Tom Hume

So, I've had a few days now to fiddle with with Guardian iPhone app - and I'm liking it. In an attempt to stretch my ability for unbiased appraisal to snapping point, I thought I'd do a little comparison of it to our own (unofficial) Guardian Anywhere app, for Android devices.

Incidentally, we saw a nice little uptick in usage of the latter when the iPhone app launched - and we're currently cruising at 4000 downloads (with 1700 of those being active installs). Considering that our promotion for this was a blog post here, a single tweet, and a gloriously underfunded Adwords campaign (446 clicks delivered so far), we're pretty pleased.

So, onto the comparison... looks-wise, I have to say I think the Guardian have done a much better job than us of replicating the brand, and the feel of print. The iPhone app feels like a newspaper, the Android app more like a database of stories. We've considered doing a more "papery" version for larger-screen devices like the Archos tablet, but it's unlikely to happen now - our attention is focused elsewhere for a little bit.

That said, I find the iPhone app a little "busy" - there's important navigation (search and settings) in the top corners, a navigation bar across the foot, a selector for latest and trending stories, and a feature that could be really useful (offline browsing) mixed into the foot of the main navigation. I could still find everything I wanted quickly (so my complaint feels a little churlish), but the overall sense was of extreme busyness - and I wasn't completely clear on the difference between "latest" and "trending".

Both apps make good use of the excellent pool of photography that the Guardian publish. But - and here's a key difference - from the iPhone app I can email a photo, and that's about it. On Android, I get the option to set as wallpaper or share the photo through a variety of mechanisms, highlighting one of the key advantages of the Guardian Anywhere (which is actually an advantage of Android as a platform): the interconnections between apps.

On my HTC Magic, I have apps for Facebook and Flickr installed. These apps then expose photo-sharing services to every other app on my phone - meaning that my copy of the Guardian Anywhere can automatically share photos with both of them, at zero effort for us, the developers. That's a really big win for me as a user: if I'm a member of a niche social network, my social networking app can help the Guardian Anywhere share content.

The same thing applies to the sharing of stories: I can post to Twitter easily from Guardian Anywhere, by virtue of having installed Twidroid. And I notice that within the stories themselves, links are stripped out on the iPhone (whilst being kept in on Android).

The iPhone app includes a whole load of audio content which is ace - I'm betting that more iPhone/iPod Touch owners listen to music on their devices than Android owners.

I was chuffed to see offline reading make it into the feature-set, though I can't help feeling that the value of it is reduced by the lack of running it at scheduled times in the background. One of the things I love about our Android app is that when I wake up, the news is already sitting there on my phone. With the iPhone, I have to tell the app to go grab the content now - which takes around 15 minutes. This just doesn't deliver the same sort of convenience, though lack of background processing on iPhone didn't leave the developers with any options.

I feel a mix of comfort and schadenfreude to see that downloading offline content takes about 15 minutes on the iPhone - it's the same for us on Android, and it's the number 1 complaint from our users. I'm confident that if the Guardian haven't solved this problem themselves, it's not so bad that we haven't yet...

And finally, there's distribution. I can't help but point out that the Guardian Anywhere is free, and available globally. £2.39 isn't an extremely reasonable price-point for such a high-quality iPhone app, but it's not available outside the UK, US and Canada. Whilst most of our users are UK and US, we have a sizable long tail in France, Singapore, Germany, Australia, and quite a few others, making up around 12.5% of our users.

It feels strange - a comparison of two very similar apps on Android and iPhone has ended up being a comparison of the platforms themselves, with iPhone delivering a superior overall look and feel (at a small but reasonable price) and Android making better use of background processing and connectivity between applications to improve the experience, for everyone.

Russ wrote a nice post a month or so back about the splintering of Android.

He's right, I think - we are starting to see fragmentation around Android. When new handsets or versions of the operating system launch, we find ourselves getting occasional small bug reports for our Guardian Anywhere product. Some of these bugs have been down to our not doing things in a standards-based fashion; some are down to differences in handsets (the Tattoo, for instance, has a much smaller screen than most other devices); and some... some we can't quite get to the bottom of.

And of course, it's not just the handset. In an application-rich world, every user has a different combination of apps, and Android's architecture allows them to run many apps at the same time - all of which might interact with one another, leading to difficult-to-reproduce edge cases. I'm also expecting to see issues caused by handset customisation (which operators are doing a great deal of - the T-Mobile Pulse is a nice example of this, and it's still early days)

So there is fragmentation in Android; but I was pleased last year to see Google quietly move from the naive line that "fragmentation won't happen, because it's not in the industry's interest" to "we'll introduce conformance tests for OEMs to avoid fragmentation". This seems to be paying off, so far - in that moving Android applications to new devices, even those with new screen sizes, is orders-of-magnitude less painful than moving between J2ME handsets from different manufacturers. That said, developers still need to do some work to provide graceful degradation.

Apple have done a fantastic job of presenting the iPhone as a single platform. There however, the reality is slightly different: 3 generations of hardware, 26 operating system releases (last time I counted), and a platform which in some incarnations has (or doesn't have) GPS, a loudspeaker, a microphone, or even a SIM card and therefore connectivity. Apple have done a great job of upgrading operating system versions to keep its installed base current, but even there there's some lag. The problem is at least finite, Apple being a closed ecosystem for hardware; and the lack of background apps helps developers avoid issues caused by interactions between applications.

So where does this leave us?

• Fragmentation isn't going away. Not until OEMs stop innovating and differentiating their products;
• Even wunderkinds of the tech industries like Apple and Google can't solve the problem for us. Even their kit - whether it be strictly controlled or lovingly curated - suffers from the issue, whatever you might hear to the contrary;
• As an industry we're getting better at dealing with it: platform vendors are taking more care, developers are evolving techniques and technology to cope;
• For those of us taking mobile products to market, testing across a range of devices is going to be something we continue to do as a matter of course - and we'll still be learning more than we ever wanted to know about weird handset bugs and software versions;

Many thanks to James Hugdroid, who proof-read, sanity-checked, and contributed to this post.

Update: Google have published a really nice analysis of deployed Android versions, implying that developers should be targeting 3 versions of the Android operating system.

• When is it inappropriate to use your iPhone - a romance flowchart;
• All hail the iPod touch; isn't it kinda amusing that one of the most popular mobile devices is completely disconnected from any traditional mobile network? Kinda says something about the telecomms industry I think;
• Is modern web design too like print design: "It feels like we’ve lost the “webness” of web design over an incredibly short period". Absolutely agree. We seem to have falled into a bit of a rut as far as our expectations of web design go...
• Very interesting report of the post-mortem for a large iPhone project;
• Node.js, an asynchronous framework for web applications. Can't decide if this is really cute (performance suggests so), or insanely evil (in that it seems to be retrofitting the WWW with select() calls)...
• If you're a fluent Japanese speaker, perhaps you could tell me what I'm talking about here? It's one of the interviews from my week in Japan...
• Simple and gorgeous - PhotoCard for the iPhone, an app to send email or physical postcards.
• I Blame The Designer: "Of course clients aren’t skilled designers; that’s why they had the foresight to hire us. But you know what? They know business. They’re as passionate, committed and talented as anyone. Many of them put their livelihoods on the line to make the web happen. And let’s be blunt: they also pay our salaries.". Bravo!

• The worlds largest multi-touch wall: "34 million pixels generated by 15 high definition projectors, supported by sound produced by 30 directional speakers"
• Twitter beard!: "just insert your face"
• Why your friends have more friends than you do: "You are more likely to be friends with someone who has more friends than with someone who has fewer friends"
• Cheap, Easy Audio Transcription with Mechanical Turk: "my 36-minute recording was transcribed while I slept, in less than three hours, for a grand total of $15.40"
• Opera Face Gestures: "lets you perform frequent browsing operations with natural and easy to make face gestures"
• Interesting post on design decisions behind Skype Chat, the best IM out there I reckon
• Differentiated presence on GMail chat status, nice touch: "when you know the guy on the other end is using his Android phone, you may decide to send shorter, more concise chat messages"
• How rich are you? Humbling.
• Square looks cute - the use of the headphone jack is particularly lovely, and I could see it getting uptake from smartphone owners (particularly if the customer hardware becomes fashionable or desirable), but I wonder how they plan to get the merchant side of the infrastructure rolled out to the extent that it's worthwhile.
• Via Dom, Appvent Calendar - a free iPhone game every day. Cute.
• The two use-cases of mobile - amen;

It's gone quickly. Micro-updates for the last couple of days:

• I actually made it over to Hombu dojo and trained with Kuribayashi sensei. Really good fun, very friendly class (about 25% Westerners as far as I could tell), not as austere as I'd feared. Hombu mats are unusually hard and *really* slippery. I found the class very tough to follow, not speaking a word of Japanese - but everyone was very friendly and I partnered with a succession of grinning yudansha who took pity on me. Sensei came over and used me for uke at one point, commenting that was I too focused on one thing. I'll try and work that one out...
• Kiddyland has eaten my wallet - thanks for dumping that one on me, Julie... it's basically the worlds best toy shop, 7 floors of really cool shit. I particularly enjoyed the Star Wars and Ghibli floors on each of my visits.
• After moving hotel (from the Grand Prince Akasaka to the Diamond) I popped over to Ueno zoological gardens yesterday and meandered around the zoo itself. The giant panda is gone (relatively recently, judging by all the signs apologising for the lack of a giant panda) but there's a good selection of bears (polar and grizzly), a dead cute red panda (think panda/raccoon cross but twice as cute), gorillas and some fun otters.
• Woke up at 3:30am this morning (again) and took advantage of the early start to head down to the fish market at Tsukiji and grab some breakfast. I missed the famous tuna auction, but had a delicious plate of fresh fishness at a little street-side cafe type thing which has set me up nicely for the day. One thing I've noticed on this trip is how much more relaxing it is to wander around an unfamiliar town with a GPS-enabled map... I've had close-to-zero worry of getting lost which makes the whole experience much smoother...

Today's my last day in Tokyo - I have an extremely early start tomorrow, and haven't quite worked out how to make it to Narita airport on time. But chuffing me currently is that I've managed to get back in contact with an old Brighton chum who I last saw on my last visit to Tokyo, 9 years ago. So hopefully beers to follow there...

5 hours into sleepytime, and I started awake at 3:30am on the day of the presentation. I'd not exercised in a few days, so dragged shorts and trainers on, and went for a run - up to the palace, around the moat, getting a little bit lost, thanking my lucky stars I had my phone with me, and carefully navigating back to the hotel. What is it about Tokyo which inevitably involves my getting lost at some point...?

I broke fast, suited myself up, and met Mr Hughes in the lobby to wander over to the embassy - which it turns out is just 10 minutes walk away, and around the edge of the Imperial Moat again. Even by embassy standards, it's really rather nice: once you're through the security there's lots of open space and gardens - though cameras are banned in these areas so you'll just have to take my word for it (I did get a few photos of the rather plush interior of the Ambassador's Residence though).

First things first, we met our interpreters for the day - two extremely helpful Japanese ladies who sat us down and ran through our presentations - to clarify the meaning of certain key phrases and the pronunciation of brand names which may never have been enunced in Japanese before. I was pleasantly surprised at how knowledgeable they were about telecomms in general, and founded myself needing to explain very little.

From there, I was taken to the garden room of the embassy for the two interviews: the first with Yasutaka Yuno and Shuichi Morita of K-tai Watch, a popular telecomms web site over here. Clearly mobile enthusiasts, they quizzed me on the types of Japanese content which might work over in the UK. I was a bit lost really - I don't know very much about what's popular in Japan right now - and could only suggest that one thing we'd *not* seen cross over to the UK was the Japanese practice of writing books on keitai. That seemed to keep Shuichi - and anyone else who asked me the same question that day - happy. The resulting article on K-tai watch can be found here (and a Google translated version here, not sure what "Future home of the president's Purattofomuzu" means tho)).

Another interview followed with Yumiko Egami of the Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun, a business newspaper; this time around the topics were more general and less focused on the detail of mobile. Both interviews were carried out through my interpreter, who very ably managed to convert my lengthy gabbled ramblings into Japanese.

A relaxing lunch followed in one of the rooms off the embassy gardens with some of the UKTI staff, 50% Brits who were doing a few years posting in Japan, and 50% locals who'd spent some time in England (and not only spoke perfect English but also seemed to have internalised the sense of humour and/or sarcasm very well).

And then we were into the afternoons talks, with headsets on to give us a live translation feed from our interpreters, who were now housed in a glass cage at the back of the room. After an introduction from the ambassador, Takamasa Kishihara of the Mobile Contents Forum gave a general introduction to the Japanese mobile content industry. I took a few notes from this one:

• >100m subscribers, driven by the arrival of 3G and flat rate (seen as being vital for allowing rich media to be consumed at a reasonable cost);
• Japan is generally seen as 5 years ahead of the UK;
• Areas of content break down into mCommerce, digital content sold via operator billing, advertisment/ad-response and social networking;
• Mobile content industry in Japan grew, even during the recession;
• MIDI ringtone industry peaked in 2005 at 100m yen revenue, now at 50m yen;
• 1/4 of the Japanese music market is music delivered to handsets;
• Takamasa spoke about a new frame-by-frame film format which sounded interesting, a cross between films and comics;
• Social networking services ere mentioned as being either ad-driven or supported by gifting;
• Japanese acceptance of the subscription billing model is seen as key to the growth of the mobile market, and many of the content providers there were also keen on this;
• Problems exporting to the UK have included regulatory/commercial issues, the web-based nature of Japanese content, and the language barrier;

Tony Hughes of UKTI then gave his talk. I'll see if I can get permission to upload his slides - it was a fantastic examination of the communications, mobile and digital landscape in the UK.

I followed up with a few case studies of content providers in the UK: Flirtomatic, MobileIQ (particularly their service for The Guardian) and Puzzler. I'd done interviews with the first two companies to prepare me for the talk - you can see slides and notes online here. It was interesting to hear a few familiar themes show themselves between these two, and I'm very thankful to Mark Curtis of Flirtomatic and Shaun Barriball of MobileIQ to the time they graciously gave for these conversations.

Q&A followed, and happily the audience seemed very keen to talk. We had some great questions on differences between the UK and China, the general approach to billing and content provision, and the relative importance of operators. After about half an hour, the questions were drawn to a close and we had a pleasant hour or so networking with attendees and UKTI staff, before heading off for a delicious Japanese meal with a few UKTI folk. Well, the bits *I* ate were delicious, the squidney and fish sperm were less appealing...

A really fun day; I was surprised how much I enjoyed myself, and found the crowd (both organisers and attendees) really enthusiastic, friendly and interesting. Fingers crossed this is not the last time I head to Japan for business, but the first of many...

If I was going to build a dream team to run a mobile event here in the UK, it'd have to include the folks behind Swedish Beers, Over the Air, Mobile Monday, Mobile 2.0 and the Future of Mobile - all favourite events that I've ranted on about before now, and had the pleasure of participating in.

Luckily I don't have to bother building this team, because they've gone and gotten together anyway... and it looks like they're doing something a little bit different. Heroes of the Mobile Screen is running in London this December, and they've picked four very sensible topics for it: where's the money? What does all this social and location stuff mean? What do the kids make of this? And what to customers, and particularly women, want?

All really great stuff, and even better for having brought together a crowd of speakers that isn't just the usual faces...

• Nokia exec talks Ovi platform, really nice discussion of where Ovi is and how Nokia see the world;
• Android Market games revenues rose in October, but only 53% which isn't the kind of massive growth you might expect to see this early in Androids life...
• Android compatibility library: "During the cross-compilation process, both the application and the Android compatibility library are cross-compiled from Java to Objective-C and linked with the Cocoa Touch compatibility library to yield a native iPhone application. "
• A new theory of awesomeness and miracles, including the putative construction of a go-playing machine larger than the universe;
• Fake Steve Jobs exposes a wonderful example of doublespeak: "I sent a copy of this to Katie with a note asking how we missed out on this guy, because he’s exactly the kind of coin-operated true believer we need around here."
• 5 things I wish someone had told me: "If your significant other absentmindedly mentions that he/she never sees you for dinner anymore, you had better resolve the situation quickly"
• Who can save Palm?: "Palm can only hope for a niche role in the smartphone market. Palm’s technology can only escape this role if WebOS software will become part of a strong, larger service ecosystem. One possibility is acquisition by RIM. Consumer potential of WebOS can take Blackberry user experience to a new level..."
• It's Googles world and handset makers just live in it: "by creating flagship devices featuring their latest and greatest they ensure forward momentum for the platform"
• Russell Davies at Playful (which I'm increasingly gutted to have missed): "These aren't games, like the industry thinks of games, these are something a little less, these are Barely Games. And these, are what I wanted to talk about."

So, the journey over here was extremely pleasant. The drive from home to Heathrow appeared to violate the laws of physics by taking around an hour without visibly breaking any speed limits or involving any acrobatics, and this gave me half an hour in the departure lounge. One observation: the only newspapers available here were fairly right-wing ones (Sunday Times, Mail on Sunday). I guess there aren't too many lefties round those parts...

After breakfast in the departure lounge we boarded and departed on time. The journey went quickly, thanks to a laptop full of presentation notes and ideas, and an excellent in-flight entertainment system. The latter - which I'm convinced is imprinted with the visual style of the Vexed team - gave me a chance to catch 500 Days of Summer and State of Play, both of which were thoroughly enjoyable. Despite a seemingly endless supply of a rather lovely Portuguese wine, I experienced a massive sleep fail on the flight. A stagger through customs and the journey to the hotel followed. By complete coincidence, I'm staying in the place I would've been at had I gotten my shit together and come to Japan with Julie and chums a couple of years ago; the advance party had told me good things, and I wasn't disappointed.

"An hours power nap", I thought, "then I'll get on with the presentation". Four hours later I crawled out of bed and - panicking slightly - cracked on, finishing around midnight and pausing only for a brief wander around Akasaka, the area I'm staying in. It's really rather nice, combining (as Tokyo seems to) greenery with skyscrapers and bustle - and seeing it by night for the first time was quite breathtaking. Within easy walking distance of the hotel are the Imperial Palace, a bevy of shops and restaurants, and seemingly hundreds of tube stations.

I slept, for fewer hours than I hoped, and then it was up to breakfast on the 40th floor. Peach jam - nyum nyum nyum.

What else have I noticed so far? There's lots of folks wearing masks, particularly in the airport but all around the streets too; I noticed that at immigration when we arrived they had heat-sensitive cameras designed to spot travellers with high temperatures, so I'm guessing there's a general disease-consciousness here (related to swine flu, no doubt).

All I know about architecture I learned in a 90 minute boat trip round Chicago earlier this year; whilst looking out of the hotel window I can't see much in the way of reference between buildings, but there's definitely an aesthetic in the layout of the whole city which I want to think about some more. Christmas is already here, chiefly testified to in neon.

Today, I plan to rehearse the presentation for tomorrow several times, and do some research into the questions I'll be getting in the media interviews. But first I'm going to wander down to the gardens of the Imperial Palace and work out a decent route for a daily run; and this afternoon it'll be time get the tube over to Hombu Dojo and go train. Looking at the latest timetable it seems I'll not get a chance to see Kobayashi during my time here after all, which is a bit sad... but I'm spoilt for choice when it comes to other instructors :)

Tonight will be an early night to keep me fresh for tomorrow, hopefully after I can drag my UKTI handler, Tony Hughes, off to the Ninja Restaurant round the corner...

A couple of weeks back I wandered along to Write Club, a night that James and Ellen have kicked off, hosted by the mighty Skiff. The format intrigued me - we were to be shown a photograph, then given a very short amount of time to write a story based on it: 15 minutes, then 10, then 5, then 2. Over the last 6 months I've been really interested in extremely constrained creativity, and I've been routinely surprised by how much gets achieved by teams participating in the Mobile Mountains workshops I've been running... so the format was very appealing, and perhaps less intimidating than I might otherwise have found it.

I don't think I'd written any fiction - other than proposals and press releases - since I was 13 years old, and despite doing a fair bit of public speaking, I was pretty nervous about reading my work out. James very kindly prefixed the event with a stern warning that there were to be no apologies - a staple of spoken-word events, I understand - and I felt that the timeboxed format gave me a convenient excuse for any misgivings I might have over the quality of my work. Even with that, I can't claim to be happy with it - I found myself routinely heading in the same direction, overly clever-clever stories which spend too much effort trying to be twisty, shocking or rude. Ah well - it was interesting to observe myself heading down the same track again and again, even when I was trying not to, and encourages me to work on developing a bit of breadth.

I've posted my stories, together with the photos that inspired them, below; and I'm looking forward to the next event already :)

The Harpooning of the Synchronised Swimmer (15 minutes) "My dad and I, we've been doing it for years... and he did it with his dad. I'm making it sound like a tradition, but really I think it's just us, we've got a bit of a taste for it. I'd be lying if I didn't say I enjoyed it.

We go out late at night; before the early morning fishermen slide their boats down the rough shingle and out into the water, we're already a few miles out. Dad knows where they go - says the sea tells him, affecting a slight cod-sailor lilt as he does so. Me, I think he's nuts but I don't like to say anything.

Sometimes we'll see none for three, four days, and then we'll hit a shoal, sliding in and out of the water, showing off to each other. It's a bit weird seeing them out in the cold green water under the smokey-grey sky: indoors is kinder for them, they have a much better life there.

My grandpa once caught eight of them, flapping away in eerie unison, still miming at one another 'n' slamming their pouty gobs open and shut as he harpooned them, one at a time, dragged them onto the wet deck and tenderly clubbed them unconscious for the ride home.

We get them back and pile them off the boat, make sure they're they'll all still compus, then it's down a back-alley at the docks to a man who knows a man who knows a man. He say takes them up to a lockup in Gatwick then it's abroad with 'em - I hear Moscow and Eastern Europe are popular these days. We don't get the best price, but it's better than a kick in the teeth; a pair will sell for more than double, a quad can make the month.

I saw the quad again, on the telly - 2008 I think, Beijing - only for a brief flash as I was flicking channels. I recognised the scar dad's barb in one of the four legs as they lifted out of the water as one, then I switched over for Hollyoaks."

Shitrag migration (10 minutes)

Morning breaks. Nothing on the mat.

"Fucking lazy fucking bastard paperboy, sacked off for the morning, no bloody respect" he grumbles, voice falling unsteadily from outrage to nothing as a month-old stain of ketchup catches his attention and derails his train of thought.

3 hours pass. Not even a bill, not even a flyer advertising window cleaners or new local sellers of pizza.

"Fucking bastard postie, fucking striking bollocks", he opines, to no-one in particular, and no-one nods quietly in agreement.

Bereft of any contact with the outside world but not really missing it all that much, he shuffles around the filthy flat. He can't find the takeaway menu - where'd she put it this time? So he cobbles together a filthy lunch, and for dessert repairs upstairs to enjoy a characteristically unpleasant 3pm bowel motion - relief followed by the crushing disappointment and then shame that only a hollow cardboard tube can bring.

As the sun crawls down the horizon and he settles down filthed in front of countdown, creases stretch out and thin triangular wings start to flex. Briefly darkening the view through the back window, the origami flock rises as one and heads 180 degrees off magnetic north for the long flight home.

Reluctant Ringmaster (5 minutes)

"Roll up, roll up, see the artist! Marvel at his brushmanship! Wonder at his innovative use of oils! Quake at the implied satire of his imagery!"

The top hat is unnecessarily OTT and slightly patronising. Plus it's dark and it's wet and it's late and I want to go inside and curl up with a ham sandwich, a jammy dodger, and Radio 1, but he says I'm not allowed to until it's done.

I bash out an especially unpleasant caricature of a rotund women who's brought her two children to see me. She shrieks, her eyes well up and they slope off, leaving 6 neat puddles of tears.

I get the night off.

Statue Pipe (2 minutes)

I been here 200 years, protected by Arts Council funding and a large umbrella-like structure which keeps the worst of the rain off and offers protection to the crowd which inevitably gathers beneath my chin in a storm. Penniless artists touch me up on occasion, keeping me fresh.

And then there's the museum next door, new plumbing, grade 1 listed over my grade 2, and I'm half-blinded by the new drain running through my left eye.