the JOHN LAUDUN experiment

One of the reasons why I picked up an iPhone 3GS was for its GPS functionality.¹ I had been thinking about getting a separate GPS unit, and in fact had asked for one Christmas 2008, but it turns out the delay worked to my benefit. At this point in time, I don’t want turn-by-turn directions, all I want is to be able to note my location coordinates and then tag my notes and my photographs with that information so that future researchers will have that information available to them.

However, getting those coordinates from somewhere on my phone to all those images is not as easy as it should be. This may have something to do, from what I can tell, with the iPhone’s SDK, which up until now has made it hard for apps to save data in a place or in a form that could be used elsewhere. This may all change with the iPad, which obviously needs to make something like a file system available to apps for storage of information. (Again, I could be talking out of my hat here — it’s a lovely IU baseball cap, and so I look quite good talking out of it.)

I have downloaded a few GPS apps, but none of them have done what I want. “Geo logging” wasn’t quite the right search. I should have been using “geotagging.” (It’s often one word these days.) And so I have turned up a number of applications that promise to make this pretty effortless:

• GeoTag for iPhone is inexpensive at $1.99 and offers to track your location for you. You then use a desktop application to tag your photos.
• GeoLogTag is more expensive at $4.99 but it doesn’t require that you install any software on your Mac. Instead, you connect your phone to your wireless network and then tell GeoLogTag to tag your photos. (How exactly this works isn’t clear.)

Frustratingly neither of these apps, and a few others at which I looked, mentions specific use cases with Lightroom. They mention iPhoto, Aperture, and Flickr, but not Lightroom.

All these apps also discuss tagging your photos within a given time window — five minutes or such. Since I tend to be at a given location to document something, I would prefer to capture that data, manually even, and then be able to drag and drop it onto a given set of images — rather like one tags with keywords in both iPhoto and Lightroom. Both of these apps, and others, assume a kind of automation which is very nice but doesn’t exactly fit with my own workflow.

The iPhone, and now the iPad, are establishing that there is a place, even with the consumer utility device market, for general computing devices. In particular, Game Developer Research has just its report on the current state of game development. The 100-page document is available on their site and is covered in the the current issue of Game Developer magazine. Some of the trends revealed in the report include that the economic downturn has more developers working in smaller companies (less than 50 employees) and an increased focus on the mobile device market:

Of these mobile developers, nearly three quarters of that group are targeting iPhone and iPod touch development, a number more than twice the reported support for traditional handhelds like Nintendo DS and Sony PSP.

This only confirms our own household’s decision to retire our daughter’s Leapster that we had paired with my old iPod Video for road trips and mobile entertainment. Both were handily replaced by an iPad Touch that not only has the games and the videos of the previous two devices but also flash card activities, wikipedia, and other applications. General computing, baby, general computing.

For those interested in iPhone/iPad development and looking for other development environments than that provided by Apple, here is an interesting item: Ansca Mobile has released Corona:

Corona is built from the ground up to enable designers, web developers and engineers to quickly develop and distribute highly optimized native iPhone applications.

You can download a trial version of the SDK or you can get a full version with a one year subscription to their Corona Developer Program.

First, the LED screen will not be there for long. Color e-ink with decent (enough) frame rates for watching video is on its way — or at least so I am told. Apple knows that this thing isn’t perfect, but I suspect they also saw that the technology in this category was lagging behind market interest and demand. iPad 1.0 is a placeholder in some ways.

Second, if I was 20 years younger, I would stop what I am doing now and immediately immerse myself in everything it took to develop native apps for this and the other devices that are going to copy it. This is the computing device that most people have wanted for a very long time. For better or worse, most folks are consumers, not producers. The IT revolution — Tim Berners-Lee core concept — was a blurring of that distinction. We have seen a lot of movement in that direction, and there are certainly a lot more people producing content than there was twenty years ago, but I think we are also seeing a flattening of the growth curve and a kind of stabilizing of who is going to do what for the time being. The iPad addresses that flattened curve very, very well.

John Nash over at Adobe has published a great essay on his personal blog about the nature and status of Flash vis-a-vis web standards, functionality, and the iPhone (and now iPad) embargo:

I came to Adobe ten years ago to build an open standards (SVG)-based Web animation tool. I like standards, and I have some experience here. … Here’s a quick summary of my long piece below:

Flash is flawed, but it has moved the world forward.
Open standards are great, but they can be achingly slow to arrive.
Talk of “what’s good for standards is bad for Adobe” is misinformed nonsense.
Flash will innovate or die. I’m betting on innovation.

Note that Nash actually worked on Flash’s competitor — remember Flash was created by Macromedia, then Adobe’s competitor for authoring applications — and is well aware of its history and its limitations. Most importantly, it’s a thoughtful piece with lots of details. No screed. No paranoia. Not your typical internet.

This essay might have also been titled The Coming Differentiation of Trust but that seemed like a really ugly slug.

The (In)Security of Apps

Only on rare occasions do I wander into the territory of security, a domain I consider to be almost as complex as religious experience in America, but the recent scare on the Google Martketplace as well as the ongoing furor over the slow, and often byzantine, nature of app reviews at Apple’s iTunes Store has got me thinking about where the acquisition of apps might be going in the future.

For those who are not familiar with the news story, the gist (from USAA’s own press release):

USAA recently stopped a software developer from selling an imposter USAA application designed for use with Google’s new Android phone. The developer had posted it for sale within Google’s Android Marketplace, but USAA took immediate action and had the application removed.

The scary part, from the point of view of victims of this fraud is that it could have captured their sensitive banking data — user id, login, password, account information — without their realizing that there was anything wrong other than the app didn’t work correctly.

One possible response to this is that Apple’s App Store is better because applications there have to pass a vetting process. A number of stories — too many to link here; I leave it to my readers to search on their own — have revealed that (1) the app store reviewers are mostly looking for applications that misbehave within the context of the operating system or misbehave in terms of the content they deliver and (2) app store reviewers are incredibly overworked and prone to make mistakes as a result.

Is there an alternative to Google’s bazaar and Apple’s cathedral? I would argue that when it comes to applications, especially those that deal with sensitive data, there is: the vendor itself. That is, the very best place for me to download an application with which to do on-line banking is from my bank itself. Why would I want to risk either downloading from an open third-party site — be it Marketplace or VersionTracker (both fine places for software to be sure but not sites that can guarantee certain levels of trustworthiness — and nor should they be in that business)? My relationship is with my bank.

I can’t help but imagine that much the same thing would be preferable for other kinds of applications as well. After all, there already exists at least one decent platform for the on-line distribution of games. Why wouldn’t I want to use them as well for my iPhone games?

This suggestion is sure not to go over well with Apple. After all, it looks like everyone wants to be in the content distribution/delivery business. (The middle man always makes his/her money.)

But the promise of the internet was the disintermediation of middle-men. And I think we should continue to hold out that as an ideal. Buying my software and content directly from its producers means the producers get more money and could, as a result, potentially afford to sell to me for less.

At the same time, one of the things we’ve discovered during this initial foray into disintermediation is that curation is, well, it’s nice to have. Librarians add value. Middlemen, in fact, add value. They add value in the form of potentially being objective purveyors and reviewers of comparable apps that then must compete. Functionality and features increase in such an environment, where the relationship is the more complex producer-channel-consumer as opposed to the simpler producer consumer dyad — which always seems ideal.

Middlemen are bound to proliferate in some fashion as more devices — including now things like cars (see Ford’s Sync) for example — become capable of extending their functionality through software, i.e., apps. Middlemen offer us curation and the creation of certain kinds of trust but we are going to have accept that trust must now be differentiated: apps for my car should come from my car’s manufacturer and apps having to do with banking should come from my bank.

The flip side of “get your apps a lot of places” is the dangerous nature of just how easily people will download apps from a variety of websites or will swap things with friends and family. That is, we have not yet had a disaster of such scope and significance that most Americans practice any form of safe computing. Too many people are just too ready to click on PowerPoint slideshows or go to websites found in e-mails from people they don’t know. (Hi, mom and dad, thanks for all those PowerPoint shows! Really!)

Finally, my thanks to Jon Gruber for writing the way he does and encouraging people like me to stretch my legs a bit.

The age of the mobile device is upon us. Smart phones, or smartphones, be they iPhones or Blackberries or Droids, are everywhere and making sure our users can access our content in a way that respects the full functionality of their devices and, at the same time, the limitations of their screens is becoming increasingly important. As many web developers already know, the problem is that the browsers on these devices often don’t announce themselves very well, and so you have to guess a bit — or, rather, make it possible for your website to guess a bit.

Here’s the <head> code for guessing the iPhone and sending its browser, Mobile Safari, the right style sheet:

<link media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)" href="iPhone.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />

A good place to begin, as always when it comes to CSS, is A List Apart, which has an article entitled Put Your Content in My Pocket.

Macworld has a review of three iPhone apps that allow you to work with your Flickr account. I don’t see anything that transforms my current workflow, but it’s nice to know they are there. Here’s the review.