Tag: apple

Page-tearing

Princeton has been running a Kindle-DX trial, in which several classes were selected, and the students in those classes were issued a Kindle-DX pre-loaded with the reading material (and whatnot) associated with that class. The article contains both the predictable and the WTF-able.

The predictable: Kindle is different than a book. It doesn’t have page numbers, for instance. Look at this magnamity in action:

[the professor] has permitted his students to use location numbers in their written work for the course

Wowie, that’s big of him. When future historians revisit “India: A Land of Contrasts” from this class’ 2009 collected output they will, however, face some cross-referencing challenges. This does, though, get at some fundamental usability issues with Kindle. The book has been reformatted and (obviously) needs to be repaginated (and actually repaginates on the fly if you visit an endnote and then return, for instance). I get that. But it would be a minor thing for Amazon to add a “Give me the page number from edition X” feature; you could presumably even generate page references from several editions if you wanted to. Seriously. Why isn’t that already there?

You can’t really mark up a Kindle. You can “fold” pages down and create a bookmark; you can (at least on the “real” Kindle, not the iPhone app) highlight text, search text, add notes, and do other stuff along those lines. But, without recourse to a straightforward touch-based interface, students report consternation in that many of these markup features are either lacking or extremely inconvenient:

“It’s clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.”

[-and-]

the annotation software was “useful but not as easy or ‘organic’ feeling as taking notes on paper.”

[-and-]

“A huge benefit to the Kindle is having large quantities of reading available at your fingertips and not having to print and lug around books and articles,” she said. “Some disadvantages are the necessity to charge the Kindle and the impossibility of ‘flipping through’ a book.”

The underlying theme of these comments leads us inevitably to the WTF-able (emphasis added):

Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs

Indeed, I think most students learn by tearing up the pages in a book. How else am I supposed to undermine the progress of my classmates? I ask you, how am I supposed to fuck them over on a Kindle? Water? Sharp objects?

As somebody who recently read Infinite Jest on the iPhone Kindle app, I feel some of this pain. Searching is actually non-existent on the iPhone version, so count your lucky stars you Kindle-DX users. Conventional page numbers are not there in any version of the device. But you can flag portions really easily. Too easily for my tastes, actually; I flagged pages by accident on several occasions. You can jump around reasonably easily, and the numerous endnotes were a dream; no using two bookmarks and flipping back and forth, finding the entry in inevitably tiny text…Kindle handles it all for you, even though it somewhat disconcertingly (at first, anyway) returns you to the space after the endnote, not to the page-view you had previously. With DFW, the endnotes are often quite, uh, lengthy, and some re-contextualizing to where you were is often a must, thus requiring a page-back, page-forward move to get back into the previous format of the page. But, with one or two exceptions, the Kindle performed perfectly in navigating multi-nested notes and always sorting out where to go to after. Seriously, read (and lug around) the annotated War and Peace and then the Kindle Infinite Jest. See which endnote approach you prefer. And, of course, there’s the constant availability and no-light readability.People never seem to mention those with “real” Kindles. Oh, wait, it doesn’t have a built in light-source. And it’s a separate, unitasking gadget to lug around, and so not really ubiquitous in the sense of something you have with you all the time, no matter what. Is it different: to be sure. Is it in many ways better: without a doubt.

So, does that mean this whole e-Book idea is kaput? I seriously doubt it. Everything they specifically complain about in the article comes down to interface, design, and performance. A more capable reader, some kind of tablet, let’s say, coming from a company with legendary interface success, a company familiar with portable computing and always-available networking, a company that can manage a large internet-attached “store” of some kind, such that copyrights can be honored, and that furthermore could put applications, or “Apps” into circulation such that this tablet would be useful for many tasks beyond just book reading and tip-calculation. Then add in a pre-indoctrinated user-base. Why, that company would really be onto something. Too bad nobody is positioned like that.

MM$

I never quite got why iPhone users were so hell-bent for MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service). Just send an email, for chrissakes. More characters, send pictures or whatever else you want (though, on an iPhone, the flexibility to send anything as an attachment is admittedly more limited than at a desktop). While you presumably add a bit more potential latency into the transaction, you’re not guaranteed instant delivery on a text anyway. Likewise, if you’re that concerned, email to a text gateway (though, with AT&T, that just about guarantees a many-hour holding time for said message). Jeff Carlson hits the nail on the head in this TidBITS article:

While MMS has many of the same properties as and more limitations than a rich, HTML email message, there’s less friction in using MMS. This is intentional, as MMS is a huge boon for carriers in terms of profit margins, which are very high. A 1 MB email message containing several photos would cost nothing to send on an iPhone (included in the flat-rate data plan), whereas a 100 KB MMS message requires a messaging subscription plan or incurs the $0.30 fee without. You can see which the carriers would prefer.

MMS seems utterly designed to:

a) make money for the carriers

2) shoe-horn something more akin to email onto older, crappier phones

-and-

iii) make money for the carriers

What’s the rumpus, iPhone owners? I understand the belly-aching over tethering. But MMS? Who cares. It will only serve to degrade an already tottering network. Stick it to The Man. Send an email.

iThink therefore iAm

Kottke talks about the iPhone (as a device-class, mind you, not specifically the device) impacting many, many more markets than just smart-phones or PDAs. It’s also a compact camera killer, to name only one segment touched on in his fine essay. And I think he’s basically right. But I want to talk about a point he makes in the second footnote (without going all DFW on you):

You’ve got to wonder when Apple is going to change the name of the iPhone. The phone part of the device increasingly seems like an afterthought, not the main attraction. The main benefit of the device is that it does everything. How do you choose a name for the device that has everything? Hell if I know. But as far as the timing goes, I’d guess that the name change will happen with next year’s introduction of the new model. The current progression of names – iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS – has nowhere else to go (iPhone 3GS Plus isn’t Apple’s style).

Gruber picks up on this point too, basically answering him directly with:

If this platform is here for the long run, the general purpose name that best works for a general purpose device is already here: iPod. In fact, iPod, semantically, is a better name for the iPod Touch than it ever was for the original focused-on-music models. As I see it, the phone in iPhone isn’t about telephony, but about the necessary contract with a mobile carrier.

Agreed. Lemkin was all over this subject back in 2007 (!), talking about Steve Jobs’ almost certain desire to skip 3G (and any other carrier-tied technology) entirely in favor of some form of ever-present WiFi that could come from any company, municipal co-op, or whatever. This, of course, is the ultimate existential threat to AT&T: if they become (as a company) nothing more than a provider of the dumb pipe, then you can substitute any old dumb pipe for them without noticing any change at all. This is why they’re fighting Google tooth and nail over Google Voice, though hiding behind Apple to do it (presumably, the relevant lawyers (correctly) predicted a prompt FCC smackdown should AT&T intervene directly). But they will lose this fight over the long term. Google has already seen to it via the bidding process on the wireless spectrum. How well did AT&T like that?

“Google is demanding the government stack the deck in its favor, limit competing bids, and effectively force wireless carriers to alter their business models to Google’s liking.”

By “alter their business models” he meant to say: “stop relentlessly fucking over the end-user through long, inflexible contracts on POS phones of AT&T’s choosing.” Oh, GenericNetCo has really cheap wireless internet this month. I’ll switch. So it’s fundamental to AT&T that they seemlessly transition you from the locked, carrier specific technology (basically today’s situation) to the quietly generic wireless technology (aka Dumb Pipes) they’re hoping you don’t even notice you can actually get from anyone and everyone that cares to provide said service.

What will be their value-add in this situation? Unclear. Presumably they intend it to be nationwide reach, reliability, convenience, and some kind of competitive pricing for same. That said, and somewhat obviously, if AT&T were dependent on consumer goodwill and raw network reach, reliability, and convenience as of today, they’d be out of business inside of a fortnight. They seem busier blaming their iPhone users for their network’s various problems than, you know, improving the service that they are contractually obligated to provide in some fashion or other. And that’s within a market and on a network whose design they’ve had decades to cultivate, tune, and understand (though with an outcome that clearly implies that they still don’t “understand” what it is these iPhone users expect from their device, and how that’s different from, say, the user of a more generically crippled feature-phone). So can they build out a nationwide, everpresent, high-speed, and five-9s reliable WiFi service that’s compelling enough to keep people around once access to the underlying technology no longer requires multi-year contracts? Without recourse to tethering them to a number or some other lock-in? I seriously doubt it.

But, yeah. It will be called the iPod. Within a handful of years, the core iPod platform will be entirely Touch-based, and thus simply morph back into iPod (with Nanos or Shuffles being the variant, but today’s Touch being The iPod). And you’ll use said device to make calls.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=6612641&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Untitled from Ars Technica on Vimeo.

Say goodbye to the iPod Touch: Microsoft’s Zune HD is simply better in every way. Want to play chess? We think you’ll enjoy this 30-second full video commercial before that application opens. Whoops, email arrived? We think you’ll enjoy another commercial while you switch to that view and another one when you’re ready to switch back. It’s what we think today’s demanding consumer wants, no, demands.

How can Apple hope to compete against this sort of usability? It’s unpossible.

Copland, Tiger, Box (A Clear Time Braid)

Perhaps the clearest sign of the Steve Jobs’ recent illness and attendant absence from day-to-day decisions over to One Infinite Loop is the Snow Leopard packaging:

snow leopard box

When I originally saw the leak of this, I assumed it must, must be a fake. And a bad one. But here it is.

Anywho, it marks an odd signpost in the evolution of Mac operating system naming… The first instance I can recall of Apple talking openly about future operating systems by code name (as opposed to simply saying “well, in System 7 we’ll have…” and so forth), came during the lead-up to System 8, then referred to by its public codename Copland. The follow-on (which, presumably, would have been System 9, but it never really got off the ground) was openly referred to as Gershwin. Internally, I believe Copland went by “Pink,” an outgrowth of the same project naming schema from the Taligent days, but that’s neither here nor there.

With the debut of MacOS X (initially called Rhapsody, but ultimately (and thankfully) re-branded as simply MacOS X, there began a new, cat-based public codename schema that Wikipedia does a very fine job of keeping track of:  Cheetah/Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, and (now) Snow Leopard.

With all of that came a steady evolution in packaging design, also courtesy of Wikipedia:

MacOS X Boxes

As you can see, only Jaguar (better known as Jag-wire to one Steve Jobs) makes any reference whatsoever to the public codename, with its spotted X and box side. And this made inherent sense with what was going on under the hood: Jaguar was the first fully polished release of MacOS (to the original Cheetah/Puma first wide-release version which still had various usability or driver issues for certain users). So it seemed quite natural to echo the Aqua-themed original OS X box with a lightly updated, speed-oriented branding.

With the arrival of Panther, apple adopted the minimalistic metallic X, adding a spotlight effect to Tiger (highlighting, you guessed it, the debut of Spotlight searching technology in the OS). This notion was extended with the galaxy effect on Leopard; it kept the basic X design but highlighted and referenced Time Machine, the most notable addition to that OS.

Now we have, uh, a snowy cat. No X, and the codename is referenced directly on the packaging. Yikes. We also gain the subhead:

The world’s most advanced operating system. Finely tuned.

I see.

I understand that labelling it Mac OS X 10.6 is probably a non-starter for the marketing class, and is seen as insufficiently differentiated from whatever it is exactly that 10.5 might be. But I can’t be the only one that has difficulty recalling the order of these damned cats when named in isolation. Tiger was, er, a while ago…but was that 10.4? This seemingly benign issue gets all the more painful when you’re tracking down, say, a compatibility issue: will Google find more results referencing “Tiger” or “10.4” or “Mac” or “Macintosh” or “MacIntosh” or God knows what else? If we’re now going to actually call these operating systems by these names “officially” as opposed to “casually during a keynote when it doesn’t really matter” I can see some serious problems on the horizon, especially when they replace the actually informative 10.5.8 that “About this Mac” reports with “Lesser Plains Leopard” or some-such. However, it should be noted that this is the same company that differentiates a $3500 computer as “(Early 2008) Mac Pro” and assumes you can still easily sort out what you’ve got come 2010…

This is where I’m supposed to roll out my own, vastly better mockup, but you’re going to have to use your imagination caps to see it. The true precedent is with Jag-wire. It was the most conceptually similar release to the current iteration: essentially a big cleanup, with not that many Earth-shattering innovations. While it certainly held more fundamental fixes and so forth than Snow Leopard, the basic idea was very similar: make what we already have put together as good, as fast, and as functional as we possibly can. So, for 10.6 you keep the essential box of the immediate predecessor, Leopard. Perhaps you fade the galaxy a bit, but it’s still back there in its vaguely holographic form. Then you fill the big X with tasteful snow-leopard spots. And the title text? It’s relegated to the side, where it reads simply “Mac OS X Version 10.6.”

Is that so hard? Apparently without Steve Jobs around, it is.

PAMtastic Questions and Answers

Still a few days to go, but I think we already have the answer to this little prediction from Palm investor Roger McNamee:

“You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two- year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone. Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later. Think about it – If you bought the first iPhone, you bought it because you wanted the coolest product on the market. Your two-year contract has just expired. Look around. Tell me what they’re going to buy.”

A: (wait for it) iPhones:

Approximately 12% of consumers who visited a retail store this past weekend to make their iPhone 3G S purchase said they were replacing a BlackBerry handset, the latest sign that Apple continues to make headway against rival Research in Motion in the high-stakes smartphone market.
That data point is one of several interesting statistics to come out of a survey by Piper Jaffray of 256 early iPhone 3G S adopters shopping for their new handsets at Apple retail stores in New York and Minnesota this past weekend.

What a remarkable and unpredictable turn of events! Apple convinced another million rubes to buy their products that, as we all know, are only a temporary fashion and not indicative of a new usage model at all. I thought this introduction would mark the end of the iPhone era as hordes of dissatisfied users fled the sinking, née doomed platform for the Elysian fields of Windows Mobile and Blackberry or scrappy up-and-comer Palm Pre. After all, they’ve got tiny keyboards. And some other features that are…probably important! RIM (and the rest) can’t possibly fail. Right? You don’t just walk in and create a “decent phone.” It’s just not possible. Well, I’m sure these poor, misguided users will be off to RIM, Pre, or Android any day now…

Tablet Rasa

Is it just me or is all the speculation about Verizon/Apple/iTablet/iPhone-lite sort of missing the point? Everyone speculating seems to forget how it is the Kindle works and how Apple might improve on that model.

Here’s my prediction: Verizon, if involved at all, will provide transparent but always-on network connectivity but no traditional phone service. This would be just the same as the way Sprint provides WhisperNet to the Kindle; this way there’s no ongoing commitment on the part of the consumer, and assuming this tablet/Verizon thing comes to pass, Apple will contract in a similar fashion with Verizon for the data service and a lifetime connection will be included in the purchase of the device. Maybe Apple throws in a MobileMe subscription for a the first year to make for seemless desktop/mobile doodad integration featuring “instant and anywhere” sync.
Any calls made on an iTablet will be made through Skype (or some other IP-phone service) over normal WiFi connections but never, ever over this mobile data connection Verizon might be providing. That keeps AT&T content for the next couple of years as the butcher gradually sidles up with the pneumatic stunner in the runup to 2010 or so. You can sum it up thusly: Verizon:iTablet::WhisperNet:Kindle.

iPhone Mini: if it exists as a US product (and I still have my doubts, though Gruber makes a nice case), it will be an AT&T device; essentially as he described it on DF: a novel form factor (size- or volume-wise) that is essentially an iPhone 1.0/3G in modified clothing. The top billed iPhone will sport an updated version of the same design we see today, but with suitably gaudy specifications by comparison.

Lost his Marble

Adam C. Engst seems to think that Mac OS X 10.6 (aka Snow Leopard) will or should be free…or at least nearly free. Say, $9.95 for the DVD. His point mostly rests on the perfectly good notion of simultaneously dragging all the remaining Tiger (and, presumably any pre-Tiger OS user still out there) into the future; the net result is a unified system architecture that helps Apple (and any developer) going forward as less heed may be paid to ensuring excellent Jaguar support in some new application.

Here’s why he’s wrong: Snow Leopard will be Intel only. In fact, Snow Leopard will be by definition a system bifurcation. Every operating PowerPC Macintosh: stuck at Tiger or Leopard (I mention both because the finest system for the PPC was clearly Tiger); all other Macs: on to Our Brighter Future.

So, carve it in stone: Snow Leopard will be announced and a full demo given at WWDC, cost $129.00, only run on Intel-based Macs, and probably ship reasonably soon after announcement, say right around 9/1/09.

How do you sell that, when this upgrade is supposedly only under-the-hood changes along with some much needed but not-at-all glamorous additions? Interface change, my friends. Marble, here we come.

Stanford and Son

You can understand a lot about the iPhone and the iPod Nano (which cost more to produce yet still replaced (at the same price point) the most popular iPod ever, the “mini”) from this quote from Steve Jobs, re: Macintosh 25th anniversary

“I don’t think about that,” he said. “When I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, ‘Get it away!’ and I shipped all that shit off to Stanford. If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward.”

Then consider this, from the then-titan of the industry:

“I’d shut [Apple] down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
–Michael Dell, 1997.

And, perhaps even more telling, this notorious quote from Jobs himself, to Fortune magazine in 1996:

“If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it’s worth – and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago.”

Which is basically exactly what he did the next year. At any rate, worth considering the state of Dell today, run to the whim of Wall Street analysts, and the then-doomed Apple (Wired circa 1997: Silence grips Apple Deathwatch). One commoditized, the other innovated. This despite the fact that even Macworld magazine had inexplicably begun running Windows NT tips. And in every major instance, Apple’s moves were greeted with derision and a fall in stock value (iMac, iPod, Apple Stores, iPhone were all (wrongly) crowned as the last gasp of a desperate company; after all, even might Dell couldn’t figure out how to do bricks and mortar. My stars!).

This is ultimately Steve Jobs value to Apple. The actual products aren’t nearly important as the corporate daring, the brass balls that are necessary to tack hard against the wind and discontinue your best seller in favor of something even better. Or to say “fuck it, we will put no floppy drive in there.” And etc… Very few other companies of size do the same. Hell, very few Mom and Pops will make moves like that. Worth considering.