Twitter Updates for 2008-02-19
- Personal space on trains Is inversely proportional to the age of the rolling stock #
- Looking to hire 2 x project managers for cool social software projects - is there anyone out there? #
- Total Macbook lockup - major fail #
- @danzarella - tease…? #
- @Aral - not nearly glamorous for that sort of soiree… #
- Updating ever-lengthening to-do list in lieu of sleeping. Not sure that the two are strictly comparable. #
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Filed under Twitter | Comment (0)links for 2008-02-19
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5 questions a teenage kid might ask if starting work at your business today
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I do not use a textbook. It is not that I dislike textbooks. It is that my textbook is the web. My textbook is YOU and ME and NOW.
Instead of a book, I add all relevant readings, videos or examples to my course delicious bookmarks.
Twitter Updates for 2008-02-18
- At desk, caught up with feeds, clean inbox. Ready for the day (or as ready as I’ll ever be) #
- Researcher needs responses from people involved in "internet open communities": http://labs.braniecki.net/survey/floss/ #
- New Moo cards have arrived. #
- Off to the BBC in a Prius #
- At the BBC, as usual slightly amazed by the scale of it all #
- @tpurves Upcoming has sorted out my evenings this week… #
- @LloydDavis Bust link on the homepage for the Googlegroup… #
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Filed under Twitter | Comment (0)Twitter Updates for 2008-02-17
- Sorted Mail.app problems in a brutal but effective way. Feeling geekily virtuous. #
- And for an encore, added iPhone-friendly themes to adoptioncurve.net #
- @rooreynolds - no del.icio.us issues from here… #
- On the train heading south. Waiting for the trolley to appear so I can get a glass for my bottle of beer. #
- Rather hacked off with ontrain wifi, and hoping problems aren’t the result of a non-Apple friendly "improvement" #
- About to crash. Next week incoming… #
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Filed under Twitter | Comment (0)More thoughts on the iPhone etc
The more I think about this, the more I’m certain that the iPhone is symptomatic of bigger changes than simply being a well-designed handset that lifts the design bar has been lifted a number of notches. The likes of Nokia and Motorola are going to have to improve on their UIs and form factors to compete. But it goes further than this - the impact on the economics of the networks could be significant as well.
The first impact will be as a result of the (as far as I’m aware) unprecedented sole carrier arrangements - AT&T in the US, O2 in the UK, TMobile in Germany and so on. The idea of Apple taking a slice of the carrier revenue is a first, and the idea that the carriers had to outbid each other for the rights to the iPhone isn’t one they will have been happy with. The interesting part is how this kickback is calculated - if it’s based on a slice of the monthly fees, then the incentive for Apple to keep the iPhone unlockable are lot less than if they’re getting a part of the traffic charges.
Up until now, the “applications” on your average phone have been aimed less at meeting customer needs than they have been aimed at maximising carrier revenue - after all, they’ve got to recoup those 3G license fees from somewhere. Hence customer-unfriendly moves like blocking IM traffic - yes, TMobile, I’m looking at you. And the utility of the average “application” has been pretty marginal, at best - “portals” which seem to be litle more than upsell attempts.
Not that the iPhone is the first device for which real development is possible, but it’s the first that seems to have any kind of mindshare amongst potential developers. But those applications which are developed are going to be treating the carrier network as a dumb pipe in the sky - just transmitting bits, not adding any “value” in the way that the carriers have attempted to do so up until now.
Already Apple have disenfranchised the networks when it comes to ringtones, because these are managed at the iTunes level, not via the network. The revenues from iPhone ringtones (although that revenue stream will only have lasted as long as it took for iTunes 7.6 to allow user-generated ringtones) accrue directly to Apple.
Ostensibly the arrival of the iPhone SDK will open up application development to the (Objective C-speaking) masses, although there’s talk of Apple retaining its control through using iTunes as the only legitimate way of getting apps onto the iPhone. But that’s cold comfort to the carriers - I can’t envisage a situation where Apple are going to entertain withholding an app because (say) O2 isn’t happy with it. It’ll be a cold day in hell before we see a legitimate Apple-delivered version of Skype for the iPhone, but if or when TMobile finally get the iPhone in the UK, they’re not going to be in a position to block IM traffic for example just because they’re trying to protect their legacy SMS revenues.
All of which puts the mobile carriers in an invidious position - whether they like it or not, they’re gradually being reduced to the position of ISPs-in-the-sky. Whether I use BT Openworld or Tiscali or Plusnet or Zen (which I do) is largely irrelevant to me when I think about internet connectivity - so long as the reliability is above a certain level, and below a certain price, I don’t care all that much. The so-called “added value” services of portals and so on are redundant, because the service is effectively a commodity. That’s where the mobile networks are heading, and it’s difficult to see how they’re going to stop that process.
Filed under Working smarter | Comment (0)After two days with an iPhone
When the iPhone initially went on sale, I was fairly ambivalent them and didn’t immediately rush out and queue outside the Apple store at midnight. A couple of things made me change my mind - firstly O2 dropped their tariffs to something approaching reasonable value for money (or at least parity with my existing TMobile contract); and I had a good play with iPhones belonging to Aral and Pedro while I was at LIFT08.
My original intention was to jailbreak the phone and run it on my existing TMobile contract, but there were two reasons why I didn’t go down that route - firstly, jailbreaking the 1.1.3 firmware was too complicated and geeky even for me (although the latest version of ZiPhone changes all that); and secondly TMobile doesn’t have an EDGE service and the iPhone doesn’t (yet) have 3G. I didn’t fancy being stuck back at GPRS speeds after getting used to 3G.
So, now that I have a shiney new device up and running on O2, time for some initial thoughts. These are thoughts from the point of view of two points of comparison - a Nokia N73 on the 3 network that I use for (or was at least given by) work, and a TMobile MDA Vario II which is mine, and is a rebadged HTC Hermes device.
The first thing to point out is that I hate the Vario with a passion that I’ve never felt about an inanimate object before. It was an ill-considered purchase made in a hurry, and it sums up everything that’s gone wrong in trying to shoehorn the Windows OS onto a mobile platform. It’s just far, far too difficult to use - the menu-driven paradigm of Windows has been “adapted” to a touch interface, so it’s virtually impossible to drive one-handed. It’s slow - you rapidly get used to watching the spinning pizza of death as it tries to catch up with the human using it. And it’s really, really flakey - little things like the phone dialler, for instance. As you dial a number, it’s scanning the contacts database at the same time to bring up the details of the person you’re dialling. That would be quite a neat trick, were it not for the fact that with 1,000+ contacts the whole process is so slow that there’s a perceptible pause between hitting the key and it registering on the screen. It sounds trivial, but is incredibly annoying - if the phone isn’t very good at basic things LIKE MAKING A PHONE CALL, what use is it as a phone?
I just don’t care about the Nokia. I find it tricky to use - the interface is unintuitive (to me at least), and after using a Blackberry for several years, I found the numeric keypad and T9 extremely difficult to work with. As a phone, it’s rammed with features - but I don’t play games on it, the music player doesn’t come close to replacing an iPod and the web browser is let down by the fact that the screen is 2.5cm wide. All in all, it’s just “meh”.
So what about the iPhone?
Physically, it’s on the large side - as Aral pointed out while I was playing with his, it’s small enough to fit into a pocket, but it’s large enough that you have to take it out and put it on the table when you sit down - so everyone can see it and go “ahh” and “ooh”. But that’s balanced by the fact that there are no external protruberances or buttons to catch on anything - it’s the same smooth form factor that you’d expect from an iPod or a Mac.
The interface is also what you’d expect - extremely simple, stripped down and entirely touch-driven. It’s covered in affordances - clues about how the software operates and what’s expected of the user. For example,
Initially I was put off the touchscreen keyboard after playing with an iPod Touch - the keys seemed extremely small, and the lack of textural feedback meant that there was no way of telling short of looking whether your fingertip had actually “pressed” a key. But to my surprise, I’ve now got to the stage where I can type as quickly as I could on the physical keyboard of the Vario. The predictive text seems to work seamlessly, and without getting in the way - on the Vario, using the suggested word means breaking your typing flow and hitting the return key, whereas the iPhone assumes that you want the correct and inserts it as soon as a space or punctuation character is entered. Ignoring the suggested word is slightly counter-intuitive, because you have to touch the suggestion bubble - but quickly becomes second nature. While you may not want to write novels, banging out emails or quick Twitter updates is very straightforward.
Overall, I think this is a device that has dramatically raised the bar between what went before and what’s to come in the future. There’s simply no other device out there that can compete from a user interface point-of-view. Comparing the Nokia to the iPhone is like comparing a green-screen terminal to a GUI, and it simply makes Windows Mobile devices look ugly, slow, old-fashioned and buggy - they’ve been designed with an “it’ll do” attitude that is the polar opposite of the Apple “don’t release until it’s perfect” philosophy.
The interesting question is what the iPhone is going to do for mobile devices in the longer term - is it the shape of things to come, or is it just an early-stage disruption that will spur development off into other areas?
Technorati Tags: geek, hacking, iphone, gadgets, puppy
Filed under Technical stuff, Working smarter | Comment (0)Twitter Updates for 2008-02-16
- About to embark on a kitchen cleaning jihad. Can my life *be* any more glamourous? #
- Attempting to unbugger mail.app, which is denying all prior knowledge of servers and passwords #
- Mail is totally and utterly b0rked. The prospect of a complete rebuild looms. #
- Backing up stuff in preparation for a rebuild. #
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Filed under Twitter | Comment (0)links for 2008-02-16
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iPhone ebook reader
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iPhone ebook reader
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I think there are two ways to start / be a great creative business - ‘the group of experts’ (which I think of as The Magnificent Seven) and ‘the group of friends’ (which always makes me think of The Double-Deckers.)
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Rosenfeld Media has just released Indi Young’s Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy With Human Behavior.
Twitter Updates for 2008-02-15
- Interwebs are playing up… #
- Off out, brb #
- Annoyed that a hospital department has 3 phone lines with noone to answer, but doesn’t provide an email address #
- Still waiting for the jailbroken iPhone to explode or something. #
- astounded by how gougingly expensive York buses have become. £1.80 for a single - WTF? #
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