About Mobility

Below is my presentation at Design4Mobile.

The Design4Mobile mini-conference has been packed with great presentations and people; researchers, designers and implementers from around the world, all with great ideas and information to share. And the town of Lawrence KS is a very nice small (university) town that reminds me of Austin…

See Design4Mobile photos at Flickr.

ceo

Dennis Bournique of WapReview wrote a nice piece on Mobile Web applications, where he ponders on the topic after attending both Mobile Web Megatrends and the CTIA Mobile Jam Session.

I agree with most of Dennis’ points. But in the article Dennis mentions two points, from Michael Mace presentation, that are pointed out as necessary for mobile web applications to take off: 1) offline functionality, and 2) access to core phone features like the phone book, calendar, camera and location.

But it is all relative…

There are classes of applications. Many applications are just fine as mobile web always-connected/no need for offline functionality and/or other handset capabilities.

Don’t take me wrong, the above two points are very important and defines the next step on mobile applications (which I call Lightweight mobile apps).

It is clear that less platforms and less fragmentation is a good thing. And that the promise of mobile web as a consistent and centralized platform is great. But for the time being and for a while (OK long time), fragmentation is here to stay: web, local, widgets. So work with the tools available to you today.

If your application is sufficient as a web app, go web. Need more functionality or richness *today*? Go (or add) local. Is the application pure query-response? Go SMS. Is there an exciting web runtime that you care about? Make a widget out of it. But there will always be web vs local apps, and it all depends on what the application needs to deliver, what your customer wants, the use cases, the target users, security, and so on… while trying to minimize development costs.

A point I want to make is the Widget vs. non-widget applications. A widget is really a design pattern. Regardless of authoring (i.e. local, web, etc) a widget by definition is supposed to be a very focused, typically single-tasked application-behavior-and-User Interface; examples are clocks, alarms, weather, search that are easily accessible and visible. Because of today’s approaches to web runtimes (i.e. differences in authoring and packaging, APIs, security and so on) we have many widget runtimes and widgets are downloadable, similar to local applications. It is a phase. But once all this is overcome, there won’t be a difference between a widget and a web application, except for the design pattern mentioned above. Efforts like Google Gears or BONDI will help with this.

My main concern with mobile web applications and widgets and the new web runtime models that will provide access to local functionality is the security and policy models, which I am afraid will be a repeat of local applications models (and related nightmares).

At the MobileWidget Camp Austin the folks from BONDI presented their initiative, and I will say that it looks promising, assuming the network-provider-centric/natural bias of the OMTP won’t become a roadblock; but the guys seem very open-minded, and I didn’t get any indication that will be the case…

ceo

A number of companies have been applying their encryption technology to SMS. One of these companies is Masabi; see Encrypted SMS As a Backup for Mobile Data Applications (Cellular-news).

Is SMS encryption a must have? Do you think users care? Personally, I don’t think so.

The problem is lack of true integration with the native SMS inbox and thus are not transparent enough. These 3rd party SMS encryption solutions work as a separate application, meaning the end-user must invoke a native or Java ME application to send/receive encrypted SMS messages.

One of the issues with encryption is key management. To address this, these 3rd party solutions rely on a server to authenticate and perform some kind of key management; here the server must always be involved in the sending and receiving on the other end (which could be another handset or a server). Some may rely on public-key encryption (digital certificate), or hashing w/ salt, or maybe even exchanging a symmetric key directly. In either case, all those solutions rely on a data connection to a proprietary server for such secure SMS exchanges. Another thing to consider is that some encryption algorithms increases the size of the actual message, and complications may arise (including extra cost) if the resulting ciphertext exceeds 160 characters.

While I am not familiar with how Masabi works, it is my personal opinion that most solutions are not transparent enough and users will not use them, not to mention that the majority of people don’t care about encrypting their text messages.

ceo

The Mobile 2.0 2008 conference has been announced for November 3rd 2008 and the list of confirmed speakers looks great. What makes this event special for me is that it has been more in touch with reality, due to the number of practitioners involved. I hope that such spirit continues. I am planning/hoping to attend.

ceo

EWeek reports that the HTC Dream, the first Android phone, is expected to be launched in New York on Sept. 23 on the T-Mobile network. The article also covers the importance for Google to get it right on the first try, which is why they are deploying at first only on a single network provider, a good idea to have a controlled environment.

I’ve been debating what my next mobile phone will be: an Apple iPhone, a BlackBerry Bold (which also will be available on the last week of September on the AT&T network), or a Google Android phone (T-Mobile at first). The Nokia Tube looks very cool but it won’t be available until next year. It is a pretty big decision as it requires getting into a contract, which I hate, and buying new handsets.

The BlackBerry Bold I like, but so far it seems that I’ve decided to go with the Android Dream cellphone… mainly because I like touch + keyboards, and it is/should be an open mobile (development) platform that offers lots of (new experimentation) possibilities.

ceo

Photos for the MobileWidget Camp Austin event have been uploaded to Flickr and tagged MobileWidgetCampAustin. If you have any photos of your own, please use the aforementioned tag, and thanks to all who have contributed photos so far:

I’m very happy with how the event turned out; this was the first event of this size that I have organized. The speakers and sessions where awesome, the facilities and food and beer were awesome, and everyone had a great time.

Thanks to all our sponsors, and to my co-organizer Dan Appelquist of MobileMonday London and evangelist at Vodafone. And many thanks to the Austin Technology Incubator’s Bart Bohn and Stephany Puno who took care of all the logistical details and helped make this event a reality.

And thanks to all the presenters both companies and individuals, wow, who traveled to Austin and made this event a high-quality mobile technology event. Hats-off to all of you!

ceo

The first ever MobileWidget Camp, the MobileWidget Camp Austin was a success. Thanks to all the attendees, speakers and sponsors!

I will be posting photos shortly, same with all the results posted notes. Anyone with photos, please post to Flickr. Presentation slides will be posted to Slideshare. Please tag all event-related stuff with tag “MobileWidgetCampAustin”.

Again, thanks to everyone for helping make this mini-conference a total success…

ceo

Below are Rudy De Waele (m-trends.org) MobileMonday Amsterdam presentation on “15 Tips To Create Value For Mobile”… as always, great content:

The MobileWidget Camp Austin event schedule has been posted…

Developers, bring your laptops, and go to the above event hyperlink for instructions on downloading the Yahoo! and Nokia Widget SDKs, which will be use during the coding labs.

See you Sunday!

ceo

I recently wrote an article on using JSON on mobile Java applications. From the article:

Choosing the right data interchange format is an important design decision when building any network-aware software. This is especially true when designing mobile and embedded applications, where attributes such as lightweight and efficient are important characteristics to consider. Such characteristics are important because they translate to lower computation requirements and use of power, potentially better performance, and lower costs of operation.

See Using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) in Java ME for Data Interchange (Sun Developer Mobility website).

ceo

Levi Shapiro wrote a neat article on Fierce MobileContent titled Austin round-up: The new hotbed for mobile; check it out.

And I agree w/ Levi… While Austin is not Silicon Valley, Austin is a great place to start your company, raise your family, and enjoy life. If you have any questions about Austin and how to start or move your startup here, shoot me an email (see the About page in this blog).

ceo

A reminder that this weekend, Sept 7th 2008 is the MobileWidget Camp Austin event:

See the tentative event schedule (it looks pretty good!).

It is a free, informal, and fun event, with food and drinks throughout the day, great topics and speakers including Nokia, W3C, Yahoo!, the OMTP, Vodafone, Opera and others, as well as individual speakers, and labs on widget development from Yahoo! and Nokia.

We want to encourage individuals to present/speak. Register below, or just sign-up at the event. Register at the event page. Space is filling up quickly…We have over 60 people registered and will be a fun event.

This free event is possible thanks to our sponsors: OMTP.org, W3C Mobile Web Initiative, Freescale, Vodafone, the Austin Technology Incubator, and MobileMonday.

See you Sunday, and bring your discussion and presentation-topics on mobile the web and widgets!

ceo

At A fresh take on the browser (Official Google Blog), the Google team writes about Chrome, their WebKit-based web-browser:

On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff — the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

Very interesting is their approach to robustness and performance by introducing Processes and Sandboxes (thus truly isolating web-applications from each other) where each browser-Tab is powered by its own process/sandbox, and the V8 JavaScript engine and Virtual Machine (with compilation to binary). Other features include better UI and navigation including their dynamic start-page and the omnibox which is Google’s new approach to the search box (on steroids). The new browser UI design also touches on better ways to deal with security and pop-ups.

Because it is based on the WebKit it already has been proven for mobile…

And Chrome source code is available as an open source project called Chromium (BSD license). See Chromium’s open source project web site.

The team also put together a very cool comic book that explains Chrome, the rationale behind it, including (design) features.

Google is not only providing compelling web-based applications (and the back-end infrastructure to deliver these), but with Chrome, Google is also providing the application delivery channel itself, the web-browser, with all the features needed to ensure web-based apps are functional, appealing (good experience), robust, connected and disconnected, and secure.

…Google is covering all the bases for the new desktop OS, the web OS, similarly to how Google is covering all the based for the new mobile OS, the Android OS.

Over time, will desktop OSes become irrelevant? It sure looks like it. Will the same happen to mobile OSes? Potentially, but only once the Web-runtimes provides the necessary access to the handset’s local functionality.

Download Google Chrome.

See Google Chrome, Chromium, and V8 launch today (Google Code Blog).

ceo

As (I) expected (and predicted), Google has launched its own application store or marketplace; see Android Market: a user-driven content distribution system (Android Developers Blog).

And with the Android Market solution, Google is addressing the problem of application discovery and download; and their approach is user-centric, similar to YouTube — very, very good; exactly as how I would have approached it… YouApp!

Developers will be able to make their content available on an open service hosted by Google that features a feedback and rating system similar to YouTube.

:

Similar to YouTube, content can debut in the marketplace after only three simple steps: register as a merchant, upload and describe your content and publish it. We also intend to provide developers with a useful dashboard and analytics to help drive their business and ultimately improve their offerings.

Very cool…

Related to this see The Next Big Thing in Mobile: Local Applications, and how the iPhone will, and how the OHA and Android can change perceptions.

Interesting to me is Google’s user-centric approach to the mobile application market, as I had started a project on my own, YouApp.mobi, whose goal or paradigm is exactly that: a user-centric application discovery, sharing and download — Google beat me to it

ceo