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What do you read for technical news?

It was just a few years ago that I regularly scanned a list of mainstream developer and IT rags on a weekly basis: ComputerWorld, Visual Studio Magazine, SD Times, JDJ, and the list goes. Then one day early last year the thought hit me and I was a bit stunned to realize that I’d stopped reading online magazines. The vast majority of my technical info was now coming from blogs, online help docs and dizzying amount of internet searches. So, what happened? I have some theories that I’ve been thinking over the last year, but I can’t really nail down anything for certain. So, it’s most likely a combination of these five concepts below.

Rapid Change. My first thought is that technology has been changing so rapidly that simply digesting the changes and understanding them takes a huge chunk of time. Huge. I’ve blogged about this a number of times. This trend cuts across the entire tech industry. The upside is that innovation happens overnight and fixes as well as new features come out quickly. The downside is it’s harder for everyone to stay on top of all the changes across updates to features, libraries, SDKs, smartphone operating systems and browsers.

Super busy. My second thought is: in addition to staying on top the über release cycle of web and mobile technologies, I’ve been so busy with project work that I simply had to narrow the scope of what I was reading. It’s a balancing act and there’s only so much time in the day. Superfluous information seemed to just slow me down, or worse it felt like a distraction from the day’s objectives. And in today’s online environment there is such a huge flow of information. So, there has to be a way or mechanism for focusing and filtering the fire hose of inbound data.

Irrelevant Info. My third thought is that every time I try to go back and read mainstream rags that I find myself sifting through a bunch of stuff that isn’t relevant to my immediate or near-term needs. Like I mentioned above, a good portion of it often seemed to be superfluous. Don’t get me wrong: online magazines offer well written and well thought out information. But, I felt the extra information, or perhaps even information overload in some cases, slowed me down. If it takes time to sift through article after article looking for a specific topic, my inclination is to go back out to a search engine and narrow down my search parameters.

Online Search Engines. Search engines have done an excellent job of (rapidly) indexing online technical content. I don’t need to mention them by name because you know all the players. At work we’ve often joked about a pattern we call “coding by search engine.” The pattern goes something like this: copy a class name or error message, paste it into the search bar and then skim through the results. If you have to go more than one page deep in the search results then stop and redo the search. Mostly gone are the days of sifting through reams of paper documentation or digging around in some esoteric corner of a vendors website. I don’t think most customers will stand for that anymore. I think more information is instantaneously available at our fingertips now than any other time in history. It is astonishing, really.

Forums. My final thought is the voice of the developer community has never been more important. Online forums, such as Stack Overflow, have become to be perceived as definitive sources on technical questions of all kinds and about all different sorts of programming languages. I’ve been in many conversations where, right or wrong, someone interjected with a comment about something learned on Stack Overflow, or similar sites. These sites are well indexed by search engines, the community can vote answers up or down, and many brilliant and knowledgeable players contribute their knowledge. These are excellent, speed-of-light resources that are freely available.

So, there you have it. This is my two cents of what I’m reading these days and why I think I changed what I read. Leave a comment or email me about how you get your technical info injection. I’m really curious to hear your experience.

* Clip art courtesy of Microsoft Office 2007.

10 Tips and Tricks for Running Live Demos on a Mobile Phone

Here’s my short list of some things to consider when you demo your company’s mobile apps to a live audience. I’ve accumulated this list over the last several years as the team I’m on does a lot of showing off apps on iOS, Android and Windows Phone. We’ve also seen quite a few demos from customers and at industry conferences.

While most of these tips apply to personal demos where you have the phone in your hand while standing in a tradeshow booth, I’m actually talking about projecting demos on a big screen in front of a live audience, or during an internet video conference call with screen sharing.

Screen brightness. Adjust the screen brightness so that the screen is not too dark and not washed out, and temporarily disable screen brightness auto-dimming. Auto-dimming is where the phones background light gets dimmed usually around ten to fifteen seconds before the screen auto-locks.
Turn off auto-lock. Temporarily disable your auto-screen lock (if your company policy permits it). There’s nothing more aggravating than talking about something for a few minutes and then when you turn your attention back to the phone you have to re-enter your unlock code. I’ve also seen this happen to people on the screen behind them and they didn’t notice but the audience could see it.
Silence the phone. For demos that don’t need sound, which is probably most demos, turn your phone’s sound all the way to “off”. Most phones beep, tweedle and pop as various things happen in the background, so spare your audience by making your phone silent.
A/C Power. Plug your phone into a power outlet. While this may seem obvious, I’ve seen a phone die during a major industry conference plenary session.
Shutdown extra apps. Shut off any unnecessary apps that will consume memory and CPU. You want your demo to run as fast as possible.
Remove unnecessary icons. Clean any non-professional app icons from the navigation screens you will be showing live. On a few rare occasions I’ve seen some fairly disturbing icons that had no place in a professional presentation.
Verify the type of demo camera. Ask ahead what kind of demo camera the conference has for mobile phones, one of the most common ones is called an ELMO. These are devices where you set your phone below it and it has a camera that points downward at the phone and connects to a projector through a switch. So, when you go to show off your app you turn a switch that connects the ELMO (or similar device) to the projector. Some of these are terrible and some are great. I use an IPEVO Point 2 for some demos because it’s portable and I trust it.
Test demo camera. Test your demo camera well before your presentation. You may need some help from the conference’s audio visual team. Make sure your phone in focus, check if you can see the application details, look to see if the background colors aren’t too white and washed out, etc.
Cache local data. Cache your data when possible. If you plan on connecting to remote data sources, consider moving that data onto a local SQLite database on your phone.
Check internet connection. Check your internet connection beforehand. Conference are notorious for having limited cell and wireless coverage. My recommendation is always create a movie backup of your most important demo points. Yep, I’m 100% serious. With an IPEVO Point 2, for example, you can project the camera image in a desktop app and use software such as Camtasia Studio, which also offers a free trial, to create a movie with audio too. Also, a note to phone developers here, it’s a best practice to check if your app has an internet connection and to let your users know if the connection goes away, for example: https://www.andygup.net/?p=155.

State of the Internet Browser 2012 – consumer browser usage will decrease

Over the next two years I see consumer browser usage decreasing and people will increasingly spend more time using native mobile applications. This has a number of interesting implications.

The facts. As a web application developer I pay close attention to browser and browser-related technology usage statistics and trends. Like most people, I judge statistics based on my own experience and the experience of my co-workers, family and peers. Here are some trends which I’ve been keeping an eye on:

Smartphones are rapidly replacing non-smart phones around the world.
The number of specialized smartphone applications is continuing to expand.*
The number of games for smartphones continues to grow rapidly.**
The amount of time people spend on their smartphone, whether it’s playing games or using specialized applications, is increasing.

Also based on my personal experience are the following additional observations that further tilt the balance in favor of native applications:

Performance. Native smartphone applications, when built correctly, almost always outperform web applications: I’m referring to actions such as page refresh, general drawing capabilities and to a lesser degree but still a factor is the look-and-feel. This is a general fact of application technology: compiled applications perform faster than interpreted applications. For the most part, once I’ve used a native application, such as Southwest Airlines check-in app, I loathe having to use their web page. It just seems so clunky and slow in comparison.
Games. Ah yes, we can’t forget game performance as well as their look-and-feel. Why would I want a mobile browser-based game? What’s the point of building a high-performance, beautiful user interface game in a browser? See my previous bullet’s comment about compiled application performance. Yes, yes, yes I know that HTML 5 is making big strides, but we are talking mobile applications and the technology as it exist today. You can’t tell your customers that they’ll have to wait another year for better game performance, because by then your favorite browser will have such and such HTML 5 functionality figured out. Your competitors would jump right in, tweak their native app and leave you in the dust!

A Corollary. If you generally agree with my bullets above, the perhaps you’ll agree that the corollary is this trend:

Consumers are spending less time on desktop and laptop machines “browsing the web” and more time using their smart phones.

In addition to the reasons I already listed, there are many reasons for this. I suspect the top reasons are because it’s so easy to use your smartphone, and it’s right by your side all the time even when you aren’t home. You most likely have seen people with their heads down playing with their smartphones during business meetings, while eating, while standing in line, while watching TV and even during sports events.

What about the Browser Vendors? These trends have interesting implications for browser vendors. They have to be aware of what’s going on. It’s possible that this is one of the many factors behind their massive push to add HTML 5 capabilities in an attempt to stave off what I’m going to call “user erosion”, as consumers spend less time using web browsers.

But, there are some facts to consider related to building applications that run in the browser:

Still functionality problems between different browsers. While the latest generation of browsers are the closest they have ever been to parity, in terms of JavaScript and HTML functionality, web developers are still hacking code to make certain things work equally across all browsers. These “hacks” cost extra time and money to code and maintain and the functionality differences between browsers cause customer frustration when things look different or don’t work as expected. This is especially true in large, retail-type consumer apps were you have little control over what browser your customers choose to use.
Faster but fast enough? Today’s browsers have the fastest parsers ever, but it’s a fact that they still aren’t as fast as native code, and they never will be. For the geeks reading this, browsers incur a CPU cost associated with parsing and then executing interpreted code. Smart engineers are going to continue to close the gap, but compiled code will always be faster and more powerful than code running in a browser. Period.
Memory usage. Browsers tend to be what we call “leaky”. The longer you use one without restarting it the more memory it will consume. I believe this is less of a problem in mobile browsers where windows get closed a lot more frequently than desktop/laptop browsers. However, it’s still an important consider this in mobile phones where more memory usage equals less battery life. Native apps can definitely leak memory, but they are also starting from a smaller initial footprint, and there are much better tools available for finding native app memory leaks. For browser apps, you also have the browser’s memory usage in addition to your application’s memory usage.
Security. Security is getting better for web browsers. But…it’s still easier to build a highly secure native app today than it is to build a secure web app. Also, for better or for worse, I suggest that many consumers perceive native apps to be more secure than web apps. Do you want to do your mobile banking over a web app or a native app? And whether a perception is right or wrong sometimes is irrelevant because it always strongly affects people’s behavior.

Concluding Remarks

Consumer-based companies are going to make important strategic choices based on information similar to what I’ve written above. My guess is that the most successful businesses will be the ones that adapt to what their customers want and if your customers are spending less time “on the web” then you should seriously consider adapting. Just to be clear, I’m definitely not saying that browsers are going away. No one has as crystal ball, and new technology is being created all the time. However, the momentum and sheer size of these trends, with hundreds of millions of people buying and using smart phones worldwide, makes it well worth studying its potential impact on your business.

References:

Mobile Apps Put the Web in Their Rear View Mirror
Mobile Apps vs. the Web – Which is Better For Business?
Gartner Report on Smart Phone Sales in 3^rd Quarter 2011

* Companies are building specialized apps that essentially replace the need for customers to visit their web site. However, these apps offer much more control and typically provide a more consistent user experience that the web. Southwest Airlines, for example offers three types of mobile apps in addition to a mobile web site: https://www.southwest.com/html/air/products/mobile.html.

** Books and games, respectively have consistently been the top two categories for the most popular apps, for example: https://www.gottabemobile.com/2011/07/06/ipad-app-store-breakdown-top-apps-categories-chart/