The Best Thing About iOS4 is, Wait For It… Folders

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Screenshot Front

My New Front Screen

The iPhone 4 comes out on Thursday, and a few lucky folks have already gotten theirs. As a developer, I’ve been using the upgraded iOS4 operating system for a few weeks now (but I’m still waiting for my iPhone 4 to ship) and Apple is now allowing official reviews. So here is the only thing you need to know. The most useful feature of the new operating system is the addition of Folders. This is the one features that has impacted my day-to-day usage the most.

Now, I know everyone is excited about multi-tasking, which is cool. I added it to PowerNap and Nightlight, and am working on Time-to-Read, Meeting Timer, and Time-to-Eat, since they all have timers in them. I’m just added the first round of Retina-display graphics to Wallet Zero and added iAds to start recuperating some of my investment in that app. But, these features in my apps, and others, are not really that big of deal, compared to Folders. Those other features are simply nice improvements, but Folders have dramatically improved my daily iPhone experience.

Folders do a great job of letting me get to my apps and data faster. I can now put every app I need on the first three pages, making most of them about two away, or, at most, two taps and two swipes. That isn’t bad. Since I group apps by activity, like news sites that I read regularly, then they are typically only one tap away as I switch from one app in the group onto the next app. It is good enough that I now prefer reading on my iPhone over reading on my iPad, simply because my iPad is tending to get a little cluttered.

Folders also makes it way easier to share my phone with kids. My seven year old son hoards games, which tends to scatter icons over several screens, but I can now tell him, “These last three screens are yours, the rest are mine,” and have it work out fairly well.

iPhone screenshot

Lots of games

So, what does this mean for the independent application publisher? This brings into focus the concept of app refinement. For apps, the devil is in the details, and little refinements that impact workflow create a big payoff in user experience. From a technology perspective, folders just are not that big of a deal, but it makes everyday tasks, like finding my app, more pleasant, more refined. Your app might have the coolest technology in the world, but those ‘hard-to-do’ things are not necessarily the most important. So pay attention to how people use your app and focus on adding refinements that improve their user experience. Sometimes the biggest payoffs are the easiest to do.

My Talk from Blackberry Developer’s Conference: Cross Platform Strategies + PhoneGap

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

Cross Platform Development Strategies with vendor review and PhoneGap case study

Voice Control is the new Touch, almost.

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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.

ImgDeviceVoiceControl1

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.
    •  

      hand signals

      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.

Technical: Scroll Home after Input Completion in Mobile Safari

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I’ve been experimenting with PhoneGap, a nice UIWebview wrapper for iPhone, Android, and ~Blackberry.  Since the development happens in javascript, you spend more time working around the limitation of UIWebView.

I ran into the following problem.  I have several input fields on a page.  As the user moves to each input field on the iPhone, the screen rightly scrolls to the next input field.  When the user has finished entering their data, the screen only partially scrolls back home.  I got around this with the following – I hope it helps someone…



//****************************  jKeyboardGotDismissed() & jKeyboardGotShown() -BEGIN- ******************************
// This snippet give you a reasonable way to detect that the user is not currently input data.
// Motivation:  On the iphone, when inputing data, the soft keyboard pops up.  When the keyboard is dismissed, it doesn't
// usually scoll back to the original position.
//
// I know this is kludgy.  There is probably some slick way to detect that a input box lost focus, but that it had
// moved on to onother input box, or not - but I couldn't find any examples.  This uses a timer, and seems to fall
// into the good-enough category.
//
// Insturctions:
//  Copy this block of code into your script
//  Modify jKeyboardGotDismissed() & jKeyboardGotShown() as desired.
//
// Use Cases:
//      Make sure the screen has scolled to 0,0 after the user finishes inputing data on the iphone
//          add something like " window.scrollTo(0, 0) " to jKeyboardGotDismissed()
var bStoppedInputtingUnlessSomeoneTellsMeOtherwise = true;
var enumKeyboardStateThereGone = "Gone";//There, means the keyboard must be visible, "Gone" means it must be hidden
function _jFocusTypeHelper() {
if (bStoppedInputtingUnlessSomeoneTellsMeOtherwise == true) {
if (enumKeyboardStateThereGone == "There") {
enumKeyboardStateThereGone = "Gone";
jKeyboardGotDismissed();
} else {
enumKeyboardStateThereGone = "Gone";// why twice? Just so enumKeyboardStateThereGone will be set before the function call.
}

} else {
if (enumKeyboardStateThereGone == "Gone" ) {
enumKeyboardStateThereGone = "There";
jKeyboardGotShown();
} else {
enumKeyboardStateThereGone = "There"; // why twice? Just so enumKeyboardStateThereGone will be set before the function call.
}

}
}

// This function gets called whenever the keyboard is  dismissed.  feel free to modify it
// Motivation: I wanted to make sure the screen scolled back to the right spot after the last input
// Known Limitations: 1/4 second delay before jKeyboardGotDismissed is notified.
function jKeyboardGotDismissed() {
//alert("The soft Keyboard just got dismissed (if, in fact, this device has a softkeyboard)");
window.scrollTo(0, 0);//Scroll home after the keyboard is dismissed.  Delete this line if you don't want that to happen.  @TODO: Add smooth scrooling
}

function jKeyboardGotShown() {
//alert("The soft Keyboard must have just popped up (if, in fact, this device has a softkeyboard)");
}

document.addEventListener("blur",function() {bStoppedInputtingUnlessSomeoneTellsMeOtherwise=true;setTimeout(_jFocusTypeHelper,250);},true);
document.addEventListener("focus",function() {bStoppedInputtingUnlessSomeoneTellsMeOtherwise=false;_jFocusTypeHelper();},true);

//****************************  jKeyboardGotDismissed() & jKeyboardGotShown() -END- ******************************

So, how would you use this? If you put this code in your page, it should just magically work.

iPhone App Store Sales Optimization by Tracking Ads

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So, you’ve just put your killer app on the on the app store. You celebrated with some Schramsberg. You sadly watch your sales asymptotically approach zero when users discover that you haven’t ‘quite’ got it right. Now, you’ve fixed that one outstanding issue and you’re ready to re-invigorate your money machine.

Ok – Not that you no longer have that new-app bump, you have to get your app re-recognized the old fashioned way, through marketing. That’s marketing, with a lower case ‘m’. Probably viral marketing, reviews, and advertising. So, as some rich manager said, “If you can’ measure it, you can’t manage it.”

Measuring advertising efficacy is a problem on Apple’s app store, because you can not, until now, measure the effectiveness of different advertising channels because they only report total sales, and not their referring source. In the 9 months that I’ve been developing iPhone apps (let’s birth this baby!) I’ve focused on executing as many experiments as possible, but I’ve only been able to do one advertising experiment at a time because it was too difficult to distinguish the effects from a particular advertisement from other factors, such as normal weekly fluctuations. Now, the smart guys over at Mobile Orchard has released a clever trick to track effects of individual back to individual sales. Check it out. I’ll update this post with my own results as I get them.

Mobile Orchard also has a good article on getting your app reviewed. Although I haven’t pushed reviews, yet, everthing that I’ve heard does indicate that it is a very personal process process. Although most sites keep a journalistic separation between the money and the review, some do not. And remember, these people are only human. Perhaps a good way to think about this is like getting a job where you have to get your resume recognized and have it stand out apart all of the other resumes.

How do you get your resume to stand out? Well, I think the first step to think beyond the resume. When I was still a cadet at the Air Force Academy, I was pretty miffed when I didn’t get a prestigious summer job at the school that I thought I perfectly qualified for. I was perfect on paper. After that job went to the other guy, I went to the decider to figure out what happened. He was too tactful, so I had to read between the lines and finally figured out that I had totally misunderstood, up to that point, the hiring process. You see, up to that point in my life, I had been chosen for things based upon “Who is the most deserving?” School admissions, for example, is, I think, a good example of that. Hiring, in contrast, is based upon “Which one will make my life easier?” It makes sense.

I believe that the getting reviews is sort of the same. The reviewers, deep down, want the most popular site possible with the least amount of work. Don’t be in denial about this reality.

Making money on the iPhone App Store

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If you haven’t read it yet, Pinchmedia recently release a good report/slideshow on the market dynamics of selling products on Apple’s app store.

You can see it here:
Title: “iPhone AppStore Secrets – Pinch Media”
Link: http://www.slideshare.net/pinchmedia/iphone-appstore-secrets-pinch-media

I have about 10 published mobile apps at this point, and although I think the Pinchmedia presentation is great, and validating, I still think that they see the world through a certain prism that filters much of reality.
From my own experience, I had created my deck on lessons and experiments of publishing on the app store. I’ve identified about, oh, twenty experiments that i’ve performed, with more to come, and put them into this short slidesow. Since it contains a lot of confidential information, I’m saving it for in-person meetings, so contact me if you’re in the Boston area.

So here are two charts from my deck:
An with pretty decent staying power.
screenshot_04.png

An app with less staying power.

screenshot_05.png

I’ve put about 10x the energy into the second app. The interesting question is, or maybe the next question is, “What make the linear decay app” vs. “What makes the exponential decay” app? I think I know the answer. I think other people know the answer, too. I think that the answer knowers aren’t talking.

Now, knowing the answer, and monetizing the answer, are, of course, two differing things….