The way we consume information and services has transformed over the last few years. Small, specialized applications on smartphones and tablets have displaced the Web browser as our primary window into the digital world. Could the proliferation of smarter, smaller, wearable devices bring yet-another similar transformation?

This post argues that we are going to witness a convergence of user experiences. Many specialized applications will disappear. A small number of user experiences (some of them in the form of personal digital assistants) will provide access to the world’s knowledge and surface/incorporate functionality from a variety of services across the Internet.

Is the Web Dead?

I recently read “Flurry Five-Year Report: It’s an App World. The Web Just Lives in It” over on the Flurry Blog. The post reminded me of a point I made during my recent talk at QCon London related to the move away from many, specialized applications in favor of few unified experiences.

The nice folks over at Flurry Analytics disagree with the assertion that “The Web is Dead”. In a previous report, they highlighted the fact that we spend more time inside apps rather than the Web. In this latest post, however, they argue that the Web is evolving to appear as a collections of apps. They also correctly point out that a lot of Web content is consumed from within other apps, such as Facebook.

Does this mean the web is dead? We don’t believe so. On the contrary, we believe that the web will change and adapt to the reality of smartphones and tablets. Websites will look and behave more like apps. Websites will be optimized for user experience first and search engine optimization second. This supports the trend of mobile first and web second, which brings both mobile app and user experience design to the mobile web.
(“Flurry Five-Year Report: It’s an App World. The Web Just Lives in It”)

Interestingly, Facebook today announced “Facebook Home”. They are trying to make a single experience the focus. They are trying to deprioritize the use of other applications. This aligns very much with the premise of this post.

So, is the consumption of Web content from within an app still “The Web” or do we need to be explicitly using a Web browser? I argue that such semantics are unimportant and that the user experience is really all that matters.

The Applification of our Digital World

We are spending much more time in front of applications on smart devices than the Web. It’s a trend that emerged due to the popularity of smartphones and tablets. Within the next few years, the usage of such devices (and the applications they host) will overtake the amount of time we spend in front of TVs, the first time in decades that TV is challenged.

There is an application for every single task that we want to perform. Apple famously used the tagline in their ads: “there is an app for that”.

Wearable Devices

The number of available wearable devices is increasing at a great rate. There is a plethora of devices producing/tracking health, well-being, and exercise data. Google is getting ready to mass-produce Google Glasses. The current demos are already showing how Google Now is the main focus of the user experience, helping users accomplish a variety of tasks and accessing information that would normally require different applications.

There are rumors of Apple, Google, LG, and Samsung releasing watches or bracelets. In most likelihood, a watch or a bracelet will be limited in terms of the application experiences they can directly host. However, when paired with a more powerful device such a phone, a wearable device can become the access points to all of the phone’s functionality. It makes sense for personal digital assistants such as Google Now and Siri to be the gateways to all knowledge and services that are available through the phone.

Operating Systems – Irrelevant?

The applification of our digital world has resulted in a new era in user interface design. Operating systems are no longer at the center of our attention. The trend is for the OS to get out of the user’s way. The entire screen surface is dedicated to application-oriented user experiences.

It’s not uncommon to see the same user experience span multiple devices. In fact, Microsoft is promoting the consistency of user experience across devices (smartphones, tablets, desktop, TVs) as a feature.

Emergence of Digital Personal Assistants

In the same way the OS is getting out of our way, many specialized applications will also disappear (but not the services that they provide). There are going to be few entry points to the world’s knowledge and services, some of them powered by personal digital assistants. In many cases, we won’t even need to see a screen. Natural User Interfaces (speech, touch, gestures, thought) will be the norm for interacting with “intelligent” software such personal digital assistants. Neither OS nor applications would be the center of our attention.

Recently, Chevrolet started advertising their Sonic car with Siri integration, focusing on the “eyes” free interaction. There is no special technology other than a Bluetooth connection to an iPhone. However, the focus of the advert indicates to the changing perception on how we should expect to consume information, to complete tasks, and to interact with technology.

I suggest that the move away from the many specialized applications in favor of few, “smart” user experiences has to happen in an age where smart devices hide inside our every-day environment. Consider these:

• In the morning, as we get in front of the bathroom’s mirror, we won’t need to start an application in order to get the day’s overview (e.g. appointments, weather, news, tasks, etc.). Our digital assistant will anticipate our interest and will offer the information.
• In the living room, we will interact with our agent (very likely through the TV), not with specific applications. We will ask our digital assistant to make reservations for dinner, to contact a friend via Skype, to find a show that we like.
• In the (self-driving) car, we won’t have to navigate through applications in order to accomplish tasks. Using speech we will be able to control aspects of our trip experience (e.g. music, temperature, communications, media for the kids at the back, etc.). Our assistant will surface notifications to us.

We are already witnessing examples of Apple and Google moving towards the integration of service functionality, in addition to surfacing information (e.g. movie tickets using Siri or sport tickets using Google Now, even if they direct to application-specific experiences at the moment).

The digital world is evolving extremely fast. The transition from a PC-oriented world to a smart device one took only few years. Applications became the focus of our attention. I believe we are going to witness another transformation (in business and technology strategies) very soon. It’s really fun to be part of all these changes!

(Thanks to Mike Calcagno for his feedback in an earlier version of the above)

(Featured photo from the Office Future Productivity Vision video)

Context: Jim mentioned in his QCon talk that I am advocating for hypergraphs as the model of choice when designing a graph store. That’s not true. The previous post has the details.

Jim and I have been discussing graph store/database design for a long time now. As it is always the case, we argue :-) Whether it’s about graph store design, indexing, or caching and partitioning, we will always find a topic on which we can have fun (most of the time over beers :-)

I started working on my first graph store, Zentity, back in 2006-2007, during my Microsoft Research years. Even back in those days, I talked about relationships with properties and relationships on relationships as key design choices for a graph store. I started thinking about the role of First Order Predicate Logic with Probabilities and ways to implement large, scalable graph stores that would efficiently provide access to the world’s information and knowledge. Zentity was the beginning of my exploration with many graph-related ideas. That exploration hasn’t stopped yet :-)

The Neo4j team made an early design decision to support properties on graphs and relationships but to not support relationships as targets of or sources for other relationships. They coined the term “property graph” for the resulting model, a term that is catching on in the graph store community. I don’t know if the early implementations of neo4j supported properties on relationships but recent versions do.

Perhaps it’s the influence that Scheme and First Order Predicate Logic have had in my way of thinking but I’d like the property graph model to take that extra step in how relationships are treated. When creating a graph-based data model, I’d like to avoid any mental gymnastics in the way I represent information. Consider the following:

Bob = Person(
  FirstName("Bob")
  LastName("Smith")
  YearOfBirth(1973)
)

Alice = Person(
  FirstName("Alice")
  LastName("Parker")
  YearOfBirth(1975)
)

BobMarriedAlice = Married(
  Bob
  Alice
  Date(Apr 1, 2001)
)

It’s easy to figure out what the above predicates represent. “Bob” and “Alice” represent two people while “BobMarriedAlice” represents the fact that they got married in 2001. They are all predicates. In fact, “FirstName”, “LastName”, “YearOfBirth”, and “Date” are also predicates. This is not dissimilar to the RDF and property graph models. The transformation from one representation model to the other is straightforward. With Neo4j, we can define “Bob” and “Alice” as graph nodes. Then, we can create the “Married” relationship between them. The relationship is given an identifier (“rel123”). Using that identifier we can add the “Date” property to the relationship.

Now, let’s say that we want to represent the following information:

Carole = Person(
  FirstName("Carole")
  LastName("Walter")
  YearOfBirth(1973)
)

CaroleWitnessedMarriage = Witnessed(
  Carole
  BobMarriedAlice
)

The above says that “Carole witnessed the fact that Bob married Alice on Apr 1st, 2001”. I don’t know if it’s a limitation of the graph property model or just a design choice for the neo4j implementation but, unfortunately, I cannot represent the above information as one might have intuitively thought.

Even though Neo4j assigns identifiers to relationships, those identifiers cannot be used as the target or source of another relationship. We have to reify the relationship in order to represent the information above. We now have to create a new graph node to represent the fact that “Bob married Alice” as a graph node.

Please note that we now have to introduce two additional “Participated” edges that only add complexity to our representation.* On the other hand, if we take that additional step in the model and allow relationships to participate in other relationships, then we won’t have to do the above. The general model can be defined as follows:

• Graph: set of nodes;
• Node: a dictionary of key-value properties with id as the mandatory key;
• Relationship: a dictionary of key-value properties with id, subject, predicate, and object as mandatory keys.

With the above model, we no longer need the introduction of additional edges in the graph.

Please note that this is not a hypergraph, even though I have been thinking about hypergraphs as a way to represent knowledge. Unlike hypergraphs, the concept of a single directed edge still exists. It’s just that the relationships, as represented by a directed edge, can be associated with other incoming/outgoing relationships.

The choice of the above model has implications on indexing, navigation, optimization, query expressions, and so on. For example, if we wanted to search for all marriages, in the neo4j case we would have to search for all nodes with “type” property set to “marriage”. In the above case, we would have to search for all edges with the “predicate” property set to “married”.

That was a long way to say that the model I was describing to Jim was not a hypergraph :-)

For the record, I think that the property graph approach implemented by Neo4j is great. The team is doing an awesome job all around and I am a huge admirer of their work. It’s not a surprise that they are the number one graph database in the industry today.

At the end of the day, the two approaches are very similar. Neo4j already represents an awesome implementation of one of the models so if you want to play with graphs with the best system out there, the choice is obvious. It’d be great if the fine folks at Neo Technology considered my proposed addition to their model. Since their relationships already have identifiers, they are almost there :-)

I’d very much like see the property graph approach (perhaps with the addition above) being adopted as the way for representing knowledge graph on the Web. Stay tuned! :-)

* BTW, the RDF graph data model suffers even more since we need to reify a relationship just to add properties to it.

My very good friend Jim Webber, Chief Scientist of Neo Technology, gave a great talk on “A little graph theory for the busy developer”. Jim’s presentation style is really out there: highly entertaining, interesting, and with substance. The room was PACKED. He has quite the following. I am so proud of him :-) He showed me the electronic feedback he received from the attendees immediately after the talk (a nice feature of QCon conferences). He got top marks from everyone. The talk will be available for everyone to watch in few months.

During his talk, Jim had some fun with the fact I work for Microsoft :-) He even used the Bing Is Not Google (BING) joke :-) I love him, so I don’t hold it against him. It’s all good fun :-) He also mentioned that I am an advocate of hypergraphs for graph stores, which is not the case. Since this relates to graph store design, I thought of sharing my thoughts on the subject. This short post sets the context :-)

BTW… I made my slides available for download (PDF). The video of the talk will be available in few months on the QCon site.

* It was great hanging out with Web geek friends. Also, Barbara Liskov’s keynote on “The power of Abstraction” was awesome.

Programming “is the closest thing we have to a superpower” :-)

(Drew Houston, Founder and CEO of Dropbox)

I love to code. It’s my hobby, my way of expressing myself, my art, my profession. I use computer programming as a way of creating, as the way of challenging myself to learn more, as a way of keeping my mind active.

I was in my very early teens. I spent any money I could find on arcade games. In Greece, at the time, it was illegal for someone under 18 to enter any place with arcade games. Still, I always found a way.

My parents somehow discovered my secret addiction. Being the progressive and forward thinking parents they’ve always been and despite the fact that they had no clue about computers, they decided to borrow a ZX Spectrum for a week from a friend of the family. They thought, as I found out much later in life, that rather than trying to keep me out of arcade game rooms, it might be better to bring those computer games into our living room.

I tried to print “hello world” in an infinite loop on the TV using ZX’s Sinclair BASIC language (yes, rather than just typing a command, you had to find the right combination of keys when programming). The feeling of having created something out of nothing was amazing. That was it, I got hooked. My enthusiasm was obvious. As a result, my parents got me an Amstrad 64 (the one with the tape player) which was later upgraded to an Amstrad 128. I played games, learnt how to program by reading magazines and books, took classes outside school, experimented a LOT. I earned my first money using my newly founded computer skills as a teenager, writing Commodore 64 programs for a local TV station. I helped with the high-school’s newspaper, taught others, joined a computer club.

Computer Science became my high-level education major. Despite the nine years of university studies and three degrees (BSc, MSc, PhD), I still think that I know nothing, that I learn everyday from the many smart people that are around me in this field. I am still motivated and feel challenged. Isn’t this a wonderful feeling to have throughout one’s career?

I once asked Jim Gray if he ever planned to retire given his continued enthusiasm and energy for Computer Science. He told me that as long as he was able to think, be creative, and be useful to others, he was planning on carrying on. I aspire to do the same!

“I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think.” (Steve Jobs, The Lost Interview)

I subscribe to code.org’s vision:

Our vision is that every student in every school has the opportunity to learn how to code.  We believe computer science and computer programming should be part of the core curriculum in education, alongside other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, such as biology, physics, chemistry and algebra.

In summary, Netflix has been collecting lots of data about what viewers do/like. They analyzed the data and made a $100M investment in a series, having high confidence that their customers will like it.

• They knew that their customers liked the BBC original “House of Cards” series from the 90s.
• They knew that the same customers also watched movies with Kevin Spacey or movies directed by David Fincher.
• So, they redid “House of Cards” with Spacey in the main role and directed by Fincher!

Again, there shouldn’t be any surprise. Loyalty cards were created for the same reason… to analyze consumer behavior. I still remember the story that Paul Watson (my PhD supervisor and good friend) told me about his time in the industry, building mainframe machines for data crunching. A large supermarket chain wanted to stop selling feta cheese because it wasn’t a very popular product. A data analyst told them, however, that they needed to keep feta cheese because the customers who spend the most always buy it. Another, more recent example, is the news about Target knowing about a teenager’s pregnancy before her father. Also, it’s been well-documented that Obama’s edge in the recent elections was his team’s ability to crunch big data (New York Times opinion: Beware the Smart Campaign).

It’s definitely a new world we live in. A major aspect of the device and service ecosystems from Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft is the aggregation of digital data about user behavior. We see it all around us. The more folks use Google’s search, the better it gets (remember Peter Norvig’s “we don’t have better algorithms than anyone else, we just have more data” statement?). The more people shop on Amazon’s properties, the better their recommendation systems become. The more we use Siri and Google Now, the “smarter” they become.

Apple might be calling their Apple TV product a “hobby” but I have no doubt that they are using it as a way to collect data, as a way to make educated bets for a future product, to quantify their decisions. It just makes sense. Google did it with their 411 call. Remember? You could call a free number, ask a question, and get information. Google collected lots of data in order to improve their ability to do speech-to-text recognition and also figure out how people ask local directory-related questions. I am sure Google Now benefits a lot from that data.

Back to the article about Netflix. There is some speculation of what additional data processing/inferencing Netflix might be doing: “It could make a lot of sense to consider things such as volume, colors and scenery that might give valuable signals about what viewers like.” There is no doubt that we are applying more “intelligent” techniques on the type of analysis performed on the collected data.

I just hope that in a world of generalizations and mass consumer targeting, we don’t forget to empower the small ones, the odd ones, the different ones who aspire to make a difference in the arts, sciences, politics, or any other aspect of life, in a way that doesn’t conform to what the big data analysis tells us.

I have already written about the “What was the title of the song that I really liked at my last concert?” scenario for the future. It’s all about machine-interpretable streams of information and reasoning over them.

An interesting essay over at Wired, “The End of the Web, Search, and Computer as We Know It”, touches on the same topic. One might say that it’s an explanation of the Reactive Framework :-) It even talks about how an operation on a stream (like a LINQ operator) can produce a new stream.

The article also talks about the value of personalized views over the world’s information streams, a topic that keeps coming up in tech articles or interviews.

• The Next Frontier For Google Maps Is Personalization
• Yahoo’s Mayer: Personalization Is Future of Search (video interview)

The vision writers are trying to tell us about a possible future. Given what the big companies are doing, that future might come faster than many might expect :-)

Fun times! :-)

In most likelihood you’ve heard about Facebook’s latest project: Search Graph. My friends over there asked were curious about my thoughts. Since I didn’t have access, they arranged it for me (thank you Iris :-) I played with it for a while and I am impressed, very impressed.

I can ask questions such as “Favorite bands of people under 25 years old” and “Favorite bands of people under 50 years old”. The results reflect the choices of the people in my social network. Given the results I got, I realized that they don’t represent aggregates over the body of knowledge that Facebook has. Somehow, I don’t think that people over 50y old around the world like the small tavern in my village in Greece, second only to Pink Flow, which somehow is categorized as “band” :-) I can ask the restaurants that are popular amongst my social network, the books they like, frequent places they visit, etc. Very cool.

I am extremely impressed with the execution. I know how difficult it is to perform structured queries over graph data at large scale. Making the transition from natural language understanding to queries against structured data adds to the complexity of the endeavor, even though Facebook seems to map input to pre-defined sentence structures. Still, the user experience with autosuggest is great.

What impresses me the most is Facebook’s ability to search over the graph while still preserving the users’ privacy policies. Very cool.

Of course, what Facebook doesn’t do is allow users to find answers. When I ask “who are the members of Coldplay?” (my usual first question when I play with a knowledge base), it changes my question to “people who are members of Coldplay” and gives me a list of profiles of people (even outside my social network) who, I guess, “like” the Coldplay page.

Facebook is doing the right thing for their users. They are adding a great feature. However, I believe their technology could expand to competing with Google’s Knowledge Graph in providing answers, rather than just blue links. But that requires the ability to reason over the Web, which Facebook can’t do (for now). The advantage that Facebook has, of course, is their ability to provide highly-personalized results. That’s the future of how we will be consuming information.

The tech press has reported extensively on Facebook’s new feature. Here is the list of the articles that attracted my attention (taken from my Pocket collection and managed using Wocket of course :-)

• “Facebook’s Bold, Compelling and Scary Engine of Discovery: The Inside Story of Graph Search” (Wired). Great read!
• “Facebook Introduces Graph Search With Limited Rollout” (PCMag).
• “Facebook’s Social Graph, Neo4j show rising use of graph databases” (ZDnet). An interesting discussion on graph databases with Neo4j and my pals over there being the main focus.

Overall, a job well done! Congrats to the Search Graph folks.

(image sources: my “Age of Semantics” post, Facebook, and Google)

If you follow my tweets, you might have noticed that I make a reference from time-to-time to an illusive “side project” :-) About 4 years ago, I started working on an idea for a web-based platform to connect the physical and digital worlds as an application of semantic computing (and no, it’s not augmented reality :-). It has been a side project of mine since then and has helped me learn a lot about many aspects of the Web, Facebook as a platform, building services using Java on Amazon Web Services and later on Azure using .NET, issues related to creating a company (but not growing one, at least not yet), the importance of design and UX, and much much more. Given that I could only dedicate a small portion of my very limited free time, progress has been slow (to put it mildly :-) across all these years.

In August 2009 (wow, it’s been more than 3 years already) I created a company and registered it with the state of Washington: CVOYA, LLC. It was meant to act as a forcing function for moving from the idea and prototypes to something real, to getting things off the ground. I even funded a small contract with the wonderful folks at Plexipixel to do some UX design work. I thought that investing personal capital would force progress. Unfortunately, between a busy social life, finishing the REST in Practice book, working crazy hours for Microsoft, and traveling, progress has been slow. However, there are no regrets though since such is life :-)

Still, the idea that led me to create CVOYA is still very much alive. I have met some wonderful people as a result of the process, I have received great advice, I have learnt from mistakes along the way, and I am very much encouraged by the enthusiasm of all of those who know the details and are keen to being part of the endeavor. More news on this front soon as we are getting close to an incorporation! :-)

With this post, I just wanted to introduce CVOYA, the company.

About the name “CVOYA”

When I started searching for a name for my company, back in 2009, I realized that it was almost impossible to find a term that I liked, or even a combination of terms, which weren’t already registered as a top-level .com domain name. The search was taking a long time. During a combination of a break and search for inspiration from my childhood hero, Carl Sagan, I started watching the first episode of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.

In the introduction (around 4’40’’ in the video above), Sagan says “We are about to begin a journey to the Cosmos” while he walks with the ocean in the background. The name of my company is a tribute to this moment. The “C” in “CVOYA” comes from the “ocean”, the “sea” (= “C”) while the “VOYA” comes from “voyage.”

The first CVOYA application

Earlier today I blogged about the availability of the Wocket application for Windows 8 devices. The application is not connected in any way with the idea that led me to create CVOYA in the first place. As I explained in a past post, I was merely missing the Pocket functionality from Windows 8 and I also wanted to familiarize myself with WinRT development so I diverged from the original plan for few hours in order to build the app.

CVOYA will continue to be a side, free-time-only activity that hosts all my for-education endeavors. You can find CVOYA on the web at http://cvoya.com.

You can read more about the available features on Wocket’s official web page.

Please drop me a line if you encounter any problems or have any suggestions for new features.

• synchronization with your Pocket collection for offline reading;
• archiving of articles;
• video/image browsing;
• operations against your collection (add/archive/favorite) while you are offline; and
• addition to your Pocket collection from any Windows 8 application through the “share” charm (last screenshot).

After the initial feedback, I am going to do some work on the UI/design. I would especially like to have the front page look more like a newspaper (e.g. the News Windows 8 app). Design-wise, there is more work to be done but I am interested in testing the main functionality for now.

And since I know that some will ask… No, this is not the idea on which I’ve been working for more than 2 years in my limited free time. That one is still in progress. We are currently setting up the company and finalizing the team.

Update Jan 12, 2013: Wocket is now available for download from the Windows Store.

Sharing with Pocket is a functionality that I miss on Windows 8 apps, especially when using my Surface. So, I decided to write my first feature-complete Windows 8 application. “Wocket” was born.

The nice folks at Pocket have given me full access to their API. I am going to write more about “wocket” once I make it available for everyone through the Windows Store. In the meantime, check out a couple of screenshots below (I am currently working on the UX so what you see are not the final pages). I spent a lot of time on the speed of the app by making sure all articles and content is synchronized with Pocket and cached locally.

Through “wocket” I managed to learn many things about WinRT development. I am hoping to reuse this knowledge as I embark in the final stages of my startup idea (taking a week off at the beginning of Dec to concentrate on coding). Also, I have a dream that even if “wocket” gives me few 10s of dollars, I can say that I directed the money towards the bigger project :-, on which I have already invested >$15K :-(

It’s crazy. So much wasted paper. In this entire pile of paper, there was only one letter in which I could perhaps be interested (and even that is debatable since it’s from the ProClub). I really need to have a word with the Post Office.

I must be doing something wrong because I find myself carrying all three: Laptop, Surface, and a phone. If you add my MacBook Pro + all cables & power supplies to the list, it’s no wonder my bag weighs a ton these days :-(

PS: Thanks to Mike Andrews for giving me his phone in order to take the photo :-)

I have participated in many elections, mostly in Greece. This was the first time I voted as a US citizen. I find it disheartening that the level of participation in this celebration of our democratic rights is so low in this country.

Go people… vote!

I needed to instantiate a SortedSet for a WinRT application that I am writing. I didn’t want to create a new class that implements an IComparer (just being lazy). I thought that a simple lambda should suffice for the job at hand. After some digging, I found that .NET 4.5 that was just released, offers this capability.

var sorted = new SortedSet<Foo>(Comparer<Foo>.Create((x, y) => x.Bar.CompareTo(y.Bar)));

Hopefully this will help someone!

Sigh! :-(

BTW… One of the many, I am sure, gatherings of friends for drinks took place yesterday!

(Thanks to Kendra for the photo)

Earlier this morning I received the sad news that my good friend and colleague at Microsoft, Lee Dirks, and his wife, Judy, were killed in a tragic accident in Peru. Their two daughters were in Seattle. Even now, I cannot process the news.

Lee was an amazing amazing guy. Larger than life.

We worked together in MSR, under Tony Hey, for almost three years but continued to be in touch (drink and play poker) even after that. I’d like to believe that Lee, Alex, and I produced some great work together. We had lots of fun collaborating and traveling around, working with communities in domains such as Scholarly Communication, Digital Libraries, Computer Science, Repositories, you name it. Lee and Alex introduced me to the wonderful world of Library/Information Science and great people around the world. Most importantly, I’d like to believe that we really connected… I would do anything for these guys.

Lee was one of those guys that was friends with everyone. HUGE smile! Always there for you!

My thoughts are with his family, friends, and colleagues.

We lost a really good guy today :-(

Update

Here are some photos of/with Lee from the things we did together:

Sasquatch Festival with Mary and Shelton

Poker at my place

The Scholarly Communications trio (at an OCLC event:-)

Our Zentity project is announced to the world.

On the road to talk about Zentity (and eat and drink :-)

We created ssdl.org and published all the information there. Unfortunately, over the years we let the domain expire so there is no record on the Internet of the SSDL web site ever existing. The domain is now used for a completely different purpose. So, I decided to republish the contents of ssdl.org for historical reasons.

Of course the world has moved on. Since then we wrote REST in Practice, SOAP is all but irrelevant today, and we are all enjoying our professional lives by doing something different :-)

Geese crossing the busiest intersection in Bellevue :-) Everyone just stopped and watched while they took their time to cross!!! :-)

I am using PhoneGap, jQuery Mobile, and the Google Maps control for a mobile app I am building. While I was debugging the app using Chrome on my MacBook, the control was configured exactly as I wanted it. It looked like this…

Note the zoom in/out buttons at the top-left. Exactly what I wanted. However, when running the same code on the iPhone, those same buttons weren’t coming up :-(

Here’s the code I original used to initialize the Google Maps control…

$('#map').gmap({
    'zoom': 13,
    'mapTypeControl': false,
    'navigationControl': true,
    'streetViewControl': false,
    'disableDefaultUI': true,
});

And here’re the few more options I had to introduce in order to make the zoom buttons appear on the iPhone as well.

$('#map').gmap({
    'zoom': 13,
    'mapTypeControl': false,
    'navigationControl': true,
    'streetViewControl': false,
    'disableDefaultUI': true,
    'zoomControl': true,
    'zoomControlOptions': {
        'position': google.maps.ControlPosition.TL,
        'style': google.maps.ZoomControlStyle.SMALL
    }
});

Even though I asked for the position to be at the “top-left”, they still appear at the bottom but at least they are there now :-) Oh, and they do look different, which is good since on iPhone the buttons need to be different. So I am guessing that the Google Maps control is doing different things based on the browser/environment it detects.

I found the solution by trying the relevant options listed in Google’s documentation for maps.