Category Archives: Mobile/Smartphone

Writings on laptops and smartphones, including devices, software and development.

Testing to Beta Stinks

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I was ready to ship FastFigures Finance Calculator version 2.0 to Apple a week ago. The day before I submitted, Apple announced that all new submissions need to be compatible with their latest developments, but I knew we were not. I had a couple of customers report to me that the calculator and table editor weren’t operational any more.

I knew what the problem was. They were built using standard UI widgets from Apple, but they were standard widgets that were meant to do something else. In other words, I hacked them and just knew eventually Apple would break it. Thought I’d at least get more than three months out of it, though.

I didn’t have enough experience at the time to build my own. I do now. I re-built the text area, blinking blue cursor and was lucky enough to find some loupe (magnifier) code to use for enlarging the area where I’m selecting. It took me two weeks — including an intensive 40 hours over Friday and Saturday and a little of Sunday to get the cursor and loupe integrated and then we all spent countless hours testing.

I’m exhausted.

There are real benefits for writing our own. I can do text substitution now (i.e., insert thousand’s separators) and entry monitoring to make sure the user isn’t entering something incorrectly (neither of which will be in this release). But, to be honest, I’d rather not have done any of it.

I did come to a conclusion, though. If Apple wants us to be compatible with a new developments, they should at least have the courtesy of sending to us a final or near-final version first, either the version they think they are shipping or the one they will. First, my entire endeavor might have been avoided if they fixed the thing that broke my hack.

Second, I found countless bugs (and reported them to Apple) in the beta version — which is by definition full of bugs. How do I know which ones I need to hack around and which ones they will fix? With a final release (or close to it) I will know. I can do a much better job and waste a lot less time if Apple — and any other OS vendor — would help me out. I also have the twin worry of my app being rejected because of bugs in the new development. Do we wait? Do we ship? We opted for ship and pray.

We are all learning together. I hope this goes much smoother in the future.

Smart Thinking Destroyed By iPhone Gold Rush

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There are a couple of trends in mobile software development that I don’t understand: 1) the over-focus on iPhone and 2) the over-emphasis on locally-running (native) applications.

iPhone or Die
On point #1, don’t get me wrong. I use an iPhone, it’s a great product and platform and clearly has mental share in the market. But it’s 10% of the smartphone customers. RIM has twice the market share with BlackBerry; Symbian four times that sell in plus a large installed base.

Maybe Yahoo! isn’t the best example, as it’s a consumer-oriented service, but apparently they have stopped developing a BlackBerry app to focus on their iPhone app. Is that a reasonable decision? Maybe. If I’m deciding, though, I look at who my customers are first. Making an enterprise or government sale? Better focus on BlackBerry first. Apple’s App Store isn’t even set up to handle large corporate purchases. Are your customers mainly in Europe? Better focus on Symbian, which is dominating the EU.

What’s a Website?
The second trend that’s bothering me is the plethora of websites pretending to be applications. The most amazing thing about the iPhone is the web browser. And yet all these sites are making native applications that are nothing more than a web site. The data still has to be downloaded to make them work, so it’s not like “offline” has any meaning to them.

Do I really need a Wikipedia app? A Google app? A Netflix app? All they do is connect me back to the web site anyway. Heck, if Twitter had a half-decent interface then I’d use their website instead. I’d much rather see time spent on making these websites really mobile-enabled. For a great example, check out ESPN’s mobile site. They’ve done an incredible job of making it look-and-feel iPhone while keeping it on the web.

Building an iPhone Business

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Introduction

A week ago I was asked to give a presentation to a local meet-up mobile group called Mobile Portland about my 12 years in mobile and how that relates to the iPhone App Store. I decided to focus this on some conclusions I came to regarding building an iPhone business instead of being specific to Infinity Softworks.

I then gave the same presentation earlier this week at OTBC, a local tech incubator that I’ve been involved with the past few years, for a Lunch-and-Learn. In total over 100 saw my presentation in person or streamed across the web.

I’ve included both the slides and video here for your review. I think I’m taking a very realistic look at the challenges. Most of the popular press and blogs have been so overwhelmingly positive about the App Store and its impact for developers. But the make-up of the App Store is far more complicated than that for the vast majority of us, and the opportunities have morphed substantially over the last nine months.

I hope this helps you with your business decisions, giving you a little more insight into the opportunities and challenges with Apple’s App Store itself. My goal was to analyze this from a business perspective. Obviously my own experiences influence the slides but feel that the presentation is broader than any one company’s experience.

Video

This video was shot with the second presentation at OTBC. The first half, 27 minutes, is my presentation. The second half is Q&A.

You can see it here if you can’t see the embedded video:http://blip.tv/file/2080839/

Slides

If you’d prefer to peruse the slides instead, please keep in mind that the video tells a much fuller story than the slides do:

To Flash or Not To Flash? That’s The Question

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I’ve been following the news out of the Mobile World Congress (MWC). There are probably two items that struck my fancy: the first is the debate raging in the mobile world regarding Adobe Flash on smartphones and the second is the lack of Android/plethora of Windows Mobile announcements. I’ll address the first this week and talk about the second later on.

Ah… Flash. To some it is the holy grail. To others it’s bloated c***-ware that’s run its course. Flash, if you are unaware, is a programming language that runs in the browser. It was invented by Adobe to provide browser functionality that wasn’t native to the web languages of CSS and HTML. Probably its most popular use in the early 2000s was as a way to deliver interactive advertising on sites like Yahoo!, but over the years it has been used to develop web-based applications as well, such as Quicken Online.

Here’s the problem: Flash is an intensive memory hog designed for desktop use and that makes it difficult to use on mobile devices. After all, who wants half the battery time.

The news: at MWC Adobe announced a consortium of mobile platforms — including Nokia and Palm — who will support the development of a full version of Flash that runs on their devices. Why is this creating a stir in the mobile world? Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, announced vehemently that Flash would never run on an iPhone. Now the world is a-twitter with “has Apple missed the boat” conversation.

The reality, however, is that Flash on a mobile device doesn’t really matter. It’s a dying platform on the web anyway, being replaced by a JavaScript protocol called AJAX that’s far less memory intensive, supported by all the browsers, and not controlled by any single entity, a holy grail for the open-standards web.

Who does Flash on mobile help? The market followers. Those crying for Flash on mobile point to Twitter clients and Facebook clients and the like. But those applications are already available at Apple’s AppStore, the market leader for third-party software. It’s everyone else that benefits from it as they get Twitter clients and Facebook clients without having to worry about significant additional development, hypothetically. Significant is the key word, of course, because some changes have to take place to work on the small, smartphone screen.

So what do I think? I think the entire conversation is a distraction. The reality is this: if Palm sells 25 million units in its first two years and sets up an effective software sales and distribution model then developers will flock to the platform, writing applications using its native development tools. And if Palm doesn’t sell millions then it doesn’t matter if Flash runs on the Pre or not as no developer will spend time optimizing their code for a couple thousand users.

Loyalty Part 2

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Last time I wrote about my customers, employees and investors who have stayed loyal, have stuck it out with me, and how much I appreciate that. (If you missed it and you are one of the unnamed many, thanks!)

As I have watched these names move from device to device, it makes me wonder which device makers are really creating brand loyalty. Clearly Apple is the king, as the tongue-wagging fanboys get overly excited about every device they bring out. (Frankly, usually for very good reason as they make some amazing devices.) RIM is another one, although their loyalty is more of the cool, upper management variety than the technology geeks of the world. It’s the “look, I can send emails rapid fire while the rest of you slobs are wasting time waiting for the train” variety.

This is where Palm and Microsoft are struggling. It seems that people can’t wait to get away from Windows Mobile, that it’s a compromise when they can’t get something else. The loyalty doesn’t seem to be there.

Palm is a different case. They once had it. The loyalty of their customers was of the Franklin-Covey, life organizer variety. The “you can pry this device from my cold, dead hands” variety. Somewhere along the line that disappeared. Now all those customer names are appearing on lists waiting for iPhone or BlackBerry Storm versions of our software. Maybe they got tired of waiting; maybe they got tired of the horrible support and square pegs in round hole products.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe these folks have been waiting for a new Palm — that promised device from those vaunted luminaries of mobile tech. And maybe they will be rewarded. When Apple almost died, they had also almost lost their loyalty base. That group has come back en masse over the past decade and, at the same time, Apple has added a whole new generation.

Can Palm pull it off, too? We’ll see.