Computer Hardware Archives
There are plenty of iPhone reviews out there. This is not another. This post is just an observation as to why the iPhone is so different and inspires such goodwill from those who use it. It is simple really, but Apple has taken tasks that on most (all?) other phones are cumbersome, non-intuitive, and often just plain crappy and made them a joy. I am not really over stating this, the iPhone is really fun to use. Browsing the web is not reminiscent of the "real" real web, it IS the real web (ok a web without Flash - for now). Google maps works just like Google maps should. Email is great, not some crippled version, and the phone, despite what some have said, is very nice too. Almost all the interfaces are easy to use and it is easy to know where to go and what to do to make things happen. My previous Windows Mobile phone and my Palm PDA phone before that, took a while to master and it was only because I learned their backwards way of doing things was I able to manage on those devices.
This should serve as yet another lesson from Apple that design matters. Make interfaces (both physical and virtual) that are fun and intuitive and people will enjoy using them and tell their friends.
A couple other observations - No wonder there is a 10% restocking fee if you return an iPhone. With the amount of plastic they use - wrapping everything multiple times in their way. It would take a while to wrap all that stuff back up, I imagine. And what is up with the industrial glue used on the bags they put the phones in when you buy them. Not sure if it is the same at Apple stores but at the at&t store the clerk put the phone in this bag and then pulled away a strip between the two insides and the bag sealed up tight - had to use keys to rip a hole in the bag to open it. When we asked him about it, he said Apple was making them do that. Think different, I guess.
iPod, phone, camera, computer running OSX, bluetooth, wifi, and no buttons*. I am glad my Cingular contract is up in May, just in time to pony up for this amazing phone.
UPDATE: Now play around with it on the Official Apple Site.
* A fact that I am sure will get a whole cadre of usability professionals crying foul, but you know what, its all about sexiness and by and large buttons are not sexy.
I cannot believe how easy the transition has been for me in my switch from Windows-based computing to my new Mac. I admit I was apprehensive and had a lot of worries that I wouldn't be up to speed as fast as I needed to be, but those fears appear to be unfounded. Sure there are a couple keyboard commands I am retraining my fingers on and there are a few Firefox extensions that don't work well, but all in all I have been pleasantly surprised by the ease of the switch.
I am sure it will take a couple months to erase some of the muscle memory of hitting ctrl + c and v in favor of command + c and v and I there are no doubt countless little things I will find in Photoshop that could slow me down (like the save for web keyboard commands, that is an awkward hand contortion). I picked up the new wireless, Bluetooth Mighty Mouse too and have adopted a wait and see approach there. It is a great mouse in many ways but it seems a bit small for my hands and I can't quite get it configured how I want (though the SteerMouse software I downloaded is helping by allowing me to set additional preferences and per application defaults). The Tabbrowser Preferences extension (does anybody else hate the change to the word "Add-ons"? I wonder if it has legal reasons) is something I cannot really live without and a couple others would sure be nice to have on the Mac side of things.
But let's talk a bit about what I am impressed with. First off, and it really does strike you before anything else, is just how physically well-made these laptops are. There was a tremendous amount of thought put into the closing mechanism, the placement of ports, and the power supply. The keyboard has a great tactile feel and the back lighting and lighted indicators for num and caps lock are great..
Inside, the operating system is intuitive and clean. It responds quickly (even with only 1 GB of RAM. There were a couple things I altered right off the bat to make it feel better to me (adjusted the font smoothing down to 6 from 8; turned on full keyboard access for all web form controls (like check boxes), and adjusted the settings for Dashboard, Expose, and the Dock.
Third party software (while I lament the dearth of free options, has impressed with the overall level of quaility in the interface department. Almost all of the applications I have downloaded (TextMate, Transmit, and Parallells), very nice and tied closely to the look of the OS.
There are still some things I would like to figure out, like how to efficiently use Dashboard and iPhoto, or how to get my Google Calendar to load into iCal like it is supposed to, but all in all I already feel very comfortable with my new Mac and am dreading going back to work in the morning and booting up my Dell.
The Java Developer's Journal has published the results of it's end-of-year poll of various Internet technology players which makes for some good reading. Here are a couple I found interesting:
Jason Bell, Editorial Board Member, Java Developer's Journal:
Incremental mainstream adoption of Ruby on Rails
It's going to happen, isn't it? Keep an eye out for Sun's offering of JRuby. Whether this is the death of other open source scripting languages like Groovy remains to be seen. Ruby has been a wake-up call and has now drawn the line dividing serious scripting languages from "hobby" languages (ones that wouldn't see enterprise adoption). For me, my job just got a whole lot easier, a whole lot quicker.
David Heinemeier Hansson, Creator of (Ruby on) Rails:
2007 will be the year where LAMPers finally decide to stop being neutral about the WS-* mess and pick the side of REST: the next wave of Web APIs will stop supplying both a SOAP and REST API and just go with the latter.
Gary Cornell, Founder & Publisher, Apress:
-IE 7 will have a fast adoption curve and so Firefox will cease gaining market share.
-The AJAX bandwagon will gain even more speed.
-Ruby's momentum will slow down as Python and PHP frameworks to combat Rails grow in popularity.
-The open-sourcing of Java will have no effect whatsoever on Java's slow decline in favor of dynamic languages (Ruby, Python) and C#.
-Apple will no longer gain market share for its desktops and will stabilize at its current meaningless level.
-Ultra lightweight notebooks based on flash memory with instant on/off will start coming out in large numbers.
I agree that so-called dynamic languages and frameworks will make big gains in '07 but feel pretty optimistic about the prospects for non Ruby on Rails flavors too. Groovy and Grails is primed to be pretty big and while I don't think it will overtake RoR in the next year, there are significant advantages that make the prospects for Groovy and its framework Grails to become very mainstream, look very good.
From a press release on the new book: The Definitive Guide to Grails:
Ruby on Rails is hot, but it seems that more recent noise from the Java community has been focused on Groovy and its framework, Grails. Taking inspiration from innovative frameworks like Ruby on Rails, or the likes of Django or TurboGears, Grails makes simple things simpler, harder things possible, and brings back the fun of creating web applications. Continuing to affirm the hype, Guillaume Laforge and Dierk König, remark "Grails definitely has an ambitious name for being the Holy Grail all application developers have sought so far. But more than a mere ambition, Grails fulfills its promises by letting you be more productive than you could have ever thought possible."
The Grails Framework is an open source, lightweight, agile Web development framework that leverages Groovy, an open source, lightweight, agile and dynamic Java-based scripting language, and complements Java web development. Grails is the ideal framework for developing in the web tier for Java developers and exemplifies the power of the Groovy language and its APIs.
I for one believe that there are too many Java developers out there (their community still dwarfs the next largest one) that are very interested in lightweight frameworks and rapid development but are not too keen on "throwing out" years of experience with the most popular language out here. Groovy in combination with the Grails framework offers the best of both of these worlds and I think people are just waiting for someone to really take up and champion Grails as David Heinemeier Hansson and 37signals have done for Rails.
If you are new to Groovy or Grails, this interview with Groovy project manager Guillaume Laforge is a good primer for learning about Groovy and Grails and where it stands in its current development.
There have already been reports of malfunctions and strange electronic voting machine behavior and the threat of the systems being hacked, or worse (and more likely). I never thought it would be an issue, but I guess I was naive. Let's hope when those of us who vote using these new-fangled machines this Tuesday, we can trust that our vote actually counted. Then again, maybe we shouldn't worry.
Daniel M. Harrison at blogcritics has been all over the potential sale of Sun to Google and what it might mean. He, along with some others, have proposed a Google move into the financial services and healthcare industries.
"Google is going into Financial Services and Healthcare!" he exclaimed over the lengthy conversation. "This is the last stage of the Java project!"
This could also be the true start to the "G-drive platform" or GO-OS (Google OS) and could also mean the open sourcing of Java? This last part is intriguing especially as other platforms and languages gain ground* on the reigning king of the enterprise application.
This claim is, however speculative and not proven true by poor indicators such as book sales and various internet pundits.
The Korean company, Gamepark Holdings, makers of the GPX2 probably did not know that their product would catch on, as it has. Because it runs Linux, it is easy to customize, add to, and hack. And despite a slew of shortcomings (no wi-fi, lack of mainstream games, less-than-stylish design, and short battery life – rumored to be fixed), the GPX2 can do many things that the more popular Nintendo DS and Sony PSP cannot (support for many common file types – mp3, mpg, DivX, bmp, jpg, etc, the ability to emulate classic games) - all because it is open.
When will device manufacturer's learn that opening up their products will make them infinitely more attractive to, hackers and developers at first, but then later, as more hacks and mods are available, to the mainstream market? Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, and mobile phone makers should be embracing freeness and openness as a means of being more profitable. Stop the arrogance (of thinking you can do it better) and start the acquiescence (and yield to the open movement).
Looks like TiVo is rolling out new features at quite a clip. Some have reported that they now have support for podcasts ad I have seen local weather and traffic and other features in conjunction with Yahoo! There would also seem to be sharing of photos with Yahoo! (Flickr integration coming soon?) Maybe this Yahoo!/TiVo partnership is going to be more worthwhile than first speculated...interesting.
More features being rolled out:
- Browse movie information/buy tickets from Fandango.
- Discover new music on Live365.
- Overlap priority (for those shows that begin or end at strange times)
- Movies on demand with Netflix (ok so this one is still wishful thinking)
TiVo is still a ways ahead of the competitors in features. Hopefully they can stay that way and somehow make a profit.
* If you ever corner me in a bar or such place have me tell you the story about Bob Sagat that Paul Provenza told the entire theater at SXSW 2005 after the preview screening.
"John Gibson of Fox News says that Karl Rove should be given a medal. I agree: Rove should receive a medal from the American Political Science Association for his pioneering discoveries about modern U.S. politics. The medal can, if necessary, be delivered to his prison cell.
What Rove understood, long before the rest of us, is that we're not living in the America of the past, where even partisans sometimes changed their views when faced with the facts. Instead, we're living in a country in which there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth. In particular, there are now few, if any, limits to what conservative politicians can get away with: The faithful will follow the twists and turns of the party line with a loyalty that would have pleased the Comintern."
"A 25-year-old quadriplegic sits in a wheelchair with wires coming out of a bottle-cap-size connector stuck in his skull.
The wires run from 100 tiny sensors implanted in his brain and out to a computer. Using just his thoughts, this former high school football player is playing the computer game Pong.
It is part of a breakthrough trial, the first of its kind, with far-reaching implications. Friday, early results were revealed at the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation annual conference. Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems, the Foxborough-based company behind the technology, told attendees the man can use his thoughts to control a computer well enough to operate a TV, open e-mail and play Pong with 70% accuracy. "
"Further out, some experts believe, the technology could be built into a helmet or other device that could read neural signals from outside the skull, non-invasively. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding research in this field, broadly known as Brain Machine Interface, or BMI.
DARPA envisions a day when a fighter pilot, for instance, might operate some controls just by thinking."
Scientists gingerly tap into brain's power
[Source: Kottke.org]
Here are some links I was too busy/lazy to post about throughout the week:
It would be very interesting to see
this on a PC.
EtherPeg is quite a cool idea. A
Linux version called Driftnet (though done independently was made too.
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Fingerprint readers flawed says study. They can be fooled with $10 of supplies and a little bit of work.
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Is
this the new dating scene? "Honey look over there. Don't we know that pair of pasties from college?"
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URLizer.com will turn those long unruly links into shorter unruly links suitable for sending in emails. [Source:
broomeman.com]
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How to Piss Me Off 101: Lesson 3:
Bring in a corporate mentor consultant type to have us "bring 5% more awareness to our feelings".
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I know that this site:
The Rainforest Site is lame but if they really can really preserve 11.4 square feet of rainforest each day I click, from the fools they sell banner ad space to, then more power to them. [Related, of course, are
The Hunger Site and
The Breast Cancer Site]
I have signed up to be a
Secret Santa. Gift giving to people you don't know has never been easier with sites like
this. [Source:
Kottke.org]
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Scientists make a computer out of DNA. "It is the first programmable autonomous computing machine in which the input, output, software and hardware are all made of biomolecules."
Here are some new (or new to me) things I have seen that seem like pretty good ideas:
People PC - the idea is you get a new computer, unlimited internet access, free on-site support, and other deals passed your way for $24.95 / month
Here's what they say:
A top-quality, brand-name computer, replaced every 3 years
Unlimited Internet access
Easy setup
Terrific deals when you shop
On-site hardware warranty, great customer service
The computer is a Toshiba 366 Mhz Intel Celeron, w/64 MB of RAM and a 6 GB hard drive. You get an 8 MB video card, a 56 k modem, a 15" monitor and speakers to boot. It seems ike a great deal for mom's (hopefully mine wouldn't need to call me for computer help then)
First Internet Bank - basically everything is online.
I am thinking about doing something like this. They offer ATM usage at any of 42,000 ATM's and give you $6/month to cover out of network ATM usage. They have 3% interest on checking accounts and its really set up to pay bills on-line (a definite plus). I just wish there we're more competitive forces at work in this industry. Really this should all be free because we are allowing them to not hire tellers and the like.
Don't even get me started on ATM fees. I cannot stand them!
Oh yeah, I back on the eBay again. I need a 12 step program.
And when the hell can I expect Homesite 5. I will not switch to 4 but I think it could be better.
