Thursday, November 1, 2012

Apple, Inc. akin to religion? Studies suggest yes

From here:
For years, observers have noted the similarities between Apple, Inc. and religious cults.  Origin myth?  Check.  Faithful masses?  Just walk by an Apple store when the iPad Mini goes on sale later this week.

“A stranger observing one of the launches could probably be forgiven for thinking they had stumbled into a religious revival meeting,” anthropologist Kirsten Bell, told Tech News Daily this past week.  Bell reviewed several Apple product launch videos for Tech News prior to the iPad Mini launch event last week.

[...]

A BBC documentary series that aired last year cited a scientific study that seems to confirm this link.  In the study, neuroscientists analyzed the brain activity of an Apple devotee and discovered that Apple stimulates “the same parts of the brain as religious imagery does in people of faith.”
Read it all.

Monday, October 29, 2012

Poll Finds Lackluster Demand for Windows 8

PC Magazine is reporting a poll that shows people aren't exactly rushing to jump on the Windows 8 bandwagon: 

In a new poll of 1,200 U.S. adults conducted by the Associated Press and GfK, about 52 percent of people had not heard of Windows 8.  Of those who had heard about the OS, 61 percent were not interested in buying a new laptop or desktop with Windows 8.  Only 35 percent said they thought Windows 8 was an improvement over Windows 7.

This is as I have predicted in several previous posts.   The problem is that, having run out of original ideas, all of Microsoft's "innovations" for the past ten years has been increasingly bent on simply making things look different.  Take the ribbon interface in Microsoft Office.  It isn't an improvement.  In fact, a lot of people think it is confusing and, overall, a worse user interface.  But it is different!  And that is supposed to justify Microsoft's huge customer base laying out hundreds of dollars per PC to get the new thing!

Now, for fear no one would buy a new version of Windows unless it had a substantially different look and feel, Microsoft has taken the most used operating system on the planet and given it an interface like a Las Vegas slot machine or an airport kiosk.  Did they really bother to test this interface among the computer literate public?

Microsoft says they want to have the same user interface across all their devices, including the Windows 8 phone.  There are two problems with that:  (1) In a world already dominated by the iPhone and Android (with which people are perfectly happy), the Windows 8 phone will never (I repeat, never) gain a significant enough user base for most people to experience the same interface on their phone and their PC.  (2) People really don't care if their phone has the same interface as their PC.  What they want is for their phone to have the interface that works best for doing what a phone does and their PC to have the interface that works best for doing what a PC does.  

While there may be an overlap, in that phones, tablets, and PC's can do a number of the same things, people use them differently.  People will get e-mail, browse the web, and (occasionally) open Office documents on their phones.  But no one does serious word processing or creates spreadsheets on their phones, not to mention graphic design or publishing.

Every time my antivirus software does a scan, I watch as it runs through over 600,000 files.  That is not surprising--my whole digital life is on my PC.  I need a powerful file system that will allow me to find and manage those files and an operating system that will allow me to do this as efficiently and quickly as possible.

All those 600,000 files will never be on my phone, and I don't want them to be.  All I need on my phone is an interface that allows me to quickly find the relatively few photos, or songs, or e-mails, or documents I choose to carry with me. 

Having the same user interface on my phone, tablet, and PC does not help.  In fact, it makes the experience worse on each device, since compromises and trade-offs inevitably have to be made for the same OS and user interface to span all three types of devices.

And, finally, I DO NOT WANT TO TOUCH THE SCREEN ON MY DESKTOP OR LAPTOP!  The idiots at Microsoft and various PC manufacturers need to get this through their heads.  I may be content to wipe my tablet off with a clean cloth every other day, but I do not want to have to take a bottle of Windex to my desktop or laptop that often--in fact, not ever.

Microsoft just isn't getting it.  They have run out of original ideas, and under the pressure to come up with something new, they are turning out products that are actually making things worse for their customers.  Given the size of their company and their user base, the results will take time to show up.  But this isn't going to end well for Microsoft.  In five years, I expect to look back at this column and say (sadly), I told you so.

Thursday, July 19, 2012

The Serious Flaw with Windows 8 and Metro

John C. Dvorak comments that "The fault is so simple that you didn't even recognize it" by which he means that the new "tiles" interface in Windows 8 actually makes it difficult to recognize what you are looking for on the screen.
Let me pose a simple question:  When you look at  your desktop screen, how do you find the program you are looking for?  You look for distinctive icons using your human ability to recognize  patterns.  It’s what we do best.  You ignore the words beneath the icon.   For example, you scan your desktop for a red flat cat, locate it, and  click, knowing the program is Irfanview.  We are so good at this that we  can identify an upside down icon.

How is it a step forward to create a tile inscribed with the name of  the program?  An old alphabetized DOS listing is easier to navigate than a  wall of tiles, on which nothing is immediately familiar.  Our innate  pattern recognition is short-circuited by similar tiles.  You have to  read text rather than react to an iconic image.  And while colored tiles  help a little, it's still problematic.
In another column entitled, "Microsoft Screws Up Windows 8," Dvorak continues the theme, with which I agree wholeheartedly, that Microsoft has screwed up royally with the design of Windows 8.  He compares Microsoft Zune to Apple's iTunes, which he also sees as flawed, by delivering one of the best descriptions of Microsoft's predicament that I have ever read:  "If Apple jumped off a cliff, Microsoft would jump shortly thereafter, only with less elegance."

My advice:  Buy Apple stock.  If Microsoft keeps plugging this kind of klunky, poorly designed user interface, people will gladly pay twice the price to move to a Mac.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

The Pirate Bay Offers Downloads of Physical Objects

I have blogged about 3-D printing before, the ability to "print" actual physical objects using a special type of printer.  For science fiction fans, think of the "replicators" on the Star Trek series—that's actually where this kind of invention is heading.

Now, you can download "physibles," or data files that deliver real, physical objects to anyone with a 3D printer from, of all places, The Pirate Bay.  Yes, The Pirate Bay—the torrent site known to most people as the bane of the recording and motion picture industries for the vast amounts of illegally shared material that some users make available via that medium.  The site currently has a dozen physibles available for download, including a 3-dimensional model of a 1970 Chevelle Hot Rod, a whistle, and a "tabletop wargaming robot model." 


As this Pirate Bay blog post makes clear, "We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare parts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years."

Of course sites like The Pirate Bay continue to face legal problems, including legislation in the US and Europe aimed at making file sharing illegal and blocking access to file sharing sites.  But the potential for the digital exchange of ideas, intellectual property, and, now, even physical objects is a compelling reason why sites such as The Pirate Bay should be protected and not hounded out of existence.  My recommendation is that you check the Electronic Frontier Foundation website frequently for ways in which all of us can help protect the freedom of the internet.

Friday, May 4, 2012

Why Verizon Doesn't Want You to Buy an iPhone

A pretty hot story is going around, stoked by CNNMoney, that Verizon Wireless sales reps are steering customers away from Apple's iPhones in favor of 4G LTE-enabled Android devices. I absolutely believe this, Verizon's official denials notwithstanding.

 [...]

Here's the problem: Verizon has spent millions of dollars rolling out its massive LTE network to cover 200 million people so far. You could call it billions, if you include the $5 billion spent on the C Block 700-Mhz spectrum licenses. But according to its first-quarter earnings presentation it's only been able to convert 9.1 percent of its 93 million users to LTE.

[...]

There's only one problem. The iPhone isn't a 4G phone. And according to Verizon CFO Fran Shammo, the carrier sold more iPhones over the last quarter (3.2 million) than it did LTE devices (2.9 million). That means more than half of Verizon's smartphone buyers are crowding onto the already busy 3G network, while the 4G network has plenty of space.

 Read it all.

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Now this caught my Pinterest

Remember the Bruce Springsteen song, "57 Channels (and nothing on)"? Sometimes the internet seems like that--a billion websites and none of them worth visiting. However, Pinterest, a visually-oriented, web-based pinboard, has caught my interest.

The relatively new website takes on the challenge of providing a new and creative way to explore and discover online content based on your interests. More specifically, Pinterest focuses on the visual images and videos rather than articles, blogs, music, or podcasts.

The premise of Pinterest is you create "pinboards," which are simply categories, to which you can then "pin" images that you find online or via other Pinterest users. Your virtual pasteboards become collections of images, with notes and links back to the original source of the images. Pinterest also serves as a site for social networking, since you can follow and interact with other users and the pinboards they create.

Pinterest, which also has a Pinterest iPhone app, differs from other sites for finding online content because it's so visually focused. The iPad app Flipboard, which bills itself as "your pocket sized social magazine," is visual, too, and makes use of the iPad's supported gestures very well. Flipboard concentrates on magazine-like content from the Web, folding text into its layout liberally. StumbleUpon is quite similar to Pinterest, giving you a "roulette wheel" Stumble button, designed to take you in new and unexpected directions whenever you feel internet boredom setting in. But Pinterest excels at the amount of information, choices, and connections it can put in front of you at one time.

Springpad, is a service that lets you organize things by being your "memory" on the internet. Springpad lets you save images and Web clips to a virtual pasteboard, which is pretty close to Pinterest in theory, but Pinterest is actually fun to use and pretty to look at, and Springpad isn't.

Pinterest is better and more gripping than Google+ because it is more modern. Pinterest is essentially non-linear and presents the user with a smorgasbord that employs the innate human ability recognize patterns and make choices from hundreds of items, while Google+ is linear and boring.

Looking at Pinterest, you will quickly see that, while it has 10 million users, subscribers up 'til now have been mostly female. That means you are more likely to find recipes than football scores or car reviews. This will change as Pinterest's user base grows, though it will be interesting to see how masculine and feminine interests co-exist on the same site. I predict that the ability of each user to pin items of individual interest will not only allow male and female users to coexist, but the site to thrive as a truly interactive and highly customizable forum for social interaction.

Right now, you'll need an invitation if you want to join Pinterest quickly. There is an open sign up that puts you on a waiting list for an invitation. But you can use the site and browse what is there even before you subscribe and create your own pinboards.

Once you are subscribed, Pinterest will help you install a bookmark button that you can use to "pin" interesting things you see online.

Next, you can choose your areas of interests from a reasonably diverse list that includes architecture, design, education, gardening, history, clothing, pets, and more. The interests that you select will determine what kind of content you'll see when you first hit the homepage.

Third, you can create boards where you'll pin things you find as you browse the web or look at things other users have pinned.

Everything you pin becomes searchable, which means you can search items others have pinned, leading to an inexhaustible web of links to ever-greater worlds of content.

So, give it a whirl. I am sure Pinterest will catch your interest, too.