BlackBerry World postscript

Following my "tradition" of always blogging a few days late, let me give a brief synopsis of BlackBerry World this last week in Orlando.

The event was off-the-hook in terms of scale--free PlayBooks to everyone, free entrance to Universal Studios (RIM rented off the park for the night!), free concert with Dragonette and Paul Oakenfold. The magnitude and the logistical orchestration was very impressive.  RIM had dozens of strategically placed people holding BBWorld signs to answer anyone's questions or direct people where to go, so you always felt taken care of. The audience was an assortment of 6000 BlackBerry enthusiasts, enterprise customers, press and analysts and regular people.  The PlayBook was a main focus, and since QNX is the author of the PlayBook software, I was constantly busy with questions--talking the entire time I was on the show floor.

Happily, people were impressed.  Despite the poor reviews that the PlayBook or RIM have gotten from the press in the last couple weeks, all the real people I talked to were far more favorable and forgiving. Partly this could have been because the software is in a continual state of improvement--the early previews provided to the press were several weeks older, and those several weeks made a big difference in the last remaining touches.

But I also think that partly it was because the press is comparing numbers--for them it kept coming back to the apps.  "Apple has more apps."  Maybe true.  However, who needs 13 fart applications or 27 flashlights?  One will do.  Or maybe even zero.  The PlayBook has more applications on launch than any other device has had (either iPad or Android), and because of the universal application platform approach that QNX is using, we can embrace many different software development platforms, allowing Adobe AIR & Flash, HTML5 & WebWorks, straight C + OpenGL-ES, Qt, Python, and yes, even Android applications to run.  The development ecosystem for the PlayBook is broad, and that's going to enable application development in a big way.

The other thing that really impressed me was how well BlackBerry Bridge works.  This is  the functionality that tethers your PlayBook to the BB, allowing you to use the larger screen for entering/viewing email, contacts, calendar, notes, and messages.  The performance was very clean and natural, and it's definitely a feature I'll be using a lot.

All of this is good news for automotive too--much of the functionality we developed for the PlayBook will be moving back into QNX CAR (with appropriate reskinning and reformulation for an automotive context, of course).  And BlackBerry Bridge (or something very much like it) that serves up an HTML5 application from the phone is probably the best way to export a smartphone application to a car head unit.

It's going to be an exciting year!

Terminal mode & iPod out

My colleague Andrew Poliak has posted what I think is an insightful blog about Meego & Terminal mode.

Also, I'd like to point out Apple/BMW’s announcement for adding Facebook & Twitter as well as other apps to iPod out. The feature has to be added app by app, which might not matter.  Application developers will be the ones doing all the work, and if it’s the big  app developers, they’ll be motivated to get themselves into the car.  Because it’s Apple's I think it’s a serious competitor to Terminal Mode.

QNX & Python email6

In a late breaking extension to my previous Python post, I just found out that QNX is going to be sponsoring R. David Murray in completing the work of porting email6 to Python 3.3.

I haven't been keeping track of the evolution of Python since I stopped coding, but I've been recently reading through the diffs between 2.7 and 3.x.  I have to admit that I'll miss print and %.  Even so, all the changes look like they're pretty good ones.  So I'm glad to see we're helping pull forward the language by getting crucial package support in the new Python flavour.

QNX at PyCon US 2011! Long live Python!

I'm excited to announce that QNX is a diamond sponsor of this year's PyCon 2011!  Excited because I've been a long-time fan of Python, and I'm very happy to see it and the community get the support it deserves.  And happy that I'll be personally involved in a geek gathering of this magnitude. I will be there along with some of my co-workers next week in Atlanta, spreading the Python joy.

(I'm about to go into a historical musing.  If I start sounding too much like Jerry Pournelle used to in his Byte column, going off onto long irrelevant tangents, please shoot me.)

I started using Python way back in 2002 when I worked at OnStar.  I was creating an "illegal" web site--illegal in the sense that ONLY EDS was allowed to do anything with our computers.  As engineers, we were only allowed to use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.  Ugh.  I had to fight tooth and nail just to get admin privileges on my PC that would allow me to install software!  Dear God, it still makes me shiver.  So the fact that I was enabling huge efficiencies in the engineering department by creating a wiki for information sharing was just a little bit under the radar.  (For the record, I did actually ask EDS to set one up first, but they refused to.  So you can see, it wasn't really my fault :-)

I was looking for something that would allow us to organize our documents & share files in a very easy to maintain extension to an Apache server.  There were a few wiki packages that I found in Java, C++, Perl, PHP, and Python.  I had used Perl before while I was a consultant, and the customer absolutely required it.  But that language was so gruesome, it scarred me for life--talk about a read-only language!  (I had a co-worker come up to me today and ask me what Python was.  "Isn't that just like Perl?"  No, grasshopper.) PHP looked a little wonky--tons of HTML and script mixed together--and it really didn't look very pleasant to maintain.  I knew C++ pretty well, and felt that I would prefer to pick up a new skill.

So that left Java and Python based wikis. The Java wiki that I was looking at didn't have great file support, so I downloaded the Python one--Pylewiki if my memory serves.  After I got over the whole "white space matters" concept of Python, I found the language to be clean, elegant, and powerful.  I made a number of extensions to the base wiki, adding change notification emails, version tracking on files, ability to embed images into the wiki pages, adding support for our information lifecycle management, etc.

I'm going into this long drawn-out story to illustrate a couple of facts.  First is that I was able to pick up Python very quickly--it's a very cleanly designed language, which makes it pretty easy to get.  Second is that even as a novice Python programmer, I was able to extend the existing source base with some pretty sophisticated concepts.  The language is very powerful, and lets the developer do amazing things with pretty little work.  As much as you can with a programming language, I fell in love.

Since then, I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Python, even though my career has taken me a ways away from day-to-day coding.  Go Python!

Consumer Telematics Seminar: Thilo Koslowski of Gartner

At the CTS show, the day before CES in Las Vegas.  Some brief notes from the first presenter Thilo, which was a great presentation and mirrors many of the findings that we have about the industry. These notes were typed in from my BlackBerry, so I apologize for the brevity.

App integration may not pay off short term Connectivity is here Dealers excited (including wireless updates) Controlled app portals are the solution everyone has converged on Nav is almost (soon) commodity

Infotainment architecture made up of: HMI, Content approach, Service apps, connectivity, Ecosystem. These are the differentiators.

Smartphones connectivity will dominate--actual "connected cars" are minority (not ever enough to influence carriers).

It's not a "connected car" but "connected driver" (90% single driver)

Dynamic apps: what are consumer prefs?

1)Wireless map updates

2)Real time traffic

3)Weather

4)Remote s/w download

5)Real-time news

What isn't top interest? Financial info, social networking, buying concert tix

Design criteria for content:

Content Develop, Content Access, Content Management

HMI preferences in order:

1) dedicated switches. (Consumer Reports complain about Sync lacking them is an example that mirrors customer surveys).

2) Natural language

3) Touch screen

4) Augmented reality HUD

5) guided voice

6) Touchpad OCR (europe),

7) clickwheel

Challenges for the market:

*cost--multiple options at different price points *app fatigue (overinflated expectations) *Not "is there an app" but "should there be"?

*Driver distraction.

*Smartphones as benchmark.

PNDs are contuining a decline in consumer preference. 2009 33% to 2010 15%

RIM acquires TAT

The Astonishing Tribe is kind of a strange little name for a company, so most people refer to it by just the letters T. A. T.  (Note to those of you like me who have incorrectly pronounced it "tat" like "tit for tat"; instead they spell the letters out.) They are a small Swedish company that does some pretty amazing UI design.  QNX has encountered them before via a number of shared automotive accounts, although they're much better known to the rest of the world for their work in the mobile space.  They've created the designs of a huge number of mobile handsets, and they were the prime contributor to Android's look & feel.

Now, we're happy to have them as a sister company.  As of December 2nd, RIM acquired TAT.  Although we worked with TAT before, I'm sure this means a lot more interaction between QNX and TAT in the weeks to come.

Automotive Meets Communication (AMC) 2010

It appears I am unable to do "live blogging"--my blogs are always at least a week after the fact.  Maybe I'll do a blog about this sometime :-)  In any case...

Last week, I attended the AMC 2010 conference held in Bonn, Germany.  Lots of participation from the telecom and automotive industry, talking about how they could and are working together to build the future of connected automobiles.  I had a speaking panel spot that, although it was the only non-German language presentation, seemed to be quite well received.  My presentation was about emerging trends in automotive, and the thanks to the material has to go to my colleague Andrew Poliak, whom I plagiarized from mercilessly. Of course, "borrowing" material happens all the time throughout the business world.

Here's a great case in point: one of the AMC speakers from BMW had a great word bubble diagram (attached below). The picture was a great one, mainly (in my view) because it included a "QNX" plug (red text; look in the lower right hand part of the "cloud"). Coming from BMW, who has been a big supporter of Linux, I just loved this slide.

The funny part of the story is that I was talking about how I was going to blog this with my colleague Paul Leroux, who is a ferocious blogger.  I started out with, "say Paul, I've got this pic I want to show you, but you have to promise that you won't blog about it first."
"No problem," Paul said, as I opened the pic.  Paul immediately gave an exclamation of surprise and then added, quite seriously, "I've already blogged about it, about a year ago.  That guy is using my diagram!"  He showed me in his blog where he had created the diagram.

It is getting so frustrating blogging about anything before Paul does--he even goes back into time to preempt me!  Even if I start blogging during the event next time, I can't beat Paul!