Dr Richard M Marshall

I've always liked to build things. Since I outgrew Lego I've been building software, development teams and most recently companies.

I'm Founder and CTO of Rapid Mobile Media Ltd in Edinburgh, Scotland. We founded the company in February 2004. We mobilise applications, but are now focussing on Ad360 Mobile Advertising Platform.

I like to think of us as creating mobile applications that people actually use, but we go much deeper than that.

This blog, however, is much more about my observations on the last frontier, the world of mobile technology. And anything else that crosses my path.


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Irritations

Why do so many devices and services come with irritations. Here, for example, are but two that have annoyed me today:

When I plug my N95 into the USB port of the computer the phone asks me if I want PC Suite or Data mode. But it leaves the keyboard locked and I have to unlock the keyboard before I can make the selection. Surely the S60 asynchronous UI kit can cope with unlocking the screen on such an event?

Why does the Apple AppStore  list apps in no apparent order? I was scrolling through the Utilities category, which is definitely a misnomer, and could not see any logical reason for the ordering. inode number on the server?

How come the market puts up with these things when most of the rest of the consumer products market would reject it out of hand. One reason is that people invest quite a lot of effort in setting up their tech gadgets and don’t fancy going through the painful process again. Any other suggestions?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 4:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Irritations”

  1. Nick Rothwell Says:
    August 12th, 2008 at 4:30 pm

    I believe the App Store uses a random listing order because, when it used to be alphabetical, vendors did the “Edinburgh Fringe” thing with “AAAAAA My Cool App” and so on.

    Not half as irritating as the total brokenness of MobileMe:

    http://www.cassiel.com/space/start/2008-08-11/1

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