Tag Archives: apple

apple, microsoft, mobile, software development

Curating an app store: does Apple have it right?

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No matter how much market share Android grabs: it is Apple’s App Store that started this app thing rolling. Never forget that OS vendors and phone operators tried to push app stores before Apple came in, but fragmentation, horrible user interaction design, billing issues and perplexing compatibility problems made them a dead loss for most users. Today, Apple’s mobile platform remains the most important one in many sectors.

The trade off with app stores is that you give up freedom of choice (install anything you want from anywhere) in return for a safer and better experience; software installation nasties like runtime dependencies, malware or fake download apps do not exist. At least, that is how it is meant to be, which is why some are so disappointed by Microsoft’s store.

Now Apple has offered us some limited insight into its own curation practice. It has published the top ten reasons for App rejections for the last week in August.

Aside from the generic “more information needed,” the top reason is bugs, and the next two are non-compliance with the developer terms (could mean anything) and user interfaces that are poor or too complex.

Close behind it is another key one:

Apps that contain false, fraudulent or misleading representations or use names or icons similar to other Apps will be rejected

which accounts for the main complaint about some apps that make it into Microsoft’s store.

What Apple does not tell us is the proportion of apps that are approved, either first time, or after one or two revisions.

There is little to argue about in Apple’s list of reasons to reject, except this one:

If your app doesn’t offer much functionality or content, or only applies to a small niche market, it may not be approved.

Apps without content are fair game, but why should small niche markets not be served? It does not bother me if a great app for jellyfish spotters makes it into the store.

The other factor here is that if an app store has enough high quality apps then the bad ones will be hardly visible, other than in search results. Store curation is about presentation as well as content.

Is Apple getting it right? I am not hearing much shouting from developers about the arbitrary or unknown reasons why their app was rejected, which suggests that it is, but it may be I am not listening intently enough.

apple, audio, music industry

Future of music: files are over says WME music boss (or, why Apple bought Beats)

In February at the music industry conference Midem in Cannes, Marc Geiger of  WME (William Morris Endeavor), which represents artists across all media platforms, gave a keynote about the future of music. Geiger is head of the music department.

It is from six months ago but only just caught my ear.

Gieger argues that the streaming model – as found in Spotify, YouTube, Pandora and so on – is the future business model of music distribution. File download – as found in Apple iTunes, Amazon MP3, Google Play and elsewhere – is complex for the user to manage, limits selection, and full of annoyances like format incompatibilities or device memory filling up.

With unusual optimism, Gieger says that a subscription-based future will enable a boom in music industry revenue. The music server provider model “will dwarf old music industry numbers”, he says.

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Who will win the streaming wars? Although it is smaller players like Spotify and MOG that have disrupted the file download model, Gieger says that giant platforms with over 500 million customers will dominate the next decade. He mentions Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Yahoo, Pandora, Apple iTunes, Baidu, Android (note that Google appears three times in this list).

Why will revenue increase? Subscriptions start cheap and go up, says Gieger. “Once people have the subscription needle in the arm, it’s very hard to get out, and prices go up.” He envisages premium subscriptions offering offline mode, better quality, extra amounts per family member, access to different mixes and live recordings.

The implication for the music industry, he says, is that it is necessary to get 100% behind the streaming model. It is where consumers are going, he says, and if you are not there you will miss out. “We’ve got to get out of the way, we’ve got to support it.” Just as with the introduction of CDs, it enables the business to sell its back catalogue yet again.

A further implication is that metadata is a big deal. In a streaming world, just as in in any other form of music distribution, enabling discovery is critical to success. Labels should be working hard on metadata clean-up.

Gieger does see some future for physical media such as CD and DVD, if there is a strong value-add in the form of books and artwork.

You can see this happening as increasing numbers of expensive super-deluxe packages turn up, complete with books and other paraphernalia. For example, Pink Floyd’s back catalogue was reissued in “Immersion” boxes at high prices; the Wish you were Here package includes 9 coasters, a scarf and three marbles.

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This sort of thing becomes more difficult though as consumers lose the disc habit. If I want to play a VHS video I have to get the machine down from the loft; CD, DVD and Blu-Ray are likely to go the same way.

Geiger’s analysis makes a lot of sense, though his projected future revenues seem to me over-optimistic. People love free, and there is plenty of free out there now, so converting those accustomed to playing what they want from YouTube to a subscription will not be easy.

That is a business argument though. From a technical perspective, the growth of streaming and decline of file download does seem inevitable to me (and has done for a while).

Listen to the talk, and it seems obvious that this is why Apple purchased Beats in May 2014. Beats offers a streaming music subscription service, unlike iTunes which uses a download model.

Why Apple needed to spend out on Beats rather than developing its own streaming technology as an evolution of iTunes remains puzzling though.

Finally, Gieger notes the need to “put out great music. After we all have access to all the music in the world, the quality bar goes up.” That is one statement that is not controversial.

Here is the complete video:

.net, apple, development, software development

RemObjects previews native Apple Mac IDE for C#, .NET, Oxygene

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RemObjects is previewing a new native Mac IDE for its Oxygene and C# compilers. Oxygene is a Delphi-like language (in other words, a variant of Object Pascal) which targets iOS, Mac, Android, Windows Phone and Windows. RemObjects C# shares the same targets. Both can compile to .NET assemblies for Windows, or to Mono for cross-platform .NET, or to a Mac or iOS executable (using the LLVM compiler), or to Java bytecode for the Android Dalvik runtime. You can get both Oxygene and RemObjects  C# bundled in a product called Elements.

In the past, RemObjects has used Visual Studio as its IDE. While this is a natural choice for Windows users, much development today is done on the Mac. Requiring Mac users to develop in a Windows Virtual Machine adds friction, so RemObjects is now working on a native IDE for the Mac codenamed Fire.

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I gave Fire the briefest of looks. Here are some of the options for a new .NET application:

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Note the appearance of ASP.NET MVC 4, and even Silverlight.

Here are the options for a new Cocoa application:

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If you are developing for Cocoa, you can edit the resource file in Apple’s Xcode and use it in your application. I started a new C# Cocoa app, made a few changes and and then ran it from the IDE:

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I imagine Microsoft will be keeping an eye on tools like this – if it is not, it should – since they fit with the strategy of supporting Microsoft services on multiple devices. Visual Studio is a fine tool but if Microsoft is serious about cross-platform, it needs strong Mac-native development tools. Xamarin came up with Xamarin Studio, which is cross-platform for Windows and Mac, but the RemObjects approach also looks worth investigating.

PS The first release of RemObjects C# lacked full generic support, for which failing Xamarin and Mono founder Miguel de Icaza took RemObjects to task on Twitter. I was amused to see this in the changelog for April 2014:

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65764 Full support for Generics on Cocoa, as requested by Miguel

For more details on Fire, see here.

amazon, android, apple, cloud computing, google, iphone, microsoft, mobile, software development

Amazon Mobile SDK adds login, data sync, analytics for iOS and Android apps

Amazon Web Services has announced an updated AWS Mobile SDK, which provides libraries for mobile apps using Amazon’s cloud services as a back end. Version 2.0 of the SDK supporting iOS, and Android including Amazon Fire, is now in preview, adding several new features:

Amazon Cognito lets users log in with Amazon, Facebook or Google and then synchronize data across devices. The data is limited to a 20MB, stored as up to 20 datasets of key/value pairs. All data is stored as strings, though binary data can be encoded as a base64 string up to 1MB. The intent seems to be geared to things like configuration or game state data, rather than documents.

Amazon Mobile Analytics collects data on how users are engaging with your app. You can get data on metrics including daily and monthly active users, session count and average daily sessions per active user, revenue per active user, retention statistics, and custom events defined in your app.

Other services in the SDK, but which were already supported in version 1.7, include push messaging for Apple, Google, Fire OS and Windows devices; Amazon S3 storage (suitable for any amount of data, unlike the Cognito sync service), SimpleDB and Dynamo DB NoSQL database service, email service, and SQS (Simple Queue Service) messaging.

Windows Phone developers or those using cross-platform tools to build mobile apps cannot use Amazon’s mobile SDK, though all the services are published as a REST API so you could use it from languages other than Objective-C or Java by writing your own wrapper.

The list of supported identity providers for Cognito is short though, with notable exclusions being Microsoft accounts and Azure Active Directory. Getting round this is harder since the federated identity services are baked into the server-side API.

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android, apple, cloud computing, development, iphone, microsoft

Microsoft repositions for a post-Windows client world

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has penned a rather long public letter which sets out his ambitions for the company. It is not full of surprises for those who have been paying attention, but confirms what we are already seeing in projects such as Office for iPad: Microsoft is positioning itself for a world in which the Windows client does not dominate.

The statement that stands out most to me is this one (the highlighting is mine):

Apps will be designed as dual use with the intelligence to partition data between work and life and with the respect for each person’s privacy choices. All of these apps will be explicitly engineered so anybody can find, try and then buy them in friction-free ways. They will be built for other ecosystems so as people move from device to device, so will their content and the richness of their services

Microsoft is saying that it will build work/personal data partitioning into its applications, particularly one would imagine Office, and that it will write them for ecosystems other than its own, particularly one would imagine iOS and Android.

This is a big change from the Windows company, and one that I will expect to see reflected in the tools it offers to developers. If Microsoft is not trying to acquire Xamarin, you would wonder why not. It has to make Visual Studio a premier tool for writing cross-platform mobile applications. It also has to address the problem that an increasingly large proportion of developers now use Macs (I do not know the figures, but observe at some developer conferences that Windows machines are a rarity), perhaps via improved online developer tools or new tools that themselves run cross-platform.

Nadella is careful to avoid giving the impression that Microsoft is abandoning its first-party device efforts, making specific mention of Windows Phone, Surface, Cortana and Xbox, for example.

Our first-party devices will light up digital work and life. Surface Pro 3 is a great example – it is the world’s best productivity tablet. In addition, we will build first-party hardware to stimulate more demand for the entire Windows ecosystem. That means at times we’ll develop new categories like we did with Surface. It also means we will responsibly make the market for Windows Phone, which is our goal with the Nokia devices and services acquisition.

Here is another statement that caught my eye:

We will increase the fluidity of information and ideas by taking actions to flatten the organization and develop leaner business processes.

The company has become increasingly bureaucratic over the years, and that is holding back its ability to be agile (though some teams seem to move at high speed regardless; I would instance the Azure team as an example).

Nadella’s letter has too many flowery passages of uncertain meaning – “We will reinvent productivity for people who are swimming in a growing sea of devices, apps, data and social networks. We will build the solutions that address the productivity needs of groups and entire organizations as well as individuals by putting them at the center of their computing experiences.” – but I do not doubt that major change is under way.

google, microsoft, mobile, software development, windows

Google I/O 2014: impressive momentum, no wow moments

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I am not in San Francisco but attended Google I/O Extended in London yesterday, to hear the keynote and a couple of sessions from Google’s annual developer conference.

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I found the demographics different than most IT events I attend: a younger crowd, and plenty of start-ups and very small businesses, not at all enterprisey (is that a word?)

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The main announcements:

A new version of Android, known as Android L (I don’t know if this will expand eventually to Lollipop or Liquorice or some such). Big release  with over 5,000 new APIs, we were told (when does Android start being called bloated, I wonder?). Themes include a new visual style called Material Design (which extends also to the Web and to Chrome), and suitability for more device types including Android TV, Android Wear (smart watches) and Android Auto. A new hardware accelerated graphics API called Android Extension Pack which implements OpenGL ES for better game performance, with support from NVIDIA Tegra. Android graphics performance will be good enough for a considerable subset of the gaming community and we saw Unreal Engine demoed.

Android L does not use Dalvik, the virtual machine that runs Java code. In its place is ART (Android Runtime). This is 64-bit, so while Java code will run fine, native code will need updating.

Google is working hard to keep Android under its control, putting more features into its Play Services, the closed part of Android available only from Google and which is updated every 6 weeks, bypassing the operator obstacle to OS updates. There is also a new reference design including both hardware and software which is designed for affordable smartphones in the developing world: third parties can take this and build a decent Android mobile which should sell for under $100 as I understood it. I imagine this is designed to ward off fractured Android efforts like Microsoft’s Nokia X, aimed at the same kind of market but without Play Services.

There are new Android smart watches on the way, and we saw the inevitable demonstration of a user using voice control to the watch for ordering taxis or pizzas, getting notifications, and sending simple messages.

Voice control demos always seem to be nervous moments for presenters – will they be understood? Unfortunately that uncertainty remains for real users too, as evidenced by Xbox One Kinect which is amazing in that it often works, but fails often enough to be irritating. Voice recognition is a hard problem, not only in respect of correctly translating the command, but also in correctly detecting what is a command (if the person standing next to me shouts “Taxi please” I do not want my watch to order one for me).

The smart watch problem also parallels the TV problem. The appeal of the watch is that it is a simple glanceable device for telling the time. The appeal of the TV is that it is a simple sit-back screen where you only have to select a channel. Putting more smarts into these devices seems to make sense, but at the same time damages that core feature, unless done with extreme care.

Android TV puts the OS into your television, though Google’s messaging here is somewhat confusing in that, on the one hand, Chromecast (also known as Googlecast) means that you can use your Google device (Android or Chromebook) as the computer and the TV as the display and audio system, while on the other hand you can use Android on the TV itself as an all-in-one.

We are inching towards unified home entertainment, but with Google, Microsoft (Xbox One), Sony (PlayStation) and Apple all jostling for position it is too early to call a winner.

Material Design – Metro for Android?

We heard a lot about Material Design, which is Google’s new design style. Google borrowed plenty of buzzwords form Microsoft’s “Metro” playbook, and I heard expressions like “fast and fluid”, clean typography, signposting, and content-first. Like Metro, it also seems to have a blocky theme (we will know when the next design wave kicks in as it will have rounded corners).

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Material Design is not just for Android. You can also implement the concept in Polymer, which is a web presentation framework built on Web Components, a standard in draft at the W3C. Support for Web Components (and therefore Polymer) is already in Chrome, advancing rapidly in Mozilla Firefox, probably coming in Apple Safari, and maybe coming in Microsoft IE. However, a JavaScript library called Polyfill means that Polymer will run to some extent in any modern browser.

Whenever IE was mentioned by a presenter at Google I/O there was an awkward/knowing laugh from the audience. Think about what that means.

One of the ideas here is that with a common design concept across Android and web, developers can make web apps (and therefore Chrome apps) look and behave more like Android apps (or vice versa). Again, there is a similar concept at Microsoft, where the WinJS library lets you implement a Metro look and feel in a web app.

Microsoft may have been ahead of Google in this, but it has done the company little good in that adoption for Metro has been weak, for well-rehearsed reasons connected with the smartphone wars, legacy Windows desktop and so on. Google has less legacy weighing it down.

How good is Material Design though? Apple’s Steve Jobs once said of a new OS X design update that it was so good you want to lick it. Metro lacks that kind of appeal, and judging from yesterday’s brief samples, so does Material Design, whatever its other merits in terms of clarity and usability. It is early days though.

Business features: Samsung Knox, Office support, unlimited storage

Google announced a couple of  features aimed at business users. One is that Samsung Knox, app sandboxing and data security for business users, has been donated to Google for integration into Android. Another is that Google Docs will get the ability to edit Microsoft Office documents in their native format, removing an annoyance for users who previously had to convert documents to and from Google’s own format when exchanging them with Microsoft Office users.

This seems to be an admission that Microsoft Office is the business standard for documents, and you can take it either way – good for Google because compatibility is better, or good for Microsoft because it cements Office as the standard. There will be ifs and buts of course.

Google is also offering unlimited online storage for business users, called Drive for Work, at $10 per user per month, upping the ante for everyone in the online storage game – Microsoft, Dropbox, Box and so on.

Google’s Cloud Platform

Google showed new features in its cloud platform, with a focus on big data analytics using an approach called Cloud Dataflow. “We don’t use MapReduce any more”, said the presenter, explaining that Cloud Dataflow enables all of us to use the same technology Google uses to analyse big data.

Greg DeMichille, a director of product management for the cloud platform, appeared on stage to show features for in-browser tracing and debugging of cloud applications. I recall DeMichille being much involved in Microsoft’s version of Java back in the days of the battle with Sun; he also had a spell at Adobe getting behind Flash and Flex for developers.

No Wow moments

The Google I/O 2014 keynote impressed in terms of numbers – Android growth continues unabated – and in terms of partners lining up behind initiatives like Android TV and Android Auto. The momentum seems unstoppable and the mass market for mobile and embedded devices is Google’s to lose.

On the other hand, I did not notice any game-changing moments such as I experienced when first seeing the Chromebook, or the Google Now personalisation service. Both of those still exist, of course, but if Android will really change our lives for the better, Google could have done a better job of conveying that message.

apple, development, iphone, professional, software development

Apple’s Swift programming language: easy coding for OS X and iOS at last?

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Apple has announced a new programming language, called Swift. (There was already a language called Swift, used for parallel scripting, but Apple links to the other Swift in case you land on the wrong page. So far it looks like the other Swift has not returned the favour).

For as long as I can remember, serious Apple developers have had to use Objective-C, an object-oriented C that is not like C++. I have only dabbled in Objective-C but when I last tried it I was pleasantly surprised: memory management was no hassle and I found it productive. Nevertheless it is an intimidating language if you come from a background of, say, JavaScript or Microsoft .NET. Apple’s focus on Objective-C has left a gap for easier to use alternatives, though the main reason developers use something other than Objective-C, as far as I am aware, is for cross-platform projects. Companies such as Xamarin and Embarcadero (with Delphi) have had some success, and of course Adobe PhoneGap (or the open source Cordova) has had significant take-up for cross-platform code based on HTML and JavaScript.

I should mention that RAD (Rapid Application Development) on OS X has long been possible using the wholly-owned Filemaker, a database manager with a powerful scripting language, but this is not suitable for general-purpose apps.

Overall, it is fair to say that coding for OS X and iOS has a higher bar than for Windows because Apple has not provided anything like Microsoft’s C# or Visual Basic, type-safe languages with easy form builders that let you snap together an application in a short time, while still being powerful enough for almost any purpose. This has been a differentiator for Windows. Visual Basic is almost as old as Windows itself, and C# was introduced in 2000.

Now Apple has come up with its own equivalent. I am new to Swift as are most people outside Apple, but took a quick look at the book, The Swift Programming Language, along with the announcement details. A few highlights:

  • Swift is a type-safe language that compiles to native code using LLVM.
  • The IDE for Swift is Xcode. It supports Cocoa development (Apple’s user interface framework) via import of the existing Objective-C frameworks, which become Swift APIs via the import keyword:

import UIKit

  • You can mix Swift and Objective-C in a single project. In Objective C you can use #import to make Swift code visible and usable.
  • Swift is a C-family language and you will find familiar features like curly braces and semi-colons to terminate lines (though semi-colons are optional).
  • Swift uses reference counting for automatic memory management. There is rather complex section in the book about weak references and unowned references, to solve some of the problems inherent in reference counting.
  • Type inference is the preferred approach to declaring the type of a variable, but you can state the type if required. You can also declare constants.
  • Swift supports single inheritance for classes and multiple inheritance for protocols (protocols are more or less equivalent to interfaces in other languages).
  • There are advanced features including closures, generics, tuples, and variadic parameters. (I am not sure if “advanced” is the right word, but other languages such as C# and Java took a while to get these).
  • Swift has something like destructors which it calls deinitializers.
  • There is an interesting feature called Extensions which lets you add methods to any existing type. For example, you could extend Int with a prettyprint method and then call 3.prettyprint.
  • Swift variables are not normally nullable; they must have a value. However you can declare optional types (add a ?, such as Int?) that can be set to nil. You can also declare implicitly unwrapped optionals which can be nil, but once assigned a value cannot be nil thereafter.
  • Swift includes the AnyObject type which can represent anything.

Swift seems to me to have similar goals to Microsoft’s C#: easier and safer than C or C++, but intended for any use right up to large and complex applications. One of the best things about it is the smooth interoperability with Objective-C; this also saves Apple from having to write native Swift frameworks for its entire stack.

A smart move? I think so, though Swift is different enough from any other language that developers have some learning to do.

What difference will Swift make? Initially, not that much. Objective-C developers now have a choice and some will move over or start mixing and matching, but Swift is still single-platform and will not change the developer landscape. That said, Swift may make Apple’s platform more attractive to business developers, for whom C# or Java is currently more productive; and perhaps Apple could find ways of using Swift in places where previously you would have to use AppleScript, extending its usefulness.

If Apple developers were tempted towards Xamarin or Delphi for productivity, as opposed to cross-platform, they will probably now use Swift; but I doubt there were all that many in that particular group.

I would be interested to hear from developers though: what do you think of Swift?

apple, software

Review: Nuance Dragon Dictate 4 for the Mac

There is something liberating about working without a keyboard – and I do not mean stabbing hopefully at a touch screen. Voice control means you can sit back, easily refer to books or papers,  and input text more quickly and naturally than is possible using a keyboard. Some conditions including RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) may make dictation a necessity. I use dictation for transcribing interviews and for rapid text input generally. I do not often use dictation for controlling a computer, as opposed to entering and editing text, but this is also a key feature.

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Nuance has the best voice recognition system available as far as I can tell, though my experience is mainly with Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking on Windows. But what about Mac users? For them, Nuance provides Dragon Dictate, which has recently been updated to version 4. It is not a port of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, but rather has its own distinctive features, though it is less comprehensive, and a glance at the Nuance forums suggests that Mac users feel a bit neglected.

Does Dragon Dictate 4 change that? The good news is that the voice recognition engine in Dragon Dictate appears to be just as good as the one in Dragon naturally speaking. The accuracy is superb though you still have to be realistic. Some recognition problems are just very difficult and the software is bound to make mistakes especially in specialist fields – mine is programming and a specialist phrase like “JIT compiler” is bound to cause an error (Dragon thinks I want “Jet compiler”). Similarly, “pull request” became “full request”. Over time you can build up a custom vocabulary, but recognition will never be 100%, so a dictation system has to handle corrections as well as original input.

Setting up Dragon Dictate involves installing the software and then letting it create a profile and doing some training so that Dragon can learn the characteristics of your voice. I highly recommend using a good quality headset since without it we cannot expect accurate recognition. I found the setup process quick and painless and was soon up and running.

Dragon Dictate has five modes:

  • Dictation Mode is what you use most of the time.
  • Spelling Mode is for spelling out problematic words. You can speak the letters naturally or use the International Radio Alphabet (Alpha Bravo Charlie etc). It is a nice feature since if you know Dragon is likely to get something wrong, you can switch to Spelling Mode, enter the difficult word, and then go back to Dictation Mode.
  • Numbers Mode is for typing numbers.
  • Command Mode is for non-dictation commands. However, commands also work in Dictation Mode. The advantage of Command Mode is that Dragon will not misinterpret your commands as text input; but there is no way to configure Dictation Mode to prevent it interpreting speech intended as text as commands. The manual suggests that you use unnatural pauses for this. For example, if you are reviewing Dragon Dictate and want to type “Command Mode”, you can say “Command [pause] Mode” and get what you want.
  • Sleep Mode puts Dragon in a resting state, so for example you can take a telephone call without Dragon trying to transcribe it.

Switching mode is easy: just speak the mode you want. If Dragon is in Sleep Mode, you can say “Wake up”.

My initial experience with Dragon Dictate 4 was not too good. The problems were not with recognition but rather with navigating and correcting existing text, which I found harder than in Dragon NaturallySpeaking on Windows. In fact my attempts to make corrections all too often ended up with more and more errors as a correction went wrong and I would be trying to correct the correction, getting increasingly frustrated.

Using Microsoft Word 2011, I experienced unexpected behaviour. For example, if I put the cursor in between two words and dictated a word to insert, sometimes the word appeared elsewhere in the text.

Another odd thing: I dictated "for example", and Dragon recognised it as "one example”. No problem: Dragon has a Recognition Window which lists alternatives when you say “correct” followed by the word you want to amend. I said "correct one” and the recognition window appeared offering "for example" as one of the choices. I selected it, but Dragon then entered “for example example” in the text. I was not offered the word “for” on its own.

Dragon Dictate 4 was rescued from a terrible review when I studied the manual. Towards the end is a section entitled “The Cache and the Golden Rule”. This explains that you should not combine the use of keyboard and mouse with dictation when editing a document. If you do, Dragon gets confused about the contents of the document and you see unexpected results. You can fix this with a special command, “Cache Document”, which tells the software to clear and rebuild the cache for the entire document.

If you are not aware of this issue, then you are likely to make increasing use of keyboard and mouse as Dragon gets it wrong, making the issue worse. That is exactly what had happened to me.

Another key point is the difference between training and correcting. If you use the Recognition Window to make a change that is not in fact a recognition fault – such as changing “good” to “excellent” – then you will confuse the voice training. Rather, you should say “Select good”, to select the word you want to change, and then say “excellent” to overtype it.

After studying the manual, I got much better results, though Dragon Dictate still occasionally seems to have a mind of its own.

Nevertheless, this fussiness is a weakness in the software. The best software works the way you want it to, rather than making the user do things a certain way. Why cannot Dragon do its cache repairs automatically in the background?

Still, what Dragon offers is of high value, and in this case if you want the best results you have to do the homework.

There are a few others things to mention. Nuance offers a free app for the iPhone that lets you use it as a remote microphone. Personally I find a headset more convenient but I guess there are scenarios where this is useful.

There are also features in Dragon Dictate aimed at general system control. I tried the MouseGrid, which overlays a grid over the entire screen and lets you zoom into the area of interest for accurate mouse control. You can also move the mouse using Up, Down and so on under voice control, and perform single, double or triple clicks.

Conclusion? The software does not feel as complete or as polished as Dragon NaturallySpeaking, but the excellent voice recognition means that this is the best available for the Mac. Recommended, but with reservations.

apple, microsoft, mobile, software, windows

A close look at Word for the iPad. What is included and what is missing?

I have been having a closer look at Word for iPad. This has limited features compared to Word for Windows or Mac, but how limited?

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So far I am more impressed than disappointed. Here are some of the things that Word on the iPad does support:

Spell check with support for a range of languages including Catalan, Cherokee, two variants Chinese, Icelandic and many more.

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Tabs including left, center, right and Decimal

Paragraph styles – with some limitations. There are a range of common styles built in, such as Normal, No Spacing, Heading 1, 2 and 3, Subtitle and so on. If you edit a document including a style not on the list, it will be formatted corrected and the style is preserved, but you cannot apply it to new text.

Text boxes. You can do crazy stuff with text boxes, like word-wrapping around angled text.

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Dictionary. Select a word, hit Define, and a dictionary definition appears. You can manage dictionaries, which seem to be downloaded on demand.

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Tables. People use tables for things like formatting minutes: speaker in left column, actions in right, and so on. They work fine in Word on iPad. You can insert a table, type in the cells, and select from numerous styles including invisible gridlines.

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Track changes. You can review changes, make comments,suggest new text, approve changes made by others, and so on.

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You can change the direction of text by 90°.

You can edit headers and footers.

You can insert page numbers in a variety of formats.

You can use multiple columns. You can insert page breaks and column breaks.

You can change page orientation from portrait to landscape.

Shapes are supported, and you can type text within a shape.

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Text highlighting works.

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Bulleted and numbered lists work as expected

Footnoting works.

Word count is available, with options like whether to include footnotes, plus character count with or without spaces.

Pictures: you can insert images, resize, stretch and rotate them (though I have not found a crop function) and apply various effects.

Overall, it is impressive, more than just a lightweight word processor.

What’s missing?

So what features are missing, compared to the desktop version? I am sure the list is long, but they may be mostly things you do not use.

One notable missing feature is format support. Desktop Word supports OpenDocument (.odt) and can edit the old binary .doc format as well as the newer .docx (Office Open XML). Word for iPad can only edit .docx. It can view and convert .doc, but cannot even view .odt. Nor can you do clever stuff like importing and editing a PDF. Here are a few more omissions:

  • No thesaurus.
  • No equation editor.
  • No character map for inserting symbols – you have to know the keyboard shortcut.
  • Paragraph formatting is far richer in desktop Word, and you have the ability to create and modify paragraph styles. One thing I find annoying in Word for iPad is the inability to set space above or below a paragraph (let me know if I have missed a feature)
  • Academic features like endnotes, cross-references, index, contents, table of figures, citations.
  • Watermarks
  • Image editing – but you can do this in a separate app on the iPad
  • Captions
  • Macros and Visual Basic for Applications
  • SmartArt
  • WordArt
  • Templates
  • Special characters (you need to know where to find them on the keyboard)
  • Printing – I guess this is more of an iPad problem

Office for iPad versus Office for Surface RT

If you have Microsoft’s Surface tablet, would you rather have the equivalent of Office for iPad, touch-friendly but cut-down, or the existing Office for Surface RT? I took a sample of opinion on Twitter and most said they would rather have Office for iPad. This is Office reworked for tablet use, touch friendly in a way that desktop Office will never be.

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Then again, Office on Surface RT (VBA aside) is more or less full desktop Office and can meet needs where Office for iPad falls short.

If Microsoft is still serious about the “Metro” environment, it will need to do something similar as a Windows Store app. Matching the elegance and functionality of the iPad version will be a challenge.

I typed this on the iPad of course, using a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard. I would not have wanted to do it with the on-screen keyboard alone. However for the final post, I moved it to Windows (via SkyDrive) in order to use Live Writer. Word on the Surface has a Blog template I could have used; another missing feature I guess.

Microsoft has exceeded expectations. This would sell well in the App Store, but you need an Office 365 subscription, making it either a significant annual cost, or a nice free bonus for those using Office 365 anyway, depending on how you look at it. The real target seems to be business users, for whom Office 365 plus Apple iPad (which they were using anyway) is now an attractive proposition.