My very late entry to mobile computing

I'm starting this post writing on my new Android phone, though I may not have the patience to finish it on this tiny virtual keyboard. (For the record, I'm using Swype to type.)

So I admit, I'm a latecomer to Smart Phone technology, having ignored the iPhone almost completely when it was in the $500 to $600 range (apart from playing with a friend's every so often). I don't much regret waiting. Although I am a geek to the core, and love my techno toys as much as the next 21st century man, I am also a cheapskate at heart and don't like to overpay for the privilege of early adoption. My problem with the phones has been not just the initial cost, but the ongoing charge on the phone bill. In this case though, after developing a healthy case of envy from seeing my dad's Android, as well as plenty of coworkers playing with their phones, I have succumbed. The price has dropped substantially, and some of the early technical problems that were apparent in the iPhone (one unreliable phone carrier, shortage of third party apps, and various other issues that you'd expect with a brand new technology) have ceased to be a concern.

The highest tech handheld device I had before a couple of weeks ago was an iPod Nano that was a few years old, and the main interface was the five button scroll wheel. Many years ago I had a somewhat Palm Pilot with a miniature keyboard and a wifi connection, but it broke too many times and I couldn't justify dumping so much money into it. When my regular phone company offered me a deal on trading in my old (cracked) phone, I realized I could replace both phone and iPod in one shot, for less than an iPod Touch costs, and also get a fully featured GPS system. So I was sold.

So. Welcome, belatedly, to the 21st century. The internet now exists more or less everywhere. This is actually pretty close to the way things were going anyway, with free wifi connections being available in every household and classroom, and more and more public buildings and restaurants. The difference is that if I get lost on the freeway now, or want to look for things in my immediate area, all I have to do is park. I have a full suite of tools and it doesn't require me to go home or carry a laptop in order to access them.

I've been using personal computers since I was eight years old, and developing software for nearly as long (BASIC, then Pascal and C in high school). At that time, everything was pretty much self-contained. Last year I reposted Tim O'Reilly's talk on the "Internet Operating System." Part of what Tim was talking about was the fact that programs now tap into a massive infrastructure of other programs that already do stuff, and that makes it easier to just hook it up into new applications without rewriting everything.

For instance, Google did not have to write a new map program just to get navigation to work on the Android. Due to the success of Google Maps and Google Earth, they've been harvesting information for years already, from satellite photos to detailed street maps to (as I am now seeing) data mined patterns indicating exactly where and when traffic is heaviest on each day of the week. So the Android Navigation program mainly represents a new interface on an existing product.

It is, of course, neat that my Android has lots of local space. Eight gigabytes of memory totally dwarfs the computers we had in the early 80's. Our first computer had no hard drive, and had to read everything off of floppy disks with a capacity of 140 KB. Our first hard drive had, I think somewhere around 10MB of space, which seemed like a huge amount of storage at the time. My Android could host that hard drive's contents 800 times, while fitting comfortably in my pocket, and doesn't make all that noise.

But as cool as that is, it's important not to underestimate the power of having your programs tap into information that's just floating around in the air. The accumulated map and satellite data from Google obviously would not come close to fitting in a phone. But I only need a small amount of local data at any given time to support the navigation system. Everything else is handled by services hosted on web servers that are "out there" somewhere, and supply just as much data as I need to find my way around at the immediate moment.

This technology, which seemed so cutting edge and exotic to me a couple of years ago is now, apparently, a commonplace app. I already downloaded it. You hold a bar code up to the phone, and it scans it, and then in a few moments you can pull up Amazon reviews and comparison shop. This actually makes physical bookstores more interesting again, as one of the main reasons I liked shopping online was the ability to jump to all the associated data that was available.

Anyway, I'm pretty enthusiastic to see the sort of horizons that have opened up now that I've got mobile computing, and I'm already experimenting with the Android SDK to see if I can, for starters, port some of the little Java games I already wrote to a new platform. Hate to sound even more geeky than usual, but it's an exciting time we live in.



(Final note: I did stop Swyping this post about halfway into the second paragraph.)

The State of the Internet Operating System

I'm working my way through a couple of long and extremely excellent articles by Tim O'Reilly, about how the operating system of the future is the entire internet.

• The State of the Internet Operating System
• Handicapping the Internet Platform Wars

I haven't got much to add that would improve the articles so far, so I'll just quote an excerpt and get out of the way.

The Internet Operating System is an Information Operating System

The underlying services accessed by applications today are not just device components and operating system features, but data subsystems: locations, social networks, indexes of web sites, speech recognition, image recognition, automated translation. It's easy to think that it's the sensors in your device - the touch screen, the microphone, the GPS, the magnetometer, the accelerometer - that are enabling their cool new functionality. But really, these sensors are just inputs to massive data subsystems living in the cloud.

When, for example, as an iPhone developer, you use the iPhone's Core Location Framework to establish the phone's location, you aren't just querying the sensor, you're doing a cloud data lookup against the results, transforming GPS coordinates into street addresses, or perhaps transforming WiFi signal strength into GPS coordinates, and then into street addresses. When the Amazon app or Google Goggles scans a barcode, or the cover of a book, it isn't just using the camera with onboard image processing, it's passing the image to much more powerful image processing in the cloud, and then doing a database lookup on the results.

Increasingly, application developers don't do low-level image recognition, speech recognition, location lookup, social network management and friend connect. They place high level function calls to data-rich platforms that provide these services.

Separating form from content

In a previous post I highlighted a video showcasing some experimental wearable Technology. One of the features in this video was that a person picked up a product from the shelf, scanned it, and received some information (green, yellow, or right lights) indicating whether the product was environmentally friendly.

A friend asked:

The thing that interests me the most about this is the impact it will claim to have on shoppers' ability to make more eco-friendly purchasing decisions. Where will the database be kept? Does it already exist? Also wondering how companies would be held to objective standards about the environmentally friendly nature of their products. Are there standards already in place? Will the database include packaging environmental impacts?

The important thing to recognize about the gizmo in the video is that it is not an information creator. It is simply a display device. In the current web 2.0 world, it's important to recognize the separation of form and content.

Essentially, the device consists of a wireless receiver, a camera, and a projected screen. All computers and computer-like devices require three basic components: input, output, and data. They've gotten more complicated over time, but they can still be best understood as variations on those basic components.

As a kid in 1982, I had an IBM PC 8086. For output, it had a screen that would display only four colors (red, green, blue, and of course black), and it had a speaker that could generate various pitches of annoying beeps. For input, it had a keyboard that made loud solid clicky noises; no mouse. It also had no hard drive. All data was stored to 5-1/4" floppy disks, which would turn on a red light when writing and produce an audible "kachunk kachunk" noise.

Many of my friends had Atari 2600s. Ataris didn't come with their own screen or speakers of course; instead, they had a dongle thingy that would plug into a standard TV and provide output. Input was limited to a joystick that had one button and four directions, which are not sensitive to the level of force you apply. Data was in the form of interchangeable cartridges. You could not save the state of your games; your progress only existed in memory while the console was on.

Now the components for a high end gaming system are getting more and more elaborate, especially with high end games: output includes complex 3D graphics and digitized sound, while input may include mouse, keyboard, camera, gamepad, and a microphone. Game files (data) take up several gigabytes, sometimes read from your hard disk and sometimes directly from a CD. Saved games may take several megabytes.

But something else is happening too.

The most important aspect of this is the internet. Thanks to the internet, the data component has shifted away from individual computers and onto servers that can be accessed from anywhere in the world. I don't have to be actually at my home computer anymore to look up some important information that's saved in an email. I don't have to be holding a physical copy of "Consumer Reports" in my hand to check out a product rating.

At the same time, wireless devices -- basically a fancy method of receiving additional input -- are infiltrating everything. We've got wi-fi hubs popping up all over the place, in coffee shops and restaurants and airports and malls. If you're not near a hub and you're willing to pay extra (I'm not yet), your cell phone will pull down an internet connection from satellite. And they're coming up with new methods to connect people, like Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, which can turn a room full of people with wireless devices into a grid of amplified signals.

So, how does the device in the video generate the information about environmental products? It doesn't. It doesn't take up space in the device's memory. It comes from the internet, from sites that are maintained by someone else.

As I envision the guts of this device, you probably install a minimal amount of middleware -- software which "knows" where to get raw data from and what is the best way to display it. The database that keeps track of individual products would probably be very large, but that needn't concern you, any more than the inner workings of your favorite web pages concerns you. You ask for a specific piece of information -- what is THIS product? -- and that gets interpreted into a web request, and the server sends it back as a stream of formatted information, to which the middleware then adds some graphical bells and whistles, for the display.

So then the question is, where does the environmental information come from? Does it already exist now, or is it just a fantasy from the video?

Well, yes it does, I think. I'm not real up on this stuff, but I googled around and came up with this and this. The data may not yet be formatted in a way that is useful to a mobile device, but the information exists in some format. If nothing else, somebody could easily write a program to scan the web page and throw out most of the HTML, pulling out only relevant information and turning it into a graphical display.

So the remaining question is: what is the standard for this information? Are these sites reliable? Well, that's up to you to decide. The main thing that has been accomplished by web 2.0 is that many competing organizations can generate this sort of content in a standardized format. Whether you trust the information depends on whether you trust the organization that generated it.

I can understand the suspicion if it is, for instance, a government agency that is known to have been strongly influenced by a political agenda. Likewise, if it's a corporate site, and the corporation is influenced by advertising dollars. But there are also consumer advocacy groups with a reputation to uphold. And while I am not a pure capitalist by any means, this really is a case where if there's a strong enough demand, the market provides what you want. "The market" in this case may be profit driven, or it may just be a bunch of activists who want to make this data available to further their agenda. Whatever the case, it's likely that you can find the data you're looking for.

The bottom line is that technology is a tool for getting at the information that already exists, or can be created. It gives you quick access to the same data from anywhere in the world.

I don't think the device shown in the video is perfect. After having some discussions about it, I think that waving your arms around is a clunky and tiring way to interact. I bet the screen is hard to read in a brightly lit area. That's not the point, though. The point is that it's becoming easier to apply technological solutions to pull in information about the world around you, and get back useful background information that's not immediately obvious to your senses.

Wearable technology

I want one of these setups. NOW.