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An Interview with Jan Ole Suhr – Developer of S60 Twitter Client Gravity

ifanr: Could you introduce yourself a bit? What’s your day job? How long have you been working on Mobileways?

Jan Ole: Okay, I’m Jan Ole Suhr. My friends and family call me by my second first name, Ole. I’ve got my first computer in 1986 when I was about 14 years old. It was an Atari ST and I was immediately intrigued by programming it. Programming quickly became my main hobby and until today it’s both a “passion” and work.

I had been on holidays in Finland for a couple of years already, when mobile phones were suddenly getting common in Finland in about 1998 or so. Being a student at that time, a mobile phone wasn’t fitting my budget, but I couldn’t resist. In 1999 I got my first mobile phone – a Nokia 8110i – and I started to develop a ringtone composer and operator logo editor for it. I was excited about the idea that a mobile phone could be used to access the world-wide web and thought that starting a (small) business might be a good idea. So at the end of 1999, I founded mobileways.de – mainly working on and selling an online ringtone composer.

After a short period of time in a new economy startup (Iobox Oy, Helsinki), I continued with my own venture, mobileways.de and concentrated all my work on the new Nokia 7650, the first S60 based phone. So since 2002 I am fully dedicated to Symbian.

Also, could you tell us about your family? In some tweets, you mentioned you have to take care of kids. How many kids do you have, and did you sacrifice family-time while working on mobile apps? Does she （your wife） use Gravity to communicate with you?

I’ve got two kids, my 4 years old son Lukas and my 2 years old daughter Maja. I’m working three days a week, basically sharing the childcare with my wife, who’s also working three days a week (yes, that’s making a one-day weekend then =))

Being self-employed makes it very easy for me to adjust to this work-schedule. Also, I’m almost never working on a contract basis, so I can freely plan my time for programming all by myself. Right now I am working every spare minute on Gravity. It’s so much fun adding new features and getting positive feedback from all over the world.

So far, it’s working well, but I think I need to cut back soon and be more with the kids on those days at home. It’s really funny, but when you hear your 4 and 2 year old kids say “Where’s daddy?” – “He’s twittering in the bedroom”, you realize that you might already sacrificing too much time

My wife has a Nokia E71 and is using Gravity a lot at the moment. This is really nice and actually the first time she’s using one of my applications. ( The apps I’ve done before were too specialized anyways. )

She’s also very much interested in social networks and for example knows a lot more about Facebook than I am. So she’s giving a lot of feedback how to improve Gravity.

Unlike most Symbian apps, the User Interface and User Experience of Gravity is most enjoyable and effective. Some say it’s the best twitter app any platform could possibly have. What’s your design concept?

There’s usually only one “concept” for an application that I am working on:

It must fit my personal needs and I have to like its design.

I am very picky with the “look” (user interface) of my applications. I can tweak a font size or color gradient for hours and still not being satisfied with it the next day.

The trouble is that I am just a programmer and by no means a designer or “graphics artist.” Working on the design of an application takes an awful lot of time for me, because it’s all trial and error over and over again.

I am also not a fan of “paradigms”. I don’t really care about user interface guidelines of a platform (like S60.) I want the applications to look good and be “pleasing to the eye.”

The best test for this is to look at something you’ve done after a day, after a week and after a month. If you don’t like it the next day, throw it away and start again. If you don’t like it after a week think about some major modifications. If you don’t like it after a month, you might need only slight modifications.

Usually, I don’t start to dislike my “designs” after day or two, but I stick with modifying them as long as I can bear with them =)

Strangely, with Gravity I still like the UI – I am actually amazed by Gravity’s UI from time to time. This never happend before and I must admit that part of it is just pure luck. (A couple of my design decisions were actually “accidents” and not planned at all.)

Have you met some challenges during the development of Gravity?  Did you conquer to achieve that?

The biggest problem with the UI design on S60v5 (N97, 5800) is that those phones are incredibly underpowered for smooth UI effects. In Gravity I started with a “hack” to get around it quickly and planned to “fix” this hack later. I am still using this early days hack for the smooth scrolling and as you probably seen in fullscreen mode on the N97 or 5800, scrolling could be a lot smoother than it is right now.

The other problem with S60 is the vast number of different phones with different LCDs, different screen resolutions, different fonts, etc. A color gradient can look extremely good on the Nokia N95, but the same gradient is bearly noticable on the Nokia E61i for example.

Any Plan for IM or other application? When will we see them？

Before working on Gravity, I developed an IRC client named WirelessIRC. I wanted to add IM to it, but never succeeded. I’m not sure if I ever will create an IM client. An IM client with a Gravity-like user interface would be cool, but I’m not sure if I have the time and resources for it.

About Gravity, any blueprint for Gravity’s coming features？Would you tell us the top 5 features on the list?

I don’t have a fixed To-do list at the moment, but there are a number of important changes that I’m planning for Gravity:
1.) finally fix the scrolling and have an “unlimited” list without a “more …” mechanism (but this will take long time to implement.)
2.) The User profile view will receive a major overhaul soon.
3.) The Friends and Followers view will be completely rewritten.
4.) The Image section must finally allow you to select any picture from the phone and also offer you to pick a video/audio file for uploading.
5.) The “message editor” will be rewritten. You should be able to select the accounts where to send the message to, add #hashtags or precomposed messages (templates/drafts), shorten URLs, add pictures or videos right when creating a tweet.

How do you determain your to do list? I mean how do you decide what feature would be top and second，and so on?

Usually I implement the features depending on my “mood” – if I want them right now or not. However, with all the nice feedback coming in, I try to work on what’s most requests or seems to be most urgent for the users of Gravity.

About develop Platform
As a mobile app developer, what do you think of the other mobile OS, like iPhone, Android, etc?

One of the first things I did when starting to develop Gravity was to buy me an Apple iPod Touch. I’ve checked out most of the Twitter clients on the iPod Touch (iPhone) platform because many of them are just great examples of a easy but powerful UI. I am trying not be a “fanboy” and check out other platforms to see if they are better and where I could learn from or copy from.

I think the iPhone is the best mobile platform at the moment. It’s what all of us “mobile professionals” dreamed of in the early days of mobile phones in 2000 and 2001 when we only got WAP via CSD and GPRS and teethering a iPAQ PocketPC with a Motorola GPRS phone was “state-of-the-art”. It’s funny and sad at the same time that the iPhone just ran over established smartphone platforms like Symbian and now leads the whole industry by such a large margin.

But this doesn’t mean Symbian couldn’t catch up quickly. Without being impudent or arrogant, I’d say that Gravity is an example for this. You can create applications on Symbian that are as attractive as applications on the iPhone.

Android is another example: a new platform that’s very exciting and trying to catch up with the iPhone starting from scratch.

Do you plan to come up with apps or port Gravity to other platforms?

I am not sure about porting Gravity – mainly because of my limited resources and because I like Symbian a lot. If I’m porting, Android and Maemo are the top candidates at the moment.

Gravity users always say it is the best twitter client compared with clients used in other mobile platforms，even among destop applications. Do you know and focus any other twitter clients？or would you learn from them？

I’ve learned a lot from the original Tweetie twitter client for iPhone. It’s very simple – basically just a Twitter “browser” – but that’s what’s making it special. I think it’s the best client on the iPhone (even better than Tweetie 2.0) and if it could run in the background it would be a strong contender of Gravity

I don’t like the Adobe Air based PC Twitter clients like TweetDeck or Seesmic so much. When I’m not tweeting via Gravity, I just use the web interface. On the other hand I am trying to keep up with the developments on those PC clients. There are a possibly some nice features which are worth considering to add to Gravity.

Is Symbian a great platform for developing an ideal client？

Yes. Symbian is a great platform for developers. There’s a lot of talk about Symbian being difficult to learn and such. I don’t think this is true. Those “rumours” are probably just a combination of bragging and protectionism.

do you think you can make it on Symbian？Will webOS，Maemo or iphone lead the future？
webOS、Maemo 或 iPhone 会引领未来么？

When starting with Gravity I wanted to create the best mobile Twitter client – and of course I picked my platform of choice, Symbian. I do believe that for a Twitter client, Symbian can deliver all that’s needed and doesn’t stand back from the iPhone OS or Android.

To be fair I must admit that the browser on Symbian (S60) isn’t state-of-the-art anymore and that’s probably a disadvantage over Android and the iPhone (when you’re visiting links from a tweet.)

About international version
will there be a chinese language version？ （surely ifanr.com will help you)

I’m not sure about this yet. I’ve never done localisation and will have to check how I can add this to the project. As I am moving very quickly at the moment ( adding new features every now and then ) I would hate to have partially translated UIs only where the new features are in English and the old are in Chinese for example.

On the other hand I understand that there are a lot of countries where Gravity could be much more successfull with a localized version – China being the most prominent example possibly.

there are a huge number of users for Twitter-like services in China, would you support them directly or support them throught hellotxt?

I’ve been contacted by other Twitter-like services from China already and I am looking forward to add support for them. I must admit that I haven’t replied to one of the last request still, as I am just overwhelmed by the feedback for Gravity.

what smartphone are you using? do you prefer touch or qwerty one?

I initially used my Nokia N95 when starting to develop Gravity. A good choice, because the N95 is limited by the low RAM.

Currently my preferred phone for Gravity is the N97. It’s actually close to perfect for my needs. But recently I started to use my Nokia E71 and E52 a lot more. When I’m on the move today, I am taking the E52 and N97 with me.

It seems that qwerty phones are more suitable than others for twitter, would you be optimized for qwerty phone such as E71, N97?

When working with the N95 as my main development phone in January-March, I quickly learned to love T9 for entering (basic) English texts. It’s amazing how fast you can type with T9 when using English. It’s not working at all when trying to enter text in German, my native language, by the way.

I think for most older people, qwerty phones such as the E71 are the best choice for tweeting or SMSing. Actually, the E71 is the most successfull Gravity phone, and I think the second is the N97 already.

All kinds of web2.0 application like twitter are going into smartphone, how will them effect smartphone and internet world?

I am very sceptical of any predictions in the internet world. I’ve seen far too many forecasts that were utterly wrong. Twitter itself is a nice example: no one could have thought about it’s success let alone planning it.

On the other hand, when I got interested in web 2.0 in 2006 or so, I immediately thought about “porting” it to my S60 phones. I think many web 2.0 services make more sense on a mobile phone than on a PC web browser.

However, you usually have to adapt the service carefully for a mobile phone. A one-to-one copy of a web service to a mobile phone will never succeed in my opinion. And I believe that there will always be a difference between using the internet from a PC and using it from a mobile phone.

About Business and Crack
seems that Crack has always been with Shareware. Someone even say crack version would promote registration. What do you think? what would you do to try to protect Gravity?

I am hesitant to comment on this. However, I think your assumption is correct: you will never be able to stop piracy. You need to take as much counter measures as possible, but without annyoing the legitimate users.

the price for Gravity is worthy. but to Chinese may be a little pricey.would you provide a local price for deveoping countries like China?

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and eventually I will come up with a “solution” for differentiating the price. I think China would be one case, but also India for example and South America as well.

I can tell you a story: at the same time when you were starting your first bulk order for ifanr from China – a developing country – I was getting requests from employees of companies like Nokia for sending them free copies of Gravity! There was also this discussion about Gravity being overprized started by someone living and working in London, one of the major and most expensive capitals of the “western world.” It’s a weird world. What else can you say?

So after all, I think it would only be fair to have a variable pricing. I am not sure how to implement this yet, though.

would you tell us how many copies saled so far？are you satisfied with the number？

I haven’t decided yet if and how I’d release my sales numbers. What I can say though is that I am completely overwhelmed by the success and currently can live from the sales of Gravity alone. I really hope that this will continue for a while and that I am able to extend and improve Gravity.

HelloTXT or support other dedicated services from China?

HelloTXT is still on the Todo list. For the dedicated services from China I would love to get some feedback from you as to which service would be most important or best to start with. I’ve checked on service a couple of months ago and figured that the documents were in Chinese, so I might need some translation help when the automatic translation by Google fails to reveal something meaningful

upload picture to Flickr just like twitpic?

Flickr is planned and partly implemented already.

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