Privacy gone wrong – iOS4 (Iocation, location, location)

[NEWS FLASH: Today at Where 2.0 Pete Warden and I will announce the discovery that your iPhone, and your 3G iPad, is regularly recording the position of your device into a hidden file. Ever since iOS 4 arrived, your device has been storing a long list of locations and time stamps. We're not sure why Apple is gathering this data, but it's clearly intentional, as the database is being restored across backups, and even device migrations.]

Apple! Please fix stupid ...

We all love Apple for all the products that they come up with. At times, we also cringe at their overprotectiveness of  interests: like blocking flash, not allowing scripts, not allowing real background processing, muscling publishers to give a cut to Apple in subscriptions and sales but this latest one is truly absurd.

If the reports from Where 2.0 conference are true, then someone needs to take a real deep look at what is going on inside Apple. The new bunch of over-zealous managers are thinking features sans compliance (who we still love as they are very bright individuals) and are acting like mindless soldiers to a few who are running this company with an iron grip and laying the foundation of a highly intrusive monopolistic technology org that makes mockery of all international rules just because they get a few products right. Someone needs to stop this absurdity either from inside apple or through government regulation. Someone needs to question the people who are making these calls.

Its is pretty scary when you associate location information with the demographics of people who use iPhones. Believe you me, someone has got a handle on 75% of wealth on this planet. There are huge business, social, and political ramifications of a small act of recording location information on subscribers / users of the phone. I will not preach but who so ever did this at Apple or the provider, my friend you are plain stupid (blinded by recent success) and few can fix stupid on this planet, they come in all shapes and forms.

Is anyone at Apple listening? Whats going on buddies? Hey you bright apples, find the bad apple in your team and fix stupid!

Note: These are my personal views and do not reflect the views of any organizations I am associated with. 

HBO Anywhere – Now thats Content Everywhere!

First of all, congratulations all on development of a HBO Anywhere apps. HBO Product team, HBO IT, tringapps development / QA teams and all others who participated in making these apps a reality. The apps are truly worthy of a great brand.

“Adaptive bit rate aware long form DRMful Content” with far better quality than some other competing aggregators. We have worked with a few other aggregators but HBO Go is my personal favorite. Its been a great association with HBO teams. Well done Tringers!

Brace for impact. HBO Go goes live on May 02, 2011

Enjoy the HBO Go Ads:

ofip – Open Format for Interactive Publications

One more format to construct magazines!

Hi tringers, given our history of working closely with Woodwing and having played a rather important part in development of a few key lego pieces, nothing delights me more than the decision from Woodwing to open source the format that they (along with Time, Inc.) worked hard to conceive and develop. It is a step in the right direction.

We have been working on a similar format – a format that has a lot of buzz around it – HTML5. What I would like to see tringers accomplish is marry ofip with HTML5 and work towards making interactive publications even more pervasive.

Once again, good luck Woodwing!!

Typecasting in Objective-C

Hey all, I decided to add a new section to my blog (for developers) where we can share some tips and tricks on computer languages, design patterns, code patterns, architecture and any trends that may be of consequence to mobile and next generation device (endpoints).

So here we go, the first one:

Objective C would say - never mind till you follow a hierarchy

In Objective C , you can always cast a pointer to an instance of one class to a pointer to an instance of its superclass implicitly. This works for indirect superclasses as well. For example: NSMutableArray is a subclass of NSArray, which is a subclass of NSObject. You can cast an NSMutableArray to NSArray or NSObject. Casting in opposite direction, however, requires an explicit cast.

For those who are new to type casting, converting an expression (general term used for structs / objects and more) of a given type into another type is known as type casting. In a number of languages implicit conversions are limited to standard types where the risk of losing data precision is minimal, acceptable. C++ is an example of a strongly typed language. Objective C, on the other hand, relaxes the rule slightly. Layout of any object is defined by the instance variables (ivars) in the root class, then by the instance variables in each subsequent class down the hierarchy. Subclasses can only add new instance variables, not remove or rearrange ones from the superclasses. this means that it is always safe, in terms of memory layout, to cast a pointer to an instance of one class to a pointer to an instance of another. From OOP point of view, this means any subclass will always respond to all of the messages that the superclass responds to. Pretty neat hmm.

Objective-C also introduces a new pointer type: id. This is roughly analogous to void*, when it comes to casting rules. You may cast any object pointer to type id any you may cast id to any object pointer type, implicitly.

Historically when Smalltalk was conceived, intent was to define a general purpose language on a single sheet of paper. Objective-C inherits a number of its features from Smalltalk. In short it adds Objects to C.

A word of caution: In most circumstances, type of objects you are dealing with is already known. If you not dealing with generating structures / objects on the fly, avoid casting (implicit or explicit), too much of cumbersome class hierarchies and the damn polymorphism. Remember any operation that the runtime needs to do for you adds up and in the embedded world, each operation is worth dollars and pounds.

Any cool examples of Typecasting are welcome!

A quick note on Mobile QA

Robust QA is an integral part of mobile/embedded software development. Mobile QA can, at times, be quite daunting even for experienced embedded professionals especially given the permutations and combinations of devices, carriers, features, platforms, content, security, performance and much more. Though we can dedicate a complete book to write about the best practices on mobile QA, let me try to highlight a few key areas that should be covered:

Mantra: Nimble process, Domain specific coverage!

1. Device Capabilities: The QA team needs to understand device features really well. If the application needs to be tested on various devices, it is virtually impossible to keep track of device feature sets unless the team has a feature/model/platform matrix that is used as a reference for developing test cases. The most common mistake I have seen across apps is inability of QA/Dev teams to gauge device display resolution and relate the display related nuances to assets/resources of their applications. SD Card and dependency on storage is another one.

2. Platform Interaction: Lets put it in layman’s terms. Device send signals to the Operating System (platform) which sends signals to the runtime (virtual platform) which sends signals to your application. Further, access to device/platform resources is governed by policies set by/on the platform. If you don’t understand this, writing test cases around interaction with OS/Runtime is virtually impossible. Memory management is wrongly considered to be an in-process imperative by a large number of QA professionals, another common mistake that requires early attention. It is important to understand bidirectional communication between your app and the platform and via platform with other apps. Get this and your architectural thought process will improve, hence better QA around Platform Interaction

3. Network Interaction: A number of platforms put policies/set restrictions on how you access network resources (edge/3G/wifi), concurrency around network connections and at times the data formats that are allowed. If you don’t understand how your app communicates over transports with your servers (beyond the device) and how your app feature set is dependent on this communication, you will certainly have a few ugly hiccups related to performance, no data access and/or your app being blocked from distribution channels. QA team needs to account for these scenarios. Again, understanding of this imperative and comprehension of these scenarios is the key before good test cases can be written around these.

4. Application Features: Functional testing. What else can I say? If you don’t understand the primary, secondary and tertiary features of your application. Your test coverage will always be below par. Usability, User Experience, Screens, Data, Ads, Metering … all of it is part of app features. Get the features right, you will get the functional test cases right. The most common mistake: What to do when a feature misbehaves? Simple: Graceful recovery or alternate scenario.

5. Location of Consumer: If you cannot think like a consumer, your app will misbehave in the New York Subway, In London Tube, Under water, Around Tall buildings, near bad vibes and during the demos. On a serious note: Understand the usage scenarios from consumer’s perspective.

6. Service Provider: Plan for edge, make the experience rich on 3G, even better on 4G and the best on Wifi. Understanding data formats and how they behave across these carrier network access levels is the key to writing great test cases around service provider scenarios. Another one is carrier policies: data limits, usage plans, internet tethering policies, get your provider matrix ready. By the AT&T’s network is ….. than Verizon …. than Sprint …. to I left it at my mommy’s place is not a valid excuse for a good QA team.

I can go on and on and give 100s of examples around these scenarios. My take on QA is simple:

a). Understand the domain (write test cases that are domain aware)

b). Keep the processes nimble

c). Automate last (imagine having automated tests running in a huge environment covering 5% of the functionality)

Tune in for more ….

Nokia Microsoft Tango – Trending sessions @ tringapps!

Way to go Tringers!!

Lets take pride in our “Trending Sessions” and have more of them every month. Our predictions were spot on Nokia strategy to rebound from the gallows. Indeed Mind melting does work. What excited me the most was our trainees coming up with insightful predictions and being spot on.

As for Nokia, It would have been nice if they had given the consumers some more option .. why chose one when you can have both (MS and Android)? Maybe the story inside is more ugly than what meets the eye. Maybe they needed the money more than the platform putting MS in the driver’s seat. None the less, good for the industry.

Moral of the story: If you keep your eyes and ears open (with mind chugging along), its not difficult to predict trends. As an SI and a growing tech. services/solutions company, being able to understand technology trends gives us a unique perspective on how to plan our growth.

Hopefully, at Tringapps, we have created an environment that encourages people to think beyond the status quo and build innovative products and solutions. Understanding trending is an integral part of making the most out of paradigm shifts.

Let me also take this opportunity to announce a $5000 dollars prize (Open to all tringers in US, India and Philippines for anyone who gets the maximum number of “spot on” tech. predictions right.

The areas are:

Cloud Computing, Mobile Processors, Graphics and display screens, Mobile Platforms, Smart Phones, Tablets, HTML5, Gaming Consoles, Internet TV.. and anything that is cool for tringapps to watch out for!

Coming back to Nokia …

This paragraph from Nokia sums it up!

Going forward, Nokia is going to produce smartphones running Windows Phone 7, freeing the company from having to develop its own operating systems. As Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said in a press conference at MWC, ”We are paying them for the software. But we won’t have to develop the software. And there will be some very apparent operating savings from doing this.”

The goal is to create a partnership that can stand up to the Apple iPhone and Google Android OS. As Elop also said tonight, “Wireless operators very much want a third ecosystem. They want customer choice and they want choices for themselves. And now they have that third choice.”

M&E Companies – taking the risk (Digital First)

Media in a multi-device world

Lets call it the “Digital First” strategy as one of my friends in a major media company loves to call it!

Most M&E companies now view their digital evolution as critical to meeting consumer demand in a mult-device (next gen. devices) connected world. In this new world, these M&E companies are quickly learning that their opportunities for growth are staggering. Equally staggering are the challenges of navigating the realms of technology and content. However, seizing these opportunities requires new thinking about how Media and Entertainment content is created, curated, packaged, distributed and sold.

On one side M&E companies must develop ways to differentiate themselves through a branded customer experience strategy that offers premium content and services to their customers. This enhanced value may come from the following dimensions: Format and additional content, timing, availability & interoperability and sharing & engagement. On the other side, the strategy needs to include technology enablers to support the “digital first” strategy.

The more we work with a number of large media and entertainment customers, the more we realize that content alone will not suffice. To succeed, media and entertainment companies will need to research consumers’ general media spending habits, both online and offline, to identify patterns between their media consumption and media spending behaviors. Media and Entertainment companies will be more likely to see their online paid content strategies succeed in countries where internet users’ online spending is more aligned to their online media consumption habits.

I am sure Corporate Strategy groups of number of our customers have the same realization and are actively working to realign their strategies to fit multi-device connected “world”. If they are not, no matter how big or powerful they are .. they should get ready for a tectonic shift in the landscape – more Huffington Posts, Flipboards, Netflixes and Pandoras are around the corner making the conventional players irrelevant and obsolete.

A number of our customers / megacorps are hard at work to find the right answers and are laying down plans; from ad revenues to monetization to delivery of content to these new emerging distribution channels. However, even the best laid out plans can fail if their infrastructure and processes aren’t up to the task. M&E companies must build or lease (cloud) world class infrastructure to support their digital initiatives. They need to build intellectual property management systems that manage contracts, rights and royalty agreements, along with digital supply chains, that make digital content easy to store, search and exploit throughout the enterprise and beyond.

As the media and entertainment companies continue to develop creative ways to generate revenues, they will, at times, launch products before they have built the operational infrastructure processes to support them. This period, from idea to execution, creates significant risks of error and inefficiency. Nevertheless, media and entertainment companies will continue to push the envelop in product innovation to meet evolving consumer demands – to reach them where they live, work and play.

We, at Tringapps, take pride in being at the forefront of this paradigm shift and we wish luck to all our friends in the media industry to innovate and bring their content to ever increasing list of distribution channels; as their success means our success.