Adaptive Path Blog

Today is LIVESTRONG Day, the Lance Armstrong Foundation’s one-day initiative to raise awareness and funds for the cancer fight. This year more than 500 events will take place in communities across the country to raise awareness and funds for the fight against cancer.

Adaptive Path wants to support this cause by donating $100 from each UX Week and UX Intensive registration over the next 7 days. That’s right, if you register by next Monday the 19th then not only will you get an early bird discount, but you’ll also help to support those battling cancer.

We have a terrific line up of speakers this year for UX Week including…… Katherine Jones and Randall Macon presenting: Building Brands The Build Community: LIVESTRONG and Blanton Museum of Art!!!

So why wait? Register for UX Week and UX Intensive now, and use the promo code “blog” for an additional 10% off. Attend the premiere User Experience conferences in 2008 and support the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

In addition to the company’s efforts, Henning and I are cycling 100 miles in July and personally raising funds for the San Jose LIVESTRONG Challenge. If you’d like you can donate for he and I on our donation pages.

Are you a runner or a walker or a rider? Then you too can participate. In addition to the Foundation’s fund raising goals, there are goals to register people for the LIVESTRONG Challenge. If you register TODAY then you get 50% off your registration fee for the Challenge.

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Michael Mace, a former VP at Palm, recently proclaimed the death of the mobile application. His position is summarises thusly:

“The business of making native apps for mobile devices is dying, crushed by a fragmented market and restrictive business practices. The problems are so bad that the mobile web, despite its many technical drawbacks, is now a better way to deliver new functionality to mobiles. I think this will drive a rapid rise in mobile web development, largely replacing the mobile app business. This has huge implications for mobile operators, handset companies, developers, and users.”

Mace provides a history of the mobile application space as he sees it from his time with Palm. He describes the rush of developers to the Palm platform 10 years ago and how interest in the creation of native apps for the platform has waned. He also quotes a colleague who left the mobile app game because he couldn’t run a profitable business there.

Sorry, but it’s simplistic to assume that native mobile apps are now dead in favor of web mobile apps. Mobile is just seeing the same tension that we see on the desktop between native and web apps. On both mobile and desktop, neither is a clear winner and there are many working to increase the functionally of their application “stack”. Just this week, Adobe launched 1.0 of their AIR platform that further blurs the line on the desktop. It is catching the attention of desktop application developers and I would not be surprised if we see a mobile version of AIR sometime this year.

Does a developer care if their application web or native? I’d argue no, they care about what functionality their chosen framework provides. Look at what Opera is doing with their mobile browser. They are turning it into an application framework as much as a great browsing tool, even giving developers the ability to “widgetize” an app. If there’s something on your mobile that has the hooks you need to build an app, does it matter if the API’s come from a browser or from the operating system? As Webkit builds out it’s offline storage mechanism, your mobile web apps can run seamlessly alongside native apps even when on an airplane.

As the stack currently exists in any mobile OS, native APIs for mobile allow access deeper into the device. This includes the ability to read and write to a user’s contacts, calendar, tasks, photos, videos, SMS, email, camera, GPS and voice. Web browsers lack this functionality. The richness of experience that these features provide provide a ‘wow’ that’s pretty tough to match in a browser.

Browser app or native app aside, the more important change that we are seeing is the opening of the mobile platform. In the article, the certification and requirement to work with carriers was noted as an unnecessary hurdle and I agree. Carriers have a history of stifling innovation in order to milk as much cash out of their pipes as possible.

Apple’s iPhone is an attempt to break that strangle hold by offering a device designed without carrier limitations. This week they release their SDK and if Apple does so with no limitations, then it will be successful. Developers should be able to create an app, upload it to the iTunes store and pick their desired monetization scheme. If Apple puts anything in the way of the interchange between users and developers, then the SDK will fail, just as Michael Mace predicts.

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Last week Peter plugged our upcoming book Subject to Change: creating great products and services for an uncertain world. I’ve put together a couple of pages that offer some more detail about the book but best of all, I’ve uploaded chapter one for your FREE reading pleasure.

CHAPTER 1: THE EXPERIENCE IS THE PRODUCT
“How do we deliver great products and services in an uncertain world? The thing to keep in mind, not just in the abstract, but truly and viscerally, are your customers and their abilities, needs, and desires.”

Feel free to grab the embed code (from the full version) and drop it into your own blog.

Oh, and of course if you want to order a copy, you can do that too!

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Microsoft is holding MIX, its annual “future of the web” conference in Las Vegas next month. Kim Lenox and I are excited to be bringing our message to this venue as part of the user experience track debuting this year. On March 6th we will lead four intensive sessions over the course of the day. Each session includes hands-on activities where you get a chance to really learn something new. We are focusing on design strategy, interaction design, information architecture and design methods. Participate in the entire day with us and you will take away all the techniques needed to be successful in defining and designing your next product.

If spending a day with Kim and I in Vegas is enticing enough by itself, then maybe you’ll want to come check out a sneak peek of new IE8 features or compete against your peers in Rock Band.

If you are going to attend, then please drop me a line at <danh at adaptive path dot com>. We hope to see you there!!

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Next week will see all of the big players (and most of the small ones) in Barcelona. They are gathering for the Mobile World Congress conference. You can expect to see all kinds of interesting announcements from device manufacturers and carriers. It’s already rumored that a prototype running Google’s Android will be on display.

This week two early announcements caught my eye. Funambol will be showing off new push email and sync services. I really like this company because they bring what are traditionally enterprise-only services to the masses via open source development. For example, they recently announced over-the-air sync services for the iPhone via both a web-app and a native app for “jailbroken” devices. Instead of relying on Apple to give its users this service, Funambol rallied the open source community to solve the problem. Similarly, Windows Mobile users (like me) who don’t have access to Microsoft’s Exchange Server can use their sync app/service in place of the native ActiveSync. Funambol is partnering with ISP’s and carriers to bring products to users as well as developing Android apps for the next generation of devices. Like Google, they are embracing open source in order to change the marketplace of mobile and this change will only help users who are clamoring for better and more usable apps on their smartphones.

Yesterday, Opera Mobile 9.5 was previewed and all I can say is WOW. Read Write Web has a good breakdown of the new features and below is a video showing off the soon-to-be-released browser. Just like mobile Safari, this version of Opera Mobile displays real web pages and allows the user to zoom in for reading detail. Unlike the iPhone, this browser supports Flash Lite. I am also intrigued by the opportunities that offline browsing and the widget support offers. If you subscribe to the notion that a web browser will be the center of a great mobile experience, then you have see Opera as a strong player here. The feature set of this browser offers a framework to replace most every function of a mobile operating system. Additionally, they are beating the latest mobile IE (Deepfish) to the market and Firefox mobile is just getting started. Opera Mobile is a mature product now and is leading the pack for user- and developer-focused features.

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Just like many of you, we were glued to the Stevenote from Macworld on Tuesday. Andrew, our resident AFIC (Apple Fanboy In Charge) latched on to the new webclips feature on the iPhone and by that evening had us all setup.

If you add this blog, or really any page on the Adaptive Path site to your iPhone home screen, you get a snazzy icon instead of the default screengrab. Enjoy!

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I’ll put it out there…. I think that this year we will see some terrific mobile interfaces. We’re just wrapping up CES and the second week of January and already there’s so much promise. After next week’s MacWorld expo and whatever announcements Apple has in store for the iPhone, I predict that we will be even more excited about mobile UX.

Google’s new Android operating system shows promise for bringing terrific experiences. Based on what Google has already shown us, the user experience was front and center during product design. Add to this the openness of the new platform allowing developers to build the best apps without restrictions.

Yahoo! released a new version of Go, a free download for your mobile that brings together all of the Y! services into one slick application. This app also allows developers to create widgets that plug-in to the Go framework. While the 3.0 version doesn’t yet work on my Windows Mobile device, I was really happy with it’s predecessor and this new one looks to fix my core issue: customizing functionality. Offering an application framework that will work on EVERY smartphone, instead of focusing on one carrier or device is a good move.

Microsoft is working on Windows Mobile 7. Screenshots and interaction models have been leaked, showing a bunch of great improvements. Of course, Microsoft is borrowing a bit from Apple and the iPhone with a touchscreen and accelerometer. I am a fan the WinMo operating system, having worked with HTC for a bit and used an 8525 for the last year. I think we’ll start to see some interesting multi-touch coming to mobile from the Surface UX team up in Redmond.

All three of the the big guys above are poised to bring some terrific innovations to users. What I am most excited about, however, is what smaller groups are doing right now. There’s the hackers who wanted more from their iPhone pushing Apple to release an SDK. There’s .NET, Java and Ajax developers building tons of great, small apps for their respective mobile platforms. And then there’s PointUI who said “we can create a better experience” and just did it. I have been using the PointUI Home interface replacement for Windows Mobile for a week and it’s awesome! Home is a thin app that sits on top of the standard OS interface. Many of the lessons learned from the iPhone, such as large hit targets gestures and simplicity have been incorporated. Check out this video or download the free software for yourself.

By no means do I think that the mobile space is going to be all roses. There will be the continued bickering between carriers, hand-held manufacturers, designers and users. There will still be attempts to woo customers with goofy features over tangible benefits. Nonetheless, after just a couple weeks into 2008, I think that we are in for one awesome year in mobile.

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Dan noticed that on the Nov 1 episode of The Daily Show, Jerry Seinfeld brought the term “blog” to task.

“Is that the worst new word of the culture, blog? It’s so unattractive. It’s like something that you spit up and its, it has like, it congeals, and is, you know, and you kick dirt on it.”
- Jerry Seinfeld

Peter, who coined the term back in 1998 agrees with Jerry:

“I like that it’s roughly onomatopoeic of vomiting. These sites (mine included!) tend to be a kind of information upchucking.”
- Peter Merholz, August 30, 1999, email to Keith Dawson

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Our very own Dan Saffer was recently interviewed for a podcast on Read/WriteWeb. As Experience Design Director, Dan has recently been seeing a lot of traction, like this interview, from his recent “Call to Arms” post on the Adaptive Path blog. If you are an interaction designer or even just interested in recent developments with device interfaces, please check out and contribute to Dan’s Interactive Gestures wiki.

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Good news for anyone who hasn’t registered for UX Intensive yet but has been meaning to. We’ve extended early bird registration until Friday, September 28. Use promotional code BLOG to get an additional 10% off the registration price.

In case you missed it, here’s our list of things we love about Canada.

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