Bernhard is the CEO/Founder of Pathfinder where he applies lean startup principles and agile development to launch successful products. As a product of the Chicago-tech industry, he has a passion for launching successful software that makes a difference in the world and helping local startups make ti big. He leads the Chicago Lean Startup Circle and the Chicago Product Management Association (ChiPMA).
Our two part series Which Mobile Platform Should You Target – on web apps and on native apps – generated a fair bit of feedback, especially from those targeting cross platform development.
Here are a few other points of view on the subject – there is certainly no shortage of opinions and angles:
What’s your take?
Related Services: iPhone Application Development, Custom Software Development
In the first installment, we covered the simple case, where your application is really a web app, not really using any device features, without local storage, just pulling data from a web application. This time, we’ll tackle true native applications.
Our company gets a lot of requests for mobile application development. Most of the time the request is for a specific platform like the iPhone or Blackberry, but every so often we get a request for “all major mobile devices.” That request usually changes when people realize that developing on iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Windows Mobile, Palm, etc. really means developing five or more separate applications. The next question is usually what platform should they target first. That’s not an easy question to answer, because of the constant changes in the landscape and the type of application in question. Here’s how we tackle it:
Earlier this year I attended TECH cocktail’s first Chicago conference. They’ve been filling a much needed local networking role for technology entrepreneurs, and their first conference here was both well attended and had a number of good speakers, with a heavy Chicago focus, from Threadless‘ Harper Reed & Scott VanDenPlas to Everyblock’s Adrian Holovaty.
Recent events in the newspaper industry got me thinking about some of what Adrian has been saying on the subject.
Adrian, as some of you may know, developed an influential early mashup called chicagocrime.org that combined crime data from the Chicago police department with Google maps, and after a stint with the Washington Post, started Everyblock with a grant from the Knight Foundation.
Everyblock takes the concept of chicagocrime.org to it’s logical conclusion, as a geographic filter that aims to collect all the news and civic goings-on that have happened recently in your city, and make it simple for you to keep track of news in particular areas. They collect information ranging from crime data, restaurant inspections and building permits to news stories and craigslist lost and found posts to help you answer the question “what’s happening in my neighborhood?”
It’s what newspapers everywhere have been trying to tackle with their hyperlocal strategy, but from a different perspective: The data is just as important as the story, if not more so.
That local data is what Newspapers are in a better position to collect than almost anyone else, if they made it their focus. Instead it’s a means to an end for them, an end that is rapidly looking grimmer and grimmer. Meanwhile, folks for whom data collection, aggregation and synthesis are the end and not a means (like Everyblock, or business focused aggregators like IMS, Lexis Nexis, Factiva, Choicepoint and Thomson) look to have a much brighter present and future. Just another missed opportunity for Newspapers, I guess.
I went to the AT&T store on Friday to buy another testing phone for our developers, who are busily churning out more iPhone applications, and to switch one of my cell lines over from T-Mobile to my iPhone. It was an interesting experience, with T-Mobile’s very friendly and courteous customer service reps pitching me strongly on the G phone, and my service getting switched over in the middle of a business call. I asked the AT&T store manager what percentage of their sales were iPhones, and after a bit of thought, he said about 65%.
Granted, that’s only one location, but based on all of the annecdotal evidence I have, as well as how well the T-Mobile folks were trained to deal with the iPhone switch (not only on my request, but on my wife’s similar call last week) I am expecting some pretty strong numbers form Apple tomorrow.
I’m also expecting decent G phone numbers for Q4, but I’m not sure how well they’ll hold up later.
Update: It looks like Apple’s Q4 iPhone sales topped 6.9 million, about 800,000 units more than RIM’s 6.1 million in the equivalent period, beating most analyst expectations by a mile.
Interesting discussion on this over at Daring Fireball (of course) as well as a piece on Fortune on traditional analysts versus bloggers on Apple sales and earnings. The bloggers got the iPhone numbers better than the analysts, but everyone missed on mac sales.
Related Services: iPhone Application Development, Custom Software Development
As I leafed through my ever growing stack of tech magazines
yesterday, a column in eWeek by Peter Coffee, entitled Thoughtful gestures
– don’t make complexity elegant; make it disappear caught my eye.
Mr. Coffee was writing about a patent
application from Apple for processing multipoint gestures on a touch input
device. The language of patent applications is notoriously dense and jargon laden, so in laymans terms, this is about making it easier to interpret what a user wants when they touch a screen or touch pad at multiple points at the same time. Some simple examples of multipoint gestures include squeezing, stretching or twisting motions while touching a screen with your finger tips.
Mr. Coffee’s contention is that this invention is a way of making
more complex tasks easier to perform, that it has no real-world, practical application, and that this is the wrong problem for
inventors to tackle. He states
that “I’d rather see interface efforts based on watching what
users do, understanding common needs and designing systems in which those
actions are simple. Making complexity elegant is an achievement, but I’d rather
just make that complexity invisible.”
This is a fine sentiment, and a good one-sentence
description of user experience design, but he really misses the point of how
new input device inventions relate to user-experience design.
He illustrates the uselessness of gestural interfaces by describing
two ways of saving a users work – one using a whole series of convoluted
gestures that makes the user look like she’s doing the Macarena, and a simple,
elegant way of using keyboard strokes. Boy, based on that example, gestural interface sure sounds like a bad
idea, and inventors should stick to improving how to use existing input
devices.
The trouble with this example is that the same argument was
made about the mouse when it joined the keyboard as an interface device. There were (and are) many things that are
easier to do with a keyboard than with a mouse – saving a file using shortcuts,
typing a letter, entering data in a spreadsheet, just to name a few. Does that make the mouse useless? Why use something as complicated as a
mouse?
Let’s take the case of a user putting together a process
diagram in Visio. Using a keyboard
interface, a user can perform a lot of complicated keyboard strokes to
generate, place, link and annotate the diagram elements. Meanwhile, back in the real world (as Mr.
Coffee would say) the user simply drags and drops the elements in place using
his mouse, touch pad or pointer.
Clearly, different interfaces are good for different types
of actions, and it’s up to the user experience designer to apply the
appropriate combination of available interfaces in a way that lets the user
simplify and streamline their interactions.
So where might using a multipoint gesture interface simplify
a current, real world interaction? How
about Google Maps: Multipoint gestures such as squeezing,
stretching or turning, combined with single point gestures like dragging, could
make navigation significantly simpler and faster than the current mouse-based approach.
The point of inventions like this is not to make more
complex acts achievable, but what things can be simplified using these
inventions. Almost all ways in which we
interface with computers are pretty complex. For example, learning to use a keyboard is a lot more complex and time
consuming than learning to use a mouse, and learning to navigate using keyboard
shortcuts requires much more familiarity with an application than using a
mouse. Gestural interfaces need be no
more complex than keyboard or mouse interfaces.
So inventors, keep inventing! Between user experience designers, developers and usere, we’ll take the best inventions to make things genuinely simple.