Tech Dropbox

Amazon's powerful content play

2011-12-20T02:25:00.000-08:00

screen shot from the amazon comparison page.

Look at the default Kindle Fire pic vs. Apple's generic iPad2 pic.

Amazon has content front and center.

Apple's only showing off the sleekness of the iPad.

I think that's a strong message to consumers. Just worth noting that point.

Think about the iPhone ads that include some of the cool apps. They're all about the experience. Apple rarely makes a point of all the content available for you on iOS. So Amazon has found a good differentiator and is pushing it hard. Even if it's only a difference in the marketing, I think it's subconsciously powerful. The content brands are marketing for the kindle. You immediately associate it with things you already like.

Who's going to tell us what's natural?

2011-11-08T00:36:00.000-08:00

Remember when Steve Jobs introduced the iPad and told us all that it feels totally unnatural to reach out and touch your laptop screen?

How many times since then have you, after extensive tablet use, tried to touch your laptop screen? I just did it the other night, and was shocked when it didn't respond.

I remain convinced that the next version of OSX will support touch-screen iMacs, perhaps even touch-screen Macbooks. Until the news last month, I had planned on watching Steve some day tell us just how natural it is that we should be touching our Mac's screen. (Reality distortion field in full effect)

Now I wonder who it is at Apple who can pull that kind of a switch on us. Who at Apple will be up on stage contradicting what Steve told us less than two years ago? If it was Steve who was telling us, we would've swallowed it whole.

Who at Apple can contradict Steve like that, without batting an eyelash, the way (only?) Steve could?

Windows8 Contracts

2011-09-14T03:02:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to point out that Windows8 Contracts are very similar to my original idea for circumventing Multi-Tasking in iOS.

I don't think it's such a brand new idea, it's kinda fundamental in OOP, but still I'm glad someone is doing this. It's a great move. Contracts would really empower iOS, wish Apple was doing it. Wish it wasn't Microsoft in a hybrid desktop/tablet OS though. I'd prefer if they rewrote windows and threw out most of the Windows part.

To be honest I think they'd prefer that as well, but if they made a move like that they'd alienate too many people and throw the company into a seemingly very risky move. By claiming they aren't taking windows off life-support they're buying time until everyone is convinced they can pull off the new tablet-focused OS -- at which point I do hope they shuffle off the dead skin that is windows 7 and under.

The revolution is about iteration

2011-05-11T01:14:00.000-07:00

It took me almost two years, but I now see why, where, and how Apple, or rather iOS, is doomed.

Don't get me wrong. It isn't going anywhere, and for Baby Boomers, and anyone who grew up with a keyboard, Apple will be your 'transitional item' (aka. blankey) that you can grip white-knuckled to cope with your fear of technology.

Yes, you will definitely fear technology as it advances. The pace is increasing all the time, we all know that. But that pace will become frighteningly fast and the only ones who will be able to keep up are the children born into the Touch generation.

Apple brought about this revolution, but it can't control it, and more to the point of this post, it cannot keep up with it.

Google is no angel, and yes, they do Evil, they're a corporation, but they get Beta and they get iteration in a way that is beyond the Apple mindset of pursuing perfection.

Perfection is something you work on when something is timeless, like art or music. Technology cannot be perfected because perfection requires reflection and pacing.

People don't actually perceive speed -- the Earth is hurtling through space at an unimaginable pace but it goes unnoticed. We perceive acceleration. When something is accelerating quickly our brain says "wow that's fast!" If a car accelerates slowly from 100 mph to 120 mph over the course of even 10 seconds, we won't notice the change at all, but if it accelerates from 100 to 120 in under 3 seconds, we'll think it's going 150 mph.

The acceleration of technological advance is going to leave us breathless. Apple's strive for perfection is going to seem downright plodding in the coming years. This will be a tremendous comfort to all those who are scared of this breakneck pace, but to those who are born into it, ADD won't begin to describe how they will fidget with impatience.

Google doesn't understand people, nor does it understand art, but it understands algorithms and code better than anyone else in the world. It iterates almost flawlessly. The best way to keep up with the kind of technological change we are talking about is to iterate. as. fast. as. you. can.

Safari, Explorer, and Firefox just cannot keep up with Chrome's rate of iteration. This is the writing on the wall.

You know what tipped me off: The Xoom. It's a crummy tablet; better than any other android tablet out there, but still crummy, not even close to the iPad 2. Did you see what Google did with the Xoom at Google I/O? Maybe you missed it. It wasn't anything spectacular, but it was a symbol of things to come. Google is being held back by the hardware, by the OEMs. As soon as something half-decent shipped, they started surging forward. For every millimeter of progress the Android OEMs make, Google will be leaping forward.

Apple's only hope is to learn to iterate faster. Even so, no matter how fast it iterates, it can't keep up with a company who never plans to make it out of Beta. Google will perfect nothing, and that is, sadly, what is going to leave Apple in the dust.

I'm a little sad for what we are going to lose along the way.

Xoom vs. iPad 2

2011-04-10T01:06:00.000-07:00

Got to play with them both today and they're both cool, but:

The Xoom feels like the iPad did a year ago, a lot of potential but no clear direction how to access and make use of all that potential.
Xoom's UI feels too small too empty for the screen real estate
iPad 2 is so polished, definitely a generation ahead of the Xoom.
With the iPad 2, it's already clear what you will be able to do with it, and it does a great job of exposing those capabilities, much more compelling than the original iPad, mainly because of the ecosystem that grew around the iPad 1, and more importantly the crowd consciousness of the ecosystem.
Xoom will make people happy, and it will find it's niche uses within the next year or so, 2nd generation will be a real contender. because it's already a contender performance-wise, there won't be such a big gap between iPad 3 and Xoom 2, hardware-wise.
The ecosystem will really make or break the competition between iPad 3 and Xoom 2 class devices when they arrive.

Summary: I'm liking the future of the computer industry. Make no mistake, this is where the entire computer industry is going, it'll only take one human generation to get there. Tablets offer so much superiority in the way of immersive interface paradigms that we're only beginning to take advantage of.

MVC for Javascript (tl;dr)

2011-04-05T03:15:00.000-07:00

There's a great in depth article on developing MVC apps in Javascript here: http://peter.michaux.ca/articles/mvc-architecture-for-javascript-applications

It's something I've been thinking a lot about lately and was excited to find someone had written about it. The article is short sweet and to the point, but for the tl;dr generation I'll summarize it here:

model: (a) All data sits in model. (b) Fires events when data changes. [server-side communication happens here. knows nothing about DOM.]
view: (a) Listens to model events. (b) Calls handlers in controller. [all DOM interaction happens here. don't use ids, so that views can be reusable within same page. knows nothing about state/logic.]
controller: (a) Decides how to respond to user interaction. (b) Modifies the model. [abstract logic]

iPhone 4 engineering will not be matched

2011-03-29T07:26:00.000-07:00

I think the iPhone 4 will be one of those classic engineering efforts that won't be matched in future products. Apple had the luxury of producing something really special and tried to outclass android handsets. In the end it is class that will win this for them but rather ease of use and ecosystem which means that future handsets will likely have to be slightly lower build quality because they'll have to compete on cost and lower profit margins.

I'm not saying that future iPhones will be low quality pieces of garbage -- they'll only grow more reliable, but the build quality of the iPhone 4 won't be matched again, unless they split the iPhone into basic and pro level products in future.

Verizon iPhone and AT&T's early upgrade eligibility

2011-01-16T01:53:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to note that my prediction proved correct: AT&T allowed early upgrade eligibility for anyone whose contract ended in 2010 for the iPhone 4, and their reasoning was in face a January 2011 Verizon iPhone.

They weren't being nice guys, they were grabbing their last chance to lock you in to AT&T for another two years before they lost their iPhone exclusivity.

the real-time web is turning you into a neuron

2011-01-13T06:44:00.000-08:00

I thought about tweeting a condolence. I could possibly chime in on the debate regarding hate speech and Sarah Palin’s role in all of this. Or maybe I’d offer a contrarian view about the pace at which each of us seems to achieve a level of certainty on any given topic. I’ve got to tweet something, right? This is what we do. Read, react, repeat. Sure, I had only known who Gabrielle Giffords was for about twenty minutes, but why should having no background on a topic and knowing almost none of the details about an event prevent me from serving up a concrete viewpoint? - Dave Pell @ Tweetage Wasteland

He makes a good point. It isn't new, but it is important to remember. The more that sharing becomes prestigious and the more we learn to value ourselves based on any kind of metric of viewership the more urgent the desire to share becomes.

Keep in mind that our ability to process and introspect doesn't change with this urgency, only our need to share whatever processing and introspection we do. I've been thinking a lot about how to teach my 3yr old about delay of gratification. I know that's expecting a lot, today 30 yr old people have trouble with delaying gratification. Still, if we don't figure it out, we become slaves to our urgent need to share. We will only do whatever minor processing and introspection is necessary to create the least amount of novelty that we can justify sharing.

As this plays out long term we are reducing our role as living thinking human beings to a more limited role as only part of the 'thinking' experience. We each become a cog in a larger thinking machine in which each person performs only a very basic level of processing and it is only through our collective networking that the thinking machine can arrive at actual fully digested thoughts. We are becoming less significant, just one neuron in a larger global brain. (It sounds so b-movie sci-fi but that doesn't make it not true.)

CVS and Dropbox

2011-01-12T03:12:00.000-08:00

The most popular search terms that drive traffic to this site are in the title. I bring it up again because recently my students were realizing the need for source control. While they are learning to be web developers and experience with a Version Control System will be essential down the road, as they are only beginners right now, it's an added complication they don't need.

So I explained to them how for my private projects I use Dropbox as a poor-man's CVS, they were very excited by the prospect of being able to access their code both in class and from home in addition to gaining free version backups.

There is a lot of criticism of this kind of idea in the Dropbox forums and there is a lot of truth to it. This is no replacement for a real Source Control system for a team of developers or even a lone developer who will suffer financial loss if his codebase rots. This is only a convenience for someone who otherwise wouldn't be using a Source Control system.

This is especially important to a budding developer who makes one accidental change and then goes through hours of progressively destroying their one file full of code trying to undo that mistake. For this particular use case, Dropbox is a perfect solution as a CVS.

Otherwise you might want to check out git and github as a great solution to storing your code centrally and tracking any changes you've been making. Unfortunately if you'd like to keep your code to yourself you will need to pay for the privilege 7$/month is a lot though, to me anyways.

The other reason many people search for CVS and Dropbox is in order to learn how to store your repository files (of an actual Source Control system) in a Dropbox for backup purposes. This thread on Dropbox's forums has a discussion of this. Be warned according to someone in the forum it has been known to fail fantastically, all of a sudden.

Mac App Store allows iOS developers additional revenue streams

2011-01-12T02:49:00.000-08:00

Apple is really turning on the pressure by saying: Once you own a mac (which you need to in order to develop iOS apps) and you know Objective-C, and you are familliar with Xcode. Why not put in a little bit of effort and offer apps for OSX as well? You can make additional returns on your same basic investment.

Apple is now offering developers one development environment which allows you access to three of the five main screens in a person's life, computer, tablet, and mobile. The remaining two are TV and the windshield of your car. AppleTV doesn't support Apps yet, but you have to be a fool to think they aren't coming.

Google will most likely beat Apple to the windshield, but lets see if they can do anything compelling there.

The difference between Microsoft or Google offerings: Each of their solutions to the 3 screens in which Apple currently competes requires different development tools and know-how. XBOX apps are not Windows apps are not Windows Phone 7 apps. ChromeOS apps are not Android apps are not Google TV apps. [Although I'm expecting Google to pull an interesting move in this space and allow Chrome Apps to work on Android and GoogleTV, which would make Chrome Apps the most interesting for developers who want to maximize their screen reach.]

Apple is playing to developers in a completely different mode than their competitors are. Developer lock-in in iOS will continue at a nice clip, it's such a lucrative market when you already know that people who purchase Apple products have already proven their willingness to shell out cash for premium products.

This should at least compensate developers for the rigorous (to say the least) App store admission process. Which I think is a good thing. Apple is first educating developers to be responsible about the user experience for the software they release, and then is rewarding them for good behavior by allowing them access to a growing number of screens and customers who are ready to pay for responsible user experience.

It's a net win for the world in my opinion. Because there's plenty of room for Microsoft and Android to commercialize anyone who doesn't fit the Apple mold, but those competing products will still need to compete on usability and making it easy for developers to access their markets.

A Tale of Two Layers: The Private web and the Public web

2011-01-12T01:18:00.000-08:00

tl;dr: Rather than fighting about Privacy or Sharing we should be developing two layers of the web in tandem: a 'Privacy Layer' and a 'Real Person Layer.'

Quora seems to be reproducing the success of Wikipedia but capitalizing on authority by leveraging real people with real names. Instead of an anonymously sourced Wikipedia article, you have answers backed by the authority of a particular persona. This has the advantage of (1) letting people know if they should take this person seriously, (2) this person's answer will now be a matter of public record, so their status and 'street cred' rides on the accuracy of their answers.

It seems that real people and real faces are what make Facebook such a resoundingly popular site. Finally you don't need to guess which of the friends whose phone number or email you do have, might have a way to get in touch with one of your old pals with whom you've been out of touch. You can just friend them on facebook and whenever you need to be in touch with them in the future, you can just poke/message/post them.

All of this makes me wonder what other Web Successes out there will be reinvented as real people with real names. Search comes to mind. Eventually someone will come up with a better search than google, based on the social graph. By better I don't mean algorithmically or even measurably better, but something that feels more helpful to a person trying to find something they need. (I suggest when it is created, that that industry focus on the verb 'Find' rather than 'Search,' which is what a person would rather be doing.)

There's also room for a Real People Amazon, and a Real People EBay. This space could get extremely interesting. Also a formalized Real People Tumblr or other centralized blogging podium.

In some ways it will greatly improve the web experience. The web's inherent anonymity is great, and it definitely isn't going anywhere, but that's what I would call a 'Privacy layer' of the Web. There's another layer where open sharing and known identities can be extremely meaningful in addition to just being useful.

It's at the crossroads between these two layers that everyone is running in to trouble. When Mark Zuckerberg talks about the benefits of sharing he's really talking about the benefits of a 'Real Person' layer on the web. When critics fire back that people should have the right to hide whatever they want, they're talking about the 'Privacy Layer.' I think for the web to be truly useful we'll need to develop both layers.

The color of fresh: Green

2011-01-06T03:17:00.000-08:00

With the new Starbucks logo going green, I couldn't help but first feeling like something is missing. It took me a minute to realize the shift that is in the process of taking place. Around the year 2000 the hottest color around was blue. Everything was being branded in blue, lots and lots of blue.

In the mid 2000s, like ~2006 all of a sudden orange and reds, warm colors, became the in color. At least where brands and especially the web were concerned.

Here we are in 2011, and here's an initial indicator (maybe I missed plenty of earlier ones) that green is the new blue. Green is in. Whip out your photoshops or illustrators or whatever it is you use and get cracking on those new green logos.

Touching up Photos: what are pictures for?

2011-01-04T23:51:00.000-08:00

For the second time in as many weeks I've seen some nice photos only to realize after the fact that they had been severely touched up. Keep in mind that these photos were meant as keepsakes, records of events from the past, so that they wouldn't be forgotten. When you touch up a photo which is supposed to be an easy way to keep an account of the past, what are you doing? Revising history? Seeing the past through rose-colored glasses? Seems innocent, but how innocent is it really?

Years later, your children may come across touched up pictures of you from your youth. Let's say they made you look a few pounds slimmer in the photos. Your children may aspire to look like you, or at least that fictitious you, and eventually may accomplish the goal. So, basically you've set in motion a chain of events where your children might work to keep a better figure than you did, in a way you've done them a favor, right? Lets say that your daughter, now twenty and looking exactly like fictitious you, happens upon that outfit you were wearing in that picture, and tries it on. Suddenly the outfit is a couple of sizes bigger than it should be and she's swimming in it, that's a weird bit of cognitive dissonance. Right there your child might lose respect for you, for deceiving them all these years. What if she tortured herself to be as slim as you were in this picture? What if she earned it through a lot of sweat and tears? Yeah, she may be healthier or better off, but she just lost faith in everything you ever taught her. Maybe all of it, all of the life lessons, the morals were just touched-up stories? Is it worth it?

What it comes down to is this: When you can remix history to conform to your ideal rather than the reality of the past, you end up with a fairytale that sounds good at first but can have both subtle and serious repercussions down the road.

Yeah, when we're talking about creating art or marketing, then photo touch-ups make sense, but the same examples still apply. Look what we're doing to ourselves by exposing ourselves to non-stop fairytale touch-ups everywhere we look.

iOS alarm clock bug - strike two: not the kind of emotional experience Apple was shooting for

2011-01-02T00:44:00.000-08:00

Everyone keeps touting the "emotional experience" of the iOS and Apple products in general. In light of that point of view, which I think is definitely accurate (if you ignore the fact that it is a pleasant 'emotional' experience to own something that is 'cool.') Apple should be firing someone over this Alarm clock bug fiasco. There have been a number of major iOS controversies: (1) AntennaGate, (2) the White iPhone4, (3) AT&T's crummy service, (4) children making in-app purchases by mistake, (5) App store developer woes and more.

This is a different kind of problem.

When people wake up late, when you make your customers look sloppy or delinquent, you create a lot of bad brand-karma. In this case iOS is solely responsible for causing its users to look bad. That's the exact opposite of the emotional experience Apple is going for. When you carry around an iPhone they want you to look good.

Now, the fact that it happened once was a royal screwup, but hey, today we live in a beta world. Failing twice just means that Apple doesn't care. They've used up a lot of their credit with this mess. They're extremely lucky that much of their largest markets are on holiday January First, and that's the only thing they have going for them with this problem.

Whoever let this happen twice is going to hang at Apple, and if Apple doesn't get it right this time, if they strike out on this super-simple super-basic iOS core functionality -- then they will lose a lot of credibility.

For the doubters: One important side consideration is that the younger demographic will care a lot less about this screwup, but the younger demographic is also the most fickle. It's the older demographic that will power the iOS market ahead of the Android market, and it's the older demographic that has the most money to spend. If that older demographic moves away from iOS because they can't rely on it, then that's a loss Apple will not be able to recoup and it could actually turn this into a Windows vs. Mac repeat.

Apple's secret weapon is that iOS actually makes computing easier for the larger and older and richer demographic. I can't emphasize enough that this is the demographic they are screwing over by breaking basic alarm clock functionality. If they lock this demographic into iOS, which they're doing, they've secured their short term future and can focus on dominating the long term mobile market.

Another crazy Apple Prediction: Channels

2010-12-30T07:24:00.000-08:00

I thought about this a while back and never posted it (nice to know I censor myself sometimes?) because I didn't think it ultimately very likely, but I'll put it out there because it isn't unthinkable, and if it were to happen, I could point to this post and say: "See? I thought this might happen" -- more or less exactly what I did with Antennagate which I all but predicted a month before the iPhone4 release.

One of the reasons Apple may be holding back on subscription services is that they may want to make a major play for bundling various media into channels: Rather than subscribing to the NYTimes, you could subscribe to "US leading newspapers" and get the NYTimes, WSJ, Washington Times, for one low price, kind of like an album, or in cable television lingo, a channel.

What's cool is that with Apple's iTunes store being multi-media, the channels could include books, podcasts, apps, music, movies and tv in a single channel.

They could have a Parenthood channel, a SciFi channel, a Self-Help (Lifehacker?) channel, a Cooking channel, a Gaming channel, a Womens channel, a MAKE channel, etc etc.

I don't know that they could ever quite pull it off, or whether they could pull it off in a way that would be advantageous to them, but think of the customer lock-in that could achieve. Sure Android might have all the same popular apps, but you can't purchase them for one low price along with related TV/Music/books/podcasts/magazine/newspapers etc.

Steve Jobs could very well usurp Howard Stern for the title King of All Media.

Getting rid of web ads for your engaged users

2010-12-22T00:50:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking for a while about how annoying advertising is. I don't like it as a fundamental business model because it is based on distraction and annoyance, or more specifically intrusion. Intrusive ads are intrusive ideas being injected into your subconscious. Nobody actually wants those intrusive ideas there.

One of the solutions that occurred to me is a variation on the Freemium model. Rather than charging money to remove advertising, why not simply allow the users to share more data in exchange for removing advertising?

That data, in other words, what might be considered good clean data would be potentially very valuable. As opposed to a pay wall, or a login wall, we'd be giving away all the services for free, but only people who want to engage those services, who bother to create a user account would be free from the advertising annoyance. In other words we'd reward engagement with an ad-free experience.

How does this work financially? Engaged users will inevitably be the minority of most free services. You won't take a very significant hit on the advertising income, assuming your particular service doesn't serve primarily engaged users. (ie. anything with a pay or login wall, or services that are meaningless without engagement, Facebook perhaps?) And, on the positive side, you will be gaining valuable information in terms of demographics and any content generated by the engaged crowd that you can then sell.

The currency would be a little lack of privacy in exchange for no advertising. I bet a lot of people would bite. The more people you would engage, and not show advertising, would in turn build buzz and momentum for your service (assuming they like using it and would want to evangelize, if it's free, useful, and enjoyable, that should be a given, but is it?) and generate a valuable database of information.

One important point is that the demographic info of the engaged users could be used to zero in on the ad demographic for those who visit but never engage. (they aren't necessarily a different demographic, just less engaged.)

Seems like a win-win.

Playbook won't walk the walk

2010-11-17T23:23:00.000-08:00

I don't really have a reputation to stake on it, but I'll stick my foot in my mouth anyways..

The from all the noise, smoke, and mirrors they are creating around the RIM Playbook, it's clearly going to disappoint when it hits the market. They should do less marketing and just ship it, let the users speak for it if it really is so great.

However, if it's just another half-thought-out solution for the 'tablet computing' space, then you might as well cancel the program now and not ship.

It's hard to make a case that the enterprise NEEDS tablet computing, and the enterprise is really the only market RIM still holds.

People, end users, need tablets for consuming and creating media, but the enterprise is usually situated in front of a desk, with a, how do I say this? desktop pc sitting there on that desktop.

If you want to make the case for niches within the enterprise then there is a small market for secure, remotely administrable tablet computing. (Real Estate, Hospitals, Inventory)

Don't get me wrong Tablets and touch interfaces are where the future is going, and people will want them, but the enterprise doesn't gain a major advantage by heavily embracing them, instead they create a problem of more portable, concealable assets each one of which poses a risk of 'accidentally' outing confidential enterprise data.

Windows Phone 7 - DOA - Dumb on Arrival.

2010-11-17T02:22:00.000-08:00

There go any illusions I entertained about making my next phone a Windows Phone 7 phone..

the official Windows Phone 7 documentation explains the rest. When storage is added to a Win 7 phone, it performs the following tasks:

It reformats the SD card

It creates a single file system that spans the internal storage and the SD card.

It locks the card to the phone with an automatically generated key.

Once the SD card is integrated, removing it will kill all phone functionality save for emergency calls; the phone will only function if the original SD card is reinserted.

http://hothardware.com/News/Windows-Phone-7-Allegedly-Breaks-MicroSD-Cards/

Why bother to put an 'expandable SD card slot' might as well make it like an iPhone and have fixed memory and leave it at that. The more smart phones come to market, the more I can appreciate how many things Apple did right.

To give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt, it sounds like this 'feature' is focused on enterprise business users and ensuring your phone data is secure. But it's still horribly crippling to everyone else who just wanted a phone where they could swap in and out extra memory chips to transfer files and whatnot.

Microsoft doing what it does best: Not thinking about the users.

And I was actually really optimistic about WP7, I was considering getting one.

The Beatles were only a test..

2010-11-17T01:17:00.000-08:00

Apple is priming itself as the premier release channel.

Any time they do something to draw attention the entire wired world joins in and gives it to them. Whether it's negative or positive Apple has proven they can draw more attention than any other Technology OR Media company.

The Beatles was the first time they called everyone together for a pow-wow about something so insignificant.

It's just Apple proving they are the ideal staging ground for releasing anything you would like to create the ultimate media frenzy. Apple is pointing out to anyone who may have doubted, they are so cool that if they want, when they release new content to the iTunes store, they can have everyone hold their breath for twenty-four hours. Even if everyone has already heard or seen that content before!

That's what this was. Apple's flexing its cool.

Macbook Air - a salute to the digital generation

2010-10-26T01:06:00.000-07:00

There's my generation, the digital generation -- we were born into an analog age, and lived through the digital revolution. But we'd better be ready to move over for the touch generation, born into the digital age, but growing and learning on the brink of the touch revolution. The iPad was the shot heard round the world, the beginning of the end for the digital revolution.

The Macbook Air is sort of a final salute to us, the digital generation, the people who still feel more comfortable with keyboards and multi-windowed interfaces. We're on the way out, but Apple is making our "later years" more comfortable.

The huge difference rests in the market applicability: Digital-age computers will always be useful and intuitive to the minority of the world population, let's say the 20%. Touch-generation appliances are intuitive to the other 80%. The future market is in Touch. OSX Tiger is a bid to allow Digital-agers the benefits of the Touch revolution, but it won't bring the Touch people into the Digital OSX camp. Yes, there will (almost) always be high-powered computers with physical keyboards (for another half a generation or so anyways) for specific purposes, like developing applications, but still they're going to go away, just like punch-card computers are no more. Touch is just more versatile, more intuitive, smoother, and less of a buffer between mind and machine.

In short, the Air will never have the mass-applicability of the iPad, yet as far as the current computing market goes (don't forget it's the 20%) it's a huge windfall. Instant-on, oh so light, and oh so quiet, it's halfway there, but only halfway. Don't get me wrong, multitouch on my Macbook Pro is addictive but only compared to the lack thereof on the PC -- it's nothing close to the potential of what will be with the iPad. Our children will never understand how we used to interact with our devices via keyboard and mouse.

Maybe it'll look like this:

The middle man - Windows Phone 7

2010-10-21T04:16:00.000-07:00

Though I think the name is a really poor choice, I'm impressed with their direction and I think they will hash out an ideal existence between iOS and Android. iOS being too closed, Android being too open, and Windows Phone 7 being juuuust right. Their biggest endorsement of this is the improved use of notifications over iOS -- iOS's achilles heal, in my opinion.

They might actually get something right for a change, only time will tell.

[as a side note, I have to acknowledge that XBox being integrated into Windows Phone 7 means we've taken another step closer to the world of Snowcrash. Kind of the same step we're taking with iOS and AppleTV.]

Twitter is Skynet

2010-09-21T02:24:00.000-07:00

Think about it. The most likely place for emergent consciousness would be on twitter. It's basically a giant neural network where each person is a node. Retweeting would be amplifying and transmitting a signal, ignoring a tweet lets the unimportant signals die down. Facebook, although it has more nodes is too spread out in terms of user focus to act as a classic neural net. Most of the nodes are just playing farmville.

Today I thought about creating a World Brain TV site that could keep track of the realtime trending topics of twitter, grabbing all video, audio, and picture content for those trending topics and mash them into a constant TV station that gives you a glance into the collective consciousness of twitter. It wouldn't be too hard to do. You could even intersperse it with relevant advertisements.

You are the product

2010-09-13T00:16:00.000-07:00

brilliant statement (via Daring Fireball)

If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.

(- blue_beetle via MeFi)

The TV as just a big screen

2010-09-02T04:19:00.000-07:00

That kind of sums up Apple's new approach to AppleTV. In terms of AppleTV I'm for it. My mother in law just got rid of her old sattelliteTV contract in favor of going it alone with AppleTV. But she's got the last model of the AppleTV -- too complicated to use easily. It's hard for her to get it to do what she would like.

This new Apple approach where basically if you've got your iPhone or iPod lying around you just stream media from it to the TV is a great idea. One of my biggest problems is getting media on to her AppleTV for her -- either detach it and walk it over to a computer, or plug in a USB Flash drive. (the better option, but I think that's only available if you jailbreak your AppleTV)

Being able to sync whatever movies/TV she might want to watch onto her iphone or my iphone or my wife's iphone and then just stream it to the TV is really cool. It totally solves the media transfer problem.

Just a real-life practical example of what is nice about this new approach to TV that apple is going for.

Share the like

2010-07-26T14:08:00.000-07:00

With so many people clamoring for a dislike button, you've got to wonder why facebook hasn't caved yet.

Still I think we just don't get it. Like is just a placeholder. It means the same thing as ReTweet or Share. What would be the opposite of sharing? Not sharing, not retweeting?

I happen to like the way this socially active web is developing. It follows pretty closely along one of the two major styles of self-improvement: There is the style of elimination, finding every single problematic thing and rooting it out. The opposite style, and the far more productive one to my mind, is through encouragement; focusing on the positive aspects and trying to repeat and improve them. Think of it as rewarding success rather than punishing failure.

If the social web continues along it's current path I think it's a net gain for everyone. Stop wasting your time deriding junk and start cultivating good taste.

I'd rather see a realtime stream of great content than an endless flow of dislikes. Remember it's far easier to create junk than to create something worthwhile. The dislikes would always outnumber the likes.

Let's focus on the good stuff until no one bothers to acknowledge the bad. Everyone will be better off.

I want my children to grow up on iOS

2010-07-18T02:55:00.000-07:00

My goal in my children experiencing a smooth UI/UX is that so when/if they make the choice to engage the underlying technology and turn to something like linux, their goal will be to attain/create the same smooth UI/UX experience to which they are accustomed in anything they produce.

This flows over into daily life as well -- one should endeavor to create a comfortable experience with others. (pirkei avot: 3:10 כל שרוח הבריות נוחה הימנו, רוח המקום נוחה הימנו - Ethics 3:10: One who creates ease in his interactions, is at ease in God's eyes as well. (my translation))‎

the kids today..are all bored

2010-07-15T08:05:00.000-07:00

Consider life in an agrarian society. The whole family needs to pitch in if you are going to have any kind of tolerable existence. The more children a family has, the more hands it has to help with all the work a farm creates.

Compare that to modern society. Most of the physical labor required for society to persist is either farmed out to technological devices or to paid workers. There isn't much we need to do in order to subsist, aside from some minor chores and a couple of 9-5 jobs to bring in the monthly paycheck. Children become, to the shortsighted, little more than a liability. They cost money but legally aren't really allowed to bring in any income for the family. (read: child labor) At best you need to basically corral your children through highschool, before they can really contribute in a more meaningful way. Which means kids for the first 18 years of their lives are mainly involved in avoiding boredom.

Of course you can get creative and give them the drive to pursue all kinds of interesting and character-building goals while they're still in the k12 academic cycle, but that takes extra time and energy on the part of the parents.

No wonder Europe all but stopped reproduction. No wonder teenagers are so often rebellious.

Society needs to find acceptable ways for children to contribute while they're still kids other than through bringing home good report cards. That's what boy/girl scouts and little league are all about, but is that enough anymore?

We're all maturing more slowly because the real-life responsibilities are getting pushed back by technology. Not to mention the ultimate responsibility, kids, is being pushed back altogether because they've become more of a burden to their more childish parents.

Technology is truly marvelous and magical, but it puts more of a burden on us to make our lives more meaningful and rewarding with the extra leisure time it creates. If we don't step up to that challenge, we all end emotionally and developmentally obese.

show me the money is not a research and development motto

2010-07-08T02:42:00.000-07:00

It's amazing to see how microsoft employees are so focused on what products are making money..

I can't imagine a similar culture at google.

How do they innovate with such an immediate, "generate cash right away or it's not legitimate" model? Microsoft keeps talking about just how much money they pour into R&D but with a culture that doesn't accept that R&D might not pay off for a decade or three, how can they get anywhere?

The trouble with tumblr

2010-07-04T08:24:00.000-07:00

It's not just tumblr or posterous, but all the new web 2.5 blogging apparati out there have found a middle ground between blogging and tweeting. The blog is now meant to roll over. It doesn't really matter what was there a week ago, except to award cred, when a prediction was awfully right, or to denounce, when predictions went beyond sour.

It's not the fault of these services, they're just trying to keep up with the pace. It's like archives are just taking up space (both screen, and disk) the rate of new news makes anything obsolete by this afternoon.

This is great and all, but there's still a big problem out there. Fast web publishing wasn't only about getting things out on the web quickly, it was about allowing people to express their ideas easily.

Tumblr and posterous and all the others are allowing for a deeper conversation than twitter, but it's still a conversation that's moving through time very quickly.

Blogs have become worse as a source of reference material, and there is no good alternative.

Next time perhaps I'll speak about why Wikis don't fill that particular void very well.

The web's a'changin

2010-06-23T04:18:00.000-07:00

A good friend of mine, and a phenomenal web design wonder, has all but switched careers. It makes sense, the web design market is so saturated that it's clearly become a commodity. The majority of businesses still don't realize how important it is to pay good money for good web design. At the same time, Instapaper, Readability, and Safari Reader are all making short work of any bad webdesign being done today.

The web is, I hope, starting to focus on content, finding that content, accessing that content, and passing that content on. It's my hope that as we cut out the bad design we will equally learn to cut out the empty content and focus on that which has real meat. I imagine it's still got to get worse before it gets better regarding content, but at least the empty content won't look as garish on the screen.

In any case, I was thinking wow, Microsoft even saw this coming with their new typography is everything Windows Phone 7. Then I saw what it actually looked like, at least for now. They just don't get usability even if they can see where market forces are trending.

TV - the (new) center of your family

2010-06-23T03:56:00.000-07:00

I seem to have 'epiphanies' lately every morning about Apple and its strategies.. Which mostly means i'm thinking way too much about Apple in my subconscious, but this one was interesting: FaceTime devices.

Steve Jobs definitely said FaceTime devices. While most 'FaceTime' devices were predictable, iPhones, iPods, and iPads [some people have said the iPad's usage angle is off for a front-facing camera, i'd disagree, it's just the front-facing camera only makes sense in the same angle that you would watch video on an iPad, so it could definitely work, like when it's sitting in it's dock, or propped up in landscape with its case.]

Yet everyone's talking about how Apple should be revisiting AppleTV any time now, and FaceTime for your AppleTV is a true killer app. Yeah, I know there are two problems with the idea: 1) It's straight out of 1984, having your TV able to watch you. and 2) Do you really want to broadcast yourself strewn out on your couch?

On the other hand, I know in my parents house they've got a 20inch PC on the wall in the kitchen with Skype Video and a webcam built in.When we video chat people come and stand by the computer, when they use it to watch something, people lounge around the kitchen table. [This is a great set up for us, since we live ~7000 miles away and can still be part of the family all hanging out in the kitchen.] So it might not be such a weird generalized use-case. When you're TVing with AppleTV you lounge, when you're FaceTiming, you move closer.

In short, I think there's a good case for AppleTV out in time for the holidays with built-in FaceTime.

If this version of AppleTV will in fact be iOS based, and it's fairly safe to imagine it will be, and if they allow for 3rd party apps, the TV can be redefined to be the central place to keep tabs on the family, even when they're out of the house, between GPS (in family member's iphones/ipads) and FaceTime. For a modern reference think the Weasley family's clock.

Update: @gruber agrees on the FaceTime for AppleTV possibility. (and i preempted his post on the topic by like 12 hours :)

The great guessing machine

2010-06-23T02:28:00.000-07:00

Here's a quote from this great piece over at the NYTimes that's already made the rounds about IBM's Jeopardy! Computer:

At best, Ferrucci suspects that Watson might be simulating, in a stripped-down fashion, some of the ways that our human brains process language. Modern neuroscience has found that our brain is highly “parallel”: it uses many different parts simultaneously, harnessing billions of neurons whenever we talk or listen to words. “I’m no cognitive scientist, so this is just speculation,” Ferrucci says, but Watson’s approach — tackling a question in thousands of different ways — may succeed precisely because it mimics the same approach. Watson doesn’t come up with an answer to a question so much as make an educated guess, based on similarities to things it has been exposed to. “I have young children, you can see them guessing at the meaning of words, you can see them guessing at grammatical structure,” he notes..

This really resonates with me, especially the point about the brain being a guessing machine rather than an understanding machine. From watching my son learn and grow I noticed there was a point where he was still guessing, because he didn't really know yet, but his guesses were so accurate he was right every time. But he was still guessing.

Perhaps by the time we really understand something it's because we're already on to guessing the answer to something even bigger.

AT&T's early upgrade eligibility

2010-06-22T00:59:00.000-07:00

What if it isn't just AT&T being a nice guy? What if before the end of 2010 Apple announces support of another wireless carrier? Was AT&T trying to lock-in as many people as possible ahead of the alleged Apple announcement coming this fall?

Really at this point, what's in it for Apple to limit the iPhone to a single carrier? It's not like they're trying to preserve the good user experience.. The only possible reason is that at this point, they can't keep up with the demand for users from just a single carrier.. (unless that's a frustrating marketing ploy)

FaceTime follow up

2010-06-22T00:55:00.000-07:00

I'm still puzzled by Apple's choice to reveal FaceTime despite the inability to use it via 3g.

It seems like one of the few places where the whole experience of the iOS breaks with the simplicity of the user experience.

It's a really unusual Apple move, perhaps now that the user is already educated about using the iPhone in general, FaceTime is a good way to educate users about the difference between 3g/4g/wimax and wifi.

If this is strategic and Apple is taking on the challenge to educate users about wifi now. This has perhaps two implications (one a hopeful stretch and one pretty clear)

This is a preemptive strike to help their users deal with the end of 'unlimited' data rates in a productive fashion.
(the hopeful stretch) Users will soon be able to synch to itunes when connected via wifi (to keep datacosts down) they couldn't really offer that service and explain it will until their customers understood the difference between wifi and 3g.

Some theoretical science behind the iPhone 4

2010-06-20T00:45:00.000-07:00

Does the fact that the antenna is exposed mean that when I'm holding my iPhone and chatting on it, that I should get better reception because I've become part of the antenna?

Presumably the seams in the stainless steel are because of two different antennas, right? does something bad happen if my hand bridges those gaps while I'm holding it? if not, why did they put the gaps in?

Here's the fear mongering question: if I do become part of my iPhone 4's antenna when I hold it, am I more likely to be struck by lightning?

I guess an electrical engineer could shed some light on these questions. (no pun intended)

better than bookmarking

2010-06-15T02:55:00.000-07:00

The web is a pretty throwaway kind of environment. If you find something interesting, you either read/watch/listen tot it or you assume you will never find it again--at least that's how I roll. Safari's Reader feature is nice and all, but it doesn't fundamentally change this.

This is the brilliance of Instapaper, not that it lets you read a website without clutter, that it lets you queue up webpages to read later. Yes, in theory, del.icio.us let you do this, bookmarks let you do this, but in practice, who knows if that page will still be there, del.icio.us has no smooth way to differentiate your reading queue from longterm links other than by tagging them. Too much maintenance. Instapaper is the equivalent of emailing yourself every article you ever wanted to read, and then auto archiving it once you have read it. Except it's only one click.

What we need is a more generalized media queuing platform that.. or maybe like OSX's concurrency queues. An orderly one-clickable series of queues we can create and maintain to organize and streamline our media consumption.

Twitter as a solution for a specific subset of this problem

As an aside, I used to subscribe to the RSS of any blog of interest that came along, there are two problems with this mode of functioning (1) It's not always trivial to find an rss link, sadly. Worse, some websites don't have RSS at all, since they're more or less static -- until they change. (2) Personalities and Products don't always update their blogs with what's really important.

So now, Twitter has become my defacto bookmarking solution. I just follow any site/person/product/business and then if for some reason they ever do anything important i should know about, sooner or later it will pop up in my twitter feed .. and if I don't notice it, i guess it was too transient to pay attention to.

The transience of information is brought out by twitter in a way that is lost on RSS. Until I read an update, it'll stick around in GReader waiting for me to read it.. even if it's boring and useless. In twitter anything that isn't "sticky" will vanish out of the sheer hugeness of twitter updates that have grabbed mindshare.

The argument against, of course, is that Twitter means the lowest common denominator get to pick out what's important.. but lists and good twitter clients help smooth out this problem.

The touch generation

2010-06-10T05:31:00.000-07:00

I grew up on a Mac, was live on the web with NCSA Mosaic from 1992, and it wasn't until at least 1996 that I owned a windows-based computer. (Win95)

I remember learning to use the Mac from my father, and I perfectly aped his learning style. The coolest thing about the Mac user interface, especially Apple's interface guidelines, was that everything you could do with a Mac or any application running on a Mac was easily discoverable. The more you wanted to do, the more you could find, in the menus, based on the type of controls, etc.

Being from the Mac generation that is what underlines my entire technological experience: I discover functionality as necesary, without fear that I might make mistakes or do something bad. Even more than that, I don't bother remembering complicated secret ways to access functionality. (It's kind of the modern day equivalent of Einstein's not remembering his own phone number for efficiency reasons [source])

I came back to Mac half-heartedly in ~2003 (iBook G3) and more seriously recently (MacbookPro 13in) in order to do iOS development. Since OSX, the Mac has taken on a number of completely non-intuitive not very discoverable controls. Which means that there are entire parts of the interface that will continue to feel uncomfortable to me.

Contrast that with the iOS. Everything is boiled down to essentials, to naturally intuitive and easily discoverable functionality. (The only caveat is that perhaps all preferences should be in the 'Settings' panel, being split half and half the way it is now is confusing.) I'm loving the fact that we're (as Users with a capital U) returning to a smooth human-computer interface that simplifies both the clutter of the desktop OS and the absolute lack of predictability and consistence of the web.

I think you had to be born in the Mac generation to appreciate what computing without arcana really feels like. Or you could just be part of the Touch generation where mice and keyboards don't even get in the way.

I truly hope my kids and all their peers never have to remember complex instructions to access features. Computing can and should be fluid and organic.

Face Time, just one question..

2010-06-10T01:46:00.000-07:00

How does Apple turn a phone number into an IP address to make the connection? (Is there an external server somewhere mediating the initial phone to phone connection?) Did anyone else not ask this question when they saw this?

Is there an obvious answer I'm overlooking?

killer app or stupid idea?

2010-06-01T07:09:00.000-07:00

What if someone developed an iPhone/iPad app simulator that ran apps as web-apps. That way, if you designed for the App store and got rejected, you could still cash in on your investment of time and energy with alternative options?

It would also solve the problem of not having convenient tools to design HTML5+CSS3 webapps.

Hell = Advertising

2010-06-01T06:27:00.000-07:00

The only problem with the whole advertising industry is that nine times out of ten you're annoying the hell out of your audience. Even when ads are done right, they're still an annoyance. Anyone want to collaborate on a start-up based on entertainment rather than annoyance? I'm sure there are some ad networks/agencies/moguls out there who get it -- I mean we see some nice ads, but the whole concept of the ad is still fundamentally to interfere with our customer's flow.. to butt in.

future-vision in hindsight

2010-05-31T07:09:00.000-07:00

I remember about eight years ago, back in 2002, I had a Windows CE (PocketPC) device, and this is what I thought:
Windows98/ME was a piece of garbage. Windows 2000 was a good improvement, XP is already a step downhill. It's time for them to rewrite the Windows codebase and throw out all the legacy code -- no more emulation. Hey! Windows CE is a fresh tight OS, written from scratch. It would be really cool if Microsoft did an excellent job on Windows CE and groomed it as the eventual replacement for Windows XP. It would be a great way to leave all the legacy code behind and fund the development of a neat new clean implementation of Windows.

Fast-forward to now:
OSX is great, but it's big and accruing legacy code. iPhoneOS is focused, trim and almost entirely fresh. Apple shipped a new Tablet device, running iPhoneOS. Apple is on the crux of releasing a new set-top TV device, running iPhoneOS. Could Apple actually be in the middle of pulling off that super-slick move I hoped Microsoft would've done eight years ago? It's certainly starting to look like it.

Fast-forward another few years and OSX may be deprecated. Isn't that kind of what Apple is saying with WWDC by being entirely iPhoneOS focused? It wouldn't be so far fetched to see MacBooks shipping running a nicely tooled hybrid iPhoneOS. Then again, who's to really say we'll still need/want the laptop form factor?

If Apple does pull it off, that should make it into some kind of Hall of Fame.

iPhone Apps in front, App Engine in back

2010-05-31T02:30:00.000-07:00

There were some great points in this UXHero article. The one that really hit home is that the iPhone's fixed (and known) screen size allows for designs to be much more consistent and more usable.

One simple piece of information, the certainty of particular screen dimensions has a huge impact on usability.

Great point. It started me thinking back to a lot of my design ideas for generic development pieces that are easily pluggable to generate flexible and diverse web apps. All of a sudden I hit on it. I'd been using Google App Engine as my REST web-service back end, and an rich javascript page as my front end. I could be developing iPhone apps as front-end clients for my generic web-services, and voila. Light-weight, highly usable and customized interfaces with a generic loosely coupled back end.

Perfect formulation for someone like me who just wants simple and persistent data storage and processing, so I can abstract that away and get to the meat of user interaction.

See? Just like my previous post, I want to see tighter integration between Apple & Google, not diversification. App Engine + iPhone Apps for the win!

multi-touch on my macbook

2010-05-30T06:32:00.000-07:00

Got a 13in Macbook Pro for the express purpose of developing iPhone/iPad apps. Didn't realize how addictive multi-touch touchpad interaction can be on a 'classic' laptop form factor -- it's a killer feature that I'm having difficulty living without on the rest of my computers...

Who benefits? I'm not sure its the user

2010-05-30T03:40:00.000-07:00

I personally would've preferred to see Microsoft+Facebook square off opposite Apple+Google.

The way I see it, Google are engineers, Apple are artists. Yes Apple does good engineering work, and Google can produce nice UI, but I'm talking about when they're playing to their strengths.

Watching Google and Apple duke it out makes me sad that I can't have them both in one awesome product. Think about the integration and synching of the cloud with the simple elegance and usability of iPhoneOS.

If we need some industry bad-guy to spurr ingenuity and innovation, couldn't it have been Microsoft and/or Facebook?

I don't want to have to choose between Apple and Google. I want to see their products integrate smoothly.

In the end, I'll probably have to go the route of iPad + Android smartphone. But I'd rather have fully integrated google services on iPhone.

Maybe I should count my blessings that Microsoft wasn't invited to this party? Now how do we make Facebook irrelevant?

[I guess Twitter gets to be the kid who's always picked last.]

iPhoneOS design manifesto - turn search apps inside out

2010-05-17T02:26:00.000-07:00

The Web is huge, the words vast and limitless also come to mind.

It is this nature of the web that mandates search as the best possible interface for the web. At any moment an even better solution to your current need may come along, how else would you know except to search for it?

By contrast your iPhone (or iPad/iPod) is tiny. It's storage currently maxes out at 64gb, that's virtually nothing. The important point is this: What's on your iPhone is your content. Every byte of that content was loaded by you, because you want it there. By contrast, what's on the web is a free for all. You have to sift through the web to find content of interest to you.

This makes a big difference when you develop for the iPhone. iPhone apps center around your content, your data, things directly meaningful to you.

If you have a search-based web app and you want to make an iPhone app as an interface to that search-based app, consider turning your app inside out:

Make the home screen a list of recent or saved searches, or a list of bookmarks. Chances are, users are going into your app from an iPhone to find something they already know is there.
The second screen can be a search screen to obtain new results, but the home screen should always be populated with content already relevant to the user.
Remember, stay focused on making the user's previous finds easily accessible, especially if there is a way to save or bookmark results.
Allowing users to find new things on the web is great, but first make sure that what they've already found is still easily accessible should they want to find it again!

Sometimes this isn't what a user wants, but most of the time it will be. Consider your App, consider your user base and see if this kind of design works for you.

PS. make sure you aren't stomping all over a bunch of privacy issues while you are at it :)

Kids' brains are early-binding

2010-04-22T14:28:00.000-07:00

When it comes to programming language variables there are two flavors, early binding and late binding. An early binding language needs to know what type variables will be ahead of time, if 'x' is going to store a number it's not going to store a string and vice versa. Late binding means you can define variables and depending on how they get used, the programming language determines retroactively what kind of variable you needed.

Based on how my 3yr old understands things, I'm tempted to think of it as early-binding. He doesn't yet know how to let words temporarily represent abstract concepts he doesn't understand. Instead if you start to explain something, he'll expect you to define and explain a word that he didn't understand, rather than making sense out of the word as its used in context.

It's not so upsetting that he can't do these things yet, these are very abstract concepts which he will develop in time. It's interesting though, for me to look back on all the programming languages I've come to know and see how as they mature, they're expected to allow for the more flexible late binding.

Empower yourself

2010-04-22T02:24:00.000-07:00

Many people are discussing whether social networking is good or bad for us.

That's the wrong question. The right question is: Are the technologies you are using empowering you?

The question becomes what do I get out of the technology I'm using? It isn't a selfish question, it's a matter of pragmatism.

Blogging is great when it: (1) Gives a platform to express your ideas (2) Provides a means to broadcast those ideas (3) Allows you to receive feedback on those ideas and finally (4) allows you to organize your thoughts so that you can eventually present them in a more structured format. [The last step happens when the blog becomes a book or a startup or a project.]

Twitter is great when it (1) lets you carry on a conversation that should be overheard by whoever else may be interested or (2) query your peers for information at a moments notice.

Facebook is great when it (1) lets you catch up with old friends or (2) plan family/friend outings, or (3) share interesting information with friends and family.

The downside of Facebook, Twitter, and Blogs is that we get addicted to the stimulus and the feedback loop closes in until we're so desperate for more feedback we lose the self control to develop our ideas, our thoughts and our resources.

It's so easy to end up posting redundant or rehashed pet peeves.

It's much harder to do original thinking, especially when all the information you're consuming is the same information everyone else is consuming, which is quickly trending to regurgitations of things you all have already written and read.

The question of whether the technology empowers you, or whether it handicaps you applies beyond social networks as well.

Email, mobile phones, skype, all of it. Use it when it empowers you, when you are the one benefiting.

Drop any technology that's holding you back or sucking up your time.

Dropbox is a great example of technology that empowers you, it stays almost invisible and makes sure that any changes to any of your files are applied across all of your computers wherever they may be. You aren't by any of your computers? Oh, well then your files are also available to you on the web, or on your iPhone or wherever. Get the idea?

Blogger really allows me to focus my ideas and get them out of my head, making room for more ideas and allowing for others to comment and give me feedback on my existing ideas.

Facebook hasn't been particularly useful except to remember people I had long ago forgotten, but if I'd forgotten them, perhaps I didn't need to remember them? Occasionally, I have to admit, I can find an email address or phone number on facebook that I'm missing.. but that's the most helpful it is.

Buzz is next to useless -- turns out most of my email contacts waste as much if not more time than me sharing idiocy.

Twitter is great, but it's difficult for people to learn and takes time to make a case for why it's useful. (It's the epitome of the long tail phenomenon.) Personally, the investment of time is too great to accomplish anything that would truly empower me, which is why, even though I understand its benefits, I invest very little energy in twitter.

"Tablet" computers don't generally empower someone anymore than any other computers empower someone. The iPad is something different - it does what I want it to do faster than a more powerful computer will do the same thing -- that's what I mean by empowering.

"Smart" phones give us portable access to the internet, which can be empowering if we aren't just feeding our own feedback loop addiction. It only empowers if it makes your life easier or better. No question that smart phones pre-iPad were not empowering, with the exception of the BlackBerry.

The point here is don't waste time and energy on paranoia about privacy, addiction, or trends, the point is: Use the technology that empowers you, junk all the rest.

No more files

2010-04-21T05:54:00.000-07:00

I just realized why syncing for iPhone/iPad is so painful. Apple wants to eliminate the idea of files and replace it with a more useful concept. I don't think they've finalized the concept yet, or exactly how it will work when accessing the same "things" for lack of a better word (ie. not "files") from multiple apps.

In the meantime they don't provide an easy way for users to sync files between iPad and your computer, not because there's no easy way to implement file sync -- Dropbox does a killer job of that across multiple systems-- but because they don't want users to bring the file concept from PCs over to iPhoneOS.

There's something else in store, and just like Cut&Paste and Multitasking when we see files replaced with "things" (or whatever they will be called) we'll understand why we had to wait.

Best online summary of HTML5 & related features

2010-04-18T09:23:00.000-07:00

http://apirocks.com/html5/html5.html What a boon to find it summed up so nicely and organized in such a straightforward way.

The App Store and the Eighty-Twenty rule.

2010-04-18T02:54:00.000-07:00

I tweeted it, but I thought it warranted a post.

The App store with all of its chaos and uncertainty turns the world on its head: Apple is making developer's lives difficult and user's lives easy.

With Microsoft it's always the opposite, making developer's lives easier at the expense of user's suffering.

When you download an app from App store, it just works.

It's simple 80/20 math when you think about it, an app submission may take a few uploads etc. But that app will then be downloaded hundreds, thousands, or millions of times. The difficulty should be in getting the app into the App store, not getting it working once you get it out of the App store.

Apple caters to the user.

[Sure that flies in the face of their lack of ubiquitous sync -- I hope that's only because they haven't settled on the perfect way to do sync yet.]

virtual unreality

2010-04-11T07:24:00.000-07:00

When I studied Virtual Reality Development @ NYU with the turn of the century, I always assumed that when computing power and functionality got up to speed, we would greatly benefit from reproducing certain real-world interfaces in 3d virtual worlds to the betterment of the human-computer interface.

As generations are becoming wired at younger and younger ages, I'm realizing that by the time really useful virtual reality will exist, there will be few if any classical "real world" metaphors left to implement in any 3d virtual human-computer interface.

There won't really even be computers by then.

When immersive realtime three-dimensional experience becomes a substitute for the world around us, augmented reality will have been the norm for a long time, and beyond that, we will have more intimate ways of relating to data than desks, pens, paper, ink, folders, and file cabinets could ever have provided.

In short, I'm starting to visualize the unimaginable future awaiting my grandchildren, and it's excitingly full of wonder. I'm not so much worried about what they'll miss out on, as I am worried about the metaphors I'm going to miss out on.

(Inspired by this piece from ReadWriteWeb)

swiping not tapping

2010-04-11T02:20:00.000-07:00

I just saw these demo videos for Swype -- an interesting typing alternative on touchscreen phones (there's an android beta) .. it's exactly what my fingers keep wanting to do on my iPhone. Hope it will make its way there soon.

When you have a highly sensitive touch screen.. this kind of input methodology is a lot more fluid than tapping -- having said that, their videos, even the ones demonstrating speed don't seem to allow faster input than accurate typing would. Perhaps there's a more ideal swiping keyboard layout than QWERTY that would make a very significant improvement to input speed -- but require a higher learning curve.

Be humble

2010-03-22T06:23:00.000-07:00

The Dunning-Kruger effect, sometimes termed Illusory Superiority, tells us that the less competent we are in any given area (competence is driven by experience), the more likely we will rate ourselves as “better than average” in competency. This illusory superiority often drives bad decisions. [from: ventureBeat]

This is such a good concise explanation of this proven effect. It's something everyone would be wise to internalize. When you feel like you have a good grasp of something and are trying to force your opinion on others, ask "is it because I actually have a deficit in this area that I believe I'm more competent?"

Learn HTML5/Canvas procedural drawing

2010-03-10T05:14:00.000-08:00

If you want a very quick hands-on tutorial on how to create a simple [extensible+procedural] drawing app in HTML5, check out Harmony. [Here's the author's abstract]

You can download the page source and play with it locally. Which is a huge plus.

on losing fluency

2010-03-10T01:18:00.000-08:00

There's a great couple of articles here on what's wrong with programming today: (the second is a follow-up to the first)
What ever happened to programming, and here's the Redux. This quote pretty much sums it up:

We talk about ‘flow’ quite a lot in software and I just have to wonder what’s happening to us all in that respect. Just like a conversation becomes stilted if the speakers keep having to refer to their phrasebooks and dictionaries, I wonder how much longer it will be possible to retain any sort of flowful state when writing software. Might the idea of mastery disappear forever under a constant torrent of new tools and technologies?

That’s it exactly.

On its face, this sounds very rational and correct, but I suspect there is something more sinister behind it all: Aging. These are developers who have a ton of experience and are getting old. They look backwards at the ease they once felt at assimilating all of the myriad technologies of their day and lament their inability to absorb the growing plethora of technologies available today and fear the overwhelming hoards of technologies coming tomorrow.

I'm only sensitive to this issue because I'm moving on in years myself (age 32) and am forever curious at what point I wont be able to keep up, no matter how flexible I imagine my mind to be.

iPad as a good omen for users

2010-02-22T07:49:00.000-08:00

There is a sea change coming, at least in some subset of the user-aware development community. As of now people are examining the computer and computer software finally through the lens of "how confusing is this to the user?"

I don't know if everyone remembers, but the personal computer was only the first step in an inexorable journey to the internet and more recently the social web.

Every one of the realizations that are currently hitting the hardware and software markets of personal computing will hit the internet and social network markets as well, in a year or two max.

Twitter is about as popular as it's going to get, it's way too user-unfriendly. Heck, even facebook is a pain to use.

We are going to see the rise of insanely intuitive social networks in the near future, and if nobody pays any attention to users and interfaces that are actually useful Apple will be one of the few (if not the sole) attendees of that party as well.

Future Internet Trends

2010-02-18T07:01:00.000-08:00

I was interviewed for an article about cutting edge directions in the Internet industry. They asked specifically if I could suggest something that wasn't a hot topic yet, but might be in the near future.

That's a tough question to answer while at the same time being something fun to think about.

Basically I boiled it down to a question:

There is this realization dawning on the computing industry that computers really need to do much more to accomodate people than they have done until now. The iPad being the prime mover in this vicinity, at least currently.

The goal of the iPhone and iPad is to simplify the interface to the point that it is intuitive and is lost behind the raw functionality of the app, or of the net.

My question is, when will people wake up and standardize on a subset of interfaces for websites that also accomodate people?

We aren't there yet, in essence we're lightyears behind the progress that's been made on the client side with the advent of transparent net terminals like the iPad, iPhone and everything else aimed at competing with them.

[ps. I think the Flash trash-talkers are wrong and there's no reason to be so against a piece of software to the point of banning it from certain hardware, but in terms of contributing to the inconsistency of web interface, Flash allows for some of the worst offenders.]

iPhoneOS multi-tasking alternative

2010-02-10T03:15:00.000-08:00

It seems the main desire for multitasking in iPhoneOS is twofold: (1) Running background processes, either to do something else like Pandora music (the #1 complaint I've seen mentioned) or to update other apps like Twitter or Facebook. (2) Relating to information in one app from within another app.

Putting aside the first issue, which has been half excused with push notifications (though it seems like a hack) the second issue has perhaps even a better solution than multitasking.

If iPhoneOS apps could publish controls that other apps could access then a user's experience could be more seemless and smoother than the current multitasking experience in Windows or OSX.

Imagine for a minute, if you want to quote a mail you recently received, you perform the 'include' gesture and you are presented with a popover or modal screen presenting you with a choice of the 'include' controls published by your other installed apps. You can click the include mail control, and be presented with a list of your mail to select one or more messages and 'include' them in your current app. The means by which they are 'included' depends on how your current app chooses to deal with included material.

This is essentially what the many image manipulation programs do now when you go to your photo roll to select an image to edit. In addition to being more seemless and more intuitive from a simple user workflow, we've eliminated the concept of files and replaced them with resources belonging to one app or another.

Similarly you could provide 'peek' functionality to just look at another app (at least the info they make available through their peek control) for a moment without leaving your current app. I'm sure there's probably six main types of controls (including 'include' and 'peek' mentioned here) that could create a standard visual and user-flow language that would answer most of a user's multitasking needs in a way that is better than multitasking.

The controls have to feel very responsive lightweight and fast, of course, but the benefit is that the line between the OS and the apps is blurred in terms of who provides functionality, but clear in that it is apparent when you are using an app's controls, and apple still has ultimate control to ensure the user experience doesn't suffer. You could even use the 'lift up the app to reveal a page behind' interface we saw in the map app in the iPad demo as the default place for the user to choose one of the six control types, and then be presented with a list of controls.

I for one would welcome an iPhone/iPad app-control-oriented future instead of a multitasking future. Users won't be able to lose windows, or leave tasks running in the background which they have forgotten about. It's a serious win for the 80% users.

Weighing in on iPad

2010-02-08T14:35:00.001-08:00

Felt I had to share my two cents regarding the iPad since so much wind is being blown around.

First, Steve Jobs' talk was aimed solely at developers, anyone who missed that needs to get their eyes checked.

Second, it doesn't matter what you think, when you get your hands on one in an apple store you will want one no matter what.

Lastly, the main market for this device is the 80%, not the 20% the computing industry has been aimed at for years. Bout time!

I wanted a big iPod touch so that my three year old could use it, iPhone form factor is too small for him to hold and not touch, with an iPad he'll be good to go!

Nice clean Google AppEngine blog implementation

2009-11-03T09:32:00.000-08:00

As I'm in the midst of essentially making a simplified Google AppEngine CMS for use in my home page, I came across Bret Taylor's blog. It's hosted on appspot, he apparently put it together from scratch using code he'd developed elsewhere. The blog is a great example of what a nice minimalist app can look like when well executed.

Even better, he was nice enough to post explaining what he did: Experimenting with Google AppEngine. On top of that, his blog's source is also available on GitHub.

all in all, it's some nice stuff, hope I can figure out how he did everything.

More posts to come about my own progress with www.yitz.com.

Using Dropbox as CVS

2009-11-01T00:19:00.000-07:00

For my own coding projects it would be nice to have a CVS to keep track of my various projects, progress i've made in their development, and historical file versions to see what I changed over time, in case I come back to a project and don't know why something doesn't compile or what the latest changes were intended to do.

Of course, not many people are organized enough or want the overhead of managing a CVS installation just for themselves. Instead lately I've been happy to use Dropbox as my CVS.

I've been developing some Google AppEngine apps lately and the one thing that drives me crazy is that I can't develop on Google's servers, only upload my code once I'm happy with it. Since I'm used to using a number of different computers, this is less than convenient.

Now, I just put my project directories in my dropbox, and viola, not only is my code accessible from anywhere, but as a nice added bonus, Dropbox keeps track of historical versions as well.

So, I get a poor-man's CVS, and cross-computer synchronization of all my code, for freeeeeee... :)

great free graphics tools

2009-10-29T05:59:00.000-07:00

First a favicon.ico generator: favicon.cc

It's pretty straightforward and if you are graphically inclined you can do some nice things by hand, they offer you a glimspe of how the finished product looks in a 'browser' which makes it seem much more real while you are working.. here's what i came up with for a few minutes of time:

The second is a great photoshop replacement webapp: pixlr

It does everything and more than I could possibly hope for in a free web-based graphics app that loads in virtually no time at all.

RSS widget from scratch (jquery+yahoo pipes)

2009-10-29T01:27:00.000-07:00

Click here for a great tutorial on creating a basic RSS widget from scratch making use of yahoo pipes and jquery.

I embellished a little bit in the yahoo pipes section by drawing from multiple blogs, sorting the entries by date, and limiting the number of queries returned:

you can see my current results @ http://www.yitz.com/

Javascript array manipulation : splice

2009-10-22T09:25:00.000-07:00

use the splice function to remove (an) element(s) from anwywhere in a javascript array without leaving an undefined cell in the middle.

don't forget indexOf for finding elements in the array to delete :)

var idx = mylist.indexOf(elementToDelete)

mylist.splice(idx,idx);

//now it's gone.

for good examples and explanation click here.