Author: Bernhard Kappe

Pathfinder’s Mike Laurence wins Hack-a-thon for iPhone app

Bernhard Kappe, Wednesday, March 10, 2010 @ 10:49 am

This year's Day of Mobile had a number of interesting tracks, including the ever popular hack-a-thon.

In the hack-a-thon, developers worked alone or in teams to build applications that targeted any one of the mobile platforms (iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Palm, Windows Phone) and presented their applications to the attendees to win prizes.

Our own Mike Laurence, who won the in in the open source category for developing an iPhone application for the Lighthouse issue tracking service. In three hours.

How? By using our recently released Core Resource Framework, a local/remote resource management framework that accelerates the creation of API clients, our soon to be released DynamicCell project, and integrating with the Lighthouse API. Pretty sweet.

I talked to Mike about it afterwards, and here's what he had to say:

"Three hours is a pretty short time to develop an application, but this was a good chance to test out the Core Resource framework. I've been working on the framework itself for the last five months or so; for the hackathon I decided to see if I could actually make a working app in 3 hours. I ended up creating a Lighthouse account (bug tracking website) for the project, and because Lighthouse has a nice API, that's what I used as my source. I did get an app up and running in 3 hours, which was pretty exciting. It even looked decent, due to the other open source project I announced (DynamicCell.")

The Core Resources framework is available now, and look for an announcement on the DynamicCell project in the next week or so.

We're building a fair number of iPhone and iPad applications now, and it's great so have someone like Mike on the team and contributing back to the community.

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Pathfinder sponsors the midVentures25

Bernhard Kappe, Monday, March 8, 2010 @ 9:37 pm

The midVentures25 event is happening this Thursday, and Pathfinder is proud to be sponsoring the event.

midVentures25 is the first Chicago-based startup demo day & conference: 25 of the best investor-ready early-stage startups will demo their products in an open-floor expo.

The top 5 startups will have a chance to pitch to an audience of entrepreneurs, VCs, angels, bloggers, media and Chicago's tech community. A panel of expert advisors will ask the tough questions -- ultimately choosing one company to win over $10,000 in services.

The focus of midVentures25 is to show the national technology and investment community that the Midwest has an abundance of early-stage innovators within the technology, consumer, and sustainability space. You can expect to engage thought leaders in education, art, media, business, science, and technology during the conference.

There are a lot of great innovations that continue to come from the Chicago community, as we know from the early stage clients we've helped towards success. We're looking forward to an event like this that brings the people that make this happen together. It should be a great evening.

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Pathfinder sponsoring Day of Mobile in Chicago

Bernhard Kappe, Friday, March 5, 2010 @ 12:15 pm

Day of Mobile is happening this Saturday, and Pathfinder is proud to be sponsoring the event.

This should be a very cool event , and we're excited about interacting with other mobile developers in the Chicago area. We look forward to seeing you there!

Day of Mobile is an all day event for mobile developers and enthusiasts that will take place at IIT on March 6, 2010. The overall goal of the event is to better prepare both Chicago's application development community and companies with mobile initiatives for the upcoming mobile revolution. We will cover a myriad of different topics relative to mobile development and strategy such as platform SDKs, cross platform development, multimedia, CMS/SMS, mobile business models and many more. The event will begin with a breakfast at 8AM and conclude after a keynote speech and hackathon awards ceremony at 4PM. Throughout the day, there will be talks running concurrently with one another in two adjoining ballrooms.

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Where the iPad will take over: 15 examples

Bernhard Kappe, Tuesday, February 16, 2010 @ 8:05 am

There's still a lot of internet chatter about why you'd want a tablet anyway. I think there's a big space between the laptop and the iphone, and that in particular, the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch will take over from a lot of purpose built devices that deliver specific high value functionality. Here are a few examples:

1. The daily commute. It's a simple matter of ergonomics here. I will use the iPad, sold with a cheap data plan when I'm sitting down on the El, rather than the iphone. Because it has a bigger screen, and it's already connected. I won't use my laptop, because it doesn't come with a data plan (or only an expensive one that I won't buy), and it's pretty uncomfortable to use in a cramped row of seats. I'll use it instead of a laptop because the form factor works much better, and because I will have bought the data plan bundled with the iPad.

2. The eBook reader. I'll use it instead of a Kindle because it will be good enough (or better), and I can do a lot more than read with it. My guess is there will be more people that read on the tablet than who buy a dedicated reader. (Just as there are more people who do photo sharing on facebook than on flickr.)

3. In the Kitchen. If I'm in a situation where a sealed, mess resistant device with a big screen is a big advantage (like a kitchen) then I will use the tablet. I will prefer it to the iPhone because it's bigger and I can look at it while I'm doing something else, and I will prefer it to a laptop because the keyboard will not get gunked up. There are already devices retailing around $300 to store and retrieve your recipes in the kitchen - an iPad with the right recipe app will run rings around that.
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Single Purpose Devices vs. Flexible Platforms and Functional Cases

Bernhard Kappe, Tuesday, February 9, 2010 @ 6:54 am

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Skype Video Phone, part of a trend towards trading needless complexity for simplicity and ease of use. It's also on the wrong side of another trend: The trend away from single purpose mobile devices to flexible mobile platforms.

For a while there was a trend towards more and more purpose built digital products, from ebook readers to portable picture frames and pocket size digital cameras, all the way to to digital recipe readers ($299) and tablet pcs with tough cases, handles and barcode scanners for the medical industry.

The iPhone, the iPod Touch and the soon to be launched iPad signal a reverse of that trend. Apple has designed and built flexible platforms that combine the ease of use and simplicity that single purpose devices with the flexibility of general purpose devices, and that is proving to be a compelling value proposition.

On the iPad, for example, you can easily get as good or better a recipe reader experience as you would with the demy digital recipe reader, a better digital picture frame or slide show experience than with a digital picture frame, likely as good or better of an ebook reader experience, and likely as good or better of a bar code scanning medical tablet experience.

How is that last possible, when the iPad does not come with a bar code scanner? The solution will likely be through peripherals built into functional cases. As an example, take a look at the digital checkout devices like Apple's own EasyPay touch (used at Apple's retail stores), Verifone and Morphie - that combine a magnetic card reader, a bar code scanner and a battery in a case for an iPod touch.
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iPad: How big is the space between laptops and iPhones?

Bernhard Kappe, Tuesday, February 2, 2010 @ 6:58 am

Laptops are a strange, inefficient tradeoff between an iPhone’s portability and a desktop’s capabilities. They don’t satisfy either need extremely well, but they’re much closer to desktops than they are to iPhones. The usefulness and portability gap between a laptop and an iPhone is staggeringly vast ... Ergonomics are awful unless you effectively turn them into desktops with stands and external peripherals. But they can do nearly any computing task that desktops can do, and they’re able to replace desktops for many people.

- Marco Arment, “The Tablet” and gadget portability theory"

One of Steve Jobs slides during the iPad announcement last week showed an iPhone, a macbook, and a space in between with a question mark. Was there room for a third device between a laptop and an iPhone?

If it's a small space, suitable for a few niche products like the Kindle, then the iPad hullabaloo is much ado about nothing. If the space is big, and eats into laptop market share, then this becomes a major turning point in how we interact with computers.

Apple is betting that the space is big, and that the future of computing will look a lot more like the iPhone than the Laptop. Let's think about what that means: If Apple's tablet, like it's smartphone, and it's music player before that, becomes the preferred and dominant device of it's kind, and that device starts displacing the preferred computing device of the current time (the laptop, which in turn replace the previous preferred computing device (the desktop computer), a market for which they currently only have 8.8% (although 91% of laptops above $1000) then they win really big.

Why would you replace your laptop (with it's bigger screen and it's moderately comfortable keyboard) with a tablet?

Both are portable, but a tablet is more portable, and more usable while on the go.

To realistically use a laptop, you need a large surface, enough room in front of you, and preferably a seat. Otherwise, you look like this.

A seat on the subway or in economy class on a plane is too cramped and uncomfortable for most people. You need at least some time.

For the times when you need a keyboard - when you're writing an email, or a document, or a presentation, or developing software - you can set your tablet up in a work environment, just like you do with your laptop - docked, or at least connected to a large display, a wireless keyboard and a wireless mouse. You can take the last two with you when you go home, or to a coffee shop, or your in laws house.

Those rare situations where you really need that full keyboard in that cramped setting without a work surface, you can either make do with the onscreen keyboard, or find yourself a flat work surface when you need a laptop.

Of course some people will not be able to do without even in those rare circumstances, like this fellow on a plane, or like those who cannot do without their blackberry, and those people will not switch (at least not right away.) The same way that many people bought desktops for a long time, and then eventually switched to laptops when the computing power difference and cost difference no longer outweighed the convenience factor.

But for the rest of the world (and I'm betting that's a much larger audience,) having a multifunction, always connected, portable computing device that I can use like a desktop or in truly portable fashion will be clearly preferable.

At that point, you've introduced a serious disruption to the personal computing market. People who don't buy your laptops but buy your iphones and ipods, now will have another reason to buy a device from you, that's a replacement for their current laptop (likely not a mac, but a windows box.) If that happens, Apple will have won not just the current battle, but the war with Microsoft and IBM that they fought and lost 40 years ago. If it happens, that's the business story of our time.

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iPad: Instant Reaction to Apple’s Tablet Event

Bernhard Kappe, Wednesday, January 27, 2010 @ 3:09 pm

I just finished looking at a couple of live blogs on Apple's big iPad event, flipping back and forth between Macworld and Ubergizmo's coverage.

While initial reaction has been all over the map, mine is overwhelmingly positive. I think they hit a grand slam.

Here's why:

1. There are lots of reasons why a tablet is a better mobile device than a laptop or a netbook.
2. The price is right (Starts at $499, goes to $829)
3. The data plans are right (Wifi, 3G $14.95 to $29.95 for data plan coverage from AT&T, use at all wifi hotspots, no contract.)
4. iWork for $30. Web browsing, photos, vidoes, reading, games, email, word processing, spreadsheets and presentations - that's 95% of what 90% of people do with a computer.
5. Dock and Keyboard. Use it like a desktop, if you must.
6. iPhone and iPod Touch software works on it now, the SDK (iPhone OS) and emulator are released the same day, and units will ship in 60 days. That means iPhone developers like us will be pushing out new versions of those 100,000 apps as well as brand new apps out there as fast as we can design and code.
7. The app store model makes installing new apps a one click affair. I don't get any "Honey, can you help me" shouts from my wife with the iPhone, and I wont get them with the iPad either (especially since it doesn't have a camera;-)

In short, this is great news for those people yearning to trade away technical complexity for vastly increased simplicity and ease of use.

Sure there are things that a lot of people (smart, tech savvy analysts and developers all) will bemoan* and think are missing, but the same thing could be said of the iPhone. It's Apple's way (only release it if it kicks ass and makes them money) it works, and it will work here as well.

* I of course was hoping for front facing video camera for video phone support.

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Apple Earnings Call: 90% of iPhone Apps Approved within 2 Weeks

Bernhard Kappe, Tuesday, January 26, 2010 @ 2:06 pm

Anther interesting item from yesterday's earnings call:

Over 90% of iPhone apps are approved within 14 days of submission.

Given over 100,000 apps in the store from a wide variety of developers (from amateurs to experts) and a wide variety of topics, that's actually pretty good. Apple claims that most rejections are actually for bugs in code, which makes sense given the wide disparity in development quality and test coverage.*

* For example, are you testing your software for ipod touch as well? You should - applications have been rejected for working on the iPhone, but not the iPod touch.

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Apple’s Earnings Call: Enterprise iPhone Adoption Growth

Bernhard Kappe, Tuesday, January 26, 2010 @ 1:52 pm

Macworld’s Coverage of Apple’s Quarterly Results and Finance Call had some interesting news on continued enterprise iPhone adoption:

• The iPhone is ranked #1 in customer satisfaction in J.D. Powers' survey.
• Corporate clients have doubled.
• 70% of Fortune 100 are actively piloting or deploying iPhone. About 50% of FT 100 are doing the same.

Not bad given that Apple has only been in this business for 2.5 years.

This certainly jibes with a lot of what we are seeing from our customers, that the iPhone is the first choice for mobile application development and the first choice among consumers and corporate customers when given a chance. It also validates our recommendations from last year on which mobile platform to develop for.

Let's see what tomorrow's big announcement brings.

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Why would you use a tablet instead of a laptop? (In Pictures)

Bernhard Kappe, Thursday, January 14, 2010 @ 6:45 am

As an answer to those asking why we need a tablet anyway, there's a very funny set of pictures and comments at WTF Is Wrong with Laptop Users in the Media. The author went through the first 400 images (out of 28,886) he got on a search at Getty Images of "Using a laptop" and compiled the highlights. My favorites:

Now ask yourself, in which of those pictures would (a sealed, always on, always connected) tablet make more sense?

In all of them (although the beach one still seems like a bad idea.)

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Sanity Amid the Tablet Hype

Bernhard Kappe, Wednesday, January 13, 2010 @ 6:45 am

As January 26th, the rumored date for Apple's rumored tablet unveiling draws near, the hype and anti-hype keeps getting more and more over the top:

Five Ways Apple's Tablet May Change the World

The world doesn't need an Apple tablet, or any other

and the inevitable

3 Reasons A Microsoft-HP Tablet PC Would Trump Apple

If you want to keep up to date on the rumors, Gizmodo has a regularly updated run-down here.

There are a couple of places that have more informed speculation and insightful commentary - I'd recommend these three in particular:

Antacid Tablet by ars technica's John Siracusa:

... There's also the popular notion that Apple has to do something entirely new or totally amazing in order for the tablet to succeed. After all, tablets have been tried before, with dismal results. It seems absurd to some people that Apple can succeed simply by using existing technologies and software techniques in the right combination. And yet that's exactly what Apple has done with all of its most recent hit products—and what I predict Apple will do with the tablet. ...

So how will an Apple tablet distinguish itself without any headline technological marvels? It'll do so by leveraging all of Apple's strategic strengths. Now you're expecting me to say something about tight hardware/software integration, user experience, or "design," but I'm talking about even more obvious factors:

• Customers - Apple has over 100 million credit-card-bearing customer accounts thanks to the success of iTunes.
• Developers - Over 125,000 developers have put over 100,000 iPhone OS applications up for sale on the App Store. Then there are the Mac OS X developers (though of course there's some overlap). Apple's got developers ready and able to come at the tablet from both directions.
• Relationships - Apple has lucrative and successful relationships with the most important content owners in the music and movie businesses.

These are Apple's most important assets when it comes to the tablet, and you can bet your bottom dollar that Apple will lean heavily on them. This, combined with Apple's traditional strength in design and user experience, is what will distinguish Apple's tablet in the market. It will provide an easy way for people to find, purchase, and consume all kinds of media and applications right from the device. It's that simple.

Thoughts on what an Apple tablet should be – or not by Andy Ihnatko

Apple always asks themselves simple and stupid questions like “How will this device be used?” and “Will this be used by human beings with, I mean, arms and hands and fingers?” and stuff like that.

The iPhone UI isn’t a desktop user interface where a pen takes the place of a mouse ... which is the model that previous smartphones followed. It was designed to be held in one hand and tapped with your thumb. Occasionally you’d use the index finger of the right hand to key things in.

You want to try to figure out the UI of the RAT? Go get yourself a comic book, or any other rectangle that measures roughly 10” on the diagonal. Hold it as though you’re reading what’s on the surface.

You see the problem? Your fingers get in the way. Think about how big that surface is, too. That’s a lot of acreage to scan, looking for the right buttons to push.

While you’ve got it in your hands, imagine that it’s a sheet of thin steel. That’s heavy, isn’t it? Hard to hold up for long periods of time.

Think about how a user interface would have to incorporate those observations. Now imagine that you’ve been doing this experiment for four years and not four minutes.

That’s a very long list of observations. If you didn’t come up with a workable solution, don’t worry: I think Apple has.

and

The Tablet by Daring Fireball's John Gruber.

... The way Apple made one device [the iPhone] that did a credible job of all these widely-varying features was by making it a general-purpose computer with minimal specificity in the hardware and maximal specificity in the software. And, now, through the App Store and third-party developers, it does much more: serving as everything from a game player to a medical device.

Do I think The Tablet is an e-reader? A video player? A web browser? A document viewer? It’s not a matter of or but rather and. I say it is all of these things. It’s a computer.

And so in answer to my central question, regarding why buy The Tablet if you already have an iPhone and a MacBook, my best guess is that ultimately, The Tablet is something you’ll buy instead of a MacBook.

Gruber's a bit more gung ho than Ihnatko or Siracusa, but they both make a pretty compelling case that something very interesting is about to happen over the next year.

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Trading Away Technical Complexities for Vastly Increased Simplicity and Ease of Use

Bernhard Kappe, Tuesday, January 12, 2010 @ 6:45 am

... it's hard not to think about how much easier some people's lives would be (hi Mom and Dad) if they could trade technical complexities they don't care about for vastly increased simplicity and ease of use.

- John Siracusa, ars technica

My parents were technically savvy enough (with a little help from their sons) to start using Skype video in their mid seventies, prompted by the arrival of grandkids halfway across the country. But for them, it was always a cumbersome affair:

1. Arrange a time to have the video call.
2. Move the laptop to the dining room.
3. Call on the telephone to tell me that they're using Skype on the computer.
4. Initiate the Skype phone call.

Needless to say, this did not happen all that often.

This past Christmas my brother got them a Skype Video Phone. They set it up with a little help from us, and when we told them to just treat it like the telephone, they got the idea. Now, they are making video calls much more frequently - not just to the grandkids, but to our cousins in Switzerland and South Africa.

They traded complexity for simplicity and ease of use, and though the skype video phone will not end up being a success on the level of the iPhone, it's already brought my parents a lot of joy, and is part of a trend towards more simplicity and ease of use. It's one major reason the iPhone is as successful as it is.

Now imagine that simplicity and ease of use in a multipurpose, always on device with a bigger screen. My parents wouldn't need the skype video phone, they'd just have that as an app on their tablet.

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Requirements Set in Stone and Software Made of Concrete

Bernhard Kappe, Monday, December 21, 2009 @ 12:06 pm

Twas the night before Christmas, and 500 pages of detailed requirements had been produced. No line of code had been written, not even by a mouse.

It sounds great in theory: You produce requirements up front, getting them so detailed that they cannot be misunderstood, you vet them with a full committee of stakeholders who will be impacted (except your customers.) Then you give it to the developes. The result: you can get a really precise cost and timeline, you'll save on expensive development time, and your CFO will sleep soundly at night.

It's a nice fantasy, but it's wrong. It's a fundamental misinterpretation of how software development works. In fact, it's a guaranteed way of increasing your costs and producing bad software.

Here's why:
If you're developing software, you're coming up with a new solution to a problem, or solving a new problem all together. Otherwise, why are you building software, rather than buying it?

Traditional requirements definition processes are a spectacularly bad way of understanding stakeholder needs, and coming up with, conveying and vetting a solution for these types of problems. You will miss certain requirements, you will over specify others, and some of them will never get used. Your stakeholders will only be able to provide feedback of limited value until the working software is actually in their hands. At that point, you will finally start getting valuable feedback that you can push through as change orders.
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You Shall Know Our Velocity!

Bernhard Kappe, Friday, December 18, 2009 @ 7:09 am

With apologies to Dave Eggers, this post is not about traveling around the world in a week to give away $32,000, but about measurement and agile development.

One objection to agile development we get sometimes from people who have never done agile is that it sounds too undisciplined, unstructured and risky.

Would they say the same thing about lean manufacturing or six sigma?

They're confusing agile with cowboy coding.

In fact, like six sigma, agile software development is explicitly about reducing risk, measuring efficiency and continuous improvement.

The old management adage of “You can’t manage what you don’t measure” holds true in software development as well. If you have no feedback loops, and you’re not measuring and improving, you’re not really doing agile development.

The core measurements we use are story points and velocity.

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Ten Keys to Successful Software Development: #8 – The Team

Bernhard Kappe, Tuesday, December 8, 2009 @ 7:33 am

According to the latest figures from the Standish Group, only 32% of software development projects are successful. If you follow our list of 10 patterns and avoid the antipatterns, your success rate should be a lot higher than that.

The first two installments were #10, Tools and Infrastructure and #9, Respect the Process

#8: The Team

Once you have the tools and the method, you need a team to take advantage of them.

Throwing together a group of individuals to make sure you have enough bodies and hoping they form a team is usually not a recipe for successful software development, but we see this all too often in projects we are called in to rescue.

The key concept here is that a team is more than just a group of individuals thrown together. As in sports, you need talented players at each position, a cohesive team, and proficient coaches. For software development projects, our teams typically have between four to eight core members, with core skill sets of agile project management, user experience design and software development.

Once you’ve assembled a good team, you need to let them be a team. My brother Dietrich has a good take on this in a recent post:

“At Pathfinder Development, we're often called on to introduce Agile practices into projects and organizations. One of the more subtle changes we introduce is that of the self-organizing team. This is where developers (and BA's, IA's, etc.) share responsibility for organizing their own work, rather than depend on managers telling them what to do. At the same time they also become accountable for this work and the ultimate success of the project. The former "managers" become obstacle removers, freeing up the team members to do their best work.”

By taking this approach, you not only get better motivation, enhanced teamwork and better results, you are in much better shape to handle the turnover and change that is inevitable in any organization: If one member of a team leaves, or you need to scale up the team, you’re in much better shape with a self organizing team, especially if they’re pairing.

Next time: Financial Management

Related Services: Custom Software Development, Agile Development

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