Droid

Browsers don't matter? Look at the longer view

17 November 2010 - 4:28pm | Laura Scott

$My iPad home screen with but a fraction of the apps I use$

I love my apps!

I have an iPad and a Droid. I used to have an iPhone (before I decided I wanted my phone to also be able to make calls). I love apps! They're efficient and fast. Websites on mobile browsers can be difficult to manage. The apps can connect with internet data, but do it with a much improved user experience. No doubt. When it comes to mobile at least, a well-designed app beats a well-designed website 99% of the time. It's a new paradigm today. An interesting read is on O'Reilly, where Mac Slocum interviews Ken Yarmosh on app dominance.

But does this browsers don't matter anymore? David Card seems to think so.

Browsers don’t matter anymore….

...Subsequent competing browsers offered the promise of a similar platform: An application that with the rise of web apps and media could act as a user’s primary UI.

TODAY’S PLATFORM DELIVERY VEHICLE

But today’s platform is the web itself, as browsers and even operating systems have been rendered less important. Companies that deliver mass-market APIs for consumer apps, like Google, Facebook and Apple, don’t depend on specific browsers for distribution. Neither do enterprise suppliers like IBM, Oracle, SAP and Salesforce.com. Even Microsoft can’t depend on Internet Explorer to establish its standards or businesses. Silverlight and Bing underscore that fact. All that’s to say that the excitement about RockMelt arises from the potential of establishing a new browser, but it feels like that potential is based on an outdated model.

Setting aside for the moment that, for front-end developers like me at least, browsers do matter — especially the bad ones that require extra work just to get them to render things properly — I disagree with his assessment on three counts.

The issue has never been requiring specific browsers — at least not since the pre-dot-bomb days when lazy developers would test only for Internet Explorer and the rest of us could just twist in the wind.
Advances in the web, however, have required excluding certain browsers. Google has famously dropped support for IE6, for example. Web technology is improving rapidly, especially in the JavaScript realm — all the more so in how JavaScript benefits from HTML5.
There is indeed a race happening between Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari, and Internet Explorer is working to catch up. (And let's not forget the snooty Opera, either.) Why are people even using Chrome? Because it's fast, its JavaScript rendering is fast! Safari, now already on version 5, is working to make itself more extensible. Firefox 4 (currently in beta) has a new fast JavaScript engine. And IE9 seems poised to (cough) actually support web standards, including CSS 2.1! I'd say the browser wars are just starting to heat up.

But my biggest disagreement with all this is with the supposition that, somehow, the proliferation of apps today spells the long-term demise of the browser. Yes, it makes sense today to create apps, because (x)html/css/js still can't match the power of client-side Objective-C etc. It's near impossible to create the full experience of a Flipboard or Pulse with just a webapp running today's html/css/js rendered on today's browsers.

But as handheld devices get more powerful, and web browsers get better (especially for handhelds), and HTML5 (or whatever supersedes its heir-apparent status), CSS 3+ and JavaScript continue to improve, I predict a trend towards web-served code rendered in browsers to create the handheld app experience.

Why?

Because apps can get to be a pain. In talking about new apps launched this week, Robert Scoble wrote recently how difficult it can be to gain adoption:

My wife? It’s hard enough to get her to try any new iPhone app, much less one that only lets her share photos with a close group of friends. She says that’s what she uses Facebook for.

I love apps, but I am finding the pain of installing and signing up and connecting and all that ends up being a barrier for me. Do I really want to download this new app? Do I really want to go through the 15-30 minutes to set it up, sign up for the service of whatever, connect with my existing networks, assess whether this thing is even worth all the effort? I mean, as easy as it is these days, installing apps is hard!

And that will count when competitor offerings are webapps where you don't need to install anything, you just use your browser, with the UI dynamics executed client side but the data and data management processing happening server side.

In other words, apps are a stop-gap — just a way of bypassing the limitations of the browser. But when browsers get better, things will change.

Browser don't matter? Ha! Ask that again in 5 4 3 2? years.

Tags:

Comments

| Permalink

Syncing into oblivion

27 September 2010 - 5:15pm | Laura Scott

There were hoods over the parking meters. All parking near the building was reserved for special permit holders. My meeting was in two minutes and suddenly I was having to go hunting for parking in downtown Boulder for a meeting on the University of Colorado campus. This could take a while.

So naturally I wanted to call to say I would be a few minutes late. I pulled over and dug out my Droid. But when I opened up my contacts, I realized I had a problem.

Android 2.2, or the Twitter app I had installed, had synchronized all my Twitter contacts into my Contacts directory. That is thousands of people. And of course I don't know most of them personally, so all these entries had were avatars. What's more, when I found the contact I was looking for, the useful information — phone numbers, email addresses — was missing. Here I was pulled over, barely out of traffic, looking for a phone number and my "helpful" device had synchronized me into oblivion.

Thankfully the email app remembered his email address, so I dashed off a quick note that I would be late, and drove off to park.

Are more connections better? When Google Buzz decided to make all my email contacts into Buzz contacts, that was not helpful. These were different worlds that Google decided I should have mushed together. No thank you! When I tried to enjoy the convenience of XMarks to synchronize my browser bookmarks across browsers and machines, I ended up with a cascading mess of multiple copies of all my bookmarks, replicating over and over and over with every sync-up. I'm still trying to clean up my bookmarks, and can't find anything I had anymore.

Today a CU student told me that Facebook is not a good way to promote things because everybody's doing it, and it's so much noise that everybody just ignores it. She even unfriends people who promote too much. Merging business-world marketing into social-context social media does not work for her or her friends. (And they "hate" Twitter.)

First we had a proliferation of community sites. Then we had a proliferation of social networks. Having to register for each and every one — and fill out profiles over and over — was a pain, so the sharing of contacts and content across systems has an appeal. But when the social networks decide how to do that merge, it can become a mess — due to technical glitches or simple misunderstanding of what users want.

I found the setting to disable contact sync with Twitter in my Droid settings, and the option to remove all those useless contacts … which promptly crashed my phone. Now my Contacts don't work at all, and I get warnings that "phone storage is low". No shit.

Tags:

Comments

| Permalink

From iPhone to Droid, Part 1: Top Free Droid Apps to Ease the Transition

18 January 2010 - 11:49am | Laura Scott

[This post appears on BlogHer.]

I did it. After months of bitching out loud to my friends and colleagues, tweeting about it and blogging it, I dropped AT&T (and thus the iPhone) and got back on Verizon with the Motorola Droid. I thought it would be a rough transition, but it turned out to be not so bad. In fact, the Droid is a pretty slick device. But, like any "smart" tech these days, it's not truly yours until you've customized it, put your mark on it. And on the Droid, like the iPhone, that starts with the apps.

Now, I've had my Droid – I've named her "Zora" (and you Blade Runner geeks can guess why) – for only a few days, so I haven't gotten far in the app exploration. I've generally avoided paying for most apps (which is why paid apps are the topic for a subsequent post), but there's a lot to be had for free.

Here are a few....

(Reader note: Search for these in your phone's "Marketplace" app. You can download them directly from there. [Note on the screenshots: Yes, they're photos. It seems that the only ways to take Droid screenshots from within are either via a Windows machine (which I don't use) or via apps that reviewers say are unstable. A little power-home method, as with the iPhone, would have been nice. Maybe in the next Android OS release?])

Voicemail

Google Voice

Forget Verizon's Visual VM. The reviews are pretty brutal. And Verizon charges you an extra few bucks a month for it. That's right, charges you each month!

You have a Droid. Embrace it! Use Google Voice for your voicemail! You can set conditional call forwarding for when you don't answer or are already on the line. Have calls sent to your Google Voice account ... and get your messages transcribed for you as well! (You can still play the messages.)

A dedicated Google Voice app gives you a very slick GUI to browse through and play your messages.

The transcripts can be rather odd, though. That's definitely still very alpha.

(Don't have access to Google Voice yet? Check with your friends. Every Google Voice user gets 3 [or more?] invites.)

Twitter

As with all of the apps here, I limited by experiments to apps that got 4 out of 5 stars or better from users. That left two main candidates for Twitter.

Twitdroid Twidroid

I like this one. Very basic. It makes me miss Twittelator Pro on the iPhone. But it suffices. And I can set my own notification sound if I get a message.

My main caveat, however, is that this app requires access to your email attachments. Why do its creators, zimmerman and marban, require this? What are they after in your email attachments?

Seesmic

This is a stable Twitter app. I just don't like it that it dumps you at the top of the Twitterstream. You have to scroll down to see what's new. That's weird to me.

And Seesmic requires access to your Contacts. Why, I have no idea, as it does not seem to integrate with Contacts. I can only guess it's the trade-off: hand over your data on your friends and in exchange you get this free app. Am I wrong here?

Music

Pandora

The Pandora app is very familiar, except it boots up with this dire warning about using up your data quota on your cellular plan. (Be sure to get the unlimited plan with Verizon. It's $30 per month, but worth it.)

Shazam

Again, the familiar app to identify tunes. Nice to have!

Amazon MP3

This is a nifty app just for finding music downloads. Since iTunes is out of the picture, and you can't play any DRM iTunes music on your Droid, this can be a handy app to have! Especially if, like me, you tend towards Amazon for your main music downloads resource.

News

AP and USA Today

These will appear identical to what you've been seeing on the iPhone.

Reuters

With a different interface – the sections are separate columns which you get to by horizontal scrolling, like switching desktops – it takes some getting used to. But it's good to get news from a source other than AP.

BBC News

Yes, they're on the Droid, too.

NY Times

Unfortunately the NY Times does not have a Droid app. (But there's always the website, and the iPhone app was always really slow anyway.)

Battery Management

There are a few key apps for ensuring that your Droid's battery runs the longest between charges.

Advanced Task Killer Free

This app allows you to selectively shut down apps that are running in the background. Those apps might be polling web services or calculating your GPS location – shut 'em down! This is the kind of tool that Apple doesn't allow on the iPhone anymore. Too bad. It's a great power saver, and also helps keep your phone running smoothly.

Quick Settings

A quick shortcut to the major power-suck features: screen, GPS, ringer, WiFi, mobile data, Bluetooth. Toggle them on/off as needed. Very handy for going into the movie theater!

Battery Refresh Beta

In the early going, it helps to train your Droid's battery – i.e., charge it fully and then drain it fully. Of course, it's not always convenient to let your Droid drain out its charge in its own good time. Maybe you're about to leave the house for several hours. You don't want it going dead on you while out and about.

You can use this app to drain your battery quickly. It basically fires up your GPS, brightens your screen, kills the screen saver, pings your cell service, all to drain your battery in a hurry. Bingo! Now it's ready for a new charge.

Games

Not much to offer you here. I looked for decent free apps for Hold'Em, Blackjack, Free Cell and Klondike Solitaire, and found two for Klondike. Both work alright, but one has larger cards that are easier to read.

Klondike Solitaire

The strange thing about this app (and the others I've actually tried) is that the deal deck is on the top left of the screen. Since most people are right handed, that means you have to reach across the screen to deal. More than once I've accidentally hit the home or menu button doing that. Why didn't they put the deck on the top right? I don't know.

Oddments

DroidLight

This nifty app uses the LED flash for a flashlight. No need to light your way via screen light.

Movies

Does for the Droid what OneTap does for the iPhone. And there's Fandango for buying tickets.

Google Goggles

Enhanced reality through your phone. Point the camera at a location and get Google info on it. Wow!

Google Sky Map

Point the camera at the stars and learn about the constellations!

PicSay

Add icons, hair, glasses, thought bubbles to your photographs. Silly but fun.

Owner

This is a nice app that displays a message on the phone's unlock screen. You can put custom text and select specific fields from your "me" contact card to display. This way if someone finds your phone, they know how to reach you.