ThinkEzy.com – Blog

The biography of Steve Jobs is a leading light in many ways.

The latest one that I liked and it is true for all the ones that don’t get things as right as Steve:

“If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.”

I have been using Digg since it started. It had a wonderful experience for tech nerds. I have been through Digg news like  their famed Paris Hilton (where is she either) break and how Kevin Rose started it on a $100 server. The other service was del.icio.us, which too is nowhere.

I have now been listening to news from all over, some sympathetic, some practical. But the fall of Digg started when they suddenly opened their gates to all other news sans tech. Paris Hilton as an isolated news story was fine but when Digg was divided into multiple sections, like sports, business etc. the user base became confused.

At the same time, Hacker News was coming up as a serious tech news channel, Digg users started moving there and Digg lost on to their pied pipers. Then the web mafia stared scamming the news posts and it was all over.

A lot of people say Digg was lost to Facebook, but it is not true. Facebook is a closed network. So is Twitter (except Search, which is neglected by Twitter execs.). Digg was truly an open network. Reddit caused a lot of problems for Digg, but Digg was far superior in user interface design. Reddit introduced lot of sections earlier on and once it was acquired by a non-tech news magazine company it’s road to glory was clear.

The techwiz Marc Andreessen says now’s the time to build companies like it’s 1999. There is a lot of sense in what he is saying.

• Apart from earthload of consumers using software of some kind, they are interconnected for the first time.
• This interconnection gives the software creators greater ability to analyse the usage in real time and making it more useful, on the fly.
• Every company is following Apple to create Systems. No longer Microsoft is a software company and Google is online company. They are creating integrated experiences for the users to consume the information. Steve was correct in 1987.
• For the first time, we have not one device, the PC, but 3 devices, PC, tablet and mobile to interact with the information. Companies like Dropbox, Evernote etc. are there to synchronize the information from one device to another.
• Internet was just connected earlier. It is now increasingly seen as a social, integrated world with API-centric applications where the information takes a different meaning for different applications.
• Because of other industries falling apart in recession, a connected software is seen as a savior in heavy resources crunch.

This gives software developers a great opportunity to impress the world. Every software, too, is undergoing a massive change because of demands for a simpler interface (as most users don’t understand technology, unlike even 1999) and a need to be an active node in a connected world.

Original message (Italian):

Il messaggio è stato inviato al destinatario.
Le mail ti raggiungono ovunque con BlackBerry® from Vodafone!

Translation:

Your message has been sent to the recipient.
The mail can come anywhere with BlackBerry ® from Vodafone!

If Google Translate works this crap out, you would see what happens to all the more sensitive prose. This just doesn’t happen to translation, but anything that humans can do so effortlessly. So, Siri sucks at voice with 38% wrong recognition, CAR / LAR (used for most of US check deposit automation) sucks at 30% wrong amount recognition (very sensitive indeed).

We still depend upon automation, do we?

When I saw the Surface tablet, I wept a little. The commercial video was all about the flap on the rear side that makes a tablet a PC. Are the major vendors fooling around? We have the same flaps on photo frames. Aren’t they made of the same material that covers the frame? HTC mobiles had the same flaps. They never made it appear as a great discovery.

Microsoft must be making its W* (a convenient name for Windows 8, use Shift-8) appear as a tablet sometime, PC sometime. But that is not going to hold much. Jeff is right. Microsoft is trying hard to change the Windows user interface (UI) after a very long time.

It’s a battle of UI, actually. Apple won on the first war front by placing touch as the new UI standard. As industry has lost out on innovation, Google and Microsoft (again! aghast!!)  have copied and tried to build some differentiation. Apple then tried speech as another UI standard (actually far from standard, as Siri is wrong 38% of time) which Google has tried to match and the reporters are falling on each other to announce the winner.

As Microsoft has nothing much to offer in both the cases, it is trying to shift the attention away from UI to the cases. (The war on the hardware specs is legendary and Apple does not care about it).

The problem is there is such a similarity in the user interfaces (copy is the main reason), that such small factor of adding a flap to the tablet can affect the entire perception of tablet / PC relevance.

The Microsofts and Googles of this world need to understand that they too can innovate big into the UIs that can be copied by the Apples. Google can harp its notification system, but its too little.

Bloggers just need some thread to start bombarding the infocean with endless posts. The latest rumor is a small iPad and people are digging up how a 7″ /  8″ iPad can revolutionize computing or information consuming once again.

We need to figure out what a small iPad would do that its Big Brother is already not an expert in doing? It will run the same apps so the content is the same again. Nobody knows what strategy Google has with Nexus 7 and why it chose 7″ target. But everybody should have a sense in considering iPad going with the same dimension when a bigger design has won the market.

Guys, Think Different! Think what a different small form factor will do different.

Only yesterday we received news that Facebook
is days away from launching its own App Center
(Uncle Steve just turned in his grave. Someone
just cut his APPle).
Today it has launched.

WWDC 2012 is just around the corner. Our journos
and bloggers can't yet figure out what is Apple
bringing out on the table. There is a ferocious
prediction game on the bloground as to what will
be announced.

Do we still believe this new press brigade
anymore?
Do your own thing. Do whatever you feel right.
SECRET is out.
The universe will show you the path.
You deserve to at least throw the bullXXXX
out of your way.

I took iPad 2 just a month back. I was aware of the yearly upgrade cycle of Apple and what the new dazzling feature set Apple was bringing every year.

Over the time, I have gone a little insensitive towards the upgrades. The iPad I took has a little quirks. When, in Safari, I press (ouch… ‘touch’) ”Open in a new Tab”, it takes a breather (Apple may call this as animated … just to hide the delay). It disables touch on the mother page so that I must see the new page first. So, I need speed.

Speed

The problem is whether the iPad 3 will open it faster. There is very little speed improvement, when dual core moves to quad core and who knows, iOS5.x supports quad cores fully. Apple must have left something for iOS6 anyway. So, it looks like iPad 3 will have the same delay and our noteworthy bloggers (esp. dear John) will rhyme it as a design genius of Apple.

Display

A retina display is fine, but what is the world are we gonna do if we can not see the difference with our retina at present? The brightness of the iPad 2 is blinding enough. Don’t go with the marketing statement - its ultra-sharp 2048 x 1536 pixel Retina display is enough to set it apart from anyone else …. It does not change anything with your eyes.

Size

The difference does not matter, though it is on a negative side – thicker and heavier. So, iPad 2 is better.

OS

No change. Any change here was welcome.

What else?

Nothing more is noteworthy from Apple stable this time.

What would have been sensational?

NFC

Nobody will point it out here, but Apple own patent for iWallet makes NFC chip’s appearance in iOS devices. Apple must be creating another walled garden around iWallet before it appears in full glow.

Mega pixels

41 mega pixels, anyone? Apple does not seem interested in exceeding competitor offering here for long. But Nokia has already made a big punch for the bloggers, who placate anything on bigger side. It reminds me the American penchant for BIG cars before Toyota defeated them with smaller cars.