The apps he uses.

 ★ 

A new feature of News.me for iPhone delivers your news to your device whenever you leave the house. It’s called Paperboy, and it uses iOS 5’s built-in geofencing to wake up the app and download fresh news in the background. How cool would it be if your grocery list or your podcasts worked the same way?



Delivery at Your Doorstep

Front-end developer (and Chief Marketing Officer) Jon Ferrer came up with the name Paperboy, and it’s a perfect description. News.me gathers all the news articles shared by your friends on social networks and streams them to you in a clean interface, which you can read on- or offline. Paperboy refreshes the app automatically as you walk out the door, so you’ve got today’s news to read when you pull out your phone.

The background geofencing in iOS is triggered by cell tower changes rather than GPS, so while it’s less precise, it doesn’t consume much additional battery life. With some apps, you'll notice the slight drop in accuracy: For example, Apple’s built-in Reminders app uses geofencing for location-based reminders, and those can be hit-or-miss. You might want to set a location reminder for a specific store, but it might go off as soon as you enter the neighborhood.

But News.me doesn’t need the precise location of the user, just the signal that he or she is leaving home, so geofencing works brilliantly. “What we’ve learned is that people love the app because they can read it on the subway,” says Jake Levine, general manager of News.me. Thanks to Paperboy, they don’t even have to remember to refresh before they go underground.









Built in a Weekend

“I’ve been trying to figure out some way to implement this idea of having different functionality based on [the user’s location] for a while,” News.me developer Rob Haining says. “I built the original Epicurious iPhone app at Condé Nast, and back then I was thinking about how you’d use the app differently at home cooking versus out shopping.”

Though Haining never got to implement geofencing in Epicurious, the idea had been kicking around for a while by the time he got to News.me: “The idea that you can mark something as your home and provide functionality around it is really interesting. And now, with geofencing, it’s easy to implement something with pretty low cost to battery life, CPU and the user.”

“This is not a feature that was on any roadmap anywhere,” Levine explains. “We were walking home one Friday night. We walked out of the building together, and Rob said, ‘Hey, what do you guys think about updating the news in the background when you leave home?’ ”

“It was nowhere near any of the features we were building,” Levine says, but they all loved the idea. So Haining went home that weekend and built it on his own time. “On Sunday night, we got a build from Rob that said, ‘First version of automatic downloading by location,’ and it worked when I left home on Monday morning.”

Implementing Geofencing









Since geofencing is built into iOS, Haining says implementing it is “pretty straightforward.” Paperboy has two components. The first uses the native map view to drop a pin designating the “home” location. By way of contrast, OmniFocus for iPhone offers a different example of how to set up a geofence; it asks the user to choose an address from his or her contacts.

The other component is the actual geofence trigger when the user leaves that place. In News.me’s case, it detects when the user leaves the “home” area, wakes the app up in the background and downloads the latest news for online or offline reading. Haining says “it’s not too bad” to implement.

For developers, make sure you peruse your App Store review guidelines if you’re building in geofencing. “There’s language in the guidelines about proper use of geofencing, and it’s incredibly vague,” Levine says. The team wasn’t sure Apple would even approve it, but they did: “Whatever the decision process was inside Apple to let this feature through, I think this is a thumbs-up for those guys.”

For detailed instructions on how to turn on Paperboy, check out the News.me blog.

Lead image via Shutterstock.

If I accept conventional wisdom, Apple is getting into the TV-making business because:

The living room is the last consumer segment that Apple has yet to completely remake in its image.
Apple creates new markets where none exist, and it isn't satisfied with merely improving upon existing ones.
Steve Jobs allegedly said that he'd cracked the code for creating an integrated TV set.
If the iPad is really "just" a big iPod Touch, and has already sold 55 million units, then a TV that is "just" a big iPad could do gonzo business.
The business of making TVs is broken, and Apple has to fix it.
Cable and satellite providers are evil, and Apple has to liberate consumers.
Tim Cook "needs" a hit.

As I stated in my last post following Apple's gaudy earnings numbers, I don't accept conventional wisdom because conventional wisdom is dead! Apple killed it.

Most fundamentally, all assumptions about Apple seem to stem from a misunderstanding of how differently Apple thinks and operates from everyone else.

For starters, Apple doesn't chase markets just because they're there. Nor do they get sucked into market share battles just so they can say they sold the most units (see: iOS vs. Android).

Further, neither the aggrandizement of the CEO's ego nor the altruistic care-taking of the consumer drive Apple's product strategy.

Rather, Apple pursues markets purely and vigorously based upon a simple logic. Do they believe that their integrated hardware + software + service approach can be applied in a leveraged fashion to create a differentiated offering that delights consumers, appeals to the masses, and can be sold at high margins at a predictable run rate?

If the answer is "yes," then game on. If the answer is "no," then leave it as a hobby (such as the current Apple TV), or avoid the market altogether.

This is the backdrop for understanding the rumors about Apple building a new-fangled television set. Rumors and whispers notwithstanding, in the words of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the obvious question is:

"Of each particular thing, ask: What is it in itself? What is its nature?"

Top layer = iOS devices; Middle layer = Core device functions; Bottom layer = Noteworthy hardware subsystems.

In the case of a serious living room play, if you check out the above graphic, what stands out most about the Apple TV in its current incarnation is its lack of apps, web, and communications support. These elements are the three biggest game changers that propelled the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad beyond the impressive media foundation that marked the pre-iOS iPod.

What is also lacking is the mainstream television programming (HBO, ESPN, ABC) that the typical consumer demands. A 'purdy' new TV doesn't remedy that problem, now does it?

But, remember, Apple is long removed from their anti-establishment days, whereby for the company to succeed the incumbent had to fail. Hence, the rebirth of the Mac was predicated on getting into bed with Microsoft; the rise of the iPod was predicated on getting into bed with the music industry; and the rise of the iPhone was predicated on getting into bed with mobile carriers.

When framed that way, who hasn't Apple gotten into bed with yet that they need to get in bed with to succeed in a mainstream way?

You guessed it; the cable and satellite providers. Why? Because as noted venture capitalist Bill Gurley sagely pointed out, "When it Comes to Television Content, Affiliate Fees Make the World Go 'Round."

In other words, for an Apple TV to be free-flowing with first-tier TV content in the same way that an iPod flows with first-tier music, Apple will need DIRECTV and/or Comcast to bless it.

ESPN, after all, earns $4.69 per subscriber household in affiliate fees on each and every cable subscriber. Apple's good friend, Disney, owns ESPN, ABC, Disney Channel and a slew of other channels. Disney simply isn't going to throw billions of dollars away in affiliate fees just so they can help Apple. All of the major TV content players view the world similarly.

So where does that get you when you connect the dots? I'll tell you where it doesn't get you ... to a television-like device that:

Is priced 2-4X the cost of an iPad.
Has sales cycles of one device every 5-10 years.
Has bad margins.
Has a serviceable form factor that for many people is good enough. (Apple challenges industries where the baseline experience is terrible. Television hardware wouldn't seem to qualify.)

Conversely, what if you could buy a set-top box that plugged into your modern, big-screen TV, and:

It just worked.
Had every channel you currently get on cable.
You could run those same channels as apps on your other iOS devices.
Your TV could be controlled by any of those same iOS devices.
You could upgrade to the newest version of the set-top box every 2-3 years (on a carrier-subsidized basis).

Who wouldn't buy this device? And why wouldn't the cable and satellite providers be all over this? After all, does anyone seriously like their set-top box?

As a sanity check, a carrier subsidy on a sub-$500 device is meaningful, whereas a carrier subsidy on a $1,500+ device like a TV set is nothing.

Wait! But, didn't Steve Jobs say that he'd like to make an integrated TV set?

Even if he did say that, do you really think that in his final official act as Apple spokesman, Jobs would telegraph to the world his company's grand intentions in the living room?

Related:

The magic adapter: Apple TV and the battle for the living room
It’s Time to ‘Think Different’ because Conventional Wisdom is Dead: Thoughts on Apple’s Q1 Earnings Call
Apple's Segmentation Strategy (and the Folly of Conventional Wisdom) 
Apple, TV and the Smart, Connected Living Room

Facebook has the most downloaded native application of all time. It also has perhaps the most visited mobile website of all time with nearly 350 million users and growing from feature phones to the smartest smartphones. It is available everywhere. The company started working on mobile solutions in 2006 and since then have grown with the times, using the tools available to them as they went along, from m.sites and WebKit touch interfaces to now the precipice of HTML5. Facebook's creed, or really just a way to make their developers' lives easier, is to write once and run everywhere. This has been next to impossible.

Facebook mobile is predicated on browser technology. As Facebook's engineering manager Dave Fetterman says in the transcript below, the browser is what Facebook is good at, how it got to the point it is at now and how it is going to iterate for the future of mobile. We will touch on the future tomorrow, but be sure to read Fetterman's presentation at Facebook's f8 developer conference below because it will inform what we are going to explore tomorrow morning. Really, how did Facebook design for all those platforms and devices?

Sponsor

What is below is a direct transcript with photos from Fetterman's f8 presentation. A few things to note:

Facebook mobile has its backbone in its mobile website. Everything that is built into the native applications actually comes from the mobile Web. Think of the way PhoneGap wraps a browser-based website and that is how Facebook approached the problem. And then some.

HTML5 is the future. The fourth page gets into how all of this history is leading Facebook to a precipice of change with HTML5 and the so-called Project Spartan.

Also note that Fetterman talks fast and occasionally swears. He is the classic Facebook engineer: kind of young, pretty brash and supremely confident. The transcript is as true to his actual words as possible.

Changing Mobile Standards Through The Past Five Years

We took an extreme HTML-based approach to this. So we will go into how we do this so you can learn how HTML5 is the way out of a lot of these problems.

Because, it wasn't really always this way for us. We have had the same mobile problems that you guys have. We are following the same mobile ecosystem that you guys are following to develop for your users.

So, we have the same problems of cross-platform development that you have and we are hoping that you can learn a little bit from us. So, we have been learning to deal with these issues with what we call "FaceWeb" and learning a new opportunity to get out of this that is emerging as we speak called HTML5.

So, in 2006, building a mobile presence meant that you had a WAP deck that was based on an HTML application with SMS and all of that. But, as you all know, mobile changed fundamentally in 2007. What happened then?

[Crowd] - The iPhone.

The iPhone! Great. What else happened in 2007, perhaps unveiling in the room that you are sitting in right now?

[Crowd] - The Platform.

Yes, the Facebook Platform API. So, what changed for us is that we had to develop a second user experience for the iPhone. A computer in your pocket that no longer sucked. So, it could have Javascript, a CSS and a really rich interaction model. In addition there was Facebook for BlackBerry, Facebook for Windows phone, for Nokia, for Samsung, for everyone now available through the Facebook API.

How about 2008? What was the big thing that happened in 2008?

[Crowd] - Ummm ... Android?

I will pretend that I heard the iPhone App Store. What most developers don't realize is that the first version of the iPhone, you could build websites but the App Store was not available to later. So, in 2008, the App Store enables us to build Facebook for iPhone. The flagship, the vanguard, the best substantiation of Facebook. Based off the API, the same way that you guys are building apps off the API now.

In 2009, what changed in 2009?

[Crowd] Ummm ... Android?

Android, yes. I will pretend that I heard Android. Android was the new player in 2009 and really started taking off. So, all of a sudden we have all of these users on all these devices using Facebook mobile in the wide rainbow of lovely different experiences across Android, iPhone, Windows, the Web. That was great from a user perspective. What sucks? The environment for my developers, essentially. You have the bad old days. You have four different platforms to build for something essentially. You want to build for all of those groups? You are going to have to build the sucker four times. Then there are all of the features - groups, deals, the new profile. All of this stuff and the matrix got really bad. So, we have to build things four times which means that the code gets slow. The code gets old. There are different versions of parity and things just don't work together which makes it extremely difficult for a fast moving company like Facebook.

Next page: Fetterman describes how Facebook reconciled M.Sites and Touch

How To Not Write The Same Functionality Four Times

So, how do we solve this problem? If we have any shot at solving this problem of building things four times ... if you want to build it once, the Web is probably your best shot. So, back in the day we said that we have two websites, right? We have touch.facebook.com and we have m.facebook.com. Different complete docket roots and who decided what is was going to be, where you are going to go based on your phone? Well, it wasn't that complicated. If you were a Webkit phone, you basically redirected towards touch, if you didn't, you got M. If you had CSS, hey, we could throw that in there, no charge, no problem. So, have had this guess and redirect sort of approach to the Web.

That doesn't really solve the problem of everyone having and optimized experience for their phone. Even things like inline images inside the screen, across CSS and versions, that is really problematic when you that those to my right are saved, those to my left are damned. That is the way it is going to work. So, if we had any chance of unifying these two groups and building something once for the mobile Web, we had to solve this problem.

So, what do we need to do? WebKit wasn't enough, we had to have a better level of granularity. What is the difference between a Javascript enabled mobile website from a non-Javascript enabled mobile website? Really, Javascript is there to enable certain types of display and certain type of interaction, primarily AJAX. But, when you think about the controller --- what is Groups? What is the news feed? What is Message? Those are kind of the same thing and they really don't have to be written twice. So back in the day you had to use inefficient solutions like NetBiscuits which were opaque. You could do some XSL post-processing but you can't post-process your way to good Javascript, it doesn't work. With Webkit you started to get poly-fills and modernizer and all this great stuff. But, you actually needed a way to write your code once.

Progressive Enhancement

Here is what we did.

The cornerstone of this is detecting what your phone is going to be able to do. Capabilities, then you can start the right experience. You guys heard of WURFL at all? Wireless Universal Resource File? This is one of the projects out there that attempts to map a user to a user-agent set of capabilities. You know, what is your screen size? What is your JS? Can it do cookies? These are all pernicious, nasty problems that need to be solved. And the use-agent, as you guys can tell, doesn't do the job. So, you need an open database for manufacturers and concerned citizens to be able to tell you what is up. We sponsored this project and this project is continuing to evolve as an open source data site.

So, once you have these capabilities you actually have to figure out what to do with these. A button on Facebook isn't just like it is HTML or this block of Javascript or something. What you want for the homepage is to have your composers render a button that does something. So, you guys say what we really want is a button. You guys figure internally what should be rendering. If it is a low-end phone maybe it is just straight up post form. It if it is a mid-range phone with CSS, maybe you could layer CSS on there. But if it is a high-end phone you really want an AJAX style experience. So, this technique was pioneered by somebody like Yahoo blueprint. So, instead of saying at the top level that this is going to be a good site and this is going to be a low-end site, each component inside that declarative markup that renders the display will decide what it is able to do. And they compose together to form the ideal experience for that phone. This technique is called progressive enhancement.

So, this actually got us to the point where we were able to write once and run anywhere across the Web. And, you know, the Web seems doable. You can do that on your desktop browsers already. Mobile is getting to the point where you actually can do this using a system like this. But, you guys are probably bored about hearing about the Web, despite the fact that an iPhone user and Android user, whoever, can go use a mobile website competently because they all have good browsers, everyone wants an iPhone feature.

So, we were able to eliminate on of our four stacks and get to the point where we had three and that is great. But, of course, everyone wants and iPhone feature. They want their stuff to look like and iPhone, to perform like an iPhone, to feel like an iPhone, all of that. So, we could write it in Objective-C, which we had to do, or we could think about this. Right, so, what about the Facebook news feed is really iPhone-y? You have the top, you have the fixed header, you have it to render directly from cache, all that great stuff. But really, if you look at the content of the publication, that looks a whole lot like a m.site news feed[…]

If you're in college (or went to college), you know that the worst part of writing a paper is trying to crank out a bibliography/works cited page at the very end when you're brain dead and running late for class. A group of ambitious young students at the University of Waterloo want to bring an end to that with Quick Cite, which lets you use the camera on an iOS or Android smartphone to scan a barcode and have the app email you a properly-formatted entry (in MLA, APA, Chicago, or IEEE formats). [iTunes via Fast Company] More »

FLIPBOARD, AS YOU DOUBTLESS know, is a social media magazine for iPad. Part RSS reader, part iPad publication uniquely curated by each reader, the app brings serendipity, discovery, and typographic excellence to the experience of keeping up with one’s friends on Twitter, Facebook, and so on. This morning (last night in Japan), a new, improved version of Flipboard was launched, offering designers like us even more visual pleasure and rewarding the hours we put into our content’s semantic underpinnings.

Designer Craig Mod, in a letter, told me his “goal was to try and produce one of the best RSS experiences out there.” It’s accomplished via features like those listed below and more, as seen in these screenshots Craig sent me from his pre-launch tests:

auto-small caps
portrait and landscape optimized typography
full bleed images
flowing of text based on image size and location in the document
auto-generation of [figure] and [figcaption] objects based on alt
text on images

Adds Craig, “What’s great is that the more semantic and clean your feed, the better it will look in the app.”

Download Flipboard or update your copy in the iTunes Store and see.

It’s only Wednesday but we already have our link of the week. Although they call it merely a “quick write-up” (and it is a fast read), iA’s mini-compendium of design insights before and after the appearance of the iPad at their office should be required reading for all web, app, and/or interaction designers.

In the equivalent of a breathlessly quick seminar presentation, iA discusses typographic resolution and feel; the effect of the device’s brilliant contrast on readability; the kitsch produced by rigorously adhering to Apple’s “make it 3D” guidelines; whether metaphors work; and more—all of it well worth far more than the little time it will take you to absorb.

In particular, I call your attention to the section entitled, “Interaction Design: So What Works?” Although intended as a guideline to producing well-tuned iPad apps, it also works splendidly as a mini-guide to creating better websites, much like Luke Wroblewski’s brilliant “Mobile First” presentation at last week’s An Event Apart, which carried a similar message:

The limited screen estate and the limited credit on the number of physical actions needed to complete one task (don’t make me swipe and touch too often), pushes the designer to create a dead simple information architecture and an elaborate an interaction design pattern with a minimal number of actions. This goes hand in hand with the economic rule of user interaction design: Minimize input, maximize output.
Since the smallest touch point for each operation is a circle of the size of a male index finger tip, we cannot cram thousands of features (or ads!) in the tight frame; we have to focus on the essential elements. Don’t waste screen estate and user attention on processing secondary functions.
We found that the iPad applications we designed, made it relatively easy to be translated back into websites. The iPad could prove to be a wonderful blue print to design web sites and applications. If it works on the iPad, with a few tweaks, it will work on a laptop.

Via iA » Designing for iPad: Reality Check.