Hung Truong: The Blog!

Instascriber: Automagically Add Content to Instapaper

I just “announced” a little web app that I’ve been developing off and on called “Instascriber.” It’s basically a tool to help you populate your Instapaper reading list with stuff using an RSS Feed subscription model. If you use Instapaper a lot and use it to keep track of your reading list, you might want to automatically add new items, say from the New York Times Book section, into your Instapaper reading list. If you already know you’d like to read the content on Instapaper, it’s a pain to manually add each thing you want to read.

With Instascriber, you can just set the feed you’d like to subscribe to. Instascriber will periodically check the feed for new items and add it to your Instapaper reading list automatically in the background. That’s it. Boom!

For now, I’m considering the web app to be in beta. So let me know if you find bugs or anything.

U of M 2010 Mobile Apps Competition – FTW!

Continuing in my tradition of winning contests that I entered with very little expectation of actually winning, I got an email a week or two back about the University of Michigan 2010 Mobile Apps Competition that I entered in November. The competition is open to students, faculty and staff at the university. Since I’m working on a part time basis at the university, I figured I would enter a few of my apps. I chose Checkmate and ♥s Threadless, and made some awkward demo videos of each.

Checkmate ended up winning third place out of many many competitive entries (leaders and the best!), so I’m super happy about that. Here’s a story in the University Record about it. The HiJack project that’s been getting a lot of press was the grand prize winner. Props to those guys!

Winning a prize in this contest was a really nice way to start my year. It’s really encouraging me to continue doing mobile apps and exploring what’s possible.

When Interaction Design Goes Bad: Airport Terminals

I recently flew into the Detroit airport McNamara Terminal, and I made an observation that most of my fellow travelers probably made as well. That particular terminal consists of two long sides that branch out of the middle of the terminal. Our flight taxied to just about the farthest you can possibly be from the exit of the airport. Everyone had to walk across the furthest path (or take the tram) to get to the baggage claim and the airport exit. Why?

I read somewhere that airports used to get a lot of complaints about the baggage claim taking too long to get started. Travelers would have to wait at the carousel thing and probably got really bored. To fix that, the airports would drop people off at further gates, making them walk further. This longer walk caused the “wait time” at the baggage claim to be shorter, and they got less complaints. Perhaps that’s what happened to me and my fellow travelers.

I would argue that the particular “fix” I described probably shouldn’t be used anymore. Since most airlines charge people to check in bags, I think many don’t even need to wait at the baggage claim anymore (myself included). The fix is an interesting psychological trick, but it doesn’t actually buy anyone time, and it just makes me take longer to get out of the airport. I’d argue that this is interaction design gone bad, but I don’t have a way to confirm that this strategy is the reason we were dropped off so far from the exit. The flight was getting in at 10:30 and we passed numerous free gates, so I can’t think of any other good reason (maybe to save the plane some fuel?).

Impressions of Android From an iPhone User/Developer

I just got an Android phone, the HTC Hero, to play around with and perhaps develop on. It was only $55 on Ebay (including shipping) which seemed like a steal to me. I’m currently using it on WiFi without any phone service (the phone has a bad ESN, so that’s probably why the price was so low).

My first impression as an iPhone user is that the interface is really clunky. There just isn’t as much attention paid to detail. For example, there are often measurable delays between pressing a button and seeing something happen. This happens when I try to add a widget to the home screen or open an app that hasn’t been opened into memory. If I press a button and I don’t see something happen immediately, I will assume I missed the button and press it again. This is extremely frustrating since the iPhone animates immediately upon user interaction. The iPhone may not be any faster than my Android phone, but it at least gives the illusion of it (which is probably just as good in terms of usability).

Another thing I noticed is the lack of “back” buttons in the Android apps. Even Twitter lacks the onscreen back button. I assume this is following some kind of standard Android paradigm of favoring physical buttons over onscreen ones. It took me a while to get used to hitting the physical back button (and home, menu and search for that matter) instead of looking for navigation on the screen. While this is a different paradigm, I’m not sure I’m in a position to say it’s worse, better or on par with the iPhone. My suspicion is that the lack of onscreen navigation requires the user to go through more context switches (screen to physical button back to screen) which is disorienting. This is made worse by the fact that there’s seven fuckin’ buttons on my particular phone! I’m sure people adapt and get used to it, but I’m personally used to having just one button that takes me to the home screen (oh, and the volume and lock buttons, but they don’t serve dynamic functions in applications (unless they want to break the App Store terms)).

About the only positive thing I can say about the Android platform is that Google is integrating the shit out of it with their own services. I only have to sign in once with my Google account and I get Voice, Talk, Maps, Search, Goggles, Places, Latitude, Market, Contacts, Gmail, YouTube and probably some other things I’m forgetting. The voice commands are incredibly cool, though I wonder how many times I’d actually use them instead of doing things the normal way. Oh, another positive is that Angry Birds is free on Android, though my device is way too slow to run it.

I’m currently using a ROM with 2.2 on my HTC Hero, so that might account for some performance issues (though I thought it was supposed to be faster). I’m still kind of unimpressed by Android as a whole though, especially in terms of end to end usability. I originally got this device so I could test code on hardware, but I’m not so sure I even want to develop for Android anymore. I’ll probably end up writing some simple code, at least.

Does anyone with a newer Android phone want to debunk or argue with anything I’ve written?

Prediction for 2011: Death of the Phone

It’s January, which means it’s time for really misinformed predictions that will just look silly in hindsight! I’ve been reluctant in the past to use Google Voice because of integration issues, but I think 2011 is the year that I’ll start relying on it more, especially if I end up changing my real phone number (I’ll just give out my Google Voice # and forward calls).

I recently bought an Android phone and was thinking of what I could use it for. With Google Voice and Skype, I could make “calls” and send text messages wherever I have an internet connection. If Google eventually enables making voice calls over wifi (like in Google Chat, and I predict they will some time this year), I think the big phone companies will start hurting, because people will want data-only plans so that they can call with Google.

This “cable cutting” has already happened with landlines (my Mom has a dedicated phone device that does VoIP) and cable tv. So it makes sense that wireless phone providers will soon feel the effects as well. I’d really love to set up the HTC Hero that I ordered as a dedicated “landline” phone that I use with my internet connection at home.

Of course, most people will still probably continue to use the standard bundled minutes + texts (+ data) phone plans, but I feel early adopters are just itching to pay one monthly data bill for all of their infrastructure needs. It’ll only be a matter of time before the mainstream begins to head in that direction. I think that the phone as we know it (how ridiculous is it to pay a phone plan based on the number of minutes in the plan?) will begin to die in 2011, with more emphasis on bandwidth as the infrastructure requirement.