John M. Wargo

When I first joined AT&T, my boss challenged me to see how long it would take before I switched full time to the Apple iPhone. Once I got settled, I put aside my BlackBerry device and tried to make the switch. My plan was to see if I could use it for two weeks solid; I made it 10 days before I had to switch back to my BlackBerry.

It’s not that I’m a BlackBerry bigot, I love technology and playing with different devices. I promise you that if I could find devices that worked the way I needed to work, I’d be happy to switch around between different ones. The problem is that BlackBerry has been optimized for the things I do the most, regular everyday email. Every other platform I’ve used tries, but comes up short in so many ways.

Having worked for Research in Motion, I’m a heavy email guy. Because of the instantaneous nature of BlackBerry email, everyone at Research in Motion uses email heavily, even to the point where email was an easier way to reach a colleague than making a phone call. You knew that no matter what the person was doing, especially being on the phone, that they’d be checking their email regularly. Interestingly as these other device platforms (iPhone, Android, Palm and others) try to tackle the enterprise, it’s just not possible for them to accommodate the business email user.

What I’ve noticed with these different platforms is that they’re not designed to deal with a user who has a large inbox. On the BlackBerry for example, I can highlight a date, click the menu button and very quickly remove any messages from the device older than the selected date. It doesn’t remove them from your mailbox, just removes them from the device. On the iPhone and Android devices, when you want to clean up your inbox, you have to click each email individually to delete them – that’s ridiculous.

If you’re a heavy email user like I am, you probably have hundreds if not thousands of folders in your inbox.  When I get an email, I deal with it, delete it if I think I won’t need it anymore and file it if I think I will need it again. On the BlackBerry, I merely press the ‘I’ key on the keyboard and the list of folders appears. If I’d filed a previous message on the same thread, the BlackBerry will automatically highlight the last folder used for messages on that thread. When I select a folder and press the Enter key it’s filed. The whole process takes very little time. Pretty cool.

With other device platforms, you have the ability to file messages, but when you activate that function, the complete list of folders displays. There’s no keyboard entry, you have to swipe through every single page of your folder list to get to the one you want. It’s ridiculous. I have hundreds of folders in my inbox, why make me swipe through page after page of folder names to get to the one I want to file my message in? It makes absolutely no sense to me. This is what I mean when I say that most platforms aren’t setup for enterprise email users.

Now, you might be saying to yourself “Well, the BlackBerry works that way because it has a keyboard – that’s an easier thing to do with a keyboard.” Unfortunately that’s not the case. Even on a touch screen device, Research in Motion provides you with the means to bring up a keyboard and start typing the name of the folder you want to file your message in. It’s an extra click, but it still allows me to file the message pretty quickly.  On iOS and Android, the user is not provided with any means to use the keyboard for folder selection. Apple and Google have decided for you that you’re not allowed to use the on-screen keyboard when filing messages. Makes no sense to me.

Why not provide the option to use the keyboard? Default to using your finger to swipe through the folder list, but for people like me who have hundreds of folders, let me select the folder I want to use via the keyboard.  These devices are supposed to be so cool and so hot, but something as simple as filing email messages is broken. Like I said at the beginning of this article, these mobile platforms are not designed for the enterprise mail user.

Anyway, on to the Big Mobile Experiment… Today I moved my SIM from my BlackBerry Torch 9800 into a Windows Phone 7 device.

I was playing last week with the HTC Surround and this week I’m poking around in the LG Quantum. The Surround was pretty cool – I didn’t need the extra weight and thickness provided by the surround speakers, but it was a functional device. I thought I’d like the Quantum because it had a keyboard, but I found that on Windows Phone devices a keyboard is actually a detriment to the end user.  I’ve found repeatedly that the UI for many aspects of the phone doesn’t rotate to the keyboard orientation when you slide out the keyboard. If the UI doesn’t switch for keyboard input when you expose the keyboard, what’s the point of having the keyboard?

Anyway, I’m going to use the Quantum as my primary device this week and see how I like it. So far, Windows Phone 7 is better than I expected it to be. I think it has a real chance in the market.

Next week I’m going to switch to either the Motorola Bravo or the Motorola Flipside. Those are both Android 2.1 devices, so I’m going to give each a week as my primary device.

Following that I should be receiving the Motorola Atrix (which I’m really excited about using) and the HTC Inspire (which is AT&T’s First 4G [marketing 4G, not technology 4G, we’re already there with HSPA+] device). Stay tuned for how it all works out for me.

Attached is the presentation that Rob Wunderlich and I presented at Lotusphere 2011. The session was entitled BP209 Delivering IBM Lotus Domino Data to Mobile Devices: More Stupid Tricks and in it, Rob and I revisited our Ten Tricks for Mobilizing Domino from Lotusphere 2010. For this year's session, we took a look at last year's tricks and identified which ones didn't matter so much anymore (since the market changed the way it looked at the requirements) and tried to come up with some new ones.

The attachment is below, the following image is just a screen shot of the first page of our presentation.

One of the things I did in the session was demonstrate some applications. I showed how to use Apple's Dashcode development environment (Dashcode is a code generator for Safari web applications) to build an application that talked to a Domino data source. I tried to build the application in less than a minute but was only able to do it in a minute and two seconds. Drat. It was still fun to do - I quickly built the app then went back and showed what I did. The complete walkthrough has been submitted as an article to the View and should be published in the next couple of months.

I also demonstrated how to build a BlackBerry WebWorks (Widget) application that connected to the same Domino data source I've used on this site for many examples.The complete walkthrough of this application has been submitted as an article for the View and should also be published in the next couple of months.

Having participated in the beta of the Kryos Velocity Designer for Lotus Domino (now renamed Velocity AppXcellerator for Lotus Domino) I was able to show how to use the Kryos platform to mobilize a Domino database.

In all it was a lot of fun and I hope I can do it again next year.

Attachments:

File	Description	File size
BP209	Lotusphere 2011 presentation BP209	2581 Kb

I've been poking around at Appcelerator Titanium for the last week or so and I have to admit that I'm really not impressed. It looked like a really interesting solution, but:

1. There's absolutely no documentation - what 'documentation' they do have is nothing more than a sample application called Kitchen Sink that has examples of everything Titanium can do inside of it.
2. It took me hours (and I do mean hours) to get the kitchen sink demo to run in the Android simulator. I followed Einstein's definition of Crazy (doing the same steps over and over again expecting different results) before it finally just worked. There's no docs on how to run it, no instructions, nothing. You can find all sorts of posts on their help area from people who had the same experience I had. I finally found something that explained why it wasn't running. I implemented the fix and still couldn't get it to work. I created several new VM's with clean configs and finally on about the 6th try it finally worked.
3. Screen transitions are slow, applications seem hesitant when running.
4. There's absolutely no layout manager that I can find. When you add objects (such as buttons, fields and so on) to a screen, you have to provide absolute positions for every single element. You can't plunk a label down then add a edit field below it, you have to add both manually, specifying two coordinates (top, left, right, bottom) for each. It absolutely makes no sense that in 2011, with all of these cool smartphones around that you'd have to take that approach to writing applications.

Granted I'm using the free version, but you'd think there's be something better than this.

I LIKE the idea that mobile development in Titanium is all about code - you hand craft code for everything, I truly like that. But to force me to determine EXACTLY where to put things is ridiculous. How do I know where my label is going to end (with word wrap, font size and so on)? Why do I have to manually, physically put every element in its place?

It just over complicates applications when you have to code at that level. It's easy for iPhone devices since you only have two real screen resolutions to work with (three if you count the iPad - which you should). But with all the different Android and BlackBerry devices out there, writing specific code for each screen resolution so that screen elements show up where they're supposed to makes no sense.

What's surprising as well is how long it's taken them to come out with BlackBerry support. It's been in beta for a very long time - I am curious what's going on with that.

I've got to be missing something here. Stay tuned, I'm going to try to build a Titanium version of my contact lookup app and see what I can come up with. I bet I won't be able to do what I want within Titanium.

A while back I started a series of articles in the View about mobile development for Domino. The first article was called Mobile Application Development Trends — What Today’s Developer Needs to Know Now which was an overview of waht I saw as trends in the mobile development space. It really had nothing to do with Domino development, it was just an analysis of the market. I followed up with two articles about developer's options for mobilizing Domino databases. The first article was called Taking It With You, Part 1: Know Your Options for Mobilizing Domino Databases via the Web and the second was called Taking it With You, Part 2: Mobilizing Domino Databases Using Native Clients, Hybrid Applications, and MEAPs. About that time I realized I had a series on my hands and I flushed out all of the articles I wanted to write about mobilizing Domino. Essentially what I did was identify all of the possible options I could think of and planned to write an article about each one of them.

The View published the fourth article in the series yesterday, it's called Mobilizing Domino Data Using Kryos Velocity AppXtender. Kryos is about to release (if they haven't already) a pretty cool platform for mobilizing Domino applications called Velocity AppXtender; I was invited to participate in the beta program and found the platform to be pretty interesting, complete and well thought out. They'll be making a big splash at Lotusphere 2011 I'm sure, so check them out when you get a chance.

In preparation for my session at Lotusphere this year I got to spend some time with Dashcode and the BlackBerry WebWorks tools. Subsequently I wrote articles about each of those tools for the View. They're both written and they're being processed by the very capable editing staff at the View. Next up on my agenda are articles about TeamStudio Unplugged and Wallace Wireless' WIC DB. I have the TeamStudio software, I just need to find some time to dig into it. Unfortunately I'm having difficulty getting my hands on the WIC DB product. I spoke with the President of Wallace about a month ago and let him know about the article series. He promised to hook me up with the code, but I've heard nothing from them since then. I followed up via email and received no response. I went to their site today and noticed that they were acquired by Vocera, so perhaps that's why they have become unresponsibe. We'll see what happens, I'll try them again soon.

I've also been poking around at Appcelerator's Titanium product. It looks very interesting and, with their acquisition of Aptana this week, makes them a pretty interesting option for mobile development. Unfortunately being a typical open source project (with a paid subscription option) their documentation is non existant. I've been looking at everything I can find on their site and there's nothing there that can help me get started. They have this kitchen sink application that you are supposed to look at to see how to do everything in their platform, but I just can't get the thing to load in the simulator. No usefull error messages or anything, it just won't install in the simulator and I can't figure out why. It's really disappointing me since I really wanted to show my BlackBerry Widget application in Titanium. Hopefully I'll be able to make something happen soon with that.

Stay tuned.