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Adobe's CTO Pitches 'Apps Near You' Concept
angry tapir writes "Next-generation applications will be location-specific, offering users information and features related to where they are at any given moment, Adobe Systems CTO Kevin Lynch, said at the Open Mobile Summit conference. 'Apps near you,' as he called the idea, would pop up on mobile screens when a user is close to a specific location. Lynch showed the example of someone with a Samsung tablet visiting a museum and being able to download a guide application."
Whilst there are useful examples for local apps, the most common thing is going to be advertising brochures.
many sites have location-aware store finders, etc. You can do a location aware serach for "museum brochure" and probably get the same result.
I smell apple marketing something that is already being done as somehow being their "new innovation"
I can easily imagine an example of someone with a Samsung tablet visiting a museum and being able to download a 'guide' application, despite the fact that the museum doesn't actually offer one.
I refuse to use
Who do you trust? Location aware listener apps on your device? Network position monitorins? An NFC tag taped to a wall?
From flash ads on browsers, Adobe offers a vision of you walking and an ad ringing you every 50 ft.
Thank you Adobe for this great IT innovation. Now we have to wait for a another smart Russian to offer tools to remove your pre installed "Kevin"ware from our telco locked phones.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
How about they just focus for a little while on flashplayer-that-doesn't-suck.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
In a similar way, do they get uninstalled when you leave the relevant location? Didn't RTFA obviously, but I bet not. What a spam-alicious idea.
:)
"Will be possible soon", TFA says. How is any of this not possible now? Local wi-fi can happily direct you to an internal web page for app download. Wifi/BT signal strength can determine position within the given building/area.
The entire article reads like something a visionary might have said a few decades ago. Saying it today, just shows you don't actually have anything interesting to talk about.
The BBC news website really went downhill when it was no longer possible to tell it where you were.
When I'm at work it's now convinced I live in the US. Even on the UK specific page it now tells me when the page was last updated in ET time.
I also get a "US view" of the world on the front page which is less than ideal.
Tim.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
We found that, for reasons we just can't wrap our heads around, the phrase "Gilded Benthamite labyrinth from which there is no waking" just didn't resonate with the focus groups... After that setback, we had to go with "social". Only losers with no friends can be against "social".
Awesome, sounds like a great idea. So does country recognition for browsers... until you are in a country whose language still gives you headaches. You might be surprised at how very unhelpful it is to someone struggling with the language to have everything popping up in Czech. Perhaps a flag to turn this off? Like google's secretive /ncr, only one that works a little more globally? I have no problem ignoring the ads in any language, but when shotwell tries to log me into facebook, I don't want the username/password prompt in Czech. Prosím? Maybe there's a case where I might fscking want to know what cars a company offers, so that when I get home I can buy one... instead of automatically being offered what is for sale in the city I happen to be logging in from. No?
'nuff said.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
The problems of course will be:
- the limited utility of advertising
- they won't make nice keepsakes or fit into a scrapbook
- hard to collect signatures on the app
- the theater being illuminated by _everyone_ having their cell phone out looking at the program
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Why cannot a museum has a good HTML page with an URL instead? What is wrong with an URL?
Wouldn't this be the ultimate vector for malware?
The other day I trought that could be interesting to have a open wifi with SSID "Play GalaxyMerchant", with this router not connected to the internet, and redirecting all the trafic to himself, then having on itself a copy of the open source web game Galaxy Merchant. This way, everyone near the router can play on it as a sorta... dedicated server. The problem is that to do so, would need to stay offline :-P ..so is not a great idea.
-Woof woof woof!
I remeber travelling to Spain last year and visiting a historic site which had posters at the entrance to download an app through wifi which was a virtual tourguide, qavailable in various languages etc...
It's management thinking that customers are big fat whales in need of opportunities to depense large and small sums of cash.
Not. And he is CTO of Adobe? I wonder for how much longer....
... if I'm likely to be eaten by a grue where I currently am.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The location-based push of data would be bad enough, but executable code is very bad. Human psychology says that people will not want to "miss out" on whatever is available and will turn off validation and other inhibitors to access these things.
Before long, rogue "location pushers" will be out there pushing things to devices and people will simply accept them to their doom.
It won't matter how many discussions slashdot and similar groups will have on the subject. It is demonstrably true that people will ignore and bypass any warnings presenting to get at anything they want regardless of how stupid it is. People do stupid things all the time for lots of reasons. This idea from Adobe is a dangerous one that can and will exploit more human stupidity.
And let's not forget that to make this happen, some sort of client or modification to the OS of various devices will have to be installed to make it possible. I guess Adobe and all simply haven't learned their lessons after all these years.
After going through the hell that is deploying adobe software (Acrobat Pro), no fecking way. They appear to be operating under the delusion that we all have unlimited disk space, RAM, and bandwidth. 1.5gb? Seriously???? And their patching "strategy" (msp fiels ina very specific order. Have to start back at the .0 rev and patch your way forward) is one of the biggest clusterfucks I've come across in recent memory. There are far better alternatives out there, more efficient, less expensive.
The only location-aware app I want is one that tells me how to stay far away from Adobe and its crapps at all times.
I remember specifically in 2000 at an IBM Developerworks conference, they were all hot for Teh Bluetooths, talking about how when you walk by a BT enabled vending machine it'd send a coupon to your phone.
I'm sure someone has been talking about this scenario for many more years than that. It's an advertisers wet dream.
Didn't want it then, don't want it now.. and unfortunately it's much more realistic now.
More spam to buzz my phone == fail, especially when it buzzes just because I'm walking by the shopping district to get to work. I'm sure you'll be able to disable it, for now - but even additional management of my mobile devices because of marketing drivel would piss me off.
No to teda musà bejt hrÅza!
AccountKiller
What the heck!? This is "desivy", slashdot cannot handle non-ascii alphabets? Or maybe it's because it knows I am posting from the US?
AccountKiller
Better than an app, if it were just a 'site' that was part of some larger networker, like, a web of sites. And when you did a proximity search you could see which sites were close to you. That'd be awesome.
Too bad hitchhikers guide to the galaxy had this a thousand years ago, prior art, suckers!
Why not just put a QR code near the entrance of the museum, or a web address?