Rev Mentor

RFS 6: iPad Applications

Most people think the important thing about the iPad is its form factor: that it's fundamentally a tablet computer. We think Apple has bigger ambitions. We think the iPad is meant to be a Windows killer. Or more precisely, a Windows transcender. We think Apple foresees a future in which the iPad is the default way people do what they now do with computers (and some other new things).

Programmers may never want a computer they don't control, but ordinary people just want something cheap that works. And that's how the iPad will seem to them. Many will never make a conscious decision to switch. They'll get an iPad as well, then find they use their Windows machine less and less. When it dies they won't replace it.

Will this future happen? It could. And if it does it will bring big changes. There will need to be iPad alternatives for all the things people now do on PCs. That could mean more than just replacing all the desktop software, because there may be things PC users now do with web apps that might be better done with native iPad apps.

Plus like any new platform the iPad will allow new types of applications that don't have any present day analogues. And no one knows now what most of them will be. Only people who become iPad developers will even think of these ideas, just as only microcomputer developers were in a position to think of the spreadsheet. Education and games may be areas where there are a lot of new ideas.

One particularly interesting subproblem is how to introduce iPads into big companies. This will probably have to be done by stealth initially, as happened with microcomputers. They'll have to be introduced as something individuals use, and which doesn't really count as a computer and thus can't be vetoed by the IT department. Don't worry about this; it's just a little tablet computer.

See also: RFS 5: Development on Handhelds

via ycombinator.com

Someone is actually putting their money where their mouth is: a respected funding group who wants to back iPad projects.

Rev developers who got an alpha of revMobile that creates now-dead Windows Mobile apps will want to pay attention to this. The question is: what is Runtime Revolution doing about it? My ear is to the ground, yours probably is as well.

Should we be getting familiar with Cocoa Touch and brushing up on our Objective-C?

Want to know what freshly developed apps for the iPad are going to feel like? Looking through Apple's iPad User Experience Guidelines is surprisingly revealing.

Some of the key points Apple's pushing on app developers for the iPad, and how Apple thinks their apps should behave:

• They want apps to work no matter how you hold the iPad: "Your application should encourage people to interact with iPad from any side by providing a great experience in all orientations."

• They don't want applications to just be bigger: "The best iPad applications give people innovative ways to interact with content while they perform a clearly defined, finite task. Resist the temptation to fill the large screen with features that are not directly related to the main task. In particular, you should not view the large iPad screen as an invitation to bring back all the functionality you pruned from your iPhone application." That's some straight talk.

• They're super into the sharing thing: "Think of ways people might want to use your application with others. Expand your thinking to include both the physical sharing of a single device and the virtual sharing of data."

• The oddly "realistic" bookshelf in iBooks isn't a fluke: "Consider a more real-world vision of your application. For example, on iPhone, Contacts is a streamlined list, but on iPad, Contacts is an address book with a beautifully tangible look and feel."

• Multi-finger gestures will abound: "The large iPad screen provides great scope for multifinger gestures, including gestures made by more than one person."

• It shouldn't feel like a computer, even if the iPad lets you do computer-y things with files now: "Although iPad applications can allow people to create and manipulate files and share them with a computer (when the device is docked), this does not mean that people should have a sense of the file system on iPad."

Starting to get a sense of things, and how apps are going to feel vs. their iPhone counterparts? There's more guidelines, like on how to use popovers, over at UX Mag. [Apple, UXMag]

The concepts here are good for any software development effort, including Revolution-based. Holding on to old models like deep file system interaction really is a form of admitting defeat.

It has revolutionised one industry after another. Now Apple hopes to transform three at once

Illustration by Jon Berkeley

APPLE is regularly voted the most innovative company in the world, but its inventiveness takes a particular form. Rather than developing entirely new product categories, it excels at taking existing, half-baked ideas and showing the rest of the world how to do them properly. Under its mercurial and visionary boss, Steve Jobs, it has already done this three times. In 1984 Apple launched the Macintosh. It was not the first graphical, mouse-driven computer, but it employed these concepts in a useful product. Then, in 2001, came the iPod. It was not the first digital-music player, but it was simple and elegant, and carried digital music into the mainstream. In 2007 Apple went on to launch the iPhone. It was not the first smart-phone, but Apple succeeded where other handset-makers had failed, making mobile internet access and software downloads a mass-market phenomenon.

As rivals rushed to copy Apple’s approach, the computer, music and telecoms industries were transformed. Now Mr Jobs hopes to pull off the same trick for a fourth time. On January 27th he unveiled his company’s latest product, the iPad—a thin, tablet-shaped device with a ten-inch touch-screen which will go on sale in late March for $499-829 (see article). Years in the making, it has been the subject of hysterical online speculation in recent months, verging at times on religious hysteria: sceptics in the blogosphere jokingly call it the Jesus Tablet.

The enthusiasm of the Apple faithful may be overdone, but Mr Jobs’s record suggests that when he blesses a market, it takes off. And tablet computing promises to transform not just one industry, but three—computing, telecoms and media.

Companies in the first two businesses view the iPad’s arrival with trepidation, for Apple’s history makes it a fearsome competitor. The media industry, by contrast, welcomes it wholeheartedly. Piracy, free content and the dispersal of advertising around the web have made the internet a difficult environment for media companies. They are not much keener on the Kindle, an e-reader made by Amazon, which has driven down book prices and cannot carry advertising. They hope this new device will give them a new lease of life, by encouraging people to read digital versions of books, newspapers and magazines while on the move. True, there are worries that Apple could end up wielding a lot of power in these new markets, as it already does in digital music. But a new market opened up and dominated by Apple is better than a shrinking market, or no market at all.

Keep taking the tablets

Tablet computers aimed at business people have not worked. Microsoft has been pushing them for years, with little success. Apple itself launched a pen-based tablet computer, the Newton, in 1993, but it was a flop. The Kindle has done reasonably well, and has spawned a host of similar devices with equally silly names, including the Nook, the Skiff and the Que. Meanwhile, Apple’s pocket-sized touch-screen devices, the iPhone and iPod Touch, have taken off as music and video players and hand-held games consoles.

The iPad is, in essence, a giant iPhone on steroids. Its large screen will make it an attractive e-reader and video player, but it will also inherit a vast array of games and other software from the iPhone. Apple hopes that many people will also use it instead of a laptop. If the company is right, it could open up a new market for devices that are larger than phones, smaller than laptops, and also double as e-readers, music and video players and games consoles. Different industries are already converging on this market: mobile-phone makers are launching small laptops, known as netbooks, and computer-makers are moving into smart-phones. Newcomers such as Google, which is moving into mobile phones and laptops, and Amazon, with the Kindle, are also entering the fray: Amazon has just announced plans for an iPhone-style “app store” for the Kindle, which will enable it to be more than just an e-reader.

If the past is any guide, Apple’s entry into the field will not just unleash fierce competition among device-makers, but also prompt consumers and publishers who had previously been wary of e-books to take the plunge, accelerating the adoption of this nascent technology. Sales of e-readers are expected to reach 12m this year, up from 5m in 2009 and 1m in 2008, according to iSuppli, a market-research firm.

Hold the front pixels

Will the spread of tablets save struggling media companies? Sadly not. Some outfits—metropolitan newspapers, for instance—are probably doomed by their reliance on classified advertising, which is migrating to dedicated websites. Others are too far gone already. Tablets are expensive, and it will be some years before they are widespread enough to fulfil their promise. In theory a newspaper could ask its readers to sign up for a two-year electronic subscription, say, and subsidise the cost of a tablet. But such a subsidy would be hugely pricey, and expensive printing presses will have to be kept running for readers who want to stick with paper.

Still, even though tablets will not save weak media companies, they are likely to give strong ones a boost. Charging for content, which has proved difficult on the web, may get easier. Already, people are prepared to pay to receive newspapers and magazines (including The Economist) on the Kindle. The iPad, with its colour screen and integration with Apple’s online stores, could make downloading books, newspapers and magazines as easy and popular as downloading music. Most important, it will allow for advertising, on which American magazines, in particular, depend. Tablets could eventually lead to a wholesale switch to digital delivery, which would allow newspapers and book publishers to cut costs by closing down printing presses.

If Mr Jobs manages to pull off another amazing trick with another brilliant device, then the benefits of the digital revolution to media companies with genuinely popular products may soon start to outweigh the costs. But some media companies are dying, and a new gadget will not resurrect them. Even the Jesus Tablet cannot perform miracles.

Want more? Subscribe to The Economist and get the week’s most relevant news and analysis.

Much debate these days over innovation and open systems. Apple is a semi-closed system and I think that's good. What's closed? The mechanism's integrity. What's open? Anything you want to create within that. The results speak for themselves.

Apple represents the “auteur model of innovation,” observes John Kao, a consultant to corporations and governments on innovation. In the auteur model, he said, there is a tight connection between the personality of the project leader and what is created. Movies created by powerful directors, he says, are clear examples, from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” to James Cameron’s “Avatar.”

At Apple, there is a similar link between the ultimate design-team leader, Mr. Jobs, and the products. From computers to smartphones, Apple products are known for being stylish, powerful and pleasing to use. They are edited products that cut through complexity, by consciously leaving things out — not cramming every feature that came into an engineer’s head, an affliction known as “featuritis” that burdens so many technology products.

“A defining quality of Apple has been design restraint,” says Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster and consultant in Silicon Valley.

That restraint is evident in Mr. Jobs’s personal taste. His black turtleneck, beltless blue jeans and running shoes are a signature look. In his Palo Alto home years ago, he said that he preferred uncluttered, spare interiors and then explained the elegant craftsmanship of the simple wooden chairs in his living room, made by George Nakashima, the 20th-century furniture designer and father of the American craft movement.

Great products, according to Mr. Jobs, are triumphs of “taste.” And taste, he explains, is a byproduct of study, observation and being steeped in the culture of the past and present, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then bring those things into what you are doing.”

His is not a product-design philosophy steered by committee or determined by market research. The Jobs formula, say colleagues, relies heavily on tenacity, patience, belief and instinct. He gets deeply involved in hardware and software design choices, which await his personal nod or veto. Mr. Jobs, of course, is one member of a large team at Apple, even if he is the leader. Indeed, he has often described his role as a team leader. In choosing key members of his team, he looks for the multiplier factor of excellence. Truly outstanding designers, engineers and managers, he says, are not just 10 percent, 20 percent or 30 percent better than merely very good ones, but 10 times better. Their contributions, he adds, are the raw material of “aha” products, which make users rethink their notions of, say, a music player or cellphone.

“Real innovation in technology involves a leap ahead, anticipating needs that no one really knew they had and then delivering capabilities that redefine product categories,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “That’s what Steve Jobs has done.”

Timing is essential to make such big steps ahead. Carver Mead, a leading computer scientist at the California Institute of Technology, once said, “Listen to the technology; find out what it’s telling you.”

Mr. Jobs is undeniably a gifted marketer and showman, but he is also a skilled listener to the technology. He calls this “tracking vectors in technology over time,” to judge when an intriguing innovation is ready for the marketplace. Technical progress, affordable pricing and consumer demand all must jell to produce a blockbuster product.

via nytimes.com

There's a bit more article there on the NYTimes link. The above auteur approach has been my approach as well, but I don't always execute on it as well as I'd like. I do get my head turned from time to time and have to reformulate my products.

iPad or Bust!

posted by Ken Case on 01.29.10 @ 4:56 pm

News, OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, OmniGraphSketcher, OmniOutliner, OmniPlan

One of the things we often struggle with as a company is deciding how much to talk about our future plans and our current work towards those plans.  Our natural inclination is to be open about what we’re doing, but there are several problems with talking about future plans:

• Our plans can and will change, upsetting customers who were making their own plans based on our original plan.
• Our plans might interfere with current sales, as customers stop buying OmniGraffle 8 in anticipation of the future release of OmniGraffle 9.
• We might get accused of promoting vaporware, as when we started talking about OmniFocus.

But there are also problems with not talking about our future plans, as it leaves people wondering what direction we’re going and whether they’d like to be going that direction too.  So, given the exciting event of this week, I think it’s appropriate for us to share some of our plans with you now…

Remember how Macintosh was intended to be the computer “for the rest of us“?  That’s what we feel Apple’s iPad is:  the best computing device for most of the things people use computers for.  (Or, as Apple puts it, “the best way to experience the web, email, and photos.”)  It’s the computer people can sit down and start using immediately, without training, whether they’re 2 or 92.

We’re really excited about Apple’s iPad, and we want to make all of our products available for it as soon as we can.  Yes, we already had a big year planned for 2010, with several long-anticipated major product releases—but we think iPad is really important:  important enough to spend some time juggling our plans to figure out how we can introduce five new iPad apps.

Yes.  Five.  We want to bring all five of our productivity apps to iPad:  OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, OmniPlan, OmniFocus, and OmniGraphSketcher.

This is a big undertaking, and we can’t do it all at once.  We started working on iPad adaptations of OmniGraffle and OmniFocus as soon as the SDK was made available Wednesday afternoon, and we’re hoping to get started with OmniGraphSketcher for iPad within the next few weeks.

OmniPlan for iPad will be a little further behind, simply because the OmniPlan development team is on the home stretch of their two-year OmniPlan 2 development cycle, and we’d like to get that out the door before bringing OmniPlan to another platform.

Similarly, the OmniOutliner team is also heavily into a major development cycle—one which affects not only the next major release of OmniOutliner, version 4, but also the upcoming major releases of both OmniFocus and OmniPlan—so that team is booked up for at least the next several months.  But while it won’t be on iPad on day one, OmniOutliner is where all of our projects start and we think it will be a great fit for iPad, so we plan to adapt it as soon as possible.

What does this mean for our non-iPad apps?  Well, for the apps we’re bringing to iPad immediately there will be a bit of a delay in their next major Mac release cycle:  for example, while we’ve already done a fair bit of work on OmniGraffle 6 for Mac, we’re going to put that work on hold while we work on the iPad adaptation.  Not that we don’t think OmniGraffle 6 is important or exciting, but we think OmniGraffle for iPad is even more important.  For the other apps, OmniPlan 2 and OmniOutliner 4, we’re hoping for little or no delay in our upcoming releases, but there’s likely to be a bit of a pause immediately afterwards as the teams shift gears and start working on bringing those apps to iPad as well.

So, that’s our current plan.  As I said in my introduction, our plans do change over time—obviously, they’ve changed quite a bit just this week!—so please don’t rely on things happening according to today’s particular snapshot of those plans.  But I hope that this snapshot at least gives you a sense of what we’re doing and why (and perhaps even an idea of when), so you can decide whether we’re going in a direction you’re interested in.  Either way, I hope you’ll let us know!

via blog.omnigroup.com

The Omni Group is a venerable producer of Mac productivity software who has changed its plans to produce FIVE products for the iPad. Seeing what Apple has done with iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) was really invigorating.

One of the side effects of the iPad reveal will be the increase in Mac version of iWork suite. I have been using it for over two years and love it. No more MS Office for me.

I sure would like to see a certain development environment produced in Scotland get iPad fever like Omni Group did.

Beautiful job, Apple! Great teamwork. To get the whole iPad picture in minutes, just watch this video.

I believe it's time for the Runtime Revolution's development team to forget about Windows Mobile at least temporarily (if not altogether) and focus all their energy on getting its loyal customers a RevMobile that develops iPhone and iPad apps. Something tells me it would be worthwhile financially. But what do I know?

I've been told that it's a more difficult task to develop a version of Revolution for iPhone and iPad than developing it for Windows Mobile. I thought they had a genius on the Rev development team. Not a financial one, at any rate.