Archives for March 2015

The best mobile experiences often involve someone getting something done quickly. Waiting sucks.

As iOS has matured it has brought us better background processing functionality; something that Android has always been pretty good at, even if the battery cost was high back in the day.

But a day doesn’t go by when I am not frustrated with an experience that should have the data to display, but has to refetch it.

A great example is (my current go to!): Slack.

How I use Slack

In a world where the dominant thinking is that “small simple apps rule!” we see a slew of messaging apps: iMessage, Skype, SnapChat, WhatsApp, you name it. The niches keep growing!

There are benefits to the silos for some users, but I have personally found that I would prefer to have a shared infrastructure. For example, I enjoy using Slack for 1:1 messaging as I get power in the unification of:

• All of the files that I upload are in one place
• I can search across all of my chats (1:1, private groups, and public)
• I can paste in a URL and get the smart UI (vs. text messaging for example that just shows the darn URL)
• Once you get used to hitting the up arrow and editing your typos, it drives you nuts not to be able to do the same elsewhere.
• /giphy! 😉

In theory then I want to use Slack to talk to folks 1:1. In practice however it is lacking. If I want to talk to a friend I can fairly quickly get to the text message chat with them and start communicating. Past messages are cached and available, and if my connection is going in and out, it will kinda take care of it regardless.

With Slack though, it can take an age to get from “I want to say something to Stefan” and being able to start typing. First of all there isn’t an easy way to go directly to the person, so you first have to load Slack. If the connection isn’t great you end up watching everything load. The channels aren’t cached, so you wait. God forbid you were last looking at another instance of Slack (I have multiple instances that I participate in) as now I have to swipe to the right hand side to “Switch Teams” and then load that world too.

If the person that you want to talk to isn’t right there in the list I end up searching for them and then your conversion with them loads up. This can be a LOT of loading icon flashing and waiting. All of the benefits and goodness of Slack that I mention above? This is why I often end up back to iMessage (unless I am already in Slack) ☹

Now you see it, now you don’t

The most frustrating situation that I run into is when I get a push notification with a message from my friend. I see what they said, and now I want to jump in to chat.

You would think that you could tap on the notification and Slack would quickly open up at that point and the data would be ready and waiting for you!

But no. You are waiting on the loading once again.

This happens to me in far too many apps out there and is the one area where Android versions beat iOS hands down.

Now, you have many more tools on iOS these days, and you can turn on background app refreshes and handle getting launches from messages. It is beautiful when an app does a good job here. Pocket is an example that always feels totally up to date whenever I go into it. Why is Pocket so good? It is an app that I integrate with via the shared extensions. From Safari, Nuzzel, and Twitter I “Add to Pocket” and it is launching the app to give it the data right there. Then, when I go into Pocket itself the data is of course ready and waiting!

The problems come in when a remote notification is involved. Although in theory you can handle this via:

application:didReceiveRemoteNotification:fetchCompletionHandler

it doesn’t always work. Why? I think it is due to the detail of:

“However, the system does not automatically launch your app if the user has force-quit it. In that situation, the user must relaunch your app or restart the device before the system attempts to launch your app automatically again.”

Most users probably don’t understand that side effect. It isn’t an insane notion to think that “if the user force quit the app, lets have it use less resources!”

What doesn’t add up to me though, is that this seems to happen to me in cases where I definitely haven’t force quit the app.

Is something else going wrong?

I hope that iOS 9 will give me the ability to bless apps such as Slack that I use all day long to keep themselves up to date. I want more of the magic where whenever I launch them they are ready for me. I want to start typing and not see a disabled input box while it reconnects.

Assume offline and work for me.

I am embarrassed to note that it took me far too long to get in front of “The Imitation Game”. As Vinnie Jones would say: “It‘s been emotional”, and I dare say that it is a must see for many.

The story has the magical touch of speaking to you on many levels. It targeted me in specific ways (computing, startups, small teams) as well as the general humanism.

This is entertainment based on history, but you need to take much of the detail with a grain of salt. Don’t let that stop you getting much of out this movie.

Imagine the balls

A professor comes in with a crazy plan to solve a problem in a totally outlandish way. It costs a fortune, and the ask is at a time when the country needs all the resources they can get.

You can’t help but wonder: how persuasive was he? how much of it was desperation?

He was able to gather a small product team with full autonomy. The bean counters gave him a time line to show value and left him to execute. Sounds kinda like a startup doesn’t it?

He also had to deal with personalities who could have easily caused the downfall of the project:

Dealing with the corporate overlords

The navy boss didn’t like him at all which reminded you that he is trying to do all of this within a large organization, similar to having a small team within a large company.

Building trust with your team

His team has little reason to trust him at the beginning. How do you build trust when you start a new job? You build relationships and you get some early wins.

The movie portrays him as socially awkward (some argue that wasn’t fair), and his methods were truly bleeding edge. On a normal project you can show progress in bite sized chunks. For this mission you need to show “yup! it works! we cracked the code!”

In reality there were more steps along the way, and the team around him was:

• much larger than shown in the movie (you need to build characters)
• incredibly smart, and could get into the details so it wasn’t a black box to them.

But still.

Imagine the stress

People dying every minute. A world war. Time running out. People not believing in you. Keeping secrets.

To succeed despite all of those factors show you how powerful the human mind can be, especially when there is a single minded focus and belief that you can do this.

Then once you solve the puzzle you know that this is only the beginning. You hit a home run, but now you need to stay calm and hold on for dear life (like dealing with hyper growth?). Getting all of the intel and making the strategic moves that help you win the war but without giving it away that you know? Take that Game of Thrones, or House of Cards characters.

I also find it fascinating that he was a very long distance runner, an activity known for great stress relief. I jump to the conclusion that he had the insight that we are all free falling, so don’t waste time screaming, breathe and solve. Easier said than done!

There are so many parallels to life at a startup. And as an investor you have people coming to you on a daily basis thinking that they can pull off the impossible. Some of them could be right. Would you be able to pick the Alan Turings?

Heroes

It took until 2013 for the Queen to pardon him after we treated him in such a disgraceful manner. He needs to be knighted. He is a true hero in every sense of the word.

If you haven’t seen this movie I can’t recommend it enough. Then read about him. You will feel all kinds of emotion and I think that you will be able to harness the parts that make you angry to power the passion to do something amazing in your world.

I doth my cap to you, Sir Alan. Without you I may not be here, and in 2015 you have managed to fire me up. I don’t think that phrases such as “I am grateful” can come anywhere close.

I will try to imitate your vision by playing this game with as much love as possible.

Getting a reliable fast connection is probably the number one feature I want in iOS 9. As Apple has shown with their highlighting of problems that you didn’t know that you had (e.g. the way that you type due to the spring machinery on your laptop), they love to go into the details to polish their products.

I was excited back in the iOS 7 era when we saw that Siri seemed to be toying with Multipath TCP which aims to bring sanity to your network, especially in a mobile world where you move through highly variable cell networks and WiFi networks all day long.

iOS 7 was some time ago and I wouldn’t say that Siri seems more reliable than anything else, but I really hope that the work is ironing out and working well in a pre-iOS 9 release somewhere in Cupertino.

If anything the need in 2015 has gotten more stark. There is a real blurring of cellular and WiFi and many of us find ourselves on WiFi networks more often than before.

To Xfinity and Beyond

You may have heard the bruhaha that occured when Comcast made their customers Xfinity modems public wifi hotspots (for other customers).

I have found myself often surprised to see my phone connected to Wifi, and it being due to it finding xfinitywifi. The connections have often been pretty good, but many of them poor, probably because I am on the edge.

I tried to take my own modem out of the loop, but it hasn’t worked (I am not the only one). I try hard to follow Hanlon’s Razor, but… hmm.

As we get more WiFi networks popping up like this it will be critical for the devices to be smart about making the use of them and augmenting the cell network to great effect.

Users shouldn’t have to think about the network as often as they do today. It feels like the details are placed front and center in an experience far more often than I would like.

Some examples of this are:

August: Choosing how you want to connect to a peripheral

The August lock started its life as a bluetooth tethered lock. They recently added an external device called the Connect that lets you talk to the lock remotely. This allows you to unlock the door from anywhere with a connection for example, which is a key feature.

You find the implementation is wanting though. When you launch the application you have to choose the remote connection to switch to that mode. Why bother me with the details? Work out the best (or only) way to connect!

Duolingo: Let me learn offline

Offline first is an ideal experience if you can pull it off. When I use Duolingo, I wish that it would work better offline. I would hope that it would batch a daily goal number of modules type solution so no matter what I can get enough done to meet my goal no matter the connection.

Ideally, I would be able to go further and also manually grab more materials for offline processing.

In other ways Duolingo does a good job of dealing with a variable network. I like how it does quick checks on answers and also talks to the server, and if it can’t get a nice specific helpful answer when you get a translation wrong it will give you something more generic.

Overcast: Start as soon as you can

I enjoy Overcast as a much better application than the built-in Podcasts app. One area that drives me nuts though is when I want to play some content that isn’t downloaded. The application sucks down the entire file before letting me play via streaming. I understand that there are features in Overcast that muck with the audio (taking out blank space etc), but I would love to make the time from tap to play as fast as possible.

iTunes: Let me download content over the cellular connection

It infuriates me when I am told “sorry, because you are on a cell connection we won’t let you download this data”.

I can turn my phone into a WiFi hotspot and download it from my computer but you won’t let me download it right here? Argh!

There is room for us all to enhance the experience of our applications as we take into account the variable nature of a mobile world. I look forward to a world wide ubiquity network that is always perfect, but in the meantime I will take the pragmatic wins!