Posts Tagged ‘Apple’

Android on it’s way to a 3.1 moment

Aug 10
22

The story of Android vs. iPhone reminds me a lot of the story of Microsoft Windows vs. Apple Macintosh. In this version the part of Microsoft will be played by Google.

The similarities are striking. Apple was first to market and wowed everyone. Google followed close behind with a competitive, less polished product. Now is where it get’s interesting.  In the original story Microsoft had success with the OS but it wasn’t until Windows 3.1 when everything clicked. I believe Android could be at a similar tipping point. A large number of hardware OEM’s are on board with Android and with a small number of adjustments the OS is primed to take off.

What needs to change?

  • Apps are inconsistent, and hard to use. The design patterns and guidance that are available in iOS are missing and developers are left to come up with their own sets of best practices.
  • Level of design and attention to detail is low. The OS works, but not well.
  • App market is incredibly poor. No wonder dev’s aren’t making money. No excuse Google has to fix this. App Search is even worse, I expect more from Google on this topic.

Fix those three things and Android will take off faster like a rocket.

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Posted in Apple, Google, Microsoft, mobile | 3 Comments »

Visual TrackPad of tomorrow

Jul 10
27

What Apple Should have released for a desktop trackpad

Apple released a product that was decidedly un-magical when it released the Magic Trackpad. Despite the use of the word “Magic” the device was really just a big trackpad with nothing to amaze or delight the end-user.  The battery charger that comes with it was more impressive.

The true trackpad of tomorrow would have the following characteristics:

  • Control the computer pointer with touch gestures (duh)
  • Provide application  specific touch interface enhancements
  • Web browser specific controls at your fingertips
  • Formatting tools from your word processor at your fingertips
  • Crop and resize photos with your fingers visually.
  • When typing a number show a calculator keypad
  • Many of the interface enhancments that are taking place on the iPad could be transposed to desktop apps.

A huge efficiency is in minimizing the number of times your hand has to move from the keyboard to the mouse and back. This is why there are so many keyboard shortcuts for things that can be done with a mouse. The mouse/trackpad can evolve to present visual ways to process input in a way that would be more efficient then either the keyboard or a mouse.

There’s an opportunity to create a true visual and magical input device that combines the best aspects of a trackpad the iPad and the mouse.

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Posted in Apple, Ideas, Prediction, User Interface | No Comments »

9 Things I didn’t know about the iPad

May 10
14
  1. The keyboard design isn’t as slick as the iPhone keyboard design
     It’s not quite a MacBook keyboard layout and it’s not an iPhone keyboard layout either. Commit actions like, done, go, search aren’t colored like on the iPhone. The dashes, dots, commas are hard to distinguish. On the iPhone a typewriter like key pops out so you can visually confirm that you hit the right key. On the iPad there is no feature to deal with occlusion.
  2. How you hold the device really alters the user experience and how apps should be designed.
     On the iPhone the design is done in such a way to accommodate the way you hold the device.  For example in mobile Safari and in email the command buttons are along the bottom of the screen. This puts many buttons in thumbs reach. On the iPad key buttons in both email and Safari are across the top. This means that if you’re holding the device along the bottom you can’t reach many of the buttons without moving your hands. Since the home button tends to be along the bottom there’s no comfortable rest-state.
  3. About my laptop
    It starts out with just email and some web-browsing but pretty soon you realize that most of the things you do can be done on an iPad. Not all, and this gap is closing. In particular heavy typing tasks (blogging for me) and heavy editing, especially visual and graphics editing is still better with a laptop. That being said I am much happier bringing a light iPad to a meeting then a heavy laptop.
  4. You don’t use this device like a giant iPod.
    I’ve never read a book or a magazine before on either my laptop or iPod.  I’ve never played a four person multi-touch game on either of these devices.  The experience is different and fun. In a new way.  Magazines and books are key here. This is the future of digital content.
  5. Certain people could use this as a replacement computer but I can’t.
    Email and web browsing without compromise. (Well maybe the Flash thing) Other then that you have a pretty nice device for doing the core things my mom uses her computer to do.  For technical users the iPad doesn’t do enough to replace their laptop.
  6. Screen orientation is flipping me out
    When you hold the screen in vertical orientation you get 4 icons across and 5 icons down. When you flip the screen you get 5 across and 4 down. The annoying part is that the icons re-positions so you can’t use spacial memory to find an icon.  Was that icon on the top right? Ohh, sorry now it’s in the middle left.
  7. The web is not ready for the iPad (yet).
    There are still plenty of sites with embedded video/flash and when I hit these sites I am likely to move on. I almost never stop what I’m doing to go grab my laptop.  As the iPad sails past the 1M mark the tech-savvy sites will transition over to H264 video. The issue is primarily video although other flash goodness will still be missing.
    Flash sucks but HTML5 is worse then Flash on many things, more on that in another post.
     Subscribe to this blog to hear more on that.
  8. The battery lasts a freakishly long time
    It’s nothing like a Kindle but compared to other bright-screen electronics. Wow. That’s all I have to say about that.
  9. A different user experience is fundamental to touch computing
    I remember a program manager from Microsoft talking about the Tablet PC back in 2000. He said, in the history of computing there has never been a product category that has failed as often as tablet based computing. From the Alan Kay to the Apple Newton and even Windows for Pen Computing.  The history books are filled with these ‘slate’ computers that have failed. He then went on to explain how the Tablet PC would be different because it focused on the input experience.

    The truth is that the tablet/slate experiences of the past were not that different. It was Windows with a great input editor. It’s too early to tell if the iPad will succeed or fail but the iPad user experience is so different in a fundamental way that it will change how people interact with computers.

    How do I know? My two year old is now reached out and trying to scroll the screen on my laptop. If that’s not the future I don’t know what is.

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    Posted in Apple, Design, Review, Uncategorized, Usability | 1 Comment »

    Apple’s Tablet, Slate, Canvas, Taplet

    Jan 10
    24

    Tablet style computing has been one of the most failed technologies ever. History is full of examples of similar devices that have crashed and burned.

    1950′s Styalator electronic tablet, 1960′s RAND Tablet and Dynabook. Various generations of Apple Newton devices, Microsoft Slate’s and Windows for Pen based computers. Even the Kindle that has sold about 1.5 million units total could be viewed as a failure when compared to numbers like 40-60 million iPhone’s and iPod Touch devices.

    Why have so many companies tried and so many failed? Perhaps more importantly what does Apple think it can do to succeed? Here’s what I predict:

    • Best overall device for consuming content. Books, Magazines, Music, DVD’s.
      Devices of the past focused on creating content (usually with a pen) only the Kindle was good at reading content and only book form at that.
    • Best mobile web-browser. Sure you can pinch and zoom on your phone but if you really want to surf you need something larger. This middle ground is great for a tablet sized device.  You can finally read a website on a bus or train without trying to balance a laptop or looking too conspicuous.
    • Interface based on the iPhone. Clearly Apple has nailed the iPhone UI. They will take this base and extend it to a larger device. Not as big as a laptop but somewhere in between. The touch based interface will be enhanced with a two hand multi-touch predictive keyboard.  Everyone will hate it at first.  Three months later everyone will call it brilliant.
    • It’ll look like a flat iPhone.  90% screen, a little edge. Thin as hell.  It’ll be priced so that people perceive it as being expensive and premium compared to everything else. $799, maybe more.  Expect people to say…  Why would I get that when I can get a Kindle for $259.  That sort of thing just makes people desire it even more.
    • App developers will flock to it.
    • Magazines will be the killer content.
    • Social games will be the killer app.

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    Posted in Apple, Design, Prediction | 2 Comments »

    Apple’s Secret

    Sep 09
    8

    Apple is generally great at keeping secrets. They love to break the news and wow the audience. They are amazing at this and control the media experience with precision. The process starts with the invitation, carefully crafted with just a hint of what’s to come.  It has the exact effect that Apple wants. Everyone is speculating and getting excited. It’s like opening a present on your birthday… What could it be?

    The problem is that controlling this experience requires secrecy. It means that within Apple there are people who know the secret and people who do not.  The secrecy creates dividing lines between groups. The groups that are not ‘in the know’ then go off and create their own secrets.  This is what has happened at Apple and it’s getting out of control.

    Everyone gets paranoid about saying too much and in turn says too little. This secrecy has created a particularly deep divide in the iPhone part of Apple’s business. The cloak and dagger secrecy behind the ways that Apple runs the app store have made me question if the secrecy is ‘worth it.’

    I appreciate the show and the magic that goes on to make it happen. That said a clearer line needs to be drawn between what’s good for hardware sales and what’s good for the rest of the business.

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    Posted in Apple, Venting | No Comments »

    iPhone 3.0 Announcment

    Mar 09
    20

    The new iPhone 3.0 release marks a significant milestone in sophistication and leadership.  The new release seems to serve two agendas.  1) Satisfy developers 2) Satisfy end-users

    From the end-user perspective the iPhone adds a number of features:

    1. Cut, copy, paste
    2. Photo/text message (MMS)
    3. Landscape use of email, notes and other applications
    4. System wide search
    5. Voice recording

    Among a long list of many other new features.  These make the iPhone a much more powerful device and narrow the gap between what was traditionally seen as a laptop function and what was considered possible for a phone.  Most of these features were changes to the core built-in tools and could only have been done by Apple.  I suspect the timing of the summer release will be such as to poison the well for the much anticipated Palm Pre device.

    The three things that users want and are still missing were:

    • Flash support
      Was omitted probably for as much political as technical reasons.  Apple likes new developers coming to the platform and wants unique native applications, not Flash ports.  I expect they will hold off on this as long as they possibly can.
    • Background applications
      Were omitted for performance reasons.  While I may not like it I agree with the trade-off.  If background applications were allowed Facebook, Twitter, ESPN and everything else would try to run in the background killing the battery.  A server based push model while not as flexible is a good way to address this pain point.
    • Video Recording
      A core function seen in many lower end phones. It’s possible the new API’s will allow developers to do this but given everything else Apple did add I was surprised this was not done.

    Developer Features

    Much of the recent success of the platform has been in large part to developer written applications and the App Store. Apple announced that over 800,000 downloads of the SDK. Wow!  Apple has taken the original iPhone that wasn’t a platform at all and over the last year has turned it into a mobile computer.

    We’ve been designing and developing applications for the iPhone since it was released and while the iPhone is a very powerful platform there were a number of rough spots that Apple has been fixed with this new release.

    • More complete set of API’s.
      The original release of the iPhone SDK was limited in that a lot of the API’s were not documented or makred as off limits. With this new release Apple promises 1000 new API’s hopefully opening up more flexibility in what applications are allowed to do and the types of tools that can be built.
    • Easier wireless networking.
      This new functionality allows users to play/chat/interact and otherwise communicate with other local users. This opens up a number of possibilities for social games, information exchange, syncronization and interactions.
    • Built-in maps.
      Google has allowed their map component to be used in other applications. It’s still not entirely clear how this will work but this adds a nice component that was previously unavailable.
    • Push Notifications.
      Many applications need the ability to alert you to new things, events, alarms, messages, etc.  Push notifications provides a solution for this but unfortunately it won’t work for some types of notifications.  You can’t build a “Where is my child application.” or “tell me when I’m near so and so.” you can however build many other applications that were previously not possible.
    • Interaction with hardware.
      This is a big one. Expect to see custom iPhone apps for many of the speaker systems and audio docks Bose, Griffin, Altec, etc. Expect to see custom iPhone apps for BMW, Volkswagon and Audi to allow you to control various car features from your phone or Ipod Touch.  This will lock in the iPhone to a lot of new hardware devices (good for Apple, bad for other competing devices.)
    • Interaction with the music library
      This will allow applications to play music from your own music library. So you can pick a playlist in a game and listen to your own music without having to exit out and go start your iPod.
    • UpSell and Subscriptions
      This is a big one for developers. The business of application building has some problems in it’s current form. Any established software company knows you need the ability to upsell.  The ability to upsell and sell subscriptions allows developers to build deeper and richer applications, create new content and new features that can be sold.  This enabled a whole new breed of applications that could previously not have been done.  Apple still seems to be missing the ability for developers to charge for software upgrades (upgrade from version 1 to version 2 for just $0.99) but hopefully this is will be possible.

    What we’re personally most excited about:

    1. Wireless networking – We have a game that we would like to enable with Wireless Networking. We’re also thinking about a business card exchange program that could do the same.
    2. Hardware Support – We have a fitness application that could take advantage of hardware support
    3. We have a music application in development that we would like to be able to play your own library

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    Posted in Misc. | No Comments »

    A better iPhone tip Calculator

    Jan 09
    17

    One of the very first things I did when the iPhone came out was to write a little free web based tip calculator. This was mostly a tool to learn about the web-capabilities of the iPhone while writing a simple tool.  We decided we could do much better with a native application.  Our new version is available today.

    For this application we really wanted to do a scenario based design.  We had three core scenarios in mind:

    1) I go to lunch or dinner and figure out a tip

    2) I go to dinner with friends and split the check with a tip

    3) I go to dinner with friends and one person just gets a salad and everyone else gets a full meal with drink.

    Most tip calculators get you to Scenario 1 or 2. Scenario 1 is pretty easy we need the bill total and the tip percentage and we can quickly compute the tip amount.

    Scenario 2 was a little more complex but not much. We perform the original calculation and then just divide the total bill and the tip line up between the number of people.

    Scenario 3 was when it got a little more interesting and I think this is a unique feature I haven’t seen anywhere else.  We allow the user to go into the details of the bill and manually adjust each dinners check.

    If one person had an extra drink you use the slider or plus/minus arrows to adjust their price and everyone price adjusts automatically.  This can also be used as people are putting money into a pile. You can quickly see who has put in how much and what amount is left.  If you adjust a slider it stays fixed allowing you to move to the next diner.

    Tip Calculator for the iPhone

    Our calculator allows you to see if you have an underpayment or an overpayment. This makes it easier to ask everyone to chip in another buck or two as needed.

    The visual design of the application is styled to look like a restaurant napkin. While this doesn’t impact the functionality it makes for a fun and attractive design that we hope people will enjoy sharing and using with their friends.

    We learned an interesting usability lesson in building this applicatoin. It turns out that it’s critical to test on actual hardware and not just on a simulator. For most of our basic development we built the application and tested it in the iPhone simulator software. It was only when we got it on an actual device that we discovered that the slider bars can be a little tricky to adjust at a fine granularity.  If you had a $90 bill the slider can go from 0 to 90 and making fine level adjustments with your finger can be quite difficult. After usability testing this we decided to add the plus and minus icons to make fine grain control a little easier.  We also made it possible to just hold down the plus/minus and allow the button to repeat as an added way to help peeople get the price right.

    There’s a lot of subteltly in building applications for mobile devices. We hope you like this one.

    Download our new tip calculator from the App Store for $0.99

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    Posted in Apple, Design, Development | 10 Comments »

    Iphone wireframe and interface toolkit

    Nov 08
    9

    A wireframe is a design tool used to easily communicate ideas, and allow for quick iteration. Wireframes can be created easily by anyone with or without technical know-how to discuss ideas. 

    Often when I work on projects with CEO’s and high-level executives there is a problem communicating design, concepts and intent. People may cite the lack of design or drawing skills. A wireframe levels the playing field allowing anyone with even basic Powerpoint skills to create basic screen designs.  I posted my original wireframe for web-applications here.  I’m now back with an iPhone based version. 

    Why iPhone? Well first off I’ve been doing a number of iPhone related projects including Runkeeper and GPSTwit among others. Secondly the iPhone provides a unique interface language and set of reusable design patterns that can be easily incorporated into new applications. While the basic wireframe components can be used to conceptualize any mobile device the iPhone interface makes it uniquly different. 

    The primary design pattern used on the phone is the list pattern. There are many examples of the list pattern but the basic idea is that it allows you to add/edit/remove/view sets of items.  The second design pattern is the table pattern usually used for forms, input and settings. Combined these two elements form the foundation of the platform. 

    The wireframe provides a number of examples of how these patterns can be used, modified or altered.

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    Posted in Apple, Design, User Interface | 2 Comments »

    Application design for mobile phones

    Jun 08
    5

    I love designing applications for mobile phones. It forces you to think about the essential features. Often times this is exactly the type of design you want on larger applications but it’s tougher to convince clients that the application gets better when you take away features. Many larger applications can learn from this.

    • Do one thing, do it well
    • Linear flow top-down
    • Purposeful word choice
    • Large fonts for readability
    • Keyboard accessibility
    • The details matter

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    Posted in Apple, Design, Experience, Prediction, Telephone | 2 Comments »