John Wargo

The View updated its web site today and I'm now listed as a Technical Advisor for the publication. I'm excited and looking forward to writing mobility-related articles for the publication and getting other mobile domino geeks like me to publish articles. Let me know if you have a topic in mind.

Here's a link to the advisor listing.

Last year I wrote a series of articles about how to build a BlackBerry application that talked to a Domino database. I intended it to be a series of three articles but it quickly grew to 4 and those articles have been heavily read and frequently commented on. I’m probably going to write a fifth article in that series that talks about some of the issues related to web services and JME and hopefully another article that shows how to talk to the same Domino web service from a BlackBerry Widget. I hope to get a chance to work on those articles in a while, but in the mean time I have some other things to write about.

At Lotusphere this year, I presented a session that basically covered everything that’s in that original article series plus demonstrated writing a Windows Mobile application that talked to the same service (let me know if you’d like me to write an article about it – I’d thought of doing it, but wasn’t sure if people cared). For this year’s conference I wanted to spice things up a little bit and add Android and possibly iPhone examples of the same application to my session.

The thing about Android and iPhone is that unlike BlackBerry and Windows Mobile, the platforms do not have native support for consuming Web Services. So, in order to be able to work with Domino from Android or iPhone you have to find another way to do it. What I did for those sample applications was rewrite the code for the service into a Domino agent that returned JavaScript Object Notation (JSON – www.json.org) when called through a web URL. It didn’t take me that long to do and it works very well, so I have what I need to work with the other mobile platforms. So, in the next few weeks, I’m going to publish an article that describes the JSON-based web service.

I wasn’t able to get the Android example done in time for Lotusphere (not without trying, I killed a lot of nights in Orlando during the conference furiously trying to get the app done – god thing I was recovering from pneumonia and didn’t want to party anyway). A while after Lotusphere I finally got the application done, so I’m going to cover that application at the View conference in a few weeks. After the conference (perhaps before if I get time) I’m going to publish an article that illustrates how to build an Android application that talks to the JSON-based web service. Just so you believe that it works, here’s a screen shot of the application.

I’m most of the way through building the same application for the iPhone. It’s been a nightmare building the application – Objective-C is so weird and complicated that I’m really struggling to finish the last part of the application. I’m planning to finish the application in time for the conference, I think I can do it, but like I said, I’m struggling. I’m probably not going to publish anything here about the iPhone application – I’m going to see if I can get an article about the application published in the View. Stay tuned on that one. Just to whet your appetite here’s a screen shot of the application.

Apparently March 18th was a big day for updates to applications in the BlackBerry App World. As the screen shot below shows, my device inbox was all of a sudden filled with notices of applications that needed to be upgraded.

Nice, I like that the system notifies me and I can tell quickly which applications need updates. When I opened the App World application, one of the things I quickly noticed was that App World didn’t have the means to update all of the applications simultaneously. Instead, I was presented with a list like the one shown in the following screen shot.

Rather than give me an easy option to update all of the applications, I had to select each application individually and start the update for each manually. Granted the developers of the application didn’t expect so many updates on the same day, but they probably should have.
This is one of the things I like about the Apple App Store, when there are a bunch of updates, you can click the ‘Update all’ button and all of the affected applications are updated.

This is a hard one – you don’t want to code for every possible options for an application, but pick the ones that you think will happen most often (and cover other cases later). But the App World application has been updated several times and if the number of applications was expected to grow (as it has) then the developers should have made accommodation for the case where multiple applications have updates simultaneously.

I’m currently working as a project manager for an application for a major retailer and one of the things that came up this week is related to this. The application is calling a web service to retrieve a list of items from a list the user has created. The Web Service the application is calling supports a calling method that returns all list items, but also supports an option that allows you to specify a starting point in the list and the number of rows returned to the calling function.  The developer of the iPhone application called the operation using the default option (all items) and during testing the customer found that the application quickly crashed. Of course, the developer only tested with short lists and the customer’s QA department tested with huge lists. Both teams tested with unreasonable size lists and of course we had problems.

In this simple case, the developer, having seen that the back-end web service supported two calling methods, should have coded the application to accommodate very long lists in its original implementation. That way, the application would work with reasonable lists (10 to 20 items) but would also work when the list exceeded the original expectation. I know it’s more work, but that’s the way it should have been developed from the beginning. As it is, we’re already a little late for release of the application and the developer is trying to submit a change order for the new work to implement the system in a way that should have been done this way all along.

For those of you who are Domino developers – look at how IBM managed the default behavior when rendering a view in the browser – the default behavior (and the expected behavior) is when the view is short, display all documents. When the list is long, render the view in pages and allow the users to page between chunks of documents until they find the one they want. Another smart thing they did was make the default number of view rows that are displayed a configuration value on the server, but also something that could be easily overridden in the ?OpenView URL.

The big announcement this week came from Apple who finally announced background processing for the iPhone and iPad. Here's a snippet from an article in PC Magazine:

Within multitasking, Jobs also highlighted several capabilities, acknowledging that the company had been outpaced by other mobile operating systems with multitasking capabilities, just as other companies passed them in adding cut-and-paste capabilities. "We weren't first to this party, but we're going to be the best," Jobs said.

If a user wants to shift to another app, he or she can double tap the "home" button. A "dock" with recent applications will appear, allowing the user to shift to another application. Apps that aren't being used become "quiescent," and the OS saves their state and pulls resources from them. When the OS shifts back, those resources are re-allocated, and the user has a chance to resume where he or she left off, Jobs said.

"In multitasking, if you see a task manager, you blew it," Jobs said.

For me though, I'm still amazed at Apple's attitude toward its customers.

'Outpaced by other mobile operating systems'? Apple wasn't 'outpaced' by other operating systems with their ability to cut & copy text or run applications in the background - those are standard features that most every smartphone owner expects from their device and Apple decided for some bizarre reason not to include the features.  I just don't get it.  The only smartphone I can think of that didn't allow background apps was the Palm OS and I was surprised it lasted so long without the ability. Copy & Paste? The only smartphone that I can think of that didn't allow that was the original Motorola Q. Those features are minimum requirements for any OS and for Apple to pretend that they were outsmarted by their competitors is a joke.

Regarding Multitasking - how is Apple thinking double-clicking a button and bringing up a list of 'docked' applications to select from isn't a task manager? That button was designed to be clicked once to activate the device or take you back to the home screen - it's a pretty hefty push to activate it and people won't be good at double-clicking it. They've clearly tried for force fit this feature (when it should have been baked in from the very beginning). 

It's not even true multitasking - notice how the article references that applications that are pushed to the background are suspended? They're not running, their used memory is stored and retrieved later when the application is reactivated. I'm sorry, but that's not multitasking. I understand how a mobile platform would want to have the ability to suspend background tasks when memory is low, but applications should be able to run in the background and only give up their memory when needed.

Imagine a user who's about to beging a time consuming task. He starts the task then switches to another application to do something productive while the original application is doing its stuff. In this scenario the user expects the application to continue with its processing, but according to the description of the 'feature' that's not what will happen.

The iPhone and the iPad are amazing devices, but I'm still continually stunned by Apple's analysis of the market and what it thinks its users will accept as reasonable. Of course, I'v ebeen having some serious arguments lateley with some friends of mine and one of them contends that Apple is catering to people who don't care about these features and that they'll just take whatever Apple gives them. I have to admit I don't get it.