John Wargo

OK, so I got an iPad. I ordered one as soon as I could pre-order and had to wait an extra couple of days to get my hands on the device because I inadvertently had it shipped to my old address and was out of town on the 3rd. It finally arrived on Monday and I've been amazed with it ever since.

It's a truly amazing device and feels great in your hands. I've started downloading a bunch of news applications (I really want to be able to keep up with my local and world news on it – no more paper newspapers) and some fun drawing tools for the kids. What amazes me the most is the weather applications that are available for it. Considering the weather we've had here in North Carolina tonight (tornado watches and warnings) my wife and I have been sitting with it watching the radar maps and local weather report videos.

It truly is going to be a game changing device – I'm convinced that it's going to completely change the way people interact with computers. I found TweetDeck for it and I'm waiting for the FaceBook application to become available for it. I've found that the web browsing experience is really great – the browsing I've done and the surveys and form data entry I've done has been very comfortable.

I have been experiencing some pretty poor Wi-Fi connectivity issues. It was comforting to hear that others are having the same problem and that Apple has responded. My Wi-Fi access point is in one end of my house and I can't access the network on my iPad from the other side of the house. Even 25 or 30 feet away I'm really not getting the throughput that I should be getting. I'm going to wait semi-patiently to see what Apple does about the problem. This is the first Apple computing product I've purchased since my old Apple //e (with 1 MB of memory mind you) and I still believe they make amazing products (although I remain unimpressed with Steve Job's (er, I mean Apple's) attitude about iPhone applications). My employer has provided me with an iPhone and recently a MacBook (so I can do some iPhone development) and I'm having a lot of fun playing with the products. I'm still a BlackBerry user day to day, but the iPhone is great for applications. When the new OS becomes available and I can finally run background applications I'm sure I'll begin using my iPhone more frequently. Unfortunately Research In Motion really doesn't seem to be trying to stay in the sexiness game and it saddens me.

I am having a problem with the iPad Book Reader application. I've purchased some books (I even found a free Isaac Azimov book from Project Gutenberg) and I spent a recent road trip reading on the iPad. I've found it to be a very nice experience. The Book Reader application though has some formatting problems that I thought I'd point out.

When the book reader displays an italicized word next to a regular word, it scrunches up the space to the left of the italicized word so it looks like it's right next to the preceding word (no space between the words) as shown in the following figure.

Figure 1

For those readers of my What Were They Thinking series, the problem I'm having isn't related to the font size I have set on the device – rest assured that I'm running it at the default font settings for the device.

Additionally, when the reader uses small caps to render a person's title, I'm having the same problem – the words are all scrunched up as shown below:

Figure 2

Another thing I noticed is that when the Reader displays an Initial Caps for the first letter in a paragraph that it inserts some extra space between that line and the line that follows. It's not like it needs the extra space, it just adds it unnecessarily.

Figure 3

I'm going to keep watching to see if others are experiencing the same problem and whether Apple takes the time to fix it soon.

Did you see the survey results published recently about BlackBerry users saying they’d get an iPhone if they had to get a new phone today?  Check out Why BlackBerry Users Will Defect when you get a chance. Very telling and I hope the folks at Research In Motion are listening.

Another interesting note appeared online this week. The makers of the SkyFire browser announced that they were discontinuing development for the BlackBerry platform. You can find the announcement here. RIM just hasn't kept up with the market when it comes to platform capabilities. People want the iPhone and Android UI experience and they're done waiting for RIM to provide it. Look at RIM just releasing the development tools for BlackBerry Device Software 5.0 - the OS has been out for months now and RIM's finally getting around to releasing the development tools? Sad. Granted they were available in Beta for a long time, but who wants to build products or Enterprise applications with beta software?

A reader was kind enough to comment on my article: What Were They Thinking #6 and point out that the issue I was writing about was caused by my personal settings on the BlackBerry. If you look at the figure, you'll see that I'm clearly going blind (just kidding, just having trouble reading things) and have the font on my BlackBerry device cranked up high. The reader was right, the problem I was complaining about was my fault, but I contend that it still never should have happened. Here's my take on this:

First of all, since I'm looking at a listing of free apps, there's no need to list 'Free' for every item in the list. They're all free, there's no need to take up the screen space (and processing time to render) content that is not needed. Do you agree that highlighing the 'freeness' of a free application that's clearly already fee is a waste?

Second, although I agree that the issue I'm reporting is related to my personal font settings, it is the responsibility of the developer to detect the size of the fonts being used and adjust rendering on the screen accordingly. The developer of the application should have detected the font size (they alread did since we can see they used my font settings to render the screen) and make sure everything fits correctly using that font. There's no reason he or she couldn't have seen that the text as written was not going to fit into the allocated space (using the settings I've defined) and wrap the text on the screen so me, the user, would be able to read the entire application name. This is something I had to do in my Official's Record Keeper application in all of the reports. For any text I wanted to write to the report canvas, I had to check it's width and wrap it manually in the code. It's a pain in the you know what, but it's something that should have been addressed by the developer and I stand by my complaint.

Look at all of the extra, unused space created by the height of the application logo. They clearly had the room to extend the row to accommodate the wrapped application title. I'd rather have the extra space under the icon than under the text block - especially since I can't read the entire application title as it is.

For this installment of my What Were They Thinking series I’m going to pick on Research In Motion. Considering that they invented the whole smartphone market, they’re usually pretty good about designing BlackBerry applications with forethought and an attention to detail. After all, they created the platform and they’re responsible for maintaining consistency across all applications. Right?

I was browsing through the list of free applications in the BlackBerry App World application yesterday and was struck with how hard it was to read the application names in the list of free applications. See the figure below for an example of what I saw:

When building a mobile application, you have to pay special attention to first of all how much data is delivered across the wireless network and how much work the application has to do to process and render the data. This is wireless application 101 stuff.

When you look at the application list, you’ll notice that they’ve designed the application so you can see the application’s icon (useful for branding purposes) but only a portion of the application’s title. I don’t know about you, but I can’t tell what the application names are for these applications.

On top of that, take a look at how much screen space is taken up by the word ‘Free’ for each application. We already know it’s a list of free applications – if we didn’t remember that when we looked at the screen, we could have easily been reminded by looking at the ‘Top Free’ in the title bar. There’s no need to show the word ‘Free’ for each application – they’re all free. It’s extra screen space that could have been used to allow more of the application name to display.

Since I can’t read the full application name, I have to open each application to learn what the app name is – bad use of my time. There’s also absolutely no reason why the application title can’t wrap around to the next line.  Who cares if it takes up an extra line on the display? If you look closely at the screenshot, you’ll see that there’s wasted space anyway underneath the application vendor name. They didn’t try to scale the application icon to the available space used by the application title and vendor – what they should have done was kept the icon the same size and adjust the font sizes to allow three lines of text for the application title and vendor.

Which is more important, making it easy for the user of the application to be able to read the information on the screen or keeping all rows the same height? I’m hoping you will agree with me that the user is more important here. I don’t mind if I can’t read the whole vendor name, but I do mind that I can’t tell what the application’s name is.

What were they thinking?