I'm Todd Sieling, and I help design software experiences and strategies for the web. Here I write and can be contacted about creating humane, effective and memorable products for the connected world.
Just over three years ago Steve Jobs closed a keynote with notice that Apple Computer had changed its name to Apple, Inc. My first reaction was that they were taking the business more towards the iPod model and away from Macs. Later, I wrote that I saw Apple taking the direction towards digital appliances and what that meant for watching movies at home. I’m happy the Mac is still central to their strategy, but in the iPad we see more of what Apple sees: the general purpose computing paradigm is a dead end.
Lots of techies are upset, seeing the future of making software as a Facebook experience: whitewashed, right angles and the turfing out of anything not deemed to fit by corporate interests.
How did that happen? There were plenty of chances to make things easy and for everyone, like the marketing copy we keep slapping onto our product descriptions. But we blew it.
Like many, I watched the iPad announcement on Wednesday and then went straight to discussion forums to see what people were saying. As with any disruptive product, there’s a mix of reactions ranging from lust to uncertainty to outrage. What gets missed in the excitement for or against is the comprehensive and disciplined innovation strategy that Apple has used three times now, most recently in the iPad. Read more »
Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs, must be losing some sleep this week. Just six days ago he made in one of his posts a call for a ‘digital flash mob’. The goal: overload the AT&T 3G network in a protest response to the company’s grousing about Bandwidth Hogs. Now, the Bandwidth Hog is a mythological beast in the world of telecom and internet service providers. Spokespeople portray them with propagandistic rhetoric as an invisible enemy among us, greedily devouring fantastic amounts of bandwidth to the detriment of us fair-minded, simple folk. Invoking such a cheap device is condescending enough, but the real insult is that these companies consistently fail to produce evidence of actual bandwidth hogs.
But that doesn’t excuse Lyons from what he must be starting to see as a bad mistake. His Operation Chokehold has escaped the crystal prison of satire and threatens to run loose in our world. That’s right, Fake Steve found the silly old book of magic spells and thought it funny to read one calling forth the Bandwidth Hog from the demon dimensions. As if in a bad horror movie (or a great Buffy episode), the beast becomes real and is loosed upon the world.
In real terms, the stunt is little more than a crowdsourced denial of service attack, and the FCC has already commented to that effect. Moreover, one has to wonder how much damage this whole thing will do to the future of unlimited data plans; if Operation Chokehold demonstrates a risk exposure in unlimited plans, the telcos will have a great shield to hide behind as bandwidth caps and tiered access once again rule the day and destroy a huge user experience benefit that Real Steve Jobs brought in with the iPhone: that you don’t have to wonder about data limits when you use the device.
By invoking the ethos of the vandal with a ginned up crowd, Lyons went beyond satire, slapped on a pair of jean shorts and made the wonderful Fake Steve Jobs jump the shark.
What Dan could and should have done is tuned AT&T anger at the partner with the trump card: Apple. They’ve shown us that they can and will break carrier exclusivity by punishing Rogers/Fido here in the Canada just last month, so why not reach for the lever that seems to actually work to the customer’s benefit?
If Dan’s satirical voice does wane after this episode it’ll be a net loss, but like the Fonz nobody made him get on those waterskies.
I’ve taken more than a couple shots at RIM on this blog, in part due to being a bit of a fanboy for the iPhone, and more for what I’ve seen as a lot of old school thinking about product development and design. But if I want to be fair, I have to give RIM props when I see what I think are good moves. Today I found just such an opportunity.
The BlackBerry swept the enterprise mobile market largely on the strength of push, which delivers e-mail messages and other content to the handset in the background as soon they arrive and can notify the user immediately. On Monday, RIM gave developers of consumer software a push API (application programming interface) for creating applications that could include Web-based e-mail and other tools.
That’s smart, because reliable push-notification is something that Apple tried to copy in the iPhone but has had all kinds of trouble with (recalling the MobileMe launch and the year-long delay to open a push service that third-party apps can use to deliver notifications from the background, where they’re (quite rightly) not allowed to run.
RIM is playing on their strengths rather than trying to chase what Apple is doing better, like a touchscreen experience. They’re also learning quickly that opening up the platform will let others help build their success. It’s refreshing to see from a company that was having a hard time breaking out of older thinking.
About six weeks ago Apple kicked out a little preview party for the iPhone’s upcoming 3rd anniversary, complete with a big slice of Beta Cake for app developers. Most commentary so far seems split between speculation on somewhat vanilla, incremental hardware improvements and the overdue-ness, the zomg-ness of the decades-old desktop computing staple: Cut+Copy and Paste.
Copy and Paste is good to have. Its absence hasn’t bothered me much, but that’s me and I recognize it’s a pain for many, especially around URLS (though the explosion of shorteners, midwifed into necessity by Twitter, alleviates that). And the way Apple is implementing the feature in a touch-screen looks good in the video.
Besides adding oft-requested (and much needed) copy and paste functionality, the company also tacked on MMS, A2DP (stereo Bluetooth) support, peer-to-peer connectivity, unlocked Bluetooth support for the touch, and a brand new global search called Spotlight.
What I think reviewers are missing can only be seen when the iPhone is viewed part and parcel with the iTunes App Store and the changes coming with 3.0. Those changes, I believe, will have 3 big outcomes:
Halt the ghettoization of the App Store as one ruled by the $0.99 price point, and radically tidy up the inventory to make app discovery and browsing much easier.
Expand App Store revenues with a massive opportunity for developers to generate new and ongoing sales.
Neutralize the threat posed by Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader by turning it into an Apple product.
The short version of why: iPhone 3 makes every app a potential store. Here’s how.
Last week Garrett Murray’s commentary on the state reviewing culture on the iTunes App Store reviews circulated through the the blogaverse, catching my eye by way of Lachlan’s Pool Room.
Garrett’s application, Ego (iTunes Link), lets iPhone users check in on their Google Analytics stats on the go. A snafu with Analytics caused his app to be blocked, but in true web spirit Google and Garrett worked out the problem, and an update to Ego was submitted into the App Store’s approval process, which takes about a week.
Meanwhile, on the App Store and Get Satisfaction, Ego customers reacted badly, giving rise to the Garrett’s two core grievances on how commenting on the App Store and elsewhere works:
Reviewers can be quick to criticize and don’t read every detail before doing so.
The App Store doesn’t give developers a way to respond to specific comments, or comments in general.
These are fair criticisms, one rooted in problematic human-computer expectations (and if we acronymize that to HCE, we can go on speaking tour), and the other in the design of the interface at the App Store. Along with people commenting on Ego’s problem, we have Google Analytics and the App Store not coming off very well. But there’s a fourth leg in this interaction dance, which is how the Ego app itself handled the unexpected use case of being blocked by Google. Read more »
It must be spring, because I’ve once again dug up and re-built the setup for this site.
This year,it’s a move back to Retrix for hosting, a change of engine to WordPress from Typo. So far I’m finding this new ride to be exceptionally comfortable, and owe a big thanks to the WordPress and its community for what they’ve built. Typo is a nice system, with one of the nicer admin interfaces, to boot, but we just weren’t right for each other. C’est la vie.
The move was relatively easy, heavy lifting done by Adam Roth for migration and Tzaddi Gordon for custom theming. A mobile theme is available thanks to Brave New Code’s WPtouch iPhone Plugin. It packs a lot of theming control into one plugin, and is well worth a donation given how simple to use and effective it is in generating an almost instant yet complete mobile theme. Bam!
So, a few rough edges remain in migrating content, and my plugin curiosity isn’t sated quite yet. Please pardon any messiness around here for the next few days.
Just over three years ago Steve Jobs closed a keynote with notice that Apple Computer had changed its name to Apple, Inc. My first reaction was that they were taking the business more towards the iPod model and away from Macs. Later, I wrote that I saw Apple taking the direction towards digital appliances and what that meant for watching movies at home. I’m happy the Mac is still central to their strategy, but in the iPad we see more of what Apple sees: the general purpose computing paradigm is a dead end.
About six weeks ago Apple kicked out a little 