Mobile and Simplicity

Posted: April 6th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Mobile, Technology |

Maybe I am just getting older or maybe I am just a simpleton or maybe both are true but as I dive into the mobile space with concentration on the iphone and Android smartphones, I am liking the simplicity of the user interface. I have always liked it of course though before the iphone I would rarely and mostly by accident fire up a mobile browser. I was acclimated to basic uses such as using the phone of course, calendaring, sms , very simple email responses and not much else. Though those are still main uses for me as well as great majority of people, with the advent of cleaner interfaces either though native apps or mobile aware websites that adapt layout when consumed within a smartphone embedded browser, I now feel that in many instances I get the core proposition of the utility or value of the particular website without all the extraneous stuff that needs to fill the space on a normal Desktop browser environment. In fact, though at the outset I was ok with websites that didn’t adapt to the viewport of the device browser and was content to zoom and pan around to make the content accessible on the smaller screen, I know generally just bail from sites that through laziness or not “with it”, do not adapt to the device’s dimensions and thereby force me to “actively” work to consume their content on a phone’s browser.

Though I have spent most of my time with the Android Development Kit, both it and the iphone variant (no time yet for iPad) are well organized in terms of having common artifacts for most of the useful interactions one needs with a typical Smartphone application. Though there are other possibilities including just customizing the presentation for a normal Browser application for the smaller real estate on a phone using the “user_agent” string of the requesting device, the programming languages of choice for the native full featured phone processing Applications are java for Android and objective C for the iphone.

In the end, there is something attractive for me both as a developer and a user for the move back to a state of simplicity and austerity.
Of course, I mean solely for what the ultimate consumer of those applications sees. For those that must dive into the Android Development Kit to actually build those applications , it is eye-popping both the richness of what is available natively within the Java based APIs , the plugins for Integrated Development Environments like Eclipse but similarly eye-popping is the shear magnitude of the different code workflow/artifacts that are used to construct a fully functioning Android Application. Many developers and development groups have become proficient in putting it all together since the first release of the Android code base over 2 years ago as evidenced by the 10’s of thousands of Android applications in the Market. Nonetheless, even the best of development teams require a significant ramp up time to gain familiarity , for the platform to evolve into a more robust and reliable platform (Android 2.1 was just released in Late February early March 2010) and for a foundation of relevant code to serve both as tutorial material and base for further extension for new application features. Building Smartphone applications does not represent rebuilding all that has gone on the past decade in the Internet space. The richness of Web Services exposing the plethora of functionality is equally suitable in many cases unaltered to serve the data services needs of your typical Smartphone application.

One thing I hope to avoid at least for now are the sundry challenges making all of the markup and Frontend code like Javascript work across various browsers with their pesky quirks. Of course I will have to deal with perhaps more esoteric anomalies on different handsets implementation of the entire Android stack. Hopefully Google has learned something from the challenges that Microsoft has had over the decades customizing their Operating System to all the different Hardware manufacturers’ specifications. One advantage that Apple possesses in this battle is the absolute control of the both the software and hardware stacks. That makes the number of possible permutations that need testing and support appreciably more manageable.