Smart. Progress.

Effective Applications is proud to announce our newest initiative to focus on Android development for mobile devices. We are currently developing and delivering mobile applications for clients. For more information or to request a mobile app for you or your organization, visit our Android page.

We develop applications for fixed fees. If you submit an idea for an app that we feel has a wide enough user base, we’ll develop it for free and give you a copy for free. Visit our Android development page and submit your idea now.

We’re pleased to announce that Effective Applications has been given the opportunity to execute an intelligent training program with the US Army. Our portion of the project focuses on the machine understanding of the training material allowing better navigation, authoring and single-point data management. The system is a research and development initiative that intends on improving the way our soldiers learn, teach and manage the information necessary to be successful.

The work is kicking off now and will hopefully be presented by the Army during the 2011 I/ITSEC conference in November. We look forward to making training more effective for our men and women in the armed forces.

Technologies improve constantly. The browser software we use on a daily basis are constantly being updated. There are developers working full-time to improve the software. There are many more developers working full-time to create content and ultimately execute businesses on how information will be displayed within those browsers. Cross-browser compatibility can be a full-time job due to the rapid changes in both software (browsers) and in the content standards (HTML, CSS, etc.). This type of technology is changing quickly. Making an impact within the technologies requires that you add value and that you work within the community to push that value to the forefront. It isn’t trivial but it is done often. Reference Flash, Javascript, DHTML, even the evolution of CSS to CSS2 and CSS3 has changed how web pages are developed in a drastic way over the last several years.



Now imagine changing a technology that doesn’t change as rapidly. It takes a different approach. Many people have tried to develop non-standard (not qwerty) keyboards (see here, here, here and here for some examples) but the qwerty keyboard is still king. There are no real competitors to this “technology”. Introducing a new “technology” in the keyboard arena takes a different approach than trying to improve CSS. I picked qwerty keyboards as an example because is an interesting use case for changing ubiquitous technology. Many have already tried and the archives of their attempts are still online. Academics have studied the ideal key positioning from countless angles. There are have been studies on keys that are most used, the best way to use our hand movements, and many more. This post isn’t about keyboards so I’ll summarize by saying that you’re using a qwerty keyboard. You’re using a keyboard that has been proven by countless studies to be less optimal than some alternatives. If you walk into Staples, I bet you won’t find any alternatives to the qwerty “technology”. A quick online search at Staples.com confirms it.



So how do you go about changing keyboard standards. Getting on a soapbox, creating a website and even lobbying the big keyboard production companies won’t do it. Should you buy a commercial slot for the next Super Bowl? Should you do another study to prove that your keyboard is more effective than a qwerty-style keyboard? Should you buy an infomercial? I don’t have the answers of course or else my pet technologies would be famous by now. I do read marketing books, blogs and magazines periodically and I read about numerous strategies that promise to make us all rich, but in their case, they’re writing the article because they’re not rich yet.



Technology changes are a bit different depending on the type of technology. Changing something folks are used to like a qwerty keyboard or the operating system for the phone they use takes a different tact than changing something that the user doesn’t interact with (programming languages, protocols, etc.). A user community is driven by several factors including but not limited to the companies who develop products that service the community, the trusted members of the community that have a loyal following and in my humble opinion, the natural progression of evolution within the community with regards to technology, social relationships, connections to other user communities and the relevance of the community itself. This is a complex set of relationships, marketing concepts and implementations and there are plenty of resources out there including consultants willing to charge you $500/hour for you to figure it out. Good luck to you by the way.



I think that, “How to impact a user community” is the wrong question. I think that the majority of effort should be put in how to make the “technology” the best that it can be and a minority of the effort should be to make it available in the easiest way. Keep the interfaces, exposed functionality and method of obtaining the technology as simple and easy as possible. Save all of your advanced study results and technically complex jibberish for the conferences. Enjoy the creation and improvement. Make it easy for others to get their hands on it and use and let the rest take care of itself. The most effort put into creating market share should be limited to creating a video showing comparisons from the perspective of results rather than methods. The business person in me wants to throw out the problem of funding in the sense that unless you can sell early versions, you won’t have the capital to improve. This is a valid point, and I’m all for shipping iterations, but be persistent in progress, be transparent in goals and concentrate on improving more than selling. Outsource salespeople (affiliate-type agreements), but hire engineers, developers and technologists for your area of interest. That latter types of people will help you solve hard problems. Perhaps this won’t make you rich, but it’ll make you happy if you’re anything like me.

We’ve recently added a resources page to our website. You’ll find links to standards and references for Systems Engineering, Modeling & Simulation, Programming, Conferences and an acronyms list. Feel free to bookmark that page and use it often. If there are links that you’d like to see included, please let us know and we’ll add them if relevant to our industry.

While we’re at it, check out the MIT course material for Distributed Computing Systems Engineering.

One more note: We’re looking for top shelf talent for Systems Engineering and Software Development. We’ll only consider the best. If you are looking for a challenge and consider yourself better than most, drop us a line.

With the iPhone 4 coming being announced today at WWDC and with the Android HTC EVO being available last week, I’m feeling as though the Palm OS boat is sinking. I’m wanting to switch over and not just for newness sake. I still enjoy the Palm OS, but the hardware issues, speed and lack of apps are killing me. Seeing friends being more productive than I on their phones is like fingernails on a chalkboard. I’m the effective one and I have the Palm OS. I have hardware problems with my device that Sprint doesn’t seem to want to take care of, that Palm could’ve avoided with a better hardware provider and that drive me nuts when trying to use the phone for an important task.

The EVO and iOS 4 (what they’ve named the iPhone OS now that it powers much more than iPhones) are light years beyond Palm’s Pre with no new release on the horizon from Palm or HP (who agreed to purchase Palm recently).

Another annoying thing the Pre is that it doesn’t have a user’s manual to tell you how to take advantage of its features so I went weeks without knowing some of the useful, but not obvious features of the phone.


iPhone
HTC EVO
Palm Pre


Android Development
iPhone Development
Palm OS Development

The emotional reward from Smart Progress is a stronger feeling than most people realize. The feeling of satisfaction and pride are already recognized as emotions that we crave. Those feelings are amplified when the effort to accomplish something was time-consuming and difficult. We don’t have to work hard though if we can work smart. I think the satisfaction grows based on the perceived difficulty of the task rather than how many hours we spent. Using your brain rather than your hands to accomplish a seemingly hard task in a shorter period of time can provide the same amount of satisfaction, if not more. Before dropping to your knees to scrub the floors, wait a minute and think how you could get the job done smarter. Take satisfaction from the end result, not the effort. We’ve been trained to think hard work is good work. I’d argue that the value of the results should be measured rather than the effort to obtain the results.


Vacations, the time we reserve for ourselves, should include work towards the one thing you want most. When was the last time you accomplished an amount of progress that left you feeling satisfied with yourself for the results you produced? The feeling of satisfaction is always better when the progress you made was towards something that you really wanted. When we take a week off from work, we tend to look for ways to enjoy ourselves in the short term: lying on a beach, skiing, sight-seeing, etc. All those things are great, but it seems that the ideal way to spend a week away from work is to improve your life for the long run. The best way I can think to do that is to spend that week making Smart Progress towards one of your biggest goals. Progress is more invigorating than sleeping or relaxing on the beach for a week.


On your next family vacation, leave a few days at the end to concentrate on working towards your biggest goal and let me know how you feel. I suspect that you’ll feel better after you slay the dragon towards your goal rather than after you get done with the relaxing portion of your vacation.

The Pre was released on 6/4/09 to a pretty average result. Many of the stores including Sprint stores themselves were sold out very quickly having only 50-100 phones on hand. I blame Palm for having such a limited amount in stores. According to preliminary polling results and numbers, the Pre didn’t come near the iPhone sales but that is to be expected as the intended audiences are completely different. Business people will hog the market share for the Pres while teenagers and Apple fanatics will be the majority of iPhone owners.


There are already some reported problems, although fairly minor. The major problems are screen discolorations, dead pixels and dying phones that required a hard reboot (remove battery). Some minor problems include the sharp edge to the bottom of the phone when opened, lack of hard synching with Outlook, lack of symbol support in the web browser for symbols not on the keyboard (having to use the Sym key) and the lack of available applications.


The three problems that really drive me crazy are the lack of hard synchronization which forced me to use MS Exchange, the lack of tethering, and the lackof available applications.


Most business people use MS Outlook and only a portion of those use MS Exchange. Not catering to the large subset that use Outlook as a stand-alone application with a seamless and out of the box solution is unforgiveable.


I understand why Sprint doesn’t want the Pre to allow tethering computers online, but it still irritates me. They need to get their $70/mo data card money.


The lack of available applications is the biggest irritant, especially since it is difficult to get applications published through their Application Catalog. There are many restrictions that they apply to you so the black market for Palm Pre apps is bigger than the real thing.


With all that said, I still love my Pre due to my recent adoption of a MS Exchange server and the over-the-air synchronization between all my computers of my email, tasks, contacts and calendar. The Pre still has a lot going for it including a pretty slick UI and multi-tasking OS that means I can put my attention deficit disorder to work. The easy to update OS seems to make progress every couple months. I do wish that the hard drive was bigger and in fact the Pre Plus being release for Verizon doubles the memory that I have.

I like to tinker, especially with the latest technology. To develop something for a phone falls within that scope so I’ve been learning what I can about the Software Development Kits (SDK) for each of the four major phones/OS:


Android

Read about and download the SDK on the Android SDK site.


Development guide


iPhone

The iPhone SDK cost $100 for the random small company person like myself and goes up to $300 for those in companies of 500 or more. This is the largest market for applications and has a good reference center.


BlackBerry

The development site boasts plenty of information for developing gadgets but I spend more time on the Java Application Section.


Pre

Finally, the phone I’m most excited about, the SDK called Mojo has not been released to the general public yet. Only a handful of pre-development vendors have been let behind the curtains so far. I’ve applied, but haven’t heard anything back yet.


I’ll post more as I traverse this journey including posting some sample applications with a focus on productivity.

Here are some of the truths we use when managing our task lists:

1. You should either know what higher level goal the task will help support or it should be a necessary task.
2. Each task should have a date associated with it.
3. If the task takes more than 15 minutes, then schedule it on your calendar

I happen to use Microsoft Outlook and synchronize those tasks with my phone (a Palm Pre thank you very much). As those tasks pop-up with their reminder, I either tackle the task right away, push snooze so I can get to after I finish whatever I’m currently doing or I immediately reschedule the task for a later date. Take those reminders seriously or you’ll snooze yourself right past a deadline. I also review my task list every morning when I get to work and every evening after the kids are in bed. This allows me to execute tasks due that day at their respective location (home or work). If I ever have spare time (haha), I’ll also review the list to see what I can check off, or at least make progress on.


Tasks should ultimately be well ordered within a larger goal for several reasons: 1) You’re more motivated to execute the task if you know that as a direct result of you completing the task, you’ll be closer to a highly desirable goal; 2) With limited time, you need to focus on important tasks rather than urgent “hey you” tasks that ultimately get you no further toward your goal; 3) The only way to get to your goals is to know that path and plan and then have the desire to reach that goal.

I was unable to attend the Google I/O in San Francisco this year, but I did watch almost all of the 80 minute Google Wave presentation. The technology looks very promising as it is based on very simple concepts, based on a strong infrastructure and will have plenty of momentum behind it from now on.


I’ve requested an account in the sandbox they’ve created in order to play around with it. I’d like to apply the technology to a couple problems I’ve been percolating: agent-based learning engine for poorly structured concepts, interest-based data synchronization across many nodes and basic workplace group collaboration with multi-level security.


I need to learn more about the APIs in order to create a functional design for those ideas, but after a quick glance through the JavaDoc, I think there will need to be some significant changes required. The fact that Google Wave is going to be rolled out as an open source project makes it exciting enough to give this a shot.