Nice review of whereyougonnabe at Ogle Earth

Stefan Geens of Ogle Earth has written a very thorough review of whereyougonnabe, and has some nice things to say, as well as some good suggestions - thanks Stefan! He compares us to Dopplr, who are really the closest site out there to what we do, and says "Dopplr is simpler to use, while whereyougonnabe is more full-featured". He thought that the "pièce de resistance" was the Google Earth interface and in his summary, he says "in sum, I very much like whereyougonnabe".

To be honest, I'm delighted that Stefan thinks we are already more full-featured than Dopplr when we're still at such an early stage of beta release, and they have been out for some time, and have - rightly - been getting a lot of interest and good reviews. And I would agree with him that Dopplr is easier to use today than we are. Part of this is that they are doing something much simpler than we are, though similar in some respects (I will discuss this in more detail in a future post), but nevertheless we know we want to make things simpler to use and we have a lot of things in our short term plan which will help on that front. But as I said in an earlier post, while there are lots of things on our to do list, it would have been easy to keep improving things for another several months before releasing, but I felt we were far enough along to get something out there and start to build up some users and get some feedback. And while we still have a few more rough edges than I would like, I think the response so far has been very good and I'm glad we did decide to get it out there rather than waiting longer.

And lastly, one small point of clarification / correction ... Stefan suggests it would be nice to have color coding to show "close encounters", and actually we do have that in there already ... I suspect he may not have any close encounters yet so the color coding has not shown up. But a green box around a friend's picture shows that you are "very close" and a yellow box shows that you are "somewhat close". What constitutes "very close" and "somewhat close" varies depending on a number of factors, including how far from home both you and your friend are (in general, if either you or your friend are far away from home, a larger distance is used than if you are close to home). The ability to have a variable distance for determining what constitutes a close encounter is something that Dopplr's approach does not handle incidentally, and I think that this will be a powerful enabler for us as we add more sophisticated features to the application (though not something that the user is necessarily conscious of).

So anyway, thanks again to Stefan for the detailed review. It's been an exciting week, with getting the system out to the world, and by and large everything went very well ... on to working through the big enhancement list now :) !!

iPhone after almost a week's experience

Several people asked me to follow up my previous posts about the iPhone again after I'd used it for a little longer, so here's just a quick update before I leave for a week's vacation tomorrow. My overall verdict on the iPhone is definitely a big thumbs up - while of course you can list plenty of features it's missing and lots of areas for improvement, it has so many great features and usability innovations that it's a real pleasure to use.

A few high points:

• The general user experience is great
• Web browsing - especially once you get used to the user interface and learn a few tricks, it's amazing how usable this is on a device with such a small screen. At first I was mainly zooming using the "pinch" technique, but on watching the "iPhone tour" video again I realized that double-clicking zooms you in to the specific area of the page where you double click (so in a page with multiple columns, it will set the display to the width of the column you click on). Though one drawback I hadn't thought about until Dave Stewart from the Microsoft Virtual Earth team mentioned it is that safari intercepts all double click and mouse move events in order to bring you this functionality, which is an issue for many browser based applications (especially mapping ones).
  
• Google maps - my concerns about the local search implementation notwithstanding, it's still very useful and fun in a lot of situations. I was just in bar talking to a friend about my upcoming drive to Vancouver, and he said that he thought that the drive from Vancouver to Whistler was one of the most spectacular that he had done - but we got into a discussion about whether you could just drive on from Whistler to Jasper or would have to backtrack, and in a minute or so Google Maps on the iPhone had resolved the question for us (you can just continue on, so this is added into my plans). And at lunch today I was in a coffee shop and decided to search for local restaurants and look at their web sites, to see how easily I could check out their menus and decide where I'd like to go - this did work pretty well, as each search result included a link to the restaurant web site (and no bogus results were returned in this case)
• The Photo, iPod and Youtube applications are all great
• WiFi support - so far I have been using this most of the time, and get great performance and don't use up minutes on a plan, etc. This will be especially useful when traveling abroad, as the mobile phone companies all really burn you on charging for data over the cell phone networks, so being able to use WiFi will be great.
• It's a chick magnet at parties (my girlfriend Paula's description, not mine!)
  

Some of my top areas for improvement:

• Add a GPS, of course
• Improve local search, as I discussed previously
• While the general user experience is great, there are a lot of areas where they could leverage some of the new techniques but didn't. Automatic rotation of applications into landscape mode is one area I would like to see leveraged a lot more. This is used to good effect in the web browser, which I almost always use in landscape mode as things are much more legible. And it is great in the photo and iPod applications (see the video). But when I'm in mail and I get an HTML formatted email, this is just like looking at a web page and would be far superior in landscape mode, yet this is not supported. As I mentioned previously, maps does not support this when it would be such a natural thing to do. And also, the keyboard is much wider with larger keys when in landscape mode, so it would be great to leverage this in situations where the focus is on data entry - for example in the notes application, or when composing an email, both of which only work in portrait mode. And there are some odd inconsistencies - both photos and maps support the notion of panning and zooming, and both support the same pinching technique for zooming in and out, and dragging with your finger to pan. But in maps, you double tap to zoom in and tap with two fingers to zoom out, whereas in photos, double click will either zoom in or zoom out depending on the situation (which is the same as in the browser). Maps also needs to support the typing auto-correction - it seems to be the only application which doesn't. These sort of things should really be ironed out.

So anyway, overall I'm very pleased with it still.

Review of Google Maps on the iPhone

Okay, so here it is, the review of Google Maps on the iPhone. As I said in my previous post giving general impressions of the iPhone, the maps look great and panning and zooming is very interactive and intuitive, but there are a number of little niggly details that counterbalance the cool parts leaving me somewhat neutral - impressed by some things, but overall left feeling that it could have been better (and this is aside from the obvious drawback of not having a GPS). So maybe "good but not as great as it could have been" is the overall verdict.



I did most of my testing using my WiFi connection, and then turned this off and used EDGE for a little while. Performance was excellent using the WiFi - it typically took around a second to download data for an uncached area, for either a street map or imagery, but up to two seconds or so occasionally, more so with imagery than street maps (which you would expect as the compressed images for street maps are typically smaller in size). The iPhone keeps a pretty good sized cache, and when data is cached display is pretty much instant, just as it is online. So overall the experience of panning and zooming around is very smooth and fast. Using EDGE instead of WiFi, I found that the download of data for an uncached area was generally taking around 3-4 seconds for street maps, and 5-7 seconds for imagery. But when data was cached, it was just as fast as with WiFi, as you would expect. So it was slower, but still fast enough to give a pretty good user experience, in my opinion. When zooming in or out, it animates the zoom using the data layer that is already there, so you see some sort of data while waiting for the data at the new scale to download.

The user interface for panning and zooming is intuitive once you learn the basics. Double tap to zoom in on a point (it doesn't center the point, but does keep that point on the screen - so if you double click on something in the northeast corner, after you zoom in it will still be in the northeast corner). Tapping with two fingers (at any distance apart and any orientation) will zoom out. You can also zoom in or out by "pinching" with two fingers and moving them closer together or further apart, which is a really intuitive interface which leverages the multi-touch capabilities.

One thing I really didn't like about the basic map display is that you can't rotate it. With other applications like the browser and photos, you just change the rotation of the iPhone from portrait to landscape, and the application automatically rotates the display (with a nice bit of animation). This is such a natural thing to want to do with a map display, I'm pretty disappointed that they didn't implement this - hopefully it will be there in a future release. This is one of multiple places where Google really didn't take advantage of some of the good features in other iPhone applications, and which makes for a less seamless and intuitive user experience as it doesn't do some things that you hope, and expect, it to do.

For the next set of observations, I took a pretty detailed set of photos which you can see here on flickr. Follow this through as a slide show to look at some search scenarios.


By and large, search worked pretty much as expected - you can type in a specific business name like "Tattered Cover" (my excellent local bookstore), or a generic term like "coffee", and get appropriate results back. But I did find a few things I hadn't anticipated, as follows:

• My search for the Tattered Cover yielded 3 incorrect locations, in addition to the (only) three correct ones. One was a location of an old store which closed a year ago, and two were the result of incomplete addresses for current stores (in addition to complete ones), one which just included the street with no number, and one which included the town but no street. I may have just been especially unfortunate with my choice of example, but this illustrates the importance of good and up to date data in any LBS application. An out of town visitor in the south side of Denver looking to visit the famous Tattered Cover bookstore could easily have driven to three locations, none of which had a Tattered Cover, by which point they would feel about Google Maps like I do about AT&T right now (see previous post)!
• Google Maps does not include the autocorrection feature for typing which is in all (or at least most) of the other iPhone applications. This is really bad. Typing is somewhat fiddly with the on screen keyboard, but you can go pretty fast if you have the autocorrect feature, and you get used to it in all the other applications. You have to type much more slowly and deliberately in Google Maps than anywhere else. This really needs fixing!
  
• When you search for items, it doesn't order them by distance from your location, neither does it show the distance to a search result in the list, which is very common in these type of applications and I think this is a serious omission too. On further investigation, I have come to the conclusion that the order in which results are returned is almost certainly determined by payment for higher placement - I found that the "Market" coffee store was consistently returned at the top of the list, and highlighted on the map, for a wide variety of different spatial queries in downtown Denver. This is not necessarily surprising - at some point Google needs to make some money back for all its investment in Google Maps and Earth, or it won't keep on investing - but it is good to know about. And if they remove the very useful function of showing how far away different search results are to hide the fact that they are (apparently) returning establishments which pay higher up the list, I'm not too happy about that. I will do a separate post about this as I think it's sufficiently interesting to highlight. You can see the detailed examples relating to this in the photo gallery.

One nice aspect of the search is that it searches your contacts (by name), so if you have someone's address in your contacts, it is very easy to find that and display that on a map or make it a start or end point for a route.

The real time traffic works well (I have the same thing on the BlackBerry also). Here are pictures showing central Denver, with and without traffic information, and you can see that the southbound carriageway of I-25 is currently congested.


The routing also seems to work well - in the picture gallery I show creation of a route from Denver to Vancouver, which was pretty much instantaneous, and you can list turn by turn directions either as text or on the map, and you can easily skip backwards and forwards in the turn list.

So general conclusion: I like the application, it's fast and intuitive in most regards, but does have a few things that need fixing. My order of priority on these would be:

• Needs to support autocorrection when typing
• Should be able to display search results in order of distance from the center of the screen (and show distances on the list) - even if this is an option, and the initial order is determined "at Google's discretion")
• The map display should rotate when you rotate the iPhone, as with other applications where this makes sense

And then of course there's that missing GPS, but that will have to wait a while longer, whereas hopefully they can make some of these software fixes sooner!