- Market Yourself An iParadigm – "The part I love the most is that the people making the 'just market your app!' comment have no real idea how much effective marketing costs. Oh sure, you can go far on viral and word-of-mouth marketing, but it all pales in comparison to even a small banner graphic in the App Store." Making your application visible is hard.
- Matthew Alexander on Torture – Nice examples of why torture doesn't work. Worth reading the linked articles.
- Robbery suspect left his address – "Chicago police have arrested a man who allegedly robbed a bank using a threatening note written on the back of his own pay cheque." Brilliant.
- Reliving Cuba's revolution – Interesting to see this on "film." They wouldn't let us take cameras up there when I visited in 2004. (Plenty of other pictures of Cuba on ZX81.org.uk though!)
- What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting – "Once one understands that a text message travels wirelessly as a stowaway within a control channel, one sees the carriers’ pricing plans in an entirely new light." I worked on text messaging software back in the late nineties and, at least for GSM, is absolutely true.
- Internet sites could be given 'cinema-style age ratings', Culture Secretary says – "Giving film-style ratings to individual websites is one of the options being considered, [Andy Burnham, British Culture Secretary confirms]." The government still seems not to understand how the internet works. If implemented, this will basically result in a system that's easy to circumvent and is paid for with higher ISP connection fees. We all lose.
- Happy Birthday Earthrise – "Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there! Isn't that something…" Still very much awe-inspiring even forty years later.
- Fearless: Apple's Macworld Expo exit is part of its DNA – "In Apple's estimation, the best time to kill off a successful product or brand is 'as soon as possible.' Dropping a winner means creating a new winner to replace it, and that's exactly what Apple has decided it must do to be successful: create great new products again and again."
- If programming languages were religions… – Apparently I'm into Voodoo and Taoism…
Tag Archives: mobile
Error Mishandling
A common refrain is that computers are too complicated for ordinary people to use. Yet mostly when I see people sat with a notebook on their lap I don’t see frustration. The confusion tends to come when something doesn’t work as expected. Naturally bad design plays a big part in this but the biggest stumbling block comes when a dialog box like this pops up:
What is an average user to do when confronted with this? Everything after the first line is utter gobbledygook. Even to a software developer much of this is unintelligible — you’d need the source code to get much a clue about what’s going on and most vendors do not share.
So, if almost no-one has a chance of understanding this, why are users asked to make a choice? It’s bad enough that the application crashed but why force the user to make a decision about something they don’t understand?
Worse, let’s remember that this is actually an improvement over what has come before. Remember the “Unrecoverable Application Error” in early versions of Windows?
I was therefore fascinated when I realised what my iPhone was doing. Initially I thought that the software was just very reliable, which was pretty naïve of me.
When an iPhone application crashes you just get returned to the home screen. No nasty error message with impenetrable text and confusing options; often you’re not even aware that anything bad has happened. Behind the scenes the crash is recorded and is reported back to Apple next to you sync with your computer.
It would be easy to conclude that “no error message” is the way to go, however the iPhone has a couple of other qualities that makes it work. Firstly the applications seem to save their state regularly, which means that even if there is a crash you rarely lose anything of significance. Contrast this with most PC application which tend to crash only when you have an hour of unsaved work. Secondly, while not automatic, relaunching the crashed application is almost instant.
The result of these three elements together is that users are not punished for finding defects in the software. Isn’t that the way it should be?
My del.icio.us bookmarks for May 14th through May 17th
- The Dumbing Of America – "The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation." The article is about the US but it's also increasingly true here. Depressing.
- New Indiana Jones movie is dreadful – Oh dear. Like many people I'll probably still go see it anyway…
- SMS costs more than using Hubble Space Telescope – "Text messaging [is] anywhere from four to 42 times as expensive as talking to the Hubble."
My del.icio.us bookmarks for January 29th through February 3rd
- Afghan Student Sentenced to Death After Downloading Report – Good to see that the invasion of Afghanistan has resulted in more freedom for the locals…
- Forget passports – teachers and kids are the new ID card targets – Despite the loss of personal data and despite the fact that they will not (and cannot) do what the Government says they will, the ID Card scheme is still not completely dead.
- The True Cost of SMS Messages – “How come technology, communication, and infrastructure is getting cheaper while the costs of SMS messages are increasing exponentially? My theory: SMS messages are transfered over air made of solid gold.”
My del.icio.us bookmarks for January 4th through January 7th
- When is a pencil and paper better than a computer? – And here’s another piece about technology and voting in the States. This time (blatant self-promotion alert) it’s one that I wrote last year…
- Follow the Money – Daringfireball links to this “forgotten” Cringely article about the US voting system. He’s right: low technology can be the answer!
- Pointui, the definitive user interface for mobile devices. – Been playing around with this on my HTC P4350. First impressions: great. I love the fact that I am less reliant on the stylus — one of my main problems with Windows Mobile.
- Make the defence of Human Rights your New Year?s Resolution – “We must all try very much harder to support Human Rights from attack, whether that is from religious or cultural forces.”
Windows Mobile 5 on Virgin Mobile UK
When I got my new phone, a HTC P4350, I quickly managed to make and receive phone calls and text messages. I even connected straight to the Internet over WiFi and (slowly) over GPRS. It never occured to me that sending a MMS, a picture message, would be so complicated.
With a “Pow!” and a “Zap!” I asked their technical support people and got the answer. It works in two parts, firstly the GPRS side, which you can find in the Connections tab of the Settings screen:
(In case you can’t read them, the important settings are “goto.virginmobile.uk”, “user” (no password) and 193.30.166.3.)
Once you can make a connection to Virgin you can configure the MMS side of things, which you can find in the “Options” menu of the Messaging application:
(Again, important settings are: 193.30.166.1, “http://mms.virginmobile.co.uk:8002” and “WAP 1.2”.)
And that should do the trick. Happy Multimedia Messaging!
(With thanks to Plasq’s ComicLife for the over-the-top graphics.)