_iPad App Review – Books

Like the previous reviews, the topic today is Books.  I will be looking at Alice in Wonderland, Disney Digital Books and Marvel Comics.

Alice in Wonderland

Here is another app that got a lot of hype.  You can read a story and move objects around.  Is that really ground breaking?  It is basically a picture book with areas that you can either swipe/drag or rotate and they move.  I think pop up books and scratch and sniff are more interactive then this.  From a layout and design perspective it is pretty cool.  Reading to your kids the book also is nice since they can interact with some objects.

Disney Digital Books

Every once in a while someone hits it out of the park.  Disney did just that.  The Toy Story version of the digital book is pure awesome.  Simple animation makes the book come alive.  Read along with highlighting the words helps the little ones read.  Ability to record my own voice so my kids can hear me read the book to them is awesome.  Add some games, have some of the pages ‘color-able’ and you got a great app!

Marvel Comics

I will say this first, I am a biased Marvel Comic fan.  With that said, this app is awesome.  The store is a simple lift from the Appstore (looks identical) but that is not the point you should care about.  Nor the ability to download a ton of old and new comics.  The point you need to pay attention to is once you start reading or I should say ‘living’ the comic.  The comic view provides a traditional read of the full page but you can also dive into each of the letter boxes and read the comic that way.  You eye is no longer jumping to the action box half way down the page but your involved in the intense story of the box.  Swipe and it animates to the next box.  Nice job.

_iPad App Review – Magazines

Today I am taking a look at Magazines.  Lets see how these publications translate to the iPad.

Men’s Health

Men’s Health is a ‘container’ app that you can view and purchase other issues.  They do a OK job with this app.  The content is lifted straight from the print piece  and put into the iPad.  So swiping through pages is the normal.  What you see in print is what you see in the iPad.  The one thing they added is interactivity ‘on-top’ of the pages.  What I mean by that is when you land on an article blue plus signs light up where you can interact.  You can view a video or take a poll.  It is nice since it takes the guess work on what your supposed to do.

BMW Magazine

Talk about a glorified PDF reader.  No interaction except for some hot spots to link out to the web.

Wired

There has been a tremendous amount of hype surrounding this app.  The hype was around 2 areas, the first being the app itself and the second being the controversy of Adobe building the app in Flash, which Apple denied.  That is another story.  The app itself, in my opinion falls short.  The app does not train the user into what to do next.  Your left clicking (touching) and swiping random spots just to see if anything is linked.  There are ads that do some interaction and others where you think there would be but do not.

_iPad App Review

If your a techie or into the digital world you have heard by now of this device called an iPad.  Even if you are not a techie, you probably have heard about it.  More and more companies are jumping at developing applications for the device and are inventing new ways to interact with it.  Some of the applications are good, some are not.  The iPad provides the developer with more screen real estate than the iPhone so options can be a little greater when it comes to creativity.

I will be taking a look at a few applications from Brands or Publishing companies.  The reason I am choosing that avenue is I am a Technologist at Story Worldwide and need to keep up on the trends and happenings that my clients competition is doing.  There are some great apps developed solely by independent developers, which I may feature but for now just Brands.

The 3 I have chosen are the following, Nike Football, Financial Times and the Weather Channel

Nike Football

The Nike Football app gets high marks with me.  Very easy to use.  Vibrant colors and a ton of videos.  A few things I like are the use of the bottom portion of the screen to put simple navigation to go from section to section.  I enjoy the large use of images on every screen and the ability to orientate the iPad and the screen shifting to a better and more usable position.

Financial Times

Yet another newspaper app, this one succeeds.  They don’t try to do too much with it.  FT presents the articles clean and the navigation between them is easy.  They provide an indicator to get back to the start or the main page of the newspaper on the left hand side.  I feel that is easy to find since you a swiping left and right.  The other big plus is the background color is a tan/parchment color which is easy on the eyes.  Much nicer than the standard white background.

The Weather Channel

If you have the Weather Channel app for the iPhone then you are fully aware of its features.  The iPad version is the same thing just in a bigger format.  Radar maps are bigger, video is bigger, 10 day forecast is bigger.

_The Real Technology War

It seems every other day there is a new battle brewing in the digital landscape.  iPad vs eBook readers, iPhone vs Android, Apple vs Adobe, HTML5 vs Flash, Chrome vs IE9, Google Docs vs Microsoft Live Office…and the list goes on.  With every new battle that starts there is another blogger tweeter techie know-it-all that comes up with an article explaining why participant in this battle is better than the other or why one will not last.  AND to top that off, you have CEO’s of companies battling with these bloggers and other companies.  It is very soap opera-ish.  ”What will Steve Job’s do next?  Will Google Chrome take over the world?  When will Microsoft strike back?  Stay tuned till next episode to find out.”

I am neither a CEO or a know-it-all but I have a different point of view that people are missing.  Let me first start out with an analogy.  Think back to when you were a kid and watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom (if you don’t remember this show, think Animal Planet).  Theses were fascinating shows about wildlife.  All sorts of wildlife.  The big episodes or the episodes that were always cool to watch were with the Lion.  The Lion is the main event.  Always!  At every zoo and every show, when there is a Lion, people stop and watch.  So true with this show.  Sometimes two Lions would fight.  Sometimes they would just sleep all day.  Other times they would hunt some prey.  No matter what they were up too you were glued to the TV waiting for the Lion to attack…yes…a Wildebeest.  The Lion would sneak up on a herd and take one down.  They would feast for hours and then move on.

Now bear with me here, I am not comparing any of these technologies or companies to either the Lion or the Wildebeest, but just the battle.  The battle would produce a ferocious scene; dirt flying everywhere, animals watching and running, blood spurting.  Most of all, the Vultures would come to wait and benefit from the battle.  Once the Lion was done, it was their time to feast.

I am a Vulture.  I am going to feast on these battles.  Why?  It is because I am a technologist and I have too.  The way I look at it is this; sure one technology will probably overtake the other but until then I will support both and deliver both.  I will feast on the remains of the war of words and the war of the diverse technologies to deliver what is right, appropriate and on target to my clients.

Here is another example.  One of my clients is a Fortune 500 client.  Thousands of employees.  They all use IE6.  IE6 is bad.  Real bad.  Not only from a security standpoint but from a coding perspective as well.  It is buggy, renders CSS differently than other browsers, and requires a lot of extra effort to make it work.  There are sites out there that are not supporting it any more.  But when a client is paying you to develop a web site and they cannot view it on their computer or better yet from, ANY of their company computers, that is a big time #FAIL.  So what do we do?  We do what they want us to do and make it work.

There are 2 rules in Customer Service that I learned from Stew Leonard’s:

Rule #1: Customer is always right.

Rule #2: If Customer is wrong, see Rule #1.

As a technologist, I am not going to deliver a solution that only works on X percentage of the devices that are out there.  If I am building a web site, not only will it work in older browsers but mobile phones, netbooks, iPads, Android Tablets etc.

So what’s the point?

There are 2 points.

Point 1:  You don’t have to rely on one technology to do a job.  Each of the technologies in question came out because one does something different from the other.  The questions should be, what are you trying to accomplish?  Answer that first, then the technology will shake out from that.  I had someone ask me about HTML5 vs Flash and what do we do since Flash is not available on the iPad.  What are you trying to do?  Will your customers go to your site on an iPad?  If so, lets make an iPad enabled site and leverage what the iPad does best.  Keep Flash for the desktop based site.  What’s the problem with 2 or 3 different sites?  You don’t wear dress shoes to go running.  Choose the right tool for the job.

Point 2:   While companies argue and battle regarding what technology will win, I will need to support all of them until there is a winner.  By supporting all of them, I will deliver 100% coverage to my clients customers which makes everyone happy.

So the next time someone asks, “Will HTML5 take over Flash?” or “iPhone vs Android”,  your response should be “I hope it is a long battle”.

_Android Activity Not Launching MapActivity

I have decided to play around with Android and started out using the Google API for Maps.  My goal is to create an app that has a tab view that you can tab through some info and on the tabs there will be a button to launch the Google Map to show the location of the point of interest and show where you are and provide directions.  I have the tab view working great but when I try to fire off an event for the MapActivity that is where it fails.

If I create my own MapActivity project it works fine, but when I include the class in my tab project it fails.

Here is what I have:

public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.location_tab);
...
Button btnMap = (Button) findViewById(R.id.btnMapview);
btnMap.setOnClickListener(mMapListener);
...
}

And my Listener

private OnClickListener mMapListener = new OnClickListener() {
        public void onClick(View v) {
        	Intent mapIntent = new Intent(getApplicationContext(),LocationMap.class);
        	startActivity(mapIntent);
        }
 };

And here is my Map Class:

public class LocationMap extends MapActivity {

	MapView mapView;
    MapController mc;
    GeoPoint p;

	@Override
	protected boolean isRouteDisplayed() {
	    return false;
	}

    /** Called when the activity is first created. */
	@Override
	public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
		super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.main);

        mapView = (MapView) findViewById(R.id.myMapView);
        mapView.setBuiltInZoomControls(true);

        mc = mapView.getController();
        String coordinates[] = {"40.750386", "-73.976773"};
        double lat = Double.parseDouble(coordinates[0]);
        double lng = Double.parseDouble(coordinates[1]);

        p = new GeoPoint(
            (int) (lat * 1E6),
            (int) (lng * 1E6));

        mc.animateTo(p);
        mc.setZoom(17);
        mapView.invalidate();

	}
}

I get a force close each time I click the button. I have swapped out my LocationMap.class with a standard activity class and that works fine. I have put my LocationMap class in it’s own project and that works fine as well, but together…no dice.

Any thoughts?  Here is my StackOverflow post