Month: October 2011

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The Horrible User Experience That Is The Apple App Store On The iPad

My wife was out of town for a few days so I decided to make sure her iPad was up to date for her return. I went into the AppStore (which by the way indicated that there were no updates) and then the updates section. It then indicated that there were 47 updates available. Wow, I guess it has been a while. I then selected Update All – and the fun began. The iPad churned for a bit then spat out the utterly useless popup ‘Application not compatible with your iPad’. Huh? Not which app or which version or how to fix it or find out more, just ‘not compatible’.

I guessed that it was something to do with the recent iOS 5 update so I plugged the iPad into iTunes and away it went with the iOS update. About two hours later it was finally done updating to iOS 5. I go back to the AppStore app and I now have 37 updates to install (what happened to the other 10 is a mystery). I select update all and AppStore obnoxiously throws me out to some random screen while it begins the update. I let it spin for a while then tried to determine what it had installed and what it hadn’t – not an easy task on an iPad.

You see, if you return to the AppStore, it doesn’t tell you what has been installed and what is pending, it just crashes. I guess I am used to Android, where the notification screen tells you exactly what is going on with installs and even shows you the status of the current install, all on one screen. Apple engineers decided that if you wanted to know about installs you had to swipe all over to find which apps still had a hollow bar on them, and then swipe around to find the currently updating app and guess how far along it is. Yep, that is a fantastic user experience, Apple.

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Apple And Oranges

Listening to the hastily assembled coverage that emerged after the unfortunate death of Steve Jobs made me think that Google search doesn’t exist or that journalists are too dumb to know how to use it. In no particular order, here is what they got wrong:

“Steve Jobs was the founder of Apple.” I seem to remember there being another guy named Steve who was there at the beginning, one Mister Wozniak.

“Apple invented the MP3 player.” Not by a long shot. MP3 players existed for years before the iPod. None of them were as popular as the iPod.

“Apple invented the tablet computer.” Again, not even close. Tablet computers existed for nearly a decade before the iPad.

“Apple invented the smartphone.” Entirely true if you don’t take into account all of the smartphones that Nokia and Sony Ericsson had on the markets (quite successfully) for years before the iPhone.

Come on guys, it isn’t that tough to get the details right.

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Kindle Fire Or Kindle Cash Register?

The Kindle Fire was announced last week to great fanfare and unchallenged hyperbolic claims. To me it just seemed like Amazon did little more than ‘invent’ the Nook three years after Barnes & Noble did.

Price was one of the big points that was claimed to make the Fire a huge hit. Not many journalists bothered to read the press release – those low prices are for the units that constantly shove advertising in your face. You can pay $30-40USD extra to get rid of the ads.

Availability of all of Amazon’s content was heralded as another component that was going to make Fire reign supreme. I am not so sure this is as compelling as it is being made out to be. For one, I can consume all of Amazon’s goods on my existing tablet (a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1). This could turn out to be a huge negative if the Fire is perceived simply as a content delivery portal and less a general purpose tablet. Here Amazon is trying to make the same play that Apple did with iTunes – trying to wrap consumers paid contents up so that it is not so much purchased as it is rented.

Recent numbers claim that there are over 250,000 pre-orders for the new Kindle, but of course, as with the original Kindle, there is no way to verify the numbers. Nor will there be any way to verify the returns when consumers discover that all they can do with the Kindle is buy stuff from Amazon and not much else.

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Responsive Design and HTML5

Lots of fine work popping up lately regarding responsive design and the growing use of HTML5 to present not only content, but a rich, interactive user experience.

Take for example the new Boston Globe site. To get the full impact of the site, view it on as many different devices and orientations as you can and not how it fluidly adjusts to each of them. A another key aspect of this site is that they took a mobile first stance with the design so things are as lean as possible – a refreshing change from the ‘flash just because we can’ presentation that is all to common today. ReadWriteWeb has a behind the scenes look at the site design.

SlideShare is another site that has moved to HTML5 to provide a richer, cross-platform experience for sharing slide decks, videos and other business documents. Another advantage of moving to HTML5 is that the site renders 30 percent faster than the previous Flash-based version. TechCrunch has more on the changes at SlideShare:

Boutelle says SlideShare continues to see growing engagement, and expects the HTML5 platform to increase usage as well. He explains that HTML5 made sense because the company wanted a lightweight experience for users and wanted documents, fonts, and more to look the same on various browser types. As we mentioned above, this is SlideShare’s first mobile presence and currently the startup doesn’t have any plans to expand to native apps. “We’re doubling down on HTML5 and making this better and bette so it works for everybody,” says Boutelle.

And, yes, even Facebook has been talking recently about how they are looking to HTML5 to avoid having to develop and maintain four different code bases across their desktop and various mobile platforms.

HTML5 is probably the way that we should have done it. This is the way we get to do it now because HTML5 has changed so much under our feet. The initial attempt at building a hybrid application, there were certain things in HTML5 that weren’t ready yet and we said forget it, we are going to keep moving forward. The initial attempt to defer certain things to native rendering and native handling that really could be better handled by something like HTML5 and with in-browser technology – device access, good native frameworks and application and display code.

With all of this movement in the industry, why are corporate developers largely ignoring HTML5? The same changes that exist in the consumer markets are already starting to appear inside the corporate firewall – tablet and mobile interactions with corporate systems. Additionally, customers are going to start expecting, if not demanding, that corporate web sites look and behave in a responsive way regardless of what device they are using to access them. These pressures are going to force a change in development toolkits and approaches for businesses to stay competitive and relevant.

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Android Tablet Sales Growing Steadily

They would probably be growing even more if Apple weren’t running around the planet trying to prevent Samsung’s tablet from being sold. Litigate rather than innovate, Apple.

From the Digitimes posting:

Lin pointed out that Android-based smartphones took two years after launch to surpass iPhone in terms of shipments and sales in 2010 and are currently still seeing the gap with iPhone expanding.

In the future, Lin believes Google’s upcoming Android operating system codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich, which will unify its smartphone and tablet platforms into one system, and smartphone’s strong software application ecosystem, which can quickly enhance applications to support tablet products, will help resolve the issues about Android tablets lacking support for software applications.

With Android tablets’ hardware design and price point to gradually reach a consumer satisfying point, Android tablets should see the same come-from-behind results as Android smartphones, and enjoy similar shipment and sale volumes as iPad in 2012, Lin added.