On my terms

If there is something that is booming right now, it is mobile software. In spite of the vast variety of incompatible platforms, the number of mobile applications is growing very rapidly. Business houses know that mobile presence is imminent for them, and developers just can’t stop themselves from making new applications for their mobiles. Given such a huge development activity, one would expect current day mobile handsets to be full of software to do almost everything. However such is not the case. The discovery and distribution of applications is still an open problem. People want to try out software on their phones, but they don’t know what software to try, where to get it from, etc.

App Stores from Apple, RIM, Palm are initiatives in this direction, and they have definitely solved a part of the problem. For these phones, there is atleast  one place where software can be found. However all these initiatives are very specific in nature, and are usually not very unbiased. There is usually an entry cost for applications, and a number of other things one could of have done without.

There has to be something simpler, something more genuine. So there is Munimo. Munimo is a community initiative, started by myself & Mobisy Technologies (P) Ltd in association with MOMO Bangalore, where mobile enthusiasts come and share their favorite applications. With a very small number of contributors at the moment, Munimo has already started turning useful for new users. Go there, and you can see the favorite applications of most avid mobile users. You know of an application and you want to share with others, just log in to Munimo and add it to the collection. Your contributions will surely go a long way in making mobiles more useful for everyone.

In its current state, Munimo is simply a web portal where people come and tell about the applications they love. The next step for us is to push out Munimo mobile application for as many platforms as possible. Though it may sound like an ardous task, but thanks to Mobitop it essentially is just a few clicks job. Oops, not aware of Mobitop? For the uninitiated, Mobitop is magic wand for mobile application developers developed by Mobisy. Mobitop is an application platform which allows developers to convert their wap sites into mobile applications via a packaging tool. As of now, Mobitop is not directly available on Mobisy website, however that’s going to change soon. But feel free to get in touch with them, Mobisy team is more than eager to share their creation with everyone.

Once the applications are out, what would you like to see more? If you got any ideas, please let us know. Ideas/Suggestions are more than welcome. Code to implement them - even more :).

What do you think about a Mobile Application Profile (MAP). So you use a phone, and have a number of applications on it. The applications and their genre is what I call a MAP. When you move on to another phone, chances are that you are going to use a similar set of applications. What if all that happens by itself using your MAP. I think it’s very cool. What do you think?

Let’s make it happen.

Quality is one of the most talked about, and yet the most ignored aspect of software development through out the industry. Organizations take a lot of efforts to create a buzz about the quality of delivery. In one of the software companies that I worked for, every week someone from HR would put up a new poster in each employee’s cabin, featuring inspirational quotes about quality, and it’s benefits. Such efforts do create awareness, but rarely do they translate into the production quality.

One may wonder if quality is just a nice to hear thing, or if there is a tangible definition to it. There is of-course no common definition to it. Quality means different things to different people. For some, it may be about a polished & chic user interface, for some other it may be low memory foot print & zero leaks, and for some others it may be just about the number of bugs filed by the quality team. It is not essential to have a common definition of quality, but what is essential is to have a definition - to each one his own.

Quality has very commonly been seen as an outcome rather than as a process. All the examples stated in the last paragraphs are the outcomes of the development activity for a software. They are just ways to quantify quality. And more often than not, that is where the story ends. Organizations follow rapid development models, with minimal thought. The understanding is - time not spent on coding, is time wasted. They would make the software in what they think is the minimal possible time, and would then devote the last phase to quality by fixing as many bugs as possible. And that is what they call making quality software. What this process conveniently ignores is that quality is not a top-down process, it is bottom-up. In a top-down process, one just makes sure that the software works at least in scenarios which are important by putting patches, hacks or whatever comes to rescue. The result, as you can imagine, is that in every two-three releases the entire software gets scrapped and needs to be rewritten so as to accommodate the new requirements.

Software development has been plagued with the can-do approach for a very long time. Anyone reasonably comfortable with the programming language constructs is considered fit to write software. How can one believe that a few programming courses can make someone a programmer. This is like expecting the leadership courses to actually produce great leaders.

Then there are some really disastrous myths that exist.

• Adhoc development can help you make a quick prototype. Oh, I see people doing this all the time. They write the code in a day’s time, try to make it work for the next 2 weeks, and then spend another month to accommodate a requirement they forgot to take care of. And still the program crashes, if one clicks on a button in quick succession.
• A well designed software can not run fast. Ahh, as if the software gives you extra credits for reckless programming.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to preach a way of programming, or to define quality. It is just a plea to care enough to think before churning out code. A software can do much better with a fewer lines of code put at the correct places.

Here is this thing about mistakes, sometimes even though you know something is a mistake you got to make it anyways.

Even really really dumb mistakes.

No? You must be a wise guy.

Do you really need that on a mobile application?

It’s high time the application developers start to see mobile & computers as two fundamentally different devices.

Computers in their early days were often a shared property among a group of academicians, students etc. Things have changed over time. You have a computer available for yourself wherever you go - there is an office machine, lab machine, home machine and so on. Through out this time, users have never had a one to one relationship with a computer. Hence, a user authentication system based on a login/pwd on each use makes a lot of sense.

On the other hand, mobile phones right from their introduction have been a personal asset. Mobile phones are full of personal information - all kept open. People don’t share their mobiles with each other. Keeping all this in mind, and looking at the mobile device in isolation, does it look sensible to ask me a login whenever I use an application on my mobile.

I am not proposing any solution here(as there are many), I am just trying to identify the problem.

- If there are things that you hate to see on your mobile phone, do leave a comment about them

Everybody has them. Office friends, college friends, colony friends etc. etc. Sometimes you even go on and make these classifications in your yahoo messenger. You usually don’t mix them when you socialize. If you are out with your college friends, you would not call over the office ones. Standard protocols.

Last evening, a friend of mine told me about his set of classifications. This chap has gone a little ahead with this classification stuff. When I asked him why a particular person was missing, he tells me “it’s a separate group - the cute ones. I went out with them yesterday.”

Can you believe it?????

– Reading a compilation of statistics on the usage of web on mobile –
Ughh, not again dude!!

Why is mobile web nothing more than a web browser? Why do I care how many people are using Safari or Opera Mini on their phone.

On a PC, I would agree that most of web usage is through a browser. But does that mean that it should happen the same way on a mobile as well? Would a plain emulation of PC on a handset make a good enough use-case for people? Think…

Hasn’t iPhone already proved a point in this arena?

Micro-blogging is more fun :D. Short and frequent (hopefully) from now on.

When I decided for myself that machine programming is what I want to do, little did I know that I would also have to serve as the global help-desk of all the relatives, non-technical friends that I have.

Ring, Ring.. Ring, Ring..

Me: Hello..
Uncle: Hey Mayank, How are you?
Me: I am fine (Come on, tell me what you gotta ask)
Uncle: Beta, we have run into a trouble. My laptop has got stolen.
Me: Hmm.. (This is going to be tricky one)
Uncle: I had my data on the hard drive (see I know quite a bit, don’t think of me like other ignorant relatives of yours who trouble you with non-sensical questions)
Me: Hmm.. (Ofcourse)
Uncle: Tell me of some technology with which I can take data out of that. I understand we can’t do much about the laptop.
Me: (OMG) So you want to retrieve data out of the hard drive of your stolen laptop
Uncle: Yea.. (Tell me, quick!!)
Me: It does give me ideas about a smart bootup application, but now that nothing of that kind is already installed on your machine, I am afraid that I have no idea about how can that be done.
Uncle: Hmm.. Come again.. (Put it simpler, your nerd)
Me: No, nothing can be done. (I know putting it that simple, I am risking my reputation)
Uncle: But you work in Adobe, right? (You useless fella!!!)
Me: Oh yea, that’s there. (Don’t tell me you are gonna suggest them to throw me out because i can’t retrieve data from a stolen machine)
Uncle: Well then, I think I will speak to a technician I know.
Me: Ok uncle, let me know if he has a solution.
Uncle: Yea, sure..

Want to hear one more, here it is.
This happened once when I was visiting a friend.

Friend: There is a problem in my machine, whatever i type appears in the reverse order.
Me: Wow!! Since when has it started happening.
Friend: It started happening yesterday. Since then it’s like almost impossible to work on it.
Me: Ofcourse, getting used to composing emails and sentences in reverse order will take time.
Friend: This is not funny dude.. Please have a look
Me: Well this looks like a keyboard issue.
Friend: I don’t know.

<we go to the machine, and he shows me typing a few words. The cursor stays at its place as you type, so of-course the words come in reverse order>

I guessed that the left arrow key of the keyboard has got stuck. I picked up the keyboard, and smashed it once. It started working fine.

Friend: (What crap!! That’s not the kind of solution i expected. It’s a computer not a bloody scooter.) Isn’t there like a better solution, you know…
Me: Sorry dude, I wish if I could have achieved this via some fancy software.

He was thoroughly disappointed :). And as you can imagine, my so called reputation went for a toss yet again.

It’s been a really long time off from my blog and my due apologies to everyone (if anyone at all) who likes reading my ramblings. A lot of things were happening around me which left me no time to write. And when there was time at hand, the thoughts were too jumbled up to be put across clearly.

I finally got married.
Raina and I tied the knot on the 8th of May last month. The wedding took place at Hyatt Regency, New Delhi in presence of the entire family and all the friends. It was a lovely experience.After the wedding, the two of us shot off for our honeymoon to Bali. I was pleasantly surprised on reaching Bali. It was far more beautiful and happening than my expectations. Highlights of Bali are the lovely white sand beaches, all sorts of adventure sports and the sea beach restraunts. Those who love water sports must not miss rafting in the Telaga Waja River. After Bali, I spent some time in Australia where Raina is currently pursuing her MBA before coming back to Delhi. For the first time, it was a pain to come back to work.

Apart from this, I was also occupied developing another mobile software that I conceptualized with a friend. However, the project had to be taken down midway, as it required assistance from the operators, and other third party vendors. Sometimes I feel I am rusting. I have produced absolutely nothing after Bluxone. It’s not about the lack of ideas I think, rather very frankly it’s the focus element that has gone wrong. High time I pull it back.

Recently, I got an iPhone for myself. I am seriously impressed with the usability of the product. One must admit that Apple has something about doing seamless design. There products run on their own. You don’t need to figure much out, and when you have to, it’s a pleasure in itself. To tell you about usability, my mom who always had a hard time figuring out how to read and write SMS on my previous Symbian phones, is now completely hooked onto playing games on iPhone (gyroscopic, in particular).There are a lot of things iPhone doesn’t do. It would not let you connect with other mobile over Bluetooth. It wouldn’t play a number of video formats, one needs to convert them for iPhone. It would not run flash content - this one is a serious disappointment. However, in spite of all that it doesn’t do, it does enough to keep you engaged. It has created a wow factor among people about using smartphones. People who never moved on beyond their Nokia 2100’s and never felt the need to do anything more than text and calls on a cell phone, are getting all worked up for getting a iPhone for themselves. Professionals who till now only used a smartphone if their company provided one, are now willing to shell out money to get one of their own. This emerging trend is doing a lot of good to not only Apple, but other phone companies as well. As more people start turning up on stores, everyone in the market gains.

On a different note, how long do you think Symbian can stay in the market if they do not do something drastic about their usability? Their developer support is already an exaggerated example of what drives away even the most perseverant developers. Let’s just wait and watch. It’s going to be an interesting battle out there.

For all the lady lovers in the country, there is some good news in the end. If you are one of those who have always dreamt of bringing the Queen herself but have never been able to afford her after adding up the import prices, this news is going to bring a smile to your face.

Finally a biking company is bringing the super sport design in the Indian markets, and that’s the master bike maker itself - Yamaha. Yamaha YZF R15 is due for its launch in India around Mid 2008. Though R15 does not possess a huge engine like the other R series bikes, but the small 150cc engine is the first liquid cooled engine in its class. The compact engine packs up a punch of 22 bhp which is impressive for such a compact design.

R15 comes from the same team which created the legends of R1 and R6, and you just need to look at the bike once to figure that out.

R15 is pretty much international, extremely well designed – and get this – there will be a little piece of plastic that will fit snugly over the rear seat giving your r15 motorcycle that single-seater look. What else have we got? You get a steel Deltabox twin-spar frame, digital speedometer and tachometer, tubeless tyres, clip-on handlebars.

And then the most important factor – price. No official figures have been given so far, but rumors say it would cost Rs 90,000 max on-road in Delhi.

After watching this movie, if someone asks me for a review of the film, I think all I would say is I am not good enough to review Taare Zameen Par. I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to the entire TZP team for making this movie. I believe that the cinema of this level will go on to educate a lot of us about things which our system conveniently ignores, and will grow us as a society.

Sometime back I read a comment in the newspaper from SRK that however good TZP may be, but Om Shanti Om would still be a bigger success. At that time, I didn’t give much of a thought to that, but now it feels that the comment posed serious questions about the intellect level of the Indian audience. Sad but true.