Dan’s Blog (2.0)

In about an hour, I will board the final flight of my round-the-world trip, from San Francisco back to London. I’ve mostly been in Beijing and San Francisco, and I’ve transited through Singapore and Hong Kong on the way. The most grueling part by far was Wednesday, where I boarded a flight at 9 AM in Beijing and after hitting Singapore and Hong Kong I finally ended up in San Francisco at 8 PM San Francisco time - that’s roughly a full day (24 hours) of traveling. The highlight from a travel perspective was flying on the new Singapore Airlines A380. This is an absolutely amazing aircraft. What struck me most was how quiet it was - others have commented on the quietness, but I haven’t seen any comments about how much bigger the lavatories were. This was a nice touch. It was the first time I’ve been able to wash my face in an airplane lavatory and not get water all over the floor - which I think is a significant quality-of-life improvement. The sweeping staircase at the front of the plane is a nice touch. I can’t wait until the A380 shows up on some of my more commonly traveled routes. This was my first flight on Singapore Airlines. They are certainly a very nice airline, but honestly I still prefer Virgin Atlantic.

Beijing was a basically what any pre-olympic city is: a mass of construction. On my one day of being a tourist, I was able to take in the Temple of Heaven and the Forbidden City - both of which are primarily outdoor, which is a shame as it was raining quite hard. I managed to snap some photos - I was particularly drawn to the architectural detail and intricate carving. Flight boarding now - more notes soon.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 23:39 under Travel
Tags: a380 www2008 web2expo

No Comments

Just made a presentation at Web 2.0 Expo here in San Francisco. This presentation was a bit of an experiment - combining some “vision thing” stuff about the Mobile Web with some specific recommendations for building Mobile Ajax applications (and thanks to Óscar Gutiérrez Isiégas, Scott Hughes and Jonathan Jeon for their contributions). I got a lot of requests for the slides - so here they are for anyone interested!

 

| View | Upload your own

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 22:59 under Misc
Tags: mobile2.0, mobileajax, MWI, W3C, Web2Expo

6 Comments

Once upon a time, a company called Apple came out with a great concept: a breakthrough consumer device with a new user interface that left the competitors in the dust. It brought UI to a whole new level by introducing a new visual and gestural language which greatly increased ease of use. In doing so, it lowered the barrier to entry for the general public, created new markets for its products and a revolution occured. Sound familiar? It should. I’m talking about the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. The new visual language of pointing, clicking, dragging and using overlaping windows gradually became the dominant UI paradigm. But here’s the problem: other companies stole Apple’s great ideas (which Apple had actually stolen from Xerox but never mind). What could have rocketed Apple to market dominance instead became a commodity that anyone could implement.

Flash forward to 2007. Apple again comes out with a new UI paradigm, together with a visual and gestural language, and they release it as part of a breakthrough consumer device; the first of a series of devices in different form factors which they think will undo the last 20 years and rocket them to dominance of all things digital. But this time, they’ve got an ace up their sleeve: a string of patents. As Wired reported in February, Apple is trying to patent the gestures that make up the iPhone UI - the iPhone’s equivalent of “point and click.” In fact, if Apple’s efforts succeed, I think they will be shooting themselves in the foot. Why? Because if we are, en masse, to move to a new user interface paradigm, beyond point and click, we are going to have to have some consistency. If “pinching” means “shrink” on one device and “close” on another device, this would be a disaster from a user experience standpoint, and could turn potential users off in a big way.

In fact, we don’t have to imagine for too long because some of new breed of “iPhone killer” devices now hitting the streets exhibit this very problem. I was just looking at a touch UI device manufactured by an un-named Korean company (that also coincidentally manufactured my fridge which now is on the blink after only 3 years of ownership - not that I hold a grudge). The problem with this device was that it was replicating a non-touch UI (a UI controlled by a four-way rocker switch) with a touch-screen overlaid on top. It wasn’t quite as bad as the Prada phone that I wrote up last year, but it was close. For example, instead of scrolling by simply flicking your finger up and down, it required you to (repeatedly) press soft buttons at the bottom of the screen labeled with up and down arrows. I haven’t actually had the chance to test out the Nokia “touch” Series-60 device, but when I read this article in News.com with accompanying spy shot, my blood chilled. A scroll bar? Menu buttons on the bottom? Could it be that Nokia is falling into the same trap - trying to replicate a button-based UI with a touch screen overlaid on top? I sincerely hope not — indeed, I think Nokia has enough UI expertise to understand that touch needs a new visual gestural language.

But this brings us back to Apple and their patents. I am not a lawyer, but I don’t believe patenting gestures is a good idea. It seems like there’s plenty of prior art - take a look at Jeff Hann’s talk at TED on gesture-based UI as an example - but the main thing is: in order for us to move into this brave new world of touch, I would argue that gestures need to be royalty free, and companies need to know that if they implement commonly used gestures they will not be sued. If anything, we need standardization of gestures so that users can have some kind of consistency between touch-based platforms. The people behind Interactivegestures.com are moving in this direction, but it’s unclear to me what the intellectual property around these gestures (if any) is. What is the way forward to ensure that gestural and touch-based UI can flourish and isn’t hobbled by intellectual property disputes before it’s even properly off the ground? We briefly “touched” on this issue during a discussion on the future of mobile user experience at Over the Air led by UIQ’s David Mery and Idean’s Mikko-Pekka Hanski, but this topic alone needs more discussion. At risk may be the very future of human computer interaction.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 15:11 under mobile 2.0
Tags: Apple, gestures, iPhone, ipr, patents, touch, userexperience

7 Comments

I was lucky enough to be interviewed by Peter Price from BBC’s Digital Planet. Some of what we talked about got onto the Digital Planet Podcast (dated 7 April). Peter also captured Over the Air speaker/participant Brian Fling and spoke about the coming revolution of “Mobile 2.0″.

It’s a great piece, which really captures some of the flavor of the event, interviewing one of the competition entrants (Simon Maddox) who was busy learning J2ME in order to build a location-based game. Contrary to what Peter says on the podcast, Simon and his team-mate Kevin were actually one of the winners, for best location-aware app. Because of the hybrid nature of the event, Simon and Kevin had access to some top-level experts in Java J2ME from Sun, Aplix and Vodafone who had presented in earlier masterclass sessions.

I think it’s also notable what BBC’s Matthew Postgate and Bill Thompson had to say about why BBC is getting involved with events like Over the Air. It’s all because BBC’s public remit means they have a mandate to encourage and facilitate creative expression and ”programming is just as valid a form of creative expression as writing books, making videos, or drawing pictures.” I think they’re absolutely right. Certainly, a lot of “creativity” was evident in the contribution entries.

The question on everyone’s lips at Over the Air was “when are you going to run another one?” I think the answer is “not for a while” but in the meantime, BBC Backstage is gearing up for their own, more PC-Web-oriented, event, Mashed happening June 21st and 22nd at Alexandra Palace. I’m definitely looking forward to that one.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 9:57 under mobile 2.0
Tags: BBC, BBCBackstage, brianfling, digitalplanet, overtheair, overtheair08, podcast

No Comments

Over the Air kicks off tomorrow at Imperial College London. But we’re already getting some great press from the Guardian’s Jemima Kiss. And they even spelled my name right!

The innovation that’s going to drive this converged Mobile/Web industry forward is going to come from the kind of people who are coming to this event. Jemima called it a “festival” in her article. That’s right, I think. Over the Air will be more than a development conference and more than a code camp. It must be a rallying cry for the mobile developer community.

I’m off to Imperial College London to start stuffing bags for tomorrow’s attendees. If you’re coming to Over the Air, I’ll see you tomorrow, and if not you’ll have to read about it in the papers.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 16:26 under mobile 2.0
Tags: mobilemonday, MoMoLondon, overtheair

No Comments