Joined-up applications and The Way Ahead

[slitchfield]

...In which I am impressed by a couple of examples of superbly 'joined-up' applications from the iPhone world. Can the Symbian ecosystem compete? What advantages does the iPhone have to help the creation of joined-up apps and is there hope for similar software for S60 users? Comments welcome - can you think of any similarly impressive Symbian examples?

Read on in the full article.

[Tzer2]

- the iPhone has a large (320 by 480, 4"), patented capacitive display that's touch-sensitive and yet has super visibility in all light conditions, something that was previously impossible.

There's actually a very big dilemma here. This is the heart of the problem:

- On a high res touch-sensitive 4 inch display you have a LOT more options for writing applications. You can display more information and options at once.

- But most people will probably never buy a device with such a large touchscreen, at least not in the near future.

If you write apps for a large touch-sensitive screen you won't be able to use those apps on much smaller and/or non-touch screens, and you'll be restricting your audience to those with high end phones.

One of the strengths of Symbian is that you can run apps on many different device sizes, screen shapes and form factors. Until the iPhone platform is available on such a variety of devices it is very difficult to compare the two platforms directly. If the iPhone platform became available on such a variety of devices, it would make the design of applications much more complicated than it is now.

Of course most people who buy cheaper phones tend not to install extra software, but if that's the case then discussion of extra software is mostly irrelevant as far as the wider mobile world goes because it's a small niche.

[snoyt]

I think, the main reason iPhone gets so many pictures posted on flickr is its screen size and the fast data contract attached to the phone. People can instantly see the quality of the picture on the larger screen and instantly post it. On a low dataconnection 32kbps or 64kbps upload speed it takes a lot of minutes to post or e-mail a simple picture.

Screensize is indeed the next best step and Nokia/Symbian has been lax in that department. Webbrowsers, picutures, e-mail, office apps all benefit hugely by a larger screensize. Taking them close to the experience at home behind their desktop pc. Windows mobile had the option larger screensize (Dell Axim X51v organizer) for a while and only executives running office software, e-mail and such really needed it. Now the average consumers wants this screen resolution too with mobile internet getting a boost.

Nokia has been working hard at mobile facilities like music stores, nokia.mobi, videocenter, youtube via flash support and loads more. WRT i.e. The current n-series are no doubt more powerful than most other (smartish) phones. There is now a whole mobile web out there, that with a bigger screen will entertain and addict many. Besides there are few things more addictive than information, useful and otherwise. If Nokia/Symbian finally gets going with Symbian Touch with better screen sizes I think the iPhone will take the same place as Apple computers do at home. Great eye candy, but very expensive for the functionality you get.

About touch and miniqwerty. Related (off)topics. Perhaps not every one agrees. But touch means finger touch. Little pens should be used for only one thing: Drawing. handwriting recognition has been a failure for years, except with flexible geeks during the Palm days. And for quick data entry with optimal screen usage for editing and composing people want miniqwerty keyboards with some sort of mouse. Either project a mouse point next to a touchfinger or have a thing like Samsung now uses.

I expect touchscreens with miniqwerty to flourish in the future and be the most sold formfactors.

[svdwal]

The advantage that the iPhone has over S60 in writing these joined-up applications are

1) a simple interface. On the iPhone there is a single interface for apps to invoke other apps with parameters. On Symbian/S60 there are multiple interfaces (StartDocumentL(), the document handler interface, the view invocation interface, Web's URL interface, server apps), and it isn't clear upfront which one you need.

2) a documented interface. On the iPhone, the interface is well-documented. On Symbian/S60, some interfaces are documented, some are not, some don't work on some phones.
The view invocation interface would be the best one, but this one is plagued by not being documented, mainly because this is a task of the app that hosts the views.

But, AFAICS, all the things the iPhone does can be done on S60 too, apart from the Google Maps interface, which is not implemented on S60 (AFAIK).

[snoyt]

About the beautiful cinema example. 'Vincinity' is a very scary application. Telling someone where I am. Tracking my positions by cookies? Where is my privacy, what about Orwell's 1984? GPS is doing just that.

It looks terrific by the way. Wanting to go somewhere while travelling. I can imagine finding a restaurant en getting their menu and pricelist and decide if you want to go there to eat. I doubt however if Apple has the pricelist of my fish and fries shop on the corner of my street or most other restaurants anyway.

Nokia Search has a yellow pages support in the Netherlands. You can search by name or category and location. Search results give phone numbers, map overviews of search results, weblinks to the company website (and my favorite cinema allows reserving tickets directly from their website) and a direct Maps integration to drive/walk there. It's not that different from Vicinity, though it does not (yet?) use the GPS for vicinity searches. Besides I might want to search for where I am tonight, not where I am right now.

The biggest problem I think is that there is no specification for location finding and entering in the HTML standard. Meaning: click on a weblink and open a satnav program of your choice to go somewhere. Or click on a button and the webbrowser says: Do you wish to send your GPS-location?

The Google API solves this I guess. So perhaps enlist it for HTML5? Including the KML and or GPX formats? If google maps becomes better than Nokia Maps/Search I might start even using it.

[pennas]

If i'm honest, reading about apps like this make me wish that the iPhone was more highly specified in other areas (camera, ad2p) so that I could actually get one

I have, on a number of occasions, done stuff like this on S60, and it can be a pain: -

- Search for shop using yell or nokia search, by typing in my postcode/town location. Or nokia/google maps if it happens to have it listed..
- Copy & Paste (or have to type in) location once found, into Nokia Maps or TomTom to get directions
- Separate google search for shop/restaurant website if more info required.

It should be said, that the pure fact that all of this can be done on my mobile phone has still provided a wow-factor for a few people! However, it could be so much easier if everything was joined-up

[ashu]

iPhone like all other phones has its merits and demerits. I am not even taking that path. Sticking to this article and whether symbian has any such joined up app or not, i will give iPhone's app developers 2 thumbs up. This is a wonderful app especially if you travel to a different city like me, and you have to spend 2 or 3 days there, its like a boon to have it.
Symbian has limitations of screen size and all, but can they not create a shorter version. We have .mobi alternative or .com, we can also have screen 2.8 alternative to screen 4.

[Nemoi]

I'm no developer, but I'm also astonished by how fast some good iphone apps have appeared. One you have not covered is the app for Wordpress, which truly does everything one needs for mobile blogging. And although some S60 are much better equipped for blogging (proper camera, keypad input etc), I could not find a good workable solution for s60. Which is a shame, I really think that a screen of 2.6" or 2.8" would sufficient.
The real game change, in my opinion, is the appstore, which makes it both easy to find and distribute apps. As you said here on aas earlier, the sooner Nokia/symbian implements a similiar system while mainting the current openess, the better.

are the joined up iphone apps mostly linked to US websites/companies?
is it because this is a phone popular in the US (and actually american) that programmers there are getting into it?
are their programmers/websites just quick off the mark in general? or just because it is "their" cool phone?

they are the most tech creative and richest country in the world after all.
we all know Nokia has never broken into the US market in any big way.

[viipottaja]

I know nothing about programming and SDK's but in addition to hearing that Apple's SDK (whatever that means ) is good etc. I gather it must indeed be much easier to develop an app that is intended to run effectively on one model only - the good thing being that there 10 million of those out there already and rising; plus Apple has the most media visibility so an developer of a great app gets part of that shine too I guess.

Ultimately, I gather these kinds of apps hopefully will make the S60 developers go "damn, if they can do it, I sure can too" (assuming there is nothing that makes it impossible in the S60 environment).

The best "joined" S60 apps that I can immediately think of are mostly Nokia's own latest offerings like Sports Tracker (soon to become Nokiavine), Chat etc. In 3rd party terms.. hmm... not too much around but I guess Shozu (and other pic apps) are doing a little bit of that but obviously not enough. Some calendar apps do it "on the local, phone level" but I am sure could potentially add some more location awareness etc.

[DevilsRejection]

This is exactly why I can't wait for Android. The iPhone and Android have a very similar philosophy of offering developers a "window" to overlay their data so they don't have to do something twice. Case in point, the browser and maps and in your demo as well the movie player.

Symbian applications have to talk to each other, but they don't do that at a low level. The iPhone and the Android OS were built to do that at the OS level.

The next few years are going to be greatly exciting and the second Apple offers an iPhone with a competent camera, unlocked, I'm going to be highly tempted to pick one up.

[viipottaja]

I know nothing about programming and SDK's but in addition to hearing that Apple's SDK (whatever that means ) is good etc. I gather it must indeed be much easier to develop an app that is intended to run effectively on one model only - the good thing being that there 10 million of those out there already and rising; plus Apple has the most media visibility so an developer of a great app gets part of that shine too I guess.

Ultimately, I gather these kinds of apps hopefully will make the S60 developers go "damn, if they can do it, I sure can too" (assuming there is nothing that makes it impossible in the S60 environment).

The best "joined" S60 apps that I can immediately think of are mostly Nokia's own latest offerings like Sports Tracker (soon to become Nokiavine), Chat etc. In 3rd party terms.. hmm... not too much around but I guess Shozu (and other pic apps) are doing a little bit of that but obviously not enough. Some calendar apps do it "on the local, phone level" but I am sure could potentially add some more location awareness etc.

[svdwal]

Originally Posted by viipottaja

Ultimately, I gather these kinds of apps hopefully will make the S60 developers go "damn, if they can do it, I sure can too" (assuming there is nothing that makes it impossible in the S60 environment).

Or, they become iPhone developers too...

Here in the states "joined up" = "mashup"

would you call facebook a "joined up" app?

>>Here in the states "joined up" = "mashup"

>>would you call facebook a "joined up" app?

Facebook linked to Twitter linked to iGoogle via BeTwitter so a status update on any one is automatically transferred to any other is fairly joined up.