2010-01-29
Competing with iPad
Everyone’s talking about the iPad, so I started thinking a little further down the road. After all, if windows and mice really aren’t the future of computing, and touch screens are, you’d hope there’d be more than one manufacturer of devices in Our Glorious Computing Future. At least, I hope there is.
So, who’d make them? I can tell you who won’t: anyone relying on Windows. Microsoft’s done very well out of the last twenty years of computing, but the last decade has shown their inability to move with the times. Windows Vista was an obvious mis-step, but so is their series of Tablet Editions, because they failed to do what the iPhone OS did: rethink the interface. Instead, they expect a thin film of touch interactions to be enough, and it’s not.
Similarly, Windows Mobile’s reliance on a stylus and vestigial metaphors - the Start button, for example - hardly shows any signs of being the foundations for a usable device. Dan pointed out there’s a chance that the Xbox division might manage, and I suppose the Zune folks might have a chance, but I’d not hold my breath.
Of course, since almost every PC manufacturer relies on Microsoft for their OS, that rules out the likes of Dell, HP, Asus and Sony. So who’s left?
Nokia have dabbled with tablets before, and with the N900, they seem to have a fairly decent handheld device. Maemo might just make a good enough layer on top of Linux, but do they have the vision to make the hardware? Unfortunately, my gut feeling is that they don’t. Two or three years ago they might have been able to get away with a grand visionary play, but now, with the iPhone and Android going after their most profitable market segment, they look a bit like a wounded giant, trying to make sure they’re still going.
So that leaves Google. Their biggest issue, as far as I can tell, is that they have two OSes which overlap uncomfortably right at the point the iPad exists: the (announced but unreleased) Chrome OS, and the aforementioned Android. I don’t know enough to tell which fits better, but I expect one of them would be fine.
The company has other problems, too. So far Android hasn’t included multi-touch in the core OS or apps, because of the fear of patent litigation from Apple. It’s possible there’ll be a deal to resolve that, one way or another. In fact, I really hope there is: otherwise the monopoly I alluded to earlier will become a reality. The other issue is that they’re still not an experienced hardware manufacturer. Their first consumer product, the Nexus One, is built for them by HTC, and they’ve had teething troubles with customer relations, especially to do with getting phones working with telecoms companies. Maybe a licensee will make a tablet first, but you could argue the potential of the phone OS didn’t really surface until there was an in-house design; maybe the same would be true of a pad.
However, of all the people listed here, I suspect Google are by far the best placed to compete with Apple. Now all I have to do is wait a few years and see how wrong this post was.
2009-11-07
post/236367899
A comment by MichellDatsun on An Astronaut Explains How We’ll Fall In Love With Space Again.
There’s actually quite a good parallel in exploration history. In the winter of 1911/1912, Amundsen and Scott raced to the South Pole. Amundsen got there first, got back, and Scott died and became a posthumous hero.
After that, there were a few expeditions around the edges of the continent, and there were still whalers in the Antarctic Ocean, but nobody went back to the Pole for decades; until 1958, in fact. The thing is, when the Americans went, they did it in force, and for good. In combination with the permanent bases on the continent’s perimeter, it’s been inhabited continually since.
Now, there’s no reason that going back to the moon has to follow the same script: it won’t unless something forces us to. The thing is, nothing really stopped a base at the South Pole, except the will to make one.
2009-09-27
post/198247002
Ben Terrett, reviewing The Hidden Park iPhone game.
I hadn’t really thought about it much, but this just shows how much I walk. It was also brought home to me when my parents were in London and we went from the RFH, via Trafalgar Square, to Leicester Square tube, which for me is a short-cut, saving a bit of faffing and with some things to look at on the way.
For them, though, used to a small town, it turned out to be a bit of a hike. Similarly, what Ben describes as a “lot of walking” is to me a short stroll.
In fact, the area he describes is very similar to that used for some of the games for the Hide&Seek weekender, and generally they didn’t feel too big. If anything, you were too likely to trip over another team (although that’s probably part of the game’s design).
Is there a point? Perhaps; it’s been suggested that those of us living in cities are less likely to be obese. Maybe it’s just that I have skewed perceptions; I’ve always been keen on walking.
2009-09-03
post/178611036
2009-06-19
post/126678781
Justin Blanton | To Pre or not to Pre?
This is a parenthetical remark that’s gone somewhat unnoticed in Blanton’s (worth reading) post about the Pre, but it is quite remarkable.
I remember the time, not so long ago, when the US cellphone market was a joke. British people would take high-end Nokais to the US, and have cameras in their phones as good that were arguably as good as some people’s digital compact cameras, and which could upload to Flickr instantly. The same phones didn’t emerge there for months.
Meanwhile, Palm were still making tethered handhelds, until they finally noticed their impending doom and acquired Handspring and their line of Treo phone/Palm hybrids. If Apple or Google seriously cared about phones at this point, nobody really noticed.
The phones you could actually buy at the mall? They were Korean or Japanese, running hideously butchered operator-locked firmwares. There were Microsoft smartphones¹, but nobody seemed to actually like them. Danger came and, seemingly, went².
Then came the last three years and, of course, everything has changed. The only phones I’d consider buying instead of the iPhone are something with Android and the Palm (although, of course, the Pre hasn’t been announced, let alone shipped, with a GSM chipset yet). Just three years, and the most desirable phones³ in the world no longer get designed in Finland, Sweden or Japan; they’re products of the South Bay. Crazy.
¹ Microsoft might have sold a lot of Windows Mobile licences in their time, but the tech bubble I live in has been utterly unimpressed with the vast majority of the devices it runs on, especially since it morphed from a general PDA platform to a mobile phone OS. Maybe that’s unfair, but I suspect not.
² I don’t have the local knowledge to figure out why Hiptop effectively failed. Certainly they never got a fair crack at the UK market; T-Mobile took the market’s rejection of their first, somewhat flawed, device as a sign they should never bother again.
³ Certainly the software on these phones is better, even if the hardware isn’t (reports indicate the N97 is pleasingly well-built and has good call quality). And yes, there’s still a huge market for call-centric, hardware-wins phones (hell, I tend to refer to the things I’d consider buying as “devices”, just to make it clear how minor their traditionally central function is to me), but surely, just as fifteen years ago nobody knew why everyone should have a phone, or ten years ago nobody wanted a colour display, or five years ago cameras in phones were seen as a showy novelty, another five or ten years will see the majority of phones be Internet devices (well, in the First World, anyway), and the software will come to dominate.
2009-04-28
Lunchtime Guardian Reading
Usually I post links elsewhere, but when I have a chunk to post, with images and quotes too, they go here. Like this:
Underground, underfunded, overrated
Huma Qureshi on the Mercer Quality of Living survey putting London eighth in the world for infrastructure (“including public transport, traffic congestion and international flights from airports”, as it says):
Eighth best city in the world? For infrastructure? Really? The report says: “London’s ranking in the infrastructure index reflects the high level of public services offered, with its extensive public transport network and wide variety of telecommunication services.”
I could whine about tube delays and how it all packed up in this year’s “snow event”, but that’s not the only issue.
I’ve written in praise of Tube lines before, but let me say it again: for all that locals like to complain, London’s infrastructure does an amazing job of getting people around; and it’s not just the tube, but the extensive bus network and the suburban trains. (I’ve been on metro systems where four trains per hour was considered a decent service; there are a dozen lines like that to mainline London stations).
Sure, it costs too much, but that’s because (as a country) we keep voting for people promising to cut taxes or privatise things. If I’ve been anywhere better in the world, it’s had to do so on a smaller scale. (I must say, though, I am very curious to see how Tokyo compares.)
A leader, no less, following on from the WSJ’s article on Vincent Connaire. I’m not at all convinced by the article, but there are some gems in the comments, including a link to a piece noting how bad the typeface is for, well, comics.
Jon Henley meets Jon Snow, the moral anchor of Channel 4 news
A good piece, with this great comment about cycling at the beginning:
“I know for certain,” he says, “that I can be in, say, Downing Street, in 11 minutes flat. Of what other means of transport, in London, can you say that?”
Collages, wall paintings and a cavern of crystals on the Turner prize shortlist
Just so I can end on a picture of Seizure, really.
2009-04-23
post/99288487
2008-12-11
Pitchfork's 20 worst album covers of 2008.
(via binkythedoormat) Some of these look like they’d fit in with the storm of naive design dross that fills up fffound. (Oh, and the Santogold cover sucks.)
2008-12-09
ffffound / ddddownload
In a moment of procrastination, I noticed that ddddownload (previously) was at the top of the delicious home page (with 150+ links). Noting a mention of swissmiss, I saw her post about it, and this comment:
FFFFFound is a pretty lousy company as they disregard copyright laws. I know from experience; they’ve posted pictures of mine without any credit to me.
This new download only makes things worse.
I notice that “Olivia” doesn’t provide a URL, so I can’t tell who she is, or which images have been reused. However, ffffound have been known to do copyright takedowns, so presumably she hasn’t complained.
Personally, I think the easiest way to beat this is to be more open, not less. If you post your images in a Flash slideshow, but people still like them enough, they’ll just screengrab them and post to their own websites. When they end up on ffffound, the attribution chain (already meagre at best (previously) is completely broken. On the other hand, if you’d just made the image available, then there’s more of a chance that the bookmarks would point directly to your work on your site.
On the other hand, she probably has a point. As I said yesterday, ddddownload strips what little metadata there is on a ffffound image away entirely, leaving you with only image filenames. Please, general-projects, fix that. (Hell, I’ll even try and learn PHP if you can accept the coding help.)
Meanwhile, while I’m in one of my occasional ffffound posts, I’m pretty peeved at the practices of some of the big names in design blogging. Both swissmiss and fubiz now seem to crosspost every image to the site, which has a couple of nasty effects.
Firstly, swissmiss bookmarks from the front page, not the article page, so the link above the image is useless once the image is more than a few days old. (fubiz used to do this, but thankfully don’t any more.) This is all the more annoying as a more specific URL from a user that follows isn’t used in preference.
Secondly, ffffound’s automatic following system seems to be based on comparing who posts things (first? before? as well as?) that you also post. When you end up with a blogger tagged as one of your favorite users, that can drown the autogenerated “new for you” page with their posts, while your quieter, more interesting “real” peers suffer. Of course, the lack of any tools for editing followers means there’s nothing you can do to block them short of finding which images offend and removing them.
Even so, ffffound continues to be worth looking at for me, and given people still seem to be hunting for invites, they must be doing something right.
2008-11-30
Why I Love Twitter | O'Reilly Radar
This post is much-linked, and usually I’d put it on delicious, but I’m going to dump in some big quotes and vaguely organised thoughts that, even with the new 1000 character limit over there, would probably be a bit much.
Twitter is user-extensible.The @syntax for referring to users, hashtags, and whatever you call the use of $ as a special symbol for reference to financial instruments, were all user-generated innovations that, because of Twitter’s simplicity, allowed for third party services to be layered not just on the API, but on the content.
For a long time, I’ve been annoyed at the cruft of hashtags and the like in Twitter messages. At-replies I’m less annoyed by, because they’re explicitly supported in the user interface I use (I’m one of those strange people who prefer the web interface to twitterrific, twhirl or somesuch). Hashtags, though, seem pointless: search.twitter.com indexes them as if they were ordinary words. The new use of $ for financial symbols also seems trivial.
On the other hand, these innovations all seem to be used far more than “proper” metadata is on other services. For example, Flickr’s tags are fairly well used, but machine tags (which are the most useful sort of hidden metadata) are still pretty rare. Perhaps I’m just going to have to accept that people aren’t good at entering things in complicated ways, and that emerging information from the nuance of conversation (to mangle a Stephenson quote) is the way to go.
In an aside on Twitter’s simplicity, there’s this:
New services likepeoplebrowsr are reframing service aggregation in a richer way, as a way of learning more about the people you follow, browsing the social graph. (Peoplebrowsr is still in alpha, but I think it has real potential as a social graph explorer, rather than as yet another people feed-reader.)
As someone who has wittered about aggregation a bit this year, I’m really curious about peoplebrowsr. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite seem to be doing what I’m looking for; roll on a true social graph explorer/aggregator.
