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Thursday, 15 April 2010 19:36 |
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Apparently March 18th was a big day for updates to applications in the BlackBerry App World. As the screen shot below shows, my device inbox was all of a sudden filled with notices of applications that needed to be upgraded.
Nice, I like that the system notifies me and I can tell quickly which applications need updates. When I opened the App World application, one of the things I quickly noticed was that App World didn’t have the means to update all of the applications simultaneously. Instead, I was presented with a list like the one shown in the following screen shot.
Rather than give me an easy option to update all of the applications, I had to select each application individually and start the update for each manually. Granted the developers of the application didn’t expect so many updates on the same day, but they probably should have.
This is one of the things I like about the Apple App Store, when there are a bunch of updates, you can click the ‘Update all’ button and all of the affected applications are updated.
This is a hard one – you don’t want to code for every possible options for an application, but pick the ones that you think will happen most often (and cover other cases later). But the App World application has been updated several times and if the number of applications was expected to grow (as it has) then the developers should have made accommodation for the case where multiple applications have updates simultaneously.
I’m currently working as a project manager for an application for a major retailer and one of the things that came up this week is related to this. The application is calling a web service to retrieve a list of items from a list the user has created. The Web Service the application is calling supports a calling method that returns all list items, but also supports an option that allows you to specify a starting point in the list and the number of rows returned to the calling function. The developer of the iPhone application called the operation using the default option (all items) and during testing the customer found that the application quickly crashed. Of course, the developer only tested with short lists and the customer’s QA department tested with huge lists. Both teams tested with unreasonable size lists and of course we had problems.
In this simple case, the developer, having seen that the back-end web service supported two calling methods, should have coded the application to accommodate very long lists in its original implementation. That way, the application would work with reasonable lists (10 to 20 items) but would also work when the list exceeded the original expectation. I know it’s more work, but that’s the way it should have been developed from the beginning. As it is, we’re already a little late for release of the application and the developer is trying to submit a change order for the new work to implement the system in a way that should have been done this way all along.
For those of you who are Domino developers – look at how IBM managed the default behavior when rendering a view in the browser – the default behavior (and the expected behavior) is when the view is short, display all documents. When the list is long, render the view in pages and allow the users to page between chunks of documents until they find the one they want. Another smart thing they did was make the default number of view rows that are displayed a configuration value on the server, but also something that could be easily overridden in the ?OpenView URL. |
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Saturday, 10 April 2010 08:04 |
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The big announcement this week came from Apple who finally announced background processing for the iPhone and iPad. Here's a snippet from an article in PC Magazine:
Within multitasking, Jobs also highlighted several capabilities, acknowledging that the company had been outpaced by other mobile operating systems with multitasking capabilities, just as other companies passed them in adding cut-and-paste capabilities. "We weren't first to this party, but we're going to be the best," Jobs said.
If a user wants to shift to another app, he or she can double tap the "home" button. A "dock" with recent applications will appear, allowing the user to shift to another application. Apps that aren't being used become "quiescent," and the OS saves their state and pulls resources from them. When the OS shifts back, those resources are re-allocated, and the user has a chance to resume where he or she left off, Jobs said.
"In multitasking, if you see a task manager, you blew it," Jobs said.
For me though, I'm still amazed at Apple's attitude toward its customers.
'Outpaced by other mobile operating systems'? Apple wasn't 'outpaced' by other operating systems with their ability to cut & copy text or run applications in the background - those are standard features that most every smartphone owner expects from their device and Apple decided for some bizarre reason not to include the features. I just don't get it. The only smartphone I can think of that didn't allow background apps was the Palm OS and I was surprised it lasted so long without the ability. Copy & Paste? The only smartphone that I can think of that didn't allow that was the original Motorola Q. Those features are minimum requirements for any OS and for Apple to pretend that they were outsmarted by their competitors is a joke.
Regarding Multitasking - how is Apple thinking double-clicking a button and bringing up a list of 'docked' applications to select from isn't a task manager? That button was designed to be clicked once to activate the device or take you back to the home screen - it's a pretty hefty push to activate it and people won't be good at double-clicking it. They've clearly tried for force fit this feature (when it should have been baked in from the very beginning).
It's not even true multitasking - notice how the article references that applications that are pushed to the background are suspended? They're not running, their used memory is stored and retrieved later when the application is reactivated. I'm sorry, but that's not multitasking. I understand how a mobile platform would want to have the ability to suspend background tasks when memory is low, but applications should be able to run in the background and only give up their memory when needed.
Imagine a user who's about to beging a time consuming task. He starts the task then switches to another application to do something productive while the original application is doing its stuff. In this scenario the user expects the application to continue with its processing, but according to the description of the 'feature' that's not what will happen.
The iPhone and the iPad are amazing devices, but I'm still continually stunned by Apple's analysis of the market and what it thinks its users will accept as reasonable. Of course, I'v ebeen having some serious arguments lateley with some friends of mine and one of them contends that Apple is catering to people who don't care about these features and that they'll just take whatever Apple gives them. I have to admit I don't get it. |
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Saturday, 10 April 2010 17:58 |
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Did you see Google's demonstration video of Google Goggles? It's really amazing software that runs on the Android platform. It allows you to take a picture of something and retrieve search results based upon the picture. Check out the video when you get a chance, it's amazing. |
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Friday, 09 April 2010 18:41 |
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OK, so I got an iPad. I ordered one as soon as I could pre-order and had to wait an extra couple of days to get my hands on the device because I inadvertently had it shipped to my old address and was out of town on the 3rd. It finally arrived on Monday and I've been amazed with it ever since.
It's a truly amazing device and feels great in your hands. I've started downloading a bunch of news applications (I really want to be able to keep up with my local and world news on it – no more paper newspapers) and some fun drawing tools for the kids. What amazes me the most is the weather applications that are available for it. Considering the weather we've had here in North Carolina tonight (tornado watches and warnings) my wife and I have been sitting with it watching the radar maps and local weather report videos.
It truly is going to be a game changing device – I'm convinced that it's going to completely change the way people interact with computers. I found TweetDeck for it and I'm waiting for the FaceBook application to become available for it. I've found that the web browsing experience is really great – the browsing I've done and the surveys and form data entry I've done has been very comfortable.
I have been experiencing some pretty poor Wi-Fi connectivity issues. It was comforting to hear that others are having the same problem and that Apple has responded. My Wi-Fi access point is in one end of my house and I can't access the network on my iPad from the other side of the house. Even 25 or 30 feet away I'm really not getting the throughput that I should be getting. I'm going to wait semi-patiently to see what Apple does about the problem. This is the first Apple computing product I've purchased since my old Apple //e (with 1 MB of memory mind you) and I still believe they make amazing products (although I remain unimpressed with Steve Job's (er, I mean Apple's) attitude about iPhone applications). My employer has provided me with an iPhone and recently a MacBook (so I can do some iPhone development) and I'm having a lot of fun playing with the products. I'm still a BlackBerry user day to day, but the iPhone is great for applications. When the new OS becomes available and I can finally run background applications I'm sure I'll begin using my iPhone more frequently. Unfortunately Research In Motion really doesn't seem to be trying to stay in the sexiness game and it saddens me.
I am having a problem with the iPad Book Reader application. I've purchased some books (I even found a free Isaac Azimov book from Project Gutenberg) and I spent a recent road trip reading on the iPad. I've found it to be a very nice experience. The Book Reader application though has some formatting problems that I thought I'd point out.
When the book reader displays an italicized word next to a regular word, it scrunches up the space to the left of the italicized word so it looks like it's right next to the preceding word (no space between the words) as shown in the following figure.
Figure 1
For those readers of my What Were They Thinking series, the problem I'm having isn't related to the font size I have set on the device – rest assured that I'm running it at the default font settings for the device.
Additionally, when the reader uses small caps to render a person's title, I'm having the same problem – the words are all scrunched up as shown below:
Figure 2
Another thing I noticed is that when the Reader displays an Initial Caps for the first letter in a paragraph that it inserts some extra space between that line and the line that follows. It's not like it needs the extra space, it just adds it unnecessarily.
Figure 3
I'm going to keep watching to see if others are experiencing the same problem and whether Apple takes the time to fix it soon. |
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Thursday, 08 April 2010 19:31 |
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Did you see the survey results published recently about BlackBerry users saying they’d get an iPhone if they had to get a new phone today? Check out Why BlackBerry Users Will Defect when you get a chance. Very telling and I hope the folks at Research In Motion are listening.
Another interesting note appeared online this week. The makers of the SkyFire browser announced that they were discontinuing development for the BlackBerry platform. You can find the announcement here. RIM just hasn't kept up with the market when it comes to platform capabilities. People want the iPhone and Android UI experience and they're done waiting for RIM to provide it. Look at RIM just releasing the development tools for BlackBerry Device Software 5.0 - the OS has been out for months now and RIM's finally getting around to releasing the development tools? Sad. Granted they were available in Beta for a long time, but who wants to build products or Enterprise applications with beta software? |
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