Author: jamesclay

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Stay hungry, stay foolish

Is Apple innovative?

David Hopkins on the Google+ made an interesting point

Am I missing the innovation everyone holds Apple in such high regard for? All I am seeing is reaction to what is happening elsewhere but no real drive or innovation. The latest updates are in reaction to Dropbox, user keyboards, messaging, widgets/homescreen, etc.

Apple have always been like that, even under Steve Jobs.

What they do best is take ideas from other people and make them really work well for users.

Steve Jobs famously said in 1996:

Picasso had a saying — ‘good artists copy; great artists steal’ — and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

Dynabook

The Dynabook was first revealed in 1973, the HP TC1100 was a fantastic tablet (let down by a poor OS implementation), so when Apple released the iPad in 2010, this wasn’t innovation, this was reinvention of an existing form factor, and what they did was make it work and work well.

There were a few music download services prior to iTunes, but it was iTunes that made it mainstream.

There were many different mp3 players, from companies such as Creative, but it was the iPod which turned the mp3 player from a geeky product to a mainstream need.

The iPhone was, though innovative, most of the touchscreen phones before were clunky and didn’t work very well. What Apple did was take the touch interface to the next level, reinvention again, really.

Even Steve Jobs said reinvent when he announced the iPhone.

An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator… these are NOT three separate devices! And we are calling it iPhone! Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone. And here it is.

Even Steve Jobs said reinvent when he announced the iPhone.

The 11″ MacBook Air is a fantastic piece of kit, but before then we had the Asus EeePC mini-notebooks, and Sony for years were making innovative VAIO laptops.

So following the WWDC keynote where we saw Apple release their version of Dropbox, the iCloud Drive (which replaces iCloud, which replaced MobileMe, which replaced the iDisk!). The previous versions were all a bit “rubbish” in comparison to Dropbox, so it will be interesting to see how iCloud Drive works against Dropbox.

Store any type of file in iCloud and access it on any device. With iCloud Drive, you can organize your files in the cloud the way you like, create as many folders as you want, and add tags to find files faster.

This is a great example of how Apple continues to copy what others do, but also demonstrates that don’t always get it right.

Another example from WWDC is the possibility of using third party keyboards.

iOS 8 brings the biggest changes to the keyboard since the very first iPhone. Now you can tap to choose the perfect suggestion for your next word. And for the first time, third-party keyboards will be available. Typing as you know it might soon be a thing of the past.

Third party keyboards have been a feature of Android phones for a fair while now, this is another example that shows Apple rarely creates something totally new, but takes on board ideas from elsewhere.

In my opinion what makes Apple a success is they focus on the customer experience, learning from what others do and then improve it.

Lastly a quote from Steve

Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.

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Skype Group Video calls now free

It use to be the case that Skype group video calls required a subscription to Skype Premium, after today group video calling will be free for Windows, OS X, and Xbox One users.

You can connect up to ten people. It will roll out to all other Skype platforms soon.

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Wearing it on your sleeve

Android Watches

Google have recently a new version of Android for “wearables” specifically watches, Android Wear.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrqZl2QIz0c

“That’s why we’re so excited about wearables—they understand the context of the world around you, and you can interact with them simply and efficiently, with just a glance or a spoken word.”

Wearables have been on the horizon for a while now. Rumours have abounded for a while about Apple’s iWatch and we have seen devices such as the Pebble which interact with your phone. Google have been “playing” with Google Glass in the US.

It’s interesting that Google see the next step is a watch.

Back in the 1980s the digital watch was incredibly popular, everyone I knew had or wanted a Casio watch, a watch that did so much more than just tell the time.

Today the watch hasn’t evolved, most people I know either don’t wear a watch or have retrograded to a “traditional” watch. In most respects, people see a digital watch as cheap and tacky!

If you though take a moment, though we are anticipating Android watches and Apple’s iWatch, there have been a few wearable technologies over the years already. The iPod nano was for many people a wearable, either attached to the arm when jogging or as a watch. Nike have their Fuelband and then there is the Fitbit.

The main difference with those devices compared to the anticipated smart watches, was they had limited functionality. The iPod nano was in the main, a music player, whilst the Nike Fuelband is about recording physical activity. You also have devices like the Pebble that aren’t isolated devices, but work in conjunction with your smartphone.

The newer anticipated devices, look like to be powerful multi-functional devices. You can see some of the concepts in devices such as Google Glass.

Mobile phones in the 1990s were in the main for making phone calls and sending SMS, some had a calculator, but generally they were limited single function devices. When you look at the Android phones and iPhones that we have today, these are cameras, gaming consoles, internet communication devices, video devices, as well as a device for making phone calls and sending SMS.

Generally when a device becomes more functional and flexible, the more useful it is for a wider range of uses and contexts.

So are you going to get a “wearable”?

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Dodgy 3G

Nexus One

Earlier this week I was without 3G on my home mobile phone. Trying to use it resulted a “failed to connect to server error”. I certainly had signal and it wasn’t even working in areas where I know it should work.

My initial thought was that the T-Mobile (EE) network had fallen over, but with no one else reporting issues it was only me having the problem.

What I found out later was that I had exceeded my “fair use” limit on my unlimited 3G plan. This has only happened once or twice before and I was, then, able to get a free booster to extend my limit.

This time though the SMS messages I received from EE, the pages I was redirected to on the phone, did not indicate that I had reached my limit. In the end I guessed I must have as it was almost the day my 3G fair use limit resets.

Most of the day I was unable to access the boosters page, but in the evening on the way home, it did (finally) appear on the mobile browser and I was able to get 3G.

I think part of the issue is I have quite an old legacy plan, which isn’t really able to be matched by newer plans, hence my reluctance to upgrade. This probably means that when I run out of 3G, the redirects don’t work as they should, as so few people are using them. I know it has only happened once or twice before for me.

One day I might upgrade, especially when 4G is more prevalent, or even cancel, if FGW get their WiFi act together this year, as I generally use 3G more on the train then anywhere else.

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Happy Birthday Mac

Today is the 30th anniversary of the launch of the Apple Mac, so Happy Birthday Mac.

My first Mac was in 2002, and it was a Titanium G4 PowerBook. I was Director of the Western Colleges Consortium in Avon, and one of the partner colleges was not happy about the support they were getting in using the shared VLE and online learning content on their Macs they used. They were using G4 PowerMacs, so in order to support them better I decided to order the “cheapest” G4 Mac I could and that was the Titanium G4 PowerBook.

Titanium G4 PowerBook

I remember thinking that if I was going to really understand the needs of the users of these strange devices I had better use it as my main device for a few weeks.

Within a week, it had become my main computer and I soon upgraded it with an Airport 802.11b wireless card so it was more useful. I remember how much I liked the fact that you shut the lid, and when you opened it, it came back on almost immediately.

It was a dual boot machine running OS 9 and OS X 10.1 Puma. It had a 500MHz G4 chip, a 10GB hard disk drive, 128MB of RAM and a DVD Drive.

It was a very different experience to the Windows 2000 PCs I was use to, and the user interface was in many ways a combination of “easy” and “challenging”. It took me a few months to work out how to drag and drop.

It lasted a few years and was eventually replaced with an Aluminium G4 Powerbook a few years later.

Since then I have had and used many Macs, including the G5 PowerMac which was an amazing computer, very powerful, various incarnations of the iMac, most recently a 27” model. With the move to Intel, I used a range of MacBooks, I really liked the MacBook Pro Retina and I am currently typing this article on an 11” MacBook Air.

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Let there be light

iSight

Interesting conversation on MacBreak Weekly about how low light impacts on video quality when using Google Hangouts or Skype. With low light, you need more gain, which means a more grainy video. More grainy video interestingly requires more bandwidth, so as a result services such as Google Hangouts or Skype have problems and downgrade the quality or buffer the video.

So if you use Google Hangouts, you may be at home or in the office, you very likely don’t have any studio lights (why would you) and therefore the environment is probably darker.

So if you are having connection issues using a Google Hangout, laggy video, latency issues, buffering, you might want to turn the lights on.

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Entering a parallel universe….

I was recently at a conference in London and I am sure that a few people thought they had entered a parallel universe, as before at conferences I was often seen with a MacBook, an iPad and an iPhone. At this conference I was carrying a Windows Surface Pro, a Nexus 7 and an Google Nexus One phone. No Apple hardware in sight!

I have recently changed jobs, so my MacBook was given back, as was my work iPhone. I did have a home iPhone 3G, but recently ended the contract on that one, so I cancelled the contract and gave the phone to my wife, as her phone had recently died. In a similar vein, I had gone out and bought the iPad (third generation) when it came out, but after a few months I also gave it to my wife, as I was using one at work and for most home purposes my old original iPad was doing a fine job.

Going to London the main problems I had was missing the Tube Exits app, which tells you where to get on the tube so that when you arrive at your destination station you are both a) on the correct side for getting off, but also b) right next to the way out.

The other problem I had was with maps, of all the map apps I have used, my personal favourite is the original Apple Maps App, which used the data from Google. I had it on my iPhone 3G and was disappointed with the upgrade last year. I was using maps to get from Euston Square Tube Station to Senate House, and though I knew the approximate direction, I wasn’t exactly sure where it was. In the end it was more luck than judgement I found it.

At the event itself my main device was the Windows Surface Pro. The battery lasted for most of the day and I was certainly using it quite hard. I have to admit I wasn’t too impressed with the images it took, I have had much better results with the iPad.

However it was easy to tweet from the device (and when I needed to catch up with e-mail or find URLs). Even with the “touch” keyboard it isn’t really a blogging device, and elsewhere I have found it easier to use a real keyboard (as it happens an Apple one….).

As for the Nexus, well that was a backup device, but I did use it to listen to some podcasts on the train home.

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Slow, but sure

iMac

I am finally getting my iMac working again after the system crash. Though I do have backups, there was some recent data that I wanted to retrieve, and as I do manual backups of the data (I know)my preference was to restore the drive as is, rather than rebuild from scratch. The simple way would have been format and then resinstall my apps and data.

Initially I was able to get the drive to “appear” using Firewire Target Disk Mode using another Mac. So my first approach was to “fix” the drive using the OS X Drive Utiity. This failed and the error message wasn’t that helpful, which was format and reinstall! I could mount the drive and read the files on the iMac, but couldn’t write to the drive or delete files.

My second approach was then to clone the drive onto an external Firewire drive, however this just didn’t work, in the main as I have a large full 1TB hard drive. So I went with manually copying over the files, but as I was copying from Firewire to Firewire through an old Mac, this was slow. When Finder said it was going to take 720 days (yes days not hours) to coop over 200GB of data, I knew that this approach wasn’t going to work.

So I created a boot drive using a spare external Firewire drive and installed OS X onto that. I then booted the iMac using the external Firewire drive as the startup drive. Success, however, though when using another Mac I could see the internal drive, when booting the iMac from an external drive the OS wouldn’t let me mount or see the internal drive.

Using the Google I searched on the Disk Utility Error Messages and the response across the web was to use DiskWarrior. I was a little hesitant as I suspected now that the drive problem wasn’t file system or OS based, but was a hardware problem (based on my previous experience).

In the end I did decide to buy DiskWarrior and once installed I got it going to let it do its work.

It took a fair few minutes to get going, but alas it couldn’t fix the directory problems and confirmed that there was a hardware issue with the drive and it would need to be replaced. However it also created a temporary file structure, which allowed me to copy files off the drive onto the replacement external hard drive and importantly do this quite quickly.

I was unable to clone the drive, but as I could copy files I was able to confirm I had the most recent copies, as well as checking system files.

So at the moment I am using an external drive, I will be taking the iMac to the Apple Store as I am disappointed that the replacement drive didn’t last very long, even though I am out of AppleCare.

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Oops, used too much 3G, but it wasn’t me!

Though I have a legacy “unlimited” 3G contract with T-Mobile (EE who are EE) it would be apparent that I have reached the fair use limit of 3GB this month. Now the reason I have gone over the limit was for a range of reasons, but the main culprits are streaming podcasts, updates for Windows and a system update for my Nexus 7.

With my new commute, I have not had the time to download podcasts and have been using BeyondPod on my Nexus 7 to stream podcasts over the internet. This does work most of the time, but of course would have quite a negative impact on bandwidth.

I also have been using a new laptop, an Acer Windows 7 machine, but of course didn’t check the update settings and as a result it has been downloading updates in the background! Well got that changed pretty sharpish, but too late for reducing the impact on my 3G bandwidth limit.

What T-Mobile do when you reach your limit, is give you a “free” 250MB booster, which I thought would be fine for a few days. What I didn’t take into account was my Nexus 7 downloading the 4.3 Android update, which was 158MB. Now what I don’t get is that my Nexus is already at 4.3 and has downloaded this update a fair few times now!

As a result for the next few days I am probably going to be without 3G… well now I will need to rely on free wifi at stations. I am slightly annoyed (only slightly mind you) as my 3G coverage has been quite poor this month, I do believe that the main reason has been other people sucking up the bandwidth, was quite impressed with 3G speeds when I took a later, quieter train.

Now do I move over to 4G?