Elegant Technologies

Power-house

My 2.0G 15″ Macbook Pro is getting a little long in the tooth. I went to the Apple store yesterday to replace an unexpected failure in the external Mag-Safe power supply. I’m now on my fourth power supply – yikes. It wasn’t covered by AppleCare – the guy behind the counter pitifully reminded me that my laptop was now over four years old. That’s at least 28 years old in computer-hardware years, and in dog-years. So it is probably time to upgrade. But I don’t think I’ll replace this laptop with another – I’ll get a desktop instead. Unlike times past, the arrival of the iPad releases me from the laptop upgrade cycle.

Happily, unlike in my old Windows days, my computer isn’t slowing-down, per se, but I’m asking a lot more of it than I used to ask. I’m doing a lot of cross device smartphone development lately, which involves running multiple simulators – tough work for any computer, let alone a laptop. The recent upgrade to Snow Leopard breathed new life into my old beast. Also, my recent upgrade to a SSD hard-drive helped, too. But my hard limit of 2Gig of RAM is killing me.

I’ve written about how my iPad is proving to be a fairly useful portable computer. I find myself writing blog posts, catching up on reading long articles using Instapaper, and writing presentations and business plans using Keynote. I can even do some emergency SSH’ing to manage basic server maintenance. I plan to eventually do app requirements development and wireframe moch-ups, too, once I get around to building those apps.

So the thing is, even good laptops don’t perform as well as good desktops. I’m realizing that my next computer might last a long time, longer than I’m used to in the Windows world. My single biggest desire, other than more horsepower, is a large screen with letters big enough to let me avoid reading glasses. I also know, from experience, that a very high quality monitor can last many, many years. So my need for an upgraded laptop just isn’t too pressing. My old laptop will probably serve my increasing occasional heavy-usage mobile needs. My iPad will probably serve my lite-usage mobile needs. My new desktop will likely serve my big screen and big cpu needs. My spectrum of needs (I’m needy), will get met.

I’ve been relying upon laptops since I got a Dell Latitude in 1998. I just need to last the two years of business school. That is about how long it lasted, too. The thought of moving away from laptop-land is weird. Scary. Exciting. Visions of three 30″, side-by-side, monitors are dancing through my head. Home office utopia might be near. Ahh, peace is settling across my being.

Good bye laptop upgrade cycle. Thank you, iPad.

[Guest Post by my father-in-law, William Haueisen, PhD., CEO of Sterling Research Group (SRG). William agreed to share his recent experience with the iPad touching the older generation that has been sadly overlooked by recently technology innovations. That older generation is rapidly growing and sometimes referred to as the silver-market because of their under-addressed needs and under-tapped purchasing power.

About SRG: SRG designs and executes high-quality, and high-volume, customer satisfaction surveys.]

Gavin and Maddie’s great grandmother, aged 86, has suffered from macular degeneration for a decade. In earlier times she was an avid reader, sometimes with multiple books “under process” at the same time. But the macular degeneration has robbed her of any ability to read. She “reads” now only by sitting under a bright light and holding a fairly strong magnifying glass. That is until a week or two ago.

Great Grandmom lives in a retirement center so meals are always a big social time. Recently she’s been hearing her friends talk about Kindles. And while she hadn’t actually seen one, she had a feeling that it might be something that could help her read again. So we took her on a shopping trip, first to Best Buy to look at Kindles. They were interesting and she was fascinated with the idea of the thing, but unfortunately, even with the text enlarged to its maximum, she couldn’t read from a Kindle except with the ubiquitous magnifying glass. Part of the problem was the lack of contrast. But, even though it didn’t help her, she sure liked the basic idea of the thing.

Next we took her to Barnes and Noble to see a Nook. No dice, not enough real estate, and otherwise the same problem with lack of contrast.

Finally, we took her to the Apple store, and after waiting in line three lines, she got her iPad. Wow, great contrast (back lighted) and very large print, and a type face (sans serif) that that made the words clear still. She could read! We loaded a couple of novels on her iPad and she went to town. She went to town when I went out of town, and within minutes of our departure, she was in trouble. Something happened that she couldn’t figure out.

Fortunately, about that time her son called from Texas, and in short time, she told him she needed a “geek” (that was her word, honestly.) Jim suggested she call Best Buy since he knew they had a Geek Squad. She did, and then the fun began. First of all, none of the Geeks had been trained on the iPad yet, so they were at a loss, and said they’d have to come to the house. They issued her an incident number and told her to log in to the Best Buy Internet site, use the incident number and pay for the consulting using her credit card.

She indicated she didn’t have Internet access. They asked her how she got the iPad, and she said her son, Bill, got it for her. How did she get her books without Internet access? She said her son, Bill, put them on the iPad for her. She would be happy to give the Geek a check, or her credit card information when they came out. They indicated they couldn’t do that, she had to pay in advance. Finally, they had mercy upon her, and agreed to be paid when they got to her apartment.

When they (two of them) arrived–the Geek didn’t have a clue because he hadn’t been trained on the iPad, but he brought one of the Apple salespeople with him, and this guy knew his stuff. Within a few minutes (2-3 at the most), they had her untangled and back in her book. She was delighted. But, when she learned that she had to pay for a hour, and they would charge her for a quarter of an hour (their minimum) she insisted they just sit down and talk to her until she used up her quarter hour. They would put the rest of her time on her “account” and she could call in again, if she needed help.

Apparently they had a good chat; they liked her, she liked them, and I suspect that she was the talk of the Geek Squad that day. Not too many 86 year olds with cutting edge technology.

So, cut to the present: she’s finished one 400 page novel–the first book she’s read in years and years, and she’s well into her second. And, what fun, lots of the “boys” in the retirement center are beating a path to her apartment to see her iPad. She’s become the hot number in the entire Manor.

The killer app for X. Everyone always wants to know, when a new widget is built, what it really does well. Often, it seems, it isn’t what was advertised. The killer app for the iPhone was suppose to be, according to Jobs, Making-Phone-Calls, with a heavy emphasis visual voice mail. The killer app for the personal computer, for those of us that can remember back that far, was supposed to be Cooking-Recipes (OMG!). The killer app for the iPad, again, according to Jobs, is Media-Consumption. All wrong.

The iPhone, although it needs to make phone calls, is only so-so good at it – but it is great for always-within-arms-reach-apps. Granted, there are lots of other uses for it, like games, web surfing, etc, but the Unique thing about the iPhone (and other smart phones) is that it is a little computer that you carry in your pocket that is connected to the Internet – and it does it Good-Enough(tm). I used to carry a Palm Treo 650 – which was also in your pocket and connected, but not it didn’t quite do it good-enough. It arguably did it better than others, but key functionality was really crippled if you weren’t employed by a company that could afford the Good e-mail back-end server. The Good software made the Treo very Blackberry-like. Apps were relatively difficult to install – more difficult than for a normal PC. The killer app for the Treo was the e-mail. Same thing for Blackberries. Maybe the twist for the iPhone is the ease of app installation and their security – you really can’t screw up your phone by downloading hack-apps. You could screw up your Treo, and you can still screw-up your Android phones.

So, what does the iPad do that is unique and awesome. Sure, you can read books. Sure, you get most of the benefits of the iPhone. But that isn’t unique. Browsing the web while I lounge in the living room, without having to fumble with a a mouse is truly awesome. Watching Netflix and ABC is, without a doubt, a game changer for media consumption. The Wall Street Journal app is within spitting distance of demonstrating how newspapers will survive. But, those are all, oh, how to say it, too obvious. However, when I attach my Bluetooth keyboard to my iPad, I roam to where there are no distractions, and write like I haven’t written in years (though, still, badly).

My desktop, for me, is for programming, and spreadsheets, and sort of serious endeavors. Writing, for me, is one of those things that is important to do, but never urgent. How could I ever justify writing? If I’m sitting at my computer, how can I allow myself to write when I should be programming? Well, nobody programs directly on the iPad. Nobody does serious spreadsheet work on the iPad. You get the idea. But an iPad with an external keyboard provides a wonderful, portable, low-distraction, writing environment.

I’m drafting this post at my kitchen table. I probably won’t add the links and pictures until I get back to my desktop, because rapid switching between programs, image uploads, etc., are a bit of a pain on the iPad – which is great – because I should be writing, not cropping images! The value is in the content, and thought, not the links and eye candy.

My 1st grade son and I have a semi-regular routine of going to a coffee shop, before his school starts, and we both write. Frankly, grabbing my laptop, the mouse, maybe the power supply, ejecting the external drive, grabbing the backpack, is just a bit too painful. Grabbing the iPad and keyboard, is cake. Not much bigger than my son’s composition notebook. I can grasp those two with one hand. He gets a the good influence of seeing a parent write. I get good writing time and good quality time. He gets to practice his writing and gets to see that an otherwise dull homework activity can be spiced up by just changing locations. We wrap-up by reading our creations to each other. His are more interesting.

According to Gizmodo, this is Apple’s next iPhone, importantly, to me, with a screen of 640×960. There has been a lot of kvetching around the Internet about the iPhone’s new case, it’s front facing camera, etc. but I think that people are missing the cooler picture here. Since the iPad’s resolution is 768×1024, and that the original iPhone’s screen is at 320×480, then we can only draw one logical conclusion: Apple hates apps.

Yup – I said it. There is no taking it back. I dare you to disagree. Well, at least some apps. The bad apps. The unloved apps.

One of the iPhone’s, and iPod touch’s early competitive advantages against the Android, Palm, Nokia, and Blackberry was it’s consistent development target. As a developer, a typical app that I built for the iPod touch would work just fine for the all of the iPhone platforms because they had the same input, same screen resolution, etc. If it worked on an iPod touch, then I really didn’t need to test it on, say, an iPhone 3G. Unlike, say, the Blackberry line, with several different resolutions, orientations, and input methodologies, developing for one model meant very little chance of it working on the other models. My early Blackberry development was a bit of nightmare. I screamed at Palm when, after making a game for them targeted at 320×480 on the Palm Pre, when they started shipping the Palm Pixi with resolution of 320×400. What kind of sadist company would do that to their developers? Don’t get my started on what it is like to test for a Nokia app. That fragmentation made it quite difficult to develop for them. The recent spat of resolution changes for the iPhone line, though, changes that Apple advantage (but don’t worry about Apple just yet).

Why would Apple do this? Well, partly, of course, is that they sorted of needed to get higher resolution screens for the iPad. But for the iPhones, those little screens are good enough, and Apple has never been known for introducing technology with out a corresponding and compelling uptick for the user’s experience. I think this is part of their strategy for culling their massive app catalog of the crappy apps. I don’t think you can underestimate how many of the apps in the app store basically don’t make any money. Stories abound about the app producer that spent $30,000 in development but only harvested $1,000 from the app store. There are countless more, and I know from first and second hand experience, of apps that, although costing less to develop, are only earning $100 in revenue over the life of the app. So, arguably, most, but not all, of the apps, just suck. Those developers will simply not re-invest the time and money to port them to the iPad or the higher-resolution iPhones.

This is win-win for Apple and the consumers. Apple still gets to rightly claim an un-godly number of apps in their catalog, but as the newer devices come online, those consumers will only normally see the apps designed for their device. As a new iPad owner, I really felt compelled to remove every iPhone app, except for the one or two that didn’t have an iPad equivalent and were actually important to my daily workflow.

My recent apps that I upgraded for to the iPad, Nightlight and Powernap: Forty winks anywhere meant some significant re-thinking of the app. I couldn’t just rely upon iPhone emulation mode – things didn’t look good without re-designing. Redesigning for a different screen is a big deal. The investment is significant. The looming changes in screen resolutions out of Apple is also having me revamp my whole programming workflow – something difficult for less sophisticate programmers and developers shops to pull off. Developing for the iPhone OS line just became a lot tougher.

What Apple could have done to make me think different? While in emulation mode, when zoomed in at 2x, I would have expected to see the fonts, for example, re-scaled. Imagine when you zoom-in in Safari, the text still looks awesome. Not the case for iPhone apps on the iPad. Graphic images also could also have been resampled/interpolated, like when you plop a DVD into a player attached to your fancy HD TV. Those DVDs, without extra processing, look pretty crummy. That crummy image was, originally, a big marketing angle for Blue-Ray purchases. But with good processing, a DVD actually looks pretty decent on an HD TV. Apple is a smart company – they could have done that, too, if they thought it important enough – they just didn’t.

This is all pretty good stuff. Apple wins. Consumers win. And, I think, independent developers will win because of fewer get-rich-quick developers out there trying to win the app lottery, undermining the economics. I, for one, welcome our new varying resolution Apple overlords.

Slideshare.com just e-mailed to tell me that my Blackberry slideshow was popular yesterday, making it to the most active slideshow on in the twitter-verse.

I’m sad that I was unceremoniously e-mailed, only to learn that I had simply slept through my 15 minutes of fame.

I recently returned from the excellent BlackBerry Developers Conference where I gave a talk on cross-platform development strategies.

So, I’ve been designing an app that is basically meant to be used by car drivers.  It’s tentative going to have full Voice Control for enhanced usability and safety.  It’s going to be a great app. I think.

Although I can totally identify with my lead user, a salesman type of guy that drives all over town, the app wasn’t really resonating with me now that I work out of my home office and spend most of my ‘commute’ either walking, biking, or on mass transit.  My automobile time is often with wife and family, so Voice Control would be terrible in-effective over the dins of a car full of talkers.  So what about me?

I’m a big fan of Apple’s new Voice Control, but although society apparently now accepts hearing one side of a phone conversation from people walking down the street, are they ready to accept that somebody saying, to no one in particular, ‘Next Item’, ‘Back’, ‘Postpone’, ‘Play songs by the Shin Shins’, isn’t a little crazy, or at least a little socially inept?  I’m not ready to be that bold trend setter.

Some grope motions we can recognize

So, how can we interact with our mobile devices while walking down the street?  If I presume that I’m wearing headphone, then I can image holding my phone in my pocket and using my phone for input if my app is giving me adequate audio feedback.  The phone could say into your ear “Your next appoint with Mr. Smith is in 15 minutes.  Tap once to acknowledge or tap twice to remind you again in 10 minutes.”  I’m excited about this and can image a whole set of utilities and games that I can use while moving around the city.  I’m calling this method of input “Grope Control,” though I’m hoping to get suggestions for a more politically correct name.

For the sake of completeness, I’ve started to enumerate some common input and output methods and came up with some names for some of the combinations, namely Classic Control, Voice Control, Grope Control, and Spy Control.  I like to name things.  I think the introduction from The Non-Designer’s Design Book put it well when it’s introduction concluded that “Once you can name something, you’re conscious of it. You have power over it. You own it. You’re in control.”

We’ll ignore mouth and nose as useful output options, though its fun to think about.  Hmm, my phone smells musky, and tastes bitter, it must be time for my 3:30 appointment.

Input Options

Named I/O Combinations:

Scenarios

Implications for the app producer

• Know your user personas.  How and where will they be using your app? Ask yourself whether you want to limit your app to a single I/O combination, or do you want to allow, and budget for, multiple IO combinations?
• You might also plan on spending some extra marketing effort in explaining and showing the benefits of your non-classic I/O options.  Can you imagine the virus buzz you’ll get as the first Spy Control app published.  Can you make a killer YouTube video to go along with it?

Implications for the app programmer

• You’ll simply need a solid gesture library.  Apple is clearly working in this direction and now has a built-in and refined “Shake” detector.
• Have a standard voice control browser for your platform would be useful.  You can test your voicexml stuff at voxeo.com’s site before putting into your app.
• What would the voicexml equivalent for SpyControl be?

Implications for the DoD

• Patent 6899539 addresses putting a trackball onto a weapon to provide (http://bit.ly/Patent899539) some mechanism to get feedback into a computer w/o taking your hands off of a weapon, say, your rifle.  The trackball approach presumes that your see a screen, which means you are not focused on your target.  Fundamentally the soldier needs more combat appropriate input methods.
  

  Image from patent with rifle and trackball

• Software robustness: If, say, a screen is damaged or, untrusted, should there be another input method available to the operator?

My thoughts 3GS’s speech recognition with implications: “Voice Control is the new Touch, almost.” http://bit.ly/Xo3A7

I’ve been playing around with my new 3GS for a few days now.  As you might know, it has some built-in automatic speech recognition (ASR) capability that Apple brands as Voice Control, good for making calls and operating the iPod.  There is now, however, no programmer interface to allow its system to control 3rd party apps – bummer.  I’d bet, however, that we’ll soon see Voice Control as a core iPhone capability for all apps – perhaps next year.  When will it come to the PC?  The future is murky. Importantly, though, the basic iPhone technology works pretty well.  Better than anything else I’ve used.  A thousand times better than the built-in bluetooth voice dialer my last car had.

For the first time in years, I found myself exploring my music collection.  “Play songs by Johnny Cash” begets “Playing songs by Johnny Cash,”  and then the classic crooner laments about love gone bad in Memphis.  This is even safer than using the in-car stereo because I kept my eyes on the road the whole time.  I found myself calling people.  Of course, driving while distracted is bad, but it was actually practical to call the house and tell the kids that I was on my way home without having to take my eyes off the road.  When ASR works well enough, you’ll want to use it. And use it in circumstances that were previously off-limits or much more dangerous.

There is a related technology in the iPhone called VoiceOver.  Designed for people with vision impairments, this uses a text to speech (TTS) voice synthesizer and basically verbalizes what the person’s finger is touching.  When you swipe between app screens, you’ll hear “Screen 3 of 11″ followed by a listing of every app on that screen.  Touching an app like PowerNap, prompts “Power Nap, double tap to launch.”  A double tap, anywhere on the screen, then launches the app.  This system works too, but not well enough. Among its various drawbacks, it still requires a lot of tapping.  So, although you don’t need to use your eyes, you still need to use your hands.

Key Technologies

• Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
• Text To Speech (TTS)
• Automatic or Semi-Automatic Voice Transcribing – for recording voice memos, and converting them into text.

Implications

… for the application producer

• If your app would likely be used by somebody walking around, then start thinking about Voice Control now, while still in your design phase.
• Improved voice control, with high quality voices and better recognition, may be worth an in-app purchase/upgrade.
• With the Silver Market (retiring baby boomers) increasing, their eyes getting worse, their fingers hurting more, then maybe Voice Control is the way to  bring/extend apps to that huge market.

… for the developers

• Think about Voice Control early in the design phase.  Don’t count on being able to elegantly retrofit your eye & finger focused app into both eye & finger and ear & voice.  Don’t believe me?  Then ask yourself how many of the mouse & click focused apps were easily ported to the iPhone’s finger-based system?
• Jump-start your mind by testing out some existing apps with Accessibility turned on.  It was an enlightening experience for me.
• Open-source SDKs here are seriously lagging behind the commercial implementations, but they might be good enough to act as a preview or teaser, and allowing  only serious users to purchase the upgrade.
• The commercial implementations are just now starting to think about licensing their SDKs.

… for R&D and DoD

• Imagine mobile applications that are useful w/o hands or screens. We’re used to thinking about the field utility of such systems, but what about the non-combatant, or at least those not all the way on the front line.
• To following this line of thought, haptic feedback is just coming to the consumer space – so if you can’t imagine soldiers chatting away all day to their PDAs, can you imagine them gesturing to one, without ever seeing the screen.
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    Not sure these are quite the right commands

• For application survivability, if the screen is damaged, say, by a bullet, shouldn’t the software still be able to function via alternative input methods, like voice?  It might not be as efficient in some cases, but perhaps it would be better than nothing.
• Low power consumption: software capable of voice control wouldn’t need a screen.
• Weight: No screen equals lower weight.

Digesting last night’s HBS lecture “Global Megatrends: Next Billion $ Opportunities”
Summary: Urbanization, Old People
http://bit.ly/75HTh