iPad iOS 4.2 review

It has been few days since I upgrade my ipad to the latest iOS version 4.2. I am happy with ipad to begin with. the new iOS upgrade makes the ipad even better. it certainly sweetens the deal as Seinfeld put it.

The most noticeable enhancement is fixing of the wifi connection bug, which drops the connections constantly and drives me crazy. The bug is fixed in latest iOS, I haven't experienced any wifi dropping since.

The task switcher which is advertised as multitasking (which really isn't) works well. I don't have to make the hard trade-off decision on whether to switch to another app.

I have a hp wifi printer, but the wifi printing feature didn't work on my ipad. it didn't recognize my printer. The feature isn't really that useful to me. I never have a urge to print from my ipad.

The only think I think ipad is lacking is a better browser. I am looking forward for a opera mini for ipad, not just the zoomed up version of opera for iphone which is the only version available on app store. It is too hard to view multiple pages at once and switching among them.

I would also hope that next ipad has a higher resolution display. Viewing webpages, such as nytimes is not the best experience when reading it in portrait. The letters become murky. however it does look better when viewing in landscape since letter become larger on screen, but you have to scroll down more.

SharePoint, its pros and cons

I came across an excellent article on sharepoint.

Sharepoint is a very popular tool in companies large and small. It is probably the standard answer when people ask about enterprise collaboration tool.

I came across several organizations where sharepoint was deployed. team members were encourage by their lead for using sharepoint portal for their daily collaboration. it normally goes like this -
"hey, we have the sharepoint team portal. you can join and upload your documents so that everyone can share."

"you know we should start the discussion on sharepoint to collect ideas on our applications"

"let's document this process on our team wiki site, so that everyone who need to know about it can find the answer themselves"

Contributing and sharing are the key aspect of social networking and would create a lot of values for the companies if people can all start doing so. However, easy said than done. There maybe 2-3% of population are the true contributors who are writing new posts or blogs and go that extra miles to express their views to the world, rest of us are just consumers, readers who read if there are interesting article but never or rarely express their own view in writing on the web.

These statistics probably explains why so many team portal site left unattended. People probably contribute some writing and document after initial setup but rarely update it with new information. Colleagues would stop coming to the portal knowing there would be very little update anyhow. There it goes a downward spiral with that chicken-egg problem.

Unless you make contributing to the team portal a part of first class citizen in daily tasks, people will always find something more interesting to do, such as searching for the best lunch place on google map.

There are a lot of use cases for sharepoint, however, I think it is not the best environment for knowledge sharing due to the above reasons. It has nothing to do with the technology. The features are there, people are not in any mood and incentive to do it.

I think a platform where it help people find information easily without them spending additional time managing those information will be key to a successful collaboration too. In fact, it is one of goals I tried to achieve with thinkj.com

Windows Phone 7

Not much fanfare for the new windows phone 7. I stopped by at att store at a mall in jersey city around 8pm. There was just one live windows phone in the corner of store and wasn't getting much attention from people there.

I grabbed the phone and launched the its browser and typed in www.thinkj.com. it renders the desktop web ok, however, when I went to thinkj's mobile site. the layout is just totally off. some css doesn't seem to be applied. div positions are also off. the same mobile site - thinkj mobile looks perfect on iphone and android's native browser. It also looks close to perfect on opera mini. but it certainly failed big on ie

not sure why Microsoft didn't just go with the webkit. Putting the layout problems aside, I couldn't find any unique features on ie that are appealing.

What collaboration problem are you trying to solve?

there is an interesting article on what type of problem enterprise collaboration tries to solve.  It would be nice to have a prioritized list of these problem.  At www.thinkj.com, we are focusing on the real time aspect of collaboration within the team, but we are also looking at a wide ranges of problems that are hindering the effectiveness of workspace.

HTML vs. App on iPhone & Android

When it comes to developing application targeting mobile users, we have two choices: HTML & App
The App, which rise to popularity via iPhone offers some unique features. Offline usage & alert are the most desired functionalities for any web developer.

Games is type of applications take advantage of offline feature. IM on the other hands takes advantage of background alert. However, other than these two type of applications, I hardly find any advantage of building app on a mobile phone.

With support of css and javascript, you can do everything you can do with App. With HTML, you can update whenever needed, the development model of html/web has been widely adapted for over 15 years. Overtime, the HTML will enable much more innovation and variation of styles than a close environment apps live.

Taking Thinkj.com as example, It takes me just few days to develop the mock up on both iPhone and Android phone using simple html and css. I can't imaging how much effort I would have to invest to build a comparable app for each of two platforms.

 

You can check more screen shots of thinkj.com on iPhone