MyTracks - Better location

I recently wrote about how location services still have a long way to go. While this is still true, today I've seen at least some of the obvious stuff fixed, although it is far from perfect.

Google engineering has an absolute obsession with math and stats, well into the obsessive-compulsive range in my view. I'm assuming this explains why the open-source Google MyTracks app applies at least some smoothing maths to tracking unlike, say, MapMyRun which had me flying from spot to spot by taking location data too literally.

MyTracks isn't perfect. It shows me jumping from one side of a river to another, but then it doesn't know there's a river there. It also claims that I left the house at 22km/h, a speed that might not quite catch Usain Bolt but is way beyond anything I can achieve. Even my heuristic approach to such algorithmic matters would spot that an immediate speed of roughly twice the average run speed is probably wrong and correct it.

The app is also missing a few simple UX things - eg starting a few seconds after you press go to allow you to put the phone away - but it is free and works pretty well. I'm assuming that if you're not running along the bottom of a steep-sided valley it will probably work very acceptably.

In my case I can knock off a few hundred meters from the logged distance and get something that's close enough for my needs.

Jelly Bean first impressions

In case you hadn't realised, Android release names are in alphabetical order. Jelly Bean is, therefore, the successor to Ice Cream Sandwich. The names are more fun than version numbers which often don't make a lot of sense in any case. And I find them a lot more appealing than Apple's pretentious big cat series for OSX.

My second Android device came from Vodafone in the disguise of being a genuine Google Experience Device (GED) but turned out to have been mucked about by Vodafone and updates came out very slowly and in one notable case, totally broken. They had actually forgotten to include the dictionaries: no autocomplete, no correct, nothing that needed words worked. And they didn't bother to fix it either; couldn't care less and didn't even acknowledge the problem.

For this reason I splashed out on a Samsung Galaxy Nexus direct from Samsung when it came out, with unadulterated Ice Cream Sandwich on it. This has proven worth the money as it is a great device and the OTA Jelly Bean update arrived last week, well ahead of operator-provided devices.

So how is Jelly Bean? Nice - it is faster, a number of small glitches that most people wouldn't notice have been fixed, Google Now looks like it can be useful, and there's a pile more transitions, transparency and artful design changes that make it pleasant to use.

The installation was particularly painless and pretty - nice graphics to show it's working and no interaction required. It might be my imagination, but photo unlock works more often than not now.

On the other hand I have noticed one app that has been affected by the upgrade: Yahoo! Weather no longer shows the name of the city for which it is displaying the weather. Everything else seems to be powering along nicely.

Slick would be the word if I had to pick just one to describe the upgrade.

Glass to the Future

Having to wear glasses most of the time doesn't seem quite so irksome after the launch of Google Glass yesterday. Watch the promo skydiver video if you've not already seen it, or the concept video of day-to-day life with the glasses.

While the skydiving is a bit like a streaming helmet cam, the concept video is particularly important as it represents a different way of doing stuff that we actually do today by taking out our phones, unlocking them and then interacting. Not sure about muttering at your glasses to make them do things, but we've already seen a huge transformation in people's public interaction with technology.

I'm sure there will be a wave of lookalike social products for sharing, photos, location and the like, but frankly those are going to be covered by Google in the base product. That leaves a huge open space for some really exciting new stuff to happen, things we've not even thought of yet. 

In Neal Stephenson's highly entertaining book Snow Crash there are a group of people who are permanently wired up to stream information into the US Library of Congress. This is exactly what Glass can do - constantly stream all environmental data to the grid. This raises the interesting question of what you can do with it all. After all, I'm sure that it is possible to piece together people's lives from Instagram uploads but I suspect that the result is dull and useless.

Exciting as the Glass platform unquestionable is, the real excitement will come from the new apps that can make sense of the flood of data. Or stop the flood: even current camera phones cause infosec experts nightmares. It's one thing to ask people to leave their phones at the door of secure areas, but glasses are pretty fundamental. 

PS Snow Crash inspired me to write my own cyberpunk novel Network Sleeper.

PPS While it is annoying that Glass preorder is only available to US-Based developers, at least this was stated clearly up front. Far too many new products from Google and others have been launched to a global fanfare only to find out that they only work in the US, or in extreme cases, just the Bay Area.

Location Still Off The Mark

Location continues to roll into more and more services. Perhaps people are getting used to it, or maybe it's just that there are more and more back-end systems that deliver location information. However there's a problem: the location is all too often annoyingly wrong. 

Let me site a few examples. I live on the edge of Edinburgh city center, yet Facebook systematically puts posts entered at home as being in Granton, which is the docks area and not particularly close. I have found no way to override this setting to something meaningful, like jumping up to city level and simply putting Edinburgh.

I love Path as a means of sharing considered photos with a small circle of friends and family. However it occasionally shows me arriving into completely random places, including Las Vegas and some strange place in rural China. I'm mystified where those came from.

And then there is MapMyRun which is supposed to track where you run. Normally I don't carry any tech with me when I run as I like the escape, but I thought it would be interesting to see what the result was. I was initially pleased to see that I had run much further than I'd expected. The pleasure turned to perplexment when I checked times, and then to irritation when I looked at the map. The tracked waypoints jumped around like crazy beans, as you may be able to see in the screen shot. Surely the coders of this app could work out that I could not have suddenly jumped 700m out and back in a few seconds. I can understand that they can't tell that I would have had to swim a river to achieve it, but even Usain Bolt couldn't have made that detour in the available time.

I've previously talked about the pointlessness of most location systems. Since then things have progressed and there are far more people using location regularly in the UK to make it more valuable. However it's got to be accurate. The quoted examples are just some of the issues I've seen recently. I still often find that the location I'm in does not show up at all or only on searching from it. 

Often the list of locations presented in mobile apps is cached from last use which is at best desperate and at worst deeply stupid. But I can understand why, as acquiring location is still very slow. So I think we need to invent a location-based equivalent of cache time-to-live, perhaps distance-to-live. Any significant movement will wipe the cache content.

And I'd like need an equivalent of the Google Maps zoom control: I can scroll out from the name of a café up to country level depending on what I'm doing.

Location has clearly a long way yet to go yet.

Mobile Quality Slipping

About a decade ago I was writing about the web as the land that test forgot. Nothing worked properly. It really felt like nobody tested anything. Thankfully that phase has passed and now, most of the time anyway, things work pretty well.

The quality front has, however, moved to mobile. There is so much pressure to move product and grab market share that nothing is being tested. Used to be that the software in mobiles was largely an afterthought and soon as the hardware was deemed ready the handsets were chucked onto the market. And with no ready way to update the firmware either. Nokia and Sony Erisson were both very guilty of that.

Now this phases seems to have returned with both my iPhone and my Samsung Galaxy Nexus restarting and glitching with annoying regularity. Apps fall over all the time, hang, or just don't respond when you tap in the right place. Even the mobile web is prone to this now - try that fascinating time sink Pinterest on a mobile and you'll see a mess. On Android it messes up immediately. On iOS it waits until you scroll a bit and the screen ends up like a collage of buttons and image fragments.

It's not as if people don't update their software often. I'm seeing a ton of updates all the time, but each one seems to bring fresh problems. Not to mention irritation at having to spend time administering them all.

A worrying tendency is that people seemed to accept this state of affairs without grumbling too much. Smartphones are expected to be a bit flakey it would seem. And that's not a good platform for the future growth that will make every phone smart.

My wife’s phone doesn’t understand me

A couple of months ago my wife upgraded her iPhone from a 3GS to a 4S. The three really noticeable differences are the flat, slab-like design, the detail and colour of the screen and, of course, Siri. I suspect that the S after the 4 is for Siri and not for speed, sport or snobbery.

So of course we’ve been doing what ever one with access to Siri does – see if it does what it claims. I say it because in the UK Siri is a man who sounds like a Radio 2 announcer. (For non-UK people, Radio 2 is a BBC Radio service aimed at those who listened to pop music stations 20 years ago and haven’t migrated to talk shows or culture.) Siri here is not the subservient female that caused such a rumpus in the US when she first came out, as it were. It would be very interesting to know why they made that decision.

First to try Siri out are, of course, the kids. Younger daughter and her friends found endless amusement in trying to get him to say things and had already heard most of the Easter eggs so they tried all those too. And Siri understood about half of it.

But for me, speaking normal, Siri just simply did not understand. In fact the results were positively comical. It was very frustrating, frankly, and if I wasn’t in the industry I’d have given up. I may be Scottish but I have very little accent, certainly nothing that should have caused problems.

Some perseverance and some research enabled me to replicate some of the known forms successfully. I was able to teach Siri that I was the husband and was able to call myself by saying “call my husband” into my wife’s phone. And I was able to add an appointment to the calendar. Pronouncing Cautiously In Carefully Composed Sentences Worked Quite Well.

However when it came to more general queries, nada. The recognition of generic terms was significantly worse than Google Voice Search, for example.  Apple have done their usual thing of creating a protected environment where things they consider you likely to say work reasonably well but outside of that you’re on your own. At least Siri doesn’t say that generic queries violent your terms and conditions.

The Right Channel

Not been posting here for the last couple of months. Can you work out what happened then? Google+ of course!

It's interesting to match our communications needs to the right channel. We have an overwhelming choice when it comes to how to reach our fellow humans:

• Talk to someone
• Telephone
• Text
• Email
• IM
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google+
• And others

Different mechanisms have different priorities and groups. We fit the urgency, size, privacy, interactivity, audience and  importance of our message to the right channel. 

Google+ seems like the right format and speed for quick comments on technical things. Twitter is great for thought bites, many of which turn out to be either complaints or discoveries. Facebook is about family and friends.

This means that we don't have a hierarchy of channels, but a graph. And I don't see there being winners or losers. I don't mean the deluge of identical startups rushing to do something social that's been tried before and doesn't work (eg finding nearby contacts or uploading and sharing photos), I mean the core backbone services. They are probably fixed for a while anyway.