Tag: Apple

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Web Technology

The Playbook is being Marketed to Fail

I don’t think this iteration of the BlackBerry Playbook will do very well, and I blame RIM’s marketing team.

If you’re not sure what the Playbook is, let me explain — and thank you for proving my point. The BlackBerry Playbook is a tablet computer released last week by Research In Motion, the company behind BlackBerry phones. It’s chief competitor in the tablet space is the iPad, followed by the handful of Android tablets that are currently available.

It’s a great device. The hardware is plenty powerful, and the software is certainly good enough for a 1.0 release. It supports native apps written in several languages, and web apps that can take advantage of HTML5 and Adobe Flash.

The Playbook has a lot going for it, but the one thing it’s sorely lacking is a marketing strategy. Without this, it will fail.

People need to know you have a product before they can buy it.

I spend a lot of time on this Internet thing. I read too many blogs, I stalk people on Twitter, I waste time on Facebook. As a tech-savvy 20-something year old, you’d think I would be the target market for a sexy new tablet. But alas! Everything I know about the Playbook, I learned from friends that work at RIM. Is that how the marketing team was expecting to reach me?

What’s their plan for everyone else? Let potential customers hear about it through word of mouth — weeks or months after launch — if at all?

That doesn’t work anymore. If you’re going to compete with someone like Apple, you have to be loud about what you’re doing.

And that brings us to an even bigger problem with RIM’s silent strategy:

When you don’t make your product sound great, your customers don’t either.

iPad users don’t need to think to explain why they love their iPads. They need only recite whatever Steve Jobs and the rest of the Apple Marketing Messiahs have told them about it.

What are potential Playbook users going to say when they talk to their iOS brethren?

“It has Flash”?

Fail.

Specs don’t sell products. Potential users want to know which tablet will improve their day-to-day life, not which one has more RAM. And that’s marketing’s job.

We’ve seen this before.

If RIM isn’t convinced that a lack of marketing will kill their product, maybe Google can sway them.

Remember when Google Wave launched? It was going to replace email, and add awesome features, and be everything to everyone!

Not a single person I knew could explain what it was in one sentence. What followed was confusion, lacklustre adoption, and ultimately, termination.

I loved Google Wave. It was a fantastic product that was constantly misunderstood because there was no marketing message to support it.

And as I read article after article, I can’t shake the feeling that I know where the Playbook is headed…

This post also appears on the Macadamian blog.

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Uncategorized

The iPad Dilemma, Revisited

Back in early February, I lamented about how hard it was to decide if I wanted a Macbook or an iPad. At the time that I wrote the post, I had already waffled quite a bit on the issue, but the discussion in the comments led me to think that a Macbook was probably better for my needs — a position I held for a long time. Eventually I made my way back to wanting an iPad, though, and I finally picked one up a couple of weeks ago. What changed my mind? Several things:

The Macbook update was less than stellar.

Before the Macbook update, I often claimed that if it included a price drop, I would pick one up the next day. Unfortunately, there was no such price drop, and the update itself was pretty weak. Furthermore, the Macbook Pro update that had happened a little earlier was actually considerably more appealing, and I likely would have gone with a low-end MBP rather than a Macbook + RAM upgrade due to how the pricing worked out. Overall, this was a big turn-off for the Macbook.

The iPhone gained multitasking through a firmware update.

This was pretty big news because it meant that the same thing could easily happen to the iPad. Multitasking was my biggest concern with the device, but knowing that it might not be an issue forever was enough to quell that fear and give the iPad another chance. Granted, the multitasking on the iPhone isn’t the same as the freedom inherent in a full OSX install, but it was certainly enough to get me looking at the iPad’s oh-so-gorgeous screen again.

I was able to get my hands on an iPad through work.

Due to the exciting work we do at my day job, we got an iPad well ahead of its release in Canada. I was slated as the likely candidate for developing an app for it for one of our larger clients, so it was left in my care. I may have borrowed it for a few evenings… and possibly a weekend. I actually read a full book on it in about 3 days (easily a record for me), at which point I realized I was kind of in love with everything about the interface. Spending some time with an iPad really helped me fall for its charms, and this was what probably sealed the deal for me.

There were other miscellaneous factors as well, (price became more of an issue when the wedding costs started to kick in) but overall it simply felt like a bad time to get a Macbook and a good time to get an iPad. And so far, I’ve been very happy with my decision.

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Software Development

Software Bundles, Independent Developers, and More!

Over the weekend, I picked up the Humble Indie Bundle, a pay-what-you-want download for five six games created by independent developers. I love these bundles! I get a bunch of cool software, the developers get a lot of blog coverage/followers/supporters/fans (let’s just call it social capital), and a cut of the proceeds go to a pair of great causes (Child’s Play and the EFF). It’s win-win-win. And it shows one of my favourite things about software:

Software is different.

No other industry can really get away with something like this. Can you imagine if those had been board games instead of computer games? Think of the logistics involved! Impossible. But software can get away with it, because once software has been developed, it costs almost nothing to make copies of and distribute. Different. Which reminds me:

Independent developers are special.

You don’t really see major publishers do this. You could make a case for Valve, because they really have this online-distribution thing figured out, but you’d never see EA partner with Blizzard for a heavily-subsidized package including Dragon Age and Starcraft 2, let alone see them donate the majority of it to charity. Independent developers can do this because they don’t operate under the same rules as major publishers, and they’ve found a loophole in traditional business beliefs that allows them to do something awesome that benefits them, their users and anyone touched by the charities they support. Special.

Now bear with me for a second, and let’s try to think of a market that sells and distributes software with a lot of support for, or even a huge bias towards, independent developers. Wouldn’t that be an ideal platform for more of these bundles? (Don’t cheat and say Valve; I know they’re cool, but that’s praise for another day and we’ve already singled them out above).

The App Store.

Apple’s App Store for iPhone/iPod/iPad contains around 200 000 applications* and is very popular among independent developers (I couldn’t find numbers for this, but polling my iPhone I’m going to wager it’s certainly a majority). With that many applications, developers could really use some extra exposure, and the visibility Apple is able to provide through the App Store is surreal. How long would it take for most iProduct users to hear about a group of independent App Store developers packaging a few apps together for the sake of charity if it was promoted directly through the App Store and/or Apple’s marketing team? Days? It would be a sure-hit.

Users would get more great software in a convenient, affordable, socially-rewarding package. Developers would get more copies of their app out there, and a compounding amount of exposure (word of mouth is big on iProducts). Apple would get some much needed love from their developers and their users (if anyone is hurting for karma right now, it’s Apple). And just think of the fantastic interface Apple’s brilliant designers could craft by integrating bundle-purchasing straight into the App Store!

There is a huge opportunity here.

Am I the only one that sees this? Tell me I’m not crazy.

* They announced at the iPhone OS 4 event back in April that they were over 185 000, so if 200 000 hasn’t been reached yet it’s not far off.

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Software Development Web Technology

Software is all about Context

Context is a very important factor in software development. Knowing the conditions under which your software will be used is an integral part of crafting a positive experience for your users. Many companies take this to heart and create truly engaging software that really connects with its users, but the vast majority miss the mark. While I’m sure I’d have no trouble pointing out a myriad of context-related issues in software made by Average Joe Developer, today’s focus will be on showing that even the top names in software aren’t perfect.

Exhibit A: The iPhone’s Clock.app

Let me tell you a story. A few weeks ago, the fiancée and I were scheduled to meet with a potential wedding venue early Saturday morning. Given that it was a bit out of the way and we tend to oversleep, we thought we’d be smart and set an alarm using the iPhone’s default clock app.

So Friday night, we set an alarm thinking it would wake us up Saturday morning. It did not; it turns out the alarm we set was for weekdays only! While this was entirely our fault, I’m still going to call Apple out on not taking context fully into account: when we set the alarm, why didn’t the app warn us that the alarm wouldn’t go off the next morning? I would imagine it’s very rare that anyone sets an alarm more than a day in advance. It’s much more likely that when someone sets an alarm at night, they expect it to wake them up the next day. This is a case where a neat feature is actually an annoyance because context isn’t handled as well as it could be.

Exhibit B: Google Maps

Continuing our story, while I was frantically trying to get ready I was loading Google Maps to get directions to our appointment. After punching in the address and asking it to route us there, Google Maps told me the trip would take over 9 hours. I freaked out! We don’t have 9 hours, we have 30 minutes; is this the right address? Did we accidentally book an appointment at a venue 9 hours out of Ottawa?

Actually, it turns out I had Google Maps set to give walking directions. Again, my fault, but again, where were the developers on this one? Did they really think I wanted to walk over 9 hours to get somewhere? Why not recognize that I was probably looking for driving directions and put a message at the top of the screen asking if that’s what I meant?

(For the curious, this story did have a happy ending: we made it there a slight 15 minutes late, and this was the venue we eventually chose for our wedding.)

Exhibit C: Firefox’s Spell-Check

Firefox is an incredible piece of software. It is currently the browser of choice for about one quarter of all internet users, and in many ways helped to revolutionize the web browser market. But one area where it hasn’t really advanced as far as it could have is its built-in spell checker. I don’t have a fancy story for this one; the data speaks for itself. Here is a list of words that show up as spelling errors in Firefox 3.6:

Some of the internet’s most popular websites:

  • YouTube
  • Facebook
  • Myspace
  • Flickr

Well-known web technologies:

  • Skype
  • Silverlight
  • Webkit
  • WordPress, CMS
  • PHP, CSS (it gets HTML)

Very common computer words:

  • Inbox
  • USB

Extremely successful desktop software:

  • Photoshop
  • PowerPoint

Apple products:

  • iPod, iPhone, iPad
  • Macbook
  • iMac
  • OSX (it gets Linux and UNIX)

These are all very common words in internet parlance, and it’s ridiculous that they are highlighted as possible spelling errors. Why not add them to the dictionary? A simple white-list that could be crowd-sourced to the community seems right up Firefox’s alley; I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see this addressed in a future release.

What can we learn from this?

My main take-away here is that context is a big factor in software development, and one of the hardest to get right. Even the big guns have room for improvement, which means the rest of us likely do as well.

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Web Technology

The Present and Future of Flash

Adobe Flash is at an interesting point in its existence. For about a decade, it was the only way to get rich, dynamic content onto the web. If it was the year 2001 and you wanted a really sleek UI, or video, or any kind of animation, Flash was your best bet — it was pretty much a monopoly. Then things started to change:

  • DHTML started to take over some of the really basic use-cases for dynamic events like rollovers and showing/hiding content.
  • AJAX made truly dynamic content easier for the non-flash world.
  • The mobile web started to take off, with most devices not capable of supporting Flash.
  • Microsoft released Silverlight, a competitor to Flash in the rich interface space.
  • Apple started releasing wildly popular devices that intentionally avoided supporting Flash.
  • Browsers started implementing support for HTML5 and CSS3, which are slowly being adopted by designs that would historically require Flash.

Slowly but surely, alternatives to Flash have been picking up speed, and things beyond Adobe’s control have prevented Flash from penetrating certain markets (mobile in particular). What does this mean for Flash as a technology?

Flash isn’t going away anytime soon…

This isn’t one of those posts about how HTML5 or the iPad or global warming is going to spell the end of Flash. Flash is a major player in many areas of the web, most of which won’t change anytime soon. In particular:

Games — There are tons of online Flash games. This is a huge market that Flash has absolutely dominated since day one, and none of the technologies mentioned above can compete with Flash on this level of interactivity.

Video — Like it or not, HTML5 is not yet strong enough to handle cross-browser, web-based video. Even when it is (and it will be sooner than you think) Flash will still be used well into the future because it’s the only solution for legacy browsers, and the vast majority of users don’t update their browsers as often as they should.

On top of that, Adobe has created an entire ecosystem of software and a vibrant community for designing, building, and publishing Flash-based applications. Plenty of people are heavily invested in these tools, and no amount of evangalism is going to convince them that their problems could be better solved by today’s Flash-alternative du jour.

…but Flash will start having a reduced role on the web in general.

It would be unrealistic to pretend that these new technologies aren’t eating into Flash’s market share. For one, even in the most complex cases, some projects are choosing Silverlight over Flash. Not the majority (not even close) but more than none, and Microsoft is a powerful competitor that can compete with Adobe on the development tools and community levels.

Secondly, HTML5 and CSS3 can do some pretty neat things. For cases such as modern, dynamic navigation and simple logo animation, it will soon make much more sense to use features supported by the browser than a heavyweight proprietary plug-in; especially if all you need is a quick piece of eye candy.

Finally, there are the problems caused by Apple. I can think of three:

No iPad/iPhone Support — The longer this keeps up (and I don’t see it changing anytime soon), the more likely it is that someone will create a cool, interesting way to do fancy, Flash-like things in an iFriendly format. And then a general-mobile format. And then a web format. The last thing Flash needs right now is for some brilliant start-up to shake things up even further.

Macbooks are getting popular — Adobe claims that Flash runs on every platform ever, but as Chris Rawson astutely points out in this excellent article, that’s been easy to say while most of the world has been running Windows. With Apple’s laptops gaining popularity, people are starting to realize that Flash doesn’t run as well in OSX. The more Macbooks Apple sells, the more Adobe’s claims of market domination will start to dissolve.

No iPad/iPhone Support: take two — I want this website to be viewable on the iPhone, the iPad, and whatever whimsical hardware Apple comes up with next. That alone means I’m not going to use Flash in my blog’s design, ever. I’m admittedly in a minority here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if today’s kids getting into web design are also going to want to show off their cool, new, standards-compliant sites on their cool, new, iApproved devices. This sort of trend will slowly but surely push Flash out of the cool-new-site space.

Getting along with OSX is something that Adobe is going to have to work towards to keep Flash competitive, especially as new markets evolve out Apple’s hardware.

I’m not anti-Flash.

I’ve been using Flex Builder to build cutting-edge Flash applications for years, and I still believe there are many cases where Flash is a legitimate choice for creating a rich internet experience; there just aren’t as many as there used to be, and this combination of new, exciting technologies and pressure from Apple are making for some exciting times in the world of web design.

2010 is shaping up to be a wild ride for Flash and its competitors, and I can’t wait to see where it takes us. What are your predictions?

Categories
Web Technology

The iPad Dilemma

Up until very recently, I was seriously considering getting a Macbook. I have a desktop PC that covers my day-to-day tasks, but I want something I can use from my couch, and in particular I’ve started to really miss OSX (I used an iBook as my primary machine up until more recently than I’m willing to admit).

Then Apple releases the iPad, which promises to do everything I was planning to use my Macbook for at nearly 1/3 the price. Now what? Do I keep eying the Macbook or start counting the days until the iPad hits stores? I’m completely torn.

First let’s get a few things out of the way. I don’t want the 3G version of the iPad. I have enough monthly bills already, and my iPhone covers all my 3G needs. I’m also not the kind of person that needs much space, so the low-end iPad suits me just fine. And I don’t want a Macbook Pro; a regular Macbook is easily enough power for me, though I would probably take the ram upgrade for an extra $100. With that in mind, we’re looking at $500 for the iPad vs $1200 for the Macbook.

I want something I can use while sitting on my couch, and all it has to support is writing blog posts and your standard email/browsing activities. Both machines are perfectly capable of performing these tasks, and I’m already fluent in both OSX variants from owning an iBook and an iPhone.

Now for the interesting part: the advantages each device offers.

Advantages of the iPad:

  • It’s significantly less expensive, as we’ve already discussed.
  • You can turn it sideways. That may sound ridiculous, but I much prefer web browsing on a screen with more height than width.
  • I love the form factor. Watching the video on Apple’s website… It doesn’t look like he’s holding a tablet and running a browser; it looks like he’s holding a browser. This level of UX is absolutely a step above anything else on the market, Macbook included.
  • It has substantially more novelty, and all kinds of potential that we don’t know about yet.

Advantages of the Macbook:

  • It’s a well-established line. You know exactly what you’re getting, and how awesome it is.
  • Multitasking. I’d like to be able to have a browser open at the same time as Twitter and an IM client.
  • The platform is more open. I like using browsers other than Safari, running commands in Terminal, and hacking together useful AppleScripts.
  • What if I want to do some iPhone development? I’d need a Macbook, unless Apple releases some sort of iPhone-specific XCode for iPad (and who’s to say they won’t?)

It’s a mess. There are so many differences, but the advantages of each individual device are so appealing that I can’t make up my mind. Worst of all, I’ll probably regret either decision — if I go with the Macbook, I’ll sigh longingly every time I see an iPad; if I go with the iPad, I’ll curse every time it can’t do something that the Macbook can. I’m still undecided, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon.

What’s your take?

Should I go with the iPad or the Macbook? Are you in a similar position?

Categories
Software Development

iPhone OS 4.0 Predictions

This week’s entry is for the Apple fanatics, and iPhone owners (or potential iPhone owners) in particular.

There was a post over at TUAW last week encouraging readers to weigh in on what may or may not be present in the forthcoming iPhone OS 4.0. I missed their deadline for submitting comments, but read on to hear my thoughts anyway — I’m going to talk about a couple of things I’d like to see happen to the built-in Maps app.

Voice Navigation

There is a big market for GPS-like turn-by-turn directions on the iPhone, and plenty of companies both big and small have thrown their hats in with varying features and price points (an excellent comparison of such apps is available at Pocket GPS World). While this is enough to show that users really want voice-navigated directions on their phone, the big reason I think this will happen is that Droid users already have this behaviour built straight into Google Maps. This is a big feature, and the difference between having it available by default on the Droid and as a paid app on the iPhone is significant, and something I think Apple will want to address.

Augmented Reality

There are a lot of apps designed to help users find nearby points of interest. Some of the more recent ones have started a trend called augmented reality, which is when a live feed of the camera on the phone is used as the background and information is overlayed on top of it based on what direction the user is facing. With the iPhone’s accelerometer and compass, this technique has proven to be remarkably accurate and holds a lot of “wow” factor; something Apple has consistently been a fan of.

Since most of these apps are simply wrappers for the Maps app, why not cut out the middleman and blend an augmented reality feature into Maps by default? This would be Apple’s first entry into the growing augmented reality market, and would really up the ante for developers who currently offer augmented reality mapping features. Apple is all about shaking things up, so while this is probably pretty unlikely it wouldn’t be entirely out of character.

Your turn!

I’ve given my thoughts about the Maps app, which I think will net a big update come the next iPhone OS release. What do you think will be added/changed/removed in iPhone OS 4.0?