sangsara.net

Tag: Mobile

  • Ditching Read It Later for Instapaper

    This evening I made the switch from Read It Later to Instapaper. The latter is by far the more popular service. On the surface, it might be hard to choose one over the other. Their iPhone apps both cost $4.99 (Read It Later, Instapaper), they both have free-to-use websites, they both suck the text out of a web article you’re too busy to read at the moment of encounter, and store it online for later enjoyment. Well, at least that’s the idea.

    It seems grabbing the right text off a page isn’t that easy, and RIL was just letting me down too many times. Quite often I’d have words like Home, About, and Related Articles – clearly bits of the navigational interface missed by the dust filter – appearing before or in the middle of the story I wanted to read. Sometimes they’d be the only words on display: the article itself having been weeded out and tossed aside, 90% of the page’s content or not!
    The RIL text engine wasn’t very smart about pretending to be a normal browser either. Sometimes the policing mechanisms of a website would prevent it from loading the intended content and direct RIL to the front page instead. In the instances where I might only get around to reading the article months later, there’d be simply no way to remember what I was supposed to have been saving. Salon, Edge Magazine, Wired Mobile, and The New York Times all gave it trouble, among others.
    There were reasons I stayed this long, though. Read It Later excels at being social. After reading an item I really liked, I could send it to Diigo for full-text archiving, or Evernote, or tweet it, Facebook it, bookmark it in Delicious, share it in Google Reader, or even email the plain text to a friend who might be interested. The Diigo bit was closest to my heart. But for every sweet feature – a full-screen view and a scrollbar for quick skimming are two examples worth mentioning – there’d also be the disadvantages of being second-best.
    I think the reason Instapaper has such a knack for sniffing out the right words from a page is that dedicated users send Marco Arment emails whenever something doesn’t work right. By his own admission, the system is a pile of hacks, but as far as the end user (me) is concerned, it just works. I wish it didn’t always have to be about Features vs. Excellence, but Instapaper definitely wins the lower-my-blood-pressure challenge. RIL probably doesn’t get enough feedback to develop a comparably intelligent engine, but missing the first paragraph of every article on the New York Times? Come on.
    Also, most apps install support for Instapaper first, and the wait for RIL integration is always long and uncertain. I don’t know if Nate Weiner, Read It Later’s developer, does anything to help adoption of his service along, but like in the case of the new Twitterrific for iPhone, users like me end up being the ones petitioning other app developers to please please please consider adding RIL support. It sucks.
    Plus, in the time since I last saw Instapaper, it’s received a bunch of great new features like a paginated viewing method, and an enhanced presentation with inline graphics. I’ll miss RIL’s sharing features, and hope Instapaper adds just a couple more export options to the current choices of Tumblr & Twitter (Diigo, please!), but for the moment it’s enough that I can bookmark stuff and be secure in the knowledge that they’ll be waiting for me, complete, when I get to them.
    The fact that this blog somehow appears in the screenshot for Instapaper in the App Store has nothing to do with it, I swear!

  • ➟ What if Nokia went Android?

    Monday Note:
    Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia’s CEO calls his new head of mobile devices, Anssi Vanjoki in his office, hidden inside the company’s research center at 995 Page Mill Road, in Palo Alto, California. On his desk, three devices: a Nokia N900, a Motorola Droid and an iPhone.
    ‘Anssi, we’re hosed.
    […]
    We once were the kings of sleek design. Now, look at the N900 next and cry. We’re the land Marimekko and Iittala, of Finnish design. All over the world, people pay a premium for elegance, for exclusivity. We’re not doomed to a race to the bottom, we’re destined to a race for quality, for elegance.
    And look at the numbers. We spend 13.5% of revenue for R&D while Apple, doing “everything”, spends 3%. If we stop spending this doomed to failure R&D money, we can lower our percentage below Apple’s.
    Next, we only do three models: good, better and best. Three price points and we’re done. Simple message, less product managers and other corporate busybodies showing PowerPoint slides to one another over endless meetings across ten time zones.
    Anssi, look at me: are you ready for the bloodbath?’
    I enjoyed this “science fiction” exploration of an imaginary conversation at Nokia HQ. It does kind of make sense for Nokia to stop throwing its money into the bottomless well of Symbian patching and superficial fixes in favor of Android. Alas, today brought a post on the Nokia corporate blog vowing to continue on the Symbian/Meego path over Android. It’s rousingly titled “The Fightback Starts Now”. I’m sure a lot of Nokia fans wish it had started back in 2007 when the iPhone was announced.

  • Smartphone usability and my parents

    I just watched my mother try to take a photo with her Nokia smartphone for the first time. An orchid in the home was blooming, and it was the closest camera within reach. She only uses it as a regular phone, and as the least technically-minded member of the family, is strangely the only one not using an iPhone. Needless to say, she was baffled by the Symbian OS. A primary hardware feature on the device, and the icon was buried in a submenu. Afterwards, she asked my father where to find the file so she could email it to herself, and he couldn’t readily answer her.

    His last phone before the iPhone 3GS was a Nokia E90 Communicator, a top-of-the-line Symbian workhorse business machine. He’d spent so much time understanding how it worked, that the iPhone’s simplicity initially confused him. He’d ask how to access the file system so he could manage his data. Coming around to a task-centric model (photos are always available in the Photos app; music lives in the iPod data well, managed with iTunes) took awhile, but now that he gets it, the Nokia way is unfathomable. Managing a nested file system on a mobile device is no consumer’s idea of fun.

    There’s always been the image of Macs being for stupid/lazy people who can’t work “real” computers and handle complexity in the user interface. Now the iPhone has inherited that reputation in the face of competition from Android, a system that David Pogue calls “best suited for technically proficient high-end users who don’t mind poking around online to get past the hiccups” in his review of the new Droid X. This became clearer as I got older, but I don’t consider most people over the age of 40 who struggle with technology to be stupid or lazy. It comes down to privilege, familiarity, and priorities.

    One of Apple’s most prominent user experience attempts at improving accessibility involves mimicking real-world interfaces, such as using a yellow notepaper background and handwriting fonts in Notes, and superfluous flipping page animations in iBooks. Marco Arment has a good post on this: Overdoing the interface metaphor. It’s a divisive strategy that works well in the early stages of familiarization, but soon becomes a hindrance as one grows more proficient/confident. One of the best metaphors I’ve ever encountered on a mobile device was the lens cover on one of my old Sony-Ericsson cameraphones. Slide it open, and the camera application started up. Along with a physical shutter button, it was perfect, and my mother would have understood it instantly. Such a design benefits even experienced users who know how to start the camera up from the main menu. It’s easy to see how a physical feature can offer that experience, but the real challenge is finding that middle ground in software.

    * I ended up taking the photo with my Panasonic LX3.

  • ➟ CNET Behind the Scenes feature on Windows Phone 7

    The company decided more than a year ago to start over yet again, with a new approach and a firm target–holiday 2010–to have the all-new Windows Phone on the market. “I think when we look back on the release five years from now, this was a foundational release, not the release that broke through,” Myerson said. “We’ve got some tough competition.

    Confirmed: Copy/paste functionality won’t be included in 1.0, and the producer doesn’t consider it one of his top 10 things to add in the future. I applaud their start-from-scratch approach, but they are starting way, way behind. Although many will demand multitasking, VoIP/video-calling, and a ready to go marketplace of apps in 2010, the combination of Zune/Xbox Live/Office features may be enough to attract some customers.
    Link [CNET.com]

  • ➟ Rumor: Microsoft may have sold just 500 Kin phones

    […] Microsoft has only sold about 500 Kin One and Two phones through Verizon since they went on sale in May.

    Unofficially, it’s speculated that the lack of a smartphone OS but the insistence on charging for smartphone-level plans may have muted interest and driven customers to the Motorola Droid and other phones with now-similar prices but more features.

    Poor KIN and Danger. It’s almost as if that stepchild division were given rope and ordered to hang themselves. Still, they must be feeling better than the JooJoo guys.

    Link [Electronista.com]

  • ➟ DoCoMo Summer Collection 2010

    Great compositing work in this 30sec TVC for NTT DoCoMo’s new range of mobile phones. Insufferably chirpy yet irresistible, as you might expect from a musical Japanese sales pitch.

    I think the girl is Kimura Kaela, a British-Japanese musician/idol.

    Link [YouTube]

  • The Causes of iPad Disappointment



    Letdown. Disappointment. Anticlimax. These words have appeared in nearly all the first articles written about the newly unveiled Apple iPad, barely a day old in the world. The reasons are not entirely important in the long run, but many of these stories themselves will admit that expectations were raised beyond reasonable levels, that Apple had no hope of impressing everyone the way they did in 2007 with the first iPhone. This environment of fanciful conjecture and presumptuous theorizing was the result of an industry’s decade-long fascination with getting the idea of a tablet computer to stick – seemingly against the wishes of the consumers meant to buy them – and the belief that Apple can succeed where other companies embarrass themselves. They’ve done it before, after all.

    It never helps that Apple says very little about what it’s got until it’s got it. The veil of secrecy provides theatrical levels of entertainment at every event; charged affairs where people whoop and whistle from the moment Jobs takes the stage. As press conferences go, they overdeliver. But on the eve of events as the iPad’s debut, such enthusiasm cuts both ways, and the company is left with the unenviable task of managing expectations without any direct communication – a task that has become increasingly hard over the past few years.

    In the beginning, Macs were a relatively quiet business; high profile products that most people saw but never considered owning. The success of the iPod energized Apple’s public image, and eventually sensational moves like the decision to cancel its hottest product, the iPod mini, in favor of an impossibly innovative new replacement, raised the bar not only for its hapless competitors, but for the company itself. Even then, the shifts from small to smaller iPods with color screens where black and white displays were once standard, were no indication of the iPhone’s shape or form before January 2007. That device’s unprecedented introduction, so many orders of magnitude beyond what had been expected of Apple (a phone that played music, and that wasn’t as ugly or challenged as the Motorola ROKR, would have sufficed for many), changed the pre-event guessing game forever. Do one magic trick, and you’re always going to be asked for more.

    Consider that at the time of the iPhone’s release, touchscreens were not a new technology. Palm’s PDAs and countless phones running Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system had touchscreens for years, and were fairly well liked. Yet as the tech world watched Steve Jobs scroll a contact list with a flick of his finger, it was impossible to make the connection between that and the experience we had become accustomed to. The older technology, resistive touchscreens, required styluses or fingernails, with scrolling conducted with bars that were clicked and dragged. A series of small innovations (capacitive touchscreens, direct contact momentum scrolling, and a smoothly-animated graphical interface) combined to redefine the way we expect to interact with handheld computers today. It’s a classic Apple play: refine existing technologies, add advancements in software, and produce an entirely new class of product.

    Given the rise of ebook readers like the Kindle, and the continuing efforts of PC makers to fashion smaller and cheaper computers from low-power CPUs like Intel’s Atom, it was only natural to think that Apple would soon do the same for the popular netbook category or a tablet*. It would be another game changer equal to or greater than the iPhone, we began to hear. In the days leading up to January 27, a quote attributed to Steve Jobs was circulated, to the effect that the tablet would become his greatest achievement. John Gruber of the Daring Fireball blog predicted that Apple was ‘swinging big’ with a new product that one would buy instead of a laptop. Others dreamt of new multi-touch interfaces that would further bury Microsoft’s second stab at tablet computer, shown to be an HP “slate” running Windows 7 without any modifications that might make operation with a finger possible in lieu of a mouse. In all fairness, many of these outsized rumors were based on the presumption that the tablet would cost up to USD$1000. What could possibly cost that much, close to a full computer, except a full computer? It would be ironic if the thousand-dollar figure was leaked by Apple to increase the impact of the final $499 price point, only to backfire by raising expectations.

    These pre-announcement assumptions by enthusiasts and tech writers are now par for the course, as are the disappointments that follow each new product revelation. The iPhone 3G largely met expectations because it corrected the one deficiency that kept the original iPhone from greatness**: the speed at which it accessed the internet. It also coincided with the opening of the platform with the iPhone SDK, which led to the app-happy state of affairs we now enjoy. Regardless, complaints about the low resolution camera, unremovable battery, etc. continued to get a public airing.

    Last year’s iPhone 3GS was roundly criticized for being an unexciting upgrade, retaining the same looks as its predecessor with little more than a megapixel and speed bump, effectively delivering the previous year’s expected iPhone but late. It went on to become a huge success. The buying public is immune to disappointment, it seems, perhaps because they don’t read blogs that sell them pipe dreams.

    The iPhone 3GS announcement, and the internet’s lukewarm reactions to it, would be a good analogy for what’s happening with the iPad, except nobody hoped for the next iPhone to summarize a decade of engineering efforts. Like the iPhone 3GS, the iPad initially appears to be an evolutionary product, being based on existing technology Apple has repeatedly shown in public. It’s faster and more powerful, but not radically different from known territory. At first sight, it’s hard to imagine what the changes mean in actual use. You might think you can live with the old model and how things used to be. That’s a shame.

    Apple is positioning the iPad as a third pillar in their portable product lineup: more than a smartphone, less than a laptop, yet better at some things than either of the other two. This instantly invalidates the idea of buying one “instead of a laptop”. Clearly you are meant to have both. It syncs with a Mac or PC the same way an iPhone or iPod does. It’s a secondary computer, but it’s also an appliance (see Farhad Manjoo’s articles on Slate.com – here and here).

    It sends email, it plays games, and it will be fantastic for Twitter, but in my opinion, the iPad in its current form holds the most value as an interactive document, or to use a term repeated many times last night, an ‘intimate’ way of experiencing media. Despite having no plans to purchase a Kindle DX or similar reader I suspect that I will fall in love with the thing the moment I hold a book-sized slice of full-color webpage in my hands. As Manjoo writes, “Everything about it—its size, shape, weight, and fantastically intuitive user interface—feels just right.”

    With the first iPhone, Apple understood that touch interfaces are an emotional experience. Pressing the pad of your finger to a virtual page (in Eucalyptus, for example) and turning it fools some part of the brain that isn’t dedicated to understanding a screen is not the same thing as paper. It’s satisfying, even though a facsimile of a real experience. It’s more realistic than using a fingernail, which one never applies to a real page, and more personal than a stylus. My guess is that if capacitive touch of that quality wasn’t available, the iPhone project would never have gotten the green light.

    I submit that the iPad takes one more step towards solidifying the illusion of digital media with real, physical presence. It’s not just a bigger iPhone, it’s an iPhone big enough to pass for a printed page and fool your mind. A frame that holds websites with long-form writing, augmented with video and animation, that we can hold lazily, effortlessly, in our hands or laps like the glossy magazines or newspapers they approximate, is nothing short of magical, to borrow another marketing word. If the iPad became transparent like a slab of glass when turned off, wouldn’t be exactly like the science fiction movie ideal of a portable computer? Don’t you want to live in the future? I say use your imagination.

    —

    And yet more frustration sprang from the absence of anticipated features, some of which are explained by the iPad’s positioning as a third pillar, while others invite more guesswork and predictions. Q. Why doesn’t it have a camera? A. It’s not for photography, and videoconferencing is the realm of a phone. Q. Why doesn’t it have USB ports/connect to an iPhone for syncing and tethering? A. It’s not a primary computer. Q. Where’s the multitasking and improved notifications? A. iPhone 4.0?

    I believed that an update to the current iPhone OS, version 3.2, would be announced during yesterday’s event, which didn’t happen. As we know, the iPad runs a version of the OS with this number, but for the next 60 days it’s not something you can buy. That gives a 60-day window to expect iPhone OS 3.2 to be released for existing iPhone users. Will this bring some of the iPad’s new features to the iPhone, like the iBooks reader and iBookstore? My guess is no. These will remain exclusive iPad features for the time-being. In that case, iPhone OS 3.2 might only bring a few bugfixes and trivial UI enhancements. I believe Apple is already looking ahead to iPhone OS 4.0, to be announced in the March-May window, and released in concert with the next iPhone model. Improved notifications are a must, and I’m fairly confident they will be present.

    The other concern, third-party app multitasking, is far and away the number one demanded feature for the iPhone OS amongst people I know, but I’m becoming ever more skeptical that it will materialize. Apple has invested heavily in push notifications as an alternative, too much for it to be merely a stopgap measure. With the iPad, which Apple is attempting to push as a viable machine for occasional work (more than a smartphone, less than a laptop), the lack of multitasking is even more apparent. If I’m writing a document in Pages and need to move back and forth quickly between a website, email, and a notes app from which I might want to copy information, iPhone OS 3.x requires me to switch in and out of the Home Screen each time, closing and reopening the apps.

    The non-multitasking answer? Persistence and a quick launcher. iPhone OS 4.0 could enable a system-wide method for saving an app’s state (what you’re doing in it) when you quit, and having it restore upon the next launch. And according to Gruber, everyone who’s laid hands on it agrees the iPad and its new A4 processor are incredibly fast. Add that combination to a home button double-click that pops up a list of your last five apps, and you’re effectively alt-tabbing between running applications without the battery drain.

    iPhone OS 4.0 will be a big deal when announced, whatever it actually does, and Apple understandably couldn’t show its features yesterday as part of the iPad. But because they share the same OS, it stands to reason that whatever the iPhone gains from here on out will also be on the iPad. Being that the iPhone is incredibly important to Apple and already accounts for 32% of smartphone profits worldwide while receiving rapid software development both from within the company and out, it’s inevitable that the iPad’s image will soon evolve beyond that of an underwhelming giant iPod touch.

    ~

    * Legend has it that research for a “Safari Pad” tablet wound up becoming the basis of the iPhone, so it’s possible that the universe is completely backward.

    ** It’s worth noting that the original iPhone was also criticized for its camera, built-in battery, price, and not supporting third-party applications, Java, Microsoft Exchange, MMS, copy and paste, etc. despite being ridiculously ahead of the pack in terms of miniaturization, engineering, web browsing, media playback, and user experience. After three years, competitors have yet to match the software or browsing. Someday, the iPad’s reception will probably be remembered in a similar way.

  • iPhone app review: Ramp Champ

    (This iPhone review and others like it have been moved to my new app review site, positivemachine.com. Why not have a look?)

    Ramp Champ (Game)

    Price: $1.99
    What it is: A carnival of sadomasochism.

    Every retirement home has one old man who used to be a championship boxer, tough enough to still knock out two young men bigger than him. Likewise, every group of cowed nerds has among their numbers one who will eventually arm up and shoot up the school in a black trenchcoat. Ramp Champ has a lot in common with these people.

    It lives amongst the feeble pursuits most call “casual games”, a candycoated term cooked up by executives to describe alternative entertainment for normal people – those don’t play first-person shooters and airplane simulations eight hours straight at a time – or as we like to call them, “games for pussies”. But don’t be fooled by the company it keeps. Ramp Champ is a prison-hard motherf*cker. I suspect it broke out of hardcore gaming prison and into casual gaming prison just because it was bored.

    Ramp Champ is like the serial killer who wears thick glasses and tucks his striped shirt into his pants and talks with a feigned speech impediment and holds a boring desk job at a government agency, but really goes home every night and becomes like Christian Bale or something, with ripped muscles from pumping rusty iron in his basement and hunting animals in the woods naked.

    So what looks like an innocent game of skeeball is actually an elaborate psychology experiment. I mean, it must be! The physics simulation suggests that you have full control over where the ball goes, if you’re good enough, and then when you need to score the most, it lets some blind Parkinson’s patient take over the shot. But sometimes, it does exactly what you expect, making the time spent smearing goat’s blood on your own face seem completely worth it. It frustrates, it makes a mockery of your so-called skills, and it’s completely addictive. I know because I’ve mastered it at the cost of my sanity.



    Slammer Rating: 4/5 shivs

    Buy Ramp Champ in the iTunes App Store.

    —


    Above: What you’ll see when you become a ramp champ. Each of the levels’ three goals filled in with a yellow dot.