Aaron Gustafson's Blog, page 15
July 7, 2013
Apple vs. the Open Web
I’ll admit it: I never really got Siri.
To me, she’s always been a bit gimmicky. When she debuted on the iPhone 4S, I thought the voice recognition stuff was neat, but I didn’t see her as being anything close to the “digital assistant” Apple promised us. The idea was good, but the implementation was about as inspiring as my then 5-year-old Garmin. Oh, but she couldn’t give you turn by turn directions.
Sure, Siri’s gotten better, but not much.
Now, after reading Dan Kaplan’s excellent TechCrunch post lamenting the Siri that could have been, I realize how much better she could—nay should—be. You see, prior to being bought by Apple, Siri Assistant was pretty damn useful. She was a true digital assistant, capable of setting up a whole evening of fun for you by purchasing movie tickets, getting you dinner reservations, and even hailing you a cab. Pre buy-out, her creators even had plans to supercharge Siri by giving her predictive awareness (think Google Now). Dan offered a few examples of how this might work:
“Hey Dan, your flight to NYC has just been canceled! Would you like me to book the next one?”
“Hey Dan, you weren’t at home when your package got delivered. Would you like me to redirect it to your office?”
“Hey Dan, you’ve got a coffee meeting downtown in 25 minutes. How about I summon a Lyft?”
Given Siri’s previous capabilities and the plans her creators had, how did she become so lame?
Personally, I think the reason is simple: Apple doesn’t get the web. Sure there are a lot of incredibly smart and talented people who work at Apple who clearly do understand what the web is and how it works, but I think as a company Apple doesn’t. Or worse it does, but they can’t control it or monetize it, so they’re not interested.
It’s a feeling I’ve had for quite some time, but reading this piece (especially in light of Jeremy Keith’s fantastic post about the movement of many web companies toward creating more walled gardens) really convinced me. I mean take a look at Maps.
Prior to iOS 6, Google Maps was the de-facto mapping and directions app. It offered your standard driving and walking directions, but it also offered public transit directions based on public data (much of which Google has coalesced into Google Maps Transit). Now, with Apple’s homegrown Maps, if you want to get transit directions, you need to download a separate app from the App Store. Travel a lot? Try 8 differnet apps. Or 10.
Instead of using existing APIs to make transit directions native to Maps, they opted to fragment the experience.*
A quick direction search using Maps and the resulting screen when I route via public transit.
Sure, you might argue that the Maps team may have had to cut the transit feature due to time or budget constraints, but they found the time to make the maps three-dimensional. Just sayin’.
Clearly Apple could have used any of the publicly available transit APIs to accomplish this task, but they didn’t. The same goes for Siri. There are a ton of freely-available resources out there to collect information and then do something useful with it—to truly allow Siri to become the digital assistant of our dreams—but Apple doesn’t seem to have any interest. And I think their software is suffering for it.
* I’m all for de-coupling functionality in order to scale application logic, but de-coupling (a.k.a. fragmenting) the user experience is downright baffling. Especially for a company that prides themselves on both design and user experience.
April 16, 2013
Orlando in a Whirlwind
March 4, 2013
Presto Change-o
February 2, 2013
Responsive Tables
January 15, 2013
Welcome Jeff Bridgforth
October 30, 2012
Slides from my talk at HOW Interactive
August 7, 2012
Hackanooga registration is now open
In a world with universal, ultra high-speed networks, all our assumptions about the web can be reset. What kinds of apps can we build when data can travel as fast as it needs to and processing power is never a bottleneck? The GigCity is going to find out.
Join Mozilla, US Ignite and a crew of forward-thinking technologists September 14-16th for a weekend of innovation, coding and fun. Leveraging the power of Chattanooga’s Gigabit network, we’ll spend two days prototyping the apps of the future. And we’ll get a glimpse at the new experiences made possible by next-generation networks and our own ingenuity.
If you plan, build or design for the web, we want you! This is not a spectator sport, so plan to get your hands dirty.
What will happen?
Hackanooga is a participatory event focused on making and doing. We want running code, not just cool concepts. Less yak, more hack.
Over the course of two days we’ll code, collaborate and kick ass! We’ll eat pancake breakfasts, laugh over midnight marshmallows, and hack furiously into the wee hours. Hackanooga will provide you with meals, snacks, general merriment and even a place to nap over the course of the weekend, so you can focus on your team’s app.
At the end of the event, we’ll revel in the fruits of our collective handiwork and make plans to join forces again. Plus, prototypes created during the event could evolve into submissions to the Mozilla Ignite challenge, with $500,000 of seed money and mentorship available to help get the apps off the ground.
Up for the challenge?
Hack yes! What do I need to do?
Everyone is welcome, but space is limited, so sign-up early. If you’re interested in participating, please register at http://hackanooga-2012.eventbrite.com by Tuesday, August, 21, 2012. (We’re also offering a limited number of travel scholarships for out-of-town hackers. If you’re seeking travel support, please complete the appropriate application fields when you register.)
Don’t worry if you don’t have a team or an app idea; we’ll pair you up with a team based on your interests. We’ve partnered with organizations around Chattanooga to uncover potential projects in the areas of strategic growth, distance education, library technology, clean energy, government transparency, healthcare and public safety. We have an abundance of ideas and expert resources, now we just need you.
Additional event details are available on http://hackanooga-2012.eventbrite.com. Questions, comments or concerns about Hackanooga? Please email kelly@easy-designs.net.
For more, check out http://mozillaignite.org, http://www.thegigcity.com/, and http://us-ignite.org. If you have questions about the scholarship, the Mozilla Ignite challenge, or US Ignite, please email ignite@mozillafoundation.org.
We hope to see you there!
August 6, 2012
Implementing Responsive Design
August 3, 2012
Aaron on the BBC (and UIE)
Aaron’s been all over the place lately. He was recently interviewed for a segment on HTML5 that ran on BBC television in the UK. True to form, his hour-long conversation boiled down to a few sound bites, but it was still an amazing opportunity. You can check the video out below:
In advance of his workshop at User Interface 17 this coming November, Aaron also sat down for a chat with Jared Spool to talk about responsive design, adaptive user interfaces, mobile and more. You can check out the podcast on the User Interface Engineering blog.
July 9, 2012
We Want You!
Finding quality talent is never a simple task. Being a small agency, we’ve primarily worked with a talented pool of awesome freelance designers and developers to “staff up” as needed for various projects. Most of our team members have been with us for years, but since our relocation to Chattanooga, Tennessee in 2008, we’ve been very interested in growing a strong local team. Working remotely with people is good, but being able to walk over to someone’s desk to ask a question or get a spot check on something you built is priceless.
So here’s the deal: We are looking for two more talented folks to join the Easy team here in Chattanooga (the “next tech city”) full-time. The enviroment here is best suited for someone who is flexible, loves variety and is eager to produce quality work. At any given time, our work consists of: client production (for clients like wikiHow, EllisLab & Nichols College and on internal projects), training & consulting (for folks like Spectra Energy & the New York Times), electronic & physical publishing through our sister company Easy Readers, and event-based training through Retreats 4 Geeks. Our projects offer a variety of experience, encourage continued growth, and require a robust skill set.
If you’re the kind of person that thrives on a good challenge, read on…
Our ideal team members are:
excellent communicators;
fun to be around & have a good sense of humor;
detail-oriented to the point of being a little OCD;
not afraid to fail quickly and often;
passionate about their work;
eager to share what they know via speaking, training, and writing; and
dedicated to making the web better.
From a technical perfective, here’s what we’re looking for:
Front-end Gal/Guy
We’re expecting this team member to:
know HTML & CSS like it’s her/his mother tongue;
understand the importance of semantics;
be passionate about progressive enhancement;
get excited by the opportunities of mobile;
grok adaptive layouts, media queries & mobile-first;
be a competant JavaScript programmer (jQuery is ok); and
understand the importance of optimization (images, JS, etc.).
It would be awesome if this team member:
is comfortable working with version control (e.g. Git);
has made open source contributions;
can program in JavaScript without the aid of a library;
understands how to optimize JavaScript for performance;
can also program on the server-side (PHP, Node, Python/Django); and/or
is familiar with ExpressionEngine.
Back-end Gal/Guy
We’re expecting this team member to:
know and love PHP;
be comfortable in at least one other server-side language (Node, Python, Ruby);
be familiar with server-side MVC frameworks (CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Django, Rails, etc.);
program in JavaScript without the aid of a library;
live and breathes SQL (especially MySQL);
know the ins and outs of ExpressionEngine (1 and 2);
use Git daily; and
understand the importance of optimization.
It would be awesome if this team member also:
has written ExpressionEngine add-ons;
has made open source contributions;
understands how to optimize programs for performance;
can write shell scripts; and
can do a little light server maintenance.
If you think you’re a good match for either of these positions, please email contact [at] easy-designs [dot] net with the subject “Hire me” and tell us why you’d be perfect for either one (or both) of these jobs. Be sure to include your contact info, Twitter handle and links to your work and/or code samples.
We can’t wait to meet you!
UPDATE 2012-07-19: These two positions have been pre-qualified for Chattanooga’s GeekMove program, meaning that if you relocate here to work for us and you buy a house, you would qualify could receive a $10,000 forgivable second mortgage and $1,250 for relocation expenses. Talk about a sweet bonus!
UPDATE 2012-07-21: Please note that these jobs are in the United States and we are not able to sponsor non-U.S. citizens with an H1B visa.
