Firefly Playground

Everyone is talking about it and so am I. Why?

For once it just might achieve one thing that few thought possible: “world domination”. (yeah … go ahead and laugh… we’ll see).

If the first iPhone did set a turning point in history when it arrived, the 3G iPhone in July 11 will make, in my opinion, another one. It’s all about the features, the $199 price tag and so much more.

The features

3G + GPS

First the features: 3G + GPS. A few years back when I bought my HTC P3300 I had to decide if I wanted a 3G phone or a GPS enabled one. As a user I was frustrated to learn that there wasn’t any mobile in the market with both technologies.

One of the worst things about my GPS program NDrive is how fuc*ing long it takes to find the satellites. It’s sooo fuc*ing frustating.

So when I hear from Apple that they have solved it I tend to believe it. Specially when they explain it so well:

In addition to A-GPS, iPhone 3G uses signals from GPS satellites, Wi-Fi hot spots, and cellular towers to get the most accurate location fast. If GPS is available, iPhone displays a blue GPS indicator. But if you’re inside — without a clear line of sight to a GPS satellite — iPhone finds you via Wi-Fi. If you’re not in range of a Wi-Fi hot spot, iPhone finds you using cellular towers. And the size of a location circle tells you how accurately iPhone is able to calculate that location: The smaller the circle, the more accurate the location.

Another important thing is the Maps thing. It was only a question of time before someone took a GPS enabled phone and do something with it. And they are doing it.

Maps on iPhone 3G use GPS to help you get from point A to point B. Find a location, get directions, and, if you like, follow your progress along a highlighted route with live GPS tracking

No more NDrive for me. Thank you.

Multi Touch

Multi Touch has to be experienced for you to truly understand it’s true power. I can’t even begin to explain how good it is until you have tried it.

Accelerometer

Accelerometer, as they put it: When you rotate iPhone from portrait to landscape, the accelerometer detects the movement and changes the display accordingly. Now this may seem like a small thing but it’s one of the features I just love in my Canon S3.

Smart Sensors

Smart Sensors are one of my favorites. If I have something that I really dislike in my phone it is looking at it and don’t see nothing due to the sun’s position. So then I’ll have to make some awkward movements with my mobile to check the hours (yes … I don’t use a watch). It’s sooo fuc*ing annoying. iPhone brings the ambient light sensor that fixes this.

The other sensor fixes something I really hate on my mobile. Whenever I take a call my ear does funny stuff to my mobile. So when I finish the call I usually have about 2 to 5 apps running and a lot of stuff mixed up. Of course I can take a call, turn off the display and the lift the phone and talk but hey I’m lazy and as strange as it may seem, when I take a call I’m not thinking about my phone problems. So iPhone solves this by turning off display automatically when you lift the phone.

So what’s missing?

It’s really hard to find something that iPhone doesn’t have. It has an iPod for audio, YouTube integration for video, a 2.0 megapixel camera with photo geotagging, 3G, Wireless, Bluetooth, GPS, Multi Touch screen, Accelerometer, Smart Sensors for daylight and taking calls and so much more cool stuff.

What’s missing then? Well I would love to see Flickr integration out-of-the-box, more space and more battery. I would also like to see some more sensors.

I would also like to make it “safer”. Geotagging is cool but also dangerous.

The so much more

Those features are all cool for the end user but in the first iPhone they lacked a major issue: Enterprise support.

Exchange Server integration and Cisco IPSec VPN

Apple licensed Microsoft ActiveSync and now supports Cisco IPSec VPN. For me this is going to be one of the killer features on the new iPhone. This is more than a blink of an eye to the corporate world. This will please many, if not all, corporations and IT Managers.

In the near future I can see corporations leveraging phones as they did with computers. Corporations don’t need to have a promiscuous computer base so they try to leverage their servers and computers in one or two brands because they get better support and homogenization. I can see this happening with the iPhone and more: Imagine sales teams with an Iphone in its hand, nurses and doctors taking notes on hospitals and so much more possibilities. That’s where I’m heading.

More information about this on the Apple page here.

For developers

The iPhone with all the features, but specially with the Multi Touch, brings a whole new level of interaction and possibilities.

As a developer whenever I think about mobile development I get the same “oh! oh!” from my brain. Why? Well there are a few things that pop into mind: Each mobile has a different OS, I’ll have to go with M$ or J2ME, screen sizes, (my brain just got tired…). And everything seems so much harder to do on mobile than everywhere else.

Another other problem is commercialization. You have to create, distribute, do the marketing and sell your product.

And so they created an SDK and a commom marketplace: the App Store. So now everyone can develop and sell globally. Sweet!

They take 30% from your price (if I heard it right) but they give you a global marketplace and the same fighting chance as everyone else. And, if you check what happened with iTunes with 4 billion songs sold until mid January accounting for 70% of worldwide online musical sales, well you’ll see that it’s a good trade off. One other thing … they won’t charge you anything if you do a free app. Cool.

Buying it

It will be released in 73 countries (yes that’s right … 73!).

On July 11th the first batch of 25 countries will receive it including our very own little place planted by the seaside: Portugal!

In Portugal it will be available through Vodafone and Optimus (wth? shame on you TMN!). And you can even pre-order it from Optimus here and from Vodafone here.

Bottom line: It’s all about the experience

For me as a consumer of something all I’m interested is the experience. If I have a good experience I’ll like it if I don’t I’ll ignore it. I can apply this to everything in my life and get away with it.

Until I had an iPod I didn’t understand all the fuzz around it. That didn’t happen with the iPhone. I don’t have one but I’ll buy an 3G iPhone and I’ll retire my HTC.

And as Apple sends neat stuff to us humans, I can only wonder how much longer will everyone else stand by. Microsoft seems to be hiding on a corner and mobile corporations seem to rely on the same old stuff of blindly adding hundreds of features. Apple also does it… but it does it with style. I can only hope that everyone else follows.

Apple totally got it. More than a user issue, it’s a lifestyle issue. Not only is it cool to have Apple products it is also very rewarding on the experience level.

And this time they did it at a killer price: $199 (about 130€). For what’s being offered? It’s almost a joke.

A mobile this affordable with all it’s amazing features will change the way everyone lives and organizes their lives and it might very well leverage/standardize technology for both developers and users alike. And that’s why I say that this might very well be a defining moment on the History of our little planet. We’ll see in a few years about that “world domination” that I speak about. Until then… you just keep on laughing.

One thing’s for sure … opinions apart we live in very interesting times and I want my 3G iPhone!

update: Vodafone launched the pre-order page here.

Last saturday I went to the very first Web Trip. Another cool event.

First an introduction… what is Web Trip? Well Web Trip is about networking in Portugal. You don’t have the resources to come to Lisbon? Everything happens in Lisbon (or in Coimbra?) Vote on a location and we’ll go there.

The way up

I went to Aveiro with Bruno Pedro of Tarpipe. It was a nice oportunity to get to know him better and change a few ideas about php frameworks, smarty templates, scalability issues, my project, his project, integrations etc.

It was a 2 hour cool smooth ride.

Aveiro City

We arrived in Aveiro at about 12:40pm and learned that the 4th exit in the roundabout was really the third for us (c’mon … the hospital is a private entrace … not really an exit :))

So after we got our path straight (after some cruising along the river and the center of the city) we finally got to the restaurant where we met Sergio Veiga and Alexandre Solleiro.

The restaurant was Monte Velho (unrelated with the wine). Nice food, a little bit noisy but cheap (in comparison to Lisbon). No matter. As we all knew each other we really didn’t need no introductions and started away discussing stuff. Celso Pinto came by motorcycle and was late so by the time he arrived we already had talked a lot about tarpipe and we were finishing eating. (pt warning: Bacalhau com natas e carne de porco à alentejana … cool) . We continued to talk about Pedro and Sergio’s project. Afterwards we went to a nearby cafe: Cafe Convivio.

So the Cafe had … free wireless. How cool is that? We went on and on about our projects, had a glimpse of tarpipe and erlang and the very first prototype of Pedro and Alex’s DataHub. We spoke about my project on ways to improve it and ideas on how to market it. Soon it was 5pm and as we all had stuff to do in Lisbon we had to say goodbye to Aveiro. Quick stop to buy Ovos Moles (local delicatessen) and a few more words between myself, Bruno and Celso about sharing ideas, designers and handivi.

The return trip and the vanishing act

The return trip was as enjoyable as the one before with a lot of conversations about sharing ideas and projects.

One small catch though. Celso was following us and after a few K’s we just lost him. As we couldn’t turn around our only idea was to call him. Celso’s byke had a few problems on the way up and eventually he had to stop and call a tow. Thankfully nothing more happened!

As for me and Bruno we went on and on until Lisbon and got here about 9pm. I still had time to see the last goal of Portugal at a friend’s anniversary. (Happy Birthday Verinha! :))

Bottom line

The first Web Trip, as we all more or less knew each other, was all about sharing ideas, projects, looking at source code, debugging, hacking and brainstorming.

Nice discussions regarding tarpipe, the DataHub project from Sergio Veiga and Alexandre Solleiro (tip: it has a black box) and my unnamed restaurant project (tip: to answer the question “where will I eat today?”). Nice conversation later about handivi from 7sintax (tip: it’s not vaporware).

Cool trip. Cool people. Cool projects. A few but great people!

When is the next one and where? I’ll definitely try to be there.

Related:

Celso Pinto

Flickr

WebTrip

image originally from 2.0 webmania related post

So I went to twittlis yesterday. Not the very best day for me as I was very tired but nevertheless it was a very cool event.

Some very interesting people there and my guess is that it’s going to get bigger:

@ppinheiro76 - Pedro Pinheiro, @als - Alexandre Solleiro, @jneves - João Neves, @armandoalves - Armando Alves, @dbar - Daniel Barradas, @mca - Luis Amaral, @jnogueira - João Nogueira, @vd - Vitor Domingos, @guillaume7 - Guillaume Riflet, @alexandrariflet - Alexandra Riflet, @olifante - Tiago Henriques, @miguels - Miguel Santos, @bpedro - Bruno Pedro, @rifkind - Nuno and Rita Pedrosa

Amongst many others I had a very nice discussion with Armando Alves and João Nogueira about spheres of influence and the ripples we project amongst each other. Is it true that important people influence more people than you and I? This gap is getting smaller by the minute.

I also got to know a little bit of Pedro Pinheiro’s photography work (loved the ufo series). Two words: Kick Ass! He’s a mean Photoshop master also. Props!

Later I stayed for dinner with Pedro Pinheiro, João Nogueira, Tiago Henriques and Miguel Santos. It was a cool dinner with lots of different discussions that went from Chernobyl to Darwin and Evolution, from Arthur Conan Doyle to human traits. I was astonished to discover how intelligent some of this guys really are (as I only knew them online - its not the same) and I was very much impressed with some of the views and arguments about humanity, survival and evolution. Made me want to put my biology/physics/etc up to date. And if only I could find the time…

All in all it was a very cool evening to repeat in July.

Thanks to @armandoalves for the banner and to @ppinheiro76 for organizing it!

I’m a huge fan of TED and if time weren’t a factor on our lives I would probably had seen all of the presentations.

Having said that, I came across this while twitting and I recommend it to everyone. Right now I believe that you won’t ever get a better and more informed description on what happens when you have a stroke.

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened — as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding — she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.

Embrace yourself for a very powerful and emotional talk:

Truly inspirational.

We have the power to choose moment by moment who and how we wanna be in the world.

Who and what do you wanna be in the world?

Original here.

So … I went to Barcamp.

There were a few presentations some nice others so so. By order:

• Carlos Rodrigues (FireHOL)
• João Rico (Técnicas de Apresentação)
• Victor Domingos (service/product/platform comparison)
• Halfbaked.com
• Wizi (www.wizi.com)
• Bruno Pedro
• Guillaume (point.pt)
• Guillaume (bookmarklets)
• Joao Rico (6 meses numa presidencia)
• Victor Domingues (co-working)
• Joao Rico (empreendedorismo nas universidades)

Ignite was fun but as we are not used to present stuff in 5 minutes it quickly became presentations as usual.

Half Baked is always a LOT of fun with some crazy ideas.

Lunch was awesome! And as I sponsor it … I’m truly happy about it

All in all it was time well spent.

A few personal thoughts on how I would have organized it (and I did talk about it with Pedro Custódio but we’re also organizing Shift and time is scarce) :

Although Barcamp is a non-conference supposedly without any order at all, it is my experience that there should be an “order” of some kind and rules must be “enforced”. Example: ignite, halfbaked

There should be zones and certain conditions:

• two rooms, full works (mic, projector, wireless, etc), simultaneous
• one chill out/networking area
• Blackboards/paper/pens/pencils/whatever
• food (morning and afternoon/codebits style/coffee breaks)
• open area (a garden for instance and if possible it should be an active area with presentations)
• lunch
• one day ain’t enough. It should be a two day event and it should be on a conference-free weekend.
• dinner & night out (helps bonding)
• at the beginning there should be a meet & greet (as in barcamp coimbra)
• it should be easy to get to
• it should be near hotels (couch surfing/hostels are options)

Barcamp 2007 at Coimbra had most of this. FCT’s missed a few things namely the two rooms for presentations, a two day event and the meet & greet. One other important factor is who goes there and some of the big players couldn’t be there … that didn’t help also.

Later I’ll post an extended article on my way of doing a barcamp to explain why I think all that stuff is really important.

Nevertheless, organizing something like this ain’t easy and it should be always encouraged. I think overall João Moreno and João Rico did a great job and the glory of organizing the first one in Lisbon goes out to them. I’m sure that next one will be better. (Btw … anyone want to co-organize? drop me a line…)

You can check the official site here: http://fct.enses.org/barcamp/app/

You can also check other people’s opinion here (I’ll add as I found them around):

Guillaume Riflet

Vitor Domingos

Celso Pinto

Carlos Rodrigues

Ruben Fonseca

Media:

Flickr

I’ll be there … will you?

http://www.reboot.dk/

So I went to SAPO Unplugged 08 in Aveiro.

The day started at 7am but I did manage to miss the bus by the SAPO crew (due to a friend of mine …). And so I drove 250Km…

I have to say that being on the University of Aveiro’s campus brought some memories from my student years but enough about that… after the usual meet and greet we went to lunch and at 2pm we were at the event.

The keynote

Henning Fischer from Adaptive Path did the keynote and he gave a presentation entitled “Stop Designing Products”. It was a really nice presentation (for those who missed it at Shift). Some notes:

• Users know who they are
• Design from the outside in
• You must have an experience strategy
• The experience IS the product

(you can also check the similar presentation at Shift 2006 by Peter Merholz over here).

1st Presentation

Óscar Mealha and Florim from the University of Aveiro showed a very interesting project about analysing the structure of a site. Why is it interesting? You’d have to see it because it does so much that I’ll miss some things. But a few pointers:

• Easy visual interface
• Every page is a node with a visual reference on mouse over.
• Very easy to see and interpret user’s paths within the site
• Many options to customize how you want to see the information
• Very understandable detection of hotspots and interconnections
• On hotspots graphics you have a color slider to define its granularity
• All this from log files

How can this tool be used? In so many ways …

An example… Ask a user to find something and then analyze its behavior: how many times did he return to index (restarted the operation)? how many options he used before he found it? how many levels did he dig into before going to another option?

This can help you to: correct navigation mistakes, reorganize your structure of content, minimize critical paths and so much more …

And all this from logs … (I wish I had a link to it … anyone?)

2nd Presentation

The second presenter was Pedro Branco from the Minho University and it was about facial expression usage as a form of human-machine interaction. I found it interesting enough and it IKEA’s online assistant come to mind. This is surely one area that will have major development in the near future.

3rd Presentation

Bruno Figueiredo (President of APPU) did a very cool presentation about his work as a usability expert on the latest redesign of the SAPO main page.

It was very cool to understand how it was done, what were the main problems with the previous version and how they solve them… just a slight flavor:

• they moved from 72 channel to more or less 30 by integrating similar channels and killing some unused ones
• they completely reorganized the publicity display. In the previous version it was (almost) all on one side which led people to believe that all that column was publicity (it wasn’t) and so all of it was basically ignored
• they created connections between “similar” channels. Ex: channel for babies with channels for women, etc.

4rd Presentation

Ivo Gomes did a presentation on paper prototyping for normal sites and also RIAs (Rich Internet Applications).

The idea is to design every screen in paper and have little bits of paper to simulate the interactions. It’s a little like “puzzle meets story”. You put the homepage in front of the testing user/client and he uses his finger to simulate the mouse (starting the story). When he touches a link something happens: either you move to a new screen (a new paper continue the story) or something happens in the same page (you put a new paper over to simulate the animation - a little piece of the puzzle).

I really could relate to some of the conclusions and objectives of that kind of aproach:

• easy to detect mistakes on the early stages before development in navigation/usability/etc
• hence a decrease of designer and programmer hours
• hence a decrease in cost
• it’s both user and programmer “friendly”
• it makes it easier to get to the clients’ objectives
• it makes the communication from client to end designers and developers crystal clear

Bottom line … I have to test it

(You can check a post from Ivo regarding this here)

Last presenter

(There was a funny moment from this presenter… But I’ll get to that later …)

Pedro Custódio was the last presenter at SAPO Unplugged 08. Nowadays he is responsible for the implementation of quality and usability on all of SAPO’s projects. It was almost the same presentation given at the Usability Seminar 2008 (you can check it here). Nothing new for me here (as I already had seen it) but here are a few pointers:

• They redesigned the way they do their kick-off meetings so that everyone in the project has the same “view” of the objective
• They used a faster alternative to extensive focus group testing
• It’s a never ending cycle that implements usability and quality issues on all stages

Bottom line

It was a good event and I really hope that SAPO continues to do some more of those on other issues: UX, OAuth, microformats, creating APIs, just to name a few I would like to hear about.

The funny (depending on the perspective) moment

As promised before here it is… the funny moment. When Florin was presenting his tool, Pedro Custódio went to get some microphones (I think) and coming down the stairs he “decided” to stumble upon himself. Everything stopped. It was funny from the audience’s perspective because it was a noisy and quite awkward fall but he did hurt himself. Hope you’re feeling better dude…

Related Posts

You can check the “falling star” aka Pedro Custódio notes here.

I Want You To Want Me explores the search for love and self in the world of online dating.

I want you to want me is a project by Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar which was commissioned by New York’s Museum of Modern Art for their Design and the Elastic Mind show.

It’s a great idea and it shows how you can create something new with something that was “always” there. It also shows how you can create really innovative interactions with a predetermined set of data in a really interactive way.

You can check it here: http://iwantyoutowantme.org/

found through Pedro Custódio

I found this little gem through Pedro Custódio.

It’s a short film by Blu: an ambiguous animation painted on public walls. Never seen this kind of art before but it was love at first sight. It was made in Buenos Aires and in Baden (fantoche).

It is truly remarkable:

Yet Another Blog …

As this is a new blog I feel that I need to introduce myself. So here it goes, a little bit about me:

If I had to tag myself it would be “workaholic”,”friendly”, “social”, “thought provoking”, “different”

I’m a 31 single guy that decided to open a company two years ago with a few friends.

I ended up being the founder, CEO and lead Web Designer of Core Factor | IT Consulting & Design - a company with two main focuses: web design - my area of expertise … we make it our business to have an emphasis on building standards compliant and accessible solutions - and server management - mainly windows 2k3, my business partner’s area.

I’ve been working on web design for about 8 years now but it was in the past year or so I that was fortunate enough to meet some emblematic guys that shaped the way I see and want to be on the web:

Pedro Custodio (Sapo), Bruno Figueiredo (APPU, Ideias e Imagens), Andre Ribeirinho (adegga.com, avin), Fred Oliveira (WeBreakStuff), Pedro Sousa (Ruby-pt, Re-inventar), Francisco Cabrita (Ruby-pt, Freebsd), Bruno Pedro (Unfolding the web, tarpipe), Alcides Fonseca (Takeoff) and Celso (Sapo)

For me it all started in Barcamp Coimbra in 2007… you really have to be at one of these to understand it’s true power. I liked it so much that we’re sponsoring the Barcamp 2008 in Lisbon organized by João Moreno and João Rico at FCT. If you wanna know more, be there and ask me …

On a side note I’m also co-organizing Shift 2008 (set your calendars: 15 to 17 October) with Pedro Custodio, Bruno Figueiredo and Andre Ribeirinho amongst others. It’s going to be awesome. Be there!

Special thanks:

A final word to thank my business partner: Peter. A workaholic (like me), two years, zero arguments … that’s how good we get along. And to thank Andre Luis, our very first web employee, you paved the way and I learned a lot.

Hope you all enjoy this blog. I’ll write about my company, web design, technology, usability, entrepreneurship and every day issues. Any requests? Feel free to contact me…