage of computing, the removal of that complexity – not the obfuscation of complexity behind a Wizard, simply the removal of it.

What would that product look like?

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”

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

think + collaborate globally – innovate locally

Alex is right to highlight this. We discussed (on Twitter) the merits of open systems (open data, open health, open innovation) and seemed to agree that openness creates opportunity but it requires individuals to provide innovation. Code4Pizza is a local group I’ve started to get folk working on projects which are ‘open’. By open, I … Continue reading “think + collaborate globally – innovate locally”

Code4Pizza is a local group I’ve started to get folk working on projects which are ‘open’. By open, I mean that anyone can contribute, anyone can benefit and as an additional bonus, the projects will generally have a public service value slant. The current project, OpenTranslink, is the result of several months of work by a group of people to get the timetable and route data (most notably, Mark Bennett from the DFP who is part of the team reponsible for OpenDataNI)

Taking the OpenTranslink project as an example. When you travel to a new country, one of the most impenetrable aspects of their culture is their public transport system. This is difficult enough when the native language is not a barrier, but very difficult when the language is different. Nearly every region is developing a suite of apps to run on iPhones, Android phones and Blackberry phones which carries the bulk of their public transport data. I’d wonder – however – if data from other regions shouldn’t be included in “Transport’-type apps.

You innovate with your technology and your design – but from then you just plug regional data into it. Differentiate based on your innovation but you collaborate across regions to provide a seamless experience for the foreign traveller.

In essence – once the clever chaps doing the OpenTranslink data visualisations, API, application logic and interface design are finished, what’s stopping them doing exactly the same for London buses, bus systems in San Francisco, trams in Lyon?

Skype on iPhone: a complete arse

Can’t use over 3G. This is a complete arse. I get an excellent 3G connection most places I go to, I never use over my minutes and therefore I’m hardly going to abuse it. So, Apple, O2, what the fuck? Lack of Push Notification. It would be lovely if Skype would implement this so that … Continue reading “Skype on iPhone: a complete arse”

Can’t use over 3G. This is a complete arse. I get an excellent 3G connection most places I go to, I never use over my minutes and therefore I’m hardly going to abuse it. So, Apple, O2, what the fuck?
Lack of Push Notification. It would be lovely if Skype would implement this so that when someone contacts me on Skype, it tells me and gives me the option of answering. As an outgoing-only solution, it’s a complete arse.
Lack of multitasking. Why is this a problem? Two words: Incoming call. When someone calls my mobile number, the frontmost application quits. This is okay if it’s music or a game I’m playing but it’s a complete arse when I’m mid-Skype. Also means you can’t do anything else when in a call.

A workaround for some of this?

First of all, get a MiFi (a 3G router). I have one from Three (3) and it means we have WiFi everywhere. Three don’t give a damn about you using Skype over their network.
Consider an iPod touch (or put on Airplane mode and then switch WiFi on). This will remove the annoyance of an incoming call.
Leave Skype running. Constantly. This may mean getting a second iPhone. Or alternatively just use your bloody computer.

So what will this tablet be for?

Well – we hear that some iPhone app developers are already working on a series of apps to be available at launch (the lack of Lists support in Tweetie and the lack of any updates for EchoFon would make me think they’re both working on a larger screen version of their apps). So we’ll have … Continue reading “So what will this tablet be for?”

Well – we hear that some iPhone app developers are already working on a series of apps to be available at launch (the lack of Lists support in Tweetie and the lack of any updates for EchoFon would make me think they’re both working on a larger screen version of their apps). So we’ll have Twitter, we’ll have some games and we’re likely to have a heap of other content as the videos below indicate…

Mag+ by Bonnier R&D:

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Time shows off Sports Illustrated

Condé Nast and WIRED magazine

My use case for the Tablet is something that works in Landscape and Portrait (in exactly the way that my iPhone does and my MacBook doesn’t).

It needs to be able to play HD video (even just YouTube HD), browse the web, have decent WiFi, run a few apps and be capable of a little text entry.
I’m not sure if it needs local storage other than synced copies of iTunes stuff? Maybe this thing will be like an Apple TV with built-in display on steroids rather than an iPhone?

I don’t think it needs 3G or GPS but the latter would be a wasted opportunity if not included.

What do you want a tablet for?

Wake up, Mac, time to die.

From one point of view, Apple, with the Macintosh, won the computing industry. They revolutionised computing in the early 70s with the Apple II and did it again in the 80s with the Macintosh. Nowadays you can’t sell a personal computer that doesn’t, in some way, bear some homage to that tiny, slow, expensive machine. Apple turned cursor computing into pointer computing and for the last 25 years we’ve been interacting with computers the same way – inputting data with a keyboard and using a single finger to poke at the virtual world.

In the late 90s I wrote a website which theorised the future of computing and I included the idea that we could have two pointers. We would have new methods of interaction as we could hold objects with one pointer and ‘tear’ objects with the other. I hadn’t considered touchscreens because my HCI year at the University of Ulster told me that touchscreens had lots of issues – not least that your pointing device gets in the way of your display. Who could have known that the success there would be with smaller screens.

MG Siegler of Techcrunch writes:

And it’s potentially even bigger than that. Last week, I argued that the reason everyone is so excited about this tablet is because there is the very real possibility that it will alter the role of computing in our lives just as the iPhone has. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber took that concept further: “I think The Tablet is nothing short of Apple’s reconception of personal computing,” he wrote.

It’s my feeling that on the 26th anniversary of the Macintosh, Apple intends to bring multi-finger computing to everyone, not just those smart enough to already be using an iPod touch, iPhone or new Unibody Mac. The gestures available on a Mac right now are minimal, the screens on iPod and iPhone are too small to effectively use more than two fingers – so something is coming. I can taste it.

One of the most obvious things about the proposed Tablet is that Tablets are not new. They’ve been around for years in many forms and Apple even had their own foray into it in the 90s with the Newton. Tablets have never been terribly successful however and have been limited to semi-lucrative vertical market deals for education and medical. For this reason, some pundits tell us that we don’t need an Apple tablet and if all things were equal, they’d be right.

When Apple released the iPod, there was a lot of choice in the MP3 player market. But no-one seemed to be getting it right. The DRM controls were a nightmare, the storage capacities were tiny (or alternatively the player was immense), the user interfaces were arcane and battery life was rubbish. Pundits stood up to tell us how wrong it was, how it was doomed to failure (just as they had with the iMac, the iBook) and almost a decade later you’d be crazy (or ignorant) to buy any MP3 player other than an iPod.

It’s a dangerous life for a pundit, being expected to support one competitor over another and being influenced by the advertising dollars which flow through your web site. In many cases, I think they delight in being wrong as folk out there are more likely to link them, more likely to comment and therefore more likely provide statistics (nomatter how meaningless) on readership and market penetration.

Pundits have, so far, been completely wrong on the iPhone (it’s still selling well, still growing, still being improved and still better than pretty much anything else out there). And as it grows, people are buying apps and increasing the investment they have in the platform – this becomes an assurance, part of a war chest that Apple will leverage for future products, be they iPod touch, iPhone or new, unannounced products. This war chest, the Halo effect’, will help ensure that the next product you buy has an Apple logo.

So – yes – we’re being played by one of the Silicon Valley computing companies.

Steve Jobs said:

“If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it’s worth — and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago.”
— Fortune, Feb. 19, 1996

Pretty much a year later, he was running Apple. He killed off the old Mac, introduced his own operating system (skinned to look like a Mac) milked the name for a decade, reduced Apple’s reliance on the Mac (with the iPod), introduced a new killer OS platform (a next great thing, iPhone OSX-based) and is about to introduce another OSX-based platform, another next great thing, which will help to cement the company in the future and further reduce the reliance on the Mac which, in it’s essence, is based on a 25-year old interaction metaphor.

Wake up, Mac, time to die.

Coverage, Coverage, wherefore art thou…

I wish someone could explain how I can get full bars of coverage but no data connection. That just annoys the heck out of me. Related posts: Holidays in England Stepmom HSDPA coverage in NI Meggan Art

I wish someone could explain how I can get full bars of coverage but no data connection. That just annoys the heck out of me.