Category Archives: Apple

Will we lose our App-etites?

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This morning’s Observer column.

Google has launched a new online tool that may eventually make you wish you’d never been born. It’s called App Inventor, and it’s a kind of DIY kit that will allegedly enable non-techies to build applications for Android smartphones. “To use App Inventor,” says Google, “you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires no programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behaviour.”

There’s a nice video that illustrates this point. It opens with an attractive young woman and her cat, who’s walking all over her computer keyboard. So she takes puss on to her lap and sets to work…

Google’s DIY App Tool

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Google is bringing Android software development to the masses. According to the NYTimes,

The company will offer a software tool, starting Monday, that is intended to make it easy for people to write applications for its Android smartphones.

The free software, called Google App Inventor for Android, has been under development for a year. User testing has been done mainly in schools with groups that included sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergraduates who are not computer science majors.

The thinking behind the initiative, Google said, is that as cellphones increasingly become the computers that people rely on most, users should be able to make applications themselves.

“The goal is to enable people to become creators, not just consumers, in this mobile world,” said Harold Abelson, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is on sabbatical at Google and led the project.

The project is a further sign that Google is betting that its strategy of opening up its technology to all kinds of developers will eventually give it the upper hand in the smartphone software market.

The strategy looks on track. For one thing, Android phones are outselling iPhones. And the Android Apps market seems to be developing nicely, as this graph from Android Guys suggests:

Why Louis Grey turned In his iPhone and went for Android

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Long, thoughtful post by Louis Gray.

For me, more than the over-used phrase of "open", the promise of true multitasking, and the platform's integration with Google Apps, was one word – "Choice". Choice of handsets. Choice of carriers. Choice of manufacturers. Second behind the word choice has to be "Momentum". I can see that Android has momentum in terms of improved quality, in terms of the number of devices sold and users, and yes, applications, which are growing in quantity, soon to be followed by quality. I really do believe that if Android does not already have a market share lead over Apple yet in this discussion, they soon will. It is inevitable. The growth in the number of handsets, carriers and users will drive more developers to the platform, and the holdouts who are not there will eventually make the move. And yes, third is "Cloud" – the idea that I don't need to be tied to my desktop computer to manage data on the phone, but instead, the phone is built to tap into data stored on the Web. Fourth is "Capability". The Android platform, as the Droid commercials offer, simply does more. The power of the mobile hotspot cannot be understated, and the iPhone is a zero there…

Worth reading in full.

The start-up fallacy

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This morning’s Observer column.

In an essay entitled "How to Make an American Job Before It's Too Late", Grove pointed out that whereas Apple has 25,000 employees in the US, Foxconn has 250,000 in southern China alone. "The company," he points out, "has grown at an astounding rate, first in Taiwan and later in China. Its revenue last year was $62bn, larger than Apple Inc, Microsoft Corp, Dell Inc or Intel. Foxconn employs more than 800,000 people, more than the combined worldwide head count of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard Co, Intel and Sony Corp."

Grove cited these figures to attack what he regards as a pernicious mindset that now afflicts government policymakers in most western countries – "Our own misplaced faith in the power of start-ups to create US jobs. Americans love the idea of the guys in the garage inventing something that changes the world. New York Times columnist Thomas L Friedman recently encapsulated this view in a piece called 'Start-Ups, Not Bailouts'. His argument: let tired old companies that do commodity manufacturing die if they have to. If Washington really wants to create jobs, he wrote, it should back start-ups."

Grove thinks this is baloney and he's right. Start-ups are wonderful but – at least in technology – they generally don't create jobs on the scale that western economies need. What really matters is what comes after that eureka moment in the garage, as the new idea goes from prototype to mass production…

Will the iPhone and iPad kill off the Mac?

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This morning’s Observer column.

Companies go where the commercial opportunities are. The inescapable conclusion to be drawn from Apple's recent history is that the spectacular growth opportunities are in mobile devices, not deskbound computers or even laptops. The iPad is selling at a rate of a million a month. More than 1.4 million of the new iPhones were sold in the first four days. And the pace seems to be increasing. It took the first iPhone 74 days to reach its first million. The iPad got there in 28. Only things like the Nintendo Wii (13 days) shift faster. Then there's the small matter of the 40% contribution the iPhone now makes to Apple's bottom line. In those circumstances, if you were Steve Jobs, what would you focus on?

I’ve just had an email from a reader who, many years ago, switched to the Mac on my advice. He writes:

I’ve just read your piece in the Observer New Review. I suppose I have to prepare for the end of civilisation as I know it!

There’s an App for that — so help me God

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From today’s New York Times.

Publishers of Christian material have begun producing iPhone applications that can cough up quick comebacks and rhetorical strategies for believers who want to fight back against what they view as a new strain of strident atheism. And a competing crop of apps is arming nonbelievers for battle.

“Say someone calls you narrow-minded because you think Jesus is the only way to God,” says one top-selling application introduced in March by a Christian publishing company. “Your first answer should be: ‘What do you mean by narrow-minded?’ ”

For religious skeptics, the “BibleThumper” iPhone app boasts that it “allows the atheist to keep the most funny and irrational Bible verses right in their pocket” to be “always ready to confront fundamentalist Christians or have a little fun among friends.”

There was a lovely cartoon in the New York Times a while back. It shows a guy coming home and saying “Hi Honey! Bad news. I’ve been replaced by an App”.

App Creep and the case for the mobile browser

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The problem with Apps (well, one problem with Apps) is that they’re largely impulse-buy items. The result is predictable: you wind up with having to wade through screen after screen until you find the one you want. And in doing so you pass lots that you don’t use much — or haven’t actually used at all. Hence the new syndrome: Apps creep. Kevin Kelleher has written a thoughtful piece about this.

By app creep, I mean the collecting (and then forgetting) of software programs. It isn’t new. But on mobile phones, the less popular apps are more visible, even a nuisance –- you frequently flip past pages of them searching for the one you need. It’s less of a problem on laptops and desktops, in part, because of the centrality of the web browsers on those devices. On a smartphone, I use a browser well less than a quarter of the time. But sooner than later, that will change, because as more and more companies offer services on the mobile web, the mobile browser will play a bigger role. Thanks to the advent of HTML5, browsers and apps will learn to live with each other.

In the meantime, while there may be 200,000 apps for the iPhone and 50,000 for Android phones, but iPhone users have on average just 37 apps installed and Android owners, 22, according to the latest figures from Nielsen. Of course, not all apps connect users to the web, but many of those that don’t contain content that can easily be found online.

Eventually, a spot on the home screens of smartphones will become like beachfront property in Monte Carlo –- highly coveted real estate. Most non-elite developers will find it easier to reach a mobile audience through the browser. But for now, the lion’s share of them are ignoring the browser in favor of native apps, which -– unless they’re a featured or best-selling app in an app store -– often languish in obscurity…

iPad: the blog killer

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As part of my ongoing project to try and assess the utility of the iPad, I’ve been using it as much as possible in the course of my day. We’re now several weeks into the experiment and I’ve noticed something interesting: I’ve been blogging less. And the reason is simple: the iPad is hopeless as a blogging tool, or at any rate as a tool for the kind of blogging that I do. Since I use Memex as a kind of working notebook — an online commonplace-book — multi-tasking is absolutely essential: I read something online and decide that I want to log it in Memex. On a real computer, that’s dead easy: highlight the key passage, hit the ‘Press This’ bookmarklet (I use WordPress), edit, hit ‘publish’. That’s it. With the iPad, the workflow needed to achieve the same result doesn’t even bear thinking about — it involves closing one application, launching another, clumsy selecting, cutting and pasting, etc. etc. Zzzz…

There is a WordPress App for the iPad, and it’s ok as far as it goes, which is only to write posts from scratch. For some bloggers — those who just write original stuff — it’s useable. But for someone like me it’s not really helpful.

Another quirk: when blogging with WordPress (and, I guess, Blogger) one’s composing inside a text box — as here:

Note that when the draft post exceeds the size of the box a scroll-bar appears. On the iPad, there’s no scroll bar. “No problem”, you think. “Just grab the text and move it up to make room”. Not possible: all that happens is that you move the entire web-page. Not sure if this is fix-able within the parameters of Apple’s touch interface, but at the moment it makes the editing of longer blog posts effectively impossible.

(And as for getting an image into the post to illustrate a point — as above — well, forget it.)

My hunch is that there’s an opening for a serious iPad blogging App. The big question, I guess, is whether it’s possible to do one within the confines of the present OS.

All of this merely confirms, of course, that the iPad has been conceived as essentially a tool for consumption rather than creation — and that users like me are, really, rather quaint exceptions with little marketing significance. Steve Jobs might say that we should stick to our multi-tasking laptops; and, given the huge sales of the iPad, who’s to say that he’s wrong?

Ulysses app causes Apple to blush

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This morning’s Observer column.

Last Wednesday, 16 June, was Bloomsday, a day revered by admirers of James Joyce the world over. It's celebrated because 16 June 1904 is the day in which all the action in Joyce's novel Ulysses takes place. Readers follow the perambulations around Dublin of the book's endearing hero, a freelance advertisement-seller named Leopold Bloom, who is tactfully keeping out of the way while his wife is being unfaithful to him in the marital home at No 7 Eccles Street.

Bloomsday celebrations take many forms but usually involve readings from the novel, and often the consumption of food and drink (gorgonzola sandwiches and burgundy, for example, in honour of Bloom’s lunchtime fare). This year there was an added frisson to the festivities, for it transpired that Apple, a company not hitherto noted for its interest in modernist literature, had been paying close attention to the content of Joyce’s great work…