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Why people hate Adobe (and have now headache with sports-tracker.com)?

Posted on August 21, 2010

sportstracker.nokia.com was a GPS based sports tracking service for Nokia phones. Around a year ago it spun off as independent company, which was a good move if you really want to develop your service business. Now sports-tracker.com has launched a new website. You can upload your runs and photos there and share your sports results through social media.

It was delightful to see the new site opened and having the features been missing so long time ago. However, I was not totally happy with what I saw.

The whole new site is built on top of Adobe Flash run-time technologies. There are no traditional web pages per se.

The problem is that full page Flash is resource hog. In the picture above you see that opening this web site in my Safari web browser spikes CPU to 100% usage – and it actually stays there indefinitely (note: on front page, see remarks below). This means that my computer is working to barely survive under the stress caused by this one web site – and my computer is powerful iMac. This means that if I have this site open background in my web browser my laptop battery would die very very fast. This means that all programs I try to simultaneously use on my computer become sluggish.

I assume that when sports-tracker.com was spun off from Nokia they contracted some digital advertisiment agency to built the new site for them. Digital advertisement agencies are often, not always, companies focused on the brand and visual appearance. They love to work with Flash because it gives good authoring tools to build nice looking, bling bling filled, animations.  Flash is a great tool for animations. Flash is a great tool for building browser based games. However, it is not good for building the whole web site where the user experience criteria could include 1) the site actually to responds to clicks 2) the site does not bring down to the whole computer. The decision makers probably drink cool-aid “hey let’s built the site with the Adobe’s latest tools – have you seen the demos how coooooool they look like”.

The thing is, I want to just see my sports tracking results. I don’t care whether the diagrams have blurred drop shadows with state of the art Web 3.0 mouse over effects. Now I can enjoy the effects, points for the artistic leader for that, but doing the actual task, accessing my sports results, have become irritating task to do. Things respond sloooow – that’s the main reason. In-flash scrolls bars have noticeable lag.

There exists an uncanny valley how normal web sites behave and how 100% Flash site behave. My right click does not work. I cannot right click a link and open it in new tab. I cannot right click a link to copy it to my friend. I cannot access the site on my N900 web browser (which even has Flash). I coudn’t even send feedback to sports-tracker.com team without first installing a desktop email client, as the email address cannot be copied from Flash to web mail. Text boxes are little different.

I cannot hold my horses to see Adobe conquering mobile phones with Flash and doing the same thing for mobile browsing experience it has now done for sports-tracker.com.

The site is not bad. Usability guidelines have been followed carefully when building the site. The developers seem to have gone into great details to make the operations smooth as possible. For example, URL fragment identifies are used to make sure bookmarking works even though Flash is present on the site. Social media features, not present in old sport tracker, are finally there. The results of design decision to built the whole site on Flash, instead of using Flash for some components only, might not have been seen by the time this decision was taken.

When Nokia Sports Tracker was first introduced 3-4 years ago with the first Series 60 GPS phones it was ahead of the competition. Wow effect had no limits – can you really do that with your mobile phone – in real-time and live?

It is funny how time passes.

It is definitely possible to build a sports tracking site, which looks cool, but does not have issues mentioned here.

Note: With little more research it seems that CPU usage stays 100% is specific to front page only and it has issues of not winding down action when you move away from your browser. However, rendering of other pages still uses vast amount of CPU, causing lag you do not see when opening web pages. The background CPU consumption on sports-tracker.com page is aroud 8% per tab when should be 0%.

Note 2: I am using the latest 10.1  Flash Player.

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Python 2.3, Python for Series 60 1.4.5 still in use… and insight into Symbian deployment process and user experience

Posted on August 18, 2010

Nokia’s Python for Series 60 has a long history. It is a Python interpreter, originally escaped from Nokia prototype labs, running in your phone. It is said to been awesome to show mobile/embedded developers, who were love with their static C compilers and 4 hours built times, opening a Python prompt in your phone and typing import audio; audio.say(“your phone loves Python”) by keypad (Nokia Series 60 phones come with a speech synthetizer). Python for Series 60 is the best tool of building a simple proof of concept mobile applications. The lack of speed, lack of good UI libraries and difficult deployment problems makes it challenging to use it in production grade environments.

PyS60 has also a history of staying in archaid Python version – namely Python 2.3. It was not until this February when stable PyS60 2.0.0 with Python 2.5 was released (1.9.x was considered experimental according to the release notes). Luckily looks like new winds are blowing (Qt acquisition, Meego/Maemo) and Python is getting higher priority. For example, PySide Qt bindings is very high profile project. Based on this, we hope to expect Python to the first class citizen in the future Meego and Symbian devices.

My company had a little side venture with PyS60 Community Edition when we were still betting that Symbian and Python would rock the world – the era before iPhone changed the game.  PyS60 community edition was effectively a revamped PyS60 1.4.x with Python 2.3 toolchain which actually made PyS60 application production deployment possible. Possible…? -you ask. Madness… no. It is Symbian. It is certification and signing and obscure error messages. Basically vanilla PyS60 is being shipped as an external SIS (Symbian package format) and Symbian platform security makes it impossible to deploy two production signed applications using vanilla PyS60 on the same device. The only cure was statically building Python for both apps from the scratch, which is exactly what PyS60 Community Edition was doing.

But this all was long long time ago. Aeons in mobile time. So I was today surprised when I got email from a person (David) using PyS60 Community Edition. We never upgraded PyS60 Community Edition to Python 2.5 . In fact we haven’t touched the project about two years. David was effectively using Python 2.3 and asked questions about the tool chain internals.

My first answer was a question Why on Earth you are still using Python 2.3? I thought maybe the guy had somehow missed the last two years or was a stuck with an old phone.

However… this was not the case and the answer was very insigtful.

Yes, I’m aware of PyS60 2.0.0, but I prefer PythonCommunity, at least for the moment: no OpenC neither Platform Services dependencies; smaller .SIS size and memory footprint. I think that the final .SIS produced with PythonCommunity, with everything necessary to run contained in it and with a clean installation without multiple dependencies, is a better fit for a mass-market than the files produced by PyS60 2.0.0, above all taking into account that people don’t know what S60 or Symbian are.

Also, the runtime deployment on the new PyS60 isn’t automatic for S60_3rd and S60_FP1 devices, so in the worst case scenario, users may end having to learn to install the different files (pips.sis, ssl.sis, stdioserver.sis, Python_2.0.0.sis, PythonScriptShell_2.0.0.sis) in the correct order, which is a big no-no for a mass-market deployment.

So…. I hope someone in Nokia is reading this blog entry carefully. Do it like Apple does. Make your application deployment static. Make OpenC static. Make every freaking library which is not shipped with the device statically buildable. It should be possible now when everything is open source. It will consume precious device RAM, but at least it will make mass market application development possible. SIS hell is worse hell than deb hell, or DLL hell, as the end user cannot fix it due to device security.

In the related news SIS smart installer was announced few weeks ago. Personally I wouldn’t bet it can deal with all the problems of versioning and Symbian platform security. Forum reports aren’t promising and looks like very Symbianish user experience can be expected. In positive light, it seems that Python is being considered for this process.

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Cross-platform mobile application development and payments

Posted on September 30, 2009

We have been piloting multi-platform mobile application development and payments in few client projects. Target platforms usually include iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Nokia Series 60. Also there are two notable usual cases which need to be specially handled

  • Image uploads
  • Payments for subscribed content

Sounds easy, right? Well it isn’t… Below are some notes for our due diligence work which you fellow developers might find interesting.

SDKs

Mobile phone vendors are jealously and don’t want to co-operate with each other. Building application which works in all handsets is major headache.

We found some reasonable candidates for cross-platform mobile development doing HTML and Javascript. HTML and Javascript pages are converted to native application using a wrapper technology (a.k.a. appaccelerator). Doing Flash Lite or Java ME can be pretty much forgotten nowadays as they won’t run on the most hyped platform, iPhone. Flash Lite has poor support for anything except content authoring due to primitive and limited APIs. Java ME provides horrible user experience.

(X)HTML is the only common language spoken by mobile phones. Thus, there has been a rise of “appaccelerators”, technologies which allow to create mobile applications with HTML(5) and Javascript.

  • Phonegap: iPhone, Android, Blackberry and possibly S60 in the future. Pluses: BSD license, very active community. Minuses: bad documentation, difficult deployment process.
  • Titanium: iPhone, Android. Pluses: Professional, Apache license. Minuses: Too tightly coupled with Appacclerator Inc. company.
  • Rhomobile: iPhone, Android, Blackberry, S60, Windows Mobile. Pluses: Professional, tries to build open source community, the widest platform support. Minuses: Dual licensing and tightly coupled with Rhomobile Inc.
  • Nokia Web-runtime: Nokia S60 and some other Symbian based phones. Pluses: Professional, good documentation. Minuses: Not open source, impossible to extend, Nokia has little interest to make this cross-platform, Nokia doesn’t like updating old models and web-runtime is useable only in the latest S60 5th edition models.
  • Palm Pre supports web applications natively. However Palm Pre application business is still taking a shape.

All these wrap the browser component (WebKit) and provide some extra Javascript APIs when your web pages as executed under the application mode.

  • Locationing
  • Contacts
  • SMS
  • Client-side database
  • and so on…

Rhomobile has little different use cases  from the rest of the bunch as it provides client-side programming using Ruby and less focuses on Javascript/web applications.

Payments and in-application purchases

There are four major way to do mobile payments “inside” the application for bought content and subscriptions. The price tag on the application itself is left out on this discussion as the application stores themselves take care of it.

  • Credit card
  • SMS
  • App Store payment (thus far Apple only)
  • Direct operator payments – you have a service provider (Bango) which can directly charge items to the operator phone bill based on handset identification.

App Store payment is the most attractive as it provides the best end user experience.  It allows you to use App Store payment mechanism inside the application. It is safe and no need to hassle with external payment providers. However, App Store payment can be used only for content consumed directly inside the application. You cannot use it e.g. for ordering a pizza. I think this might be related to recent EU legislation forbidding SMS payments for services not consumed in the phone itself.

SMS payment is ok for little payments. Operators take big cut of the revenue, generally 30% – 70% depending on the country. Short code fees usually start from 500€ set-up fee + 500€ / month. SMS cannot be often send as a background, but the user is presented the normal SMS editor which reduces the user experience somehow.

For credit card payments there exists several providers. Credit card has the cheapest entry fees, but the downside is that the user needs to have the credit card. This excludes teenager audience.

Direct operator payments are not very well supported yet globally. Most western operators support them. The operator also takes a big share and the fixed fee is pretty high.

My favorite payment provider thus far is Bango which provides credit card payment starting 9€ / mo. and scales up to worldwide SMS payments which cost few grannies per month.

In most cases, the payment experience will not be smooth. You need to open the phone main browser on the payment provider page to do the payment. This usually will close your own application. Rarely you can do the payment inside the application and support multiple platforms. After doing the payment most platforms allow you to close the browse and reopen your application using a special URL handler.

Wikipedia mobile payments page is also useful.

Image upload

<input type=”file”> won’t work on iPhone and some other platforms as those don’t have user browsable file system. Also the file dialog usually doens’t have image preview making it useless.

Phonegap has a branch which supports images picking using iPhone’s own gallery browser.

In any case, there is not yet cross-platform solution for this.

Future prospects

In some time-frame we will get rid of the need to wrap HTML applications natively as the web browser applications will support all HTML5 features without extensions and probably have some proprietary extensions for mobile specific features like SMS. We already have had some taste for this: