Lounging on the Couch with iPad and Dog

Part 3 of my iPad (32GB, WIFI, iPhone OS 3.2) review:

• General Review
• List of Areas for Improvement
• iPad for Consumers (here)
• iPad for Business Users
• iPad for Photographers
• My Current Favorite iPad Apps

(9/29 Update: Parental preparation and then adaptation has kept me from finishing this series on the iPad.  Once home life stabilizes in a few months I may try to wrap it up in some fashion…)

It is no secrete that Apple produces products for consumers (Steve Job indirectly admits this in the first paragraph of his Thoughts on Flash letter).  And the iPad is a wonderful consumer based computing platform.

Notice I didn’t say computer but rather computing platform.  It’s different enough from your current desktop/laptop that you can’t really compare the two (though we try because this is our current point of reference).   For the consumer, the person who primarily needs or wants to consume information/entertainment, the iPad is a great platform in which to do it.

It fits in your hands, you use your hands to interact with it, and applications are only starting to take advantage of the user interface.  It truly makes the information on the Internet more personable to you.  Each week there are more iPad specific information consumption applications that become available.  Whether your reading email or a book, browsing the web or the current news, watching a movie or a streamed TV show the iPad makes consuming content more enjoyable.

The iPad is an application platform, which means that the best way to consume content on it is through applications that take advantage of it’s unique capabilities.  Luckily, for content providers, these applications essentially pull data from their existing websites and just display it in a new, more personal, context of the iPad application.  So all a company like ABC, BBC, NPR, or the Wall Street Journal needs to do is build an App that talks to their existing websites.

This is why the issue of Flash not running within the iPad’s web browser becomes a less important topic.  Viewing content through the existing web sites of these content providers gives the consumer a less than optimal viewing experience on the iPad.  Most websites aren’t designed to truly take advantage of the iPad’s unique interface.  Over time they may eventually be able to take advantage of the interface, but not yet.  While supporting flash would give the iPad users more content options, Apple would rather have those content providers build an App for their content.  That’s the trick of any new platform, they only become successful if the platform provider can convince, or force through fear of lost potential market of consumers, others to build on top of it.

The fact that the interface is intuitive and hands on makes a more ideal platform for new or hesitant computer users…like elderly parents.  The self-contained nature of the iPad means less plugs and wires to go wrong and confuse a less savvy user.  I’ve heard of many iPad users who let their parents use it and had a hard time getting it back.  I honestly think that my mother, who currently doesn’t use the computer at all, would actually use the iPad (next time I’m home for a visit we’ll find out…).

The only downside to the iPad for consumers is that need for a another computer to activate and backup the device.  This should really be an optional step for syncing media to the device only.  If this was the case, I think there would be more people possibly using the iPad as their only computer…like my Parents.

A case for the iPad is a must.  After using my iPad for 3 weeks without a case, I finally got my back ordered Apple iPad Case and it makes a huge difference.  The ability to stand the iPad upright to watch a video or to prop it more upright in your lap is a must.  The non-slip surface also helps keep the iPad in the right spot on our lap for the most comfortable use, not to mention protects the iPad.  I recently also came across the Moleskine inspired DodoCase which I found really appealing.  The hand made DodoCase is made like a book and contains all natural materials to encase the iPad in a cover that looks more like a journal than. It was either my penchant for Moleskine journals or the thought of wrapping my high tech iPad in all natural materials that made me order one.  Check back in 4-6 weeks for a review.

Part 2 of my iPad (32GB, WIFI, iPhone OS 3.2) Review:

• General Review
• List of Areas for Improvement (here)
• iPad for Consumers
• iPad for Business Users
• iPad for Photographers
• My Current Favorite iPad Apps

So while working on the iPad, there are a number of small gotchas and issues that I found and have documented here.  The hope is that these items may help other iPad users/prospective customers as well as (ideally) be found by Apple and corrected in the future…thought I’m not holding my breath on the latter.  I may add to this list over the next few weeks as I continue to find additional stragglers; I’ll add a date to the items I add after the original post.

(May 7th, 2010 Update:  I added to my list based upon my time using the iPad at a 3 day technical conference…)

Issues & Areas for Improvement

• Mail Doesn’t Cache: If you are not online there is no way to do things like delete or move email since the mail app doesn’t cache changes locally, tries to connect to server to do change in real time. (exchange/does cache for imap, though it complains about not finding server later).
• Mail Has No Setting to Auto Download Attachments: this would be nice to have especially when you are using the iPad offline while traveling.  We can only hope that there will be a setting for this in OS4 to do this in the background.
• No Airplane Mode: Unlike the iPhone, there is no simple switch for an airplane mode to disable the wireless. This mode should start to force caching and cancel all network related warning messages.  Blame here can also fall on the applications as well, they shouldn’t always assume a network connection and throw error messages when you launch the app.  Lack of this mode is even more confusing considering the 3G version of iPad.
• No System Usage Data:  was planning on monitoring a full battery drain by resetting the usage stats, but realized that there weren’t any.  Not critical but it would have been nice to have (especially for the 3G version). I hope to see this get added in any updates for the 3G version.
• Notes App: not sure why, but I always had a problen activating the keyboard when I would jump into notes and the keyboard was hidden.  Touching the note to edit it didn’t always seem to bring up the keyboard…
• Pop Up Menus: This is a very nice usability enhancement to the OS.  There are many more places where it needs to be used for easier access to applications and there are times when data entry pop ups become unusable when the keyboard is visible and you are filtering a list (try clicking on an address or phone number in an email and then try adding it to an existing contact that you need to look up…)
• Numeric Lock Code Keypad Need to Randomize: unlike an iPhone’s small screen, the large screen on the iPad can make it easy for someone to see your lock code if it’s only numeric (the iPad pops up a numeric keypad automatically when you set a numeric lock code).  Making the keys change their layout randomly would be a nice added security measure to prevent someone from seeing your number pattern.  NOTE:  I recommend everyone to set a lock code on their iPads for security; my employer requires this and once configured exchange to connect to their email system I was forced to set a code.
• No Way to Sync clock on iPad with Internet Time Sources: I quickly noticed that my iPad and my Mac/iPhone clocks were off when alerts from iPad would go off just a minute or two later than my other devices.  Sadly, no way to automatically set the clock using an internet based time source.
• Email Still Doesn’t Support Meeting Invite Standards: This is 2010 already!  Anyone who has spent a few days working for a company who uses Exchange and deals with conference calls knows that the location field often contains a phone number or web meeting address (except apparently Apple Engineers).  Yet the iPad OS still doesn’t automatically turn those fields into clickable links. This has been infuriating on the iPhone and sadly the iPad doesn’t do any better.  This is another item that I hope gets changed in the OS4.
• Calendar Invites Don’t Cancel Meetings Correctly:  Another modern day business use case that is glaringly not handled.  When you get an meeting cancellation (and you click “cancel”) the iPad’s calendar doesn’t actually delete the meeting. This can be very confusing for busy people who depend on their electronic calendar to run their lives (or allow others to schedule meetings in their lives).
• Email Synchronization issues to IMAP Accounts: I still have problems (just like with the iPhone) of IMAP email accounts syncronizing correctly.  I’ll read eamil on the iPad/iPhone and delete messages, etc.  When I go back to my main computer and check that IMAP account, the messages are still there (even when they are gone from the iPad/iPhone).
• Alert Pop-up Messages are Disruptive: It would be nice to have a less disruptive alert message when you get a calendar invite or have a meeting alert go off.  The dialog in the middle of the screen is frustrating when you are engage in some other application (like watching a movie!).  It would be much nicer if there was an option to have a small message in the title bar or a self canceling alert in a corner.
• Web Sites Incorrectly send you to Mobile Version of their Site: I’m not sure if the iPad’s web browser can be differentiated by websites from the iPhone browser (I assume yes), but a number of sites default to their less functional mobile version of their site when I connect.  This is frustrating now that I have a larger screen to view the site.  Once of the biggest annoyances I found was with Google Reader and not being able to do certain things thru the mobile version of their site that I can do on the full version (like manage RSS subscriptions); even though I prefer using Google Reader using the mobile version on the iPad.
• There is No Front Facing Camera: While this is an obvious item, I feel this is so important that it’s worth mentioning.  For as revolutionary as the iPad is, it would have been even more so if it had a front facing camera to do video chat/video conferencing.  I honestly don’t see the value in a rear facing camera as the iPad is too big to be used as camera.  I find it hard to believe that the processor in the iPad couldn’t handle video capture (it does a great job with video playback).  I think it was a combination of legal agreements with the cellular companies and a product marketing strategy on Apple’s part.  I’m sure the AT&T can’t handle the iPhone data explosion still 3 years after it’s launch, and the added bandwidth consumption of video must scare them (as I think ahead to June release of new iPhone…).  But if there was a video camera, then how would Apple sell the next generation of iPads?  By putting the video camera in the next generation of iPads (based upon iPhone product releases, expected in 1 year), they have a second wave of customers who will swoop back in for more iPads.
• iPhone OS Really Needs a Centralized File System (at least on iPad): Currently all data and “files” can be stored at application level which makes sharing of files between apps and between iPad and other devices harder than it should be.  A OS based file system, ideally one that could be synchronized to the cloud (via mobileMe perhaps?) is such an obvious omission. (20100505)
• Quick Access to Key Settings:  there are a number of key settings on the iPad which you should have easier access to via the app (home) view.  The ability to activate airplane mode (oh, wait…), wifi network, VPN should be a quick finger motion away from where ever you are in the iPad. (20100505)
• Apps Have to Get Smarter at Network Syncing: Apps shouldn’t always expect a network, allow me to work without one and sync upon request or when the network is detected (or ideally in the background with the next version of the OS).  A great example of this is Evernote which tries to sync with the online service every time you open the app.  Which makes it unusable if you are offline and trying to use Evernote to do something like….take notes. (20100505)
• Adding Contact from Email Should be More Automatic: Why can’t the email packages pull out contact info from the email signatures?  We have been dealing with this long enough that this should be a standard feature by now.  For the iPad at least allow me to move the bubble-like contact add window so I can see the email message that the bubble window is floating in front of.  Currently it is a very cumbersome process that is not very user friendly. (20100505)

The iPad is primarily about media consumption, not creation. The potential is there for more, but it’s up to the apps and OS to still realize it. After 2 week of usage while at home, on the road, and at the office, this is the most succinct summary i have been able to come up with.

A little over 2 weeks ago I picked up a 32 GB iPad (WIFI only) after about 10 minutes of of hands on usage at one of my local Apple store. This was after a week of internal contemplation on why I would need one–most of this contemplate was triggered by an understanding of how much time I spend looking at computer screens daily and the recent San Francisco Magazine article Tech Gets a Time Out.  I also waited to give the typical Apple new product hysteria time to pass, but I’ll be honest that after a few minutes of use I knew I needed to purchase one though I couldn’t really explain why.  I have spent many an evening using the iPad at home, at the office, and on a week long trip.  What better way to learn the strengths and weaknesses of a new device than to use if as a replacement for your current device.

The iPad is not a replacement your current laptop. Especially if you consider yourself a power user.

I typically spend anywhere from 25-40 hours a week actively working on the computer (the cost of being a knowledge worker). This includes jumping between up to 15 different applications during a day.  Downloading files, creating files, saving files, sending files.  Huge amounts of typing.  The iPad alone (minus external keyboard) just couldn’t cut it as my only device.  I couldn’t go one entire day without needing to break out the laptop.  Especially when I needed to work on a file or when my hotel didn’t have WIFI available in my room…though the attention I got in the hotel lobby bar was more than usual. 

[For the record, I did type at least half of all these reviews on the iPad. Eventually realizing that the WordPress App for the iPad didn't support cut/paste!  So the second half and final editing was done old school...on a physical keyboard.]

While the user interface of the iPad is revolutionary, I believe that is still suffers from a few core issues that currently limit it’s potential as well as suffering from the typical 1.0 product issues.  Over the past weeks I have been collecting my thoughts about the iPad and will summarize them in this multipart review (each part will be posted a day or two after the previous):

• General Review (here)
• List of Areas for Improvement
• iPad for Consumers
• iPad for Business Users
• iPad for Photographers
• My Current Favorite iPad Apps

Now don’t get me wrong, if you’re not a power user the iPad may be a great secondary computer.  You just need to have another computer in the house to activate the iPad via iTunes.  And to back up the iPad.  Oh, and then there is the fact that the iPad only supports a single user…so it’s kind of hard to share between family members.  But, for someone who only needs to check a single email account and possible visit web pages (like my Parents), the iPad may be an ideal solution.  No more remote troubleshooting of wires and plugs with my Father after the grandkids visit and my Mother might even actually use it on her own.  (This was my backup plan when purchasing the iPad…until my wife confiscated it for 3 hours one night…)

It does take some time to get use to typing on the iPad, especially if you are a touch typist like myself.  I find myself constantly looking at the keyboard instead of the text that I’m typing.  If I look at the text, the lack of tactile feedback causes my fingers to drift causing mis-spellings that auto correction can’t even guess at or, even worse, I accidentally touch the text area causing the cursor to jump.  A colleague of mine indicated that some studies show that the fastest typers are on the iPhone/iPad keyboard once they get use to it.  If this is so it can only be at the cost of people completely giving up on typing what they wanted by letting the OS auto correct their mistakes to what it thinks they meant.  Not sure if I’m comfortable with that trend…

Ideally, if there was a OS level text to speach capability that applications could tap into, this would truly make me change my tune here.  While you can add a keyboard to the iPad, that’s just seems like a legacy boat anchor on this cutting edge device.  The ability to quickly enter data into the iPad with voice is something that I think we need to keep an eye out for in the future.

It is much more comfortable to use the iPad than a laptop, especially for doing stuff like reading email (not necessarily responding to email) and surfing the web.  You are truly holding the content in your hands and can sit more comfortably than with a laptop.  Typing on it is a bit more tricky, as I found it not really usable to put my feet up on the coffee table with the iPad in my lap for typing.  I needed the iPad higher up on my lap to type comfortably and it kept sliding down.  Similar issue when trying to type on the airplane, I found myself with the tray table down and me hovering over the iPad while typing. Though both of these will be different for each use based upon their build.  If you are watching something on the iPad, you will eventually want to rest it on something to give you hands, arms and/or neck a break.  This is where a easel style iPad case is a must have.   The best one appears to be the one from Apple, except that they seem to have under estimated the popularity of their case as they are sold out at all the Apple Stores I visited and back ordered on the online store.  Alas, I wait and suffer until mine arrives.

I did hear a unconfirmed rumor of a better case coming out in the near future, just not sure if that’s an upgrade of the Apple Case or a new 3rd Party one.

The iPad is a great platform for consuming media. Whether that is surfing your favorite (non-flash) websites; watching a streaming Netflix movie, one you have stored locally, or a TV show from ABC; reading your favorite news site, newspaper, or book, you can do it all beautifully from this one device.  Oh, and rumor has it there are some nice games for the iPad as well…

Again, the comfort factor for the iPad comes through here.  You have your own personal high quality screen.  A great headset and your good to go. I find myself walking around the house with the iPad getting caught up on news and blog reading.  And I have watched more Netflix steaming movies recently than I have the physical discs they send me.  The real risk here is how much time you end up spending staring at a screen.  Just like Crackberry and iPhone addiction, iPad addiction is sure to be on the rise.

It would be nice if multiple user support was added to the iPad in the future.  It would be good to be able to log into my own iPad view of apps, bookmarks, and email accounts separate from those of my wife’s.  Even at a lower price point, I don’t see buying a second iPad anytime before a new hardware version (with a front mounted camera) comes out.

Unfortunately, I have experienced the WIFI signal problem.  I get severe WIFI signal degradation on the iPad where I don’t with my Laptop.  After moving the home office out of the future nursery I installed an Apple Airport Express on the other end of the house to boost the WIFI signal and iTunes enable a stereo.  Amazingly, the iPad doesn’t seem to be able to pick up the signal or get handed off to the stronger signal of the Airport Express, even when I’m standing right next to it or connecting anew to the network in front of it.  This has been annoying at most and something I hope will go away when I upgrade my primary WIFI router to a newer model that fully supports 802.11N.

Net Net:  If you’re a consumer needing a new computer for just web access and email, the iPad should be seriously considered.  If you’re a business user and want the iPad for something more than attracting attention for the next few months at the hotel bar, think about what you really need your computer to do. Add a docking station/keyboard if you need to do any heavy typing.  Make sure you invest in an iPad case that can be used to prop the iPad up at different angles as this will make using the iPad much easier.  Just don’t expect the iPad to replace your primary computer just yet.  At least not until iTunes free iPad activation and cloud based backup of the iPad data becomes a reality.

Yesterday I logged in to check out Yammer, the Twitter for Business.  What Yammer has created is the innovation that Twitter was not able to:  a way to create social media tool for businesses and come up with a business model to charge for the service.

Yammer is essentially a channel-ized twitter.  But the channel is only other people in your business; they force that by using the domain of your email address to create or add you to a channel.  Now, your status updates are only seen by your co-workers.  And if you start to carry on a conversation in your channel, you can view messages based on threads.

Where I think it gets interesting is their business model.  Offer the service for free, but then charge the company for an Admin privileges on the channel.  An Admin can brand the channel for the company, control members of the channel and even provide security by restricting the channel so you can only log in from the corporate network.

The problem with Yammer?  It’s yet another social communication channel.  The whole social networking services have become way to fractured.  Too many places to network.  Not enough time accomplishing anything.  To use the phrase “social not-working” is getting more an more applicable. (on that point, Yammer was developed by the Geni team…how’s that for not working.)  The advantage of a service like FriendFeed is that it is one place to check all your social networking feeds, even if you can only reply back via FriendFeed.

The openess of the web needs to be extended so that something like Yammer can be a piece of infrastructure that can be plugged into multiple other services.  One think I like about Twitter is that there are 3rd party interfaces.  I have enough web browser windows open on my desktop as it is, I need less not more.  As fredrickvan tweeted today, the key is keeping your social touch points in control.  While Yammer figured out a way to make money off of the status message, it’s just another social touch point that we have to manage.

Earlier in the week, a old colleague of mine, pointed me to a list of business books that is maintained by Tom Kosnik
Professor in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford. His word document list of best books is constantly updated and contains literally over 100 books in 12 different reading areas:

1. Branding
2. Communication
3. Creativity, Individual Decision Making, & Individual Performance
4. Designing Systems that Summon the Spirit: (Strategy/Org Theory)
5. Facilitation, Group Process Management, Interactive Learning
6. Global Entrepreneurial Leadership
7. Global Entrepreneurial Marketing
8. Negotiation
9. Sales, Account Management, Business Development
10. Project Management and Leading Teams
11. Spiritual Practice: Books for Reflection and Self-Renewal
12. Women’s Issues and Diversity

The great thing about this list is that Kosnik breaks the books down into the best from each category as well as his personal top 25 books of all time (non fiction of course).

My friend also gave me a copy of the book How to Get Your Point Across in 30 Seconds or Less, which is on the top 25 list. Later that same day, my friend was giving an overview of himself to someone else and I timed he…30 seconds exactly. Finally, a Marketing person who understands the sales term “elevator pitch”! (Just kidding Rob!)

One of my personal pet peeves is bad presentation skill. Considering the technology industry is so focused on information and knowledge, it’s amazing how bad we are at communicating it. I see this almost on a daily basis in Sales. It’s either an over loaded presentation on technology from marketing, a badly organized presentation from Sales people, or — worst of all — a presentation that is just a printed record of what the presenter said. Blah!

So I was giddy with excitement (honestly, just ask my wife…she was there) when I came across a wonderful book by Garr Reynolds called presentation zen. I have relying on this book lately as I develop a couple of presentations, specifically funding presentations where it is most important to be able to tell a story about what your working on and why it’s the most important thing since sliced bread (at least to your potential customers). That is one of the key points that presentation zen makes: your presentation should be telling a story, and it shouldn’t be a novel…think more picture story book.  (for a great example, see Larry Lessig’s TED presentation on How creativity is being strangled by the law.)

The best part of presentation zen is that it can be used as a quick reference guide as your working on a presentation. It helps to reinforce the lessons you know. Such as start planning your presentation without your computer. You need to know your story line and flow, and having the computer in front of you when you do this only distracts you into things that don’t matter (like large bullet lists). I forgot this lesson when I started working on my latest presentation and the book, along with some peers with whom I reviewed an early draft, reminded me of my errors.

If you do presentations, do your audience (and yourself) a favor and buy a copy of this book!

I would also check out a Guy Kawasaki’s The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint, he brings up a great set of points on creating a presentation as well as a wonderful template to start with if your building a funding presentation (and he happens to have written the forward to presentation zen). A huge thanks goes out to Val for pointing me to this posting!

Since I’m on the topic of funding, if you interested in the world venture capital, I recently came across an interesting opinion piece on the Software VC Outlook for 2008.

Social networking sites are still all the rage. The challenge lately seems to be coming up with something that is not only new and original but adds value. Of all the sites where I have created an account LinkedIn is still the only one that I will use multiple times a week due to the value I receive from their service. As a business person, it is extremely valuable to stay on top of changes in my network and being able to leverage my network in my business dealings.

Today for example I came across Dopplr for the first time and have to ask…why bother. If I don’t see the value, either personally or for some greater good, in investing my time creating yet another profile and entering in yet another set of data I won’t do it. While the idea behind it is interesting, the value isn’t there for me. Especially if I have to hand enter the information that makes the social network work.

On the flip side of this coin, I have come across a few that I find really interesting.

One is a stealth social network site that I was granted early access to which not only is a new twist on an old idea but has the potential to add value in an area that is still lacking. The trick is always figuring out how to monetize the community without upsetting the community or destroying the value of the information that draws the community to the network in the first place. This, usability, and my knowledge of the target user community, were the areas that I was talking to this company about. Unfortunately, I was granted access under the agreement that I wouldn’t talk about it yet…so I have to honor my NDA for now, but stay tuned for more as soon as it launches.

Another is a site that my wife came across this morning, Carbonrally. This is such a simple, yet wonderful idea; one of those that surprises you that no one has done something like it before. From their mission statement:

“Carbonrally is a web-based activism platform offering individuals and groups a fun, simple and social way to have a measurable impact on climate change. “

It’s not only a social network of people wanting to fight global warming, but also a platform to enable this through simple challenges that help you reduce your carbon footprint. Yet, by making these challenges competitive and by tracking how you and others do in these challenges, they tap into the human competitive spirit to drive people to have an impact. Combine this with some basic statistics to help you gauge your impact on regional basis (and extend that competitive nature by comparing your region’s impact to others) and you have a very compelling social network that creates real social change.

Unfortunately, I failed today on the latest challenge. I forgot my commuter mug when I got my morning coffee…but after the gentle reminder and concrete information on the impact that my forgetfulness had, I won’t tomorrow.

The future challenge that I see Carbonrally facing is how to keep the site engaging for users so that when the initial competitive thrill wears off there is a reason for the users to keep coming back.  There will always be the die hard planet saving types who will create the core of the community, but they need to expand beyond that core to really have global impact.  The fact that the topic of the community is something altruistic in nature might help them.  Time will tell.

One of the great things about Open Source software development is, well, it’s open-ness. Sort through your list of Open Source packages that you are running in your organization. You can go in and look at the source code for each one of them, right? But what’s behind that source code? Or Who?

I recently found a very interesting open source directory called Ohloh. Ohloh (oh, what a name!) takes a very interesting ‘bot’ approach to open source. They employ a legion of software bots to crawl through the major open source repositories and collect information about open source projects that you may never have known.

For example, did you know that the Firefox project has over 3 million lines of code? More importantly, how fast has the code base been growing? (or is it shrinking?). All you have to do is check out Firefox’s Code Statistics on Ohloh. You can see a breakdown of how many files within the Firefox code base are licensed under which licensing scheme. A trended history of code lines. And a breakdown of what percentage of Firefox is written in what programming language. When deciding on an which smaller scale open source projects to use, you can use this information to make a better decision. Do you have programmers with experience in the languages used within a project?

You can also look at an open source project’s list of contributors and how long they have been with the project as well as how often they submit code. The system even gives a heuristic on each contributors experiences level with various languages based on how many submissions have been found in each language and over a given period. There is even a social network aspect to the site where programmers can rate their peers (which needs to be taken in context of any social network site…). About the only thing that is missing is the one click ability to see if there are other projects that a contributor is also involved with (you can do this by doing a search for a contributor on the main page of the site, but this is so obvious I’m surprised the site’s developers didn’t include that on each developer’s project page).

Of course, what would a website with social features be if you couldn’t have an account and provide your own feedback on projects. Ohloh has that, as well as the ability for members to define the stack of open source software that they use. Which gives viewers the ability to see how many people are using a projects.

Ohloh provides a new twist on evaluating opens source software projects. However, there were a number of projects that I use which were not on the site, some of those missing projects surprised me as Ohloh has been around since 2004. Guess no one is perfect…

It’s not too often that I find a really useful and free service that I can see myself using almost daily. Today I found one. Even with the wide spread use of mobile email, at times it still not practical, safe, or possible to take down a quick note on your smart phone and email it out. Wouldn’t it be great if we all had a personal secretary that we could call to transcribe our note and then email it out? But who could afford that…right? Now we all can!

Jott is a essentially a note taking service that allows you to call a toll free phone number, record up to a 30 second note, reminder, idea, or whatever and then have it emailed to your inbox…fully transcribed! Even better, set up other people in your account and have the note emailed to them instead (or sent as a text message to their phone). Group people together and send a note to the entire group. And if you can’t wait the few minutes for the message to be transcribed, send it as an audio attachment! Jott even makes it easy to pull in your contacts from other services.

Jott is so simple, it’s brilliant!

I also love how the “Jott in Action” section on the website simply explains how the system works. If you know how to use a phone, email, and web browser…you can use this service.

Jott has been around for about a year now, and have a great service up and running in that time. The current restriction is that it’s available only in the United States. But I assume that this restriction won’t be there for too much longer.

I will definitely be using this service almost daily!

I have been using Google Analytics for almost a year now to track the visitors to this blog and a few other sites I have. Tonight, I was slightly surprised when I logged on to my account and saw a whole new set of graphs. Google Analytics underwent an update today:

If your a user of Google Analytics, then you’ll notice the changes right away. The changes give the Analytics’ graphs a fresher look and feel. The dashboard (the first screen you see when you choose an account) has been redesigned as well. What is nice about the new dashboard is that it shows a historic line graph of your visitors for more than just the last 7 days (like the old versions). The menu options seem to be nearly the same as before, but I haven’t fully explored the new version yet (nor fully explored the old version). The only thing that I have found that I don’t like about the new analytics is that loss of granularity. Before, I could look at the stats for a single day and see when visits to my site occurred (valuable to understand what time of day vitis happened or how shortly after a blog posting that visitors arrived). This new version seems to have lost that level of granularity, now the finest grained detail I can view is a single day’s worth of traffic.

If you don’t mind sharing your site’s traffic with Google and you have a mechanism for installing the required javascript widget on all your pages, Google Analytics is a great tool for viewing and exploring your traffic. Especially if you use Google Adwords, since they are integrated. But, once you reach a certain volume of traffic you will need to sign up for the commercial version of analytics. Until then, try it out and see what you think.

Oh, and it’s not really clear if Google use this data for any other purposes…but they don’t specifically guarantee that they don’t… (see their Terms of Services, Section 6)

A few weeks ago my good friend Jon Hodgson was visiting me over the weekend. Jon and I worked together for over five years at Resonate during the startup, through IPO, to acquisition of the company (quite an interesting 5 year ride). Jon has spent the last few years, from Resonate through today, focusing on multi-tiered application performance tuning. This is a complex area that can contain all sorts of technologies within the Enterprise infrastructure (i.e., firewalls, networks, servers, web servers, application servers, database, middleware). He is currently the guy in this area at OPNET with their Panorama product.

If you have a multi-tier application (and who doesn’t today) and are running into performance issues, you need to give Jon and his team a call. He shared with me some of the work he has been doing in this area with clients, and the advances that he has been involved with in this area since we last worked together are amazing.

He showed me some of the capabilities that Panorama and the OPNET technologies have, and my jaw kept hitting the floor. With Panorama, he showed me how the tool can display the communication between each tier in a multi-tiered application, drill into the part of the communication that is causing the most latency, and then pinpoint the source of that latency within the multi-tiered environment. Like that wasn’t enough, he then combined the Panorama capabilities with ACE to then predict what would happen to the application’s performance if various changes were made to the network environment. Like what would happen if you added a firewall and only 1ms of latency between a Java application server and a database?

Jon and I were involved with building some of the early capabilities for a tool in this area at Resonate before the company was acquired and taken private. The recording, playback and predictive simulation capabilities of the tools that Jon has been involved with building at OPNET are mind blowing compared to what we were working on eight years ago! While I haven’t been involved in this space for a few years, I also know that I haven’t seen anything that comes close to the capabilities of the combined OPNET solutions.

While this tool may not work for everyone, OPNET’s Panorama is definitely one of those hidden gems of the technology world that should be considered by anyone responsible for application performance tuning.

(Disclaimer: I originally wrote this posting on January 12th after the launch of the iPhone and while I was traveling. I posted it a few days later (posting date) once I had the bandwidth to find the links and post)

It’s been a few days since the Apple’s announcement of their latest foray into the consumer electronics realm..the Apple iPhone (not to be confused with the Cisco iPhone). Those that know me well (especially any Product Manager that has ever worked with me…) know that I’m a stickler for design and usability. That being said, I fought the urge to be like every other technologist out there and write about the new iPhone. But, as I sat here tonight on a cross country flight, my mind kept creeping back to the iPhone. So I caved…

Sidebar: one of the most interesting things I found online about the iPhone was the iPhone Concept Blog. This blog has numerous postings from people who envisioned and mocked up the iPhone. There are both some truly uninspired entries as well as some that will beconsidered by other cell phone manufacturers for the inevitable slew of iPhone knock-offs.

First, some background info about me: At an average of 1500 minutes a month, I am a power cell phone user (don’t tell my wife, but I’ve estimated that some extreme months I’ve probably talked to my cell phone more than to her…hmm, can you say New Year’s resolution?). I have been a Palm user for almost 10 years now…and I have information in my palm that I can date back to 1997. I have also been a Palm Treo user for almost two years (and have gone through three of them). I also was an early Apple devotee; obviously dating myself I have owned in my past an Apple IIgs, Mac IIsi, and a Powerbook 540. (I’m itching to ditch my Windows XP laptop for a MacBook Pro, but that’s a whole different post)

As a review of an unreleased phone, I will break my thoughts on the iPhone into two categories: Design & Usability and Market Strategy.

Design & Usability

As no surprise to Apple fans, the iPhone looks to be a work of design art. And with over 200 patents filed for the phone, it is definitely setting some new usability records. Here are some of the aspects of the phone that jumped out at me the most:

Touch Screen: The sexiest thing about the iPhone is the touch screen. The new interface must be where the majority of Apple’s patents on the iPhone live. I can also see this being the biggest usability issue for people…especially power users. First, the lack of any tactile feedback could be a deal killer for a lot of people. Image trying to dial you phone while driving (and ideally keeping your eyes on the road…I know, call me crazy!). This was one of things that annoyed me the most with my Treo, luckily the Treo address book interface solved that problem by allowing me to jump to within a few entries of a person by typing in 2-3 character of their name. I don’t see that as being possible on the iPhone, you have to scroll around the phone to get to a name in the address book. The most obvious way for Apple to get around this would voice recognition capabilities; just say the persons name and phone finds the address book entry and/or dials the number. Honestly, I’m surprised this feature isn’t available on more cell phones (especially “smart” phones). If this feature doesn’t appear in the next iPhone (or as a software upgrade within a year) I will be shocked.

The touch screen also is shocking with regards to the text communication aspect of the phone. Have you ever tried typing on a soft keyboard (one that has no physical keys to it)? Not the easiest thing. Luckily it should be easier when “thumb typing” on a cell phone. Again, Apple is not the first to have this on a smart phone; there has been a project going on for a while on the Palm platform called thumbboard. I at least hope that the button sizes are large (or even better, configurable in size) on the iPhone. One of my biggest complains about smart phones, specifically my Treo, is the small buttons. Yes, I admit it…I have fat fingers. The number of mistakes I make on my Treo when typing a message is frustrating. If the iPhone misses this mark I will be shocked and saddened.

Expandability: The fact that the iPhone only comes in 4GB or 8GB capacity surprised me at first. I thought that a device designed to be an iPod/cell phone hybrid would need more storage than that for the music along. Then I looked at my 30GB iPod Video. I am only using a little over 5GB on it for 1140 songs and 51 videos (most of the videos are video podcasts that I find difficult to keep up on watching). Still, for a iPod fanatic even 8GB is going to be small. I’m surprised that they didn’t put in some sort of expansion capability into the iPhone. Every smart phone I can think of accepts expansion cards (typically for memory). It’s smart that Apple stuck with only flash memory (moving parts draw more power and fail faster …especially when you drop your phone…time and time again.). But to limit the phone to the built in memory is painful. Memory cards are now coming in 8GB and 16 GB (with only larger ones on the way). Why restrict your customer?

Durability: Speaking of dropping your cell phone–why do you think the average lifespan of my Treos are less than a year–I am concerned about the durability of the device. It didn’t take long before my iPod Video had numerous scratches across the screen with very light usage. Eventually I got smart and bought a protective case for it, but the feel of the device just wasn’t the same (nor was the cool factor). I am assuming the iPhone will be designed in a similar fashion. The metal band around the edge of the phone should help protect it, but for adequate protection most people will want to get some sort of cover for it. While this helps to spur the accessory market for the iPhone, it does hurt the cool factor. I wonder what type of protective case will come with the iPhone? I think it was the protective sleeve that came with my iPod Video that caused most of my original scratches.

Wireless Access: Providing Wi-Fi support is a great step forward. With the large screen, the phone is targeting internet access. If your within reach of a Wi-Fi hotspot, why not allow the user to use the faster connection? However, the lack of any forward looking capability like VOIP from the iPhone over the Wi-Fi is a bit surprising. VOIP cell phones are already appearing. So the lack of this capability makes the iPhone seem a bit behind the times on this capability. However, I expect you will hear about some VOIP (Skype?) capability for the iPhone within about 9-12 month of availability.

Support for data download over the cell network is a must; this is where the EDGE support comes in. What is surprising is that the choice of EDGE. According to Cingular themselves, EDGE is more than 5 times slower than the HSPDA technology. Additionally, HSPDA allows for both voice and data transfer at the same time (ever try talking to someone while looking something up on a web page or accessing an new email?). In Apple’s defense, EDGE is supported over a wider portion of Cingular’s network.

OS X Support: In some respects, what else would you expect the iPhone to run as an operating system but OS X. The cell phone market has been talking and working on Linux based cell phones for literally years and there are a number of them currently available. Since OS X is a derivative of Unix, this in it’s own right is not that impressive (just don’t say that to a Mac Fanatic). Seeing OS X be converted to run as an embedded OS is very interesting. This opens up the potential for OS X to be used in other places…I can image some Apple engineers working weekends to hack their Toyota Prius’ to run OS X!

The downside of OS X support is the lack of applications available for it. There will undoubtedly be a slew of OS X mini applications to run on the iPhone in the near future (assuming Apple provides a way to install them). This is one of the areas that Apple has succeed with OS X, embracing the Open Source community and the weekend coder. But it will be a while before any decent amount of business related applications appear for the OS X on the iPhone.

Sensors: The ability for the iPhone to sense its environment and adapt is hands down cool! With the wide display automatically switching perspectives based upon how you are holding is such an Apple design. Especially when you combine this feature with web browsing or email, it (should) increase the usability of the iPhone for both of those tasks considerably. The auto adjusting brightness also has potential. The key here is to see how it works in the real world. Laptops still aren’t able to be used in really bright light…and trying to just eats up the battery.

Battery: Speaking of battery, I find it shocking how the discussion of batter life or access has been completely ignored. We all remember the battery fiasco with the iPods batteries. Can you image if you couldn’t replace your cell phone battery yourself? Or even more important buy an extended battery? Personally, I can’t believe Apple would make this mistake again (and pass up on all the extra revenue from replacement batteries) but I have been wrong before…but only twice.

Camera: Of course every cell phone has to have a camera in it today. A fact that I only partly understand (as a avid photographer, there have been very few times that I have ever really needed to use the camera on my cell phone…). Apple places the new standard in cell phone cameras in the iPhone: 2.0 megapixel. Again, there are cell phone cameras on their way to market (and might arrive before the iPhone) that are pushing 3.2 megapixels.

Now, what would have been up to the Apple design standards is if the camera on the iPhone was facing the same direction as the screen (or rotatable). Next add the right software and you have video conferencing on your cell phone. (I remember a sci-fi television series by Gene Rodenberry where video cell phone with cool roll-up screens were a normal item in this future world…we could have had that in the iPhone, except without the roll-up screen.) Maybe some Apple engineer will stumble across this posting and make it happen.

Market Strategy

Apple’s Market Strategy with the iPhone is both expected as well as confusing. It’s expected in the fact that the Apple has made it clear that their focus is on the consumer electronics’ marketplace (the old Apple devotee did enjoy the way Steve Jobs stole the show from Bill Gates down at CES). What is surprising in that Apple is still ignoring the business market.

With regards to the consumer market, there are a number of aspects of the iPhone that I feel will hurt it’s acceptance. Lack of expandability might have some small impact, but not much. Initial support for only Cingular could hurt some initial buyers, but again I think marginally. Mostly, it’s the issue about the battery uncertainness, durability, tactile feedback, software support and high cost ($500-$600) that will limit the acceptance. Of course there will be the rash of buyers with high disposable incomes who have to follow the trends with the latest and greatest whatever along with the Apple devotees. The interesting thing to watch will be if and how quickly the spike of initial buyers will taper off (assuming it does).

I’m predicting that the iPhone will not make any noticeable impact into the business smart phone market. The fact that there is no business software (yet) for the iPhone is the key hold back. Most companies live off of the Blackberry or GoodLink services for email (some have generic VPN mail access directly from the phone). None of that is available for the phone yet. The fact that most business’ mail servers are not located outside of the firewall limits the usability of the phone for business email, still the key driver for business smart phones. Thought I’m sure there will be some interest from companies that have moved to web based apps, the iPhone could be best platform for mobile access to them…especially if the browser “zoom” feature works as shown on the Apple website. The browser zoom feature smartly solves the problem of surfing the web on a small screen.

In the end, while the old time Apple devotee in me would love to have an iPhone, the more pragmatic business technologist needs more out of it than what’s there right now to justify the time and energy to move to a new platform. But I will be keeping my eye on it.