andresmujica

On the iPad

I think I have read every possible post about the iPad since it was announced more than a week ago. What I have found is that there are mostly three kind of people’s opinion about the product: people who don’t seem to get the idea behind the product, people who get the idea and are fine about it, and people who are worried about that idea. I’ll try to comment about it here.

What is it?

Well, as it was announced, the iPad goes in between a computer and a smartphone, to be used when you don’t want to use your computer and your smartphone. When is that? I had questioned myself that a lot of times since the netbooks arrived, because netbooks are meant to be used on those moments too, and never found a good answer. Maybe that’s why I’ve never been interested in netbooks.

But the day after the keynote it became clear to me. My parents wanted to buy some stuff on the web and the whole process was: wait till the computer load Windows, manage Windows and anti-virus updates, open Firefox, update and restart Firefox, load the site to buy what the wanted to buy. It’s way too much friction to just buy some stuff. I know it’s not the same process every time but If they had an iPad, everything could have been faster and more comfortable.

A laptop or a netbook could have offered comfort too but it’s not about the hardware or form-factor, the friction is in the software. As I said when I talked about Chrome OS, the third niche is there but it’s not good enough because the software isn’t right. Chrome OS and the iPad (and maybe others like litl, who knows) should change that, and all those trivial tasks we do today (people turn on their computers just to go to Facebook or YouTube) in our main computer will go to these new devices, to do it faster, frictionless.

So, think about the iPad as a product to use when your computer is way too much and your smartphone way too small.

Still, there are some cases where the iPad could fit well as a main computer (grandparents, mothers and kids, for instance), and as a “laptop” to people who don’t need more and already use a desktop.

The tablet-style seems adequate since is not a work machine. If trivial tasks these days means e-mail, web browsing, music, videos, photos, games and social networks, the screen keyboard suffice. If you want a more comfortable writing, there is the Keyboard Dock.

The reason why the iPad is frictionless is because of iPhone OS (Chrome OS should be frictionless too because is basically the current Chrome browser right in your face), a pretty straight forward system with one app at a time focus and one home button to change between apps. There’s no explicit multi-tasking, at least not as we know it. On the iPhone, apps like Phone, Mail, iPod, Messages or Calendar are always running in the background, but the user don’t even notice it. Third party apps don’t run in the background, they save their current state when the home button is pressed, and go back to the way they were, when the user come back. Also they use push notifications If they need to notify something.

If you watch the demo for Pages, Numbers and Keynote from iWork for the iPad, you’ll notice that the whole concept of the file system is gone, the user don’t have to see it anymore. All the files created by the user appear when the application launch and you swipe to navigate through them. I don’t know what happens when the user has too much files but I suppose there must be a way to organize them, maybe with tags or something.

This way, Apple take care of the device’s resources and the user don’t need to think about closing apps, the system running out of memory, file system, folders and things like that (Mac OS X on the iPad wouldn’t have bring this). Everything is transparent and works, letting people to focus on using the product (and updating it occasionally) rather than using and maintaining. Is the way it always should have been.

Do I have to worry?

We didn’t notice it with the iPhone, but the iPad is telling us what is the future of iPhone OS and computers as we know it. It will be first in this in between devices but obviously will end up in our main computers as well. With this kind of OS, computers (with the current form factor or new ones) will be like other devices where you basically turn on, use and turn off when your done, noiseless and, in the case of the iPad, even safer, since all the applications you’ll use will be from the App Store.

The App Store is great but what really worries me is what apps can or can not be in the App Store according to Apple’s “duplicates existing functionality” policy. If Apple fix this, what I’m envisioning here could be awesome.

This OS concept obviously will evolve, maybe they’ll add the option for third-party apps to run in the background with its way to change between apps, maybe some sort of notification inbox, a different way to organize your apps, but don’t expect something complicated because the point is simplicity and ease of use. They don’t want to turn iPhone OS into Mac OS X.

Operating systems as the way they work today, will be there just for developers, geeks and enthusiast. Because, let’s face it, we are the only one who care about root access and stuff like that. Normal users just want to get the work done and move to their own lives.

The iPad is a really nice idea to take computers to the next level, but this whole concept will depend on how well the product sells. I don’t know If this will work or not, but I hope it does.

John Casasanta on Amazon.com’s Kindle app for the iPhone:

[…] But there’s one thing that stood out to me in the app when I stumbled upon it. It’s a brilliant fix to an issue that’s been plaguing the iPhone since day 1, and made even worse with the 3.0 update… If you’re reading on your iPhone while lying down, it often inadvertently flips from portrait to landscape orientation. Amazon’s fix is to add a “rotate lock” control that appears in the bottom-right corner when the orientation changes.

To say the least, this ingenious little UI element has taken away a lot of frustration for me. Nice job, Amazon!

I wish Apple would adopt this mechanism for their own apps, especially Safari and Mail.

It is really annoying while lying down, indeed. This actually must be an option on every app where the landscape orientation is just a wider version of the portrait one. Some games let you choose it on the settings, but Amazon’s solution, obviously, is more convenient.

Many things have been said about Google Chrome OS since it was announced last Tuesday. From:

Forget the netbooks, which Google is targeting initally. We’ll see PCs of all types being sold by the major manufacturers as soon as Google gets this out of beta next year. Microsoft has a very serious competitive threat to the core of their revenues.

To:

Trying to make an OS out of Chrome is like saying you’re going to turn a Pontiac Aztek into a stretch limousine. I suppose it could be done, but why?

Windows and Office aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, even with some web apps fulfilling the needs of many normal users. On the other hand, it’s always nice to have another competitor in the OS market and hopefully their attempt to re-think what operating systems should be turn into something clever.

But, even in that scenario, there’s something more complex that Google will face: the netbooks paradigm.

People don’t get netbooks. In their heads netbooks are just cheap and smaller laptops. And even worse, they’re afraid of change, netbooks shipping with Linux experienced higher return rates than those with Windows XP and now, they’re almost out of the game.

Why it will be different with Chrome OS? Why should we think that when people get home with their brand new netbook, they’ll not replace Chrome OS for, let’s say, Windows 7?

Google says they are working with hardware partners and, to me, they should be focusing on putting the netbooks back to basic, so people could see them like a web-client machine instead of a small-cheap-laptop. Something like the CrunchPad but with the actual form factor, making things clear so nobody expects anything else.

That is what netbooks needs in order to prepare the path to Google’s vision of our “cloudy future”.

This will open the netbooks market as a real new niche, Chrome OS as the center of all this and people consuming web content around the house.

Yes, the house. We already have smartphones for the road.

It’s been a week since Michael Jackson’s death. I don’t know if it was nostalgia from my childhood (I was a big fan as a kid) or because every news about him goes with one of his songs in the background, but the day after, all I wanted to listen was his music.

Probably the last time I consciously did it was in the HIStory days (about 12 years ago or so). I don’t have any MJ song on my computer and didn’t want to look for my CDs, so I went to Grooveshark and made a playlist, and it ended up being so good that I’ve been listening to it almost non-stop since then.

So here it is, my favorite 24 Michael Jackson’s songs.

BTW, Grooveshark needs integration with Last.fm ASAP.

Beginning in August, Xbox Live users will be able to download full Xbox 360 games to their consoles via the service. Microsoft made the announcement during a luncheon following its pre-E3 press conference.

Similar to XBLA titles, new releases will be made available weekly for a price comparable to what the boxed version is selling for at retail. Once the service — which is integrated into the Games Marketplace — launches, 360 game download purchases can be made using Microsoft Points or using a credit card.

[…] The possibility to downloading games on a rental basis was brought up but not confirmed.

Didn’t expect to happen in this generation consoles. Brilliant move. Not sure about matching retail prices, though. Game rentals would be the icing on the cake.

Tim Bray about throwing away disks and books:

I dream of a mostly-empty room, brilliantly lit, the outside visible from inside. The chief furnishings would be a few well-loved faces and voices because it’s about people not things. But of course there’d be handy tools there, to bring the universe of words and sounds and pictures to hand on demand. But not get dusty or pile up in corners.

Amen. I’m all about getting rid of everything that could be digital. Although I haven’t thrown anything yet, haven’t bought CD’s in years, the last books I bought were Non-DRM PDFs, and hate every time I’m forced to print something. It’s hard to imagine that we’ll be in a mostly-empty room in the near future (and hope the inside not be visible from the outside) but it definitely sounds great.

Paul Graham:

As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums?

What’s different about religion is that people don’t feel they need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone’s an expert.

Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too. Politics, like religion, is a topic where there’s no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions.

Do religion and politics have something in common that explains this similarity? One possible explanation is that they deal with questions that have no definite answers, so there’s no back pressure on people’s opinions. Since no one can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid, and sensing this, everyone lets fly with theirs.

But this isn’t true. There are certainly some political questions that have definite answers, like how much a new government policy will cost. But the more precise political questions suffer the same fate as the vaguer ones.

I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people’s identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that’s part of their identity. By definition they’re partisan.

[…]  If people can’t think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible. [2]

Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. But there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

Actually the root of the problem is fanaticism. Religion and politics are huge topics in our culture. People tend to be fanatical. Chances are that you find more religion and politics fans than Javascript fans.

Certainly, everyone has an opinion on religion and politics but there’s a minority who doesn’t necessarily start a war every time those topics emerge. Why? Because they’re not fanatics. They believe and have convictions but don’t need to flame or defense anything.

On the other hand, sometimes you can see that there’s one or two who divert the conversation even if the topic is something different, defending their cause blindly, even if they’re not experts. They’re fanatics.

So, you can have identity and like a lot of stuff, because we are human and subjective, but you have to have it clear and know that there’s no need to be a fanatic. You can even use the word as in: “I’m a big fan of PHP”, just like an atheist can say “oh my god” to express surprise, but nothing more.

Remember when you used to be able to search for “productname + review” and actually find a review? Yeah, those were the days.

This remind me an idea that I had years ago, a site that let you find reviews categorized by importance and at the same time tells you in few words the pros and cons and some sort of five stars rating about the product based on those reviews.

A couple of months ago found a Firefox extension, called Pluribo, that does exactly what I want but only with Amazon’s reviews. We definitely need Pluribo to grow and be capable to index the whole Internets or maybe it’s time for Google Review or something.

Via tumblelog.marco.org.

Jason Fried on economic downturns:

When the people using your product aren’t the ones paying for your product you’re at a strategic disadvantage. Your improvements can’t just be targeted at users, they also have to be targeted at advertisers. So now some of your energy is split into pleasing two different groups. It’s possible advertisers and users have the same goals, but it’s less likely. You’ll notice I’m calling people users now. That’s what people become when they don’t pay for your product—they are users, not customers.

Beyond charging or not for your product, the fact that you have to focus on two groups is the real challenge. Something to have in mind if you’re not good handling several fronts.