Common Dream

Apple-Bing Is About User Experience

The web was abuzz today with rumors that Mobile Safari, the iPhone's web browser, will soon switch from using Google to using Bing as it's default search engine. The rumor is about as likely to be true as it is likely not to be, but it does bring some interesting questions to mind. Do I really want to use Bing on my iPhone? Is Bing ready to be my main search provider? Is it better than Google? I decided to fire both of the sites up on my iPhone. They're both actually pretty unimpressive as far as mobile experiences go:

Remember, Apple is ultimately focused on providing great experiences, so my general assumption is that they won't drop Google for a noticeably worse search experience. And while it's true that Apple and Google are gearing up for some solid competition in the near future, Microsoft is still a solid threat as well. So what would cause Apple to decide on using Bing?

Any discussions about switching to Bing that Apple is having aren't about petty competition, they're about creating amazing experiences for their customers.

My guess is that Apple is cutting a deal with Bing that would allow them to control the search experience. I think Microsoft would readily allow that - they'd get the lion's share of the mobile search market overnight and would still pay Apple based on advertising click-throughs. And for Apple, the benefits could be huge. Just imagine the kind of awesome experience web search could yield if it were baked into Mobile Safari - features like voice search, location aware results, a much more visually appealing interface and integration into the iPhone's built search screen.

The two companies are basically both approaching the same problem from opposite directions. Google has built an impressive set of cloud services and is now attempting to ensure the best possible experience with those services on a mobile device. Apple has built the best mobile device ever, but now their task is to grant that device seamless access to all of the data in the cloud. Search is something Apple has to excel at to make that a reality. 

Qik Video Camera

I love Fusion Ads. One of the big reasons is that I've discovered all sorts of neat products and iPhone apps through them. This morning the app I discovered was the new Qik Video Camera. It's an app that lets you record video on your iPhone 2G or 3G. The quality certainly isn't as good as recording video on an iPhone 3GS, but for those of us without a 3GS, it's a great alternative.

They've got zoom and some built in features, but I have a feeling I'll be skipping those and jumping straight to simply recording some video and then processing it in iMovie. You download the videos from your phone by going to a URL in your web browser that is displayed when you look at your list of movies.

Here's a sample video to show you the quality:

So certainly, if you have a iPhone 2G or 3G, go download this 99ยข gem from the App Store.

Jumpy Jack & Googily by Meg Rosoff and Sophie Blackall

"That was a great one." - Lucy

Visual Studio Meets TextMate

I'm going to be doing some C# programming again in the near future, and I'm really going to miss TextMate during the process. Rob Conery, though, has made that process a little bit more bearable for me with his port of Vibrant Ink to Visual Studio.

His work is based on an original port by John Lam (of IronRuby fame), and I have to say thanks to both of them for helping me feel a bit more at home on a Windows machine. Not too at home, though.

Textmate Theme for Visual Studio, Take 2

iPhone App Store Secrets By Pinch Media

A good, but dated, look into some stats about the App Store by Greg Yardley at Pinch Media (now Flurry) based on more than 30,000,000 app downloads worth of data. I ran across it looking for data about free versus paid apps in the App Store, and there were some real gems on that front:

  • Free apps ended up with 7.5 times as many unique users as paid apps in the sample.
  • Free apps were only run 6.6 times often as the paid apps in the sample.
  • Free apps were only run 3.9 times more total time than paid apps.
So, although free apps were downloaded much more frequently, they were run less often and were kept open significantly lower amounts of time. In the presentation Greg also breaks out a calculation of how much you need on the CPM front for advertising to make sense for your app.

Vampire Weekend - Contra

I've been listening to the new Vampire Weekend album, Contra, nonstop for about a week now, and I think it's one of the best albums that I've heard in quite a while. Every song has some wonderful nugget of sound and lyric embedded into it, and almost every song has a different sound to it. If you were impressed with their self-titled first album, you've got to check this one out.

Here's a video of Vampire Weekend performing the album's first track, Horchata.