Compliantly

The new iPhone software announced Tuesday has some features that should make enterprise users happy, but it lacks others that could have made the iPhone far more enticing to businesses.

Push, cut and paste, integrated maps and enhanced calendar synch could all help to make iPhone users more productive at work. But administrators and enterprise application developers were hoping for a couple more capabilities that did not appear, namely background processing and device management tools.

The push capability is one of the most interesting for enterprise application developers, said Senthil Krishnapillai, director of product management for Sybase's enterprise mobility group. It could allow Sybase, which has a partnership with SAP, to push CRM (customer relationship management) notifications to iPhone users. For example, a potential sales lead could call in to a main office and the lead could be pushed out to a sales person in the field for immediate attention, he said.

"We still need to understand what this means from a scalability perspective, but we're excited about this as a long-promised feature," he said.

He's also pleased with the capability that will allow developers to offer updates within applications. "That would help us provide additional capabilities to applications without having to go to the App Store and go through the whole process," Krishnapillai said.

The iPhone 3.0 software will also allow maps to be included in other applications on the phone, which could prove useful to many businesses. For example, engineers at Herrera Environmental Consultants use iPhones and would find an application useful that would let them take photos that are automatically tagged with a location, said Stuart Maxwell, an IT manager at Herrera.

He's also interested to see what kinds of applications take advantage of the push capability. Adding push to an application like Yammer, a collaboration and communication tool for business users that is a cross between IM and Twitter, could be useful. "I've been playing with the idea of introducing Yammer into this office, and I think the usefulness would increase if certain messages were passed immediately to people who are working on a project," he said.

But the new iPhone software still lacks capabilities that enterprises need. "One thing I haven't seen is on the management side. We haven't heard of a strategy for how to manage these devices," Krishnapillai said.

A potentially even more important omission is the lack of background processing, said Ken Dulaney, analyst with Gartner. "It desperately needed background processing," he said. "You can't do security effectively without it." That's because for a security program to be effective, it needs to run independently of the applications being audited, he said. But since the phone can't run processes in the background, it can't run security separately from the applications, he said.

Management tools also can't work effectively without background processing, he said. While management tools can use the push notification, that still requires the recipient to take some action. With background processing, the iPhone could have a service like Microsoft's Windows Update to automatically update devices, he said.

The lack of background processing also prevents the use of applications that might connect an iPhone to a corporate PBX, he said.

"[Apple has] been enormously pressured by enterprise buyers to put this in and I thought they'd respond," Dulaney said.

He was critical of Apple's reasons for leaving out background processing -- that it would reduce battery life and slow performance.

"In the case of battery life, I'm not sure I buy it, unless there's something fundamentally inherent in OS X that prevents them from managing this from a power-efficiency standpoint. If you look at [Research In Motion] or Symbian or Microsoft, they can all do background processing. Even Android does it," he said. "And I would say that RIM has far better battery life than Apple."

Background processing can slow performance, but other cell phone makers have learned how to control it to mitigate the effect, he said. "Maybe they're waiting for multicore processors," he said. That would allow processes to run in the background without interfering with the application running in the forefront.

Apple released the beta software development kit for the iPhone 3.0 software on Tuesday and revealed the new features that will come with it. IPhone users will be able to download the software in a couple of months.

Apple and Google used to compete in different markets and for awhile, both parties seemed to get along. Google CEO Eric Schmidt sits on Apple's board, and Apple has a partnership with Google, who provides a search engine box on Apple's Safari browser.

Now it's starting to get a fuzzy.  Google has its own browser, Chrome, which competes with Safari for market share. Google also has a mobile operating system, Android, which is being used on mobile devices that compete with Apple's iPhone. 

The mobile software market is considered the next big revenue opportunity. Some speculate that Apple, a clear innovator in this category, may build its own search engine likely for a better mobile experience.

OS X can, to a limited extent, interact with background applications. For instance, you can move background windows around without activating them--just hold down the Command key and then click-and-drag on the background window's title bar. You can then move the window around, and when you release the mouse button, the background application will not come to the foreground.

In some cases, though, you can do more than just move a background window around. You can, for instance, Command-click on links in Safari or Firefox to open those links without bringing the browser to the foreground. Even more interesting, though, is that you can activate contextual menus--in many applications--without bringing a background application to the foreground.

Why might you want to use this trick? If you're copying a number of links from your Web browser into a TextEdit document, for instance, you can use this trick to save the time required to Command-Tab back and forth between the applications.

In order to do this, though, you need an actual two-button mouse, or a trackpad that's set up to work as a two-button mouse. In other words, you can't use a Control-click to activate a contextual menu in the background. Position your windows such that you can see the background window in which you'd like to activate the contextual menu, then just right-click and the contextual menu should appear.

This trick also might not work in all applications, though it worked in quite a few in my testing--Safari, Firefox, iChat, Terminal, and Mail all handled it fine. The Finder, however, was a bit strange. I wasn't able to activate a contextual menu in the main portion of the window, but I could do so for items in the sidebar. The best way to know if a program supports this trick or not is simply to try it--if the program comes to the foreground before displaying the contextual menu, then you're out of luck.

Diane Sieber, an Associate Professor University of Colorado at Boulder, believes that laptops do harm grades. According to an article in the Daily Camera, she told 17 of her students who used their laptops "intensely" that they performed an average of 11 percent worse than classmates who were not using laptops. After making this announcement, "the number of students on laptops eventually dwindled to a half dozen, and the test scores of students who stopped using their computers during class shot up."

Seventeen is hardly a scientific sample, and not everyone involved with higher education agrees with Sieber's conclusions. A Chronicle of Higher Education blog post on her experience produced a lively debate.

"Why are professors so afraid to enforce a no-laptops policy if they choose to do so?" asked David S. "I've had a no-laptops policy in my UG and MBA classes for about two years due to the abuses and discourtesies noted in the above article." A survey of his students showed that "about two-thirds liked the policy and thought it was a good idea. Very few were strongly opposed."

But another professor, Don, argued that "a fair number of my students are more skilled at typing notes than at hand-writing them and are more comfortable (and more efficient) searching through a pdf than flipping pages...All I ask in my classes is that the laptop users stay out of the way of the non-laptop users by sitting in the back of the class or well off to the side, and that they turn off their wireless capability."

A student with the handle live_your_passions agreed. After taking notes by hand for two years, "I made the switch to the laptop. Since I type much faster than I write, I found that using a laptop allows me to spend more time listening to the lecture and synthesizing the information presented while taking notes...It is unfortunate that some students abuse the use of laptops in class by surfing the net, but it is equally unfortunate that some students who use their laptops responsibly have lost access to this useful learning tool due to a full stop laptop ban."

iPhones are quickly becoming a major player in the games market and Trinity (a japanese accessory company) has released a "gaming grip" to assist with the steering wheel type movements that are often needed in games.

This is cool in a very narrow way, but I think most people are playing iPhone games in quick bites while waiting in line somewhere and it might be a bit conspicuous playing with a bright blue steering wheel (however ergonomic it may be) while waiting for the bus.

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