This is the question I hear from many organizations these days. Whether they’re selling a product or whether they’re offering a service or even just as a way of getting ahead of the competition, they all ask whether they need an app for smartphones and tablet users. And although, at first glance, the answer would seem to be yes – it is 2013 after all – it’s important to drill down to find out exactly what each organization really wants.
So, let’s think about what question having an app is the answer to. For some organizations, it’s simply ticking the box saying people can download our app. But that begs the question about what are they going to use the app for, and, perhaps more importantly, will they ever use the app? We’ve all got apps that we excitedly downloaded and just sit there unused on our smartphones and tablets! And that isn’t good PR.
For other organizations, an app is a way of saving money. Think about it, if a client comes into your office and speaks to someone, let’s say that interaction costs £15. If they phone up, let’s say that costs £7.50, but if they do everything online, that costs, say £1. So an organization that moves its customers and potential customers online will save huge amounts of money. Having an app allows people to buy an item, book a visit, or whatever from their phone as easily as from a laptop.
For many people, online banking, online shopping, booking something, Facebooking, Tweeting, texting, etc are very familiar and, these days, second nature. People who aren’t quite so mobile-savvy are more likely to pick up a phone and ring than they are to use other alternatives such as choosing from a menu on their TV and trying to type a message using the TV remote control.
The next question for organizations to ask is whether they want to develop an app and continue with their Web site, or whether they want just a mobile Web site. People familiar with CS6 Dreamweaver will know that the software allows ‘fluid’ design, so users can create a style sheet that applies to smartphones, tablets, and standard Web pages. The same text appears on all three devices, but the layout adjusts – depending on how the designer wants it to look. One thing to bear in mind at this stage is that whether you choose an app or mobile Web site, users will expect a very high standard. And if their transaction doesn’t work first time, they will probably not bother trying again. So whatever a company chooses, they need to get it right.
If you do choose the app route, then your organization will need at least two of them – one for Android and one for Apple devices. And then you may want a Windows app, and a Blackberry app, and who knows how many other variants may be required.
Although an app designed for a device will probably be easier to use, using a mobile Web site means the look-and-feel will be the same on every device and will be available on every device (even the more obscure ones) immediately. This is called being platform agnostic. Another advantage of an app is that data could be browsed offline. But with the prevalence of wifi hot spots these days, that’s not such a big deal. Of course, regular users might be happy with an app, but a casual browser may not want to download an organization’s app for a single use. For the organization, they can push out information using the app, which they can’t with a Web site – unless people sign up for the e-newsletter.
A simple compromise is to build an app that takes people to a useful landing page on your mobile Web site. And make sure it works
Showing posts with label tablet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tablet. Show all posts
Sunday, 4 August 2013
Sunday, 24 June 2012
On the surface
Do we need another tablet device? Hasn’t everyone who needs one got an iPad or an Android tablet? What was Microsoft thinking when it announced its own manufactured Surface tablet device this week?
Microsoft has a mixed history with hardware – you perhaps tend to forget about things like the Microsoft mouse, the keyboard, the IntelliMouse, etc, which you see around and were successes. And we all know about the ubiquitous Xbox and Kinect, but conversation after conversation seems to remind us about the Zune mp3 player and the Kin smartphone (which went on sale and disappeared from market in an amazingly short period of time) that weren’t such great successes.
So what exactly has Microsoft announced? Well, we know that the Surface tablet will come in two versions — one that runs on ARM and one on Intel chips. There will be two versions of Windows 8 – one for each chip. We also know that it comes with a USB port and includes a snap-on cover that acts as a keyboard and there’s a kickstand. You can see a picture of it here. It’s 9.3 millimetres thick and it weighs under 1.5 pounds (if I’m allowed to mix Imperial and metric units), which is a bit thinner and a bit heavier than the iPad. The screen size is slightly larger and (like Android devices) uses the more preferable 16:9 aspect ratio – iPad’s use a 4:3 ratio (like old-style TVs). We also know the Windows 8 Pro version on Intel will be slightly thicker and will have a stylus to allow users to make handwritten notes on documents!
That’s about all the detail – the rest is a bit vague, such as delivery dates, prices, etc. If the ARM version is the same price as an Android tablet, and offers much the same capability, what’s the selling point? If it offered Office bundled in, that might work – certainly in a business sense.
If the Intel version actually ran applications rather than cut-down apps – and bear in mind Apple has scaled down applications to add to the apps available with each iPad announcement – then Microsoft will have a winner. The pricing problem is that a laptop could be cheaper than the new Surface tablet. Therefore the tablet has to score points in terms of thinness in order to justify the extra money spent on it. So how much RAM are you going to be able to have? What can you actually run on it? These, along with price, are the questions that businesses are going to ask.
With the soaring sales of tablet devices, Microsoft needs to be in this space. But the fact they are making their own hardware (like Apple) must come as a blow to other hardware companies, like Dell and HP, that build Windows-based tablets.
To be honest, I’d really like an ultra-thin tablet-like PC that I could do real work on using high-end applications (such as Adobe’s Creative Suite). One that I could carry around like a book, that didn’t need its own bag and other baggage. One with battery life that lasts for a long meeting – at least three hours – while I’m doing more than just browsing minutes in Word and forecasts in Excel.
One day!
One a completely different topic, you’ll be interested to know that Mozilla (the Firefox browser people) have announced Thimble, which is part of the Webmaker project. Thimble is designed to help people write and edit basic HTML and CSS in a Web-based code editor. You can start from scratch or pick a project. Like Dreamweaver, you get instant previews. There’s a code editor on the left and your preview on the right. You can then publish your site to the Web in a Webmaker domain with just one click. Have a go at https://thimble.webmaker.org/en-US/editor.
Microsoft has a mixed history with hardware – you perhaps tend to forget about things like the Microsoft mouse, the keyboard, the IntelliMouse, etc, which you see around and were successes. And we all know about the ubiquitous Xbox and Kinect, but conversation after conversation seems to remind us about the Zune mp3 player and the Kin smartphone (which went on sale and disappeared from market in an amazingly short period of time) that weren’t such great successes.
So what exactly has Microsoft announced? Well, we know that the Surface tablet will come in two versions — one that runs on ARM and one on Intel chips. There will be two versions of Windows 8 – one for each chip. We also know that it comes with a USB port and includes a snap-on cover that acts as a keyboard and there’s a kickstand. You can see a picture of it here. It’s 9.3 millimetres thick and it weighs under 1.5 pounds (if I’m allowed to mix Imperial and metric units), which is a bit thinner and a bit heavier than the iPad. The screen size is slightly larger and (like Android devices) uses the more preferable 16:9 aspect ratio – iPad’s use a 4:3 ratio (like old-style TVs). We also know the Windows 8 Pro version on Intel will be slightly thicker and will have a stylus to allow users to make handwritten notes on documents!
That’s about all the detail – the rest is a bit vague, such as delivery dates, prices, etc. If the ARM version is the same price as an Android tablet, and offers much the same capability, what’s the selling point? If it offered Office bundled in, that might work – certainly in a business sense.
If the Intel version actually ran applications rather than cut-down apps – and bear in mind Apple has scaled down applications to add to the apps available with each iPad announcement – then Microsoft will have a winner. The pricing problem is that a laptop could be cheaper than the new Surface tablet. Therefore the tablet has to score points in terms of thinness in order to justify the extra money spent on it. So how much RAM are you going to be able to have? What can you actually run on it? These, along with price, are the questions that businesses are going to ask.
With the soaring sales of tablet devices, Microsoft needs to be in this space. But the fact they are making their own hardware (like Apple) must come as a blow to other hardware companies, like Dell and HP, that build Windows-based tablets.
To be honest, I’d really like an ultra-thin tablet-like PC that I could do real work on using high-end applications (such as Adobe’s Creative Suite). One that I could carry around like a book, that didn’t need its own bag and other baggage. One with battery life that lasts for a long meeting – at least three hours – while I’m doing more than just browsing minutes in Word and forecasts in Excel.
One day!
One a completely different topic, you’ll be interested to know that Mozilla (the Firefox browser people) have announced Thimble, which is part of the Webmaker project. Thimble is designed to help people write and edit basic HTML and CSS in a Web-based code editor. You can start from scratch or pick a project. Like Dreamweaver, you get instant previews. There’s a code editor on the left and your preview on the right. You can then publish your site to the Web in a Webmaker domain with just one click. Have a go at https://thimble.webmaker.org/en-US/editor.
Saturday, 25 February 2012
BYOD
There was a time when you had to go into the office to use the mainframe. Then, with SOA, we allowed people to access from browsers running on any devices anywhere. Nowadays, people are wanting additional flexibility and demanding that they can work using their preferred computing device, rather than one allocated to them by IT.
You can understand why. I know of a number of sites that still roll out XP laptops to staff because they didn’t like Vista. They have older software applications that stop them moving to Windows 7 and IE9. You can understand why their staff would be frustrated in that situation. People who own super whizzy iPads and Samsung Tabs, or top of the range smartphones that can do pretty much anything, find that going to the office is like going back in time – and they don’t want it. They want to use their own devices, which they’re familiar with and can carryout their own simple IT support on, to access their work applications. Hence the growth of BYOD – Bring Your Own Device.
There’s also a growing population of Mac users that find they don’t get any IT support from the usual IT channels. For them, a Google search will usually identify the cause of a problem and a solution, and so they can get on with their work. If you are a Mac user, there's plenty of Mac to MVS info at http://planetmvs.com/mvsintosh/index.html.
Nowadays, users at Windows-based sites can easily connect to things like a Citrix receiver and access a virtual work desktop on their hardware device of choice.
In a further complication, Canonical is developing an Ubuntu release that can run alongside Android on high-end dual-core smartphones. When the smartphone is docked, the user gets a full desktop experience. The Linux operating system shares the Android kernel, enabling the safe sharing of resources and data by going through the same kernel access layers. This offers all sorts of advantages. Users have a phone that works, plus, once docked, have a working computing environment. It’ll be interesting to see whether we see a lot more of Ubuntu for Android. Can you imagine being able to do that with Windows?
VMware’s Horizon mobile application (announced last summer) lets workers use personal mobile devices for work, while letting IT retain security and control over work-related apps on those phones. In effect a user has the handset they want and runs their work phone virtualized on the same hardware. The user gets the handset they want, and IT get the security they need.
And you can access the mainframe with your iPad. For example, you can have 3270 emulation – MochaSoft provide TN3270 from the Appstore. Rational HATS and WebSphere Application Server (WAS) can help make CICS access from an iPhone possible. Lotus Notes Traveler accounts allow users to access Notes from iPhones or iPads.
There’s a free Quick Reference for IBM System z mobile app available for Android, BlackBerry, and iPhone, which (IBM claims) provides quick and easy access to the latest System z product information, success stories, social networks, and z experts. You can get it from www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/resources/mobileapp/index.html.
Many software vendors are making use of the browser on tablet devices and smartphones to provide access to mainframe data – I’ve written about William Data Systems software in previous blogs, but they are a good example of a vendor embracing new technology to access mainframe performance info.
My opinion is that tablet devices are not quite there yet, and, like early laptops, will be a million times more useful and usable in a couple of years time. But plenty of people have them, and it makes sense for those people to access the applications they want on corporate systems, whether that’s a copy of Excel or a CICS transaction.
Watch out for more people demanding to bring their own device!
You can understand why. I know of a number of sites that still roll out XP laptops to staff because they didn’t like Vista. They have older software applications that stop them moving to Windows 7 and IE9. You can understand why their staff would be frustrated in that situation. People who own super whizzy iPads and Samsung Tabs, or top of the range smartphones that can do pretty much anything, find that going to the office is like going back in time – and they don’t want it. They want to use their own devices, which they’re familiar with and can carryout their own simple IT support on, to access their work applications. Hence the growth of BYOD – Bring Your Own Device.
There’s also a growing population of Mac users that find they don’t get any IT support from the usual IT channels. For them, a Google search will usually identify the cause of a problem and a solution, and so they can get on with their work. If you are a Mac user, there's plenty of Mac to MVS info at http://planetmvs.com/mvsintosh/index.html.
Nowadays, users at Windows-based sites can easily connect to things like a Citrix receiver and access a virtual work desktop on their hardware device of choice.
In a further complication, Canonical is developing an Ubuntu release that can run alongside Android on high-end dual-core smartphones. When the smartphone is docked, the user gets a full desktop experience. The Linux operating system shares the Android kernel, enabling the safe sharing of resources and data by going through the same kernel access layers. This offers all sorts of advantages. Users have a phone that works, plus, once docked, have a working computing environment. It’ll be interesting to see whether we see a lot more of Ubuntu for Android. Can you imagine being able to do that with Windows?
VMware’s Horizon mobile application (announced last summer) lets workers use personal mobile devices for work, while letting IT retain security and control over work-related apps on those phones. In effect a user has the handset they want and runs their work phone virtualized on the same hardware. The user gets the handset they want, and IT get the security they need.
And you can access the mainframe with your iPad. For example, you can have 3270 emulation – MochaSoft provide TN3270 from the Appstore. Rational HATS and WebSphere Application Server (WAS) can help make CICS access from an iPhone possible. Lotus Notes Traveler accounts allow users to access Notes from iPhones or iPads.
There’s a free Quick Reference for IBM System z mobile app available for Android, BlackBerry, and iPhone, which (IBM claims) provides quick and easy access to the latest System z product information, success stories, social networks, and z experts. You can get it from www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/resources/mobileapp/index.html.
Many software vendors are making use of the browser on tablet devices and smartphones to provide access to mainframe data – I’ve written about William Data Systems software in previous blogs, but they are a good example of a vendor embracing new technology to access mainframe performance info.
My opinion is that tablet devices are not quite there yet, and, like early laptops, will be a million times more useful and usable in a couple of years time. But plenty of people have them, and it makes sense for those people to access the applications they want on corporate systems, whether that’s a copy of Excel or a CICS transaction.
Watch out for more people demanding to bring their own device!
Saturday, 2 July 2011
Where do the tablets go?
So, your organization has a mainframe – had one for years – and everything is nicely locked down. You can recover almost up to the minute the system or subsystem crashed (which it hardly ever does), and you’ve got people who seem to know, almost by instinct these days, when something isn’t performing quite right.
On top of that, you’ve got another layer of IT. People who use laptops with Windows and/or people who use Linux, and possibly bits or Solaris dotted around. These people have more interesting lives. They have to fight to get the best performance. Their back-up strategy is good if they can recover to last night! They probably still insist on people using XP as their Windows operating system because Vista was no good and it’s a bit of a jump to Windows 7. Plus they’re probably coming to the end of a virtualization project to reduce the number of server boxes they’ve got lying around. Parhaps they’re installing Citrix to virtualize desktops, or SharePoint to produce an intranet and join up all the separate islands of computing.
Plus you’ve got remote users, who are logging in over somebody else’s wifi. Or they might be using the 3G network on their smartphone. It’s your fault, of course, because you spent so long changing your CICS and IMS applications so they could be used in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment. But, I guess you have strategies in place to secure the connection, and secure what applications they can run, and what data they can see.
In fact, you’re probably convincing senior managers in your organization that it really was their idea all along to combine the strengths of mainframe computing with the flexibility of distributed systems. What your organization needs is a nice z196 mainframe – perhaps one of the planned-but-not-quite-announced Business Class (BC) machines.
For those of you who’ve spent the past year on Mars, the z196 brings together the latest mainframe technology with POWER7 and x86 IBM blade systems, giving potential users z/OS, AIX, Linux, and (coming soon) Windows, all on the one box. At this stage, I should point out that there are very strong arguments for going to zLinux. It’s been around for 10 years now, and is just becoming an overnight success – as they say.
So, there you are thinking that you can use your mainframe experience and expertise to tidy up all the other computing areas in your organization and get them under your control when HR tells you they have supplied everyone on the board of directors with an iPad. Now, you might think this is a good opportunity to bring some of the board into the 21st century, but it creates yet another rip in the secure blanket you've been throwing over the company’s computing infrastructure. Can you set up a security policy for iPads? Well, yes, if they come into a Microsoft server – in the same way you would for Mac users. Can you allow board members to download apps? Or can they have only pre-approved ones? Where do you start building proper security? It’s back to herding cats!
And don’t think I’ve singled out iPads, Androids have similar issues. You can download firewalls and anti-virus software for them, but it’s not the same as RACF!
And it might not just be board members – you may still have road warriors that want the small form factor of a tablet. The issues of theft or forgetfulness compound your security problems.
My suggestion at this stage is to wait for Windows 8 tablets, and hope that the policies laid down by the non-mainframe ITers will apply to them. And by then, Windows will be running on our z196 box. So everyone’s a winner!
Tuesday, 12 April 2011
Taking the tablets!
A few weeks ago I was talking about how William Data Systems had integrated their ZEN z/OS network management suite of products with iPhones and iPads and they’d also just included Blackberry and Android phones. I’d been particularly impressed how an iPad user had been able to identify where a problem was occurring and taken steps to rectify it. More recently, the iPad 2 has become available, and I thought it was definitely time to to investigate whether I ought to get myself a tablet device.
Now, I feel that I can argue a business case for using a tablet device. I need to browse the Internet when I’m at home, travelling, and with clients, and sometimes a phone just isn’t a big enough screen and a laptop is just too big and bulky to easily carry around. I also regularly need to browse Word documents – minutes of meetings, proposals, articles that I’m writing, etc etc. I also use Excel regularly – for all the things that you’d use a spreadsheet for. And I give presentations and talks that make PowerPoint a must-have – plus an easy way of connecting to a projector.
And, for me, that’s kind of the core usage – a big phone or a small laptop – it’s all down to form factor. A 10 inch book size device seems like the Goldilocks solution. But it has to be more capable than a gloried Netbook with widgets!
So let’s look at my nice-to-have list. It’s got to be fast. It’s got to have USB ports so I can swap files around easily. It’s obviously got to have wifi, and when I’m connected to the Internet I want access to Flash files (I really like those flipbooks rather than downloading and reading giant PDFs). I need it to play AVI files – my back catalogue of films etc would keep me amused while waiting at airports. And two built-in cameras facing opposite ways for Skyping and photographing whatever I can see.
I’d quite like an HDMI port so I can connect to a TV. I’d like a music playing app – like media player. I’d also like something like Dreamweaver so I can work on Web sites, and something like Photoshop so I can edit images. And possibly something like InDesign so I can produce newsletters etc. And I’ll need a firewall and antivirus software.
So, that seems to mean that an Android tablet is probably out and a PC-style tablet is what I want.
Now, the cost of devices varies in different countries, but I’ll give you the UK prices. An iPad 2 with wifi starts at just under £400. The Motorola Xoom is going to be £499. It has HDMI, 32GB of storage (plus an SD card slot), and twin cameras. The Advent Vega is £249.99, but that still uses Android 2.2 not 3.0 (Honeycomb). There’s a 10 inch Dell Streak coming. The Asus EeePad Transformer comes with a mini-HDMI port at £380. And Toshiba has an intereting-looking Android 3 tablet coming soon.
For PC-based tablets, Amazon has a 10.2" Windows 7 Tablet PC with 1.3MP Webcam, G-Sensor, HDMI Port, 3x USB2.0 ports for just under £300. The Zoostorm 3310-9500 SL8 is priced at just under £500. The Asus Eee Slate, which comes with just about everything you could want costs nearly a thousand pounds.
And that’s really the problem. Anything meeting my wish list is extremely expensive, and anything else seems little more than a glorified boy’s toy! It seems that unless I get my hands on something that’s so impressive I’m prepared to pay the extra money, for the moment I will bide my time and see what comes available as we move into the summer. Prices are bound to drop and performance is bound to increase. Don’t you think?
Now, I feel that I can argue a business case for using a tablet device. I need to browse the Internet when I’m at home, travelling, and with clients, and sometimes a phone just isn’t a big enough screen and a laptop is just too big and bulky to easily carry around. I also regularly need to browse Word documents – minutes of meetings, proposals, articles that I’m writing, etc etc. I also use Excel regularly – for all the things that you’d use a spreadsheet for. And I give presentations and talks that make PowerPoint a must-have – plus an easy way of connecting to a projector.
And, for me, that’s kind of the core usage – a big phone or a small laptop – it’s all down to form factor. A 10 inch book size device seems like the Goldilocks solution. But it has to be more capable than a gloried Netbook with widgets!
So let’s look at my nice-to-have list. It’s got to be fast. It’s got to have USB ports so I can swap files around easily. It’s obviously got to have wifi, and when I’m connected to the Internet I want access to Flash files (I really like those flipbooks rather than downloading and reading giant PDFs). I need it to play AVI files – my back catalogue of films etc would keep me amused while waiting at airports. And two built-in cameras facing opposite ways for Skyping and photographing whatever I can see.
I’d quite like an HDMI port so I can connect to a TV. I’d like a music playing app – like media player. I’d also like something like Dreamweaver so I can work on Web sites, and something like Photoshop so I can edit images. And possibly something like InDesign so I can produce newsletters etc. And I’ll need a firewall and antivirus software.
So, that seems to mean that an Android tablet is probably out and a PC-style tablet is what I want.
Now, the cost of devices varies in different countries, but I’ll give you the UK prices. An iPad 2 with wifi starts at just under £400. The Motorola Xoom is going to be £499. It has HDMI, 32GB of storage (plus an SD card slot), and twin cameras. The Advent Vega is £249.99, but that still uses Android 2.2 not 3.0 (Honeycomb). There’s a 10 inch Dell Streak coming. The Asus EeePad Transformer comes with a mini-HDMI port at £380. And Toshiba has an intereting-looking Android 3 tablet coming soon.
For PC-based tablets, Amazon has a 10.2" Windows 7 Tablet PC with 1.3MP Webcam, G-Sensor, HDMI Port, 3x USB2.0 ports for just under £300. The Zoostorm 3310-9500 SL8 is priced at just under £500. The Asus Eee Slate, which comes with just about everything you could want costs nearly a thousand pounds.
And that’s really the problem. Anything meeting my wish list is extremely expensive, and anything else seems little more than a glorified boy’s toy! It seems that unless I get my hands on something that’s so impressive I’m prepared to pay the extra money, for the moment I will bide my time and see what comes available as we move into the summer. Prices are bound to drop and performance is bound to increase. Don’t you think?
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