Herein you’ll find articles on a very wide variety of topics about technology in the consumer space (mostly) and items of personal interest to me. I have also participated in and created several podcasts most notably Pragmatic and Causality and all of my podcasts can be found at The Engineered Network.
Speaking of small nothings for Humankind...DOS for Playbook!
Wow. I mean really. Wow. It never ceases to amaze me how people choose to spend their free time. For example you could play with your kids (if you have any), go out with your partner (if you have one), or party with your mates (if you have any) or solitary things like write a novel or do something artistic. If, instead of this list of good options, you instead chose: Port an unsupported, 20 year old operating system onto an unpopular tablet computer, then you must have been this guy. Meltbox360 has posted instructions on how to run DosBOX (a cross-platform DOS emulator) on the Blackberry Playbook. From this, one can run Windows 3.11 and any manner of really old games with a touch interface they were never designed for.
Speaking of small nothings for Humankind this one takes the cake for me. There have been tablets around for ages that could run DOS programs anyway. If that’s a selling point for you then you won’t buy a Playbook in the first place.
This Is My Next becomes The Verge
I’ve been following the careers of three very different people with a common passion for tech since they started at Engadget many years ago. I’ve discussed their departure from Engadget, with more of their friends following shortly thereafter, and their move to SB Nation. I am referring to Joshua Topolsky, Nilay Patel and Paul Miller, and they ran an interim site they called “This is my next…” for about six months while they worked in the background on their new project they unveiled recently as “The Verge”.
The quality of the content is high and the delivery is sharp, concise and to the point mostly. The skills they’ve developed over the past few years have set them up well in their newfound role. Like Engadget before them, they’re covering much of the same material as before but the big difference is the structure of their site and some of the interesting features their site has.
I encourage you to check out their website and pay particular attention to their story stream (example) which is very nicely organised. In all the site is quite full-on in so far as there is a lot of information with a lot of colour that tends to overload the brain on first glance. As you scroll around it’s difficult to know where to look first and it took me a good week to get my head around the layout of the site. That said - it’s worth the trouble.
They have also continued their podcasts which are always fun and usually informative. Joshua in particular is becoming a much bigger personality now that he appears on Jimmy Fallon regularly and writes a column for the Washington Post newspaper. Things are going well for them and it’s clear that it’s the result of a lot of hard work. Keep it up guys - we’re watching.
iTunes Match (Cloud Streamed Music) vs Local Storage
At first I believed my thoughts revolved around iTunes Match but really they just revolve around Cloud-based streamed music content. Streamed music takes bandwidth and data allowance. Since when you’re out and about on 3G (not WiFi) bandwidth is so variable and since data allowance costs a lot of money (I get 1.5Gb per month but it costs $59/month to get it). Assuming I personally had all of music stored in the cloud then I could continuously stream music for 34 days - by which time I would have a new quota. It’s feasible but then most people don’t have a 1.5Gb quota (usually 200Mb and that lasts about 4.5 days continuously).
Yes, I know that people won’t listen to their music streaming continuously however the arguments are these: why not buy a 64Gb iPod Touch or iPhone and fill it with your music rather than stream it? Certainly the model costs more than the others but the cost of a bigger data plan to accommodate this would cancel out in less than a year for most people. Add to that the variability of 3G coverage and the certainty of being able to listen to music locally stored and there’s no argument.
I do see a place for a-la-carte music streaming services - but that is more of an impulse desire to listen to any song in existence whenever you like. iTunes Match isn’t that - nor is Google Music [Beta] nor is Amazon Cloud Drive. The appeal of these services will be niche at best until the cost of data goes down and the bandwidth and coverage of 3G and 4G networks improves. Even then, with the cost of flash storage falling all the time, it will still be a questionable proposition for most.
Gimmicks Sell
I’ve been around technology for my whole life - I suppose most people reading this can say the same. Big corporations trying to pry your hard-earned money from your fingers will do anything - yes anything - to grab it if they can. Long-term saleability of any product has to have more going for it that just one single idea usually, but if you can add more and more ideas to the product in a way that compliments the others, that can’t hurt can it?
In short: Gimmicks sell. There’s nothing wrong with that but please don’t get angry or flippant with companies that want to add one or two to their next product. Recently there was a bit of controversy with Android 4.0 - so-called “Ice Cream Sandwich” and their new feature that unlocks the phone using facial recognition. Seems simple enough: put the phone in front of your face and it recognises you as the owner and unlocks itself for you. It wasn’t long before someone found a way to cheat the system and by showing a photograph of the owner to the phone they were able to gain access every time. Begin the tirade of criticism: “oh what a terrible idea” and such from the peanut gallery.
The fact is facial recognition is nothing more than a gimmick. In the same way that the iPad 2 has Smart Covers that can automatically unlock the iPad 2 when they are opened. Steve Jobs sold the idea on stage by proudly announcing that the cover had “magnets” to a few chuckles in the audience. Obviously magnets are nothing new but it was a cool gimmick to have the option to automatically wake up and put to sleep the iPad 2 whenever the Smart Cover was opened or closed. The security conscious would never use since it leaves the iPad 2 vulnerable to anyone to access at will.
I think the problem is that facial unlock on ICS was seen by those less tech-savvy as being some kind of biometric security measure or at least an add-on that extends the security of the device. The fact is that this was never really the case. Google intended it to be a gimmick for those not as concerned about the security of their devices - no different to Apple with their iPad 2 Smart Covers.
The thing about gimmicks is, if you keep adding enough cool gimmicks on top of others and they work well together, you get a potentially popular product. I think it’s great Google added this gimmick - Apple will eventually add it themselves I imagine. It pushes the envelope forward and that’s a good thing.
Just remember that it’s only a gimmick - and gimmicks sell.