Tufts E-News: Innovation on the Go

Tufts E-News
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Innovation on the Go

Tufts engineers make their mark with successful apps for smartphones.

Medford/Somerville, Mass. [08.24.10] As companies and independent computer programmers seek to gain a foothold on your smartphone's home screen, the development of mobile applications-or "apps"-has emerged as a hot new industry.
We spoke to three developers from the School of Engineering, two alums and a current student, who have had success in this burgeoning field.
Loren Brichter (E'06) - Tweetie / Twitter for iPhone
When Loren Brichter (E'06) developed Tweetie-an iPhone application for users of the microblogging service Twitter-in the fall of 2008, he didn't expect it to be a big deal. It was simply his initial foray into mobile app development.
But as Twitter users discovered Brichter's app, it became a big deal. In April 2009, Wired magazine wrote: "Tweetie will create a significant impact on Twitter as a whole." Brichter went on to win a 2009 Apple Design Award, and Time magazine hailed the second version of Tweetie as one of the top 10 iPhone apps of 2009.
Twitter took notice. This past April, Brichter joined the company's mobile development team and appropriated Tweetie as the default Twitter client for the iPhone.
"Looking back, I released it when Twitter was just exploding in popularity, and Tweetie hit some sweet spot between power, speed and simplicity," Brichter said in an e-mail interview. "I just got lucky. "
A coder since middle school, Brichter had taught himself an array of programming languages before arriving at Tufts, where he majored in computer and electrical engineering-"the hardcore hardware stuff that makes the software work," he said.
"You can treat something as a black box after you understand how it works," he said. "Nothing is magic."
After graduation, Brichter went to Apple and was part of the team that worked on the original iPhone. A year after leaving Apple, he developed Tweetie, mainly because he wasn't happy with the other Twitter apps that were available.
"I never ever would have guessed this is where it would take me, but it's been an awesome ride," said Brichter. "The folks [at Twitter] are crazy talented, and they really appreciate good design and give fantastic feedback. The upcoming stuff is going to be way better than what I could have made alone."
So what is next? Could it be the Twitter app for the iPad he was hired to help develop? Brichter remains cagey. "Hopefully you'll find out in a few weeks," he said, signing off with the emoticon for a smile.
Michael Sheeley (GE'05) - RunKeeper
Michael Sheeley (GE'05) is training for a half-marathon in what you might call a perfect union between brawn and brain.
Sheeley is co-founder and COO of the company behind RunKeeper, an app for iPhone and Android phones that helps runners, walkers, hikers and cyclists track their training regimens and fitness. Time magazine named RunKeeper, which has been downloaded more than 2 million times, one of the top 10 iPhone apps of 2009.
But he's not just the co-founder-he's also a customer. Realizing that he needed to use his company's product in order to better understand it, Sheeley, who was not a runner, began using RunKeeper last year to train for an 11K race. He lost 15 pounds in the process and received support from the RunKeeper user community. By training for the half-marathon, he's hoping to drop another 30.
"Throughout my career, I've realized leadership usually comes from the person who's the most knowledgeable," says Sheeley, who earned a master's in computer science. "What Tufts did was put me to the next level in my career and in my knowledge to become a leader in software [development]."
Entrepreneurship seems to be part of Sheeley's DNA. In 2001, as an undergraduate at the University of Connecticut, he developed a social network for college students, well before Facebook launched in 2004. As a graduate student in Tufts School of Engineering, he started his own company developing mobile applications to help cable television repairmen respond to customer calls while on the road.
"Devices were too expensive," he says. "Wireless networks back then weren't robust enough" to support the volume of data being transmitted.
At Tufts, he studied with Professor Carla Brodley, whose data modeling course informed his research into GPS tracking-a key function of RunKeeper.
"She let me research stuff that I was interested in," recalls Sheeley. "She knew I was an entrepreneur and didn't constrain me or my ideas."
After graduation, just as the cost of cell phones began to drop and data networks were becoming more sophisticated, he got a job at the aerospace firm BAE Systems, where he continued to build his skills in mobile development.
"When the iPhone came out, it was like, 'Eureka! A business model can be built on top of these platforms,'" Sheeley says.
He connected via the career networking service LinkedIn with Jason Jacobs, a fellow entrepreneur who envisioned a mobile application for runners, and the two founded RunKeeper. The app launched in August 2008.
Sheeley foresees developing a "Facebook for fitness," where users can track their exercise and nutrition and draw motivation and coaching from their network.
While Sheeley admits it's been a "crazy ride," he says "it's extremely rewarding to actually have a product out there that people are using. I'm actually making a difference in our users' lives."
Foster Lockwood (E'13) - The Facility
There is no riddle behind how Foster Lockwood (E'13) became interested in computer programming. Now it's his own riddles that have put him on the app map.
"The Facility," an iPhone mystery puzzle game he developed for computer science lecturer Ming Chow's Introduction to Game Development course, has been downloaded more than 95,000 times. In May, the game achieved iPhone App Store rankings as high as eighth for puzzle games and sixth for adventure games. It also ranked as high as 39th for top games and 71st for top applications.
Lockwood, whose dad ran a software company, first experimented with programming by trying to recreate the features he saw in other games. After high school, he took a community college class in the programming language C++, which he found unexpectedly intuitive.
As a freshman at Tufts, he took a course in data structures with Associate Professor Soha Hassoun, learning programming principles such as memory management, which is especially relevant to iPhone development since the small devices have more memory constraints than desktop computers. "Afterward, I didn't believe how much more I knew," he says.
Lockwood developed The Facility as his final project for Chow's class and, at his professor's suggestion, submitted the game to the iPhone App Store. It was accepted within the week. At one point, it was downloaded 10,000 times in one day. He has since created a sequel, "The Facility 2."
Lockwood got the idea for the game from an interactive fiction-writing exercise in Chow's class. The game begins with the player waking up alone in a strange room and gradually exploring the rooms of "The Facility" and unraveling the mystery.
"I'd always been into the programming part of things, but not the ideas," Lockwood says. "But this got me to take the coding out of it. You really just had to make an interesting story."
Like programming, the game's foundation is attention to detail. To create the world of the game, he taped giant Post-It notes to the wall of his dorm room and drew a grid that laid out the rooms of "The Facility."
Puzzle games exploit the part of the human brain that thrives on reward, Lockwood says.
"It's amazing how addicting just answering riddles or trying to find out the plot of a mystery can be," he says. "You can really get people into something just with a simple paradigm like solving a riddle."
Profiles by Georgiana Cohen, Office of Web Communications

Printed from: http://enews.tufts.edu/

Tufts E-News: Innovation on the Go

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iPad - Laptop Killer?

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The MasterBlog

• PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY
• APRIL 1, 2010

Laptop Killer? Pretty Close

iPad Is a 'Game Changer' That Makes Browsing and Video a Pleasure; Challenge to the Mouse

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  By WALTER S. MOSSBERG

For the past week or so, I have been testing a sleek, light, silver-and-black tablet computer called an iPad. After spending hours and hours with it, I believe this beautiful new touch-screen device from Apple has the potential to change portable computing profoundly, and to challenge the primacy of the laptop. It could even help, eventually, to propel the finger-driven, multitouch user interface ahead of the mouse-driven interface that has prevailed for decades.

But first, it will have to prove that it really can replace the laptop or netbook for enough common tasks, enough of the time, to make it a viable alternative. And that may not be easy, because previous tablet computers have failed to catch on in the mass market, and the iPad lacks some of the features—such as a physical keyboard, a Webcam, USB ports and multitasking—that most laptop or netbook users have come to expect.

If people see the iPad mainly as an extra device to carry around, it will likely have limited appeal. If, however, they see it as a way to replace heavier, bulkier computers much of the time—for Web surfing, email, social-networking, video- and photo-viewing, gaming, music and even some light content creation—it could be a game changer the way Apple's iPhone has been.

The iPad is much more than an e-book or digital periodical reader, though it does those tasks brilliantly, better in my view than the Amazon Kindle. And it's far more than just a big iPhone, even though it uses the same easy-to-master interface, and Apple says it runs nearly all of the 150,000 apps that work on the iPhone.

It's qualitatively different, a whole new type of computer that, through a simple interface, can run more-sophisticated, PC-like software than a phone does, and whose large screen allows much more functionality when compared with a phone's. But, because the iPad is a new type of computer, you have to feel it, to use it, to fully understand it and decide if it is for you, or whether, say, a netbook might do better.

So I've been using my test iPad heavily day and night, instead of my trusty laptops most of the time. As I got deeper into it, I found the iPad a pleasure to use, and had less and less interest in cracking open my heavier ThinkPad or MacBook. I probably used the laptops about 20% as often as normal, reserving them mainly for writing or editing longer documents, or viewing Web videos in Adobe's Flash technology, which the iPad doesn't support, despite its wide popularity online.

My verdict is that, while it has compromises and drawbacks, the iPad can indeed replace a laptop for most data communication, content consumption and even limited content creation, a lot of the time. But it all depends on how you use your computer.

If you're mainly a Web surfer, note-taker, social-networker and emailer, and a consumer of photos, videos, books, periodicals and music—this could be for you. If you need to create or edit giant spreadsheets or long documents, or you have elaborate systems for organizing email, or need to perform video chats, the iPad isn't going to cut it as your go-to device.

The iPad is thinner and lighter than any netbook or laptop I've seen. It weighs just 1.5 pounds, and its aluminum and glass body is a mere half-inch thick. It boasts a big, bright color 9.7-inch screen that occupies most of the front. As on all Apple portable devices, the battery is sealed in and nonreplaceable. It has a decent speaker, and even a tiny microphone.

Memory, also sealed in and nonexpandable, ranges from 16 gigabytes to 64 gigabytes. And you can order one with just a Wi-Fi wireless connection to the Internet, or Wi-Fi plus an AT&T 3G cellular connection. The Wi-Fi models will be available Saturday and the 3G models, which I didn't test, about a month later.

Prices start at $499 and go to $829, with the costlier models having more memory and/or 3G. The cellular models don't require a contract or termination fee. You can pay AT&T either $15 a month for 250 megabytes of data use, or $30 a month for unlimited data—a significant reduction from typical prices for laptop cellular connectivity.

I was impressed with the iPad's battery life, which I found to be even longer than Apple's ten-hour claim, and far longer than on my laptops or smart phones. For my battery test, I played movies, TV shows and other videos back-to-back until the iPad died. This stressed the device's most power-hogging feature, its screen. The iPad lasted 11 hours and 28 minutes, about 15% more than Apple claimed. I was able to watch four feature-length movies, four TV episodes and a video of a 90-minute corporate presentation, before the battery died midway through an episode of "The Closer."

Oh, and all the while during this battery marathon, I kept the Wi-Fi network running and the email downloading constantly in the background. Your mileage may vary, but with Wi-Fi off and the screen turned down from the fairly bright level I used, you might even do better. Music plays far longer with the screen off. On the other hand, playing games constantly might yield worse battery life.

Apple says video playback, Web use and book reading all take about the same amount of juice. When I was doing the latter two tasks for an hour or two at a time, the battery ran down so slowly for me that I stopped thinking about it.

I also was impressed with the overall speed of the iPad. Apple's custom processor makes it wicked fast. Screens appear almost instantly, and the Wi-Fi in my home tested as fast as it does on a laptop.

I found email easy and productive to use, and had no trouble typing accurately and quickly on the iPad's wide on-screen keyboard. In fact, I found the iPad virtual keyboard more comfortable and accurate to use than the cramped keyboards and touchpads on many netbooks, though some fast touch typists might disagree. Apple's $39 iPad case, which bends to set up a nice angle for typing, helps.

The Web browser also works beautifully, and takes advantage of the big screen to show full pages and cut down on scrolling. It even now has a bookmarks bar at the top. As noted, however, it doesn't support Adobe's Flash technology.

I also was able to easily sync the iPad's calendar and contacts apps with Google and Apple's MobileMe.

Watching videos, viewing photos, listening to music, reading books and playing games was satisfying and fun. I used the device heavily for Twitter and Facebook. And I even got some light work done in the optional iPad word processor, called Pages, which is part of a $30 suite that also includes a spreadsheet and presentation program.

This is a serious content creation app that should help the iPad compete with laptops and can import MicrosoftOffice files. However, only the word processor exports to Microsoft's formats, and not always accurately. In one case, the exported Word file had misaligned text. When I then tried exporting the document as a PDF file, it was unreadable.

The iPad can run two types of third-party apps, both available from Apple's app store. It can use nearly all existing iPhone apps. These can either run in a small, iPhone-size window in the middle of the screen, which makes them look tiny, or blown up to double size. The larger size makes them fill the screen, but can make type inside them look blocky. Still, the dozens I tested all worked properly. And it can run a new class of specially designed iPad apps, of which Apple hopes to have 1,000 at launch. I successfully tested the revamped App Store, which features the iPad apps most prominently when you're on an iPad.

Based on my very small sample, some app developers may be testing higher prices for iPad apps than the 99 cents or $1.99 typical for paid iPhone apps. The paid iPad apps I saw ranged from $3.99 to $49.99. Others were free.

Apple has rebuilt its own core iPhone apps for the iPad to add sophisticated features that make the programs look and work more like PC or Mac software. For instance, there are "popover" menus that make it easier to make choices without leaving the screen you're on. And, when the iPad is held horizontally, in landscape mode, as I often preferred to use it, many programs now have two panels, making them faster and more useful. For example, in email, a left-hand panel shows your message list, while a larger right-hand panel shows the message itself.

The photo app is striking, and much more like the one on the Mac than the one on the iPhone. The device can even be used as a digital picture frame. The iPod app is beautiful, too, as are the calendar and contacts app. Unfortunately, Apple excluded some of the more familiar apps from the iPhone, including Weather, Clock and Stocks.

I tested a small selection of the new third-party iPad apps Apple hopes to have available at launch, and most were also rich and feature-filled, beyond what iPhone apps offer. These included games such as Scrabble and "Touch Hockey," a database app, news services and more.

I was able to try a pre-release version of The Wall Street Journal's new iPad app (which I had nothing to do with designing), and found it gorgeous and highly functional—by far the best implementation of the newspaper I have ever seen on a screen. Unlike the Journal's Web site, or its smart-phone apps, the iPad version blends much more of the look and feel of the print paper into the electronic environment. Other newspapers and magazines have announced plans for their own, dramatically more realistic iPad apps.

I also found iBooks, Apple's book reader and store, easy to use, and read a couple of books on it. I consider the larger color screen superior to the Kindle's, and encountered no eye strain. But the iPad is much heavier than the Kindle and most people will need two hands to use it. The iBooks app also lacks any way to enter notes, and Apple's catalog at launch will only be about 60,000 books versus more than 400,000 for Kindle.

I did run into some other annoying limitations. For instance, the email program lacks the ability to create local folders or rules for auto-sorting messages, and it doesn't allow group addressing. The browser lacks tabs. And the Wi-Fi-only version lacks GPS. Also, videophiles may dislike the fact that the iPad's screen lacks wide-screen dimensions, so you either get black bars above or below wide-screen videos, or, if you choose an option to fill the screen, some of the picture may get cut off.

All in all, however, the iPad is an advance in making more-sophisticated computing possible via a simple touch interface on a slender, light device. Only time will tell if it's a real challenger to the laptop and netbook.

—Find Walt Mossberg's columns and videos, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Emailmossberg@wsj.com.

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