bisql.net

Mobile World Congress 2012 Day 1 Impressions

Ash — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 20:03:49 +0000

I started the day at the App Planet exhibition in Hall 7 and whilst one or two of the stands were still busy setting up I started at RIM where they were demonstrating NFC and streaming media from Blackberry to PS3. I found the Blackberry guys to be typically bullish (always a little more so than you might expect) and their offering was quite slick but overall they lacked a ‘message’, especially when compared to their closes rival in the smartphone space: Nokia.

Having kept everything under wraps until after the press conference had finished Nokia really had something to show and the message loud and clear was: “we’re doing lots of crazy cool stuff”. Innovation was a strong theme including high-definition call quality, nano-technology and indoor positioning as well as the superb tie-up with Dolby for digital audio and the frankly incredible 808 PureView boasting so many features you have to double-take when you find out that it’s a Symbian phone. It was definitely good to see them back on form and if the enthusiasm of the staff is anything to go by thing are looking up and seriously, it’s gotta be hard to stay chirpy in a blue Where’s Wally outfit.

One interesting technology I saw was Clic2C, a print watermarking method that gives QR-code like functionality but without the ugly QR code despised by magazine layout artists the world over. Most impressive was the fact that it can work in newspapers which typically have a low dpi. The best individual app I saw was probably Runtastic, a fitness tracking app due to launch imminently which is available with a heard rate strap and receiver for around €60. Another app launching soon is Voice Over IP service Voxtrot, free of charge from handset to handset with PSTN calling coming later their USP compared to Skype is set to be call quality and address-book integration – interesting if it lives up to the spin.

I had an interesting chat with a guy from haptics company Immersion, if you’ve never heard of them you may still have used one of their products – they’re responsible for that little buzz when you press the on-screen keys on your phone. Their idea is to provide a sense of physical action when interacting with touch screen devices and some of the uses demonstrated were quite compelling though hard to explain in writing. The advances are being made in terms of response times, sensitivity (very soft to quite aggressive) and resolution (i.e. how close to your finger does the effect feel), this is great news for gaming though I am convinced that all kinds of apps can benefit from improved and varied user feedback mechanisms.

Down in Hall 1 things were much more carrier oriented With LTE testing gear and a phenomenal focus on small cell and femtocell technologies. One unexpected highlight of the day was SpareOne, an emergency phone that can be powered by a single AA battery with a reported standby time of 15 years (basically, the life of the battery) and a talk time of three hours on a single cell. Sure, it has niche uses and isn’t going to be supplanting the major handset manufacturers but it has the potential to make a massive impact on the niche it serves and will no doubt save hundreds of lives. Also down in Hall 1 were Opera, touting their Opera Mini browser – a great alternative to the stock Android browser and with the benefit that their proxy technology saves on bandwidth and makes content load considerably faster than other browsers.

Back to handsets, HTC were hanging with the carrier-grade boys but had a good showing with their new HTC One lineup and whilst I’d be hard pushed to explain the differences between the V, the S and the X some of the features in the range were impressive. As a photographer the burst mode shooting caught my eye, allowing you to take 5 photos per second which will be great for taking photos of moving subjects – parents taking photos of kids will definitely appreciate that as kids and animals rarely stay still. The Beats Audio addition is interesting and it adds a bit more “welly” but under the hood I’m not sure it’s anything more clever than the “BASS” button you used to get on old portable tape decks.

Well, that’s the bulk of my floor-walking for the day – time for a bite to eat and some shut-eye to prepare for tomorrow’s sights.

The Database Countryside Code: Best Practices for BI & SQL Users

Ash — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 13:01:52 +0000

Those ‘City Folk’ among you may not be aware but in Rural England we have what is called The Countryside Code, it’s a set of guidelines that everyone should follow in order to keep the countryside clean, tidy and a nice place to visit. You may be asking – what does this have to do with Business Intelligence and Database Administration? Well, I think it’s vital – if we all follow a fairly simple but broad set of guidelines then all classes of database user will have a better experience from Developers to DBAs and Analysts to CIOs. This isn’t really about making your databases perform better, it’s about working better with each-other and taking other people’s perspectives on board. Having been in most of the related roles over the years this is what I’d put into The Database Countryside Code…

1. Enjoy the countryside and respect its life and work

Whether your application is an ‘out of the box’ software suite, a Business Intelligence package that can be tweaked on implementation or a hand-crafted bespoke solution if you’re running against a database maintained by someone else or shared with other applications you need to take heed of this point. Remember that cooperation is key and if you build a good relationship with the DBA and the other key users of the database you’ll have a much better time of things and if there are any critical issues you’ll be included in the remediation process and may even be able to help your own users get back online faster. It’s easy to see DBAs as grouchy, narrowly focused sorts who tend to view all user activity as bothersome (I can say that as I’ve been one myself) but generally speaking if the DBA is aware of user activity at all the chances are that there’s already a problem as it’s the long running, resource intensive activity that will stand out in alerts and performance reports. Before your application goes live you should do some testing, run your designs and SQL statements / stored procedures past the DBA for some advice (but remember, you don’t have to take it) and establish some sort of procedure for reporting issues, and remember that an SLA can work both ways as you may need the DBA’s help as much as they might need yours.

2. Guard against all risk of fire

Security is a huge issue and as exploit frameworks and toolkits become more and more prevalent and feature-rich the likelihood of vulnerabilities being discovered in our applications should be treated more like a certainty. If you’re developing bespoke applications and especially web apps you’ll need to pay close attention to the OWASP Top 10 application security risks but from a database perspective the most notable threat is SQL Injection - the art of passing SQL into an application so that it might be executed by the database (as a good starting point check out OWASP’s SQL Injection Prevention Cheat Sheet). If you’re deploying packaged apps or BI tools don’t think that you’ve gotten away with it, the primary responsibility may be on software developers to avoid exploits but if they’re baked into an application you’re implementing it will affect your users and your business, so…

3. Protect wildlife, plants and trees

The most important security contribution we as implementers can bring to the table is to review and limit the privileges required by our applications. Many install guides and expensive external consultants ask for a ‘dbo’ (database owner) level user and some even ask for ‘sa’ (system administrator) or ‘root’ level privileges but don’t hand these out like candy on halloween. In most cases these high-level privileges are only required during setup and install and can be removed afterwards but often basic read/write access is all that is required (and for BI tools often read-only), it may only be achievable through a few frustrating rounds of trial and error but if you assign your applications the lowest possible permissions you will significantly reduce the risk of compromise in the future. Another important step during implementation is to make sure that your permissions are segregated, where possible have a separate user for each service and an entirely separate user for accessing each database not shared by any other application. Whilst it may seem excessive this setup will allow you to audit any security issues and identify which user was compromised and exactly what they had access to.

4. Fasten all gates

Many Business Intelligence tools include some degree of control over connection management and if you’re developing your own application you’ll have complete control over all database connections, the decision to be made is whether connections are ‘pinned’ open, closed after x minutes or closed at the end of each transaction. The preference will vary depending on the load and the usage, in most Business Intelligence use cases there tend to be a large number of users, not always connecting concurrently and issuing fairly large queries against the database followed by periods of quiet whilst a report is read – in this case there is usually no need to keep the connection open for long. On the other hand if you have users issuing a constant stream of small transactions (e.g. a Point of Sale system) the overhead of creating and dropping connections might actually add load to the database so it would be more effective in this scenario to maintain the connection.

5. Keep your dogs under close control

This applies more to developers and BI architects where your dogs are your users, if you are deploying an application that creates load on somebody else’s database you should do whatever you can to limit each user’s ability to cause long running queries – in some BI tools you are handed an option to let a query time out after x minutes and perhaps limiting the number of rows returned. If you are developing your own application you should include both of these options but make sure that you kill the query at the database level rather than just killing the thread in your application that made the request otherwise it’s equally bad if not worse since the user may simply re-issue the offending query. The actual limits are bound to vary from database to database but that’s where the first point comes in, discuss this with both your users and the DBA.

6. Keep to public paths across farmland / Use gates and stiles to cross fences, hedges and walls

When it comes to solving problems try to stick within the basic and simple boundaries of an ordinary user, avoid using undocumented stored procedures, excessive use of user defined functions, custom data types, plugins and extended stored procedures or anything else that strays too far from a standard install of the database platform. Obviously you’ve got an app to deploy and you want to solve your problems in whatever way is best for your users but the further you are from a standard deployment the more issues you’re likely to encounter, both you and the DBA might be fully aware of this amazing new setting you tweaked to make things run better but a couple of years down the line during a disaster recovery will it all come flooding back quite as easily? What if one or both of you that setup the application have moved on to other roles? Thinking outside the box is great but be conscious of introducing risk and if you do feel that it is necessary then make sure that it’s well documented in the Run Book or the corporate wiki.

7. Leave livestock, crops and machinery alone

Since you may already have elevated privileges on your own database, a shared database or even the server you may be tempted from time to time to perform maintenance tasks or make minor ‘improvements’ to indexes or configuration settings – do not do so without the DBA’s blessing. If you’re following the rules above you’ll probably have a fairly good rapport with the DBA already so it’s likely that you’ll be granted some level of trust not to mess things up but be careful not to overreach, the DBA will be ‘in the loop’ of many changes and other requirements (e.g. critical deadlines, disaster recovery tests, unplanned maintenance) whereas you may not be aware of them so before you make any changes run them past the DBA – just in case.

8. Take your litter home / Help to keep all water clean

If you’ve ever been a DBA you’ll have seen, on more than one occasion, tables popping up called tmpSomethingorOther, tblToBeDeleted or TableName_bak but when it comes to the key questions (How long have these been around? Are they still required?) nobody seems to have a straight answer. I know myself that whilst I’ve been developing data warehouses I’ve created these sorts of tables and subsequently forgotten what they were used for, not too much of a problem if you’re ‘the guy’ but in a large team or with personnel changes over time it can be hard to know what is required and what isn’t – I came to a database once with temporary tables over five years old which had not been deleted out of fear that they were important. The moral here is an obvious one, clean up after yourself or if the table must exist for some short period of time put a note in your diary to come back and cull it.

9. Make no unnecessary noise

Be mindful of what errors you raise and what you write to public logs, if your application causes a large amount of data to be written to database or other centrally collated logs you may inadvertently make it harder to detect genuine issues which will hurt both you and and other users of the database. If you do occasionally need exhaustive logs consider adding a ‘debug mode’ into your application which can be turned on or off via a configuration setting, that way you can turn it on whilst you’re tracing a fault and need more verbose logging then turn it off when you’re done.

10. Take special care on country roads

There can be plenty of unexpected hazards on country roads so don’t always rush around everywhere at 60mph, acknowledge that whist you might want everything to go as fast as possible you could be causing some other critical process to slow or stop. Driving at night can be treacherous too as you might come across an unexpected backup window or import/export process, talk to your DBA and coordinate the major tasks. If it’s a shared server make sure you have access to the task list so that you know where to slot in your jobs and that those jobs get put back into the master list.

Really it comes down to one thing, as the great and wise Jerry Springer oft said, “take care of yourselves, and each other”.

Mobile Web Design Best Practices, Tips and Tricks

Ash — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 07:51:45 +0000

Everyone knows the key mantra for designing mobile web sites – “keep it simple” but there are some tips and tricks that will help to create a great user experience for mobile visitors…

Capture mobile users from the full site – if your full site isn’t rendering well on mobile devices how are people going to find the link to your mobile site? Put in place a redirect to a mobile optimised layout though it’s worth remembering that redirects could also be annoying to users that wanted to see your main site so…
Provide a link back to your full site – this could be in the footer or as a landing page but in some cases the user may be trying to achieve something not possible on a slimmed-down mobile site or they may be on a tablet that is incorrectly being recognised as a mobile device.
Remember the bad old days - there are still a large number of mobile devices out there that do not fully support CSS and JavaScript, including older Blackberry models which are common in corporate environments. If non-smartphone users are a target audience for your site it should be designed with these older phones in mind and progressively enhanced to support more modern design features and input validation.
Consider multiple mobile layouts - you could have a theme that optimises content specifically for iPhone and Android, leaving the other mobile users with a plainer but still small-screen optimised site. Figure out what your audience is likely to be using and target that but don’t forget to tweak and customise the site after you’ve gone live based on the type of devices your users are actually using which will change over time.
Use appropriate input types – if you are asking the user to provide email address or usernames via a form it can be difficult for them to enter correctly if autocomplete is turned on, similarly it would be better to provide the numeric keypad if you are asking for a telephone number and you usually would not want . You can provide this functionality with a mix of the tag and the autocapitalize property, there are a whole host of other possibilities including length checking and regular expressions but bear in mind not every device will respect these features.
Avoid scrolling – pagination vs. scrolling has long been a debate in web design circles but if you want to provide your users with a more ‘app-like’ experience the key elements to your site should fit adequately on the page without the need for scrolling. This may not apply to content but if the user is being asked to follow through a process or provide a series of inputs it will be much clearer to the user what they have to do if it fits on one page, equally…
Avoid clutter – if you have pages with little content it may be worth ensuring that any non-essential (but for whatever reason required) footer information sits below the bottom of the screen to avoid clutter, at the very least you should consider a little trailing white space followed by a dividing line to clearly separate the content from the footer.
Consider the user’s goal – you might be falling over yourself to provide content or services to your mobile users but is that what they really want? Consider whether or not the user might have other goals in visiting your site and show how they can be achieved, even if that is not via your mobile site. For example, it may be helpful to include a ‘contact us’ or a telephone/email link on at least the first page if not every page.
Don’t be annoying – it’s the little things that tend to irritate users and on a mobile device this is magnified since they are already compromising on screen size and input capability. For example, pre-fillling forms with help text may mean that the user is going to have to delete that text to enter their own – irritating enough on a desktop and even more so on a mobile device.
Device testing is essential – there are dozens of emulators and simulators for mobile devices but nothing will ever match testing on devices, it is very tempting as a developer to test primarily on a desktop but it really isn’t the same as holding a small device at arm’s length and using a tiny keyboard to provide input. During your testing phase have someone with a very critical eye run through your site to check for any minor irritations, make sure to tell them to be ruthless in their criticism.

I hope that provides some useful information to those of you starting out with the mobile web and of course, much of this is up for debate so do get in touch if you disagree or have content to add. The list is not intended to be exhaustive and over the next few months I’ll add posts on testing and more technical aspects of the process.

How to bring OSX Lion’s Natural Scrolling to Windows 7

Ash — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:27:22 +0000

If, like me, you move between Windows and Mac on a daily basis you may have found yourself finding it a little hard to figure out which way to scroll the mouse. With OS-X Lion Apple introduced ‘natural’ scrolling which means that when you scroll the wheel on the mouse an upwards push sends the scroll bar down, that might sound weird but in essence your upward movement of the wheel actually pushes the screen upwards – very much like a touch gesture on a smartphone or tablet.

Whether you love it out loath it, getting used to switching between the two is difficult and you could either turn it off on the Mac or if you like it you could bring the same feature to Windows. As it happens the feature is already there, to enable it you need to edit a registry key and if you’re not familiar with this process I would advise caution since a mistake in the Registry can make your machine quite unstable but if you’re comfortable with RegEdit you’ll need to modify the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\HID\????\????\Device Parameters\FlipFlopWheel

Set the value from 0 (default) to 1 where the ????\???? section are whatever device IDs you can see. I changed the FlipFlopWheel property for all of the devices I could see, unplugged and re-plugged the mouse and the then it worked – natural scrolling on Windows.

Credits go to darkfader on the NeoSmart forums for the original solution.

Quick Tip – PostgreSQL Equivalent of ISNUMERIC()

Ash — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 09:03:33 +0000

Very much like my previous MySQL ISNUMERIC() post I have recently been setting up a data source to collect records with telephone numbers from a Postgres database and one of the essential validation tests is to make sure that the field really does contain a number.

Despite the fact that many regard Postgres as the best open source database platform I find myself frustrated by it’s lack of standard functions. I understand that Postgres is designed to be extensible and that user defined functions can be built but I need my code to be both portable and read-only so I have to work with what I’m given. Ideally what I’d be looking for is an equivalent of Microsoft SQL Server’s ISNUMERIC() or Excel’s ISNUMBER() functions but very much like MySQL I had to turn to regular expressions although as you’ll see, Postgres does not have a clean and clear REGEXP() function…

SELECT DISTINCT contact_number
FROM customers
WHERE (contact_number ~ ‘^[0-9]+$’)

I hope that helps any of you out there that encounter the same problem, thanks to the poster here for my original answer.

RIP Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Ash — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 03:09:47 +0000

Today we lost one of the founders of the modern personal computer, a man who put technology in the hands of the average consumer and whose impact on the history of technology cannot be overestimated.

As a long term user of Apple products I was shocked and deeply saddened to hear the news, Apple users around the world are feeling a depth of emotion never seen before following the death of a business leader. In truth Steve Jobs was not just the founder, CEO or chairman of a technology company, he contributed to and enhanced the lives of millions through the products produced he created at Apple and the movies produced by Pixar.

RIP Steve, you will be missed.

Over The Air 2011 Mobile Web Notes & Wrap-up

Ash — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 12:00:34 +0000

I recently attended the Over The Air mobile conference at Bletchley Park (please donate), the event was free to attend and very well organised with plenty of free food and drink as a bonus. My focus for the conference was the mobile web and I’ve compiled links to topics mentioned in presentations I attended in that area, they’re well worth a look so I thought I’d share them here…

Responsive Web Design

Various Links

Useful Sites/Tools

Some W3C links…

An iPhone User’s Take on Android / Samsung Galaxy S2 Review

Ash — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 21:12:00 +0000

I was given the chance to order a new work phone recently and whilst I could’ve upgraded from the iPhone 3GS to the iPhone 4 I decided to make the jump to Android with a shiny new Samsung Galaxy S2, I’ve still got the iPhone for testing though so I’ll be jumping from one to the other. Having been a long term iPhone user it does feel somewhat like a switch to the dark side but if I’m going to design Android apps I’m going to have to understand the good and the bad parts of both platforms.

One of the most important considerations when designing mobile apps is the user’s expectations and that varies considerably from one platform to the next and despite their differences iOS and Android are comparable platforms, much more so then Windows Phone 7 or Blackberry. Both Apple and Google have created thriving downloadable app ecosystems that together are fast becoming the platform of choice for the modern smartphone, I’m confident Windows Phone 7 will become a major player in the space but there’s a long way to go before it gets there – as for Blackberry and HP/Palm – who knows?

So now to the results of my little experiment, in this post I’ll focus on the features and capabilities that I like about Android and whilst I will cover the things I don’t like, this is not a rant for or against either platform, it is intended to be as Bill O’Reilly beautifully puts it without a hint of irony: “fair and balanced”.

The best features…

The “back” button – at first it seems redundant to have a hardware based button for just one purpose but once you get used to it you realise how handy it really is. Every time I go back to the iPhone I end up in a situation where I find myself bailing out of an app when all I really meant to do is back up a step, everyone that owned a Sony Playstation or PS2 will know how natural it felt to always use the triangle button to go backwards and I really do find I miss it when I’m on the iPhone.

The pull-down notifications bar – this may well be more of a Samsung customisation but the top status bar can be pulled down like a roller blind to reveal some quick key settings (turn on/off bluetooth, Wifi, GPS) as well as showing notifications such as apps needing updates, new emails, push messages, etc. It’s a brilliant way of accessing those features without compromising on screen real-estate.

Swype – if you’ve not come across Swype already you have to give it a try, it is an alternative keyboard where you type words not by tapping each letter but by drawing lines between them. This might sound a bit odd and it is at first but once you get up to speed it really is a delight to use. The main issue I have is that whist you’re in the middle of a sentence and you’re flowing nicely from word to word if you suddenly hit a word that Swype doesn’t recognise or isn’t in the dictionary your entire flow is broken and a hole is punched straight through the fourth wall of user experience. As soon as you have to start thinking about what you’re doing it’s game over in UX terms, something Apple have turned into an art form and most find hard to emulate.

‘Front Screen’ and ‘Back Screen’ applications – the iPhone has a ‘desktop’ and you’re stuck with it, sure you can have folders but even they’re a little limiting and I find myself completely unable to organise my apps in a way that makes sense. Android on the other hand has a distinct separation between the ‘desktop’ where you can have both apps and widgets (time, calendar, twitter, etc.) and the full list of apps, this makes it easy to de-clutter the main screens of your phone but you’re only ever one click away from your entire app library.

The bad parts…

Massively modal menus – I really, really, really don’t like the way that most of what you might call ‘right-click’ actions bring up giant, screen-filling menus from which to choose options. For example, if I’ve opened an email and I want to mark it as unread I have to come back up to the inbox, hold my finger on the email for a second or so then the screen is filled by a giant ugly menu (with plenty of dead-space) from which I can choose to mark the email as unread. On the iPhone if I’m reading an email I’d just press the “Mark Unread” button. No really, that’s it.

General flakiness – it’s hard to qualify this exactly but I’m referring to the many times where I’ve tried to do something and received some weird obscure error message and thought “oh well, that didn’t work then” without knowing why or what to do instead. As an example when I first started playing with the phone I bounded like an excited puppy towards the Android Market, I signed up for an account and picked up a few freebie apps before deciding I really had to have Nmap so I clicked to buy and got the message: “A server error has occurred”. After a little Googling around I finally determined that the cryptic “server error” was just because I didn’t have my card registered in Google Checkout – why couldn’t it have just told me that in the first place? Issues like this really make me think that Google just doesn’t “get it”, at least not yet.

Text selection – again it’s hard to describe but in a nutshell – it’s horrible, I almost never end up putting the cursor in the correct spot and about a third of the time I end up opening a modal menu where you can copy and paste (it works but it’s clunky not very intuitive).

Security – I’ll start by saying that I’ve not personally had a bad experience of security on Android but I know there are plenty of known instances and I can’t help feeling a little ‘ooky’ about download strange and unheard-of apps knowing that anyone could have put them into the Android Market and they didn’t have to go through any approval process.

The hardware…

The first thing you notice upon seeing the Galaxy S2 in the flesh is the size of the screen, it’s big, it’s bright and it’s enormous – brilliant for watching movies or taking advantage of the bundled BBC iPlayer app. The downside to that huge screen is a pretty poor battery life, once you get used to charging it regularly it’s not too much of a pain although there will be the odd time where it doesn’t last a day (my worst was 6 hrs) which gets old quickly. The camera boasts an 8 megapixel resolution but has such a poor low light performance that it’s all but unusable indoors or on a rainy day, definitely not a point-and-shoot replacement for sure.

I don’t mean to be down on the Galaxy S2 though, I thoroughly enjoy having it with me and for cross platform apps I tend to choose it over the iPhone since the bright and beautiful screen really makes the content stand out. Another plus is that despite the screen size the phone itself is relatively light and thin and doesn’t sit awkwardly in the pocket as you might think.

Conclusion…

There are plenty of things to love about the Galaxy S2 and I honestly think that if you’ve never owned an iPhone you’d pick this up and be pretty happy with it but switching from iOS to Android still feels like a step backwards to me. There’s a reason why more iPhone users pay for applications (here) and why more iPhone users make use of apps and the web (here) – it’s because iOS provides a simple, pleasant interface and like a good movie soundtrack adds to the experience without every really coming to the user’s attention.

Despite my lukewarm reception I do like Android, as a technical user I do like being able to run apps like Nmap, wifi scanners, penetration testing software and so on but as normal user I think it’s got some way to go before I’d put it on a par with iOS. In the long run I’m sure it will get there – the open nature of Android almost guarantees it, we’ll be seeing plenty of phones, tablets, TVs, cars, set-top boxes and fridges running Android over the next few years and I expect that from 4.0 onwards we’ll start to see the platform mature both in feature-set and user experience design.

I’ll be keeping my Android phone and if I were to choose a handset again right now I’d still choose the Samsung Galaxy S2, I look forward to seeing where this thing will take me.

The Seven Best Features of OS X 10.7 Lion (and the bad bits)

Ash — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 22:40:04 +0000

It’s always a risk upgrading to a brand new operating system and clearly so on the day of release so why have I done it? Because I’m insane? Because I’m an Apple fanboy? Not really (though maybe a little bit of both), I’ve only upgraded my laptop which isn’t really used for anything overly critical so I’m free to have a play and chase down the gremlins before upgrading the development boxes and production hardware.

So, on to the meat and potatoes of the post – is it any good?

The Good Bits

File Vault 2 – now with whole disk encryption, a must for road warriors and anyone whose laptop is regularly out of the house and clearly missing from previous versions.
Mail – I’m loving the favourites bar in the new mail app and the conversation style view is pretty slick without being annoying – a UI that adds to but doesn’t dominate the user’s attention.
Dashboard – I couldn’t say quite why but I used to find the old dashboard irritating, the new one seems better but only time will tell if I actually use it.
Calendar – oooh it’s pretty. That’s not a reason to love it but it is pretty, it may sound kinda wooly and like one of those things that PC users hate but it just feels nicer.
Full Screen Apps – I was skeptical and to some degree I am still but when you go full-screen the apps really do look nicer and it’s especially handy for reading PDFs in Preview.
Quicktime - exporting the audio portion of a video is a great feature and something I’ve often needed to do. The ability to make screencast recordings is brilliant, coupled with the trim feature and instant sharing to YouTube and Vimeo just makes it so easy to produce quick tutorial videos.
Electronic Distribution – you might think this is a lame pick but downloading from the Mac App Store just worked and it’s clear to me that it will be the future of software distribution.

Where I’m Nonplussed

Sure, there’s a whole load of shiny in Lion but there are a couple features that I’m underwhelmed by, namely…

Launchpad – provides an iOS style application launcher but whilst you can make folders by dragging icons on top of one-another you can’t rename the folder whilst double-clicking and you can’t drag a folder to the dock. It’s one of the few examples of Apple UX design where I’ve found that what feels natural doesn’t work.
Facetime and iChat – having both never made sense and solidfying this in the new release makes even less.

The Bad Bits

On a new upgrade there will always be a few third-party apps that won’t work and in this Lion is no exception, so far I’ve only had trouble with the LastPass plugin for Safari but the FireFox version works just fine so it’s no biggie – I’ll update the post if I find anything else but you should check out the community compatibility wiki at roaringapps.com.

Overall I will say that the new look and feel is a tad blocky, I suppose I’ll get used to it but it does seem a little bit 1994. The additional UI tweaks also push my old black MacBook a little close to the edge performance wise, the fans seem to be running a little more often than they used to do.

You reach a fork in the road…

Ash — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 13:29:56 +0000

Recently I’ve been working more in the smartphone world than in BI and SQL although for the time being at least I’ll be doing a bit of both so you’ll probably see more mobile app related posts in the feed. In order to provide some degree of separation I’ve created a Mobile User Interface Blog at usabl.net which contains links and screenshots of interesting designs, though any longer more technical articles will still appear here.

If you’re wondering what the crossover is between mobile apps and Business Intelligence it’s all about the user experience, in BI you generally aim to give people the information they need as quickly and efficiently as possible not necessarily in terms of software performance but in report design. I’m not the only one that’s thinking along these lines, Jen Stirrup gave an interesting talk on Data Visualisation at the inaugural SQLHerts meeting and if you’re interested in either topic you’ll most likely be able to catch both of us at the next meeting on July 28th at the University of Hertfordshire (register here).