Thoughts from the Road

I’m in Tampa, at the University of South Florida, attending the Higher Education Enterprise Mobile Applications Conference (HEEMAC). I’ve seen and heard some really great things that colleges and universities are doing, from a mobile enterprise perspective.

One group, however, is strikingly absent – faculty. I’ve run into Associate Deans, technologists, native app developers, web developers, and even the odd CIO… but only one or two faculty members, out of 100+ conference attendees.

Admittedly, this is an enterprise mobile conference, and not one centered upon pedagogy.

Still.

I believe that faculty are under represented, overlooked, and generally ignored in conversations of campus technology, where they are every bit as much stakeholders as the students we strive to support. This week is only reinforcing – at least, for me – the great divide between academics, and the information technology infrastructure supporting the administrative side of things.

I was heartened to hear words like “enable” and “facilitate” in the context of opening up APIs, mobile development best practices, and providing software development guidance.

I was equally disheartened to hear that some mobile projects are being intentionally “slow walked” in order to have these projects wither and die from neglect.

To paraphrase from Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

“Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle mobile application.”

We have much yet to do to make our technology decisions inclusive of all stakeholders; not only because it is the right and proper thing to do, but because we are allowing strategic decisions be driven by what is simple to support and easy to do. If we are to innovate, stand out, and convincingly argue our institutions’ cases for value within the current environment of uncertainty, high debt, and questionable sustainability in higher education, then I believe we must do better than simply be “good enough.” We must be exemplary. And that can’t be done on the cheap, nor the easy.

We have real innovation occurring in higher ed mobile. We also have a lot of cookie cutter, least-common denominator solutions.

Is that good enough?

I’m grateful for the forum that our gracious hosts at USF have afforded us to conduct this inquiry into values, technology, and mobile strategy. We have our work cut out for us.

Changes a’ Comin’

I’ll have some news tomorrow.

Watch this space.

When Your Baby Is The Ugly One

This scenario plays itself out repeatedly:

Company A releases a great new mobile app. Initially, it runs on only mobile OS X.

Users of mobile OS Y decry how epic this FAIL is on the part of Company A, how clueless they are, and how they are totally missing the boat and losing their business.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Trust me – companies don’t go out of their way to NOT service their customers and consumers.

These decisions are based upon market share, money on hand, time to market, and availability of manpower to build product.

In short, it’s business.

For the most part, this script usually translates as: Company A releases an iPhone app, initially. Users of Android, Blackberry, Palm, etc. are unhappy that they are being slighted. They think the company doesn’t value them.

In fact, the company is probably coping with a small set of developers, looking to get the biggest initial bang for their constrained development resources, and has every intention of getting their product on these other platforms, as time, resources, and money permit.

Apple’s ability to allow consumers to discover new applications is superior to what Android and Blackberry offer. I’m sorry. It just is. You can’t browse the Android Market or the Blackberry App World from your laptop to discover apps. You can with the App Store. Therefore, the chances for new consumers to discover, disseminate, and advertise your new app are greatly multiplied by releasing an iOS version, first.

Again, this is a business decision, not a straight-up fan boy love affair.

Yeah – it totally blows to have to wait for something the other cool kids are playing with now (hear that Twitter? Still waiting on “new” Twitter. Le sigh).

This is how I, as a cross platform developer, look at these platforms when trying to design and develop a new commercial product. I’m keeping “religion” (i.e., the relative merits of open source vs. closed source) out of this discussion in the main, aside from mentioning availability of sample code:

Apple:

Pros: Has maximum reach, best application discovery, best user experience with regard to UI and overall integration, highest quality store; customers spend actual money here. Best UI design tool of any of the mobile smartphone environments (Interface Builder) . Easiest to system test code, because you only have 3 basic iPhone models.

Cons: Strict curation can be an impediment to delivery. Wait times for approval have gotten better, but definitely adds friction to the process.

Android:

Pros: Easiest to ship, fastest growing smartphone OS. Lots of open source examples. No curation to get your app in the market, which means revisions and bug fixes happen in “internet time.” The ability to customize AVMs for creating device simulator configurations is the most flexible across all OS SDKs.

Cons: Horrible UI design tool. No application discovery, aside from third party websites. No curation in Android Market means anything goes. System testing is a nightmare, because you have a cross product of dozens of combinations of hardware and OSes that realistically won’t be fully exercised by small developers. The user experience across carriers is inconsistent – anyone who have ever implemented an application on Android that has to use the camera can attest to the variability in operation, quality, and performance. Fragmentation really doesn’t capture how fast this is getting worse rather than better (see: Verizon and Amazon creating their own market, see: carriers installing root kits to frustrate rooting, see: application filtering by carrier).

Blackberry:

Pros: Huge installed base of devices. Market leader in penetration inside of enterprises. Secure. Dozens of software simulators available for testing.

Cons: Worst SDK of any smartphone OS. SDK runs only on Windows (technology release now available for Mac OS X, but no simulators and it works only for directly attached OS 6 devices, which is one: the 9800 Torch). No UI tools, period. Worst developer community of any smartphone OS (no disrespect to the many fine BB developers I have met the past couple of years. But in the main, most of these guys – and they are guys – are usually company drones that I for the life of me can’t seem to find any actual apps that they have written. Prolly cause there’s only 9,000 apps in Blackberry App World, and unless you have a Blackberry Phone with a data plan, you’d never see ‘em anyway). Multiple OSes, hardware form factors make unit and system testing impractical for rapid releases. Browser – with the exception of the latest OS 6 release – is the absolute worst of any smartphone. Research in Motion also doesn’t seem to really care about software, except for only the sense that it is needed to operate the hardware. They’re a hardware company first and foremost, and it shows in spades.

Your mileage may vary.

But since the majority of application release scenarios we see play out in the marketplace are iPhone First, Android Second, Blackberry when we get around to it, I don’t think my take differs from those actually doing cross platform development, rather than those opining about it.

Nobody likes to have their baby called ugly.

But when it is, it is.

The Cobbler’s Children Have No Shoes

You know the old saw.

“The Cobbler’s Children Have No Shoes.“

Same’s been true with me and updating my own marketing material lately.

To correct that, I’ve been playing around with Animoto this week (http://www.animoto.com).

Verdict: Me like. Me like lots.

Anyway, here’s the result:

iPhone Apps

Android Apps

Blackberry Apps

Debugging for the New Blackberry 9800

Hopefully, a helpful hint:

Use the Blackberry SDK version of the 9800 simulator, and not the one that you can download separately from the Blackberry website.

The SDK simulator seems to work fairly well; the separate download version tends to lock up when trying to access embedded web controls.

This may be a very temporary thing. But for now, I can say at least anecdotally this has been my experience.

Playing a Sound File in a Blackberry Java App

Without a lot of undo fuss, here’s one way to play a sound file in a Blackberry Java app:

Class cl = null;
try {
cl = Class.forName("com.mycompany.myapp.MyAppMainClass");
} catch (ClassNotFoundException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
if (cl!=null) {
InputStream is = cl.getResourceAsStream("/someSoundFile.mp3");
try {
Player player = Manager.createPlayer(is, "audio/mpeg");
player.realize();
player.prefetch();
player.start();
is.close();
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} catch (MediaException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}

I usually create a package under the res (resource) package, name it sounds, and plop my sound files there.
Easy Peasy.

Hiding Blackberry Background Processes

If you’ve ever developed a Blackberry app that has an Alternate Entry Point and runs in the background, you’re familiar with this typical scenario in your main application class (or something very much like it):

public static void main(String args[]) {

if (args.length>0 && args[0].equals("autostartup"))

{

MyApp app = new MyApp();

app.registerPushApplication();

app.enterEventDispatcher();

}

else

{

new MyApp().showGUI();

}

}


But wait a minute… how come I can ** still ** see my application’s autostart instance in the “Switch Applications” dialog?!?

This isn’t what I wanted.

Here’s the additional “secret sauce” you need:

First, declare a private global boolean in your main application class. I call mine (usually) _acceptsForeground and set it to false initially.

Next, in your main application class handle the UIApplication.acceptsForeground callback and code it like this:


protected boolean acceptsForeground() {

return _acceptsForeground;

}

Finally, in your showGUI() method (or whatever you call your analogous implementation) you need to add the following two (2) lines of code at the beginning of the method:

_acceptsForeground = true;

UiApplication.getUiApplication.requestForeground();


And that’s that. No longer will your application’s autostart instance appear in your task switcher.

The Alternative to the Blackberry Battery Pull

Tired of yanking your Blackberry battery out when things go wonky?

Fear not, friends.

I have a tip.

There is a Blackberry equivalent to the Windows Ctrl-Alt-Delete three-finger salute.

Press the Alt, Right-Shift, and Del keys and hold them down.

It’s the little things, right?

A nice little BES / BIS “gotcha”

A funny thing happened while testing today.

Well. It really wasn’t that funny.

Just strange.

I was testing a new Blackberry app to run solely over BIS and / or solely over BES.

And all hell started breaking loose.

JSON wouldn’t parse. Calls broke. Dogs and cats lied down next to each other.

After a little digging, I discovered that when an app makes calls over BIS or BES, there’s a good chance the data you get back will be a mixed stream of UTF-16 and UTF-8 data.

Not just a good chance. In my case, it ALWAYS returned mixed data.

Talk about your basic cluster smuck.

The fix turned out to be simple enough. I just had to set x-rim-transcode-content in my HTTP headers to none and voila! Problem solved. Nothing but good ol’ pure UTF-8.

I can’t imagine how many people out there are having this problem.  But I hope this little “heads up” can save someone a little grief.

Blackberry BrowserFieldListener downloadProgress

The downloadProgress event for BrowserFieldListener never fires.

Let me repeat.

The downloadProgress event for BrowserFieldListener never fires.

So, this is causing me to put together a dirty hack. And it will work.

But once again, spending development time to fix documented Blackberry “features” that simply don’t work.

Like isFocus.

And now, downloadProgress.