Hugh Spear's Blog

Is the pendulum of popular support now going to start swinging away from Apple?

Back in 1994 when we started Dialogue with an SMS application called PageMail we gave ourselves three years before we were either acquired or out of business. Why? Well in those days the personal computer software world was controlled by Microsoft and the general view was that if you did something well and it was popular then Microsoft would either do it better and make it cheaper, or acquire you and your product. The result would be the same but you would be wealthier if you were acquired. 

We've lasted longer than 3 years partly because SMS didn't get as popular as soon in the US as elsewhere. We've also seen that Microsoft has become less important in the world and this is partly due to anti-trust lawsuits which have prevented them from having a stranglehold on the market. The most prominent of these was the one which prevented Microsoft from automatically installing Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system. 

Now we seem to be seeing the same approach coming along from Apple and threatening small groups of developers who just like Dialogue are just trying to create and sell innovative solutions to an embryonic market.

The advent of IOS 5 marks for me the stage at which the  world's support for Apple will start to weaken and it will be seen less as a force for good and more and more in the same light as we saw Microsoft at the height of its powers. 

I was one of many who applauded Apple for its pioneering iPhone. In one fell swoop it disrupted the mobile industry forever. Nothing demonstrates this more than a look at the once unbeatable market leader Nokia. Nokia has lost market share, lost its Finnish locus of control and lost its' operating system. 

I also applauded Apple's way of dealing with mobile operators who have always been in control of what went on at the handset. This control has not given us great usability nor great innovation. It has pretty much continued with a status quo. Apple pretty much single-handedly democratised the production of a better user experience.

It has been fantastic to see m0re and more handset manufacturers making devices which are as close to the look and feel of an iPhone as they can get without infringing upon Apple's intellectual property.

So all of this work by Apple has been a breath of fresh air to an industry which was set in it's ways. Apple was the new kid on the block, doing something different, frightening the old dinosaurs and we all loved them for it. I still have no sympathy for other handset manufacturers nor carriers who have had the resources to innovate but failed to. But in the background something less healthy was going on.  Apple was getting to enjoy its growing market share and it moved from the 'little guy' fighting the giants, to the 'big guy' who liked to throw his weight about. 

The first hints of this were the controls it placed around what Apps you could install and run on your iPhone. But we forgave them for that because there were so many Apps out there that we ignored the ones we missed. Then there was the very public denial of support for Flash on the iPhone. Again we forgave them for that because Adobe is big enough to take care of itself, and we've all suspected that Flash wasn't as stable as it needs to be.  But all the same we don't put up with this 'Big Brother' style control over what we use on our PCs.

Now we find that with IOS 5 Apple has included all kinds of new components, applications and services and has been accused on several fronts of cherry picking the best third party Apps and recreating these to be part of the Apple product set.

I love the idea of not needing to synchronise with a PC. Even with my MacBook Pro it takes 3 hours to sync my iPhone. It takes twice as long with my iPad so it has ceased to be a suitable solution. So moving iTunes to the cloud and synchronising over wi-fi is fantastic. But wasn't there a wi-fi sync App which was refused approval by Apple and ended up being a very successful App for jailbroken iPhones?  Also, moving iTunes to the cloud makes sense, but iCloud also provides all kinds of other document storage and synchronisation. This poses challenges to products like Dropbox and services like Flickr to compete.

iMessage goes down the same route. There are lots of Apps which merge instant messaging with SMS. One of the more popular is WhatsApp Messenger.  These Apps have had to work around all kinds of difficulties to provide a good product with a good user experience. They are all significantly challenged by Apple bringing out iMessage which is a closed App and doesn't have any obvious API access.

In a recent article, Tim Hanlon explores this idea of Apple putting App developers out of business even further. Sadly, he concludes that it's Apple's ball and they will decide what you do with it and for how long.

I guess we do all have to play Apple's game just as we once did with Microsoft. But there are starting to be the stirrings of anti-trust lawsuits against Apple now and at some point, if they are not careful, they will become the target of a lot more. 

Perhaps it is the natural order of things that empires whether they are technological or political eventually become too strong and people turn against them. It woud be a shame if this is now starting to happen with Apple. It probably won't stop me from using their products, but it will reduce my admiration for their business.

Android's killer App Inventor

I can't think that there can be many neutral bystanders in this battle between these two behemoths of the Mobile Internet; Apple and Google.  But those of us that think we are still enjoy anything that one company does which might challenge the dominance of the other. 

Witness the iPhone antenna flaw coming so soon after the triumph of the release of the iPhone 4. A product which seemed to raise the bar still further for anyone trying to compete with Apple in industrial design. Everyone, other than people in Apple, must have been secretly smiling that this gave one glimmer of hope to competitors that Apple were not perfect. They were in fact just human.

This brings me to the point of this post which is something non-human, Android in fact. And it isn't a consumer product in the conventional sense at all, but it may be, just may be a defining strategy which will shape the future of this battle.

The strategy comes in the form of the Android App Inventor. This is a simple point-and-click tool for creating applications for an Android handset. It is apparent that the tool has been created to enable students to create mobile applications. The product is quite clearly educational in its approach and there are a number of teachers and professors that are using the application to teach computer science. 

Now two things spring to mind when I use the App Inventor. 

The first is that it is a very smart idea to get students using your products. Today's students are tomorrows employees and eventually they will have some influence over what their employer does. I remember seeing row and rows of SUN SPARC stations in Sheffield University when I was studying Software Engineering. The one thing I knew was that I wanted to work on one of these once I had a real job. If everyone undertaking computer science courses in schools and colleges is learning how to programme for Android devices, then you have a ready made bias entering the workforce.

The second thing about the App Inventor which gets me excited is that it is such a simple intuitive programming interface that you just want to go back and use it more and more. What was the last software tool that got me this excited? Visual Basic. I was lucky enough to use this tool in 1991, it was the dawn of the IDE (integrated development environment), where your programming was within the development tool. Visual Basic let me prototype windows applications and then just continue and build them. So what if it was interpreted code, the code was BASIC and it wasn't as fast as 'C'. I'd created something while you were discussing a budget, and it worked. It wasn't just me that loved Visual Basic (my previous programming language was BCPL, so I had an excuse!), it was just about everyone. Corporates loved it because they could do something useful quickly and save a fortune. Individuals loved it because they could solve a problem with an application and create a business. In fact Dialogue was created out of PageMail an SMS application written in Visual Basic version 3 which had at least 1 million customers. 

So anyone that can provide a tool which enables others to innovate and rise above their own personal or business challenges, is onto a winner. One might even observe that Visual Basic was in part responsible for the success of Windows and Microsoft over Apple over fifteen years ago. 

I'm not saying that App Inventor is there yet. It lacks a fair bit of what many of us would expect from a serious tool, but I'd say that the folk behind this product have done the hard part, they've created the environment, the 'Lego-like' building blocks and the other components. Adding a few more libraries and creating a way of deploying the results into the Android Market seems to be a relatively small job, and one which probably is the subject of a fair be of internal wrangling.  

If the result of the early trials of the App Inventor are good and the people of Google and Android feel that their commercial purposes are well served by opening up this product to the world at large, then I think it is 'game on' for Google in terms of giving Apple a challenger which is coming at the same problem from another angle. Surely Apple will see this coming and not repeat the history of the 1990s where people loved to use Apple Macs but ended up buying into Windows because of the applications and developer support. Well lets see!

Review of the iPad after 2 months in Europe

Prologue

It is right that this is composed on my iPad and also that I am doing this in the departure lounge at Bangkok airport after two months of user testing in Australia, England and Denmark.

I would say that my testing has been pretty thorough as I have used the device mostly for work, my two sons have used it for leisure and my wife has transformed her life with it.

I guess the executive summary is that I had been fairly skeptical about the value of a tablet-like form factor, but I and we have been bowled over by it's usefulness. It is a revelation.

For more detail read on...

I bought the top of the range WiFi/3G iPad from the Apple Store in Sydney at the end of May 2010. Experience taught me I'd need lots of memory and I also expected the device to become a useful travel companion so 3G was essential. I only used the device for a day or two in Australia, so saved the 3G experience for the UK where I was to be based for most of June and July 2010.

 

Connecting Up

In the UK I knew that Three has the best tariff and also great bandwidth. In fact the bandwidth was so good that I used 3G in preference to WiFi in most places other than my office. The process of getting a 3G micro-SIM in the Three store in Sheffield UK was not very easy and make harder by my being their first customer for such a product. Nonetheless we all persevered and got the job done in around 45 minutes. I chose the 10Gb plan and struggled to even use half of that each month.

First Impressions

My first impression was that the iPad was a super-sized iPhone. This meant that I knew where to find things, but it also puzzled me that there was no support for SMS or voice. I guess this gives Apple some clear blue water of separation from the iPhone. To some extent I can see the justification for this, but I can also see that this will be an easier device for fat-fingered texters like myself.

When we started Dialogue back in 1994 one of our premises for developing PageMail: an SMS application for the PC,  was that it was easier to type a message than key one into a mobile phone. I still think that this is the case for many people and that is why we've continued the PageMail spirit with envelos: a web based application for the desk.

Anyway after configuring email and a setting my iTunes account into the device I had a play.

Everything seemed good and the email app is fantastic. However in order to hear my music and view my photos I had to plug into a computer and sync via iTunes. It took about 3 hours and out of everything I have done with my iPad this is the most ridiculous.

The iPad is a computer in itself so it is really daft connecting it to another one to synchronise data. I expect Apple have a plan to host everyones iTunes content in "the cloud" and then we can all connect wirelessly, but until then we will have to put up with something which looks suspiciously like a ruse to increase sales of other Apple products. Now I've got that rant off my chest I can continue with what will be a fairly glowing tribute.

 

Applications 

Once you realise that the soft keypad is all you need you start to want to create documents rather than just read them. The iPhone in contrast was ok for quick emails and diary entries, but you wouldn't want to write a report on one.

Creating documents really requires you to have some apps for the job. The best ones for this on the iPad are in my view those from Apple: Pages for word processing, Numbers for spreadsheets and Keynote for presentations. These for me do all I require and I could review my company's board reports and write my own using the apps. I could even use a nifty VGA connector to do my strategy presentation directly from the iPad. I found the only downside of these apps was there compatibility with the market leading desktop Office applications from Microsoft. Keynote would not convert to Powerpoint though it could open and convert Powerpoint files. This was a big drawback for me as I would then have to share presentations as PDF documents. Also Pages was not great at exporting to MS-Word format. Things like footers, fonts and tables were lost or altered. This really meant that the only person you would share the document with would be yourself, and you could then use Word to reformat the document so you could send it to your colleagues. Again, this isn't a show-stopper but it reduces the utility of the iPad from my perspective.

As well as the standard office apps I also downloaded some more. These were Omnigraffle a kind of Visio replacement which is fantastic as an iPad app, Sketchbook Pro from Autodesk and iBooks. Omnigraffle allowed me to create flow charts and other diagrams which I could then embed within other documents using Keynote and Pages. Sketchbook was more of a leisure app for my son who has a talent as an artist. I knew that the revered British artist David Hockney amongst others had become a real advocate of the iPad as a painting canvas, due in no small part to this app, so I wanted to get my son to give it a try. Here is an example of one of his early efforts:

iBooks was a possible Kindle killer and I wanted to see if it really worked for me as a replacement for a book. One great side benefit of iBooks is that it will also act as a bookshelf for PDF documents that you might download. This made it a good place to look for many online reports I find myself wanting to read. The book I bought to accompany 'Winnie the Pooh' which comes with the iBooks app, was 'Crush It!' by Gary Vaynerchuk. I heard him being interviewed by Jason Calacanis in the 'This Week in Startups' podcast, and wondered if he could be as passionate in writing. He can!

My view about iBooks is that is it brilliant if you want to have several books but probably won't win you over if you just want one book for your holiday read.

I also tried some iPhone apps which worked on the iPad but by and large were not much good at showing off the ipads great user interface.

For me, using the device for work, the experience was great. You get that 'instant start' feeling when you switch it on. There appear to be no moving parts and so the speed of operation is so much faster than listening to a laptop booting up and thrashing around trying to load everything into memory. The email app, the safari browser and the office apps all work pretty seamlessly together to give me all I need with just the exception of the file format compatibility mentioned above.

I'd say my Top 5 likes are:

1. Instant access. When you want to use it - it's there.
2. VGA output. Allows me to present to my colleagues without needing a laptop.
3. iPad specific apps. They aren't as cheap as iPhone apps but they give me so much more value.
4. Portability. It will be my companion whenever I go anywhere on business.
5. 3G - for a lot of us our stuff is in 'the cloud' so you need to be connected whenever possible.

My Top 3 dislikes (because I couldn't think of 5) are:

1. Syncing via another computer. I won't go over this again though.
2. File format conversion difficulties. Must be fixed for business users.
3. Lack of support for SMS. A pet love of mine and my business.

My Top requests for the next version are:

1. Fix above issues.
2. Camera in the front for video conferencing.
3. HDMI output.
4. Multi-tasking.
5. Do something about touch. If the soft keyboard gave some kind of haptic response then perhaps I could touch-type.

Views of others

My children (10 and 13 years old) seemed to be able to use the device immediately, and they were fighting over it within a day. For them it is the best thing in our house and 'Angry Birds' is their favourite waste of time. I have a small wager with myself (and anyone else who wants to join in), that the place where the iPad will truly succeed is in schools and in education in general. My wife is the toughest user to please; a lifelong Luddite she takes to any new technology reluctantly; like a duck to "l'Orange"! However apart from a minor falling out over my use of the Maps app for Sat-Nav, she welcomed the iPad into her world with open arms and was very often first to check her email each morning. This was the biggest surprise to me and I'm guessing that I need to buy everyone one of these if I am to be able to take mine to work.

All in all the iPad gets a big thumbs up from me, but I do hope that some others soon give Apple some competition in this product category.