There’s an App for that: Apple

Today, we celebrated one of my work colleagues birthday’s in the usual fashion by off key singing – somewhat lacklustre, with the lack of alcohol to uninhibit the developer contingent in the audience – and a collection of delicious gourmet (pronounced: gore-met) cupcakes.

We found candles, which was useful, but we couldn’t find matches, nor a lighter to light said candles.

We’re a healthy bunch here, with none of us smoking.

So, living up to and exemplifying Apple’s publicised assertion that “there’s an app for that”, one of my colleagues hit the Apple App Store and within 30 seconds had dutifully downloaded a virtual candles and cake app, which actually works.

As in, you blow the (unlit) real candle and the virtual candles blow out, on the iPhone, via way of the decibel meter monitoring a change in ambient noise or shaking the phone using its inbuilt gyrometer.

Nerd alert.

Talk about servicing a niche requirement within the market!

And for the record, Blackberry’s App Store is far too sensible for such frivolous code to be there. Blackberry devs are just reinforcing their view of being boring folk, more concerned about data protection and security.

My Space vs Facebook

Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch fame noted on his blog a couple of days ago the fact that My Space’s growth is stagnating compared to its arch rival Facebook .

Getting too it – why is My Space in decline?

Simply put – Usability. It sucks. I never got onto My Space because almost every time I visited it, I encountered the following problems

• Navigation moved around. One My Space site is different to the next, and the lack of consistent representation of the User Interface made it a nightmare to move through the site. I’m time poor as it is – I don’t want to spend it wading through and wrestling with navigation.
• Readability: Fonts and the use of crazy colours like white font on a yellow background (or vice versa) made it tough to read. Add to this the personalised backgrounds which varied from grim dense photos across to riotous  patterns made it nigh on impossible to read.
• Rubbish: Many My Space pages I came across were rubbish. I mean not even interesting rubbish. Just rubbish.
• Profile Picture Inconsistency – Portrait, Landscape, Big, Small – your friends lists looked like a mish mash of images stacked on each other. Amateurish.

I’ve always been of the opinion that My Space’s popularity stemmed from 2 key areas – Celebrity and Personalisation. The Celebrity aspect is that Hollywood A-List types, Rock Bands, Rap Singers, Soccer, Aussie Rules all got onboard, as the benefits from a distribution point of view and the relative low cost for the publicity and doing the “in thing” were all tangible and measurable in their benefits. Everyone flocked online, as the iconisation and ability to “friend” aspect were easy, accessible and straight forward. The Personalisation side is the ability to build your own page “just so”. That’s where the “Usability that sucks” enter.

Facebook on the other hand is positively anodyne in its austere interface. I’ve been on it for about 2.5 years now and watched it go through 3 changes. The current interface leaves alot to be desired, so much so, that I barely login anymore unless I’m wanting to see what is going on with friends who are travelling overseas. On the upside, the community is cohesive and a proper closed garden if you set your privacy settings correctly. The other strengths, or they were in the past, was that the interface was relatively persistent and most importantly, it was readable, putting the content as the focus. Usability and the subsequent User Experience went up, because, well it was easy to use.

And then when Facebook released the developer API in early May 2007, all hell broke loose, as Facebook’s own way of personalisation had entered the market, driven by the hot trends of the day – beyond the walls of the Facebook employee group, who whilst smart, could never hope to compete with the groundswell of applications from the global developer community racing to commercialise the next hot idea. Smart move Team Facebook.

And look who else has done good by releasing the API – Apple. iPhone. App Store. Is Good. RIM (Blackberry), Nokia & Sony Ericsson are playing catch up.

My Space has a MASSIVE user base. Right now. They need to start utilising it to maximise revenue by creating a community within its boundaries, one that embraces the individuality. They just need to fix up the Usability for it to work.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/18/myspace-is-in-real-trouble-if-these-page-view-declines-dont-reverse

Palm Pre

I will freely admit that I have had a huge number of mobile phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDA’s) in the past 15 years. Before smart phones existed, combining PDA’s and Mobiles into the one unit just wasn’t a possibility and working around computers, lots of data and lots of people made for hundreds of contacts, necessitating some serious organisational capacity requirements. By contacts, at its peak I had over 3,000 individuals and with SIM cards at the time not being able to hold more than 99 entries, was far in excess then what the venerable paper address book could cope with.

Enter the PDA.

As a consequence, through various roles and personal circumstance, I’ve been fortunate to have run through my possession an original Palm Pilot 3,  Palm IIIx, Handspring Visor (remember them!?), Palm Zire 71 and the pinnacle being a Palm Tungstan T3. The T3 served duty for some 4 years and I only sold it last year on eBay to make way for my first smart phone. It was an awesomely well sorted piece of kit with a rock solid operating system and fantastic functionality, battery life and ergonomics. Hand in hand with this, my mobiles of choice since 1995 have ranged from  what would surely rate as an antique analogue Nokia 100, Ericsson GH337, Ericsson T10, across to what I thought at the time was a very cool Ericsson T39, Nokia 5110, Nokia 6230, Sony Ericsson T610, Motorola V620 (AWFUL Ergonomics) and a Sony Ericsson K610i. The key thing with all of these devices was that they had good battery life, were stable, secure and kept me productive whilst on the road and doing my job, staying in touch with friends and family.

I made my first foray into smart phones in 2007 with a O2 Atom Exec, which was a nice device, aside from running Window’s Mobile, which frankly, was appalling next to the smoothness, stability and functionality of the Palm OS. To say that I had grown spoilt by Palm’s excellent operating system is a gross understatement of the highest order. The unfortunate situation with Palm going across to Windows Mobile for their Treo range of Smart phones only jaded my faith with Palm and what had been a memorable relationship. The honeymoon was over.  Since that time, I’ve graduated to my current device, a Blackberry Curve 8330. A significantly different beast from my previous phones, I became a Crackberry addict from day one, as it has the same level of stability, battery life, functionality and robustness I had come to enjoy with the 2 device lifestyle I lived for so many years.

Then along came Apple’s iPhone.

I’ll paint a picture. I work in a Digital Services agency and suddenly 7 of them appear within a matter of days, 3 of them within 2 meters of me with the MD, GM & Dir. of Ops. cajoling, daring and taunting me to “upgrade”, because of the App Store, because of the usability, because of the gyrometer thingy, blah… blah… blah…. They said it was inevitable. In fact, the MD said too me at one time “Come on Col, just give in. You know you want too”. You’d think I’d been teleported and had landed in Apple’s Cupertino HQ and these guys had shares in Apple the way they were selling me the benefits. You can guess who was left defending RIM’s finest against the arm bending/dipping maniacal actions of my App Store talking, pick one: Urban Spoon, Weather, Word Scramble, Flight Control,  smug colleagues.

Then my wife get’s an iPhone and I have a really, really good opportunity at trying this “Smart” phone out. 1st thing. I get 80+ emails a day. Big attachments, often long, lengthy audit trails of response. There goes my data plan. Big time. 2nd thing – battery life or lack there of. It’s downright awful. 1 day??? I thought I was downgrading from 10 days standby/5 hours talk time with my T3 & K610i to the Blackberry’s Herculean 5 days/5 hours next to the Apple’s paltry offering. And what’s with the aversion to “Cut & Paste”? And not being able to send multiple SMS at once nor receive MMS are also big downsides in my book.

The upsides? That App Store – it IS fantastic. Web Browsing on 3G/Wireless. The fact it HAS wireless – what drugs were the Blackberry guys on when they neglected to include Wi-Fi with a Generation 4 phone? The web browsing experience is superb, font and image rendering, page caching in slide screens, zoom view, the whole lot. Contact’s integration with both Outlook & Mail is great. Contacts handling on Mac’s (we have one at home) is something Apple have had down pat for years – change the contact in any location – Address Book, Mail, iCal, it syncs and just works.

I had resigned myself to the fact that I was going to join the Apple masses and ditch my email connectivity, in favour of all those pesky games.

But then I saw the new Palm Pre tonight.

http://www.palm.com/us/products/phones/pre

Check out the Video’s in the “Meet the Pre”. THAT’s usability. Merged Contact & Diary’s between Google Gmail, Outlook and Facebook all at once? That’s contact management.

If the User Experience is 50% of what is shown on this site, I cannot wait to get my hands on one of these units.

Welcome back Palm.

#1 iPhone App in the world

Hats off to the team over at Firemint in Richmond, Melbourne, Australia. Working on the Walmart principle of “Stack them high, watch them fly”, they have created a polished game with a simple premise and extremely well suited to the iPhones touch screen technology whilst being addictive and thought provoking – but not too much so – all at once. For the reasonable sum of $2.99 USD, Flight Control has become the most popular iPhone application in the world. And to celebrate this achievement, they have at time of writing cut the price to 0.99 cents. Whilst this is obviously to seed the way for their new and upcoming titles – so what? It works, it’s fun and it’s good value.

Go buy it here: http://www.firemint.com/flightcontrol/index.html

Watch the The Age Media report here: http://media.theage.com.au/technology/tech-talk/aussie-iphone-app-flying-high-485451.html

Independent review of the application here: