Blog

iPad 3? iPad HD? iPad 2S? Retina display? LTE? A6 processor? Well, we'll know on Wednesday, and Tap! will be at the event, liveblogging for all we're worth! Follow along!

One little aside: We'll be feeding CoverItLive from our Twitter feed, so you can either follow here or follow along there. The same tweets will go up on MacFormat, our sister magazine's feed, so you might want to unfollow one of us while the event's on!

All done? Now go and read TechRadar’s new iPad 3 review!

I’m at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The halls are buzzing especially with Android developers and vendors touting everything from security systems for your phone to bespoke enterprise device management solutions… for your phone. There’s actually very little here for iOS.

The reason MWC is so focussed on Android, I think, is that Apple leaves the industry no room to do anything. Either iOS does what you want it to do, or Apple blocks third parties from fixing its shortcomings, real or perceived.

Oh, and while everyone’s pushing Android, a vanishingly small percentage of tablets you see are anything other than iPads. My friend and colleague Chris Brennan’s is typically eloquent on the subject. (And though there’s more variety in smartphones, the iPhone still dominates.)

This morning, we picked up on the following video, created by Samsung.

It made us confused and irritated. So we made our own video, showing just how easy it is to perform the challenges that Samsung claims the S Pen stylus enables the Galaxy Note to perform.

For more great videos, and our app, game and kit reviews, get the Tap! app

The new issue of Tap! should be available in our app edition later today, but there’s something awesome you can get your hands on right now – a new version of the app itself that’s Universal!

Before, you had to have an iPad to get our app edition of Tap!, but now you can read it on iPhone and iPod touch as well. Now, at the moment, what you get on the iPhone and iPod touch is essentially a PDF version of the print magazine (if you have an iPad, you still get the same interactive edition you always did) but we know we can do better; we’re hard at work at bringing the same rich experience to the iPhone and iPod touch as well as the iPad. At least now you have some way of reading Tap! on your pocket device, and if you have ideas about how we can translate the iPad edition to the smaller screens, we’d love to hear from you.

If you’ve bought an issue on the iPad, you can restore it to your iPhone or iPod touch for free – see the app’s Help screen for more. Drop apps@futurenet.com a line if you have any questions.

Get the app edition now!

(Oh, and we’ve finally got the issues to sort in the right order! Sorry ’bout that!)

Privacy isn’t a privilege, it’s a right – so make sure your app takes a cautious approach towards sharing user information

With customers becoming increasingly protective of personal data, it’s important that your app earns their trust, rather than assuming it

In any sensible list of the world’s greatest computing scientists you’d find the late Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper of the US Navy. She wrote the first compiler for a programming language, popularised the term ‘debugging’, and much more. No doubt to her lasting amusement, she even won the inaugural Computer Sciences Man (sic) of the Year award in 1969. Our field owes her a great debt.

She’s also attributed as the originator of the phrase, “It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission.” She was encouraging spontaneity in trying new ideas, and it’s a guideline that’s often true – but not always. As I believe Grace would readily have acknowledged, privacy is a counterexample.

People provide their personal information to machines constantly, but the degree of implicit trust they feel tends to subtly vary by device. Computers, being relatively stark and impersonal, engender only limited trust – and thus, a corresponding amount of conscious caution. We’ve all been taught to be aware of phishing, malware, viruses and so forth, and we think of those things in the context of desktop computers (or at least desktop operating systems).

Mobile devices are different. There’s an intimacy conferred by portability, and an automatic increase in the level of implicit trust. Coupled with a general perception that privacy issues are the domain of ‘proper computers’, users of mobile devices are inherently vulnerable – both emotionally and practically – to invasions of their privacy. Don’t let your app be the one that shatters your user’s illusion of safety.

The golden rule must surely be to always ask. This is a legitimate exception to the user experience principle of, “Don’t ask the user unless you really have to.” With privacy, you always really have to. In some cases – such as location data, and enforcing security during In-App Purchases – good behaviour is enforced by the App Store review process, or by iOS itself. That doesn’t excuse you from having a design philosophy based on earning trust.

If your app can link to Twitter, don’t treat the act of authorisation as blanket permission to auto-tweet the minutiae of the user’s activity. Ask first. Show what you’re going to share. Let them say no – not just this time, but for the future, too. If your game uses an online high-score board, don’t assume you can share the user’s full name, or even just their forename; as just one example, many women prefer gender-ambiguous nicknames to minimise unwanted attention.

The industry media has been awash with tragedies (real and imagined) of privacy violation in recent months – the Gawker user database, Sony’s PlayStation Network user accounts, and even Apple’s local cache of recently encountered cell towers and Wi-Fi networks on iOS devices – and users are rapidly educating themselves about the perils of loss of privacy and security. Our collective patience has worn thin in a very short time.

When you’re in the position of having access to people’s personal information, you’re dealing with fundamental issues of privacy and of trust. In that situation, it’s always better to ask permission than beg forgiveness.

NB: This blog post was written before the recent privacy issues surrounding the address book in iOS and the Path app. You can see Matt's take on that specific example on his personal blog here.

Matt Gemmell is an iPad, iPhone and Mac OS X developer specialising in user experience. He runs his own business, Instinctive Code, and frequently speaks at industry conferences.He has written hundreds of articles covering development and interface design at mattgemmell.com, and his clients include Apple and other Fortune 500 companies.

Get Tap!'s great features and app, game and kit reviews delivered straight to your iPad every issue with our interactive app edition!