“8.9″ screen does not affect the overall weight of the Eee PC™ 900A, which remains below 1kg – allowing children and women to carry it with ease.”

Because children and woman are genetically engineered to fail lifting anything above 1kg.

But it is only last week that I was playing around my iPhone’s settings, only to discover there is a Facebook settings pane that had this very interesting option turned off by default: Shake to Reload.

This shows one again how the iPhone’s capabilities can bring man-machine interaction to a more natural level.  I love this feature, use it all the time. The problem is.. I find myself shaking my phone in all other apps to reload too.. Mail, Safari, STM Mobile … to no avail.  My message to developers: you know what to do!

Shaking your iPhone like that in public can make you look a bit crazy, as if you’re about to beat the world record in cellphone throwing, but I’m ready to accept that for the sake of a higher UI usability.

This thing is just brilliant. In less than 24 hours, it became one of my most frequently used apps.  I took 3 buses yesterday, all I had to do is get my iPhone out of my pocket, tap in the bus stop number and select my bus line. Very quick and fast.

And when it’s set to your favorites, it takes 3 seconds (as opposed to the 1 minute it takes to call AUTOBUS, with STM always wanting you to answer their automated survey, before you actually get your bus times)

This little application is pretty great, but I hope to see some new things in possible updates. Here’s my little feature list so far:

• Information caching
  In “Favorite stops” the app should be able to cache the times. When you quit the app and come back, it has to fetch the times again. Instead of displaying the last fetched times if no network connection is present; it displays a [n albeit very elegant] warning that I am not connected to the Internet. This could be easily fixed in a future update. [Update: This was fixed in 1.0.1!]
• Use of localization services
  Use of the localization of the iPhone, somehow. I shown this to a friend and the first thing he said was “And does it find your location automatically and the nearby stops?” All I could say is “uhm.. Oh.. No.. No it doesn’t”.
• Trip planning and more
  Metro map [Update: added in 1.0.1!], “Tous Azimut” trip planning support (if STM would allow such).

This application is a must have for those taking the bus regularity in Montreal. It’s available for $0.99 on the iTunes App Store. As of 3:45 pm on July 31st 2008 it is the 10th most downloaded paid app of the Canadian iTunes Store!

Now the geeky part:

First, let me add that this is the most beautiful application I have seen so far on the iPhone OS beside Apple’s. The developer is a true master of Cocoa Touch, as this uses user interface controls and features I have only seen in Apple’s own apps so far.

Second, I’ve been trying to find out how this application fetches this information. I doubt STM has REST API web services for apps like these to bring back the content.  I just don’t feel like sniffing the traffic between my iPhone and my WiFi access point right now! ;) Anybody know? I’ll email the author of the app and ask him. [Update: It seems the app fetches the info directly from the web pages it parses]

If  STM were to make such info available via web services or the like, perhaps they could also open up access to their trip planning service, which could then be integrated in mobile apps like this.  This would be the most remarkable thing.

Je commence donc à lire.. Plus je lisais, plus je fronçais les sourcils, car moins ça faisait de sens. Je lisais de plus en plus rapidement, tentant de repérer un commentaire des Grands d’ISF, les Michael Lenczner, Benoit Grégoire, Richard Lussier, Alexis Cornellier, Laurent Maisonnave… Rien.

Pendant ce temps, la nouvelle se répand sur la liste de diffusion des volontaires d’ISF. Plus la journée avance, plus on devient sceptique. On y apprend que La Presse et son journaliste Tristan Péloquin se seraient basés sur des documents préliminaires (mais tout de même disponibles sur le site de la Ville [2]). Aucun des membres de l’organisation Montréalaise n’a apparemment été consulté avant la publication.

En plus de se baser sur un document non-officiel et non final (pour un article qui fait la première page d’un journal de bonne réputation, je vous le rappelle), les faits ne pourraient pas avoir étés moins bien rapportés que ça.

On parle de l’installation de 400 nouveaux « hotspots », ce qui représenterait une hausse de 187% par rapport aux 350 actuellement en opération, tout ça pour 200 000$ par année.

Correction : le document prévoit qu’ISF passerait à 400 hotspots, donc 50 – et non 400 – bornes supplémentaires, pour un montant qui est loin d’avoir été confirmé.

Le plus drôle est sans contredis le passage suivant :

La Ville de Paris a quant à elle récemment mis sur pied un réseau de 400 points d’accès gratuits. Le développement du réseau a coûté à la Ville lumière 2 milliards d’euros, plus 500 000 euros par année en entretien.

2 milliards d’euros! Haha! Voir que la Mairie de Paris utiliserait le tiers de son budget annuel [3] pour 400 hotspots! Avoir été parisien, j’aurai appelé à une nouvelle Révolution! Franchement! Il y a une limite à faire des erreurs dans un article (qui je vous le rappelle encore une fois, a fait la une), mais on peut tout de même se servir de son jugement! Je me demande bien ce qu’il aurait pu y avoir de si extraordinaire pour qu’un point d’accès sans fil puisse coûter 5 millions d’euros!

Correction : La Région de l’Île-de-France et la Mairie de Paris ont dépensé près de 2 MILLIONS d’euros, auxquels s’ajoute un demi-million d’euros annuel pour la bande passante et la maintenance.

—

Mis à part tout ça, il n’en reste pas moins que je suis extrêmement content (et jusqu’à un certain point, fier) qu’un tel partenariat ait lieu.

OSBL montréalais, Île Sans Fil fait appel à WifiDog – le portail captif à source libre (« open source ») développé « in-house » par les bénévoles et actuellement utilisé partout dans le monde. ISF agit également comme agent de diffusion et d’échange dans le domaine de l’art numérique et technologique d’artistes montréalais à travers les divers projets ou événements avec lesquels il s’associe.

C’est vraiment une bonne nouvelle pour tout ceux qui ont déjà travaillé ou travaillent toujours au sein d’ISF, pour les citoyens mais aussi pour la Ville de Montréal dont les actes sauront, je l’espère, faire boule de neige au sein de la communauté pro logiciel libre, mais aussi auprès des autres grandes métropoles mondiales.

Longue vie à île Sans Fil! Continuez votre excellent travail!

–
Pierre Nick

[1] Aussi disponible sur Cyberpresse Technaute

[2] Ville de Montréal > Projet d’expansion du réseau de Île sans fil à Montréal

[3] Mairie de Paris > Budget et fiscalité locale > Budget primitif 2007

This comes just when Apple releases iPhone software update 1.1.1 which rendered unusable any user-installed application and relocking the unlocked devices, while also completely disabling the said phones in an effort to keep its platform closed.

This is a sad thing to behold. An Apple-designed phone user interface sleekness was very welcomed in a world were phone interfaces offer nothing to be proud of, where Palm OS is slowly dying on the account of the exceptionally atrocious Windows Mobile, or where Symbian which even while having a rock solid core, is usually garmented with poor user interfaces. The difference is that all those platforms are known for all the applications you can get for them.

Apple had a slew of developers at its knees, begging for an iPhone software development kit. They were offering Apple the biggest gift of all: propelling the platform higher and further. The Web apps are great but they aren’t only what its all about. If Apple so believes in this, I ask why didn’t they make all their own included applications work this way as well?

On the other hand, I can live without added applications. I must assert that I have faith in Apple’s capability of delivering an amazing user-experience through its own applications. But I still can’t imagine owning a $400 phone locked to one single carrier. That sure is a definite no-go.

I know everyone is already talking about it, but since I’m such a Facebook whore addict active user and an avid Apple-lover I had to point it out. A simple UI giving you access to Facebook’s main features, the iPhone way. I almost prefer it to Facebook’s mainstream interface.

The interface is so lickable (Jobs referred to Aqua in 2001 at the unveiling of OS X as being “so nice you want to LICK it” and this is how I feel about it). It’s clean and it sizzles[1] for über user-centric leveraging of e-communities social Web 2.0 mobile networks.

To those saying the iPhone’s Web isn’t supposed to be a “mobile Internet” or a “watered down version of the Internet”: let me just say that the Web wasn’t designed for multi-touch goodness ;)

Literally, it’s stalking social networking at your [multiple]fingertips!

[1] (c) François and Olivier

Update – 6:44 PM: Speaking of which.. François – who’s on a trip to the San Francisco Bay Area – just called me from an iPhone in the San Francisco Apple Store by touching “Call Pierre-Nick” from my profile on Facebook for iPhone.. Oh wow.. Can we say killer app?

I’ve just been made aware that Motorola will be closing their Montreal-based Research and Development Center as part of a worldwide mobile handset division restructuring. Not only are they closing their R&D here in Montreal, but also one they have in Adelaide, Australia, and a major one at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Research Park.

You know Motorola (or any company) is doing badly when they have to lay off people and close off some of their business, but what you also know is that Motorola is doing VERY badly when they are laying off their R&D workforce, the founding roots of innovation > new products > sales > money.

Everyone was praising them when they released the RAZR, for its innovative sleekness. It sold out like crazy and took Motorola’s handset division out of its slumber. But did they think they could live from the RAZR – and all of its variants part of the LETRZ branding – forever?

History only repeats itself: Motorola did the same thing when they released the then revolutionary StarTAC – the world’s first true clamshell cell phone – in 1996. It was a tremendous success. Motorola then virtually stopped innovating, and plunged (until the arrival of the RAZR 7 years later).

The reason I think Motorola still has the second largest mobile phone market share (after Nokia and before Samsung and Sony Ericsson) mainly comes from the fact that they focused on low-end phones, the kind given for free with a mobile operator contract.

Maybe I’m wrong. I believe you need to be a pretty talented engineer to work at Motorola. If that is the case, it’s a management problem. Lack of creative freedom, ideas drowning in the Motorola ocean.

About 200 people are to be laid off from Motorola Montreal’s closing. In other news, Ericsson announced last week that their Montreal R&D center is looking forward to augment its workforce by exactly 200…

In the meantime, you can check out those other handset manufacturers who are actually profitable (there are less than you might think) such as Scandinavian pioneers Nokia and Sony Ericsson (Ok, part Japanese too). Or OpenMoko.

Many factors contribute to the success of those companies. One of them I think is putting user interface design, ease of use and high usability as a top priority. This will constitute the focal point of part II of this series.

– Pierre Nick