Posts Tagged ‘iPhone’

Direction counts!

Sunday, January 3rd, 2010

I took advantage of an offer to upgrade my iPhone 3G to the 3Gs model just before Christmas. I spent some time considering the alternatives, and speculating about what might become available during the next eighteen months of my new contract, but I’ve been more than happy with the 3G so my decision was quite an easy one. The 3Gs offered three main improvements over the 3G:

  • a faster processor
  • a better camera
  • a ‘compass’

At first glance, these improvements seem quite modest. But, as we shall see, they add up to something quite significant.

The feature which attracted me mostly was the better camera. People talked about the paltry 2MP camera on the iPhone 3G but to be honest it wasn’t the resolution that was the problem – 2MP is actually adequate for the sorts of pictures I want to take with a pocket camera. The problem with the camera on the 3G was that it was just a rotten camera. I had a better camera in a Sony Clie PDA some five years ago. The camera on the 3Gs is, indeed, better than that on the previous model. It’s not great, but it is just about usable.

The surprise for me is the impact of the other two features. The faster processor was firmly in my ‘nice to have’ category – a welcome improvement but not especially important to me. Once I tried the new model however, I quickly realised what a difference this has actually made. With the previous model, I had attributed a lack of performance in certain applications to network latency. Essentially, I believed that a few apps were simply a little too advanced for the prevailing networks to serve them well. A good example of this was Evernote, an app which seemed promising but was just too sluggish on the 3G to be very useful to me. On the newest iPhone however, Evernote really flies, and network latency does not often impinge on it’s usability. Having a snappier user interface is always nice – but the 3Gs is so much more responsive as a result of its faster processor (and presumably its increased memory).

I had assumed the compass was, effectively, a gimmick. I could see how it would be occasionally useful to orient myself when using the GoogleMap application for example. But over Christmas I started to play with some of the many astronomy apps available for the iPhone. Several of these take advantage of the iPhone’s built-in GPS receiver and compass, allowing the screen to show the night-sky exactly as it appears to the user based on their location and the direction they are facing. This allowed me, for instance, to identify and point out Jupiter to my actually-quite-impressed-for-once family. Direction counts!

What the iPhone 3Gs offers to its applications is a sense of location and direction. Combined, these properties can afford a powerful new functionality.

During 2009 there was a little buzz about augmented reality, with apps such as Wikitude appearing for Android and iPhone, superimposing text and images over real-time views of the physical environment. While I try to avoid predictions for the new year, I’m confident that augmented reality apps will continue to develop, and will become more interesting, during 2010. All of the hardware ingredients – a fast processor, a decent camera, GPS + compass, are present in the iPhone 3Gs. I’m looking forward to what develops as a result.

Coincidentally, my good friend Peter just alerted me to an application called Star Walk. It doesn’t do anything that several other apps don’t also do, but it does it so beautifully. Like all Apple products, aesthetics count for much with the iPhone. When I fired up Star Walk I had a sudden thought – that the reality had just caught up with the aesthetics of mainstream science fiction. If you have an iPhone 3Gs, I recommend you spend the £1.19 for this application, if only to admire the way it looks.

Happy new year!

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Posted in Cool Stuff | 2 Comments »

Inadvertent spamming and calendar woes

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

At the University of Bath, where UKOLN is based, we use an enterprise calendar solution from Oracle. It’s OK, no worse than some others I’ve used, but not great. It does have a client for Mac OSX in its favour…. but I don’t really want to use a dedicated client when I have systems and workflows with dependencies on the Mac’s built in calendar application, iCal. iCal is not particularly great either, but it is integrated into Mac OSX and there are advantages to be had from this. I have a few colleagues who would like to be able to use MS Outlook for similar reasons.

Primarily, I want to be able to keep the calendars on my iPhone and my MacBook in sync. Ideally, I want all of this to be synchronised with the ‘work’ calendar on the Oracle system. Prior to owning the iPhone, I was a long-time Palm user and had configured my Palm to synchronise with the Oracle system via SyncML using the excellent tools from Synthesis. The Palm became the conduit between my MacBook and the Oracle system which while not ideal, was a manageable solution. But I bought the iPhone partly to replace the Palm as a PDA, and having to carry the Palm around to act as a conduit between various calendar systems is not ideal.

The most likely medium-term solution to this will be a promised iPhone SyncML client from Synthesis, which might be available sometime this year once Apple sort out their ‘official’ application supply chain arrangements.

In the meantime, today I decided to see how far I could get using the iCalendar file format for calendar data exchange. The Oracle server does not expose iCalendar files except through SyncML, but it does allow them to be exported and imported via the client. I wondered if the ‘clunky’ process of exporting the work calendar every morning and importing this file into iCal might still be less painful than using a Palm as a syncing device. So I imported the iCalendar file into a new calendar in the iCal application, and experimented with a few things.

When I had finished, I decided to delete local copy of the entire calendar, and it was here that I encountered the dialogue box telling me that doing so would send a notification that this ‘event’ had been deleted. There were two buttons, ‘Cancel’ and ‘Delete and Notify’. I wanted to ‘delete’ but I didn’t want to notify anyone…. I ‘cancelled’. Trying to delete a single ‘event’ in the calendar gave the same message: I clicked ‘Delete and Notify’ to see what would happen. A ‘new email’ window popped up, with my email address pre-filled, and the body of the message explaining that this event had been cancelled.

Now I have real trust in Mac OSX. It’s not always perfect, but it’s rarely bizarre and annoying like some other popular operating system user interfaces I could mention. So I went ahead and deleted the entire local copy of the calendar, pressing the ‘Delete and Notify’ button….. By the time I had reacted sufficiently to get the network cable unplugged (I wasted precious seconds trying to cancel the process and then disabling the WIFI device before remembering I was connected with an ethernet cable) about 70 email messages had been sent to various colleagues. By the time I regained control of my laptop, around 400 messages had been queued up to be sent….

After a little investigation, it transpires that the previous version (Tiger) of Mac OSX’s iCal had three buttons for this dialogue, the other button allowing you to delete without notifying. So this is just a strange oversight perhaps. But it is easy to find forum threads where people have complained about this. It’s enough of a problem that John Maisey has released iCal Reply Checker – a utility which simply addresses this problem. It works fine – although it is a little disconcerting that the buttons haven’t changed their labels, only their effect.

Come on Apple – sort it out!

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Posted in Mac, Software Development | 1 Comment »

Get off of my cloud

Saturday, February 9th, 2008

Yesterday I left a comment on Brian Kelly’s post, Is That A Pistol In Your Pocket?, where I explained how the iPhone had changed my mind about preferring to carry several dedicated devices which inter-operate, as opposed to carrying one integrated device. At one time I was determined to pursue the former approach, making connections with Bluetooth and, later, WI-FI. Essentially, I expected to create a responsive peer-to-peer network of devices, what has been termed a Personal Area Network.

I’ve given up, probably temporarily, on this approach – the sheer ease-of-use of the iPhone trumps my other concerns at this stage in my career/life/biorhythms. But as we approach a world of ubiquitous, networked computing, it seems to me that a new model is emerging. Where once the personal network of peer-to-peer devices seemed an obvious approach, now we might observe that this can be unnecessary: each of our devices is going to be, if it isn’t already, capable of communicating with the global ‘interweb’ at usable speeds.

To give a concrete example: I once aspired to use my PDA (with it’s larger screen) to act as the pocket display device for photographs I had taken with my mobile phone. Both devices had a Bluetooth interface, so this was the channel to use. I did get this working, but it was never a convenient operation and I eventually stopped bothering.

With today’s equivalent devices, I might do something different: use the mobile phone’s internet connection to post photographs to flickr for instance, and, on my PDA, directly download the ones I want to display there. Of course with my iPhone, I can go a little step further – I have sufficiently robust access to the web to be able to be able to leave some resources on the web and just view them from there when I want to.

Now, there are plenty of use-cases where one might want one’s devices to inter-operate, and where the web might not provide an easier solution than a short-range, peer-to-peer approach. But some common requirements, particularly around the using and sharing of resources (photos, video, bookmark lists, contacts databases etc.) are ideally served by the web.

So, it seems that it is the area in personal area networks which is diminished in importance: the networking remains, but the very local area has been supplanted by the cloud in some respects.

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Posted in Mobile, Web Infrastructure | 2 Comments »

Loving the user

Sunday, February 3rd, 2008

It hasn’t even occurred to me to look for a user-manual. This user-interface is so much better than any comparable device, it’s just not funny. It’ll be copied for sure, but right now the iPhone is fast heading for the horizon and those other poor phones and PDAs out there are going to have to run to catch up.

This is the first gadget I have brought home where the family have soon clustered around it, wanting to touch it and play with it. The ‘wiggling’ icons had my 3 year old giggling, and he played for ages with with the way the iPhone senses its physical orientation and rotates images accordingly. My partner, who often rolls her eyes at my love of gadgets, was browsing YouTube videos within minutes of picking it up. I had my all my contacts, appointments, music and podcasts synced from my Mac without even really consciously thinking about it.

As a phrase, user-friendly just doesn’t cut it. We need a whole new phrase, something which implies that the fact that it’s easy to use is just an obvious starting point, barely worth commenting on, but which also expresses the sheer delight that it can bring. Maybe something like user-loving?

I think that the iPhone is going to change the way I work in all kinds of ways, now that I’m connected most of, rather than much of, the time.

I’m still having way too much fun with this thing to write anything like a real critique, so I’ll leave it there. Even if you don’t buy one (and it’s certainly not the greatest deal in the world in terms of tariffs etc.), you really should have a play. In many respects it’s utterly brilliant.

And Mike (if you still read my blog) as far as our long-running argument about integrated versus multiple, specialised and connected devices goes….. well, you win :-)

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