Software Testing Blog

In my recent post with my thoughts on the iPad, I noted that while the iPad will run iPhone apps, they won’t look that great.  Instead, developers will need to create new iPad apps.

“That’s fine!” you exclaim, thinking that you’ll just uprez your widgets and artwork from your iPhone app to the new iPad screen size.  Problem solved, right?  Apparently Apple thought so too and tried creating iPad sized versions of their default iPhone apps.  And apparently that idea sucked.  From Daring Fireball:

It’s not that Apple couldn’t just create bigger versions of these apps and have them run on the iPad. It wasn’t a technical problem, it was a design problem. There were, internally to Apple (of course), versions of these apps (or at least some of them) with upscaled iPad-sized graphics, but otherwise the same UI and layout as the iPhone versions. Ends up that just blowing up iPhone apps to fill the iPad screen looks and feels weird, even if you use higher-resolution graphics so that nothing looks pixelated. So they were scrapped by you-know-who.

Think this is just an Apple problem?  No, it’s a mobile device problem!

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Today Apple announced their much anticipated tablet computer – the iPad.  With a 9.7 inch screen, the iPad is a supersized iPhone; and it’s already inspiring both love and hate from Apple fans worldwide.  Comments so far have ranged from “I want it now” to “I was expecting a lot more than an XL version of the iPhone with no phone capabilities.”

So what does the iPad mean for developers, testers, and Apple users?  Here are a few thoughts:

Layout now matters for iPhone developers.
Up until now, an iPhone app was one size fits all.  Every iPhone has the same resolution, meaning apps didn’t have to worry about scaling up or down.  Not anymore!  The iPad is a larger device, but it runs the same iPhone apps.  While it can automatically scale up an app designed for the iPhone, the results are kind of ugly.  The bigger screen real estate opens a lot of interesting possibilities, but for iPhone developers now is the time you need to start worrying about how your app will look on a larger screen that isn’t 480×320.

New interface means new challenges.
If it’s not enough that the iPad comes in a different size, now developers will also have a slew of new interface widgets to work with.  Whether or not those widgets will be available on the iPhone remains to be seen, but whatever the case developers will have their hands full making sure their apps look correct on each platform.

Testers needed!
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I think I read somewhere that Apple may be announcing something on Wednesday. </sarcasm>

If you’ve been near any media source in the past few weeks, you’ve probably seen the build-up of Apple’s upcoming announcement, which is widely expected to be the launch of their new tablet device.  To watch the drama unfold, check out Wired.com’s complete coverage.

Does anyone have predictions about size, feature set, price point, et al?  Share your thoughts.  Being a software testing shop, we’re particularly interested in what types of apps that will be built for this new category-defining device.  Will there be an entirely new class of apps (and thus, more Apple-related testing)?  Will it work with iPhone apps?  Is it purely a web device?

UPDATE:  Ok, so now that we know more about the iPad (check out Mashable’s iPad coverage… or TechCrunch’s… or AlleyInsider’s), I’m curious to hear what you think — Worth the wait?  Overhyped?  Revolutionary?  Meh?  Weigh in and tell us your take.

Bug-iversary Alert! Tomorrow is the 20-year anniversary of the “crash” of the AT&T Long Distance Network. On January 15, 1990 faulty software was installed on the AT&T Electronic Switching System (Number 4 ESS): a one-line bug incapacitated the entire system, disabling switches throughout half the network.

Known as one of the most serious telecom bugs in history, more than 75 million calls were not connected during 9 hours, an estimated $60 million loss.

Dennis Burke of California Polytechnic said it best: “The Jan. 1990 incident showed how bugs in self-healing software can bring down healthy systems, and the difficulty of detecting obscure load- and time-dependent defects in software.”

Speaking of “load defects,” AT&T — after signing up to be exclusive U.S. provider of iPhone service — has recently come under fire for the quality of its network coverage. Businessweek’s top headlines read:

• An AT&T Mystery: Abrupt New York iPhone Shutdown
• AT&T Mulls Plans to Deal with iPhone Data Demand
• Can AT&T Meet iPhone Network Demands?

In light of this bug-iversary, I can’t help but wonder if more testing should have been done before AT&T took on the massive data demands of modern 3G smartphones? What do you think?

Mobiles’ 2009’s impressive growth storyline continues in the early days of 2010. By now, you’re probably familiar with the impressive growth in the number of mobile app:  100,000+ approved apps in Apple’s store, nearly 20,000 Android apps, and yesterday, InformationWeek reported that Palm’s app catalog has surpassed the 1,000 mark.

And while it’s widely accepted more apps = more users = more impressions = more revenues, how about some updated financial figures that are closer to the top line?  Well, Jason Kincaid over at TechCrunch outlines a recent report from AdMob that shows that the number of mobile ad impressions doubled in just TWO months:

Some more stats from AdMob’s latest post:

• Increased device diversity: In December, 7 devices generated more than 3% of requests each: the Motorola Droid, HTC Dream, HTC Magic, HTC Hero, Motorola CLIQ, HTC Droid Eris, and the Samsung Moment. This is up from only 3 devices in October (HTC Dream, HTC Magic, and HTC Hero).
• Droid Invasion: The Motorola Droid is already the leading Android handset in the AdMob network and generated 30% of requests in December.
• US leads Android adoption: 90% of Android traffic was in the US in December, up from 84% in October. Top countries by requests are the US, UK, Germany, France, and Canada, respectively.

It’s an understatement to say that mobile was hot in 2009 — from our vantage point, mobile app testing was the fastest growing segment of uTest’s business.  But a growing number of trends are pointing to 2010 growing at an even faster rate.

Is it possible that this year will make ‘09 look like the quaint, simple, slow times in the world of mobile apps?  Based upon what our customers (hundreds of app developers of all shapes and sizes) are telling us, the answer is a definitive ‘yes’. What say you?

UPDATE 1/5/10: And if all the above stats didn’t convince you, Apple just hit the 3 billion download mark! In just over 3 months, Apple went from a record 2 to 3 billion downloads by iPhone and iPod Touch users. Simply incredible.

Two days ago, Google announced the development of a new programming language called “Go“.  Outwardly, Go is similar to other programming languages in the C family, but don’t let that fool you.  Go is a brand new language written entirely from scratch and includes sophisticated built-in support for concurrent programming.

With the development of easy parallel programming tools, Google may now be competing with Apple in yet another technology market.  If you recall, Apple introduced Grand Central Dispatch with the release of their Snow Leopard operating system a few months ago.  While GCD is still very new, it generated a lot of excitement for how easy it made developing multi-threaded applications.

Go is also creating a lot of excitement, but it’s still very raw and requires a lot more development to be ready for production programming.  Still, developers should be excited to see two new technologies that will help them do more with concurrent programming.

However, despite Go and GCD’s ease of use, the hard part remains: developing a concurrent application first requires identifying parallel components that can be run independently.  In many ways, once a programmer overcomes that hurdle, regular old Pthreads don’t seem so hard.

By now, it’s painfully obvious to all of us that the market for mobile apps is BOOMING and shows no signs of slowing down.  But I was still amazed by the stats/news that back up the hype. Within the past few months, GigaOm has reported the following mind-blowing proof points:

• Apple users downloaded 2 billion apps
• Android’s Market will come pre-loaded on Verizon phones
• Microsoft launched its Windows Marketplace for Mobile
• Apple will hit shelves in China, the world’s largest market
• Research In Motion (RIM) expanded with its new App World
• Palm introduced premium apps for its webOS
• Verizon is opening its own app store later this year

And the list goes on and on…

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Have you heard of Grand Central Dispatch?  If you’re a Mac addict, then you might know that it’s Apple’s new easy-to-use tool for parallelizing code.  If you’re not a Mac addict, then the first thing you should know is that GCD is one of the most exciting innovations in software development in years.  The second thing is that Apple just released it as a cross-platform open source project, meaning it’s coming soon to a platform near you.

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On Friday, Apple released version 10.6 of their Macintosh OS X operating system.  “Snow Leopard,” as this new version is called, is an unusual release for Apple.  Whereas previous updates of OS X often brought big usability changes, Snow Leopard is all about under the hood improvements.  It’s faster and better, but not different.

So it came as a huge surprise last week when John Nack, senior product manager for Adobe Photoshop, announced that Adobe wasn’t supporting the two and half year old CS3 version of their products on Snow Leopard and would instead encourage their customers to upgrade to CS4.  Nack later clarified that the CS3 products actually work fine – Adobe just couldn’t allocate resources to fix any undiscovered problems.  Despite these assurances, many people were confused and upset, especially because Snow Leopard wasn’t supposed to be a major upgrade for Apple.

My thoughts below the fold.

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On Monday, Apple announced a whole bunch of exciting and innovative new products.  Two of the more anticipated were the iPhone 3GS and version 3.0 of the iPhone software.  Both of these introduce interesting new features for iPhone users everywhere.  You can watch the entire keynote here.

Apple’s keynote presentation went very well, but there were a couple of snags while demoing some of the new iPhone apps.  Two different apps had problems with their demos.  One app had an issue with some on-stage props, but the other simply stopped working in the middle of its presentation.

The presenters for both apps recovered and continued to highlight other features of their products.  However, I can’t exactly fault them for having trouble.  In fact, what actually surprised me was that so many of the apps worked given how difficult Apple makes testing iPhone apps.

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