Posts Tagged: berlin

Articles — Comments Off
10
Aug 10

Knocking Down (Geo Data’s) Brick Walls

Earlier this week I was interviewed by Cian O’Sullivan for GoMo News as part of the run-up to the Location Business Summit in San Jose. The interview is now up on the GoMo News site and is reproduced here with permission.

Ovi Places: Mobile Navigation needs to knock down its brick walls

When Ovi Maps launched at the start of this year, it really shook up the navigation industry. The free software gave everyone with access to Nokia’s Ovi Store a perfectly serviceable Personal Navigation Device (PND), completely for free. But Ovi Maps is just the first exposure of the Nokia branch called Ovi Places. Recently appointed Director of Ovi Places, Gary Gale, took some time to talk to GoMo News about the state of mobile navigation ahead of his appearance at the Location Business Summit, USA, 14-15 September, San Jose.

Most people know about Ovi Maps, but a lot won’t have heard about Ovi Places. What is it, exactly?

It’s the slightly unglamorous name for a set of back-end systems that understand what people are looking for. Within the Ovi Maps client, on both mobile and internet, there’s the ability to look for what the industry calls Points Of Interest – or POIs. But we prefer the term “places” – because POIs comes laden with preconceived baggage. Our colleagues in Japan consider anything that isn’t nailed down as a POI, including bus stops, park benches or traffic lights. That can lead to too-much data, an overflow that can’t be easily consumed. People tend to think of these kind of location and navigation services as a yellow pages business listings – which is certainly important for the classic LBS model of “where am I, and what’s around me”. But Ovi Places takes into account local information, colloquial information, landmarks and places you’d want to go to as a tourist. For example, where I am in the Nokia office in the middle of Berlin, we’ve got the really common tourist POIs showing up – like the Brandenburg Gate, for example – but Places also refers to an excellent restaurant in the courtyard below me, and a local coffee shop.

If there were more signs like this.......

Where do you source that info? Are there Places fact finders or do you buy the info?

It comes from a variety of sources. Some of it comes from commercial data providers – this is actually one of the main reasons we acquired NAVTEQ, and why TomTom bought TeleAtlas. Digital mapping companies have a rich set of data above and beyond the normal PND stuff. But there are also a whole variety of specialist premium partners that we do deals with; we’re talking about regional specialists that we talk to on a country-by-country basis in order to gain their local insight.

There is no “one true” source of data – you need to make a lot of partnerships to get the best local data available.

At the moment, Ovi Places really only powers the Ovi Maps application. Are there plans for more services to exist under a Places umbrella?

At the moment, it’s exposed only through Ovi Maps. For the future… I can’t say anything specific, but watch this space!

How do you plan to make mobile location more personal to the mobile user?

Actually, the mobile user is probably the easiest use case for navigation. Your device has lot of options available to it to determine your location. From there, services like Places can provide rich experiences. The key problem is whilst all of this is pretty much mainstream now, there is a “Bay Area bubble” where a lot of the products and services coming out seem to think your user will always have a smartphone, and will always have a GPS lock with an excellent data connection. That may be fine for San Francisco, and even Western Europe. Sometimes even areas you think would be well served are awful. I recently went on a trip to Calais – when I got off the ferry and the GPS took 15 mins to pick up a lock. So you have to realise that there can be patchy 3G data coverage in even highly developed countries, and then look at areas which have growing economies and even worse connections. There are places in Africa and Asia that won’t have 3G data in the next 5 or 10 years.

You mentioned that mobile users are the easy use cases – what would you consider to be a challenging case?

The challenges arise when you’ve got infrastructure problems. Consider some of the poster child location services, like Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp. Lack of 3G data infrastructure doesn’t appear to be factored into the business models for these companies. Try using one of them in Africa, or India, or Asia. The infrastructure isn’t there to address these needs. The populace simply don’t have access to these services.

Is Places doing anything to address that problem?

We’re looking at potential handsets that don’t need a dedicated on-board GPS or AGPS. They don’t need the typical app store economy. We’re able to tap into cell tower triangulation, where local laws and legislation permits it. It may not be as accurate as a GPS lock, but it’s better than nothing.

Is that really important for a developing country? How worried is a resident really going to be about their location services.

I think the best answer to that is from an article by Dr. Tero Ojanperä (Executive Vice President of Services, Mobile Solutions, Nokia). He said that the target is less about producing a device that runs apps than it is about creating a really useful platform – it’s more about producing a context-aware device, that gives you the best relevancy depending on the services available to it.  ”It’s about devices that offer truly connected services and learn your habits so well that they can give you what you want“. That means you have a service that will provide good services to every customer, no matter what the state of their local infrastructure is.

Last month I was at the GeoLoco conference in San Francisco, talking on a panel about the challenges the industry is facing. An audience member asked “what advice would the panellists give to someone who is trying to establish a foothold in location?” I felt my answer got the most responses, at least on the Twitter back-channel. which was “I come from Europe – don’t forget that we exist! There is a market outside of North America that is different in its needs and infrastructure“.

Services like TeleAtlas and OpenStreetMap (OSM) make a lot of use of crowd-sourced info. Does Ovi Places allow for that?

Very much so. We already have this kind of functionality built into the newer handsets, allowing you to add corrections and updates while you are on location. Crowd sourcing is very much a part of this industry’s future – but I don’t think it’s the panacea that people think it might be. It’s a vital additional source, but not the best thing since sliced bread until; at least, not until the industry gets together and comes up with a way to verify and editorialise new info. It’s a benevolent technological anarchy – because there’s no formalised control over how you tag a place, a consumer has to accept that finding out how to use the data will take significant time and revenue investment. If your local authority is trying to map its assets, you want to make sure those assets are exactly where you claim – because taxation and revenue streams can be assessed on that. If you get that wrong, it will lead to the kind of bad press a local authority doesn’t want. Especially if emergency services are trying to get to a specific street address – you need that data to be 100% accurate.

What do you think the main challenges facing mobile navigation are?

I think there two main challenges.

First is the privacy angle. People don’t quite understand what it is that they’re giving up to use the latest LBS app. You need to make sure that people understand the value proposition on the table when they’re giving up their location to gain relevance in their local search. The public as a whole needs to understand this. And it will probably be driven by tabloid headlines – some celebrity who gets divorced because a location service proves they weren’t where they said they were. And it would be better if it didn’t happen that way. I hope the Industry is open and transparent about it as much as possible. It will be to our detriment if we don’t expose this kind of information, and something sensationalist does happen.

Second, there’s a need for people to talk to one another. We’re all building loads of very rich data sets – OSM is doing it, Facebook, Foursquare, government services, NAVTEQ – but at the moment, to unlock their potential, they need to talk to each other. The current licensing set up means location data is still stored in a series of vertical silos which aren’t allowed to work with each other. And the actual industry moves so fast that even those who are involved in it find it hard to keep up with developments. So keeping the legal and licensing system up-to-date with it must be nightmarish. It’s getting increasingly more difficult to get solid patents in this area – and patents being wielded by the patent troll houses are being used in a way they were never intended. In order to work around this, I think the future will have to be less about aggregating these data silos, and more about synchronising the end-point exposure. If you have an identifier in one data set that corresponds to an identifier in another data set, they can sync up and present a united service to the end user… without having to share protected data.

Plant on Brick Wall

Gary Gale will be speaking at the Location Business Summit, 14-15 September, San Jose, where he’ll be further addressing the issues surrounding the “silo problem” and licensing issues.

Photo Credits: William Warby and Ajith Kumar on Flickr.
Written and posted from the Nokia gate5 office in Berlin (52.53105, 13.38521)
Journal — 4 Comments
30
Jul 10

Cartographically Speaking; Data (Lots), Maps (Not So Much), Problems (Many)

In September I’ll be at the 46th. Annual Society of Cartographers Summer School at the University of Manchester where I’m lucky enough to have been asked to give a talk on geographic data. This topic should come as no surprise to anyone who’s come across one of my blog posts.

I’ll be talking about Welcome To The World Of The Geo Data Silo; Where Closed Data Is Open And Open Data Is Closed; the talk abstract is now up on the SoC web site and it’s reproduced below.

We’ve been mapping the world around us for centuries, even before the Mappa Mundi first appeared in Hereford Cathedral. But now, as location becomes ubiquitous (if you have a smartphone and you’re not in an urban canyon), as the major and minor players coalesce into the nebulous thing we call the “geo industry” and as there’s sources of geographic data everywhere, suddenly the map isn’t the important thing anymore. Now, it’s all about the data.

At this year’s Where 2.0 in the heart of Silicon Valley, a veritable geo-fest if ever there was one, the map was strangely absent. Instead we have data, lots of data.

data slide

Some of it commercial and authoritative (Navteq and Teleatlas), some of it niche and authoritative (Urban Mapping), some of it country specific and authoritative (Britain’s Ordnance Survey) and some of it crowd sourced and growing aggressively (OpenStreetMap). But there’s also data from unlikely allies, from geo-tagged photos (Flickr), from location based social networking services (FourSquare and Gowalla) and from forward thinking experimental authorities (Vancouver’s Open Data Catalogue).

Data, data everywhere. Some physical, some spatial, some subjective, some colloquial. But all of it locked in its own private little data silo. There’s much irony here as well, as previously proprietary data becomes unlocked and open (Ordnance Survey) and open, crowd sourced data become locked behind a well meaning but restrictive license.

You could call this Geo-Babel and we’re in the midst of it right now. How can we recognise this and, more importantly, how can we as part of the geo industry dig ourselves out of this hole?

… now I just need to write the talk and the accompanying slide deck in time.

Photo Credits: bionicteaching on Flickr
Written and posted from Berlin Tegel Airport (52.5545447, 13.2899969)
Journal — Comments Off
30
Jul 10

Berlin’s Tegel Airport; From Plane To Taxi In Under A Minute

According to that fount of online knowledge Wikipedia, an airport “is a location where aircraft such as fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and blimps takeoff and land“. You don’t see that many blimps around these days but it seems simple enough. Airport. A contraction of the words aircraft and port. But not all airports are created equal. Take Heathrow for example, which, under the ownership of BAA is now less an airport and more a rambling shopping mall, spread over 5 terminal buildings, where hapless passengers (note to UK railway companies, we’re passengers not customers) are crammed into a small space in order to extract the maximum amount of cash out of them in overpriced shops, bars and restaurants and where the act of getting on and off a plane seems to be tacked on as an afterthought.

Even with travellators between the gates and the fun and games of immigration and baggage reclaim it can take anything up to half an hour from the moment you get off a plane to the time you emerge blinking into the outside world.

What a refreshing change it is then to use (the soon to be closed and replaced with Brandenburg International Airport) Berlin’s Flughäfen Tegel, where checking in takes minutes and where the duration from plane to taxi rank can be measured in seconds not minutes. Sounds hard to believe but yesterday while waiting to disembark from a flight from Heathrow I idly set the stopwatch on my iPhone and started the timer running the moment I stepped off the plane. I then stopped it the moment my backside met the seat of a taxi outside the terminal building. Total elapsed time from plane to taxi … 52 seconds.

Berlin Tegel Airport. From Plane to Taxi In Less Than A Minute.

Fifty two seconds. Count them. 52. Fifty two. Less than a minute. Lovely and plush and modern as Brandenburg airport will be when it finally opens, allegedly in 2012, it won’t be a patch on Tegel.

Written at the Radisson Blu hotel, Berlin (52.519648, 13.40258) and posted from Berlin Tegel Airport (52.5545447, 13.2899969)
Journal — 2 Comments
29
Jul 10

Geo-Loco; Where The Geo-Wonks Meet The Geo-Clueless And All Points Inbetween

Last week I was in San Francisco, ostensibly to meet with fellow Nokians in Mountain View and Palo Alto, the homes of Google and Stanford University respectively. But I was also there to take part in a panel on the topic of “is geo loco a business or a feature?” at the Geo-Loco conference, chaired by geo-eminence grise Marc Prioleau.

With the explosion of interest in all things geo recently (and for once I think the hyperbole is justified) and thus a large amount of new conferences on the topic, I was somewhat skeptical of how Geo-Loco would pan out. But the presence of Marc Prioleau and other geo-rati such as LikeList’s Tyler Bell, Urban Mapping’s Ian White, Tom Coates, the man behind Yahoo’s Fire Eagle and Waze’s Di-Ann Eisnor, to name but a few, swayed me to participate.

I was interested to hear how Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures would keynote but was sadly disappointed; it was a rambling and somewhat disjointed affair with little structure or insight; the sole exception of which was an interesting technique to quickly mashup your Foursquare check-ins on Google Maps. Thankfully Fred fared much better when interviewed one-on-one later in the day by John Batelle of Federated Media, which produced an engaging discussion on the state of the geo market; some of which I even agreed with.

Geo-Loco Conference 2010

Proof that Geo-Loco was a fully fledged geoconference was evident in the Twitter back channel which was, by turns, witty, informed, damning, sarcastic, enlightening and downright funny. I may have contributed to this part of the proceedings. A bit. Here’s a brief sampler of some of the comments the speakers and panels contributed to, albeit inadvertently.

One of the braver panels was chaired by Phil Hendrix of IMMR who asked the audience and a panel consisting of the Institute for the Future’s Michael Liebhold, GigaOm’s Liz Gannes, the aforementioned Di-Ann Eisnor, Rackspace’s Robert Scoble and Google’s Lior Ron (who I’m not sure uttered a single word during the entire panel) to pontificate on the futures of location based services.

Now, making predictions of any sort is a risky business at best, even more so when those predictions are on an industry moving as rapidly as geo, a fact I noted last month in an article for Coordinates Magazine …

Attempts to predict the growth, success and uptake of technology are rife. Accurate predictions, less so. “There’s no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home“, said Ken Olsen, then founder and CEO of DEC in 1977. “I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers” is apocryphally attributed to Thomas Watson of IBM in 1943.

… but the panel gamely attempted to agree, disagree or abstain on 5 statements.

Geo-data will be free, with OpenStreetMap and other crowd-driven open-source data eclipsing commercial vendors.

Oh dear. Not this one again. Quite correctly the panel were split on this. Whilst I’m a big fan and supported of OpenStreetMap, this will not sweep all pretenders to the throne to one side and reign supreme. There is no one sole authoritative source of geographical data in the world for very good reasons; differences in use, in scope, in language support, in coverage, in acquisition methods; the list goes on and on. Even with the success of OSM, I’d still feel safer if the emergency services route their vehicles to where they’re needed by using official national geo data. It’s also worth noting that whilst people don’t seem to want to pay for geographic data any more, both Navteq and Teleatlas were acquired by Nokia and TomTom respectively precisely because of the value inherent in their authoritative views of the world, albeit one tempered by the Personal Navigation Device view of the world.

Location-awareness will be integral to any mobile app.

There was pretty much widespread agreement from the panel on this one. My take, whilst in general agreement, is tempered with the fact that we don’t all live in the Silicon Valley bubble, where there’s 3G coverage everywhere and everyone has a smartphone capable of location awareness. Will location be integral to smartphone apps? Undoubtedly. Will location be integral to all forms of app running on any nomadic device, be it tablet, laptop, phone or otherwise? Only if there’s an infrastructure to support it already in place, which gives the developing nations a disadvantage.

More than half of all mobile advertising in 2014 will be location based.

Not much agreement on this point from the panel and I’m in accord with them; advertising is notoriously difficult to predict at the best of times and to put a 50% figure on all mobile ads being location based in 4 years time should be viewed with extreme cynicism.

Virtually all user-generated content will be geo-tagged.

The panel were enthusiastically with this point and I’m also with them. But again, not everywhere in the world has the networking infrastructure to support geo-tagging so this statement needed to be viewed with cautious agreement. We’re also long overdue a highly publicised event which brings the topic of location privacy to the general public’s attention; the result of which may cause a significant turn off of location services. When, and not if, that happens, the prediction for location based advertising looks on even shakier ground than it is right now.

Proximity will become a critical filter for content.

Well yes, duuh, but isn’t this already happening? Either through our own efforts to obtain relevancy, through constraining search queries to locations or through localised services. The question should really be “automatic, meaningful, proximity will become a key context for content” as there’s no relevancy obtained by automatically constraining results to a local area when what you’re really looking for is information on your next vacation destination.

Photo Credits: Ken Yeung on Flickr.
Written at the London Heathrow BA Lounge (51.47286, -0.48726) and posted from the Radisson Blu hotel, Berlin (52.519648, 13.40258)
Journal — Comments Off
2
Jul 10

Service Suspended On The London Underground (API)

If you build it they will come. Or to put it another way, sometimes demand outstrips supply. After the phenomenal success of the Transport For London Tube API, the London Datastore blog sadly notes:

Owing to overwhelming demand by apps that use the service, the London Underground feed has had to be temporarily suspended. We hope to restore the service as soon as possible but this may take some days. We will keep everyone informed of progress towards a resolution.

In the meantime, if you want to see how it does looks when the API is up and running there’s a video clip of Matthew Somerville’s recent Science Day hack visualisation over on my Flickr photo and video stream.

No Victoria line service after 2000 tonight

Photo Credits: Martin Deutch on Flickr.
Written and posted from Berlin Tegel Airport (52.5545447, 13.2899969)
Journal — Comments Off
24
Jun 10

Where’s My Tube Train? Ah, There’s My Tube Train

Back in December of 2009, I wrote about Paul Clarke trying to solve the problem of where’s my train; that there must be a definitive, raw source of real-time (train) information and that

I assert that train operators know where their assets are; it would be irresponsible if they didn’t

Whilst the plethora of train operators that fragmented from the ashes of the old British Rail network haven’t answered this challenge yet, Transport for London has, opening up just such data as part of the London Datastore API. In today’s age of talented web mashup developers, if you release an API people will build things with it if the information is useful and interesting and that’s just what Matthew Somerville of MySociety did at the recent Science Hack Day … a (near) realtime map of the London Underground showing the movement of trains of all of the Tube lines. A screen grab wouldn’t do it justice and it takes a while to load, so a video grab might help here.

Coming down the escalators at Waterloo and want to know whether to head for the Bakerloo or the Northern Line to take you north of the river? Now you can tell which line has a northbound train closest to Waterloo.

Want to see just how close the gap is between Leicester Square and Covent Garden on the Piccadilly Line really is? Now you can.

Of course, this doesn’t solve every problem …

  1. If you’re on the escalators at Waterloo how do you get 3G data coverage to view this mashup on your phone as Transport for London still haven’t manage to achieve cellular coverage underground, unlike Amsterdam, Berlin and other cities?
  2. The site will probably be the target of a tutting campaign from the Health and Safely police insisting that such a visualisation will cause people to run for the train and of course, they might trip and hurt themselves.
  3. If you’re at the top of the escalator and the train is in the station, now, right this very minute now, how do you get down to the platforms quickly?

Whilst I can’t answer the first two of these questions, this publicity stunt from Volkswagon at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz U-Bahn station might just hold the solution for the third question … a slide!

Written and posted from the Ramada Hotel Berlin Mitte in Berlin (52.529858, 13.383858)
Journal — 1 Comment
23
Jun 10

Getting You There; The Battle Between PND, Mobile And Car

Attempts to predict the growth, success and uptake of technology are rife. Accurate predictions, less so. “There’s no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home“, said Ken Olsen, then founder and CEO of DEC in 1977. “I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers” is apocryphally attributed to Thomas Watson of IBM in 1943.

It’s easy to say “well … duh” with the benefit of hindsight in 2010 but consider this. The first generation of in-car GPS units appeared in 1996. If anyone had told you that 14 years later you’d be running something infinitely more sophisticated and customisable, more powerful than one of Olsen’s DEC VAX computers that I started out on, on a device that you stuck in your pocket and which, by the way connected to a global network of computers and was also a telephone, you’d probably not have believed them or suggested that at a minimum they cut their coffee intake back.

Another reason not to trust everything computers tell you

Fast forward back to 2010; the big two mapping data providers, Teleatlas and Navteq, have both been acquired, Garmin, once synonymous with GPS is looking increasingly less and less relevant and both Google and Nokia are offering full turn by turn navigation on mobile devices, for free.

So how will this play out? What will dominate? PNDs, telematics dashboard “info-tainment” systems or mobile phones? It’s probably going to be all three but not in their current form thanks to the headlong convergence of computer, phone, camera, internet terminal and PND.

In 1996 the first GPS navigation systems were the preserve of the high end, executive car marques; both prestigious and viewed as a luxury commodity they were the precursor of today’s info-tainment consoles. Skip to 2004 and TomTom’s GO was one of the first of the now ubiquitous PNDs at commodity prices. Six years later and GPS enabled mobile phones are capable of running the same, turn by turn navigation systems but for free and they come preloaded with the handset. Sensing that most consumers are unlikely or unwilling to pay for a dedicated PND when they can have a free navigation system on their mobile the market is reacting and we’re seeing the first interfaces between smartphone and info-tainment consoles such as that from Harman and Nokia.

Get Your Free Sat Nav Here

Surely this means that we’ve come full circle and moving back to in-car based systems? I doubt it. The mobile offering has all the advantages; multi modal routing, pedestrian routing, your music collection, a camera, a phone, an internet console with email and social media apps yet none of the disadvantages; additional subscription cost, another gadget to carry, only works in the car.

The mobile phone and the in-car console are here to stay; the PND is destined for extinction. But like Messrs. Olsen and Watson, I could be wrong.

Written for and originally published in the June edition of Coordinates magazine.

Photo Credits: Unhindered by Talent and Paul Robinson on Flickr.
Written and posted from the Ramada Hotel Berlin Mitte in Berlin (52.529858, 13.383858)
Journal — 1 Comment
17
Jun 10

Two Weeks In; Of Dog Food, Mobile Handsets and Finnish Doors

Two weeks into the Nokia and Ovi experience and I can finally pause and catch my breath. It’s been an intense two weeks and asking me what my impressions are of Nokia are akin to putting someone at the top of a very large, very steep and very fast roller coaster, watching them plummet down and then, before they’re even out of their seat, asking them to comment on what the scenery was like. So I won’t even try to comment on the scenery and will instead merely record the four things that have stuck in my mind.

I’ve been busy. I’ve been very busy. I’ve also been at home for all of two days in the last two weeks and whilst video chatting with my family over Skype is better than a plain old fashioned voice call it’s no substitute for being at home more; but things will settle down into a more manageable routine over the coming weeks. Being busy has meant that I’ve kept my head down and tried to assimilate all the new information with which I’m being bombarded, a fact that’s not gone unnoticed by Chris Osborne … “severe drop off in @vicchi’s bloggage and tweetage levels, means that maybe, just maybe, he is actually doing some work these days“. Quite.

Nokia gate5 GmbH

I learnt today that Ovi is Finnish for door, proving for once the adage that you learn something new every day.

At Yahoo! we used to talk about eating our own dog food a lot; thankfully meaning that a company should use the products that it makes rather than that the employees develop a predilection for Pedigree Chum. Although it took me the best part of the first week to notice, Nokia certainly eats its own dog food; apart from the ever present starfish style conferencing phones in meeting rooms, there’s no desk phones at all. None. But everyone has a mobile, and uses them a lot, either over the cellular network or hooked up to the internal VOIP system through the office wifi. Actually everyone seems to have more than one mobile handset, two, three and even four handsets doesn’t seem to be unusual.

I can haz new badge pleez?

In a previous role I seemed to spend a lot of my time talking about why location and all of the many geo facets it encompasses is important. Many was a meeting with a senior exec which started with the depressing question “so .. location … is it really important?“. Nokia gets location; there’s absolutely no doubt about that. The question is now how do we deliver real value and real market share with location … and that’s half the fun and half the challenge.

New Job. New City. New Desk. New Country

Written and posted from the Radisson Blu Hotel, Berlin, Germany (52.519426, 13.403229)
Journal — 2 Comments
21
Jan 10

iPass Connect on the Mac; great service, appallingly designed app

I find myself travelling a lot for work these days and that means a roaming service for wifi hotspots and hotel internet connections really makes life simpler. I could maintain subscriptions to The Cloud, T-Mobile Hotspots, BT OpenZone and so on and so on, but fortunately Yahoo! provides me with an iPass subscription.

iPass is great; it allows me to connect to pretty much every hotspot and hotel internet service there is. I’ve been using it for over 4 years now and can only think of a single time when I haven’t been able to get a connection. I’m using it right now, sitting in the departures lounge at Berlin’s Tegel airport waiting for my flight back to London.
So far, so great, but the current, Snow Leopard supporting, version of the iPassConnect app, v3.1, seems to have been designed by someone with scant regard for anything approaching consistency and usability. Let me count the ways in which this app frustrates.
1. Quit iPassConnect? I see no Quit menu option.
From the Mac OS X GUI you can’t stop iPass running. The app lives in your menu bar and scans and rescans for wireless networks (which I’m sure reduces battery life) even when it’s connected to a wireless network. If I’m connected to a wireless network why would I want to look for another network, all the time, constantly? There’s a red and white animation going on in the menu bar which I’m sure someone thought was cute but which is incredibly distracting. But let’s overlook that for a moment. To quit an app, you simply select the menu bar and select Quit or press Cmd-Q.
Not that I’ve ever been able to find the mythical Quit command for iPassConnect. The only way to kill the damn thing is from within Activity Monitor or by the killall command from the shell within Terminal.
Simple resolution: Let the user choose when they want to run your app and when they don’t. Add a Quit command.
2. Install as a Login Item? Every single time?
It’s a simple, plain fact that the more apps you have in your account’s Login Items, the slower your login time will be. Like most people, I keep the number of Login Items down to a bare minimum and then start apps up as I need them. If I don’t use something all day, every day, it’s very unlikely that I want to make it a Login Item. Most apps are well behaved and ask your permission before inserting themselves as a Login Item but not iPassConnect. Run the app and hey presto you get a Login Item. Mildly annoying but at least you can remove it from your list of Login Items. Run the app again though and hey presto you get a Login Item. Each and every single time. It’s frustrating the first time it happens and induces psychosis after the hundredth such occurrence.
This is uncontrollable, un-configurable, totally unacceptable and verging on downright insulting. It’s an app designer’s way of saying to the user “I don’t care what your preferences are, I know better than you”.
Simple resolution: Act in a well behaved manner, ask the user for their preference, act on it and remember it.
3. Update? What update?
Most apps these days have a way of calling home and checking for an update. For those apps that run within a window there’s usually an Updates option in the application’s menu. For those apps that don’t run in a window there’s usually an option in their preferences pane. Note the word usually and let’s have a look at the iPassConnect preference pane.
There’s an Updates tab which is a good start. There’s an Enable automatic updates option which is also a good thing. But it only controls the hotspot dictionary that the app maintains. Want to update the app or know whether there’s an update available? Not with this app (and the iPass website is remarkably update free as well).
Simple resolution: Add an update option and ask the user if they want to check for updates.
4. Snow Leopard support. In 32-bits.
Snow Leopard continues Apple’s march towards a pure 64-bit operating system. A cursory glance at Activity Monitor shows that most apps running are Intel (64-bit) and this includes the System Preferences app. So let’s try to set some preferences for iPassConnect.
Ah yes, the iPassConnect preferences pane is 32-bit which means that you have to restart System Preferences in 32-bit mode and there it stays, running in 32-bit mode, until you manually restart System Preferences in the default 64-bit mode.
Simple resolution: If you say your app has Snow Leopard support then fully support Snow Leopard. That means 64-bitness across the board.
iPass is a great service, it deserves a great app; version 3.1 is not that app.
Written and posted from Berlin Tegel Airport (52.5545447, 13.2899969)

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

Journal — 18 Comments
19
Jan 10

Is it Great Britain, the United Kingdom, the British Isles or what exactly?

In February 2009 I wrote a post for the Yahoo! Geo Technologies blog about how people outside of the United Kingdom are sometimes confused by the vagaries of how to correctly write street addresses in the UK and if the United Kingdom is a country and if England is a country then how can England be part of the United Kingdom. Some pointed comments to the original post ensued from the likes of Ed Parsons from Google and Andrew Larcombe from the British Computer Society’s Geospatial Specialist Group.

And so almost a year later I went back and started to research exactly how the United Kingdom, Great Britain and the British Isles are actually put together. It was an educational journey because, even with being born and bred in London, it turned out that even I didn’t fully understand this subject. So I tried to codify it with a variation on The Great British Venn Diagram, which looks something like this:

Let’s start with the easy bit. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are constituent countries at an administrative level; they’re shown in yellow on the diagram above.

Great Britain, so named as to distinguish itself from Brittany, is a geographic island which comprises the countries of England, Scotland and Wales.

The United Kingdom is a sovereign state, shown in red, which comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Ireland, also a geographic island, contains the administrative country of Northern Ireland and the sovereign state of the Republic of Ireland or Eire.

So far so good, but what about the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands? Both of these are not part of the United Kingdom, instead they are both Crown Dependencies, shown in purple, and are part of a federacy with the United Kingdom. And a federacy? That’s a type of government where one or more of the member administrative units have more independence than the majority of the member administrative units.

Finally, there’s everything else; those remnants of the British Empire scattered across the globe which enjoy the slightly nondescript appellation of British Overseas Territories (or British Dependent Territories prior to 2002 or Crown Colonies prior to 1981).

To be more precise, these are parts of the British Empire that did not gain independence and that the United Kingdom asserts sovereignty over.  They take in Anguilla, Bermuda, British Antarctic Territory, British Indian Ocean Territory, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, Pitcairn Islands, St Helena, Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha, the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekalia and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Written and posted from the Kempinski Hotel Bristol in Berlin (52.5052405, 13.3280218)

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous