In the two weeks I was over there, touring around quite a lot of country, I found two places where I could get free wifi and one of them required a photocopy of my passport to get a login! Otherwise the going rate was about €5/hour. So when I had internet it was very brief and I’d just download everything and read it while offline. Therein lies the problem.

Firstly, it was fantastic to have NetNewsWire as a real application on the iPhone since it could then cache the thousands of unread news items. Similarly, having a native email client enabled caching – this has to be the single biggest advantage of native clients over web apps, even if you only notice when you travel internationally.

Secondly, being offline a lot really highlights Mobile Fail Point #1 – synchronization. NetNewsWire has always been rock solid with synchronization even if it did require manually hitting the refresh button at the right times. It all went horribly wrong when I got back from Italy though. I think the sheer volume of posts that I read while offline and the length of time involved just pushed it over the edge. I must have read 4000 posts while offline between the two times I got internet and when I got home. Unfortunately, NetNewsWire on my laptop never seemed to get the message and even after doing all the refresh mumbo jumbo required the laptop said I had 2000 unread items and the iPhone said I had 400. There was no way to tell who had what so I just marked everything as read and moved on. There’s no way I could hope to reproduce it or really explain what went wrong, things just got confused after a very complex and unusual usage pattern. Oh well.

What was perhaps more interesting though was that in amongst those posts was an announcement of Google’s adapted-for-iPhone translation service. It really couldn’t get any more useful – I was in a foreign country trying desperately to remember the Italian I learnt in primary school and desperately wanting to know a few really key words. Sadly, the service requires an internet connection. So the optimum point of need for the system coincides with the time you are least likely to be able to use it. Now a completely offline system, even if it had a much more limited set of words would be infinitely more useful. That said, while a hard copy phrase book adds to weight, it’s cheap enough to leave in your pocket in touristy areas where the risk of pick pockets is high – iPhone’s are not.

The other thing that mobile applications need to embed is opportunistic publishing. The iPhone does this for email – if you send a message while offline it will just sit in the outbox until you next get connectivity and then it sends. It doesn’t provide a way for other applications to do this though (except if you specifically open them of course). It would have been nice to write blog posts and have them automatically publish whenever they could.

PS: The key words I should learn before going to a non-English speaking country has expanded from just hello, goodbye, yes, no, please and thank you to include: left, right, ticket, parking, why, where, when, what, who and help! (with exclamation mark, it’s only needed when you’re being chased by scam artists dressed as Roman Gladiators). Police works as a stand-in for help if you need it, as does a really loud, blood curdling scream.

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.