Useful iPhone tips

20 tips from Computerworld:

20 iPhone tips

Verge: 10 years of iPhone

January 9, 2017 was the ten year anniversary of the first release of the Apple iPhone. It's strange to think of how much the world has changed with a single product, but I can scarcely imagine a world without smartphones.

From this:

To this:

Here is the link to the full article:

Verge: iPhone 10 Year anniversary

The missing link

Original post:  Jan 8, 2015

A few years ago when the iPhone was just starting out, there used to be a marketing tag line that went "there's an app for that." Now that there are literally hundreds of thousands of different apps, there really does seem to be an application for just about anything that you can imagine. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to link these various apps together.

One of the reasons search engines have been so successful is that they take the chaos that is the world wide web and help to simplify and organize it into digestible chunks. You don't have to be an expert about every topic under the sun. By crawling the web, sites like Google and Bing do the heavy lifting for you to return relevant search results. There is no such entity linking apps together. At this point, there are all kinds of data and information inputs in all of these apps, but nothing linking them together.

This article from the New York Times discusses this gap:  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/06/technology/tech-companies-look-to-break-down-walls-between-apps.html?_r=0

Here is an introduction to the issue:

Navigating the Internet used to mean painstakingly typing the exact address you wanted into your computer. The web browser and the search engine simplified that, giving us the Internet we take for granted today.

Now, across Silicon Valley, companies from tiny start-ups to titans like Google and Facebook are trying to bring the same simplicity to smartphones by teaching apps to talk to one another.

Unlike web pages, mobile apps do not have links. They do not have web addresses. They live in worlds by themselves, largely cut off from one another and the broader Internet. And so it is much harder to share the information found on them.

It is not just a matter of consumer convenience. For Google and Facebook, and any company that has built its business on the web, it is a matter of controlling the next entryway to the Internet — the mobile device.

The major companies are hard at work on the problem:

Take Google, which makes money helping people search the web. When people search in apps, it is mostly left out. And while the company has a fast-growing business selling apps through devices that use its Android operating system, that pales in comparison to its business selling search advertising.

Google’s solution is App Indexing technology, a way to catalog app pages, letting Google’s search engine retrieve information from mobile applications as well as from web pages.

Still, there are major challenges:

With so many companies and investors working on deep linking, the competition has become a problem. That is because the easiest way to get apps to link as if they were part of the web is to get app developers to adopt one standard that would work across devices and operating systems.

“Once we’re all using the same plumbing, everyone can go and build businesses and interesting experiences on top of that,” said Eddie O’Neil, a Facebook product manager working on the company’s program, App Links.

The app problem traces its origins to 2008, when Apple introduced the App Store for iPhones. Unlike websites, apps were set up to be separate little boxes whose technology prohibited them from interacting with one another. At the time, the idea of a phone full of apps was new enough that most people were not very worried about whether those apps could link to each other. But today, apps have begun to eclipse the web. Americans spend about half of their time online using mobile apps, according to comScore, a digital media analytics company.

It will be fascinating to watch as our mobile world morphs and changes over the coming years.

The limits of focus groups

Original post:  Sep 30, 2014

Marketing teams constantly discuss the need to obtain the "voice of the customer." There are many cases where the best products are the result of talking to real customers and asking them what they want out of a product. It's a time-tested method that generally provides solid results. There are, however, limits to what focus groups can tell you. In the words of Steve Jobs at Apple, "It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."

Now that the Apple Watch has been released, it will be interesting to see how it is received in the marketplace. While Apple products like the iPhone and iPad are now iconic, they were not given warm welcomes at their debuts.

When the iPhone came out, here was analysis by the market research company Universal McCann:

"The simple truth," said Tom Smith, the author of the iPhone-damning report, is that "convergence [an all-in-one device] is a compromise driven by financial limitations, not aspiration. In the markets where multiple devices are affordable, the vast majority would prefer that to one device fits all."

Only about 35% of those polled thought they needed "one portable device to fulfill all my needs". They couldn't imagine a future that had never existed before

A few weeks after that was written, the tide began to turn. Initial users of the iPhone had a positive experience and the rest is history. Ironically, the process would repeat itself again with the launch of the iPad.

Now comes the Apple Watch. Derek Thompson of the Atlantic writes:

Today, there are lots of people saying "I have no idea how I could buy a $300 smartwatch with no battery life when I have an iPhone already." They are telling the truth. They really can't imagine owning a smart watch.

But the moral of the story is that it doesn't matter that they're telling the truth. A smart watch that syncs with Apple's ecosystem and makes payments over the Internet and opens the door to technology that brings healthcare to wearables on a massive scale doesn't exist yet. Apple just invented it. Our projections of a piece of technology that's just been invented don't matter compared to the factors that actually drive adoption, like widely read reviews and the user experience of your colleagues, friends, and family. The success of Apple Watch is in their hands.

Here is the link to his full article:  Why Would Anybody Buy an Apple Watch? - The Atlantic

One for the thumb

Original post:  Sep 29, 2014

Now that Apple has finally relented to the phablet craze, it seems that the relentless march towards increasingly large phones is showing no signs of turning back. Not only are phones growing in size, their usage is increasing as well. Here is one chart from a recent article in Quartz showing the browsing share of larger and smaller phones:

With all of that increased usage, mobile design will have to adapt accordingly.

From the article, there is a study on how people use their larger phones:

This assumption comes from a study that mobile expert Steve Hoober conducted with 1,333 people early last year. He discovered that people held their phones in the following ways:

• One handed: 49%;
• cradled: 36%;
• two handed: 15%.

  Handedness figures were also instructive: 

• Right thumb on the screen:  67%;
• left thumb on the screen: 33%.

Hoober notes that left-handedness figures in the population are around 10%. So the observed higher rate of left-handed use could be correlated with people doing other things at the same time—smoking, riding a bike, drinking coffee, eating currywurst and so on.

Here is an interesting heat map from later in the article. It displays the progression of the average user's ability to use their left thumbs in a one-handed mode to reach various areas of the screen. As you can clearly see, there are significant programming challenges if you have an app or website that involves a user in one-handed mode!

Here is the link to the full article:  How to design for thumbs in the era of huge screens – Quartz

Obvious...in hindsight

Original post:  May 31, 2012

We often filter out some of our ideas. Perhaps it is because we think that some of them are so obvious that they must have been thought of before. At other times, we convince ourselves that there must be someone else working on it if the idea were any good.

Ironically, some of the best ideas ultimately turn out to be fairly straightforward--once they have become commonplace. Up until that time, they are subject to the constant drumbeat of naysayers and skeptics.

Clayton Christensen, the inventor of the term "disruptive innovation," is quoted as saying that he thought the iPhone would be derivative. Instead, it has completely upended the market for mobile phones.

What do you see in the picture below?

Whether you see a young woman turning her head or an older matron depends, ultimately, on you. Once you have "seen" both pictures it is nearly impossible to imagine that you ever thought there was only one view. In actual fact, the picture itself never changes. It remains what it always was.

I am starting to think that most of the challenge with innovation is not coming up with the ideas. It's that the road to reality is a constant struggle. Most of them can't survive the journey.