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Interview: Brian Fling on Mobile apps, iPhone, iPad & more
Monday, 08 February 2010
A great example of the new style of tech conference is on shortly in Wellington – Webstock, founded a few years ago by Mike Brown and Natasha Lampard, brings together the many arms of the internet, from traditional development through coding to open source, mobile and human interface issues to speculative journeys into a future world of web 3 and beyond. Speakers come from the many disciplines and from all over the world to present there; I will be attending the conference myself, and blogging from it next week. It’s a truly excellent reason to visit Wellington, and I suggest checking out the impressive schedule.
One of the speakers is Brian Fling (picture from Webstock site). Brian has worked with hundreds of businesses from early stage start-ups to Fortune 50 companies to leverage a variety of mediums, like mobile devices, “to design for the needs and contexts of real people” (quoting the Webstock blurb on him).
Author of the O’Reilly Media book ‘Mobile Design and Development: Practical concepts and techniques for creating mobile sites and web apps’, Brian has in-depth knowledge of the design principles involved in creating mobile experiences for this new era of multiple devices and context.
Brian Fling is from Seattle, Washington, which for many years served as the heart of the US wireless business. It's also the HQ of Microsoft – and good breweries and coffee houses, I believe.
Fling has been working with a variety of mobile companies, doing both web and mobile design, for over ten years now.
I got got to ask Brian some questions by email a week before Webstock (16th-19th February 2010). He responded with a full and fascinating insight into mobile apps and the future of technology:
mac-nz.com — When did you first become intrigued by the mobile platform in preference to desktop computer?
I have to say it wasn’t until 2001 or 2002 that I really started to see mobile phones as computers, basically once I started seeing real web browsers become common in smartphones. Back then, within the mobile community, we used to dream of a fictional device coming along that would help people see that what they have in their pockets is not just a phone, but a ubiquitously connected computer, too.
mac-nz.com — Stan Ng of Apple Inc told me last year that even Apple was blown away by the scale and breadth of iPhone apps, covering all sorts of areas that hadn’t even been conceived of when Apple developed the OS and released the SDK.
Did you see this coming?
I thought it might, but I really hoped it wouldn’t.
Mobile applications have been around for as long as I’ve been in the business. The difference was that it would take ages, in some cases up to a year, to build and test an app for say just the J2ME (now Java ME) platform. Then it would takes several months to get it on to the carrier portals (called ‘decks’) in order to sell. Once there you had to negotiate with the carriers to get good deck placement. It was a long drawn out and sales-based process with little return.
What Apple did was to remove that entire ecosystem from the carrier and manage it themselves. They offered developers a simple SDK that worked with all current and future iPhones, something that no one had really done before. In short, they took an entire established business model and made it 10 orders of magnitude easier than what anyone else had done.
Why I hoped it wouldn’t is that supporting native apps is still a slippery and costly slope. Supporting one device, like the iPhone is a snap, but supporting two is double the cost. Three, triple the cost. And so on. Even now, adding iPad support, which is built on the same platform as the iPhone, increases costs of an iPhone project. Every mobile device is a bit different and therefore adds complexity to the design and development of it.
Most clients I talk to just aren’t in the position to support three to four platforms. What I try and help people do is see when and where the web can be the one and only platform they have to support, but still leverage the advantages certain platforms like the iPhone has to offer.
mac-nz.com — How did you get into the iPhone app field?
Well I’ve always been doing some mobile work. But in the US prior to the iPhone it was hard. No one wanted to spend the money it took to create a mobile web site or application. When the iPhone came along, I saw the iPhone Web App business explode overnight, which I did for close to two years.
I hoped that the market for Web Apps would continue, but by then the market for native apps was established and I saw the writing on the wall: I needed to evolve my business and support at least iPhone apps if I wanted to grow it.
I still pitch every lead and every client with doing a mobile web app first, in order to support multiple platforms. I start there and then work through every feature to make sure that the business goals are aligned with providing the user the best possible experience.
mac-nz.com — Is is difficult and/or worthwhile to redevelop iPhone apps for other mobile operating systems? You say on Pinch/Zoom [http://pinchzoom.com/services/iphone-apps/] “… great mobile products are always created, never ported”. You also cover this in your book ‘Mobile Design and Development’ out on O’Reilly. This implies that you prefer device-specific development. Please elaborate:
Different platforms offer the user different user experience metaphors to perform tasks. Once the user becomes comfortable with them, the application, site or web app must embrace and accommodate them. Throughout the design and development process you have to put the needs of the user before all other concerns. More often than not that means a lot of rework if you plan to support multiple platforms.
For example, on the iPhone mosts screen have the back button on the upper left side, which implies that a toolbar must exist on all screens that need a back action. Whereas on Android devices, there is a back button physically on the device, making the need for a screen button, or even a toolbar along the top, unnecessary.
Even the larger screen of the iPad forces us to rethink some layouts and design elements between iPhone and iPad, though supporting these two platforms simultaneously in development is far easier than different device frameworks.
So far we’ve found that there is a quite a bit of thinking that can be reused across platforms, but it mostly is how you lay out content and visual design elements.
mac-nz.com — It seems to me that the major difference between a mobile device and a laptop is not just power, but also the ability to input data. IE, it’s much easier on a laptop’s keyboard to type notes, write a story ... Do you think this distinction will be maintained or do you think that as mobile devices become more capable, input (for example, voice to text) will become easy and the distinction will be lost? Or is this not a consideration?
To me the biggest distinction between a mobile device and a laptop is the network. Most mobile devices are designed to always be connected, which adds a slightly different mental model to how and when we interact with information. The input is also a concern, but I think really only for “old” people, in which I mean anyone over the age of 30.
These days I’m thinking that there are two different types of mobile users: those of us who remember the days before the 3 As: Atari, Amiga & Apple – and those who don’t. The 3A people are very particular about their mode of input, they think of a task, then need to translate that in their heads into how and when to input or interact with it. They perceive these devices as tools.
The non-3A people think in services. Destinations like sites or apps, or their social connections, are the tools to perform tasks, the method of access is completely replaceable. Twitter is a perfect example of a non-3A service, I can interact with it in a number of contexts, devices and inputs to the extent that is makes the mode of access irrelevant.
mac-nz.com — The mobile device market keeps growing as the huge installed base of cell phone users migrates upwards to smartphones and as, perhaps, people prefer smartphones as pocketable alternatives to lugging computers around. Is this the main attraction to mobile app development, or do other factors come into play?
Let me put it this way: I think the distinction between “mobile” and “desktop” is going away entirely. In fact I think it will be completely gone within the next five years. I think there will be devices “on the network” and devices “off the network.”
The growth of Machine to Machine (M2M) will explode, especially in markets like the US where federal stimulus money is targeted at improving infrastructure by putting more non-mobile devices, like home energy meters, traffic lights or cameras and other powered devices on the network.
To put it another way, while I was pretty sceptical at first about the rumours surrounding the iPad, I have to admit, that I think it has the chance of being bigger than the iPhone. For 80% of the people I know, this is the only computer they will need. It has the Web, email, an office suite, a couple 100,000 apps, long battery life, it can always be on the network – and all of this for about half the price of a modest laptop.
Where I saw the iPhone as the future of mobile, I think the iPad might just be the future of computers.
mac-nz.com — Another factor in mobile is the ability to be ‘always connected’: if you can’t find a signal, your device diminishes dramatically in usefulness. Do you think cell phone providers and wireless providers will be able to keep up? (Not just in the US, but all over.)
And do they understand the need to?
Absolutely. Prior to the iPhone, the wireless providers were trying to create demand for their network by offering token services like mobile video, or push-to-talk. A stark contrast to today, where we see networks are being crushed under the use of iPhones. The problems AT&T has had with the iPhone have served as a wake up call to the rest of the world.
The conversation at every mobile conference I’ve been too has changed from adding services no one needs to improving and extending the quality of the network. A shift in thinking that I believe network providers are very willing and eager to embrace.
mac-nz.com — Apple refuses to support Flash on the iPhone and is pushing HTML5 as a web and device standard. What do you think the future of video is on iPhone and other mobile devices?
I think Flash is dead. I don’t think the iPhone is the cause, I think it has just brought the conversation forward.
Let me put it this way, Adobe and Macromedia before it has been pushing Flash and Shockwave as a mobile platform for 10 years. For the first five years I was a big supporter. For the last five years I’ve been a big critic. First and foremost, for all their efforts Adobe hasn’t been able to make Flash streamlined enough to run on the majority of devices.
Second, the licensing. Why should Apple pay Adobe money for Flash when we have standards like HTML5, canvas and SVG? These open technologies are pushing forward quickly, in both web and mobile, to the point that the Flash horizon can be seen by enough people in both communities to make it irrelevant across the board very soon. The popularity of the iPhone is just expediting the transition.
mac-nz.com — What do you imagine will be the case for mobile devices in five years time? Ten?
Well that is a big question, so I’ll reply with a big answer: The next five to ten years has the potential to define the next century and mobile is at the heart of it. We are in the very beginning of the next industrial revolution, where a variety of elements will create the dramatic confluence of everything. Technology, globalisation, economics, politics, cultural and behavioural patterns are all looking to each other for solutions. This creates a unique nexus that only happens once every 100 years.
But this revolution is hard to imagine and even harder to try and act on in the corporate environment. Mobile of today forces companies of all sizes to begin having the conversations that will begin to define their company for the next century. It helps them see beyond the capitalist mentality of the last century and see a ubiquitous, people-centred economy of the next century. Growth will transition from being driven by sales and marketing, to being context and value-driven, something that mobile exposes very quickly.
So to answer your question, I’d say the case for mobile today is to help define the business of the next five to ten years.
mac-nz.com — And finally, (I have to ask this), are you a Mac user or a PC user?
As if you had to ask. I’m the worst kind of Mac user: a reformed PC user. I switched in 1998 and have never looked back.
