Author: Raanan Bar-Cohen

Raanan Bar-Cohenhttps://raanan.com/
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Native VS Mobile Web Apps & Ideas for Gmail Mobile Web App

I was at the excellent GigaOM Mobilize Conference 2010 last week as we, Automattic, were a sponsor with our WordPress for iOS app.

At the conference there was an interesting panel about mobile web apps VS native mobile apps.

My gut feeling re: this debate is that we are at a place in mobile that is similar to where the web was in early 1994. In 1994, you had very rich desktop clients such as AOL, Compuserve, and others that delivered a great web experience. And you had this Mosaic browser that just got ported to Windows, that everyone was raving about but was clunky, a bit buggy, and served up pretty plain looking web pages. Fast forward a few years, and we all know how this story played out.

I think that the mobile web apps vs native client debate will play out in a similar fashion — in that the mobile web will come to dominate native clients in much the same way — it’s a matter of time — but it’s probably a good 2-3 years out. Also native apps today are moving into games and video that require a big local storage component, and since mobile networks can’t stream fast enough, and today have terrible latency issues, I don’t see how mobile web apps will compete in the short-term for that category. But the advantages of mobile apps — fast iteration, no need for specific hardware testing, instant feedback, built on open source stacks, etc — that’s a winning combination.

This prediction is coming from someone who has invested a ton of time in the WordPress mobile apps, and I still sees plenty of value continuing to invest in native apps for at least the next 2-3 years. It’s also very possible that a hybrid approach will emerge, where it’s a native app embedding a mobile browser, and just using some of the native hardware capabilities and processing power, but in essence a 95% mobile app inside.

So in reference Gmail — after the sessions I was chatting with a few people, and on twitter a few folks were asking me which mobile app was the best. My response:

Re: those asking what the best mobile web app is: to me hands down it’s gmail. Local storage, fast, and better than the built in iphone mail

For context, I use Google Apps for all my email — both work and personal, and have been using Gmail mobile since it was a BlackBerry app back in 2007. With my type of work, I live in email a good chunk of my day.

Scott Eblen who works at Google on Gmail mobile then kindly reached out asking about any suggestions to improve the service. Since I can’t quite fit that into 140 characters, I though I’d blog it. Here is my take on Gmail mobile – the web app – used mostly on my iPhone4 using mobile Safari:

The good:

  • It’s fast and efficient — I use it probably 90% to triage email — erase, star, label, and archive, and about 10% for actual composing and replying
  • Since there are no iTunes approval waits, or extra device testing — the team seems to be iterating very quickly. The new buttons and new placements have improved a ton in the last month. The new feature for moving inside a thread is wicked — wish desktop Gmail had that feature to be honest
  • The local storage feature is great — even offline I can load up recent messages, and it adds to the overall snappy feeling of the web app
  • Related to the local storage item, the web app, unlike many others, loads up with the icons, buttons,etc already loaded
  • The main pane scrolls without showing the location bar now — hard to describe but you’ll notice it when you use it
  • Search rocks, and was the #1 reason I started using it instead of the built-in iPhone mail

What Can be Improved:

  • My number one issue — I can’t choose which email account for sending. It defaults to my ‘default’ which covers me 95% of the time, but wish I could switch to my other accounts
  • Related to the above, would be nice if it matched my account based on the email address that it was directed to. Regular web Gmail does that
  • When I switch between wifi connections or 3G, I sometimes need to reload the page. Refreshing within the app just spins ( happens much less often then it did a few months ago )
  • More of a UX thing with mobile, but I’d like to see better options for inline replying and cutting & deleting. Might be an HTML5 limitation, but a smarter way to select and delete would be helpful
  • Would like to see phone numbers automatically highlighted and clickable for a call. Bonus points if it can launch the google voice native or web app
  • Would like to see some way on the iPhone for Gmail to have access to local hardware capabilities like the camera and GPS. Android OS already supports this, and the HTML5 spec does as well.

So that’s my take — looking forward to seeing what the Gmail team does next. And keep an eye on WordPress in the mobile space — some exciting stuff in the works.

Windows Live Spaces Migrating to WordPress.com

Big news – at TechCrunch Disrupt we announced today that Live Spaces will be migrating millions of blogs to WordPress.com, and that new blogs will be created automatically on WordPress.com.

In addition, we’ve added support for Messenger Connect as a Publicize option, which enables you to automatically share new posts on your WordPress.com blog with your buddies on Windows Live Messenger. This new Publicize option joins our built-in support for Twitter, Facebook, and Yahoo!.

WP.com today has nearly 14M blogs, reaches over 260M uniques, and is growing at a nice clip. With the addition of all the MSN Spaces blogs it will add to the great community of bloggers and amazing content being produced each day on WP.com.

As Matt posted a few minutes ago:

I’ve been impressed with Microsoft’s regard for their users in providing a solid upgrade and migration path with a really smooth experience

Ditto — too many services today provide very weak or super manual tools for migrating over. Big props to Microsoft to working on making it as smooth as possible and easy for their users — really impressive. On our end, we make sure to preserve all the content with original post dates and the like — and we redirect all the old URLs over, so nothing gets lost or drops out of the search indexes.

For Spaces bloggers looking to make the move, check out the MSN announcement post, and our welcome post on WP.com.

Two Factor Authentication

My introduction to two-factor authentication (aka “two-step” authentication), where you needed to enter in a unique code on top of your normal username/password, was nearly 10 years ago when I worked at a large publishing firm. Whenever I accessed the VPN when I was outside of the physical office, or when I accessed some critical internal system, I would get prompted for a code. We had these key “FOBs” we carried around which generated a unique code, and they were issued from RSA and looked something like this:

( Side note, I never knew why we called them a “FOB’ – but wikipedia provides a solid explanation: “The word fob may be linked to the low German dialect for the word Fuppe, meaning “pocket”, however, the real origin of the word is unknown.” )

The FOBs worked quite well, had a long battery life, and were reliable. I kept waiting for this technology to trickle down into consumer web application, online banking sites, and the like — but they never did. With the terrible password habbits that most people kept, it just seemed like a natural thing that these FOBs would one day make their way into our hands for non-work use. I just assumed that the price would dip to a point that banks would just send consumers these devices for free.

So clearly that prediction didn’t happen, but fast forward 10 years, and I use my mobile phone/SMS for two-factor authentication without the need for the extra FOB hardware. Services like Paypal (SMS option), and now Google Apps (SMS and mobile apps) offer two-factor authentication by sending an SMS text with a code or running a native mobile app that generates the unique code. Brilliant !

Overall, I think this is great, and a good trend, and that we’ll see this level of security baked into more and more web apps and services.

WordCamp Jerusalem

I’m excited to be attending WordCamp Jerusalem this Sunday. Check out the lovely sidebar graphic on this blog 😉

I attended WordCamp Tel-Aviv nearly two years ago, and happy to be back in Israel again for this event.

Our company Automattic will be well represented at this WordCamp — myself, Barry, Yoav, and Matt will all be speaking at this event, and Ran will be attending as well.

Tripit

Been traveling a bunch lately, and started using the Tripit service again. I know many people are hooked on this, but I had looked at it previously when it first came out, but for whatever reason, it didn’t quite work for me. Now it’s rock solid.

The way it works, is with their super smart email parser, every confirmation email you get from airlines, hotels, car rentals, etc gets automatically put into trip itineraries, which are then accessible on mobile devices too. You can also manually enter in the info.

And what’s cool is that it finds the gate info for your flight, alerts you to changes, and allows you to share trip info as well.

Useful stuff.

Food Inc

For a couple of years I’ve been meaning to watch this documentary Food Inc, about how food is now produced in the U.S. — and just the other week saw that it became available on Netflix streaming and had no excuse — watched it on my iMac that night.

I found it to be a pretty powerful movie and the interviews with the farmers were very revealing. The stats on FDA investigations, and E. coli contamination were hard to argue with.

And is if on queue, this story popped into my stream today “1 million pounds of ground beef recalled: 7 people sickened by E. coli after eating meat from California company” while I was eating a quick bite, and I just had to blog this 😉

My $.02: Cost and lack of choice make it hard for everyone to pick locally grown produce and organic meats. I think efforts to have food labels include the source of the food, treatment of the animals, etc — and make it available online — are a good approach to this. Then people can vote with their pocketbooks on what foods they want to consume, and hopefully drive the marketplace to better choices and better pricing as farmers gain predictability of demand. In fact, in Food Inc there is a segment on how Walmart is moving in the direction of offering more sustainable and organic foods — purely because that’s where the market is heading and that’s what their customers want.

Movie trailer below:

Thoughts on the Real-Time Web and its Impact on Investing

A couple of my quick thoughts that were part of Zach Miller’s new ebook companion to his recent book: TradeStream.

The rise of independent publishers through blogging tools such as WordPress has been profound for the investor community. With the integration of RSSCloud, PuSH, Twitter, and Facebook — blogs are now part of the real-time stream and are playing an ever large role in the day-to-day of the investors. I’ve seen firsthand two major trends that were previously unthinkable and nearly impossible to pull off.

[ Read more at tradestreaming.com ]