Apple has updated their website to include 11 new video tutorials for the iPad.
Tag Archives: tech
Apple’s 10 biggest issues
Jon Gruber, a true thinker on all things Apple, gave this presentation a couple of weeks ago at MacWorld Expo. Worth a watch if you an Apple follower. Also, do look at his blog Daring Fireball, which is (and has been) in my Blogroll.
A demo of Wired on the iPad
A thoughtful look at Facebook
Facebook is the most popular “social media” site on the interwebs. I think it has serious issues, and I have deleted my account.
The New York Review of Books currently contains a thoughtful history of the site, its reasons for growth and its weaknesses. It si written by Charles Peterson of n+1 and is well worth a full read.
The first sign that Facebook might cause trouble came, for many, when a few unexpected members showed up—those who didn’t attend your college, or at least one of the same caliber. Especially for students who had graduated from a public high school and then gone on to an elite private college, the addition of state universities marked a turning point, as former classmates joined the site and started asking to be “friends.” A major attraction of the early Facebook, it was suddenly apparent, came from its snob appeal—the fact that some had been kept out, and only a highly selective few let in.
The mechanics of these “friend requests” are worth describing in some detail. Within a single college, in the early days of the site, everyone could see everything. You “friended” a fellow student not to see her page but to add her name and picture, like a trophy, to your list of friends; this “friend list” then appeared not far from your lists of favorite books and favorite music, more evidence of your discriminating tastes, or proof of your popularity. If a college acquaintance wanted to look at your page, she could simply type in your name—just as she might glance your way on the quad, or eavesdrop on your conversation in the dining hall.
Zuckerberg, however, cordoned off each college from all others. The “friend request” then took on a new function, becoming the means of authorizing people at other schools to see your page. The only way someone at a state university, for instance, could access the page of a student at a private college was by asking to become “friends.” But unlike when a student at a private college might run into an old acquaintance on winter break, it was impossible to politely respond to such a request while giving little away. You had to say yes or no.
Bourdieu, it now appeared, might have been right. When Facebook had been limited to a few elite schools, listing Beethoven among one’s “favorite music” could easily stand as a statement of aesthetic discovery. This was due to that other salutary fiction of an elite meritocratic education: that class distinctions disappear, to be replaced by pure judgment and analytic reason. But beneath the gaze of one’s former classmates, such a claim might well come off as a pose. It was no longer possible to treat the site as an extension of an elite college—the private haunt of one’s “most cultivated” contemporaries.
Google plans super-speed data network
Google has just announced it is planning to launch a high speed data network operating at up to 1 gigabit speeds. Wow!
We’re planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We’ll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.
And they appear to be doing so in conjunction with local governments who are being asked to apply, which is a great way to go, given the foot-dragging by for-profit ISPs in bringing the US truly high speed data.
iPad and the new world of computing
Steven Frank (of Panic Software) has penned a thought-provoking essay on the history and direction of personal computing, analyzing where the iPad might fit in to the bigger picture. He notes the relatively short history of personal computing (as compared to other technologies) and hypothesizes that big changes are coming. Overall a great essay.
In that really incredibly short space of time we’ve gone from punchcards-and-printers to interactive terminals with command lines to window-and-mouse interfaces, each a paradigm shift unto themselves. A lot of thoughtful people, many of whom are bloggers, look at this history and say, “Look at this march of progress! Surely the desktop + windows + mouse interface can’t be the end of the road? What’s next?”
Then “next” arrived and it was so unrecognizable to most of them (myself included) that we looked at it said, “What in the shit is this?”
The Old World
In the Old World, computers are general purpose, do-it-all machines. They can do hundreds of thousands of different things, sometimes all at the same time. We buy them for pennies, load them up to the gills with whatever we feel like, and then we pay for it with instability, performance degradation, viruses, and steep learning curves. Old World computers can do pretty much anything, but carry the burden of 30 years of rapid, unplanned change. Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X based computers all fall into this category.
The New World
In the New World, computers are task-centric. We are reading email, browsing the web, playing a game, but not all at once. Applications are sandboxed, then moats dug around the sandboxes, and then barbed wire placed around the moats. As a direct result, New World computers do not need virus scanners, their batteries last longer, and they rarely crash, but their users have lost a degree of freedom. New World computers have unprecedented ease of use, and benefit from decades of research into human-computer interaction. They are immediately understandable, fast, stable, and laser-focused on the 80% of the famous 80/20 rule.
Is the New World better than the Old World? Nothing’s ever simply black or white.
Where to “watch”
The real story on the Apple tablet
The Onion has the real story…
Claiming that he completely forgot about the much-hyped electronic device until the last minute, a frantic Steve Jobs reportedly stayed up all night Tuesday in a desperate effort to design Apple’s new tablet computer.
Cutting edge tech: 1979 version
Take a look at this report from the Consumer Electronics Show in 1979. Lots of ideas, most of them stupid, as it turns out.
Parrot AR.Drone: coolest tech toy ever?
Well, according to appadvice, yes. This remote controlled flying toy with augmented reality and it is controlled by an iPhone app. I have to say that it looks pretty darn cool to me. A remote flying device with a camera, augmented reality and controlled remotely if desired. Coming in March.
Let’s wait to see how the reality stacks up.
The year in social media
(via Newshoggers) Watch in HQ if you have high bandwidth.
The (rumored) Apple tablet (updated)
There are two schools of thought on the rumored Apple tablet, which may be announced at the end of January. One view is that it will fail, primarily because tablet computers have been offered by many companies over the years and none have developed anything more than a niche market.
My own view is that there is a substantial risk of failure. The only hope for success is that Apple has taken the time to do an in depth analysis of what a tablet can and should do and has designed the interface in a way that creates new functionality not present in other tablets. This is certainly within Apple’s ability as a company.
However, not everything that Apple creates (or has created under the leadership of Steve Jobs) becomes a market success. One example is the Newton Message Pad (released in 1993 when John Sculley was CEO of Apple).
The Newton was an early PDA with handwriting recognition that became a joke. The Newton does have followers to this day, but it was never a major success and was dropped by Apple in 1998.
Other examples include the no longer produced Apple iPod Hi-Fi Speaker System, the Lisa, the 20th Anniversary Macintosh, the Apple Cube, and, at least arguably so far, Apple TV. (Let me make it clear that I own two Apple TVs, and I love the product. Nonetheless, it is currently a product that even Steve Jobs has called a “hobby.”)
Apple has some great strengths to bring to bear on the tablet. They have relationships with large media companies who can be expected to deliver content to the platform. Their iTunes Store gives Apple a direct connection to millions of customers, each of whom has registered credit cards with the company. This network (and the installed iTunes application) is very powerful. Further, Apple has a huge developer network created in connection with the iPhone and that too could provide a huge advantage that other tablet manufacturers simply did not have. Finally, Apple’s customer satisfaction numbers are the highest in the industry and people are likely to give a product from Apple a try based on their prior experience.
Jon Gruber has a great essay on his views of the upcoming tablet arguing that Apple is going to use the table to try to redefine personal computing:
And so in answer to my central question, regarding why buy The Tablet if you already have an iPhone and a MacBook, my best guess is that ultimately, The Tablet is something you’ll buy instead of a MacBook.
I say they’re swinging big — redefining the experience of personal computing.
It will not be pitched as such by Apple. It will be defined by three or four of its built-in primary apps. But long-term, big-picture? It will be to the MacBook what the Macintosh was to the Apple II.
Over all, given Apple’s strengths and its recent performance, I give Apple an 80% chance of success with the tablet.
That is, of course, if they are even developing a tablet.
Update: Here is a concept video from Apple in 1987 showing the never-manufactured “knowledge navigator”. It is tablet-like and while it isn’t likely that Apple will follow this approach, it provides an interesting take on how creative Apple can be.
Disclosure: I have a long position in Apple stock. Nothing on this blog should be construed as investment advice.
RIMM: three strikes
After reporting stellar financial performance in the most recent quarter, RIMM now has some news that is not so good. It suffered an email collapse on its Blackberry service throughout the Americas. This is possible because of the centralized nature of RIMM’s push email technology. It creates what is essentially a single point of failure risk to the system as a whole. It appears the outage lasted 8 hours.
Even worse for RIMM, this outage is the third in a month.
The issue represents the third such failure within weeks and comes just as RIM is counting on continued strong sales to buffer itself against competition from the iPhone, which may come close to or match BlackBerry sales based on some analyst estimates.
2009 – A wave production
Google Wave was announced this year. It is a way to produce content collaboratively. Here is a Wave highlighting the events of the past year. It was produced by Whirled Interactive.
Facebook’s attack on privacy (updated x2)
If you have a Facebook account, you recently were offered the “opportunity” to change your privacy settings. Sounds good.
But what isn’t good is that Facebook pointed you to a “privacy” page where the default settings opened all your data to the world. This is a profound change for a service was created and operated on the underlying assumption that you would share your information only with those you chose. In other words, the default security was privacy and you were given the option of sharing with a broader group than your friends.
As the EFF says:
… the Facebook privacy transition tool is clearly designed to push users to share much more of their Facebook info with everyone, a worrisome development that will likely cause a major shift in privacy level for most of Facebook’s users, whether intentionally or inadvertently.
The basic problem is that Facebook is now pushing folks toward total openess for Facebook’s own economic reasons. Facebook is doing this in a way that is misleading. They have aligned themselves against their users.
Dan Gillmor summarizes the situation very clearly:
Why don’t I feel safe and sound in their benevolent hands? Because although some of the changes they’ve made in their privacy settings are actually helpful, they are suggesting that users share much more of their data and other information, much more widely than ever. Facebook’s extremely smart leaders know perfectly well that the majority of users are likely to accept these suggestions, because most people say yes to whatever the default settings are in any application.
And I wonder whether the Facebook user community will remain loyal as they discover what is going on?
Update: More news via TechCrunch.
Update 2: Jason Calacanis has posted one of the best essays on Facebook’s shameful behavior.