My “iPhone Experience”

I think that all developers should have an iPhone experience. What is this you ask?

I recently got an iPhone for the first time after years of having a Blackberry and more recently an Android phone. My first impressions were that it’s sexy, relatively easy to setup and the number of apps available are amazing.

Oh, but then.... I tried to configure something my way, a little different and I hit a brick wall. Very quickly I found that this started happening more and more.

It then dawned on me, Apple only let you do things they think you should do!
If you look closely at most of the very successful Internet apps, in the early stages of their explosive growth they offer relatively limited functionality.

I realised that with the recent development projects I've managed, I have tended to present to the user with how I think they should engage the application. And .... I am not the user. The user does not necessarily want to "peek under the hood", they just want to get the job done.

Today I read an article by Andreas Bonini, "Users Don’t Like Choices" bit.ly/Z6SkZQ. It reiterated to me that users like applications that present them with and unambiguous straightforward functionality that gets the job done.

I still have the iPhone … it’s my daily reminder that users are not programmers.

The API is the Computer?

There has been much talk around open standards, open software, big data and more recently open API’s. To me, an example of this is the Open Bank Project, “…empowers retail banks to dramatically enhance their online offering by opening transaction data to wider groups of people (including the public) and software applications via an open source powered API…”

Investors and innovation facilitators are now looking to back projects that facilitate the creation of API’s, in particular those which have the potential to change the way we do things for the better.  Large potential benefactors of this are social enterprise, education and health. I think that the UK Government is proving itself as a leader in this domain with its efforts around open data [http://data.gov.uk/] and its general design principles statement [https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples].

 I was reading an article today and the phrase “The API is the Computer” came to mind. I found no existing references to this after a quick search, but hey who knows.

This reminded me of the marketing tagline by Sun Microsystems some years back, “The network is the computer”. I am sure more recently someone must have quoted the “the cloud is the computer”.

I think that “the network is the computer”, “the cloud is the computer” and “the API is the computer” are all more or less the same thing. Each, a concept reflecting the current focus or perspective on technology evolution.

The idea that the API is the computer got me thinking. My colleagues and I have been working on a project named Landfall, we have already made this available as a product and have published some information on our website if you want to know more [http://www.navohpartners.com/tech_landfall]. Landfall is a generic application-building framework built upon open software and open standards. 

“The API is the computer” is one concept to me that makes Landfall standout from other generic frameworks. I believe that this API approach is innovation we have contributed to for which we have a working example of. We call this pattern Landfall is built on, Genoa.

 To test the effectiveness of this innovation, we have prototyped several different application models to access its effectiveness in time to implement, scaling, performance, flexibility and user experience. We have been very impressed; you are very welcome to contact us directly for more information on these.

Enlightenment

This must be one of the first chances I have had to reflect on the past few months. Family and work have taken all the time I have and more. Then .... every once in a while there is an event that forces one to take stock.

For me this was a burst appendix, for a rare moment in my life I have not been able to try and juggle all the things I normally do. And as a result I have had a brief chance to see the wood for the trees. It's also a great experience to see all the people that really care for you.

I have also have a chance to read more and listen what other people are saying particularly around Open Source. Its been a great boost that there is now far more consensus around what I have believed for some time and I think validates the projects we are busy with at Navoh Partners .

The essence off what I see happening around open source software is that the general connotation is moving away from the view that Open Source is just free software. The benefits of transparency, community scrutiny and validation,  security and open standards are now widely recognised and valued.

I will expand on this over the next little while looking at how these benefits and more  relate to real opportunities for both software developers and companies requiring technology solutions.