Thinking About Mobile

The idea of the "Mobile Phone," has morphed and shifted into the new reality of the "Mobile Web." This has largely occurred largely on the shoulders of a single company. That company? Who else but Apple.

Think back 2 to 3 years. Look at any mobile carrier and compare any regular or smart phone to the iPhone. If you're honest, you realize how mediocre the hardware and software has been. Add to it that going to a mobile carrier like Verizon was akin to taking a trip to the DMV. Going in, you had the knowledge that when you walked out the doors, there was a high degree of certainty that you would come away irritated, pissed off and maybe even a little helpless, cause you where at their mercy.

And that is how Apple has been able to gain so much traction in the market so quickly. All they really had to do is stay, "Apple." What does that translate into? Words and principles like, "Experience economy, quality, elegant, ease of use, functional, intuitive, High quality customer service and comfort."

It might seem like a million years ago, but pretty much everyone scoffed at the thought of Apple even having the notion that they could walk onto the playing field. That notion was reinforced by a dismal product known as the Motorola "ROKR," that was Apple's way of seeing what the water temperature was like.

What was Apple's problem? Hadn't they heard the words, "Motorola, LG, Samsung, Blackberry, Verizon?" Every thought Steve Jobs was either, drunk on Apple culture, mentally insane or some combination of the two.

Looking back now, as people gleefully purchase their iPhone and download their favorite app(s), it all now looks so inevitable that Apple would succeed. How could you have ever lived without Safari, my Kindle App, Twitter, Skype, Epocrates and the 10,000 other apps that are available?

As I work on some applications and test the iPhone 3.0 Beta 4 software, I can't help but think, this is the new reality of "personal computing. Our data is ubiquitous (as long as we have a wireless connection). It really can be everywhere you are. This is especially true if you have Microsoft Exchange, Mobile Me or the fledgling Google contacts and calender "Push," enabled in your Gmail settings panel. The expression "Cloud," computing is truly meaningful within our lexicon.

To use a Bill Gates expression, the new mobile experience is about, "rich," immersive experiences facilitated by applications as the connector. It's about having hardware/software that is so well designed that when you don't have it you feel naked or discombobulated without it, because it seems so natural. It's having a phone where you don't need a book to figure it out, it just fits into your life.

The notion of "Just fitting into your life," is something that Apple does very well. On the horizon is the soon to be released Palm-Pre. Google Android, while a good first effort has had setbacks because the hardware has not been powerful enough to allow the software to shine. As we move along the technology curve, look forward to having richer, unobtrusive, connected experiences. In the future when you hear the words "desktop," or "lap-top," you'll put them in the same category as 8-track tapes or VCR's.

Mobile life is a good thing. Enjoy as much as you can, just drop the crappy hardware and software.

Jaye Morris

A Little Disappointment in Life

Recently I got a hold of a string of applications from the iTunes Apps store that just plain stink. From my perspective it wouldn't be so bad if they where free, but that's not the case.

A great example of sucking badly is TextGuru. It should be called Text-AntiTech-Counter-intuitive-Piece-of-Crap. First the reviews in the kindness light where miss-informed on the "ease of use factor," and at worst flat-out lies. It did not work as advertised which brings back my argument for trial-ware. It can certainly be done and I have no idea why it's not.

Text-Guru is supposed to allow you to "seamlessly" allow you to connect with your iPhone and move, share and edit basically any file format. Wrong. I still to this day have not been able to get the file transfer to work, despite being a pretty darn good geek, and in existing word documents you lose cut and paste functionality. The only documents that you can actually cut and paste are text files. That blows. They left out that little invaluable tidbit of information. There are a bunch of other clumsy things about the app and I'm not very happy. Why? Because if it happened once, I'd say okay, but it's happened multiple times.

Several other "Apps That Suck?" Ummmmm Chef, Pick & Choose Groceries, ATT Yellow Pages, What's On, Where and a few others but as I write, I'm just getting more upset. It's just too mind bending.

So to keep this from being a full on rant, Apple needs to do something about the process. As I said above, allow for trial-ware for goodness sake. Show little demo's movies, something. Come on this is the tech age. You can make our lives easier.

Jaye

Captivate 2 - Mis-Take 2

I came across a situation this week where a client needed me to convert a SWF to an FLV. I thought to myself, simple enough - they probably didn't realize that they could directly export it to FLV from captivate. This comes up all the time with MS Word and Excel document versions.

After looking into the situation, I got a surprise. Adobe...errrr Macromedia.....errrr Adobe did not include the FLV file format export. Are you kidding me? From a programming standpoint that is definitely what we call a "missed requirement." That's just plan terrible, dare I say - unthinkable.

Upon more research the most concise instructions I could find was from a developer called Dexterous and it goes something like this...

1. Create your project in Adobe Captivate 2 (Note - Create your project only as demonstration, do not include any interactivity in it)
2. Save the project.
3. Open Macromedia Flash and create a new file with the same dimensions as in your Adobe Captivate Project.
4. select File -> Import -> Import to Stage, browse and select the CP file.
5. In the options for importing DO NOT import the playback controls and DO NOT select 'slides as movieClips'
6. Export from Flash as an AVI (File -> Export -> Export Movie)
7. Now from Macromedia Flash 8 Video Encoder or any other AVI to FLV converter, you can easily convert it into an FLV.

Now if you ask me, that's just a wee-bit convoluted. It takes something that should take about 30 seconds and turns it into an hour long expedition and quite frankly I found this to be surprisingly weak and uninspiring on Adobes part. They need a fix, patch, update or whatever. Not being able to natively FLV stinks. I'll step-off h soapbox now.

~Jaye