Shafer Walters Group

Technology by Design

Inventive User-Created Apps Growing in Importance

I just posted the following comment in a thread on ZDNet and thought you might find it interesting. Feel free to contact me if you want to talk more about Inventive Users. The post was a response to a user who dismissed the whole idea of user-created apps by saying, "Only a tiny part of workers can really create apps"

Your comment is perhaps a bit antiquated. As a pioneer in the field for which I coined the term "Inventive User" more than 25 years ago, this allegedly newly spotted trend is a yawner to those of us who have been monitoring this space for years.

Employees will bypass the IT department whenever it suits their needs to do so if they can find accessible tools with which to do so. Many years ago, Apple produced a tool called HyperCard that led to tens if not hundreds of thousands of apps being written in the trenches to solve problems that were too specific and small to get the IT shop's attention. A logical successor to that amazing technology (which Apple blew completely) is called LiveCode from Runtime Revolution is even more empowering than its ancestor. Reasonably intelligent employees with an unmet need for processing power will find tools and use them to do things the IT shop can't or won't approach.

I don't know or recommend QuickBase, but I can tell you this: my corporate clients get a clear message from me in consultation situations that they need to find ways to encourage Inventive Users to assist in making the organization more efficient and effective. At a time when most if not all companies are asking fewer employees to do more work with less money, this sort of activity is becoming a key, if invisible, part of a company's IT picture.


Gray Screen of Death But No Data Loss!

Tonight -- or rather early this morning -- I experienced the first Gray Screen of Death on a Macintosh I've seen in so long I can't remember the last one. It was sudden and inexplicable. First, my Bluetooth Logitech keyboard lost its connection to the system; this has happened a lot in recent months. Before I could even react, I got the dreaded gray washdown over my screen and the black-and-white, multilingual message telling me I had to restart.

When it happened, I had an open document in TextEdit I hadn't saved. It wasn't very long but it was made up of a bunch of ideas that had begun to gel about a new kind of social network. It was important stuff for me. I could certainly recreate it but would I lose some of the spontaneous stuff that makes such middle-of-the-night gotta-write-this-down idea generation scintillating the next day?

Oh, well. I powered off my Mac Mini, waited a few minutes, and restarted it.

Not only did the system restart cleanly, there was my unsaved TextEdit document exactly as I had left it when the bleedin' demise of my Lion system had happened. I nearly shouted with glee. If my wife hadn't been sleeping in the same room, I might have done so.

So this is just another good reason to keep using Mac for me. For all I know, Windows would be just as brilliant in helping me recover from a system failure but none of my personal experience suggests that would be the case. 

Thanks, Apple.

Without Steve, iPhone 4SGTLR32?

The too-recent and too-soon passing of Steve Jobs has been met largely with the kind of praise you'd expect for a giant of a man of industry and creativity and marketing. I penned my own paean to his influence on my life and career.

But as time comes for the second breath, people are beginning to ask the important Next Question for Apple. Business Insider columnist Henry Blodget is typical of those commentators:

The question now, of course, is what happens to Apple in Steve's absence. The company will be led by exactly the same people who have led it for the past decade, so in the short term the company will probably be fine.

But the idea of "losing its edge" is important. And if Apple does begin to change for the worse without Steve, this will likely be what happens.

 Like Blodget, I don't fear for Apple in the near term. But in the mid-range, say, 5or so years into the future, I do wonder whether Apple can keep its innovative edge. I don't think we can say for sure yet.

One thing I do believe, though, is that for whatever reason, Apple failed to introduce the iPhone5 last week because it wasn't ready. The iPhone 4S was a backup plan. It had to be inserted into the announcement at the last minute because the company saw it couldn't make the iPhone5 ready for the introduction in time.

Part of that may be due to legal disputes in which Apple is embroiled like never before in its history. Parts suppliers have been reluctant to ship needed components to a company that is suing them. Go figure. But part of the reason may well be Steve's resignation in August as CEO. It's the first time we've been certain (or nearly so) that a planned Apple product intro went astray. It's too small an indicator and far too early to point to as a harbinger, but still. Don't you wonder in the back of your mind whether this does indeed not bode well for the iconic digital company?

Another Nit for Amazon.com: Search Results Artificially Limited

I don't know why I've taken to this trend of nibbling away at Amazon.com and their amazing Kindle apps and hardware lately. But here's my second one in less than a week.

I discovered by accident the other day that if you search in a Kindle book on a Kindle app (in my case, running on an OS X box and an iOS device), the search results are limited to the first 100 hits. On the Kindle device, on the other hand, all available results are returned.

Why?

I'm not a heavy-duty programmer but I think I understand programming the Mac and iOS apps well enough to be pretty sure that memory constraints wouldn't be an issue. Not only are both machines pretty robust in terms of memory, but managing virtual memory on an app isn't all that difficult. So even the amount of available RAM shouldn't limit the result set. 

Is this just a silly ploy to get me to buy a Kindle? I already have one, folks! Just let me find all the results I need on whatever app I'm using a Kindle publication on. 

Why would I need more than 100 results, you ask? If I'm doing research and I'm looking for references to a particular word or phrase that appear in, e.g., a specific section or chapter of a book, and that section appears after the first 100 results the app returns, I have no way to get at the additional results as far as I can tell. No excuse for this and it is in my way.

Apple is Now Like the U.S.: It Has a Jobs Problem

As you know by now, Apple co-founder and Main Wizard Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO of his company yesterday.  I'm a little saddened but nobody is surprised. COO Tim Cook was, as widely expected, elevated to the CEO post.

I've read several dozen analyses of the situation. Useless speculation is one of my favorite pastimes, so I'll add my voice to the mix.

My predictions for Apple as a result of this semi-seismic shift:
  • Near-term (next 12 months or so), little to no effect. Jobs remains as Chairman and will still be involved in design and product decisions. With him, "involved" means "dominating." Cook's been running day-to-day anyway. Apple has its hands full extending and fully exploiting the new product categories it's either defined or led.
  • Mid-range (1-3 years), Apple's rep as THE primary innovator will fade a bit as other companies take the lead in new product categories and Apple scores an occasional win. This assumes two things: Steve doesn't fully retire or die (he's had surgery for pancreatic cancer and in general the prognosis for long-term survival is not good); and no major new product categories emerge from an unknown space.
  • Long-term (3+ years), Apple will settle into place as a once-innovative, still-excellent company with a broad range of consumer products based around computation and multimedia, becoming, if you will, the Sony of America.
If Jobs' influence ends sooner than 3 years either by full retirement or illness or death, then all bets are off in the mid-range. What makes Steve unusual -- his co-founding partner Steve Wozniak has declared Jobs to be the greatest tech innovator and executive in history and I'm not sure that's an overstatement -- is his combination of vision, style, and execution ability. Ideas are a dime a dozen; the ability to sort out the good from the bad is more unusual. But to find someone who can do that and then execute a strategy to make the chosen idea successful is a true rarity.

Cook's management style has been characterized as gruff and assertive, two of Jobs' traits, but more disciplined and predictable. He promised in an email to the troops that Apple wouldn't change its DNA. But DNA evolves and it's not clear to anyone how well Cook will weather change when he has the helm.

I may have more thoughts in coming hours and days but for now, I see this as a fairly smoothly handled transition in a company that has tremendous momentum and is unlikely to be badly hurt even by significantly dumb decisions, of which I don't expect very many.

Great Approach to Organizing iPhone and iPad Screens

My colleague Steve Lomas has written a great post that describes clearly how to organize your multiple screens of scattered icons on your iOS device for easy retrieval. It's a great system if you can get yourself to think in terms of folders on those devices which started out with no such concept and then implemented the idea in a sort of obtuse way.

I decided to try his technique on my iPad. In less than 30 minutes I took six screens of icons down to two. It would have all fit on one, but I decided to leave my three-year-old granddaughter's page intact so she wouldn't get confused and then start rummaging around my other icons!

Good idea, Steve.

LiveCode (Formerly Runtime Revolution) Gaining Some Serious Cred

My favorite programming language is gaining some serious traction in the world of iOS development.

Formerly called Runtime Revolution after the company that made it, the more recently christened LiveCode is up for a MacUser award in the innovations category and a fairly simple demo app written using only LiveCode has gained significant recognition both on YouTube and on the iPhone/iPad platforms in Apple's App Store.

The app is called Sheep Herder and while it's a bit simple-minded to make a really playable game, it has enjoyed a four-star rating and lots of great user comments. The YT video shows the game's designer/developer building the complete app in LiveCode in just over three hours. (BTW, you can download the entire source code for the app here, but it won't do you much good if you don't own LiveCode and an iOS developer account with Apple.)

LiveCode is good enough that a number of folks who have seen the video (upwards of 250,000!) and the game have expressed doubts that the story that the game was written without using XCode or Objective-C. I can say this: LiveCode is certainly fully capable of creating the game and a lot more complexity than that. Could a LiveCode newbie do it? Sure. Not in three hours, probably, but certainly it's possible. And LiveCode has one of the shallowest learning curves for a programming language I, a language junkie, have ever encountered.

The only reason I don't still  live in LiveCode as I once did is that it's still not quite where it needs to be for me to build Web apps, i.e., apps that run entirely in the browser. You still need a plugin for that and folks seem more reluctant than ever to download and install plugins outside a  handful that have gained reputations for reliability and safety.

Amazon's New Web App: Good, Bad, No Ugly

Amazon.com today released its HTML5 Web version of the Kindle reader and online store combination. Clearly a response to Apple's heavy-handed restrictions on allowing the sale of ancillary content from within apps sold through its App Store, the new Web solution is a welcome addition to my iPad and another strong indicator that HTML5 is a tidal wave that will, without question, ultimately replace proprietary technologies.

That's not to say there isn't some cruft in with the welcome news. The biggest issue for me: Highlighting of text is not supported. This is a very real problem for me; I use this feature constantly and I probably won't be able to switch to the Web app for my reading until this one's fixed.

First, the good stuff.
  • It's HTML5! Any time a new HTML5 solution emerges that provides the substantial look and feel of a desktop app, it's one more nail in the coffin of proprietary technologies that have never had a legitimate place on the Open Web.
  • The bookshelf experience is clean, familiar and reasonably responsive.
  • Books you want to use on your iPad or other browser reader are downloaded in the background quite seamlessly and efficiently.
  • The experience of the Kindle store is well-translated from app to browser.
Now, the not-so-good (aka bad) stuff.
  • While it's understandable that Amazon can't support browsers (like Firefox) that don't support offline features of HTML5 well or at all, there doesn't seem to be a good reason not to allow the app to run on Safari on iPhone. Yeah, the UI is clearly optimized for the iPad, but still....
  • The overall experience is clearly not as smooth as the native app (and couldn't be).
  • App switching is quite slow because each time you switch from one app back to the browser-based app, it appears to re-load the entire page. Not sure why they're not doing a better job of caching here, but it could be an HTML5-on-Safari limitation.
  • Another problem with app-switching arises if you install the Web app as a desktop icon and switch from another app to that icon rather than to Safari (which runs the icon, of course). Safari remembers where you were before you switched out; the desktop icon/app doesn't. Weird.
  • The Kindle Store, while largely well done, has some UI problems. For example, if you go into your account and select a previously purchased item, then try to get it delivered to a specific device, you'll find it maddeningly difficult to tap in exactly the right place on the disclosure diamond next to the option, which then opens a dropdown list from which to make the choice. There are other places where screen real estate has been used unwisely.
  • "Sort recent" doesn't, at lest not for books in the cloud as they are initially placed in your bookshelf. My books were not sorted in any order I could determine.
  • Installing the app on the desktop went fine but produced what appeared to be a bogus error about installation problems. When I tapped on the inconspicuous error message at the bottom of the screen, it immediately disappeared and the install was clearly fine.
I'm sure I'll uncover other stuff as I use the app in coming days, though for now at least -- until someone forces my hand -- I'll keep using the standalone app as long as I can keep the seamless in-app purchase. I'm sure that at some point Apple will figure out a way to force me to upgrade. Meanwhile, I'll keep an eye on developments in the Web app. But I'm definitely glad to see it arrive.