Symphonious

I had two of our keen young developers (Dylan and Suneth) email me overnight to ask my CTO-ish opinion of trends in the mobile space and how they might apply to Ephox. It’s a very good question - with the advent of BlackBerrys first and now even more so with the iPhone, mobile internet is finally moving from “the future” to “the now”, even if it’s not evenly distributed yet. Of course, Ephox is squarely placed in the enterprise content creation business so no matter how popular the mobile world becomes we’re very unlikely to bring out a mobile phone game or a tip calculator. So here’s my take one where the mobile world is with regard to enterprise content creation.

Content Creation vs Content Consumption

Firstly, it’s important to realize that there are two quite distinct areas to content - creation and consumption. There is a huge amount of content consumption on mobile devices - on the go access to email, websites, notifications, twitter etc are probably the most common uses for mobile internet. However, nearly all of this is just content consumption. Most people read their email but don’t reply until they get back to their desk and have a full keyboard. People receive notifications on their phone and then take action via their computer. When people do respond to these things, it’s generally a very short note because of the limitations of the input mechanism. After all, even with a physical keyboard, BlackBerrys are still a very slow way to write long emails.

What this means for content creation is that the input tools are generally extremely simple - usually if not always just plain text and maybe a photo or video from the onboard camera, but it’s rare to find formatting functions etc. For a company that creates editors like Ephox, it’s not looking like a particularly lucrative market.

Other Content Types

One area that is picking up on phones is the creation of non-textual types of content. After all, if you take away the full size keyboard and replace it with video and audio capabilities it’s pretty obvious that text isn’t going to be the most popular medium. Again though, the features required are actually pretty minimal - when you’re on the go, you really just want to quickly grab the photo and move on or record your audio or video and either publish it immediately or upload it somewhere so you can edit it later on your full PC. The physical device constraints simply make it too hard to edit the content on your phone directly so it makes far more sense to use a full PC for that, or just not bother.

So Are We Done?

If it’s the physical constraints of portable devices that are dictating their usage, does that mean that software has done all it can? Definitely not. There are two key aspects of the mobile content puzzle that to me seem largely unsolved, finding the content you need and annotating it. Plus as I mentioned in my previous post, synchronizing content.

Finding the right content is usually a hard problem on full PCs, but with the physical constraints of mobile devices it’s even harder. Search obviously plays a big part in this, but so does notification systems. Having your phone tell you that you have important information waiting for you, or even just interesting information for when you have time, is a huge knowledge sharing opportunity. That’s why reading your email on the go is so popular - it delivers generally useful information straight to you so you can use your travel time to stay on top of it and ready your thoughts before you get back to the office to type an email. There’s a lot more information out there that’s being created throughout the enterprise that you probably should be made aware of though and it’s not all suited to email.  New sales leads, updates to support cases, updates to intranets, wikis and blogs etc would all be useful to have delivered to you either with a notification get your attention or to just sit there for when you have time to look at your phone and find out what’s new.  I expect RSS and Atom to play a huge part in this but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are content specific or area specific applications that come about as well.

The other aspect is annotating content. Quite often you have a few brief ideas you want to jot down on the go and the flesh out later, or perhaps you just want to proof read existing content etc. There are actually very few existing tools that allow you to do this. You can read content, you can often write new content or reply, but annotating existing content is quite rare. What I want to be able to do is read an email and add little notes to myself on it - preferably attached to specific points in the email but even just a generic notes field would do. For PDFs, RSS entries and web pages that could be even more useful as it would allow you to capture your thoughts on the spot so you don’t forget them.

Summing Up

There’s a huge potential for innovation in content in the mobile space but it’s probably not just porting more and more of the desktop applications to mobile devices. The key is to take advantage of the “on the go” nature of mobile devices without forgetting their inherent limitations and inefficiencies. Combining mobile platforms and the desktop is the key to creating genuinely useful applications.

I’ve quickly come to realize that the mobile worlds has a huge dependency on synchronization tehnology to make things work smoothly. Toucan read your email on the phone and reply from your laptop. Read rss items should be synced and just about everything else on your phone should be synced with somewhere else.

The problem is that generally synchronization support is lousy. NetNewsWire is too slow syncing feeds, Mail.app doesn’t seem to notice if a message changes from unread to read and the WordPress iPhone app doesn’t seem to download drafts that you created in the browser interface.

Sync is the killer requirement that goes unsaid on mobile devices. You can spend as long as you like polishing he UI but if your synchronization isn’t seamless your app will be a chore to use. If you get it right users won’t notice at all.

Brent has an excellent post up about his experience developing NetNewsWire for the iPhone and he manages to say what I tried to yesterday before I got caught up listing my frustrations with Mobile NetNewsWire:

I’ve always worked in public or semi-public: release, listen to feedback, release, listen, repeat forever. I worked this way for years UserLand. All of NetNewsWire was developed this way, beginning with the very earliest betas of NetNewsWire Lite back in 2002.

…

Which is why I’m more than a little bit at sea with the iPhone development experience. Getting beta testers is a technical and legal challenge. And I’m used to having hundreds, not just a few. Discussing development and design issues with other developers is usually a valuable thing, but there’s an NDA in the way.

That’s basically what I meant to say. The iPhone development model, the secrecy and the timelines imposed by Apple have effectively prevented any of the developers from creating a truly great iPhone app. To create truly great apps you need user feedback. Apple itself has enough people internally that can try the iPhone and give that feedback, but the smaller developers can’t get that feedback without releasing publically.

Sadly, in my last post I only managed to get one sentence that actually reflected this, despite the fact that it was intended to be my main message:

Sadly, the launch of the app store for me demonstrated just how much effort Apple put in to polishing their applications and getting them right and just how important it is to get real user feedback during development.

I’ve been looking forward to the iPhone 2.0 OS and the App Store for a fair while, not because there was new functionality I desperately wanted on my iPhone but because having access to native resources should make the few common webapps I use better. I was particularly impressed by Apple’s notification system and looked forward to say having a flag on NetNewsWire showing me how many unread items I had or being able to be notified me when someone sent me an instant message.

Sadly, the launch of the app store for me demonstrated just how much effort Apple put in to polishing their applications and getting them right and just how important it is to get real user feedback during development. None of the applications on the app store that I’ve tried have really impressed me. Most are good applications, but none have really thought through the use cases well, none of rounded off the corners and been polished. In short, none of them are iPhone standard.

The thing is, by Mac software standards they’re all notch applications but the iPhone requires really going the extra mile and getting the whole package right.

NetNewsWire on the iPhone was my biggest disappointment, mostly because NewsGator was my most used webapp and I looked forward to NetNewsWire taking advantage of the extra things an iPhone app could do. Sadly, it simply didn’t add anything over NewsGator except that it downloads everything at the start and is then generally snappy. It doesn’t provide a badge showing the number of unread items which is the one thing an app could have added over NewsGator’s iPhone tuned interface. Worse though, it takes a number of steps backwards - it doesn’t show all your feeds but it also doesn’t show the ones with new items. It shows the feeds that have recently had new items. The net result is that you don’t have access to older unread items and you have to scroll through your feeds to find the unread ones.

Worse, it provides a “Next Unread Item” button but not a “Previous Unread Item”. Sure it removes clutter, but it also means you wind up reading posts in reverse chronological order. With the blogs I read that means reading conversations in reverse.

On the responsiveness front it comes tantalizingly close. I like the fact that it does the downloading upfront and can then let me whizz through all my unread items but if you try to whizz past a post with images you’ll just find yourself coming back to it at the end. Items aren’t marked as read until the iPhone has downloaded every last referenced image in the item. I’m sure there’s another way to mark it as read, but it completely defeats the point of using the next unread item button to quickly flick through feeds.

The synchronization is a major step backwards too. With NewsGator once something is marked as read, it’s read and you can just refresh your feeds with desktop NetNewsWire and it becomes marked as read. With iPhone NetNewsWire that’s not the case. If you open it, whizz through your feeds and close it to do something else, everything you read will be left as unread on the server. Synchronization only happens when you refresh the feeds. This is true of desktop NetNewsWire too but it at least runs in the background (though it’s still annoying if you read your feeds then close your laptop and walk off - you’ll read those feeds again on your iPhone).

Now I know the iPhone NetNewsWire isn’t designed to be full featured and I’m glad it’s not. It’s designed for those times when you’re bored and want to quickly check and maybe read a few feeds. It’s pretty good at that, but wouldn’t the “reading feeds on the train” use case seem important to anyone? Wouldn’t that imply wanting to have synchronization happen rapidly (so you can read right up to the minute the train pulls up and not have to reread stuff when you get into the office)? Wouldn’t that imply wanting to skip things quickly instead of waiting for images to load? After all, you’re doing the same sorting and filtering that you’d do on the desktop, just more likely to clip long articles and read them later.

I really don’t mean to pick on NetNewsWire here, it’s just that I so enjoy using the desktop version because everything is so well thought out that if there was one app on the iPhone that was going to be insanely great it had to be NetNewsWire. I still think it’s the best non-Apple app on the iPhone but I think that’s a shame. We’ll have to wait a while longer before a truly awesome 3rd party iPhone app turns up.

My bet is it will be NetNewsWire 2.0.

Jeff Atwood posted a rant about the iTunes Music Store requiring iTunes to be installed in order to access it. In particular, he didn’t like how a link to something on the iTMS resulted in an error page if you didn’t have iTunes installed.

Is it so unreasonable to expect links in your browser to resolve to, oh, I don't know, web pages containing information about the thing you just clicked on? Is there anything more anti-web than demanding users install custom software to display information that could have just as easily been delivered through the browser?

It’s an exceptionally compelling argument but there’s one small flaw. If you’re not sure what it is, just drop me an email.