Dan’s Blog (2.0)

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

Great blog post at the New York Times last week about the disproportionate percentage of iPhone users (84.8%) who use the iPhone regularly to access the Web (compared to users of other smart phone devices). Mark Donovan of M:Metrics is quoted in the article saying that this is because the iPhone is particularly well suited to “people who are jacked into the Internet all the time.” Doesn’t putting the Web front and center on the device, bundling the device with very Internet-friendly price plans, and making the thing so damn easy to use have just as much to do with it? It’s no surprise to me that Google has seen 50 times more searches from the iPhone than from any other mobile handset (as reported in the FT last month). I’ve spent the last 3 years in lamenting the fact that device manufacturers make it so difficult to find the place to enter the URL into the browser that most people simply give up. My three year old daughter picked up my iPhone for the first time and within seconds she had brought up the browser, found the space to enter a URL and had started typing away. That was a an ah-ha moment for me about the iPhone’s usability. Mark kind of implies that iPhone owners are using the mobile Web because only because they are naturally predisposed to such use. My gut feeling is that the iPhone is actually “crossing the chasm” into the general public. There is a latent demand for the mobile Web and the iPhone is tapping that demand, where others have failed and continue to fail.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 19:46 under Mobile Web
Tags: iPhone, M:Metrics, MobileWeb

5 Comments

Why, in this day and age, when they can send a man to the Moon, is it so frickin’ difficult to tell what time it is? Specifically, what makes it so seemingly difficult for mobile devices, which are connected to a public network, to tell what time it is? Surely mobile connected devices should be our most trusted time sources. The network they’re connected to is constantly pumping out a time-sync. So what is the problem? Three examples:

I normally carry around a couple of devices. Most recently, these have been consistently unreliable sources of the time. The Blackberry has two time-sync options: network and “blackberry.” Neither of them ever yield a correct time (as measured by my Mac, whose time-sync works flawlessly when measured against the BBC).

The N73 also has a “network sync” option which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. I have often found that the time is wildly off – by as much as a few hours. It also doesn’t help matters that a change of this setting requires a reboot.

I have to manually set the time zone on the Blackberry but the Nokia N73 somehow can figure that out for itself.

I just came out of the other end of the Channel Tunnel and my iPhone hasn’t picked up the fact that I’m now in Central European Time – so it’s still showing an hour behind.

In this fast-paced world, it’s more important than ever for your device to know the correct time. This becomes especially important when you’re sharing media (as, for example, a number of people are contributing camera-phone images into a photo pool which you then want to be able to view sequentially). I constantly find myself on conference calls with multiple people in different time zones and knowing the correct time can be extremely important in such situations (and don’t even get me started about how most software just does not know how to deal with meeting planning that happens across multiple time zones or meetings that are being scheduled in a time zone other than your own – the software on Blackberry is a rare exception – I often find myself using the Blackberry to schedule a meeting even when the PC is right in front of me). So what’s going on here and how do we fix it? I’m open to suggestions.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 19:02 under Mobility, Travel
Tags: blackberry, iPhone, Mobility, Nokia, rants, time

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Yes. Believe it or not, there is something that has overshadowed the launch of the iPhone around the world. It is the story of the developer community that has come together around the iPhone to create a whole ecosystem of applications and clandestine methods for loading these applications onto this platform. In a matter of months, loosely organized individuals and companies with names like Nullriver, Conceited software, drudge and “Erica,” have managed to unravel the turtleneck of iPhone security and in the process they have created something entirely new in the industry: a mass-market mobile phone platform that is completely open to the application developer community. They have also created application loading tools for over-the-air installation which have no rival in terms of their sophistication and ease of use. Indeed, there’s no tip-off, except for the author names, that the software you’re using wasn’t developed and pre-installed by Apple - they’re that good.

Along the way, we now have a few new words in our mobile lexicon. Of course, there’s “brick” as a verb, as in “to brick your phone.” Of course, most iPhone users who found their phones bricked after the first software update have since “de-bricked” their phones through various widely available methods. There’s also “jailbreak,” which has come to mean to enable third party software to be loaded onto an otherwise closed platform. A platform so prepared can be called “jailbroken.” The rest of the lexicon is still being worked out. The popular press can’t seem to figure out the difference between SIM-unlocked and “contractless” for example. One can Jailbreak and SIM-unlock their iPhone but still be locked into a 2 year contract.

When the first iPhone “jailbreak” method came out, people were a bit tentative. Surely Apple would “fix” this in a subsequent update. Indeed they did, resulting in the “great bricking.” But when the new firmware was broken as well, the developer community began to smell blood. We’re on our third firmware revision (which has also been broken) and I do not believe at this point that the community can be stopped.

Unfortunately this has all somewhat overshadowed what possibly should have been the biggest story of 2007 - the rise of sophisticated mobile browsers such as Safari for iPhone. I still believe the roll-out of these browsers will have a huge impact in the mobile Web space. But the overall impact on the industry of the iPhone jailbreakers, I believe, will be more important in pushing the industry towards openness, user choice and the wide deployment of connected mobile applications - in a word, Mobile 2.0.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 14:43 under mobile 2.0
Tags: iPhone, Jailbreak

2 Comments

A week ago when I was in San Francisco, I picked up an iPhone, with the intention of unlocking it when I got back to the UK. When the software update came out (and the iBricking started), however, I decided to activate it in on the AT&T network (allowing me to use the device) and then deactivate my AT&T account by phone within the 30 day grace period. So now I have essentially a Web pad / music player device. Why not go for an iPod Touch? Well, I still hope to unlock it and get it working with a Voafone SIM but until then I can also use the Apps that the Touch doesn’t have like Mail and Google Maps.

But mostly I’m interested in how the browser performs.

What are my initial impressions after a week with the iPhone?

In general, I am very impressed. Breakthrough device. Blah blah blah. I’ll refrain from gushing.

I am deeply concerned about the whole locking fiasco. I don’t think Jobs is in the right. Apple should allow and encourage third party development to thrive on this platform, and they should allow you to buy the thing unlocked or at least activate it without attaching to a mobile operator, especially considering the price you are paying up front for the device. It seems to me that this is a strategy that has evolved from the iPod platform - a platform which Apple is used to controlling with an iron fist. But iPod is an embedded OS. The iPhone (and iPod touch) are a different ball-game. What’s clear is that developers will find a way around Apple’s locks so Apple should probably just give up now before they find themselves fighting a war of attrition. Jobs: declare a general amnesty for the iBricked and make steps to open up the iPhone platform itself.

Having said that, I am very enthusiastic about the messaging Apple is putting out there about using the browser itself as an application deployment platform. This reflects a general industry push towards use of the browser and of Web technologies to deliver application-like UI. We explored many of the issues around this topic at the Mobile Ajax Workshop last week (a workshop where Apple was conspicuous by their absence). But if Apple is serious about letting developers create content using Web technology, then why not let them create Widgets, a-la Apple’s own “Dashboard” technology?

Anyway, on to the nitpicks:

I had hoped that the 1.1.1 update would include SVG support in the browser but it doesn’t appear to have. Even the 1+ year old browser in my N73 based on an ancient version of Webkit can do simple embedded SVG images inline.

Inability to select text is a problem. Even though there’s no copy/cut/paste function (which I think is a mistake - I mean come on, at least allow this as an advanced option) it’s still handy to be able to select text, for example, when you’re entering a URL in the location bar of the browser and you want to one part of the text string but not the whole string.

Typography and fonts: In the Web browser context, the iPhone’s scalable font technology is impressive, and it does feature many more international characters than your standard mobile phone. Out of the box it appears to support Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic, Greek and all the European character sets. So what’s there is miles ahead of most other smart phones in terms of rendering and font support. But it’s not a patch on full MacOS’s support for international characters. No Arabic or Hebrew, for a start.

The WiFi is flakey. To be fair, this is more to do with the way many public or guest WiFi WLANs are set up. Because the iPhone sleeps after a short period of inactivity, it drops off the WLAN. The guest WLAN in my office then releases its IP address from the DHCP register which means when I pick it up I have to log in again (through the interstitial Web form). I had the same experience in a hotspot as well. Not great. On another WLAN which has simple WEP security but a hidden SSID, the iPhone keeps dropping off the LAN. The “simple” user interface of the iPhone makes this kind of problem difficult to debug.

The screen keyboard is very difficult to use compared to the RIM keyboard I’m used to. The usability is much better in landscape mode where you have more to work with, but then you have very limited screen real-estate left for the actual thing you’re trying to work with (e.g. a Web form) which can be frustrating.

For some reason, it drives CPU on my laptop whenever it’s connected (even when iTunes is not launched). This has something to do with PTPCamera.app automatically launching in the background whenever the thing is plugged in. This is annoying because my Powerbook fan then spins up and makes and awful racket.

It’s big. I know it has to be to have such a big screen but this necessarily limits its usefulness as a totable music player. It’s bigger than my second generation iPod! I’ve used it to watch a video on the Tube on the way home (the Designing Web Content for iPhone video from the Apple Developer Connection site), but you don’t actually need a screen this big to watch video content like this - an iPod Nano would be perfectly adequate. And the thing gets really greasy. So much so that I would hesitate to hand it to someone else to use just in fear of grossing them out.

On the topic of Web content, some impressive Web applications are starting to emerge for iPhone, such as iphone.facebook.com. [Disappointingly, however, the iPhone interface to Facebook, though mimicking the iPhone UI very well within the browser, doesn't have as much functionality as the regular mobile site (for example, you can't accept an invitation to an event on the iPhone while you can on the regular mobile app).] Incidentally, mobile web sites like m.facebook.com or dev.mobi work really well on the iPhone browser. I have encountered some sites, however, that seem to be permanently zoomed in and do not allow you to zoom out again using the “reverse-pinch” gesture.

Those are my thoughts so far. Having watched the vieeo and read the developer guidelines document, I am left with the feeling that a lot of Apple’s guidelines are actually what one might term “hacks.” For example, Apple tell you to use the following link syntax to use a special stylesheet for iPhone:

<link media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)"
href="small-device.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />

Um. I hate to quibble, but this code won’t do what Apple says it does. In fact, it will use the referenced stylesheet for any device with a screen width under 481 pixels. The only reason Apple is getting away with this statement is that they happen to be one of the only mobile browsers out there that actually supports this kind of media query syntax. I can’t test it because I don’t have a device to hand, but I think this code would load the very same style sheet on, say, a Windows Mobile device running Opera Mobile. Anyone care to verify that? It’s not necessarily a bad thing if this happens, but developers need to know that if they put this bit of code in they should also test on some other media-query aware platforms.

That’s it for now. I’ll keep putting thoughts and observations up as I have time.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 17:18 under Mobile Web, Mobility
Tags: iPhone, MobileWeb

3 Comments

James Pearce (CTO of dotMobi) wrote a great article yesterday about the impact of the iPhone on the industry and what it means for them. Of course, he’s right. What the iPhone is doing is helping the Web along to become a mobile medium. Does this make dotMobi or efforts like the W3C Mobile Web Initiative obsolete?

Let me pose the question another way. In 5 years’ time, when the majority of Web usage is from mobile devices, will we all be using the browsers on these devices to pan, scan and zoom around pages that were designed for large screen desktop PCs? I think we can agree that this would be a kind of dystopian vision of the future of the Web. Apple certainly agrees. That’s why they released a set of guidelines on ptimizing Web Applications and Content for iPhone. These guidelines, while developed by Apple in house specifically to match the capabilities of the iPhone browser, bear a striking resemblance to the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices and the dotMobi Developer Guide in their approach, language and purpose. All these documents are trying to change the mind-set of developers to get them to think about both the technical differences between mobile devices and PCs (for example, Apple saying “a touch-screen is not a mouse”) and also the differences in usage and behavior that need to be taken into account in designing for mobile use.

The main difference between the Apple guidelines and the dotMobi and W3C documents are the level of browser technology assumed. Because the dotMobi and W3C guidelines are targeting a wide range of form factors, devices and browsers (some of which are fairly bare-bones) they encourage the developer to not rely on scripting, advanced CSS or other technologies that are usually not well supported in these devices (while encouraging developers to use these capabilities when they do know that the device/browser in question supports them). Apple’s guidelines are targeting only one browser on only one device, so they can afford to tell developers to use Web technologies like CSS, scripting and AJAX.

In two weeks’ time, however, the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices working group (which I chair and which includes dotMobi as a member) will be meeting in London. This meeting will be the kick off of a new phase of work for the group. We will be working on a successor document to the basic guidelines document issued earlier this year. The new document will provide guidelines to developers targeting more advanced devices, like the iPhone; devices where you can assume a higher level of capability. I have called on Apple to contribute their developer guidelines into this effort. Why? Because it’s in their best interest to make sure that Web sites and applications developed for the iPhone also work across a range of other devices, and that mobile Web applications designed according to industry standard guidelines work seamlessly on their devices.

The iPhone will herald a whole generation of advanced Web-capable mobile devices. In this context, a converged set of Web developer guidelines for such devices will be a boon to the developer community and will help create the necessary conditions for the evolution of the Web into the Mobile space, an evolution which Alan Moore, in a very thoughtful essay, calls the dawn of the 7th Mass Medium.

It’s the Web. But not as we know it.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 16:37 under Mobile Web
Tags: AlanMoore, dotMobi, iPhone, MobileWeb, MWI, W3C

5 Comments

How did it happen that Europe is looking on longingly as 700,000 U.S. consumers are experiencing the mobile technology equivalent of sliced bread? Only one week ago, we were hearing about how Apple’s unreasonable demands were making it impossible for European operators to even think about doing business with them. Now mobile operators are falling over each-other to offer iPhone exclusively in their territories. We are truly through the looking glass.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 23:41 under Mobility
Tags: iPhone

3 Comments

Why not? I live in Europe so I don’t have access to any iPhones today but here are my €.02 for what it’s worth:

The iPhone is already catalyzing a sea-change in the mobile industry. This change is primarily about form factor, user interface and the Mobile Web. In terms of form factors, we will see a slew of touch-screen devices coming into the market, but it won’t stop there. Manufacturers are going to take all kinds of form factor innovations off the shelves and start flogging them to operators and consumers.

Similarly, there will be a revolution in device UI. We will see lots of “fluid UI” iPhone rip-offs from other manufacturers but also other UI concepts. At our last Mobile Monday London on mobile gaming, I was very interested to see people like NVidia talking about the use of 3D acceleration technology not just for games but for all kinds of immersive user experiences (see the podcast).

Finally, the iPhone will have a huge impact on the mobile Web. First of all, people in the U.S. will stop looking at you funny when you talk about using the Web on your phone. But more important is what Steve Jobs announced at the end of his keynote regarding development of applications for the iPhone. He talked about using standards to develop Web applications as an alternative to the “traditional” mechanisms for mobile app development. So it’s not just about “keyhole browsing” (zooming and panning around Web pages built for PCs). This is a neat trick, but the real revolution happens with Web Apps that are built for the iPhone browsers (and for other advanced mobile browsers such as the S-60 open source browser or Opera Mobile). Keyhole browsing is the gateway drug that will drive the usage of the platform and thereby drive innovation in this new field of application and service development.

So, irrespective of whether the iPhone itself is a success (and if Apple’s previous product launches are any guide, it will likely have its ups and downs) it will be a wake-up call to complacent industry executives and a needed shot in the arm for efforts to expand the Web developer ecosystem into the mobile platform.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 19:18 under Mobile Web, Mobility
Tags: iPhone, MobileWeb

3 Comments