If you've ever seen a child interact with an iPad, you've seen the power of the touch interface in action. Is this a sign of what's to come — will we be touching and swiping screens rather tapping buttons? I reached out to Josh Clark (@globalmoxie), founder of Global Moxie and author of "Tapworthy," to get his thoughts on the future of touch and computer interaction, and whether or not buttons face extinction.

Clark says a touch-based UI is more intuitive to the way we think and act in the world. He also says touch is just the beginning — speech, facial expression, and physical gestures are on they way, and we need to start thinking about content in these contexts.

Clark will expand on these ideas at Mini TOC Austin on March 9 in Austin, Texas.

Our interview follows.

Are we close to seeing the end of buttons?

Josh Clark: I frequently say that buttons are a hack, and people sometimes take that the wrong way. I don't mean it in a particularly negative way. I think buttons are an inspired hack, a workaround that we've needed just to get stuff done. That's true in the real world as well as the virtual: A light switch over here to turn on a light over there isn't especially intuitive, and it's something that has to be learned, and re-learned for every room we walk into. That light switch introduces a middle man, a layer of separation between the action and the thing you really want to work on, which is the light. The switch is a hack, but a brilliant one because it's just not practical to climb up a ladder in a dark room to screw in the light bulb.

Buttons in interfaces are a similar kind of hack — an abstraction we've needed to make the desktop interface work for 30 years. The cursor, the mouse, buttons, tabs, menus ... these are all prosthetics we've been using to wrangle content and information.

With touchscreen interfaces, though, designers can create the illusion of acting on information and content directly, manipulating it like a physical object that you can touch and stretch and drag and nudge. Those interactions tickle our brains in different ways from how traditional interfaces work because we don't have to process that middle layer of UI conventions. We can just touch the content directly in many cases. It's a great way to help cut through complexity.

The result is so much more intuitive, so much more natural to the way we think and act in the world. The proof is how quickly people with no computing experience — people like toddlers and seniors — take so quickly to the iPad. They're actually better with these interfaces than the rest of us because they aren't poisoned by 30 years of desktop interface conventions. Follow the toddlers; they're better at it than we are.

So, yes, in some contexts, buttons and other administrative debris of the traditional interface have run their course. But buttons remain useful in some contexts, especially for more abstract tasks that aren't easily represented physically. The keyboard is a great example, as are actions like "send to Twitter," which don't have readily obvious physical components. And just as important, buttons are labeled with clear calls to action. As we turn the corner into popularizing touch interactions, buttons will still have a place.

Mini TOC Austin — Being held March 9, 2012 — right before SXSW — O'Reilly Tools of Change presents Mini TOC Austin, a one-day event focusing on Austin's thriving publishing, tech, and bookish-arts community.

Register to attend Mini TOC Austin

What kinds of issues do touch- and gesture-oriented interfaces present?

Josh Clark: There are issues for both designers and users. In general, if a touchscreen element looks or behaves like a physical object, people will try to interact with it like one. If your interface looks like a book, people will try to turn its pages. For centuries, designers have dressed up their designs to look like physical objects, but that's always just been eye candy in the past. With touch, users approach those designs very differently; they're promises about how the interface works. So designers have to be careful to deliver on those promises. Don't make your interface look like a book, for example, if it really works through desktop-like buttons. (I'm looking at you, Contacts app for iPad.)

So, you can create really intuitive interfaces by making them look or behave like physical objects. That doesn't mean that everything has to look just like a real-world object. Windows Phone and the forthcoming Windows 8 interface, for example, use a very flat tile-like metaphor. It doesn't look like a 3-D gadget or artifact, but it does behave with real-world physics. It's easy to figure out how to slide and work the content on the screen. People figure that stuff out really quickly.

The next hurdle — and the big opportunity for touch interfaces — is moving to more abstract gestures: two- and three-finger swipes, a full-hand pinch, and so on. In those cases, gestures become the keyboard shortcuts of touch and begin to let you create applications that you play more than you use, almost like an instrument. But wait, here I am talking about abstract gestures; didn't I just say that abstractions — like buttons — are less than ideal? Well, yeah, the trouble is you don't want to have the overhead of processing an interface, of thinking through how it works. The thing about physical abstractions (like gestures) versus visual abstractions (like buttons) is that physical actions can be absorbed into muscle memory. That kind of subconscious knowledge is actually much faster than visual processing — it's why touch typists are so much faster than people who visually peck at the keys. So, once you learn and absorb those physical actions — a two-finger swipe always does this or that — then you can actually move really quickly through an interface in the same way a pianist or a typist moves through a keyboard. Intent fluidly translated to action.

But how do you teach that stuff? Swiping a card, pinching a map, or tapping a photo are all based on actions we know from the physical world. But a two-finger swipe has no prior meaning. It's not something we'll guess. Gestures are invisible with no labels, so that means they have to be taught.

Screenshot from Apple's trackpad tutorial.

In what ways can UI design alleviate these learning issues?

Josh Clark: Designers should approach this by thinking through how we learn any physical action in the real world: observation of visual cues, demonstration, and practice. Too often, designers fall back on instruction manuals (iPad apps that open with a big screen of gesture diagrams) or screencasts. Neither are very effective.

Instead, designers have to do a better job of coaching people in context, showing our audiences how and when to use a gesture in the moment. More of us need to study video game design because games are great at this. In so many video games, you're dropped into a world where you don't even know what your goal is, let alone what you're capable of or what obstacles you might encounter. The game rides along with you, tracking your progress, taking note of what you've encountered and what you haven't, and giving in-context instruction, tips, and demonstrations as you go. That's what more apps and websites should do. Don't wait for people to somehow find a hidden gesture shortcut; tell people about it when they need it. Show an animation of the gesture and wait for them to copy it. Demonstration and practice — that's how we learn all physical actions, from playing an instrument to learning a tennis serve.

How do you see computer interaction evolving?

Josh Clark: It's a really exciting time for interaction design because so many new technologies are becoming mature and affordable. Touch got there a few years ago. Speech is just now arriving. Computer vision with face recognition and gesture recognition like Kinect are coming along. So, we have all these areas where computers are learning to understand our particularly human forms of communication.

In the past, we had to learn to act and think like the machine. At the command line, we had to write in the computer's language, not our own. The desktop graphical user interface was a big step forward in making things more humane through visuals, but it was still oriented around how computers saw the world, not humans. When you consider the additions of touch, speech, facial expression, and physical gesture, you have nearly the whole range of human (and humane) communication tools. As computers learn the subtleties of those expressions, our interfaces can become more human and more intuitive, too.

Touchscreens are leading this charge for now, but touch isn't appropriate in every context. Speech is obviously great for the car, for walking, for any context where you need your eyes elsewhere. We're going to see interfaces that use these different modes of communication in context-appropriate combinations. But that means we have to start thinking hard about how our content works in all these different contexts. So many are struggling just to figure out how to make the content adapt to a smaller screen. How about how your content sounds when spoken? How about when it can be touched, or how it should respond to physical gestures or facial expressions? There's lots of work ahead.

Are Google's rumored heads-up-display glasses a sign of things to come?

Josh Clark: I'm sure that all kinds of new displays will have a role in the digital future. I'm not especially clever about figuring out which technology will be a huge hit. If someone had told me five years ago that the immediate future would be all about a glass phone with no buttons, I'd have said they were nuts. I think both software and context and, above all, human empathy make the difference in how and when a hardware technology becomes truly useful. The stuff I've seen of the heads-up-display glasses se[…]

A friend of mine is working on a complicated publishing app; the data is
XML, perfectly appropriate when your objects are documents. She
told me they were thinking about automating some of the work by running XSLT
transformations out there in the client with
libxslt. I said “Well yeah, as long as
the client’s a PC not a tablet”. The category of “things you can do on a PC
but not a tablet” is interesting.

Anyone remember
AJAX? Now we just talk about Web apps, with towers
of JavaScript code (CoffeeScript for the
ultra-hip) built on an ever-growing library substrate (yes, there is
more than jQuery) making the browser look interesting.

It’s a good architecture! People like using browsers, JavaScript is growing up,
the Web Standards Project of yore has sort of won, and
REST keeps things nicely decoupled.

I dropped AJAX into that narrative for a reason. The ”X“ stood for
XML, which these days feels kind of heavyweight for use in Web apps,
unless you’re working with real actual documents. But when AJAX was a bright
shiny new idea, we didn’t care, because we had near-infinite power at our
disposal.

At the center of our world was a poor overtaxed Web server trying to take
care of a kazillion users’ requests. It was usually running in maxed-out mode,
while the computers it was serving were, in aggregate,
infinitely powerful, had hundreds of meg of lightly-used memory,
and typically ran with idle times averaging over 90%.

So all those other architectural advantages aside, the computer-resource
macroeconomics weren’t subtle; any piece of work you could offload from server
to client was a win.

It might still be. But there are clients and clients and clients.
Like I said at the top, you can’t run an XSLT transform on a phone.

In fact, there are lots of things you can’t do on a phone. I’m privileged
to work in close contact with platform engineers, and I’ve learned how
close mobile frameworks live to the edge of the possible. There’s no spare
memory and, since there’s no spare battery, there’s no spare CPU either.
I’m not just talking about Android, either.

This sort of sucks. There was a time when every client was a browser running
on a PC, and most PCs were in the big picture like most other PCs, and that’s
how the world was. But now, we’re in a position where client memory is very
nearly as scarce and precious as server memory. Which changes lots of things.

I’m not sure how this plays out. Right now, on Android or iOS, you can get
more out of that candybar in your pocket with a native app than with Web code.
But who knows how long that will last? We’ve got
Chrome on
Android now, and some of the phones they’re rolling out at MWC 2012 in
Barcelona constitute pretty big iron. On the other hand, you’d maybe like
your app to be available on a minimal developing-world phone too.

The one thing in the big picture that I don’t see changing any time soon is
the basic JSON-over-HTTP architecture of more or less every interesting
business app. That at least insulates the moving target running on the server
(NodeJS? Go?) from the moving target running on the client (Dart?
B2G?), and that has to
be a good thing.

Apple is slated to announce the fruits of its labor on improving the use of technology in education at its special media event on Thursday, January 19. While speculation has so far centered on digital textbooks, sources close to the matter have confirmed to Ars that Apple will announce tools to help create interactive e-books—the "GarageBand for e-books," so to speak—and expand its current platform to distribute them to iPhone and iPad users.

Along with the details we were able to gather from our sources, we also spoke to two experts in the field of digital publishing to get a clearer picture of the significance of what Apple is planning to announce.






Read the comments on this post

Mobile analytics company Flurry has been tracking the progression of iOS and Android application penetration across the world. No surprise, the United States is the most mature smartphone market on the planet. The rest of the world is catching up. China and South Korea both have made great leaps in 2011 to bring smart devices to users and where there is a smartphone, there is an app for that.

The U.S. has the highest install base of Android and iOS devices running apps in the world at 109 million. China is second at 35 million with the United Kingdom third at 17 million. The mobile app market is by no means saturated. Flurry still sees lots of room for it to grow.

Sponsor

Flurry tracks 140,000 apps across Android and iOS devices worldwide. The snapshot of what the company calls the "addressable market" - people not yet using Android or iOS apps - was taken during the last 30 days. Flurry is only counting phones currently in use, skirting the numbers that Apple and Google has said they have sold to date that have been replaced by new models.

Flurry encourages app developers to look overseas for potential growth markets. For instance, in China there are 122 million middle class adults age 15-64 that are not using iOS or Android. In the U.S. that number is 91 million (figuring a 200 million potential smartphone user base or about 60% of the population).

This brings us to the "addressable market." Right now, the most mature markets are the ones that have the highest penetration per, population. That means that the U.S., Sweden, Hong Kong and Sweden are the most mature. At the same time, the U.S. still has lots of potential to grow in iOS and Android adoption. Take a look at the chart below.

This chart is a little confusing if you do not know exactly what you are looking at. Here is the explanation from Flurry:

The vertical axis measures our total addressable audience (TAM), which we define as adults, 15 - 64, who are at least middle-class. The TAM per country is represented by the larger, light blue circles. The U.S., with the largest light blue circle, has the largest TAM at 200 million. The horizontal axis shows percent penetration, which is the active user (iOS or Android device that used an app over the last 30 days) divided by the TAM
.

Now that we have a look at the mature markets, which ones have the most potential? The light blue portions of the circles show the potential for the apps ecosystem to grow. In this chart, the U.S., Japan, China and India have the highest potential. Sweden and Hong Kong drop right off the map.

Expect developers to start focusing on more emerging markets in 2012. The U.S. may be the test bed for popular apps, but there is big money to be made overseas. Is your studio planning on taking advantage? Let us know in the comments.

Discuss

Mobile analytics company Flurry has been tracking the progression of iOS and Android application penetration across the world. No surprise, the United States is the most mature smartphone market on the planet. The rest of the world is catching up. China and South Korea both have made great leaps in 2011 to bring smart devices to users and where there is a smartphone, there is an app for that.

The U.S. has the highest install base of Android and iOS devices running apps in the world at 109 million. China is second at 35 million with the United Kingdom third at 17 million. The mobile app market is by no means saturated. Flurry still sees lots of room for it to grow.

Sponsor

Flurry tracks 140,000 apps across Android and iOS devices worldwide. The snapshot of what the company calls the "addressable market" - people not yet using Android or iOS apps - was taken during the last 30 days. Flurry is only counting phones currently in use, skirting the numbers that Apple and Google has said they have sold to date that have been replaced by new models.

Flurry encourages app developers to look overseas for potential growth markets. For instance, in China there are 122 million middle class adults age 15-64 that are not using iOS or Android. In the U.S. that number is 91 million (figuring a 200 million potential smartphone user base or about 60% of the population).

This brings us to the "addressable market." Right now, the most mature markets are the ones that have the highest penetration per, population. That means that the U.S., Sweden, Hong Kong and Sweden are the most mature. At the same time, the U.S. still has lots of potential to grow in iOS and Android adoption. Take a look at the chart below.

This chart is a little confusing if you do not know exactly what you are looking at. Here is the explanation from Flurry:

The vertical axis measures our total addressable audience (TAM), which we define as adults, 15 - 64, who are at least middle-class. The TAM per country is represented by the larger, light blue circles. The U.S., with the largest light blue circle, has the largest TAM at 200 million. The horizontal axis shows percent penetration, which is the active user (iOS or Android device that used an app over the last 30 days) divided by the TAM
.

Now that we have a look at the mature markets, which ones have the most potential? The light blue portions of the circles show the potential for the apps ecosystem to grow. In this chart, the U.S., Japan, China and India have the highest potential. Sweden and Hong Kong drop right off the map.

Expect developers to start focusing on more emerging markets in 2012. The U.S. may be the test bed for popular apps, but there is big money to be made overseas. Is your studio planning on taking advantage? Let us know in the comments.

Discuss

The media and news industry, after 10 years of disruption and economic torture, finally thought that it had gotten a step ahead. Publishers were in on the ground floor when the tablet revolution started with products ready to go even before Steve Jobs introduced us to the original iPad. The marriage of tablets to publishing would be a boon for everybody.

The honeymoon has not been sweet.

Publishers did not have the tools to create fully functional magazines from the very start. Sure, they were nice looking, but that was about it. Over the last two years, though, publishers and developers have created dynamic tools that allow the news media to create apps that do not just meet user expectations, but go beyond them.

Sponsor

The growth of the toolset for publishers directly coincides with the rise of the startup community that has emerged to add new functionality to major mobile operating systems. For instance, Urban Airship, a cloud services provider for mobile, was probably not ready to fully unleash its suite for publishers when the iPad was first announced. Localytics, a mobile analytics company out of DogPatch labs in Boston, was just starting. Other cloud services like Kinvey, StackMob and Parse were nothing more than ideas.

What can these services offer now that was more difficult to do when publishers initially came around to the idea of tablet magazines and newspapers? Quite a bit, actually. Let's look at what Urban Airship can do for publishers looking to put magazine apps in Apple's iOS Newsstand.

Newsstand library support: configures newsstand apps for auto-renewable subscriptions and single issue purchases through Apple's in-app purchasing toolset.
Content delivery: Hosts and delivers content available to users on any iOS device.
Push notifications: This is a big one and perhaps one of the main items missing from original tablet apps. The ability to create easy push notifications enables publishers to put news right under the noses of users, increasing engagement and page views and alerting readers of new issues. The evolution of push notifications for mobile and tablet apps will be a critical piece in how publishers utilize the devices.
Audience segmentation: Who is reading what? Where do you want to send certain readers? Urban Airship has "tags and aliases" features to associate mobile users with publishers CRM and personalize the experience.
Free seed content: Users hate to download a news app and then automatically be forced to subscribe before getting content. Publishers need to sweeten the deal a little bit and give users free content, such as back issues, listed next to subscription services.
Reports: How are users interacting with the news app? Analytics is the heart of understanding mobile users and there are a variety of companies out there, from Urban Airship, Localytics, Flurry, Apsalar and others that can help administrators reach the core goals of engagement and behavioral analysis.

What it comes down to is that publishers need to start looking at tablet apps like a developer would look at any other app, like a game or a utility. The goal is to gain reach, engage users, analyze behavior and monetize it. The Guardian and Future Publishing use Urban Airship and large publishers employ Flurry, Apsalar and Localytics for engagement and advertising insights.

There are also design tools that publishers can turn to for creating news apps that have evolved in the last year or so. Mag+ recently announced a new suite of publishing tools and pricing tiers for the smallest publisher to the largest magazine. Designed by editors and designers for editors and designers, it provides three tiers of publishing tools. There are also solutions from companies like Daylife, which launched real-time media management in June.

Apps are a data driven ecosystem, tied to the cloud, in the pockets of users on the go. News publishers need to understand the tools that can help them make the jump for the decaying old media standard to flexible and responsive new media technology companies.

Discuss

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)“Where am I?” and “What’s around me?” are two questions that cartographers, and Google Maps, strive to answer. With Google Maps’ “My Location” feature, which shows your location as a blue dot, you can see where you are on the map to avoid walking the wrong direction on city streets, or to get your bearings if you’re hiking an unfamiliar trail. Google Maps also displays additional details, such as places, landmarks and geographical features, to give you context about what’s nearby. And now, Google Maps for Android enables you to figure out where you are and see where you might want to go when you’re indoors.When you’re inside an airport, shopping mall or retail store, a common way to figure out where you are is to look for a freestanding map directory or ask an employee for help. Starting today, with the release of Google Maps 6.0 for Android, that directory is brought to the palm of your hands, helping you determine where you are, what floor you're on, and where to go indoors.Detailed floor plans automatically appear when you’re viewing the map and zoomed in on a building where indoor map data is available. The familiar “blue dot” icon indicates your location within several meters, and when you move up or down a level in a building with multiple floors, the interface will automatically update to display which floor you’re on. All this is achieved by using an approach similar to that of ‘My Location’ for outdoor spaces, but fine tuned for indoors.Mall of America in Minneapolis before and after, with a floor selectorSan Francisco International Airport before and after, with 3D tiltWe’ve initially partnered with some of the largest retailers, airports and transit stations in the U.S. and Japan, including:Mall of America, IKEA, The Home Depot, select Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s, Daimaru, Takashimaya and Mitsukoshi locations and more. Watch an IKEA demo here.Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL), Chicago O’Hare (ORD), San Francisco International Airport (SFO) and Narita International (NRT), among others.JR and Tokyu CorporationFor a detailed list of participating locations, please visit our help center. And this is just the start--we’ll continually add new indoor maps to public buildings across the world. If you’re a business owner interested in getting your location’s floor plan included in Google Maps, visit maps.google.com/floorplans.We’re thrilled Google Maps continues to provide you with new and helpful perspectives—whether you’re rushing through the airport or finding your way around a mall. To visit our website and learn more about indoor Google Maps and other features, start here.Posted by Brian McClendon, VP of Engineering, Google Earth and Maps

Earlier this summer, author Jonathan Stark (@jonathanstark) launched a social experiment by releasing his Starbucks card to the general public. Based on the "take a penny, leave a penny" tray near some stores' cash registers, Stark encouraged people to use his Starbucks card — to spend the money on it and/or to add cash back to it. While Stark never put any stipulations on the process, some observers were taken aback when another developer, Sam Odio, explained how to use Jonathan's card to buy an iPad.

It's been several months since Starbucks shut down the experiment, and now that the frenzy around it has subsided, I asked Stark a few questions about what motivated him to begin the project and what he learned in the process.

Why did you launch the Jonathan's Card experiment?

Jonathan Stark: The motivation stemmed from my underlying belief that the vast majority of people are good. An opportunity to test this belief in public and on a global scale clicked with me at a very deep level. I couldn't have articulated this at the time, but it became very clear in retrospect.

For what it's worth, here's how the experiment got started:

I had been testing various mobile payment solutions while doing research for a client project. Starbucks' iPhone app was pretty cutting edge at the time, and I liked it. I wanted to test the app on an Android phone, but Starbucks had not yet released their Android app, so I took a screenshot of the in-app barcode on my iPhone and emailed the picture to my Android device. Sure enough, the barcode reader at the Starbucks point-of-sale (POS) system was able to read the picture of the barcode on my Android phone. This blew my mind because I had essentially emailed money to myself and bought physical goods with a digital photo.

A screenshot of Jonathan Stark's Starbucks card (click to enlarge).

As far as I knew, this was unprecedented. So, I did what any self-respecting geek would do: I blogged about it.

In the blog post, I invited readers to download the card image to their smartphones and see if it worked for them elsewhere in the US and around the world. It did work all over the US and in a handful of places outside the US. People who used it were amazed and delighted. It was really fun giving out free coffee, so I reloaded the card online a few times. Eventually it got a bit pricey, so I figured it'd be a once in a while thing.

Then one Saturday night, I noticed that my card balance had gone up. This freaked me out because the app is linked to my debit card and I thought someone might have guessed my starbucks.com password and was emptying my checking account. Fortunately, this was not the case. What had actually happened was that one of my friends discovered that he could anonymously add money onto my card using the picture of the barcode, either in person at the POS or by entering the number at starbucks.com.

At this point, my head exploded. I instantly realized that I could use the picture of the card to create a worldwide "pay it forward" experiment. I was up all night building a landing page that described the experiment, gave instructions on how to use the card, and how to donate to the card. I also wrote a script that scraped starbucks.com every minute for the current card balance — whenever the balance changed, the card would tweet its balance. When the card balance went to $0, it would tweet for help with a link to the instructions on how to donate.

What surprised you the most about the experiment?

Jonathan Stark: There were a lot of surprises. It's hard to say what surprised me most. Here's a list of biggies:

That Starbucks let the experiment go on for as long as it did. Sharing the card goes against the company's terms of use, and it could have been killed right away.

I was surprised how many people were perfectly comfortable with the concept of buying things with their phones. It seems to me that the average smartphone user is more willing to accept the "mobile wallet" concept than industry analysts would lead you to believe. I expected more people to have security concerns. I think I only got two questions about that.

How fast and huge something gets when it goes viral. I was getting contacted by network TV producers within days once the experiment took on a life of its own.

How addictive the Twitter feed was. By the end, @jonathanscard had more than 9,000 followers, many of whom later told me that they were watching it like TV, cheering when someone would make a big donation, booing when someone would spend $100 at a pop.

How generous most people are. I was amazed how many people were willing to throw $10, $20, even $50 into the pool to buy a coffee for some anonymous stranger. In one week, more than $19,000 went through the card.

How accommodating Starbucks baristas are. We heard stories about people bringing all sorts of wacky stuff up to be scanned: digital cameras, laptops, iPads, and so on. People who didn't have any mobile devices even took to printing the barcode out and scanning it like a coupon.

What are the broader implications from this experiment?

Jonathan Stark: There is no doubt in my mind that the experiment would not have taken off like it did without the Twitter feed. It was addictive, interactive, and simple. Once the community grew and started to engage with each other we had to create a Facebook page to allow people to have threaded conversations. Twitter became the card's data feed and Facebook was where people talked about it. Both were critical but in very different ways.

Starbucks doesn't have an API, which I think is a big missed opportunity. Retailers want to make sticky and engaging loyalty programs, right? One great way to do that would be to publish an API that allows third-party developers to build on top of a loyalty program in all sorts of delightful and unexpected ways. One thing everyone was asking for during the experiment was a heat map of where the purchase activity was taking place. Because there was no API, I couldn't provide this — which is too bad because it probably would have become viral in its own right.

Strata 2012 — The 2012 Strata Conference, being held Feb. 28-March 1 in Santa Clara, Calif., will offer three full days of hands-on data training and information-rich sessions. Strata brings together the people, tools, and technologies you need to make data work.

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This interview was edited and condensed.

Related

Lessons From the End of the Free Starbucks Card Experiment
Mobile payments target the point-of-sale
Who will own your mobile wallet?
3 mobile payments products hint at future

This guest post comes from Amber Case, co-founder of Geoloqi, a private, real-time platform for location sharing. She also speaks frequently on Cyborg Anthropology, the study of humans and computers.

In this post I’ll describe how we planned, built and tested a truly real-time location-based game with Socket.io, Redis, Node.js, and what we learned along the way. Over the past few months, we’ve spent the majority our free time building a real-time game as a test for our location platform, Geoloqi. We call the game MapAttack! due to its map-based nature. Two teams compete to capture the most points on the gameboard. The gameboard, in this case, is the city streets of the neighborhood the players are in.

We set each geofence up with a point value that would give players points for entering geofences. The idea was that a virtual map would be set up on top of the real world, and players on red and blue teams would try to capture all of the geofence points in the game before the other team. To capture a point, the phone would have to detect when the player entered the fence, determine the point value of the fence, notify the player that he received the point, turn the geofence the color of the team, and then add the point to the player score and the overall team score.

Why Build a Real-Time Geofencing Game?
We wanted to create a game that allowed people to physically interact with the real world instead of a computer console like a first person shooter or a real-time strategy game. We were inspired by playing a real-life version of Pac-Man called Pacmanhattan, invented by graduate students at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU in 2004. We played it at Portland’s WhereCamp conference in 2008, and we wanted to see if we could make a GPS version of the game, as Pacmanhattan relied entirely on phone calls and physical maps. We also needed a good demo of Geoloqi’s streaming API.

Technical Challenges
Here is an overview of the problems we had to focus on in order to build the game.

Handling the detection of users entering and leaving 200+ geofences concurrently.
Handling the volume of location-updates from all the phones in a given game (20 or more users per game).
Allowing each phone and web browser watching the game to be able to see the movements of players and the geofences changing color in real time. Every phone in the game sends its location to the server, which broadcasts that data to every other phone and browser watching the game.
Handling errors and differences in GPS technology on different smart phone models in order to ensure a fair gameplay experience.

Differences in GPS Hardware
GPS signals are known for reflecting off of tall buildings in urban settings. This causes inaccuracy and inconsistency in location data. It is less-pronounced in newer phones, but it greatly shows in older ones.

Before our Streaming API
Before we finished the Geoloqi streaming API and before we started using Node.js and Socket.io, everything was based on polling for new updates. Phones reported their location at 5 second intervals and the browsers would update the game board in 5 second intervals.

Using Socket.io, Node.js, Redis, and Sinatra Synchrony

Socket.io

Socket.io is a cross-browser web socket implementation allowing us to do real-time data updates on the browser and also supports older browsers. We can use the latest technology without requiring all of our users to update to the newest browsers, thanks to Socket.io falling back to older technologies in older browsers. This allow us to do instant updates across browsers and the phones in the game.

Node.js

Node.js is Evented I/O for V8 Google’s Javascript implementation for Chrome, implemented with a reactor pattern, that enables for large amounts of asynchronous data traffic.

We use a Node.js server to stream the location data from the phones to the Redis pub/sub channel. It publishes to Redis, and another Node server subscribes to that redis channel. Our Node.js server receives updates from the phones using a custom protocol similar to Google’s Protocol Buffers, which is essentially a very compact binary JSON.

When a browser wants to start streaming data, it connects to the Socket.io server and that server then subscribes to the Redis pub/sub channel. The Socket.io server sends that data via Websockets to the browser, falling back to Flash or long-polling if Websockets is not available.

In essence, Socket.io allows us to use Websockets, which are completely new, but also allows this to work on older browsers thanks to the fallback tricks.

Redis

Redis is an open source, advanced key-value store that has support for message queues using something called publish/subscribe, or pub/sub (not to be confused with PubSubHubbub).

From the higher level what this lets us do is handle the difficulty of sending data to all of the phones in the game and the browser in real-time. Every phone in the game sends its location to the server, which broadcasts that data to every other phone and browser watching the game.

One of the interesting things about the publish/subscribe system is that with a traditional system you have to maintain connections and iterate through each in order to pass data through them. The alternative would be that if you had 10,000 users you’d have to iterate through an array of 10,000 connections, which would be very slow and prone to locking up on socket problems.

Using Redis pub/sub is like starting a radio station. Once it is turned on, people (in this case, browsers) can just listen in. This allows us to do real-time data updates to clients (browsers and phones) at a massive scale.

Sinatra Synchrony

Sinatra::Synchrony is a small extension for Sinatra that dramatically improves the concurrency of Sinatra web applications. Powered by EventMachine and EM-Synchrony, it increases the number of clients your application can serve per process when you have a lot of traffic and slow IO calls (like HTTP calls to external APIs). Because it uses Fibers internally to handle blocking IO, no callback gymnastics are required! This means we can just develop as if we were writing a normal Sinatra web application.

Sinatra::Synchrony allows us to do asynchronous programming (ala Node.js), except that it wraps the callbacks in Fibers (which are basically co-routines in Ruby). This allows you to do synchronous programming while taking advantage of asynchronous code. Aside from being easier to program this way, it also allows us to switch to a different concurrency/parallelism strategy if we need to. Kyle Drake developed Sinatra Synchrony specifically for MapAttack. Drake’s work became popular after he made a presentation on Sinatra::Synchrony at PDX Ruby.

The MapAttack Game Server
Finally, there is the MapAttack Game Server. In this case the Game Server is a simple database that takes care of storing the player point data that is displayed on the map and on the phones as players grab points in real-time.

Source Code
We made the source code for MapAttack available for download. You can download or fork the source code for the MapAttack website, iPhone application and Android application. If you build anything interesting with it, please let us know.

Upcoming Games
We’ll be bringing MapAttack! to WhereCamp Portland on October 7-9, 2011. We’ll give an overview of the technology there as well. If you plan to be in the area, please join us.

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Related ProgrammableWeb Resources Geoloqi API Profile, 2 mashups

If you a hear a word in regular conversation that you don't know, it can be hard to look it up if you don't know how to spell it. Instead, just throw it at Google Voice Search to get an accurate definition. More »

This morning I caught up with Chris Tolles, CEO of news aggregation service Topix. I've been following Topix since it began, back in 2004, so it was interesting to find out how the service has evolved. Originally, as the name suggests, Topix was focused on being a news site that categorized its content into topics. Nowadays Topix is very focused on localized news, particularly for small towns across America. Tolles said that 44% of their traffic comes from rural areas, rather than metropolitan areas.

Topix has also seen rapid growth in mobile access over the past year, from about 1% of their total traffic to 10% now. Tolles told me that 70% of that mobile traffic is coming from the iPhone.

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When Topix began in 2004, just 10% of Topix's channels were local. But soon after, Tolles told me, they noticed that about 45% of their traffic was coming from those local channels. Topix then embarked on a journey to "own local news" for towns. By 2007, Topix was focusing almost exclusively on local news. It aimed to become the "home of local voice on the Web."

Small Town News

Topix is about discussion, rather than traditional journalism. Tolles explained that they use a community approach to get people to participate and add news for their town. The content on the site is largely driven by community discussion. Tolles said that small towns often don't have enough news, so "discussion is what fills this out."

According to Tolles, Topix can be a substitute for traditional press in some small towns - especially if there's no local paper (or if there is one, it's not daily but, for example, a weekly publication). Given its focus on discussions, Tolles said that Topix is the place to go "if you want to throw rocks at your mayor."

As noted, Topix does well in small towns. The southeast of the U.S. is currently working very well, said Tolles, with some small towns attracting thousands of comments a day. However, by his own admission Topix does poorly in big metropolitan cities like New York City and San Francisco. Tolles attributes this to increased competition in those places, but also in smaller cities or towns locals often "have axe to grind" and so that fosters discussions.

I asked how Topix markets itself to towns. Tolles replied that the biggest way Topix is discovered is through Google - for example, people searching for their town's news. He said that 40% of Topix's traffic comes from Google, but that 50% is organic - meaning that people come via the URL or a bookmark. That means that a solid percentage of Topix's traffic is return visitors. Tolles noted that when people first visit Topix, they are attracted to the comments.

Mobile Usage Dramatically Increased

Probably the most interesting factoid I discovered about Topix today is that mobile usage is increasing at a rapid rate. Tolles said that in just one year mobile traffic went from 1% to 10% of the site's total traffic. Most of these are iPhone users: 70% of mobile traffic, as noted above.

What's more, mobile users are good commenters, too. Tolles said that about 30% of mobile users leave comments on Topix, which is a high ratio when you consider how difficult it is to leave comments via a mobile device.

Tolles noted that Topix has an iPhone app, which was released almost two years ago. However, he said that most of the mobile traffic comes from a mobile browser. Topix supports 38,000 towns or cities, all of which are available via mobile.

Mobile is by far the fastest growing aspect of Topix currently, said Tolles. He also remarked that advertising space in mobile is an open field. Topix monetizes well on the Web, at almost $4 per CPM. However, the mobile side is not quite so high currently. He expects this to grow, but he isn't sure if it will be Google, Apple or another company that will provide the optimal mobile advertising platform.

Discuss

Mint, the popular personal finance service that aggregates data from all your online banking and investment accounts, just announced the launch of its Android app. The application offers roughly the same features as the company's popular iPhone app, but it also features a number of Android-specific features, including integrated search, a Mint.com widget and support for Android notifications. The new app is compatible with phones running versions 1.5, 1.6 and 2.0 of the Android OS.

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Just like Mint's iPhone app, the Android app allows users to check their current account balances in real-time, check up on recent transactions and manage their monthly budgets.

All of this highly personal data is password-protected and if the phone is lost or stolen, users can easily disable access remotely from the service's website.

Given the Android platform's recent surge in popularity, adding an Android app to Mint's lineup of mobile apps was probably a no-brainer for Intuit, which acquired Mint in September 2009. According to Intuit, Mint currently has about 3 million users and given the service's demographics, many of these are likely smartphone users.

Discuss

Is there a tablet in Google’s future with a three-dimensional, multitouch user interface? It’s increasingly likely, given that the search giant has just acquired BumpTop, a startup whose unique software creates a 3-D environment where users can toss files and folders around as though they were playing cards, stack them in related piles and “hang” them on the virtual walls. If Google is working on an iPad-style tablet, as many believe that it is, a BumpTop-style interface would be dramatic departure from the typical 2-D app/icon approach, and could provide a significant alternative to the look and feel of Apple’s iPad.

A post on the BumpTop website on Sunday confirmed the acquisition, and said the company’s existing software (which was available for both Windows and Mac computers) “will no longer be available for sale [and] no updates to the products are planned.” Despite this, however, sources say the purchase of the company isn’t just another case of Google “acqu-hiring” some talented developers (something it has been doing a lot of recently).

Instead, they say Google is looking at the company’s 3-D, multitouch interface — or elements of it — as a potential addition to a tablet device. Mark McQueen at Wellington Financial also seems to see the potential for this, saying in his blog post:

Given the arm wrestling going on between Apple and Google over who will have the sweetest user experience, Bumptop’s cool desktop and underlying technology are a natural piece of Google’s user interface puzzle as they prepare to take on the current kings of all consumer electronics. The ones down the street in Cupertino.

There’s no question that the iPad is a revolutionary device in many ways, with its form factor and multitouch interface, but the look of the desktop is surprisingly boring, with tiny app icons spread out in a typical desktop grid. If Google is looking for something more dramatic to set its own tablet-type device apart from the crowd, BumpTop’s 3-D desktop would certainly fit the bill. As shown in the video below, icons representing files and folders can be flipped, stacked, fanned out, resized and manipulated in various ways. And perhaps just as important, BumpTop also holds patents on its interface.

Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed, but the Wellington Financial blog speculates that the price was in the $35-$40 million range. According to a recent profile of the company in the Globe and Mail, the Toronto-based company has raised $1.65 million from GrowthWorks Capital and Extreme Venture Partners, as well as angel investor and former Macintosh designer Andy Hertzfeld. According to Startup North, Canadian entrepreneur and angel investor Austin Hill was also involved in funding the company.

Speculation about a Google acquisition began with a tweet from someone in the Canadian startup community, which was noticed by TechCrunch, but then deleted (although StartupNorth got a screenshot). A post then appeared at the Wellington Financial blog speculating that the company had been acquired by Google, and the BumpTop website was later updated with confirmation of the deal.

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According to a number of well-informed sources, Apple just acquired Siri, the personal mobile assistant that won the SXSW BizSpark Accelerator competition last month. Nobody at Siri is allowed to talk about this acquisition before Apple makes its own announcement, but our own sources confirm that this acquisition has indeed happened. These rumors are also substantiated by this recent FTC disclosure (PDF) by Apple and Siri.

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The first person to notice this acquisition was Robert Scoble, who found a reference to it in this FTC document (PDF). While we are still waiting for official confirmation, our sources tell us that the acquisition is basically a done deal at this point.

Why Apple?

For Apple, this acquisition makes perfect sense. Siri was spun out of SRI International, and its core technology is based on the ambitious DARPA-funded CALO artificial intelligence project. With VoiceOver, Apple already features some voice recognition in its projects. This acquisition, however, will allow the company to take it to a completely new level. You can, for example, ask Siri - by voice - to check for a dinner reservation through OpenTable at a local Italian restaurant nearby or check on local movie listings.

When we first looked at Siri in February, we described it as one of the "most ambitious mobile services we have seen in the last few years." Siri's ability to understand natural language will give Apple a major advantages over other players in this market.

It remains to be seen, however, if Apple will continue to develop Siri in its current form, or if the company is mostly interested in Siri's intellectual property. When we first talked to Siri about its roadmap, the company's CEO, Dag Kittlaus, told us that Siri also planned to offer an API and versions for other mobile operating systems in the future. After this acquisition, it is probably safe to say that we won't see Siri for Android anytime soon.

Discuss

One of the nice things about this job is that I’m meeting lots of interesting
startups who are doing mobile apps. My fave so far is
Bump.

Bump World Headquarters

The idea is simple: I bump your phone with mine, and the result
is that I transfer something to you; say, a phone number, or a picture, or, of
course,
money.

A good place to start getting the picture would be their
FAQ.
This is the kind of technology I like; a simple effect, instantly
understandable, that requires rocket science under the
covers to pull off.

Ah, that startup ambience. You’ll note that I erased the
whiteboards, but I can reveal that one of them contained scraps of what
appeared to be [gasp!] Haskell code.

Bump and Android
There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that they’re running on
Android (very nicely) and shipping an Android API. You can bump an iPhone and
an Android together and it Just Works, no problemo.

In fact, there are a couple of things they can do in Android that are
harder on other platforms; for example, because of the Android
Intent
feature, you can register Bump to, for example, share pictures.

Of course, nothing’s perfect. The Bump guys had run
across a couple of issues which were causing them extra work at release time,
and really shouldn’t have.
So I visited them to look at the source code so we can figure out how to set
things up so that particular bug doesn’t bite anyone else.

Practical compatibility testing at the Bump World
HeadQuarters.

Any other startups reading this, I’d be happy to get pitches. But I probably
won’t write you up here unless I’m actually going to use your app myself.

India’s Bharti Airtel will become the fifth-largest telecom provider in the world by purchasing 15 African markets from Zain in deal valued at $10.7 billion, according to Wireless Intelligence. Combining the 15 new markets with the three that Bharti held prior, the purchase will give it just under 170 million subscribers out of a potential customer population of 450 million in all 18 areas. Unless a regulatory issue holds up the deal, the newly acquired markets will include: Burkina Faso, Chad, Congo Brazzaville, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

As I review the largest mobile providers in the world, I’m reminded that I need to spend more time looking beyond my backyard in the U.S. It would take the combined subscriber counts of the two largest carriers here — Verizon’s 91 million and AT&T’s 85 million — to rival Bharti’s new size. Perhaps Nokia’s focus on emerging markets isn’t such a bad strategy after all. This worldwide approach is rubbing off on others as Dell just announced a deal with Telfonica Group in Latin America, the world’s No. 3 three mobile provider, to provide services and smartphones such as its Android-powered Aero handset. Now if we could only get the carriers to work out better international roaming agreements so that no one ever gets another $10,000 monthly bill, we’d be in business.

Here’s a look at where Airtel will fit in among the top mobile providers in the world:

Worldwide Mobile Telecom Rankings

Rank
Provider
Total Connections
Markets

1
China Mobile
525,331,266
2

2
Vodafone Group
309,580,257
23

3
Telefonica Group
202,333,430
20

4
America Movil Group
186,544,900
17

5
Airtel Group
169,468,523
18

6
China Unicom
147,587,000
1

7
Deutsche Telekom Group
127,919,986
12

8
Telenor Group
101,367,838
10

Table Source: Wireless Intelligence

Google CEO Eric Schmidt sat for a Q&A at the company’s Atmosphere event yesterday pitching its Apps platform to the enterprise. A couple of his remarks stuck with me today and I wanted to share them as well as a video of the session that Google has now made available to the public.

Schmidt made two specific comments about resource allocation, saying that the hardest and most pressing engineering issues facing Google today are around sharing and mobile. He was talking to the enterprise execs present but his statements were so absolute I think it’s fair to apply them more broadly.

“Companies are about sharing,” Schmidt said. “One of the new things in the last five years about the web is that it enables sharing-sensitive apps.” He continued:

I think of calendars as incredibly boring, but I’m wrong, calendars are incredibly interesting because they’re incredibly shared. So from a computer science perspective, all of a sudden we have our top engineers who want to build calendars. I’m going, what’s wrong with you guys? But in fact it’s a very interesting example. Spreadsheets are similar, the most interesting spreadsheets are highly, highly interlinked, something I didn’t know, and was not possible with the previous technology — Microsoft technology made it very difficult because they were not built in that model.

Schmidt also recommended to the executives present that: “You should always put your best team on your mobile app that enables your service. The answer should always be mobile first.”

As the mobile Internet becomes central for both consumer and corporate users, the core product questions are interoperability, security and safety, Schmidt said. “What’s important is to get the mobile experience right, because mobility will ultimately be the way you provision most of your services,” he added, saying that Google considers phones, tablets and netbooks mobile experiences.

Lastly, to make good mobile, web and diskless computer (aka Chrome OS) apps, Schmidt had a platform recommendation as well: “From our perspective the single most important development has been the arrival of the HTML 5 standard.”

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Google is said to be planning a rival device to Apple’s iPad that will be powered by Android. Assuming this is true, what does Google need to do in order to make its slate competitive with the iPad?

Size matters — A “Google Pad” should target the sweet spot of screen sizes, that of 5-8 inches. Any larger and some will complain that the device is too heavy — as is already happening with the iPad — while smaller devices simply don’t offer enough benefit over current smartphones, some of which have displays of 4 inches or larger. Google would have to subsequently adjust how Android and its apps run on larger displays — my own porting of Android to a 7-inch touchscreen computer offered a less-than-ideal experience because the user interface is optimized for small screens.

Fix the Market — Other companies already offer Android-powered tablets, but those devices are mysteriously hobbled by limitations that include not having access to the Android Market for software. Obviously, Google wouldn’t similarly constrain its own product, but it still needs to make finding and installing software from the marketplace easier than it is now. One small tweak that would yield huge benefits is an “update all” function. Users don’t want to have to update software one app at a time.

Sync or swim — Unlike its competitors, Google doesn’t offer software to synchronize data between Android devices and computers. One could correctly argue that the sync solution Google offers is the cloud — mail, contacts, calendars and other data is all available through an over-the-air web connection. But not all consumers are ready for a true wireless data sync. Google should either bundle solutions like DoubleTwist for media and application synchronization or perhaps the Missing Sync for personal data.

Boost productivity — While most people don’t buy tablets to replace the productivity offered by a traditional computer, if it’s making one, Google should leverage its Google Docs platform for it. Currently, Android supports document viewing, but not much in the way of editing aside from limited spreadsheet changes. A native Android application or enhanced Google Docs functionality in the browser for basic document editing would rival Apple’s iWork software for the iPad.

Court developers — Apple has already got the attention of third-party developers, so Google will have to offer an equally if not more compelling development environment in order to have blockbuster applications on hand at launch. Netflix is a fine example — Apple successfully convinced the company to build media-streaming software for the ARM-powered iPad, enabling consumers to watch video wherever a web connection could be found.

As someone who switched from an iPhone to a Nexus One earlier this year — yes, I bought an iPad, too — I find the Apple experience more refined than that of Google. But Android still has much to offer, namely the lack of an ecosystem lock-in, easy integration with Google services and a growing number of software titles. If the company addresses the five areas I’ve outlined above, a Google Pad could be a very worthy alternative to Apple’s iPad indeed.

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Thumbnail tablet rendering image courtesy of the Chromium Blog

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com

Microsoft today launched its Kin line of handsets — web-enabled touchscreen phones built around social networking features, messaging, video sharing and the company’s Zune music offering — with two initial models. The new line is aimed squarely at the pre-smartphone demographic — a group that few competitors are targeting.

The Kin One and Kin Two contain three software and service features not found on any other Microsoft handsets: Kin Loop, Kin Spot and Kin Studio. Similar to Motorola’s Motoblur, Loop provides a central place to follow contacts on Facebook, My Space, Twitter and Windows Live with constant refreshes. A nice touch is how it allows users to prioritize friends, so that updates from people you’re most interested in take priority over passing acquaintances on the web. Sharing web pages, pictures or locations involves a simple drag and drop of data to the Spot. The Studio, meanwhile, provides web-based timeline-styled backup of all data created on the phones, such as still pictures, videos and messages. It can be used to view any of this data, even if it’s not locally stored, which helps offset the limited local storage capacity on both handsets.

Although the new Kin services are front and center, Microsoft’s use of the Zune ecosystem is clever in several ways. First, it could bring in revenue via teens’ accessing of unlimited music tracks for $15 a month Zune Pass subscription. And it provides a shot across the bow of Apple, which doesn’t yet offer a music subscription service — an opportunity that, as I noted in a GigaOM Pro report (subscription required)  about streaming tunes from the cloud, the company was missing out on.

The Kin is clearly a direct descendant from the Sidekick line that Microsoft gained when it purchased Danger two years ago — the Kin offers similar features and targets the same crowd. And that narrow focus on a largely untapped audience is undoubtedly what convinced to finally start selling its own branded line of phones — something it previously said it wouldn’t do.

So the social teenager who’s ready to move up from a feature phone but doesn’t want or need an expensive smartphone and corresponding app store will be well-served by the Kin line. After that, Microsoft will be more than happy to introduce them to full-fledged Windows Phone 7 devices.

The two Kin phones debut exclusively in Verizon Wireless retail stores next month; they’ll also be available on the Vodafone network at a future date, which the company declined to name.

LoadingNextPreviousPicture 1 of 6 kin-phones-with-zune

During a media event in San Francisco today, Microsoft revealed the spiritual successor to the Danger Sidekick messaging phone. Called "KIN," the new platform is designed with a heavy focus on social networking and is targeted mainly towards younger users that Microsoft has dubbed the "social generation."

KIN is launching with two different hardware versions. KIN ONE is a small touchscreen QWERTY slider that looks not unlike the Palm Pre. It has 4GB of flash memory for storage and a 5 megapixel camera optimized for low-light use.

KIN TWO is a larger, more traditional-looking QWERTY slider, with a larger, wider touchscreen. It has 8GB of storage and an 8 megapixel camera that can shoot 720p HD video.





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One day has passed since Apple gave developers a sneak preview of iPhone OS 4.0, and already there's new (NDA-breaking) information floating around about the other 90-some features that Steve Jobs didn't discuss at Apple's media event. 
In addition to renewed evidence that Apple may add a front-facing camera and other camera-related features, developers with access to the beta have told Ars about even more tidbits buried within, essentially making OS 4.0 a piñata of API goodies for devs to beat on.

Thursday's announcement immediately turned up evidence that Apple might be adding a flash to the iPhone's camera, thanks to functions named VCaptureDevice.hasFlash, AVCaptureDevice.flashMode, and AVCaptureDevice.hasTorch. Apple is allegedly investigating LED flash options, which would make such a feature very BlackBerry-like. Additionally, the latest iPhone SDK continues to contain hints about a front-facing camera as well as iChat support.





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Many have written about how the iPad heralds a new paradigm in computers. Computers today are too complex. The iPad is the device that our parents will use so they don't have to worry about the dark, scary underbelly of the file system.

During a recent panel at Mobile Portland, both the audience and the panelists discussed the shortcomings of the iPad as being obstacles for themselves, but that these problems wouldn't slow the iPad because the tech-savvy audience wasn't the target demographic for the iPad.

Despite the fact that everyone believes the iPad is targeted at those who need a simpler computer, Apple itself has never made that argument.

You cannot use an iPad without a computer. The iPad cannot:

Install operating system updates without connecting to a computer.
Back up data and software without connecting to a computer.
Print documents without somehow emailing or sharing the document to a computer.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a recent survey found that the people most interested in the iPad are the typical leading- and bleeding-edge adopters.

In the long run, the iPad may yet revolutionize computing in the ways that people hope. It certainly holds the promise to do so. A lot will hinge on when Apple addresses system updates, backups and printing.

If these issues are tackled in the 4.0 version of the iPhone/iPad's operating system, which will likely arrive this summer, look for a surge of interest from people looking for a simple computer during the back-to-school and holiday season.

Until then, I keep thinking about how Mobile Portland's tech-savvy audience—the crowd that argued that the iPad wasn't meant for them—responded when asked if they planned on buying an iPad.

Nearly every one of them raised their hand.

Just a few days after the launch of the iPad, Apple plans to reveal more details about the next version of the iPhone operating system tomorrow. As with any Apple product, rumors about the new iPhone OS, which runs on the iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad, are already floating around the Internet, but the reality is that nobody outside of Apple really knows what the company plans to unveil tomorrow.

Here are a few features we would like to see in the new version of the iPhone OS.

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Multitasking

The iPad, which is far more powerful than the iPhone, still runs what is basically a modified version of the current iPhone OS. Currently, Apple still doesn't allow developers to access the OS's multitasking features and prevents them from running their programs in the background. We expect to see some support for multitasking in the 4.0 release, but it isn't clear what form this will take.

The latest rumors point towards an Expose-like interface for switching between apps.

Even if Apple just allowed some music apps to stream in the background or allowed some apps to regularly send location pings or wake their programs up remotely or at regular intervals, this would already be a huge step forward for what developers can do with the iPhone OS.

Better Notifications Management

Push notifications were supposed to be a stop-gap measure until Apple opened up the floodgates for background applications. However, for breaking news updates, email alerts and Twitter notifications, these push alerts will still be useful (if only to maximize battery life). Right now, however, the iPhone OS doesn't manage these notifications well. There is no way to see all recent notifications in one place and no way to just turn off notifications for certain hours of the day (and night) without having to turn them off altogether.

New Home Screen

This new notifications system could be integrated into a new home screen that shows new email, notifications and text messages instead of just dropping users into a list of apps.

File Management

As Apple continues to push the idea that the iPhone OS family isn't just for surfing the web and gaming, but also for using serious productivity tools, managing and transferring files becomes a must. That, of course, represents a serious challenge for Apple's user interface designers, so we don't expect to see this anytime soon - but we still hope that Apple will surprise us.

Reduced Need for iTunes

iTunes wasn't designed as a file management tool and it's starting to show. With the iPad, you now have to use iTunes - a music player - to manage your books and documents. Why can't we just get this data right from our email inbox or just use a dropbox folder on the iPad and iPhone to drag data onto the device?

Easier Podcast Management

Sure, you can use third-party apps to manage your podcasts, but why Apple hasn't included an easy to use podcast client is beyond us. We can see why Apple wouldn't want people to transfer hundreds of megabytes over the cellular network, but why not just make this a WiFi-only service? Instead of having to sync with iTunes on a laptop while traveling, for example, wouldn't it be nice if you could just use the hotel or airport WiFi to download all of your podcasts with one click?

Of course, we will bring you all the news about the new iPhone OS tomorrow. The announcement is scheduled to begin at 10am Pacific.

Discuss

The iPad isn't a big iPod touch—an iPod touch is a miniature iPad that restricts the full multitouch experience in exchange for offering greater portability. With the iPad, in contrast, you get multitouch the way it was meant to be done.

That's one of our many take-aways after having submerged ourselves in iPad land since launch. The larger screen doesn't just offer more space to work with—it opens up a different and more immersive user experience. Because of this different experience, though, the closed nature of the platform can get under some users' skin in ways the iPhone and iPod touch do not.

Still, the iPad is likely to just be a starting point for Apple and for multitouch computing in general. There are obvious downsides to the device—we'll tell you what those are—but it's clear that it does sit in its own category that floats somewhere between a smartphone and a laptop, and it serves different purposes than either its smaller or bigger siblings. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

A large chunk of the Ars staff contributed to this review, either in the form of writing full sections or by offering feedback and insights based on their own experiences. Because the 3G + WiFi version is not yet on the market, we all tested a WiFi-only iPad. We think it's worth noting up front that the WiFi-only version is probably best if you only plan to use it at home or at Starbucks—you'll definitely miss not having an Internet connection while out and about, and the (non-contract) 3G data plans are not bad at all, so long as you can stomach the extra $130 you'll have to fork over for the privilege.

It's also the case that there are some parts of the iPad "experience" that we didn't get to cover here, but we think the next several pages will convey more about what using the iPad is like than you ever thought you wanted to know. So let's get on with it!





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The iPad may be Apple’s next gold rush, but it’s also positioned to pay dividends to mobile developers in a big way. Applications for the much-hyped device will generally cost more than similar offerings on the iPhone, developers said in a story from the BBC this morning, due to unknown demand for the iPad and the extra work required to design to create feature-rich offerings that take advantage of the gadget’s high-tech screen. That presents a lucrative opportunity for developers who can entice users by fully leveraging the device’s capabilities.

Just how many people will want an iPad (or any other tablet) is uncertain, but GigaOM Pro VP of Research Michael Wolf predicts the tablet app market will reach $8.2 billion by 2015 (sub req’d). The increasing demand for mobile applications is crystal clear, however, according to data released today from Mplayit. The app discovery and merchandising startup said that 35 percent of iPhone, Android and BlackBerry users are interested in paid applications, with BlackBerry users willing to pay the biggest premium of all, with a medium price point of $5.99.

Those figures should be especially encouraging for developers targeting users of the iPad, which promises to offer a more interactive experience than is possible on even the best smartphones. Consumers who have grown accustomed to shelling out a couple of dollars for an iPhone game will surely pay a premium for titles that leverage the iPad’s 9.7-inch, high-resolution screen and its multitouch functionality. So if the iPad is a hit, developers who can deliver the goods on the impressive device will benefit as much as Apple will.

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Image courtesy Flickr user Johnny Vulkan.