Creating the next generation of connected vehicle

So, I teased this a few days ago. My new job has been heating up and since my linkedin profile now shows it, I guess I can talk about it here. At the beginning of the year, I took a new job as Product Manager for IBM’s connected vehicle offering. We are working across the company and with partners to build out exciting new things for the auto industry. A collegue of mine has the coolest name for this job – Joe Speed. On his blog MobileBit he talks about our machine to machine messaging offering, which will blow you away. This technology and all the other strengths that we can bring together will change the way you interact with your vehicle in the near future.

And now back to our regularly occurring blog about local mobile app developers.

New year – new job

Well, I had planned on doing more posts this year, but as I have accepted a new job i am finding that I have even less time than before to post. During the day time, my job is now that of a product manager for IBM. This means I am working on new and exciting things…more to come as I can announce.

Local startup scene

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Full disclosure, I grabbed this screenshot from a game I am playing lately – Hipster CEO. I don’t believe they are local, but the game has some great lessons to budding developers in the area.
First off, the game is hard. You start as a bootstrapped single person company. Like most developers I can relate to this. You have to balance your time between creating your company technically, market wise, and sales. This balance is hard, so you start hiring people. If your product launches well, you end up with lots of competitors. They will try and hire your people away. You can offer perks, and bonuses, but eventually you have to take on investors. They may be very “active” including hiring expensive people. Suddenly your site is hacked, you have to refocus, and you run out of cash. Game over!
The second part of the game that I like is that your experience carries over. So you will learn to be better at marketing, or sales, or design, etc. Each of these skills means you can hold off longer to establish your product, or find new niche markets, etc. You learn the lesson over time that you don’t expect to do one startup and knock it out of the park. You have to build up your skills over time. What a great lesson.
I’ve talked to many start ups over the years and am amazed by those who make it big. They are not just strong technically, or market smart…they are well rounded individuals or teams, who know how to grow their skills and their teams. They know what their weaknesses are and focus hard to improve in those areas. So while many people will tell you play to your strengths, I would add, know your weaknesses and focus on those too.

TapsBook App Review

This past Thursday, at the local Triangle Cocoaheads meeting, the creator of the app TapsBook showed his app and asked for feedback.  Sherwood (the developer) expressed that his love of photography and desire to tell stories with all the pictures he came up with necessitated a better way of build photo books.  The app is iPad only (sorry iPhone people), and allows you to tap and swipe your way thru building photo books that can be shared either on the web, on social media, or thru printing at your local Walgreens drug store.

I too take way too many pictures, and having just spent a few days at Kennedy Space Center watching the launch of the MAVEN mission, I thought this would be a great test.  I had recently used Google+’s AutoAwesome features to create some really exciting pictures of the launch, so TapsBook sounded like a perfect way to print a book of the picture.

As I mentioned above, it was iPad only, so I had to wait until I got home to test it. I hope they resolve this soon, as I don’t always carry my iPad with me, but the iPhone is my constant companion.  I was a bit surprised that the app was sluggish on my iPad Air, I had a full photo stream (1,000 pictures) and the UI stuttered a lot when working with the pictures.  I was able to grab a share I had created of the MAVEN launch and start working on the swiping up and down to say which pictures were the best.  So after getting over the sluggishness, I felt the design was pretty cool.

Modifying the pictures within an auto created storybook, did not work as I expected.  I had hoped I could just grab a picture and move it to a new location.  Also, the algorithm ignored the large group of pictures I had taken of the launch sequence itself.   It scattered the pictures over the last groups of pages, interspersed with other pictures.  I am sure I need to do a bit more study and hopefully I can correct this.  But given the ease of auto creation, I would expect an option to say respect sequence of the pictures.

When I wanted to share the book, it required that I create an account.  The app itself is free, but you are limited to 500 pictures uploaded and shared.  I get this, storage is not free and I respect that Sherwood and team need to get paid.  I also tried to print the TapsBook to Walgreens and was surprised by the 20 page limit.  I have never used their service, so I am sure that is a limitation of Walgreen and not of the app.

Overall, I think the app does well in making creation of picture books (or  stories) easy for most people.  It is free to start with, and if you find that you like it, I would certainly buy a subscription to support the developers and cover the disk space costs.  As for printing, my test book was 65 pages long, and I couldn’t choose which pages to cut, so I didn’t get that done.  Maybe I will find a good 20 page book to print soon.

I hope Sherwood and team come out with more apps, since the interface design is certainly intuitive.

One week with the iPad Air

I received my iPad Air this past Monday, and as promised, here is a little review.

I’ve had every generation of the iPad up to the 3rd Generation. When the 4th Generation came out, I could not justify the speed bump ad the only benefit. Nor could I justify the mini, since it was not Retina. So when the new iPad Air came out, and not only was significantly faster, but also included a significant weight decease, and the M7 chip, it was time to upgrade to a new device.

The iPad Air does not disappoint. The first thing I noticed is that it does feel incredibly light compared to the iPad 3rd Gen. The reduction from 1.46lbs to 1.054lbs is a major improvement. I read in bed at times, and the 0.406 lbs makes a huge difference when you are prone. The challenge with shaving off this weight means that once again older cases and stands may not work. When I went from the iPad 2nd Gen to the iPad 3rd Gen, most of my cases started getting a little lose. Now that the iPad Air is noticeably thinner both in depth and width, prior cases no longer work. I’ve always liked having a case with a keyboard built into it for writing blog posts, but due to Apple’s secrecy the supply chain has not caught up with the new design and new cases with keyboards are not yet available.

So what about the speed differences? For most people, you may not notice the significant speed update. Most people use the iPad to read emails and to surf the web. While page rendering is faster, it is not noticeable on most sites. If you are a gamer, the speed difference is amazing. Load times are noticeably faster, and game play is smoother. The new UI introduced with iOS7 is also much more fluid than on the iPad 3rd Gen.

Are there any other things that are noticeable? To me, not really. I don’t use the camera much, so I don’t notice that improvement, even though I understand it has been improved. The battery seems to be just as solid as before, and the fit and finish I decidedly Apple.

So should you upgrade? If you have a 4th Gen, I can’t think of any reason that makes makes it a critical upgrade. If up have a 3rd Gen, you will notice improvements, but even with selling my old one to Gazelle this was a $500 upgrade so if you are cash strapped I would say hold off. If you have a iPad 2nd Gen, I think it’s definitely time to upgrade. Apple is doing well with upgrade cycles, new phone every two years is a must, iPad every three is a must, and I would say if you keep your laptop to every four years up are in a perfect cycle. So what is the one device that Apple can put out that requires you to upgrade each year, now that their software is becoming free? Perhaps we will find out next year!

Did you pick up your new toy today?

I ordered a new iPad Air this morning. My day is back to back calls and I figured there was no way I would be able to get out to pick one up. I went to the Apple online store and it looked like I was going to be able to order one with in store pickup; however, when I went to checkout it indicated I couldn’t do it. So I checked when I could get it if I ordered with shipping, and the order said I could have it on Monday. So needless to say, it is ordered and I am looking forward to playing with the new device next week.

However, I did get a break for lunch, so I ran out at lunch and saw that the line at my nearest Apple store (over at SouthPoint Mall), had only 1 person in the line. I could have just picked it up then, but didn’t happen. So now I am waiting until Monday. I guess I’ll be okay.

The iPad Air

Apple made a few announcements this week… And like many I had been hoping that the fingerprint reader would be added to the iPad … Like others, I was hoping that Apple would announce a Retina version of the iPad mini.  So I guess I should be 50% happy. Realistically, I think the fingerprint reader is a bigger disappointment to me than the iPad mini is a positive.  I really don’t need the mini.  I like the larger screen of the iPad Air (the new name).  I’ve gotten so used to the fingerprint reader on my iPhone that I really wish they would add it to every apple device that needs some level of security.  Heck I think it would be great to add it to the Apple TV remote so I could use it to require an approval before renting a movie to watch.  Oh well, I guess I will have to settle on having a much lighter, much faster, and thinner device than my old iPad 3.

Having said that, I will write up a review after I can pick one up (hopefully on Friday the 1st).  I will not be getting up early and standing in line for the iPad, like I did for the iPhone 5s just a few short weeks back.  So I hope I can get mine shortly.

G-Wizz! Plus Review

While I was at the Google Glass event a few weeks back, I met the developer of G-Wizz! Plus (Google Apps Browser Plus). He has written this app a while back, before all the really great Google apps were made available for iOS. We had a nice / brief discussion and I decided to see what his app was all about. There is both a free version called Google Apps Browser, and the paid version I picked up. I picked up the paid version and was amazed by all the apps that this app supports: Gmail, Facebook, Google Maps, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, Google Voice, Google News, Google Music, Google Drive, Tasks, Blogger, Google Calendar, Tumblr, Flickr, Instagram, Yelp, Google Finance, Google Groups, MySpace, YouTube, Picasa, Images, Places, Books, Translate, Shopping, Offers, AccuWeather, Yahoo! Mail, and Hotmail!! Wow that’s a ton of Apps. If you only could install one app, this would be the one.

Having said that, the basic approach of this app is that it provides you with a single app that keeps you logged into the website for each of these services. This would be a fine app a few years back, but I have found a few problems that make it less than useful. For example, the Twitter tab prompts me with a screen to either install the twitter app, or sign-up for twitter. This is probably a problem with the Twitter mobile site, because if I say create account, I finally get to the sign in option.

Given the great apps that are available for each of these services, I may still play with this app, but it doesn’t hit a need for me. I love supporting local developers but this is an app that has outlived it’s value.

Local Engineer’s cool Pen

A couple of months ago I was given a PressurePen by Chuck N, from the local Triangle Mac Users Group. The idea was to play with it and write up a blog entry. I had been running iOS7 most of the summer, and the app didn’t seem to work with iOS 7 on either my iPad or my iPhone. So It’s taken me a while to write up this post. Having said that, I’ve now had some fun playing with this pen, enabled via a Kickstarter.

Let’s begin with the device itself, it is a set of open source designs that allows you to print our a shell for a pressure pen. A pressure pen is used by artists to behave much more like a real pen or brush. Applications sense the amount of pressure being applied to the pen and translate that into things like the width of the stroke, the amount of “paint” being applied, and how fast the “paint” is used up from the brush. The goal is to make the process of creating digital art, more like traditional art.

I’ve tested the pen on three different devices and two different apps. Due to the iOS7 problems, Charles Mangin (the creator) suggested I test on my Android tablet (a Samsung Tab 2) with Infinite Painter app or if I wanted to test on iOS that I use an app called Pen & Paper. Both of these apps worked fine. My artistic skills are bad, so I won’t post any pictures of any of my “art”. If you want to use the Pressure Pen app on iOS7, it currently does not recognize the pressure off the pen. Charles does not have an iOS device, so there may be a delay on support. I have offered to test it for him, if there are others who would test, comment on this post and perhaps we can help Charles update this app.

So how does the PressurePen work? The pen is battery powered, so don’t forget to turn it on. The novel idea is the Pen plugs into your audio jack on your device and uses that to send the pressure levels to the tablet. Pretty simple. To that end I found the pressure to be a little less response than I expected, however, as I am not a digital artist, it may be that I’ve not yet trained myself to understand the limitations of this medium over pen and paper.

Overall, I think this is a very cool idea and I wish more apps supported this type of pressure pen. I find it would make a great addition to a photo manipulation application. What do you think? Go pick one up, it’s designs are open source and most of the parts a very inexpensive (there’s a kit available for $35 at the Pressure Pen website – http://pressurepen.net) or you can get a preassembled Pen for $65.

Autolayout improvements

Ok, well not really improvements to auto layout on iOS, but improvements in my understanding of Auto Layout. The biggest thing I learned is that it is easier to setup and manage constraints in code, then to try and use Storyboards to define and modify the constraints.

If you have not used AutoLayout, Apple recommends that you start with doing it in Interface Builder. I find that this is not necessarily easier, and in my mind, it seems that using the code based method is much easier. The second thing I found was that the Visual Forma language is very powerful and easy to use. For example @”[self(<=128@800, >=64@800)]” indicates that the object has a minimum width of 64 points and maximum width of 128 points withe a priority of 800. You can set relationships between objects and to themselves. By doing this, you can setup very dynamic layouts that automatically resize and will adjust certain constraints over others. The priority, lower numbers == lower priority. 1000 is maximum priority and 0 is the minimum.

A great way of thinking about constraints is to think of constraints of the object on itself, then in relationship to things around it, and finally in regard to the entire view. If you’ve not watched the WWDC sessions from 2012 and 2013 on Autolayout, go watch them now! They are fantastic.