Tim Gregory » iPhone

Food24 Restaurant Finder on the iPhone

Tim — Sun, 23 May 2010 16:07:47 +0000

24.com has launched a free Food24 Restaurant Finder iPhone app. The app is great – it lets you search or browse for restaurants, view restaurant details, click to dial the restaurant phone number, create a list of favourites, and read and post reviews and ratings from your phone.

The app is also something of a landmark development for us, as it’s the first app we’ve created using only in-house developers and designers, and it’s also the first app we’ve delivered that is tightly integrated with our CMS and search technology rather than being driven by content feeds in the same was as the News24 iPhone app.

A couple of things about the app that I think are super-cool:

The app is integrated with our CMS platform both for reading data from the Food24 site and for posting back to the site. This means that ratings and reviews are shared between the site and the app in real-time, and if you’re sitting in a restaurant waiting hours for your food or you’ve just had the best service of your life you can share your thought immediately with anyone using the Food24 site or iPhone app. This CMS integration also lets the Food24 website editors update elements of the Food24 app like the “Featured” restaurants simply by dragging the restaurant name into a category in the CMS.
Solr search for the restaurant search – we’re using a Solr index on the Fod24 restaurant database, and this same search technology is exposed to the iPhone app for powerful keyword and parameterised search queries
True geo-search – the app has a button labelled “Near Me” which actually uses the phone GPS and then does a search for all restaurants within a 3km radius of your current location. You can manipulate the radius used in the search, which opens up really amazing search opportunities such as “show me a map with all the restaurants that serve sushi within 2km of where I am now”

This was a tech-led project, and was a great illustration of what’s possible when you leverage existing data and internal capabilities to create a new window on your content and new ways of interacting.

If you haven’t tried it yet, go to theiTunes App Store and download it, and please rate the app in iTunes once you’ve used it.

Drop a comment here if you have any feedback on the app.

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My first week with a Kindle DX

Tim — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:49:07 +0000

I’ve had a Kindle DX for about 10 days now and thought I would jot down a few thoughts about it.

A couple of friends have said “Uh…you chose a Kindle? Really?” in a way that sounds like they’re asking “So you bought the whole Britney Spears back catalog on vinyl? Really?” – as if there’s something simultaneously uncool and outdated about the choice.
What lies behind the question is the imminent availability of the iPad, and the question is really “why buy the big Kindle, when you don’t have long to wait for the iPad to be released?”

In a word – the screen.

I had high hopes for the iPad. I really thought it would be incredible. I thought it was going to be the most sci-fi device you could have until robot girlfriends and flying cars are available. I was deeply disappointed.
No multitasking. No cameras for video conferencing. No direct file access to the device (iTunes only). And the most disappointing – a plain old, 1024×768 LCD screen with a backlight.
In other words, the iPad is a giant iPod Touch. I can’t really see it fitting in to my life when I already have a powerful Macbook Pro and I have an iPhone – what I really wanted was a device that I could use for long reading sessions.
I’m studying at the moment, and I cart around a backpack full of files containing material printed from PDFs. My eyes can’t take an LCD screen for a whole day at work and then still look at one in the evening.
Working at a laptop is different from reading on a laptop – when you work you actually look all over the place – different windows, your keyboard from time to time, around your desk etc.  Reading 100′s of pages on an LCD screen doesn’t work for me.  So it had to be e-Ink or a hybrid screen.
The choice was pretty simple for me – Kindle DX was the best way to get a high-resolution e-Ink screen with native PDF support for documents that were designed for A4 printing.  I would have preferred a Que or an iRex device with built in Wacom tablet for note-taking, but then the price would double.
If the iPad had used a next-generation screen from Pixel Qi, Liquavista or Mirasol then it would have been an obvious choice, but not with an IPS backlit LCD panel.
I’m glad I made the choice I did – the Kindle screen is amazing. At this point, I think I prefer reading on it to reading on paper. The soft grey screen with crisp text is extremely easy on the eyes, and it’s absolutely flat, unlike a book or magazine page that seems chaotically bendy and unstable after using the Kindle.
On the down side, it’s difficult to manage files on the Kindle. Although you can simply connect it to your computer via USB and create folders and documents on the device, they all appear in one flat non-hierarchical view. I have about 200 documents stashed on mine, and it means scrolling through 13 pages if I want to browse the whole collection. I’ve been assured that a software update is on the way, but until then it’s an interface failing.
Overall, I’m super-happy with the device. It does exactly what I wanted it to do, and it reminds me a lot of my first monochrome iPod in it’s focus on doing just one thing very well. No regrets on the Kindle, and I’ll take a closer look at the iPad when it hits version 2.

Amazon, Kindle, and the Apple Tablet

Tim — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 16:17:01 +0000

I spotted a piece of news today from Mashable claiming that for the first time, Kindle e-Books outsold real books. This is interesting for a couple of reasons…

First off, unlike Apple which is in the hardware business and make high margin on iPod sales but little to no margin on music sold through the iTunes Music Store, I believe that Amazon sees the Kindle as a mechanism to sell content rather than a hardware business unto itself.

iSuppli, a company that takes apart consumer electronics and estimates their cost of manufacture, shows that although Amazon is making some margin on the Kindle, it’s nowhere close to the 100%+ markup that Apple routinely enjoys on their iPods.

The other interesting thing is that the Kindle app on the iPhone already let’s you read books you’ve bought from Amazon on a device that is not a Kindle.

The worst-kept Apple secret ever is that they are working on a Tablet device that should be released some time early in 2010.

If rumours are to be believed, it will probably sport a hybrid LCD/e-Ink multi-touch display that can play back video in full colour and also display crisp text without a backlight in full sunlight. The screen technology that seems to be the best candidate for the Tablet is from a company called Pixel Qi, a company making a hybrid screen in a convenient 10″ size, perfect for a tablet computer.

Now we add this little nugget from TechCrunch in which Steve Jobs talks about eBooks:

Q: Has your opinion of e-readers changed?

A: I’m sure there will always be dedicated devices, and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing. But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device. You notice Amazon never says how much they sell; usually if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody.

We don’t see that it’s a really big market at this point. And in the future, the more general-purpose devices will tend to win the day.

I’m not sure that Amazon, as an example, really cares that much about being in the hardware business. If I were Amazon, I’d love selling stuff where I didn’t have to have a warehouse, didn’t need UPS.

It all stacks up to a possible future where Apple sells a fantastic multi-purpose device that can act as a very good eBook reader by running a Kindle app that allows purchases from Amazon.

It’s possible that Jobs has cut a deals with book publishers in the same way he cut deals with the major music labels before the launch of the iTunes Music Store, but I think it’s unlikely.

What do you think? Will Steve add books to the iTunes Store, or will the Apple Tablet run a Kindle app that allows purchases from Amazon?

Perhaps both options can co-exist?

The Exhaustive Guide to Apple Tablet Rumors [Apple] (gizmodo.com)
The Apple Tablet’s Name: iSlate (At Least, It Sure Looks That Way) [Rumor] (gizmodo.com)

Confusing distribution and consumption in News

Tim — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:25:58 +0000

I’ve recently been on holiday in Australia and had a chat to a family member about the future of newspapers.

It was a conversation that may be familiar to many people, and has probably played out thousands of times all over the world.

His position was that he had no interest in reading his news on a screen, and that he preferred a newspaper and was prepared to continue buying and reading them.

My perspective was that newspapers were a terribly inefficient way to consume news – it makes no sense to me to spend time designing and laying out newspaper pages, printing them, driving the papers around in trucks, selling them in shops and in the street, and then reading them and throwing them away.
And for all this effort, the news is a day old when you get to read it.

It struck me that we were talking about very different things, simply because we were confusing the distribution mechanism with the consumption mechanism for our news.
When reading newspapers, they are connected simply because in order to read your content in a broadsheet, printed format, it’s necessary to print and distribute the paper.

When content is distributed digitally, it can be consumed on a laptop, in an internet café, on a mobile phone, or on a reader like the Kindle using an e-Ink display. The distribution mechanism is not linked to how the content is consumed in a digital world in the same way reading a newspaper dictates the distribution mechanism in traditional publishing.

So the crux of our argument was really about how he preferred a particular way of reading his news, while I preferred a particular way of my news being distributed. And I was prepared to put up with an inferior reading experience.

It’s particularly interesting to me that Amazon has released a Kindle reader for iPhone. What this says is that their distribution mechanism and content catalog is so compelling that people are willing to read long-form content on a tiny backlit screen. The cost saving (no Kindle reader to buy) and utility (read your books any time you have your phone with you) make it worth putting up with the limitations of the iPhone as a reading device.
It suggests to me that if the content is compelling, the price is fair, the quality of the reading experience improves, and the devices become cheaper we should see much greater take-up of digital distribution for content that is currently still on paper.

The other area in which the Kindle is succeeding is slightly counter-intuitive… I’ve picked up from numerous comments online that the Kindle is being used by old people with poor vision, and by people who suffer from arthritis.

They find that the Kindle is much easier to read for them than traditional books because of the light weight of the device, the fact that they don’t need to be held open, and because the text can be enlarged to a size that is comfortable for them to read.

If the young folk and the old folk are both prepared to give up paper when the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, we’re looking at a compelling shift in the chosen method of consumption and the associated distribution.

What are your thoughts on how this will play out? Can you see a day when you no longer read long-form material like books, newspapers and magazines on paper?