John M. Wargo

US Airways is such a technology unsavvy airline. I've been signed up for alerts for a long time now, but they just refuse to alert me when it's time to check in for example. Their day of travel alerts are next to useless as well (see Figure 1). They're notifying me that my flight is expected to be on time, but they refuse to tell me what gate the flight is scheduled to depart from.

Figure 1

If I already have my boarding pass (which I did) and I'm heading to the airport, many airlines leave out of multiple terminals, so how am I supposed to know which terminal I'm supposed to be dropped off at?

Charlotte has 4 terminals where US Air flights come in and out of. For my morning flight, I'd already checked in and didn't have a bag to check, so I just walked into the airport and headed through security. Once I got inside, I started looking for my gate and of course the first location I went to, all of the screens were blank. With 4 terminals as viable options for me, I was in a pickle – fortunately I was able to find a bank of monitors that worked and quickly learned my flight was leaving out of a faraway terminal, but if US Air cared enough about me, they would have told me before I got to the airport which terminal I needed to go to. I understand that the gate might change, but why not tell at least what you know today then let me know, via another email, if the gate does change down the line?

This truly makes no sense to me – you have the data, I'm your customer and you know I'm interested in the data, why not share it with me?

I was excited to learn at BlackBerry DevCon 2011 that RIM had finally released the Macintosh versions of their development tools for BlackBerry and Playbook development. Having a MacBook in my hotel room (my Windows Laptop died ore than a week ago) I downloaded the code and tried to install it. I noticed some weirdness with the tool installation, so I thought I'd write about my experiences here.

The tools download as a zip file, a different zip file for BlackBerry vs. Playbook development. That's not that big of a deal, except the zip files contain an application installer with EXACTLY the same name. Instead of naming the packager within each zip file with a name appropriate for the particular installer, they named them both the same and it causes problems. Take a look at Figure 1, you'll see the two zip files (with separate file names) but then two applications, both with the same name (although the second one has a 2 after it's file name).

Figure 1

How do you tell which one is which? You can tell by the file sizes (very different between BlackBerry and Playbook), but you shouldn't have to – especially since the Macintosh Finder doesn't render files in this layout by default. RIM should have thought of this scenario and named the installers better.

OK, when I got around to installing the tools, I came across something I'd never seen before on a Macintosh. Take a look at Figure 2, it shows the first screen you see when installing the tools. When I first saw this message, I had absolutely no idea what to do with the information. I knew that Windows would allow me to run an installer as an Administrator, but had no idea how to do that on a Macintosh.

Figure 2

I closed the installer and poked around to see if I could figure out how to run the application as an Administrator. I couldn't find anything, so I just launched the installer again. I stared at the screen for a while then decided that the only option available to me was to click the lock icon and see what happened.

Guess what? It prompted me for the Administrator's (me) password as shown in Figure 3 and proceeded to perform the installation.

Figure 3

What concerns me though is why I had to go through that? Why didn't the install just progress and leverage the feature of the Macintosh that prompts me for the password? That stupid little lock icon didn't make sense, nor did the prompt that apparently was trying to tell me that I needed to click the lock icon to get past this particular issue.

I've said this before, if there's only one option available to me, why not just click it for me automatically? Why make me click it when there's really nothing else I can do? Why doesn't the installer provide a message that tells me I need an Administrator password then politely let me know I can enter said password by clicking the lock icon? There was absolutely no way for me to know, based upon the information provided me, that the lock icon allowed me to enter the Administrator password. Why put the lock icon, the only thing I can and should click as far away as possible from the message warning me that I needed to click the icon?

It's almost like they really don't want me to install the tools. Ugh!

Today wraps up BlackBerry DevCon 2011. Overall it was a great conference. Like I said in a previous post, the sessions and the pace were great. There wasn't a lot of energy about the place, but it was a big crowd and lots of focus on web development and open source tools.

The one disappointment for me was a session I attended this morning on PhoneGap and BlackBerry WebWorks. I was really looking forward to the content, but the presenter was interrupted with so many general questions about PhoneGap (rather than questions related to the session's content) that he ran out of time and only covered about half of his presentation. I wish he'd enforced only taking questions at the end of the session and gave me what I was looking for from the session. Oh well. What RIM should have done was have an intro to PhoneGap session first, which would have allowed this more advanced session to cover its content as planned.

I learned a lot about many open source JavaScript libraries – as soon as I wrap up the book I plan on digging more into those libraries just to round out my skills.

Not sure if I'll be attending another DevCon. My employer has been great in letting me attend and the information I gather helps me in my day to day job, but the event is really more about game development anymore so there's not much there for me.

In preparation for BlackBerry DevCon 2011, RIM released this year's version of the DevCon mobile application. I've written here about this application and the BlackBerry World (WES) conference applications over the years and I've never been quite happy with the applications. I've always felt that the applications were hard to use and included features that just weren't needed in an application like this. My belief was that RIM focused too much on making a flashy, showcase application instead of focusing in an application that got the job done as efficiently as possible.

This year's BlackBerry World and DevCon applications were different. They are highly useful, efficient and got the job done. Gone were the fancy background graphics that made the menus difficult to read and gone too were those ridiculous page transitions that took so much time to get you from one screen to another. This year's DevCon application just works and I found myself actually using it for a change rather than using the desktop web version and downloading session information into my calendar.

It looks and feels like the application is a BlackBerry WebWorks application. It shouldn't be possible to tell, but for some reason I just 'know' it's a WebWorks application. The cool thing is that because it's a WebWorks application, it was very easy for RIM to make it available for both BlackBerry and Playbook devices. That's a great testament to the application direction RIM has taken.

There were some problems with the application though, and that's why this particular post made it into the What Were They Thinking category. In this case though, I'm really not trying to complain here (as I usually do with this particular series), but instead to point out design or implementation decisions that were made that probably should have been made differently.

Let me show you what I mean:

When looking at the application home screen shown in Figure 1, it's really hard to tell that the icons shown there are clickable. They look like they're disabled. They use color for the logout button and the DevCon logo, but deliberately didn't use color to indicate clickable areas on the home screen. Those icons are dull and truly (to me) do not look like anything I should be able to click on.

Figure 1

As you will see later, other parts of the application are rich with color, but not the home screen icons. What were they thinking? ;-)

A neat new feature for this year's application was the ability to synchronize your event schedule with your BlackBerry calendar. Finally! For previous conferences, you could do your calendar on the desktop web and download them into a calendar program (Microsoft Outlook, IBM Lotus Notes and so on), but it was challenging to do it from the mobile application. With this year's application, synchronization is automatic and it's an excellent feature.

One thing I noticed though, and I probably wouldn't have noticed it except that it caused me a problem, was that the calendar appointments the application made for me were not marked as Busy on my calendar. One of the reasons I liked the calendar sync was that it updated my calendar so colleagues would see that I'm busy and not schedule appointments for me during those time slots. I had people trying to schedule me for meetings in time slots I knew I had blocked for sessions I was attending. It was only when I looked at some of the entries created by the program that I realized that even though the DevCon app made the appointments for me, it simply didn't make them the right way. What's the point of putting an item in my calendar but not marking my time as busy for that time slot? What were they thinking?

Another thing I noticed, and this is a HUGE pet peeve for me, is that when you open the agenda or my schedule, the application doesn't by default open the current day's schedule. The application knows what day it is and it knows I'm opening my schedule, why not default to opening the current day's schedule then give me options to select different days if I want? The designer of the application has to think about how the application will be used; in this case they didn't. 99% of the time I'm going to be looking at my current day's calendar, why not show it to me first instead of making me click the current day every single time I open that part of the application. I shouldn't have to make a selection on the screen shown in Figure 2 every single time I open that part of the application.

Figure 2

Open the current day's schedule no matter what then give me previous day and next day buttons on the top to use to get to a different day. It's only a three day conference, so it would never take more than two clicks to get to any day but only one click to get to the current day.

Another thing I noticed about Figure 2 is that it's impossible to tell that the BlackBerry Partner Directory image at the bottom of the page is a clickable item. I noticed by accident that it was there and clicked on it to see if it was clickable only to be surprised to see that it was. Why have an additional item on the page that breaks the theme of clickable items? In the UI, they have things that look clickable (the list of the event dates for example) and other things that are clickable, but don't look clickable. That's bad design. What were they thinking?

The next thing really surprised me since it's such a simple thing and it's pretty glaring. Take a look at Figures 3 and 4 below. Notice how much bigger the DevCon icon is compared to other icons on the BlackBerry and Playbook. The icon seems to match the 'theme' of the device or at least not look out of place against the other icons, but no effort was made to make the icon proportional to the other icons on the device.

Figure 3

Figure 4

How hard would it have been to make application icons that fit with the other icons on the device? As you can see from the BlackBerry Torch screen shot in Figure 3, the icon is so big that the icon and label scrunch up against each other.

For both examples, the application title is so long that it truncates. Why would you ever assign an application title that no matter what will always be truncated on any device it is installed on? It's clear that whoever created this application wasn't paying attention when they created the application icon and assigned the title for the application. They should have called the application DevCon 2011 and let the word 'Americas' in the icon indicate which version of the application was installed. Or, for people who would need multiple versions of the application installed (which would only be RIM employees and vendors, right) call the application DevCon Americas or something similar instead. Again, what were they thinking?