Category: geekery

Occasionally, I like to engage in a bit of recreational tech prognostication, and with the current hubbub over what Apple will do next, it seems there’s a considerable slice of the world who thinks the next big thing is a “smart” watch.

This is dumb.

Brutally dumb.

Apple, in its current aesthetic is a premium product company. If they are going to make a product, it will feel like the most materially luxurious version of that product. Hence the metal and glass design language they’ve adopted over the past few years.

Here’s the thing, most people don’t wear watches any more. They’ve become an enthusiast device, and the premium end of the market is mechanical. Mechanical to the point of fetishising that very nature, so that whole new classes of designs and movements are being invented, creating even more baroque ways to enable accurate progression via purely mechanical means. The joy of the modern watch is to wear a mechanical engine on your wrist.

That leaves the other wrist. Whatever Apple is working on, will be something you’d keep on your wrist while NOT wearing a watch. It will not be a portal to your phone, it will probably not have a screen at all. My bet, it’s going to be a motion recorder, like fitbit, which allows you to log and stream all your movement for interactivity like a wiimote.

More importantly, it also acts as a wearable passcode key for all your devices. Your mac unlocks when you approach, and locks again when you leave, your phone and tablet unlock when you pick them up, and it talks to iBeacon-using smart house devices (ie those who will fill the void left by NEST becoming a pariah for joining Google) around your house for smart house integration. iBeacon will be the new feature for home environment and control devices, the way AirPrint became a must-have for printers. It’ll be waterproof, and charge inductively.

There is no “how do I tell the time on my wrist” problem to be solved. There is no “how do I get a small music player for while I’m exercising” problem to be solved. There is no “I want to see my email but not take my phone out of my pocket” problem to solve, no actual people think like that. All the “problems” current smart watches “solve” were invented post-hoc purely to justify the concept of the “smart watch”.

Whatever it is, it won’t solve a glaring problem you, or anyone else thinks you have. It will solve problems that were so constant, so low level so much a part of the background friction of your life, that you never recognised them for what they were.

Update March 10th:

Here’s an article on an Apple patent for for doing one of the things I mentioned.

So there’s this bug in the calendar app in Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, where even though the reminders preferences are set to “None”, when you create new events they’ll show a reminder for the day before at 9am.

Having gone quietly mad trying to figure out the problem (there seem to be several solutions listed online relating to editing .plist files, none of which work), the situation and solution is thus:

When Calendar.app is started up afresh, there are 3(4) calendars in it:

• Home
• Work
• Birthdays
• (Reminders)

These have no reminders set in them, however any new calendars created will have the 9am day before default for any events created even if the preferences are set to none.

The solution is to create any new calendars, then create a new event, and open the inspector to you can see the event’s properties. Open the preferences, and toggle the reminders from none, to one of the other options and close preferences. Then open it again, toggle the reminders setting back to none, and close preferences again.

Problem solved.

If this article was of use, a donation would help support my projects.

This is a living list of the glitches and bugs, and general “this is not a fit and proper product for sale” nonsense I’ve had while playing the Far Cry 3 multiplayer mode on Xbox Live.

• Can’t find servers – 5-10 minute waits to get into a team deathmatch game at times.
• Lag.
• Killed and shown hits in a place I had been seconds earlier, where there hadn’t been any gunfire.
• the bug where another player is raining from the sky as they run along.
• button unresponsiveness – crouch button not working until I’ve jumped
• spawning in places where you’re caught on the collision map, requiring a jump to be able to move.
• spawning in places where you’re caught on the collision map, and jumping doesn’t work, leaving suicide as the only option.
• stuck in aim mode after using and releasing a mounted weapon.
• “committed suicide” while randomly walking or running along a flat piece of ground with no weapons fire.
• killed in one place, then magically teleported to the other side of the map to bleed out.
• reloading a half full weapon empties it of all but 1 round.
• killed and told I couldn’t be revived because I had been revived already, despite this having not happened.
• had my view wrenched in un-commanded directions while shooting at enemies.
• reloaded a weapon, then immediately revived someone, then find the reload has unhappened after the revive animation is complete.
• get killed and then fall through the map, plummeting through empty space as the terrain disappears into the distance above me.
• get killed, have my body catch fire, respawn on fire and lose all my health.
• get killed, respawn and immediately die again in a secluded area with no enemy present.
• unbalanced numbers on teams. One occasion playing on a team of 2 against 10.
• reload a weapon, attempt to shoot with a full magazine, reload sequence is triggered again, get killed by the person I was attempting to shoot.
• kicked from server due to being idle, while running around on the map looking for someone to kill.
• Spawn into the beginning of the game, with no weapons.
• everyone else frozen while I can still run around, and kill all the opposing players, and keep killing them when they’re on the ground.
• Falling off the ship and getting stuck a foot deep into the deck below.

With 2013 upon us, we’re in the window in which Apple CEO Tim Cook had promised that there’d be something new for Pro customers. Many people interpret this as code for a new Mac Pro which would in some way resemble the current behemoth.

I’m not so sure. I wonder if we’re in for an FCPX-style paradigm shift. Back when Apple introduced the first G3 PowerMac, there were two models of machine serving the Pro desktop market – the Powermac 8600, and 9600. The only difference was that one had three PCI slots, the other had six. The replacement G3 had 3 slots. Apple’s answer to those complaining, was to suggest that many of the previous two-card solutions had consolidated onto single cards, alleviating much of the need for six slots. Further, they suggested that the small fraction of the user base who needed more slots could go buy a PCI expansion chassis, which would plug into an existing slot and provide up to six more.

I hope we’re in for a similar shift on the Mac Pro.

Continue reading “What I want from a new Pro Mac”

There’s a bizarre meme which seems to have cropped up in the technology journalism world, which can best be summed up as follows:

The iPad is a content consumption device, but has little value for content creation.

Now, if you look at Apple’s more advanced apps such as the iWork versions, iMovie, or the stunning new Garageband version, what you see very clearly, especially with Garageband, is that the iPad paradigm already does some things for content creation better than a desktop OS can. Application designers have only just begun to scratch the surface of what is possible, when freed from the necessary mindset of everything rotating around moving a single point focus-assigning dot around the screen.

The next extension of this meme seems to be that the iPad is poor for content creation specifically because there’s no programming tools on it – that in effect, you can’t create iPad software with an iPad. Some lament that this relegates the iPad to an ancillary role, forever enslaved to a desktop computer.

This argument has two main problems:

1. So?
2. Programs aren’t content, they’re tools.

I would argue that programming is not content creation. Content is what you make with programs. By way of analogy, consider a small village, in which you have a blacksmith, and a woodcutter.

The blacksmith uses his anvil to make axeheads, which the woodcutter then uses to cut down trees which both feed the blacksmith’s furnace, and produce rudimentary furniture. Is an axehead any less of a tool because it can’t make other axeheads? Is it any less of a tool because it can’t be used to make a hammer and nails to hold together the wood it cuts to make furniture? Do we think the axehead is a doomed or stupid tool because it can’t do these things?

Do we seriously want to use an anvil to cut wood?

The reality is that for most people, most of what they can, or would use computers to do can be done as well, if not better on an iPad. If your computing needs can’t be met by an iPad, then you’re probably not in the “most people” category. That’s something that never fails to amaze me – technical geeky types who are completely oblivious to the fact that their preferences for how technology should work are so far removed from what the general populace wants, that they can’t actually recognise that fact. You see it in tech journalism all the time, usually regarding Apple products.

So the other day, Apple announced a change in their iOS developer rules that enables apps to have subscription billed content.

Anyone who reads a magazine app now has an Apple-mandated choice to subscribe and buy content wholly within the app. Yes, choice.

Now the tech blogosphere pundit-tards are losing their freaking minds because Apple mandated that consumers have a choice of how to subscribe, and whether they want to give their personal info to publishers. It’s easy to see why some companies like Rhapsody are looking at taking their bat and going home when you consider their sales plan:

1. make a free app which acts as a reader / viewer for your content.
2. Get your customers to download that app from the appstore, for which Apple will wear the hosting and bandwidth costs.
3. Sell access to content yourself, keeping all the profits, while stiffing Apple with the expenses.

Yeah, that was going to work. Apple are idiots, you see. They’re a social-good commons that all people should be able to exploit for nothing while reaping the benefits, right?

Oh wait, that’s not what’s happening, is it? No, the way it works now is:

1. make a free app which acts as a reader / viewer for your content.
2. The customer chooses if they want to subscribe through your website, or internally within your App.
3. If they buy in-app, the customer chooses if you get their personal details (which you sell to advertisers) or not.
4. You keep 100% of revenue when you process the subscription on your site, Apple keeps 30% when it’s done as an in-app purchase.

Ironic really that pundit-tards scream about Apple locking down consumer choice, then when they actually come up with a policy that mandates consumers get a choice, it’s not the right choice. Rhapsody are talking legal action, yeah have fun with that, and many organisations are threatening to leave the platform.

Well, don’t let the door hit you in the arse on the way out. You see folks, what all these companies either fail to grasp, or are well aware of and weeping into their hats about, is a fundamental fact about what the obsession with design has meant for Apple:

Apple’s products are better at being what they are, than (any) developer’s apps or publisher’s content are at being what they are.

The iPhone is a better music player than Rhapsody is a music service. The iPad is a better tablet than the Kindle App is a book buyer/reader. For the vast majority of consumers, the Apple product experience is so much better than the competition that non-Apple “exclusive” software or content simply doesn’t enter the equation. This isn’t a matter of market abuse, monopolies or anti-trust, it’s a simple case that noone else has built a device that is close enough to being on par with Apple devices, that content availability is a factor in purchase decisions.

Why do you think the lack of Flash has meant bugger all to the vast majority of iOS users? Content is only king, if all other factors are equal.

Steve Jobs’ clean, methodical takedown of Flash.

Everything about Adobe these days is summed up by this basic point.

Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Adobe has been obsessed for the past decade with the idea of becoming a platform vendor, rather than a tool vendor. As a maker of tools in the desktop publishing era, they were fantastic, but once Acrobat became something more than a convenient printing format, and especially once they were infected by Macromedia, this ridiculous notion of Adobe as a platform, Acrobat, Creative Suite and Flash, gained ascendancy.

We are all poorer for it, because innovative nimble companies can’t get the market share and finance to directly compete with, for example, Photoshop; instead relying on crumbs by making low end, budget “recreational” visions of Adobe apps. I haven’t used CS5, but CS4’s primary characteristic is that it feels old, as in “take that old dog out behind the woodshed and shoot it”.

Evergreen stalwarts of mediocrity, Adobe are crying to momma because big bad apple won’t let them play in Apple’s sandpit:

“without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web.”

As usual, Adobe have got it completely ass-backwards. Noone buys a Flash device. They buy an iPod, an iPhone or now an iPad, and they do it in ridiculous numbers. Flash not being on Apple’s devices has done exactly zero to harm sales and popularity of the device, and zero to harm the popularity and usable integrity of the platform.

Adobe’s statement would be better phrased as:

without iPhone OS suport, Flash developers and website designers will be unable to target the 100% of iPhone OS users, who represent the most financially lucrative consumer demographic. That’s why we’re falling over ourselves to salvage something with vapourware mutterings about CS5 producing “real” iPhone apps.

Oh, and while we’re talking about all those “great” flash sites, lets remember that when YouTube was faced with the opportunity of the iPhone, they went and rebuilt their entire system in h.264, and are now migrating to HTML5, Vimeo are going to HTML5, Zero Punctuation one of the web’s most popular video shows, has gone to h.264 (and the files are now about half the size of the Flash versions).

Cast your mind back to the start of the iPod, when everyone was declaring iPods to be the devil’s own product, and doomed to fail because it didn’t support .wma or .wmv or playsforsure or whatever Microsoft’s strategy of the nanosecond was. The vast majority of portable audio players supported MS’ formats, so all those poor Apple customers were being “locked out” of the “majority” of content.

Yeah, how did that work out? Anyone recall? Oh wait, Apple gouged out Microsoft’s brains and violated the corpse before playsforsure got knifed by Microsoft in favour of their next failsforsure effort, Zune.

If you want to be successful in a consumer category, you have to play in Apple’s sandpit, because noone else is capable of delivering a compelling consumer experience. The most hilarious, or perhaps pitiful aspect of this is that this situation isn’t a result of illegal, monopolistic or anti-competitive tactics by Apple, it’s just that almost everyone in the consumer electronics business actively sucks at the job in comparison.

Apple offers a manicured sandpit, your other options are craters of turned earth. Where do you want to play?

If Apple are about to launch a tablet style computer, I wonder if their recent purchase of an online advertising company Quattro is because they’ll be offering a centralised advertising service for tablet format publications, so that a publisher can just specify a place for an ad, and get a royalty paid direct by apple for the number of impressions the ad gets.

If they were to do this, I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple had a policy of text-only, or static ads – overly animated attention stealing ads are, I suspect, the reason people have developed both cognitive blindness for banner ads, as well as ad-blocking software.

A couple of hours until we find out.

EDIT: still waiting, but I thought I’d chime in a bit about why previous tablets have largely failed – in the Windows world, they’ve been about selling a windows computer that doesn’t need a keyboard – that’s the goal as far as microsoft and OEMs have been concerned. The goal hasn’t been “create the best digital magazine experience”, where the hardware and software are just the enabler, because people in the PC world haven’t really had the big picture vision to want to move the world in a particular direction as the goal, in the way Apple did with music. Microsoft doesn’t really want to change the world, they’re the established player, keeping the world the way it is, thankyou very much, is their be all and end all goal.