Everything and the Mobile Software Universe…

Hello all…

Last week I attended the Open Source in Mobile conference in Madrid, at which I could get a demo of the “One-Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) XO device from Jeff Waugh, a prominent figure of the GNOME project.

For those of you not familiar with this project, the “One-Laptop Per Child” foundation wants to bring laptop computers to schoolchildren in developing countries. I will not here dwell on the price or success of the device, but rather focus on its software and really innovative user interface.

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Hi all

For my first post here, I have decided to just be an aggregator, i.e. spare you the hassle of browsing through all these blogposts about the most-hyped CE product ever: the iPhone… now you have it all here summarised in neat bullet points.

Kudos to Engadget Mobile for their extensive review, The Register for their numerous and humorous articles, as well as iFixit for their step-by-step reverse engineering.

Also worth noting that there is now a very extensive entry for the iPhone on Wikipedia.

In short: it’s a great device in terms of usability and design (so long as you share Apple’s tastes), but suffers quite significant shortcomings when it comes to business productivity (notably due to its poor email application) and lack of capability to have 3rd-party applications installed.

/Guilhem

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Checkout this amazing Video from : Microsoft Surface Video – Touchscreen, Multi Touch Coffee Table – Behind the Scenes – Popular Mechanics

Official Microsoft web site

Ok, it not new, but really not so far from production

Diagram by Intoaroute

Something that really buzz me about those new kind of interfaces is obviously the “home” and “personal” application and services, but I see also some possible tremendous change for the software development : with the raise of multi-core, parallel programming will be mandatory, and to leverage this horsepower, a paradigm shift is needed, to break the C/C++/C#/php/ruby, etc sequential view. And this new paradigm may be graphical programming. See this LabView/QNX article or this one at DevX:

The U.S. government, through DARPA, had previously awarded contracts to proposals for High-Productivity Computing Systems. A major premise of this thrust is that the performance of computers is outstripping our ability to harness the power through programming. It is logical to conclude that we need better methods to program them, and DARPA had funded three research languages. All three programming languages are textual X10, Chapel, and Fortress. It seems that the research has run its course, and the answer is that the breakthrough opportunities fall short of the grand hope of catching up with computers. This just makes me wonder all the more if a graphical approach will ultimately be an avenue for a programming breakthrough.

Technologies like those multi-touch screen may bring a lot to the developer ability to dig and build his system….and it is needed: look how poor are the current graphical languages in the “graphical” and above all the user interaction aspect: (below a LabView screenshot)

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

After reading a product description of what Abaxia is doing with its MobileTag – What is a Tag ?. I dug a little and found a really great and fast moving technology.

Did you know that nearly everything in Japan is tagged with QR Codes – two dimensional Matrix codes – these days? Okay, I guess you don’t, but believe me, you have to know about these funny codes. ^_^…Whenever you see a QR Code just take your phone out of your pocket, point with it’s camera at the QR Code and let the QR Code reading software decrypt the QR Code. That means: The QR Code reading software turns your phone into a mobile scanner for QR-Codes. Cool, right?

Robert Peloschek aka Unic0der: Free QR Code Readers for your Cellphone

CHeck this Video fora realife example:

Many formats seem to compete today, Code 2D (in French) gives some examples:

MobileTag

Data Matrix

QR Code (The most deployed, especially in Japan)

Shot Code

SemaCode

Basically you have two kinds of storage: either the data is directly embeded in the matrix (like in QR Code or Digimatrix, few KiloBytes of data) or the code is “only” a redirection to an URL where the content is stored and can be read (MobileTag is working on that principle).

What really buzz me is the concept of “physical world hyperlink”, as described by the pondering primate :

Physical World Connection Companies
When a display was added to the first mobile phone, a new media was created. Since then, Internet connection and a camera have been added that have created a new way to interact with the physical world.

Soon speech recognition will allow an additional way to browse the physical world too.

Every physical object will have a physical world hyperlink

That means every physical object will allow connection to a designated website and the mobile phone with it’s physical world browser will be able to surf the “real world”, the physical one.

The Pondering Primate: Physical World Connection Companies

(This vision seems to be shared also over at barecodemobile)

This can be strongly related to augmented reality where the “web world” is augmenting the “real world”. Even microsoft is taking the bandwagon as described in the always good Mobile Learning
Really getting an address from an advertisement right into my cellphone by taking a snapshot, or storing an appointment for a movie or a special event by taking a photo of an ad seems really valuable to me: today even with my glorified Treo with its big keyboard, I’m reluctant to loose my time entering those snippet of information.

This sounds exciting! … and for now all the generators and readers seem to be free of charge, I only wish we have more of this tagging in Europe….

Mobile Crunch is pointing Mobile complete in this article Mobile Complete: Virtual Handsets for Real World Developers. A MobileCrunch Exclusive

But others exist, like : Paca Mobile Center (with Mobile Distillery as one of its founder, check them out, the product seems great).

So this kind of business really put a definitive end to the java “right one, runs everywhere” (if it ever had a begining ), and things are even worse in the Mobile space…I’m not sure fragmentation is a bad thing after all cause it gives a lot of freedom to hardware/UI/software design … but less power to little software companies, application provider etc….but we are not in a PC world, and perhaps applications are not so releavant here…but the data (and its presentation) is!

Update: GigaOM covers it also, and add an interesting bit of info: funding comes from Motorola Ventures…

Mobile Complete,1 a 3-year old San Mateo-based startup that provides mobile application testing services, says it has raised2 a Series B investment led by Motorola Ventures. While the round size is officially undisclosed, it is rumored to be around $10 million. Previous investor Innovacom VC also participated in the round. The company says it’s using the new funds to expand its service internationally and add more mobile handsets to its testing of roster of 300+ list of handsets. Check out the company’s virtual device-testing service called Deviceanywhere.com.

GigaOM » Motorola Funds Mobile Complete

Good read at edschepis:  Is still there any Java ME Programmer Thinking in Object?.

I’ve always been myself an Object Programming advocates … if you know what Object Programming is! And after a lot of interaction with many developpers, frameworks, etc:

• Object Code is great if you know what you do, what is the philosophy of objects, self containment, inheritance, etc. But MANY people don’t know what is an object, they code Java/C++ as if it was in C, leading to code bloat, bad maintenance and performance.
• Object Interface are…hum counter intuitive: you never know what object to create or what function is really called if you don’t have designed yourself those objects: object are great for YOUR code, but not so great for libraries where your user won’t know/master all the maze of your object graph (have a look at Symbian APIs … far from being intuitive).
• Many time it may hide some very big CPU/RAM issues, but it has more to do with the associated libraries, like the STL (see my previous post about that performances trade off) .
• …did I say that I like Object Programming? .

:: 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 .

Here is a “Joel on Software” analysis of the MS Vista menu .. and its, hum how to not say something rude, surprising number of available user choices .

The real fun comes just after, when Moishe Lettvin, that was in charge of the developpement of this feature
gives its explanations!…Lenifiant, and “ubuesque”,

…24 people involved in this feature. Also each team of 8 was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, so let’s add them in too, giving us 24 + (6 * 3) + 1 (the shared manager) 43 total people with a voice in this feature. Twenty-four of them were connected sorta closely to the code, and of those twenty four there were exactly zero with final say in how the feature worked. Somewhere in those other 17 was somebody who did have final say but who that was I have no idea since when I left the team — after a year — there was still no decision about exactly how this feature would work.

moblog: The Windows Shutdown crapfest

Really really something to go through…cause it seems that all kind of organizations may tend to those limits. And it is a good list of what NOT to do, or try to not do when your business is growing bigger….

But things can be different, look a little at Google:

From a high level, Google’s process probably does look like chaos to someone from a more traditional software development company. As a newcomer, some of the things that leap out at you include:

- there are managers, sort of, but most of them code at least half-time, making them more like tech leads.

- developers can switch teams and/or projects any time they want, no questions asked; just say the word and the movers will show up the next day to put you in your new office with your new team.

- Google has a philosophy of not ever telling developers what to work on, and they take it pretty seriously.

- developers are strongly encouraged to spend 20% of their time (and I mean their M-F, 8-5 time, not weekends or personal time) working on whatever they want, as long as it’s not their main project.

- there aren’t very many meetings. I’d say an average developer attends perhaps 3 meetings a week, including their 1:1 with their lead. – it’s quiet. Engineers are quietly focused on their work, as individuals or sometimes in little groups or 2 to 5.

- there aren’t Gantt charts or date-task-owner spreadsheets or any other visible project-management artifacts in evidence, not that I’ve ever seen.

- even during the relatively rare crunch periods, people still go get lunch and dinner, which are (famously) always free and tasty, and they don’t work insane hours unless they want to.

These are generalizations, sure. Old-timers will no doubt have a slightly different view, just as my view of Amazon is slightly biased by having been there in 1998 when it was a pretty crazy place. But I think most Googlers would agree that my generalizations here are pretty accurate.

How could this ever work?

Stevey’s Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile

And read the whole article also cause it is a refreshing rant about Agile … and a good insight at Google success…and why everyone wants to work there!

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