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.

From Brett, our engineering manager extraordinaire:

With Ephox’s recent sales growth we are expanding the R&D team and are currently looking for two outstanding Java developers to join the team in our Brisbane office.

We develop in both Swing and J2EE using agile techniques and have a set of values based on the XP values. We have a fun workplace and are looking for the right people to join us.

This is a great opportunity for someone who wants a fulfilling and rewarding position that takes their careers to the next level.

If you are interested, the job has been released on Seek.com, so check it out and apply.

Definitely a great place to work and there’s lots of new technology and cool stuff being used, abused and developed there.

Oh and did I mention that Ephox is a rapidly growing company with offices in Brisbane, California and now the UK (picturesque Windsor no less)? While our developers generally stay in Brisbane, there are opportunities to travel, particularly if you stick with the company for a while - that’s how I wound up being relocated over here to the UK.

Doug’s discovered a way to improve the effectiveness of simian to avoid adding more duplication to a code base:

The solution is very simple. The simian-report is a an xml file, so I wrote a SAX2 DefaultHandler that was able to parse the number of duplications at the different threshold levels. Putting this into a trivial ant task then gave us a task to help make things no worse even at levels below what the simian-check was doing! Within the first week, the new legacy-check was breaking the build (where the simian-check would never have) and focusing the teams attention on how to make things better.

The solution is simple and really cool. I have no doubt that it will have a big impact on the amount of duplication and the overall quality of our code. The trouble is, Simian’s normal reporting is really, really lousy and Doug’s extra check highlights just how useless Simian is at telling you where the duplication is instead of just detecting that there is duplication.

I discovered this new check when the build broke after a simple commit I made that fixed an annoying bug and removed some duplication. Unfortunately, it happened to change the distribution of duplication so that it triggered a simian-legacy failure. I can, after the use of a few choice words, handle failures like that because it shows I could have and probably should have done more to improve the code around the change I made. Someone’s got to go in a clean things up - it might as well be me.

That’s when I encountered Simian’s report. It’s one great big long HTML page listing pretty much every bit of duplication it found broken down into sections of numbers of lines duplicated and it has a pretty useless index at the top. Over VPN it took 15 minutes to download and render. It hung Safari and FireFox for about 5 minutes trying to render it locally. Once it loads you have to sort through the thousands of duplication matches it’s found (matching as little as 2 lines duplicated and with quite liberal settings on what constitutes a match - again, a good thing) to try and find the one new duplication that caused the build failure.

Eventually I discovered the easiest way was divide and conquer. Simian can run even if the code doesn’t compile, so I rolled back each file individually until Simian passed again. Then I patched my changes back in, searched the report for that file name and eliminated as much of the duplication involving that file as I could and reran Simian.

I’m still in two minds as to whether or not the new check is worth the pain it causes. I really like the idea of it, I just really wish there was an Eclipse plugin for Simian that highlighted duplication right there in the code, or at least a HTML report that showed the actual code marked up with duplication. Then again, if you just have to guess at what duplication to remove the code base will get better faster…

CMSWire: Vendor Criticism of CMS Watch

In an industry whereby most of the "independent analysts" are heavily dependent on revenues from the very firms they claim to be "independent" of, it's unusual to see truly critical research get published. So it becomes a surprise to both buyers and sellers when they read such criticism. In our reports we widely distribute the compliments and brickbats — if something is truly terrible we will tell you.

The way I see it, criticism is one of the most important things a product company can receive - particularly in an aggregated, general form like an analyst report tends to give you. It lets you identify areas you need to improve in that are actually affecting clients rather than the ones that seem important to you.

The first thing I do when I get a new vendor report is to search through it for any mentions of Ephox (it’s amazing how often we turn up in reports about web content management systems) and see what they didn’t like so we can work out how to fix it. Then I go through and find the general trends in the report etc to establish a wider industry direction and market opportunities etc.

I’ve said this internally to Ephox already but I want to give a big congratulations to the team on getting EditLive! 6.4 out the door. We have a lot of customers who have been waiting quite a long time for the features in that release and only a year or two ago they were thought to be effectively impossible given the Swing Text APIs that EditLive! is built on. It’s a testament to the team that this can be done at all, let alone with such high quality.

Of course, now it’s onward and upward so it’s back to the grindstone for all of you!