John M. Wargo

I was poking around in a mall in Plano Texas today and stopped by a Barnes & Noble just to see what's new, but of course to see if my BlackBerry book was on the shelves.

As I looked through the computer books I noticed something that's really indicative of the smartphone market. There were a TON of iPhone and Android development books (I didn't count, but I imagine there were around 30 or more overall) and even quite a few Windows Phone development books. As I searched and searched throughout the whole computer book section I only found one BlackBerry book.

Now, the good news is that the only BlackBerry book on the shelf was my book (BlackBerry Development Fundamentals), but how sad that with the 15 or so BlackBerry books on the market, there was only one on the shelf. As much as RIM's still selling a bunch of devices, it's clear they're losing mindshare.

It's cool to see my book on shelves, and I usually mention to the sales clerk at checkout that I am excited to see my book on the shelf. When I do this, sometimes the clerk acts excited for me (which happened today) but sometimes the clerk acts like it's no big deal. I'm not famous or anything, but they can't have that many authors come in off the street, can they? I secretly hope they'll ask me to sign the book, but that never happens. Why is that?

Wouldn't you be more interested in a book signed by the author? Why not have a pack of post-it notes that says something like 'Signed by the Author' with a place to sign - they could then post it inside the cover and someone who wanted it could keep it and someone who didn't could pull it out and throw it away. That wouldn't be that bad, would it?

If you have a public-facing web site that you maintain, you're probably aware of the capabilities provided by the free Google Analytics  (GA) service. Essentially it's a web-based web metrics application that you can use to understand a whole bunch of stuff about your site's visitors.

I use the service to track visitors to this site and several other sites I maintain, it provides you with a lot of very useful information. I can tell how steady my site's traffic is, where people are visiting from as well as what type of hardware and software visitors are using to access my site. Another interesting feature is traffic sources, I can tell how people are finding my site - which would be very useful information if I were advertising and trying to understand where I should be spending my advertising money.

GA tells me which articles are the most popular, allowing me to see trends in readerhip interest. Of course, if I cared about my readers (and I truly do), I could use information about which articles are being read to help guide me on what to write about next. The big question for Domino developers though is how do I effectively use GA to help me track readership in my Domino-based public web site?

Lotus Domino web application URL's are...ugly. Lotus has built a great system for managing content on the web, but the behind the scenes URL Domino uses to represent a document in a database doesn't translate very well in GA. You can add analytics to a domino application, but when you look in GA to see which articles are being read, what you'll see is those funky Domino URL's; you won't really be able to tell which documents or views are being opened unless you can translate Domino's internal URL into something more useful.

You can easily build your Domino application so all links are more human readable, but when you open a document from a view in a Domino database, the URL reported to GA is the internal one maintained by Domino rather than something human readable. To help Domino developers get around this, I recently published an article in The View called Creating Domino-Friendly Entries in Google Analytics that descibes in detail how to use special features of GA to allow a developer to control what URL information is delivered to GA. The article contains a sample Domino application that illustrates the implementation. Check it out when you get a chance.

As you know (or may not know) I've been working on a series of articles for The View on mobile development for IBM Lotus Domino. I've tried to identify each of the ways you can mobilize Domino and Notes applications then write an article about it. I proposed a series of about 15 articles and the most recent article (#5 in the series) was just published today. It's called Mobilize Notes Applications to iPhone and iPad Using Apple Dashcode and it was a lot of fun to write. The article essentially shows you how to connect a web application created using Apple's Dashcode web development environment to a Domino database. The article shows you step by step how to build the application and test it on the iPhone simulator.

For many applications, building native mobile applications to talk to Domino can be a bit daunting (understatement), but using the code generating capabilities of Dashcode made it really easy. Check out the article when you get a chance.

The next article in the queue for the View is an article on how to modify your Domino applications to get more useful statistics out of Google Analytics. I'm hoping that one will be published soon as well.

I’ve been in device heaven the last couple of weeks. With all of the new devices AT&T has released and finally having some time to play around with them, I’ve been having a blast.I've got 7 devices here on my desk and I'm playing with all of them.

Windows Phone 7

I got a couple of Windows Phone 7 devices before Christmas and I’ve been using them the last week or two (I’ve even taken one of them as my primary device for the week). As I said in my post yesterday, I’ve found that Windows Phone 7 is a much better operating system than I expected. It’s clean, crisp and responsive – I actually like it. Not more than my BlackBerry, but I do like it. It would be very interesting to see what this looked like on a tablet.

Galaxy Tablet

I got a Samsung Galaxy Tablet and I have to say that I truly love it. I know Steve Jobs is poopooing the smaller format, but it’s really, really compelling. The fact that Android is open and I can do essentially anything I want with it (as opposed to what Apple ‘allows’) makes it awesome. The form factor is great – it’s big enough to be really useful, but small enough to be very comfortable in your hand (as opposed to hands). As my wife said this morning “that’s something I could fit in my purse” and that particular though is really more compelling than you’d expect.

Motorola Android Devices

I’m excited about using the Motoroloa Android 2.1 Bravo and Flipside devices. I really expected the Captivate to be the device I could carry full time, but it was so unresponsive most of the time that I just couldn’t use it. We’ll see what the Moto devices feel like.

BlackBerry Playbook

I’m not getting the feeling that the BlackBerry Playbook is going to be a better experience than the Galaxy Tablet. The only thing it has going for it is the tight integration with the BlackBerry device. Since Research in Motion is supposedly planning on a Cellular version of the device (to be released later), I don’t see that feature remaining that compelling. Research in Motion supposedly sees people who don’t currently own a BlackBerry device being interested in the Playbook, but I don’t see it. I can’t imagine someone buying a playbook over the iPad or the Galaxy Tablet unless they are currently a BlackBerry user and want to stay that way. Any other reasons don’t make sense to me.