Category Archives: Technology (General)

Writings on technology that is not laptop or smartphone related.

Why Apple’s Force Touch technology was Monday’s most interesting announcement

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There was a lot of interesting aspects to Apple’s Monday keynote. The Apple Watch is compelling, although I still have not decided if the first generation is for me. The new Macbook is exciting. The only thing we ever plug into our family laptop is the power cord. The idea of lighter, simpler and smaller really appeals to me. And the ResearchKit SDK is fascinating. I hope it really helps us solve some of life’s most troubling diseases. Given all that, though, the minute or two spent on Force Touch technology was the most interesting.

When Apple introduced the iPhone, one of the biggest innovations was Apple’s touch layer. For really the first time we could use a finger to scroll around a screen, zoom in with a tap, gesture with a pinch motion and more.

All of these gestures, though, were two-dimensional across the surface of the device. With Force Touch, Apple now makes touches three-dimensional. The force applied to the touch will also have meaning.

Think of all the ways this could be used by developers:

  • A game could use Force Touch to indicate how hard to throw a weapon
  • Drawing apps can thicken the line based on the force used to touch the screen
  • Note-taking apps with pen input can use force to distinguish between the pen and the wrist resting on the device, significantly improving palm rejection (and opening up true pen input)
  • Buttons can take on additional meaning, revealing power user functionality based on the force of a tap

There are already rumors that Apple will be integrating the technology into iPhones. This is a no-brainer and hopefully Force Touch will be a standard iPad feature as well. Adding a third-dimension to touch interaction could open a world of fascinating possibilities, one that no other device manufacturer has.

The technology behind our Mobile First Cloud First strategy

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Excuse my particularly nerdy topic today. This is an exception for me but felt it important to outline what technologies we are using to make this strategy work.

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The problem with being Mobile First Cloud First as a tiny little indie developer company is that you have to become proficient at a bunch of different technologies. This is hard for a single developer or two-person team to accomplish.

We are currently developing for three platforms using five technologies. The three platforms are the web, iOS and Android. The languages are Javascript, (ansii) C, iOS/Objective-C, Android/Java and Ruby on Rails. The technologies, besides Javascript and C, don’t matter that much specifically, although writing for iOS and Android leave little choice.

Have you ever really looked at a map of Florida? I mean really looked? In the middle of the state is a massive lake, Lake Okeechobee. It’s so big that it is actually the primary source of fresh water for all of south Florida with tens of millions of residents. When I was in high school in Ft. Lauderdale I remember hearing that Lake Okeechobee was so shallow, though, that you could walk across the entire thing without ever having your head below water level. I’m sure that’s not true¹ but I love the metaphor. That’s how I am as a programmer: miles wide and inches deep. I know all four languages pretty well (my partner does all the ansii C development) but in none am I an expert. Allowing myself to just be proficient is important to pulling this strategy off.

The one that I am probably best versed in today is the most important to make this cross-platform strategy work: Javascript. It’s the primary language we have that works across all devices. And lucky for us it has gotten awfully good over the last few years. We use it in specific views, never for view transitions, minimizing the places where it is obviously not native code.

Within those views we do have some animations and a few controls.² We consciously decided, however, not to match the look-and-feel of native controls. Instead we created our own that function well but don’t try to be the same. I suspect most of my customers won’t really notice the difference.

As much as we could develop in cross-platform code we did. That means big chunks of the UI are in Javascript and big chunks of the back-end technology are in C. This allows us to treat the “native” code as glue. On the web that glue is Ruby on Rails, although it could be Python or Go or node or whatever. For the most part it handles JSON callbacks, serves pages and interacts with the database.

On iOS and Android, the framework for the apps is all native and only a single primary view is HTML. This one page, though, is 80% of the UI work to develop and maintain the app. Thousands of lines of code are all cross-platform. Furthermore, we stuffed as much of the processing into C as we could, which will link into Rails and Android and run natively on iOS. The key is being able to make quick updates to all apps.

If you are just starting out, I highly recommend the following resources for iOS, Android and Javscript:

Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (2nd Edition)
iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (4th Edition)
Android Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide
How To Learn Javascript Properly
Agile Web Development with Rails
Railscasts

Becoming proficient at multiple languages is time-consuming but important to our success long-term. We can keep churning on the same ol’ mobile-only apps we have, making a few bucks a month, or take some of that time and start learning technologies that let us be mobile and cloud first. I think the latter is the only way to sustain success.

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¹ Besides, I think the alligators would probably get you before you made it across.
² Check out Greensock, especially in the iOS and Android browsers. Amazing stuff.

Death To Calculators: A Personal Journey Trying To Disrupt Math Education

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Every year when school starts some influential newspaper writes an article about how hardware calculators persist and why they are favorable in the classroom even though they cost as much as a general-purpose smartphone on contract. This year it’s the Washington Post. They never come talk to me, though, which they should. To this day I’ve run a software company who has the only software product accepted for use on a national standardized exam. Here’s my story.

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I remember the call like it was yesterday. I was in my car, driving to a Board members house in Corvallis, Oregon, when the phone number with area code 212 popped up. I pulled off the side of the road and hit the green Accept button and said, “Hello?” as if I didn’t know who it was. Unfortunately I also knew what the answer was going to be.

The year was 2004 and I had just spent the past three years wooing The College Board, jumping through hoops to get a Palm device with our graphing calculator software, powerOne, accepted on the Advanced Placement Calculus exam.

Before I could convince The College Board, though, I had to convince Palm. Palm really started to spin up their education efforts in 2000 or so, hiring an incredible team to go after the market. This Palm team understood that it needed industry-focused software to sell its devices and assembled some of the best mobile developers at the time. Palm helped pay for us to be in front of the market and demonstrate the power of mobile computing in the classroom, put together studies and influential educators, and made a market possible. With our help, we’d close the deal, selling devices and software to 64 million students and educators in the US alone. The opportunity was there for the taking.

Palm, though, wanted little to do with us at first. They had partnered heavily with another company for math software and didn’t realize that their solution wasn’t enough for high school math. It took a while and the help of an advocate on the team, but eventually Palm came around. Shortly after that we lucked into building our own strategic team around the opportunity, including a marketing person with years of experience in education and two influential math educators who advised TI, HP and Casio when they gained acceptance on the AP exam.

Our small team started putting the pieces in place. We made contacts at The College Board, we met with people on the committee that eventually would need to give their thumbs up to any deal, we met with hundreds of teachers, school district administrators, even state officials, who could give their mark of approval. We were building a massive pipeline of hundreds of schools and even two states that were willing to buy powerOne and Palm devices as soon as we gained AP approval.

Why AP, and why AP Calculus? What’s amazing about AP Calculus is it is given to only a few hundred thousand students a year yet it dictates math technology adoption for 64 million. Historically AP Calculus is the linchpin exam for technology in the math classroom. When TI got hardware calculators in, they started with AP Calculus and many of the most influential high school math teachers teach at that level.

So why wouldn’t schools use TI calculators in AP Calculus and software calculators on modern technology for everything else? Because schools can’t discriminate. They can’t decide who is tracked for AP and who isn’t. They aren’t allowed to make these kinds of decisions. And teaching kids to use TI calculators when they are preparing for an exam is futile. Have you used one of these things? Every time I pick one up I need a manual.

Schools choose to use the same technology for all their students, unfortunately making math less accessible to millions in the process. Our research showed the teachers spent as much as half of the class time training kids on which buttons to hit on the calculator to get the results they needed. When I’d show powerOne to educators, mouths would drop. Keystrokes were minimal because of the touch screen and you could do things — like drag the tangent around a curve — that you could never do on a TI. I remember one teacher literally crying and another proclaiming that her kids would finally understand derivatives after years of using hardware calculators.

Before that, though, we needed The College Board.

The rules for AP technology are specifically designed to eliminate touch devices, pen input and anything with a keyboard. The College Board didn’t specifically say these are the devices you can use. Instead, they said these are the technologies your devices cannot have. Pens and keyboards ruled out the Palm. We needed an exception.

Our advisors explained the process to me: first, we need to convince the head of AP programs that this is worth considering. Our goal was to show him data on how hardware calculators were the past, how they were holding back students, and how Palm devices were already gaining acceptance elsewhere in our schools. Put pressure on the Board to modernize.

If we got past that step, then we’d go in front of the committee. The committee was concerned about implementation details, so not only did we have to prove that powerOne could do what the tests needed but also that we could secure the devices, keep kids from cheating, and make it possible for the test proctor (who was likely a football coach or similar who needed a little extra pay each month) from screwing this up.

If the committee gave their approval then we’d likely see a limited roll out to a few hundred districts the first year before mass acceptance after that. From there, we could start negotiating with AP Statistics, SAT and other national and state testing programs. We were certain, however, we wouldn’t make it that far as one of the big boys would gobble us up. We figured we had 18 months of independence from acceptance to buy out.

So we got a meeting with the head of AP and a small group and pled our case. We got no response for months. And then we got lucky again. The previous head left and a new head came in. Once he was settled we connected again, went to New York again, and pled our case again. This head had vision. He was young and wanted to put his mark on the program and after a few months (like hours in education time), signed off. We were headed to the committee, where our lobbying efforts had already begun.

This is where the timing gets fuzzy for me. Somewhere in the period — the spring of 2004 — Palm fired their education team and we went in front of the AP committee. I can’t remember the order so let’s start with Palm. This was post-merger where Palm bought out Handspring and brought back its founding team. That team decided it wasn’t big enough to focus on handheld computers and smartphones at the same time so fired almost everyone involved with handhelds, including the education team. It was a monumentally stupid move. At a time when Apple was about to sell hundreds of millions of iPods, Palm gave up.

The committee, on the other hand, was much more friendly. They heard our story, saw a product demonstration (they all had the software on Palms before that), and saw a prototype of our answer to security (which was actually more secure than hardware calculators). Little birdies told us we did very well and that we’d soon get approval.

So here I am in my Honda Civic driving to a Board members house when my phone rings from the 212 area code. I knew the call was coming from The College Board soon, which was in New York City, but didn’t know when. The head of AP called to tell me that we did gain acceptance from the committee but because of Palm’s decision, the Board was not going to roll out trials.

We did spend some more time with the Board and made some important contacts. We spent the next couple of years working on a new education product, this one web-based. In retrospect it wasn’t very good. We did, however, get a contract to provide a web-based graphing calculator that is still in use on a few national and state-based exams, but the decision by Palm followed by the decision by The College Board pretty much ended my hopes of upsetting math education for the better.

In the end, math education is what it is because The College Board acts as a de facto regulatory body. Without The College Board, nothing will change. And while articles gush about the lasting abilities of TI calculators and list a plethora of reasons why it has and will remain that way, I can tell you that there is one and only one reason anyone still uses those monstrosities: because The College Board says you will.

Barnes and Noble Splits In Two

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In their fourth quarter financial report yesterday Barnes & Noble announced it was spinning off its Nook business into a separate, wholly-owned subsidiary. My first thought was, “about time.” Barnes & Noble should have never had the Nook business as apart of its primary business. The only way to disrupt yourself at that size is to run the new business on its own, completely separate from the politics of the primary business, which in B&N’s case is retail book sales. Being an upstart, it is ripe to be squashed. Keeping it separate would have helped, or at least given it a fighting start.

The question is can the Nook business survive on its own? I don’t know. Many people made a bet on e-book readers already and bet Amazon. I did. Because of that decision, I make a concerted effort to buy books for only that device. On top of that, we have a couple of them around here, all linked to the same accounts. If my wife wants to read a book that I’ve read, she can just by downloading it from the Amazon store.

Then I saw this: “Any separation of NOOK Media and Barnes & Noble Retail into two separate public companies …” (emphasis mine). Oh, that’s not good. The Nook business has been blamed for years on dragging down Barnes & Noble’s earnings. It’s been a money loser. Instead of given it room to grow and then go public on its own, Barnes & Noble is attaching an anchor called quarterly filings to it and setting it to sail. I have a hard time seeing how it survives that.

The last remaining piece, of course, is the Barnes & Noble retail stores. Supposedly this is still a profitable business. I’m not surprised. Almost everyone else is gone except a few hold out independents (like Portland’s very own Powell’s). For many many people holding a book in one’s hands is still magic. We have hundreds of books in our house still, even after going mostly digital, although most of them are kids books. e-books don’t really cut it in many cases.

Is that enough to sustain a business? I’m skeptical but I guess we’ll find out. Apple has figured out how to make a physical business survive and thrive in a digital world. Can B&N figure this out, too?

What If Apple Is Actually Better Without Steve Jobs?

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Last one, I promise, on Apple and its worldwide developer conference. This one, though, from Ben Thompson was too good to pass up:

What is critical to understand about Steve Jobs’ Apple was how much it was rooted in fear. Not fear of Jobs, but rather, the abject terror of the company ever finding itself in a similar situation to the one Jobs stepped into in 1997. A company bankrupt technically, and on the verge of being bankrupt financially, deserted by the partner it had made into a powerhouse (Adobe), and forced to accept a loan from its oldest and most bitter rival Microsoft. Jobs, and all of those closest to him, swore never again.

And so, Apple hoarded cash like a depression-era grandma; every new Apple product was locked down to the fullest extent possible, with limitations removed grudgingly at best. This absolutely extended to developers: not only were apps originally banned from the iPhone, and later on subject to seemingly arbitrary limitations and restrictions, but even today it’s unclear if non-game apps can be the foundation of sustainable businesses because of Apple’s restrictions.

There has been a lot of press discussion the last few years about how Apple will fail without Steve Jobs, its undeniable leader. But what if Apple can be a better company because Steve Jobs is gone?

I believe that there is a time in every company’s history when it is time for founders to step aside. Companies change drastically as they grow large and often times the man or woman who started it from scratch and ran it when all hell was breaking loose, when no one knew whether it could make payroll, when its future was uncertain, often times that man or woman is not the right man or woman to run it once its a 30,000 person behemoth.

Steve Jobs was clearly a brilliant man but the company that is Apple today is no where near the company it was when Jobs returned in 1997.¹ In 1997 Apple had $7 billion in revenue for the entire year. In 2013 Apple’s revenues were $171 billion. In fact, Apple’s fourth quarter profit — PROFIT, not revenues, and only the fourth quarter — was more than Apple made in all of 1997 ($7.5 billion Q4 2013 profit versus $7.1 billion 1997 entire year revenue).

Apple, as Ben points out so well, was near failure in 1997. It had been abandoned by almost every big software company. If it wasn’t for one government anti-trust lawsuit it might have been everyone. Jobs had to figure out how to keep Apple alive, and then had to figure out how to grow it. As someone who just went through a life-and-death situation with his own company, albeit no where near the size and scale of Apple, I can tell you how focusing it can be. It was definitely an all-hand’s-on-deck, batten-down-the-hatches experience. It made me fearful for every penny and mistrustful of every “partner.” It instilled loyalties in me that I never thought I’d have for non-family and made me hateful of people I felt abandoned me or didn’t believe in me. I understand completely that “abject terror” of ever finding myself in that situation again.

For Apple, though, that was 17 years ago now. Since then Apple has given us iPods, iTunes Store, Apple Stores, Macbooks, iMacs, iPhone and iPads. It has gone from an after-thought to a leader in the stock market, a thought leader on design, a king of technology, and the envy of retailers everywhere. Millions stand by waiting for what Apple will do next and hundreds of thousands of developers and artists rely on Apple for their living. In every way imaginable Apple is not even close to the same company it was back then.

And that’s exactly what I mean: maybe it was time for a change? Maybe it was time for the fear and loathing that served the company so well in the late 90s to move on? Maybe the ideals and perspectives of Steve Jobs are no longer the right ideals and perspectives for Apple?

We are seeing that now. The management team has changed substantially in Tim Cook’s few years on the job. People who attended WWDC are saying they saw a different side of the people who work for Apple, more open, more cooperative. The features and capabilities announced certainly are a sea change from the Apple of old.

There’s no denying that Steve Jobs was an incredible leader. He ran a team of five and a team of 50,000. That’s a rare skill duplicated by few. He was an amazing thinker, a fascinating strategist, a top-notch designer and technologist. And that was exactly what Apple needed for many years.

But maybe, whether sick or not, his time to lead Apple was coming to an end. And maybe he knew this. Maybe that’s why he established “Apple U” and hired top-notch professors to run the program. Maybe Steve Jobs knew, one way or another, that his time as CEO was coming to an end and that it was important for him to instill in Apple a legacy and mythology that could be carried forward without him.

 

What if Steve Jobs’ last brilliant move as the founder, recoverer and guardian of Apple was to leave Tim Cook to run it?

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¹ It isn’t even the same company literally. Apple was Apple Computers, Inc. in 1997; now it is Apple, Inc.