Everything and the Mobile Software Universe…

On Device Portals, or the new magic Eldorado? If you are not familiar with the term (I think it is an ArcChart one, but not sure) , an On device Portal is a way to access quickly and easily your services and data on your phone: to provide a good user experience to the user when consumming services and contents.

This is a generic term that can be applied (at least according to me ) in more or less extent to many industry actors:

• Home Screen providers (like Abaxia, the guys behind the Orange Home screen or others)
• Widgets Framework Providers (Opera goes here, or mobease…)
• some actors like Macromedia Flash Cast
• …and, looking at recent developments, service provider seeking desperatly to find their way on mobile phones: Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

To promote their services they are in fact trying to replace as much as possible the traditional ways services are, poorly, presented to the end user today by mass market phones.

They are already fighting each other (see this yahoo mobile vs google mobile comparison at Yahoo) , this comparison between Google Maps and MS Maps (mobile) : There is something big here, and Carrier have long understood that the Home Screen is a key part to drive th euser behaviours and services use, because everything is one click away. Bringing big added value services to a one click access in a phone seems to be the new holly grail (see this example for GPS at TomSoft but it is one of many many)….

And again who are on their ways? : Carriers that are trying to do the same thing, alongside big brand OEM (above all Nokia and SE).

It’s perhaps why Google is working on its own phone, and how amazed I was when I read this:

A job posting on Google web site is being taken by many as proof that Google is developing some kind of wireless device that can use its web services.

The job posting in question says:

Google organizes information and makes it accessible and useful. To improve accessibility, Google is experimenting with a few wireless communications systems including some completely novel concepts. We are building a small team of top-notch Logic Designers and Analog Designers aimed at nothing less than making the entire world’s information accessible from anywhere for free. Are you in?

The posting goes on to say that a qualified applicant needs to have an Electrical Engineering or related technical degree, extensive circuit modeling and analysis experience, and excellent programming skills.

Job Posting Sets Off New Round of Google Phone Rumors

(see also here :

Simeon Simeonov is in the news for his story on the Google phone! Simeon Simeonov is in the news for his story on the Google phone!

Simeon Simeonov is in the news for his story on the Google phone! )

They are hiring HARDWARE engineers! wow this is a blast as it is for sure not their core business nor competency, and they prefer to do that instead of speaking with the today chipset vendors (Texas Instrument, NXP (ex Philips Semi), Infineon, ADI, Broadcomm…). I really don’t know where they are going or what is this strange strategy: but they made the point clear: they want to control the whole experience…exciting!

What do you think?

In its last blog entry, surfing one the wave of  button less iPhone clones, C. Enrique Ortiz  states the following,

Pictured above are the LG Prada, the Apple iPhone, the “Google Phone”, and the Meizu M8. Will Palm follow the same trend?

…

Yes, that’s right. Think about this shift from hardware to software design; the way of the future in handset design. The handset itself becomes pretty much a “generic” apparatus: connected or network-aware, with high-quality sound, and high-quality LCD with touch-screen, and totally software driven – the look and feel, the user experience, and all or most of user interactions.

C. Enrique Ortiz Mobility Weblog: The future of handset design: from hardware to software

While, as a software developer I may look at this kind of vision with envy, but intuition … and practice lead me to really challenge this view where the hardware would be completely commoditized to allow full software creativity.

Be prepared to that mobile software vendors: in real life (at least in Europe) a phone is first chosen because it is sexy/good looking! See the success of the LG Chocolate (and its Samsung carbon copy, the E900) , or the upcoming Shine or Prada phone: they are simply handsome, and my wife doesn’t bother about the so-so and flacky UI and usability flows of her E900 (ok to be honest now she has one for a few weeks, she IS complaining…but the buy decision was based on hardware look only). Do yourself a favor and check this really funny Guardian Article about the E900 and its glorified unusable UI and touch sensitive buttons (found via the always refreshingly cynical Techype)

So yes hardware design matters, that’s a fact, and am I the only one to loooove hardware buttons? I’m a long time Palm fan, used to stylus, touchscreen and so on, but to be honest, on my treo 650, I only use the keyboard and nav pad, I’ve even lost the stylus and really I don’t need it. Did you ever tried a remote control for your TV based on a touchscreen (like Phillips did some time ago)? wow, awkward, no tactile feedback, the screen is collecting all what your fingers are collecting…really poor design.

But the worst aspect of the “all touchscreen” aspect in that you always needs your two hands to do anything, even answering a call! and this is killer for me, really, cause doing every operation with one hand is something I’m now so accustomed to.

So yes the iPhone and its clones may lead to new user experience studies, but I really think that to bring a really good user experience you need to master the whole design process, from hardware to software … to network services. For sure today it is more the hardware design that leads the pack, software vendors trying to bring something new (see the last Vision Mobile Article on this one) …and Operator continuing adding some, hum, crap to the user experience (look for Orange Home Screen in google … and oh joy the first answer are “help me to get ride of the Orange Home screen” ).

So yes software vendor may have more room to innovate, but phone makers are learning fast:

• Palm is getting its software back, so under control
• SE bought UIQ…for the same reason
• Nokia has S60 and Maemo
• Moto is pushing its Linux Platform

If this is not a sign ….

What do you think?

Thomas

During the last LiPS forum face to face meeting we had in Seoul (thanks again to Mizi Research, great organization), Access/Palmsource presented its Application framework, now Open-Sourced: Hiker, and one point has raised a little debat: it is fixing the way applications can be layered, interacting with each others (One running Application with the User Focus at a time, no multiple instance of the same application): so it is hard to implement some Vodaphone Live! use cases requring multiple launches of a same application like : You are in your Address Book, you recieve an sms, you answer, you look for a contact launching again your address book from the sms, the address book will be on top when you close it you are back to the sms and when you close the sms…you have your first address book below with the same state before the sms reception, at the beginning.
It’s not a secret, I’m a big old time palm fan, but now I’ve a better understanding of what is a phone and the industry around it: Hiker seems great and may bring good usability practices, etc BUT it will be difficult to fullfill some Operators or OEM requirements, cause it fixes the way the User Interactions have to be done: it reduces innovation (good discussion about that at MobHappy)
Apple has made an Apple phone from A to Z, from Software to Hardware (see this Michael Mace article if you were on another planet, and this nice round-up at TomSoft for the 58# Carnival)…but if you (as a phone manufacturer) want to make a phone you designed, chance you are an hardware company, and you make money with it:

• If your are an ODM, you have an OEM specification.
• If you are an OEM you have your own specifications, matured for years.
• If your are an OEM or ODM you may also have some Operators strong requirements or sometimes complete product specifications (Vodaphone Live!, NTT Docomo, or some iMode recomendation from Bouygues for example).

So:

• Either you will go shopping for an external software solution (like Moto with TTPcom and many ODM and some other big players)
• Or waste millions of dollars in an unmaintenable solution (I wont’t throw names here … even if the list is long). Because it is not your job.

If this external solution locks you in a single type of product, so in a niche…you are screwed, plus the royalties are high and the hardware minimums are stratospheric compared to the real phone market.

Choosing Access/Symbian/WinCE : Choosing the OS equal make a fixed and finished product:

• impossible to comply with operator specs
• same for OEM
• : it is why nokia has made s60 and SE bought UIQ (I often take as an example the Text Input specifications: it accounts for around 25% of a complete Phone UI specification….it is very hard to change it in high level OSes…but it is a big brand asset for many OEMs)

Your are not making your phone but a windows/palm one

Interestingly solutions coming from the US are more monolithic and impose a user experience (palm, winCE, sky mobile media has bought eSim an israeli company to have a kind of UI customization), compared to EU ones (symbian is nothing without a customization, Open- Plug, Digital Airways and TAT for UI, etc are all about customization, Qtopia in less extent)…there is certainly something cultural here (many time the “not invented here” prevails in the US leading to more integrated products but moonolithic, while EU is by nature more diverse and consensual…just a guess here). Somewhat related: good read at Vision Mobile about Mobile Linux.
At the end I’m not sure an Operator is really able to specify a full User Experience, focusing on usability (no no , it is not sarcastic ). Software companies, can do it in some extent, but at the end only OEM with strong brand assets, big worldwide tracking records of mature products for all cultures may know those little things that make the difference.

For sure new comers with good ideas (like Apple here) and a good knowledge of software AND hardware can do great stuff for a niche market…but selling to China, Arabic countries or India is another beast, it is a 2.7 billions users game!

:: mobiface :: next gen mobile interface thoughts

Be sure to read the three quoted links:

• UI “cruft” : …wow refreshing to see why our OS are so counter intuitve … ouf, I’m not completely dumb , check also from the same author: Why Free Software usability tends to suck.
• The Monkey Experiment : no way, read this one…and get free!
• This Is What Happens When You Let Developers Create UI this is sooooo true…:

from Mobiface also: Interfaces as art that links to a great design site pingmag

with a very nice article about art and phone UI Here are some examples:

Look at the contrast between the four above images and the first one…no comment.

It should be forbidden for a Software Designer to design any UI! To do that Designing UI MUST be done with non dev tools, but authoring/design tools … Seems obvious, but really not the case in the real world .

Perhaps you’ve heard a lot about ULC (Ultra Low Cost) cellphones in the industry (many companies are aiming this market, see The Motorola F3)…but they are targetted to new markets, where text rendering/input is really more complex than our relatively simple alphabet: it is mandatory if you want to reach the mass of Indian users, Sri Lanka, Cambodge, Hebrew, Arabic, Philippina , Chineese…and you want cause “texting (smsing)” is a big thing: else your new emerging market will be limited to eastern Europe or South America, and be sure that text messaging will continue growing bigger. Look at the buzz around hotxt (read this mobHappy article about this new service, even if it is all but positive about it or at SMS Text News, please check the comments on this one… ) or Berggi (Berggi GigaOM article, I’m not sure about the business model of such an offer, 10 bucks a month to send sms!!). IM is perhaps the next text heavyweight champion (check this techCrunch article about the next bif ideas around IM)
So Text IS big and will stay big…so emerging markets have to have the tools to leverage this potential!

Two different issues to be fixed araise:

• Text Rendering
• Text Edition

In fact text edition is not so diverse and different accross the languages: the T9 you know is not so far from Chineese input. At the end you only have two kinds of predicitve text input methods:

• One for alphabetic languages, the one you have on your phone today. For those languages multitap is also of course heavily used
• One for “ideogram” languages (hum, only in China/Taiwan and Japan (kanji) in fact ), with Pinyin, Strokes, Bopomopho input being some variations

And after having implemented both in real life here at Open-Plug…the alphabetical one is in fact more complicated!
Two companies have the lion share for the predictive engines:

• Tegic (now AOL) and its T9 offering, more Western countries oriented
• Zi corp (eZiText, eZiTap), more Eastern oriented

Both have great products and large and complete languages databases, for me their biggest IP. Cause once you have a predicitve engine the real pain only begin…the UI and user interaction around those dictionnaries is really really complex:to give you an idea, the specification of text entry methods and use case represents more than 25% of the whole UI specification! and of course, for each phone/vendor/carrier it changes, so integrating T9 or EZiText really means if fact tayloring YOUR existing text entry framework for a given specification, the predicitve engine being only a little part of the whole thing. We ended up, in collaboration with LiPS to create a real “Text Entry Framework”…

So let’s move to the text rendering part…
Many companies are developping solutions to render text…so why such a fuss? After all it is only about drawing characters on the screen no? For us, with our simplisitc alphabet european languages, it sounds like something trivial…IT IS NOT, cause complex languages are REALY COMPLEX.

• First you have the magic around Bidirectional text (for those crazy men that are writing from right to left, Hebrew, Arabic…I’m sure they say the same for us writing from left to right )… you will say it is only printing in reverse….you couldn’t be more wrong, simply look here for the full specification of the bidirectional algorithm, hum, simple isn’t it? How to insert left to right text in a right to left paragraph, how to wrap in that case?
  
• Then you enter the brave new world of GSUB, GPOS ans co. In some languages some characters are mixed together and inversed to form a new character: the logical ordering (in memory) is really far from the display ordering. Champions in those kind of games are Devanagari, Indic, Thai…
  

So to handle all those languages, a solid text layout framework (for character clustering, reordering, wrapping) is needed, and a good font renderer. The open source community has developped Pango for the layout and Cairo for the rendering. ICU, from IBM is also a well known open source text layout engine.
Anyway those projects are huge, a big linguisitc knowledge is needed (try to debug a devanagari string…) so to have a quick working solution the industry offers you partners…and many exist, showing that this is a real issue!

• nCore :a little finish company that has a full Layout+rendering engine and a rich text editor, we are working with them already : their solution is really great, fast, light, etc, plus they are darn good at what they do. Their core busines is not font, but rendering.
• Tegic (T9) has a solution (seems to be based on nCore technology), adding their own features and a good integration with their text input solutions
• ZiCorp has also a solution that can be integrated with predictive text input solution
• Monotype, a 100 years company that invented the Arial and Times New Roman fonts…they know well how to render texts , their market is more toward the fonts themselves
• Arphic a taiwaneese text rendering vendor, I don’t know much about them
• Bitstream, a US text rendering vendor, with a solid technology. Also more “Font oriented”, and vector based
• Microimage, I’ve heard of them thanks to 3GSM Asia, but for now I don’t know much about their technology

So to play seriously in the ULC field the phone software needs a very solid text solution…and really it doesn’t come overnight! And be careful when designing/implementing/choosing your solution/partner: it won’t run on smartphone but on ULC phones, so no extra RAM nor CPU, and here CPU IS a challenge. Aslo don’t pass on it, people are really not willing to simply learn english

Seen on this french Blog: La vidéo 3D pour bientôt ? – Torréfaction

Ok, quite not ready to be embedded in a cellphone … but this is futur!

In this blog we talk a lot about developpement frameworks in the mobile space, which are close to “traditional” framework (like GNOME, Qt, Windows, MacOS, even Java in less extent), but newcomers are popping … from the web space.
I’ve played recently with a great CMS (hum : a blog engine on steroid) Drupal to developp as quickly as possible an in-house test cases/release quality report system for our test teams, a weekly tracking tool for my team and some other stuffs: I’m NOT a php/javascript/XML/HTML junky, I’m a C/C++/algorithmics dev, and … doing that was EASY and FAST, and I must say efficient.
The biggest positive points that have popped out:

• Documentation of PHP/Drupal : amazing, clear, dense, …neat
• Data formalization (RSS feeds and XML)
• Powerfull presentation framework that let me concentrate on the job

If we compare those point to exisitng frameworks, some are really missing : Documentation of course is not only many time missing, but when it is present, it has been written by code monkeys, certainly good at coding and architecture, but not for teaching and giving fun (I’ll quote here one of my Kathy Sierra favorite post never underestimate the power of fun). Data formalization: it is a joke today in the C/C++ world, where is easy serialization? Database?. Presentation framework : ok you have some exisitng but you still have to fight with widget mechanics…boring and bug prone.

It is where new web frameworks may bring something new, I’ve spotted 2 at this time:

• Ruby on Rails
• OpenLaszlo (found again via TomSoft)

Ruby on Rails is really pushing the MVC (Model View Controller see my post here and here) paradigm to its limits, with a clean high level language….I’ll try to use it as soon as possible.

OpenLaszlo claims to bring the desktop power to web applications … and the approach seems greats (look at the examples) : the UI is described in clean XML, then everything is compiled in Flash or DHTML, AJAX stuff/javascript are hidden.

So it will be time to bring this kind of technologies to mobile developement … and constraints… Flash today is perhaps too RAM and CPU consuming (but I’m sure it will change). Making things too easy has also its drawbacks, especially in an area where customization is a key differenciator, see also this Kathy’s post about ease of use.

At Open-Plug we already have a clean, all recoded GTK that is running on Ultra Low Cost phones with no issues, for me the next step would be to add some more formal and high level UI descriptions, and some better data modeling to come close…We have begun, and it is exciting!

After the BenQ Black Box, Here is the Nokia one … with no button either (seen on pdafrance)

Update: It seems that TomSoft has been quicker than me on this one

YouTube – MIT sketching
enjoy:

I have coded an application on palm that was able to tranform sketches in geometrical forms … but this one is really great, mixing physics and so one, nice touch! (ie : I have to work in those areas someday )

Good article at brighthand about input entry methods : The Writing in Your Hand.
I firmly think that voice is not a natural way to communicate with a computer, or write a message, and if you have already tried DragonDidacte/IBM Via Voice, you know how painful it is : the issue is not the recognition engine accuracy, but that you don’t write like you talk!, sounds obvious…You need to talk as if you were writting, not so easy, and not effortless. In France Orange has changed its voice mail machine to answer to voice commands like “callback”, “delete”,”next”,”previous”…and you know what? Technically it works like a charm, ergonimically it’s hum..crappy , you really felts like an idiot talking (giving orders) to your phone (ok ok, this one seems paradoxical). Talking is a human affair, and talking with a non sentient entity, (a pedantic name for a machine ) IS un-natural. It is why I agree with the last conclusion of the brighthand article: new entry methods have to be found!

Nothing related but here is a potentially very interesting new 3D display technology, seen at Engadget:
NTT DoCoMo unveils portable 3D display – Engadget

Mobile shopping may become much more attractive, and … and did you say games!
If you add movement detection for gesture commands … a “brave new world” of user interactions may be opened!