Disqus - Latest Comments for rbarooah

Re: Unsocial - Tao of Mac

rbarooah — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:45:22 -0000

Not really. You clearly dismiss whole services outright:

e.g. "FriendFeed is pointless, period. Also, it is not completely symmetrical and decreases fidelity of the content it aggregates, which ought to be enough reason for my not going there in months."

Sure, you might not find it useful in your particular life, but that's not what you're saying here.

If I'd read previous articles of yours on this topic (which I hadn't) it wouldn't change the meaning of these statements.

Re: Unsocial - Tao of Mac

rbarooah — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:05:38 -0000

I agree about the potential for social websites to cause distraction and noise, but are you sure you're not attributing a little too much to the services themselves rather than your usage patterns?

I didn't have a good experience on twitter until I followed a small number of smart people, almost all of whom I have met in person (at conferences etc) who post interesting insights that are relevant to my field. I check it every day or so and get a huge amount of value from it.

FriendFeed can be far more overwhelming than twitter. For a while, I would get sucked in to public discussions, some of which lasted for days, and then I'd get burned out or realize I hadn't really gained anything. I learned to control who I follow with lists, and to use the email and IM features to let me know about postings from people (mostly close to me) who I don't want to miss. I have collaborated on a paid consulting project using a private FriendFeed room (and it's worked better than any tool I've used), and I have met and conversed with interesting people outside of the 'argy-bargy' of the public debates,

It's useful for everything from discussing the latest book I've read with a few friends, to organizing a coffee meeting.

If we judged the web based on the 'average' experience of visiting random websites, you'd probably conclude that it was a complete waste of time, but we value the web because we've learned how to identify useful websites and ways to have positive interactions with them. I think the same is true with social networks.

It sounds to me as though you've identified a whole load of things you don't like about social networks that you want to avoid - which is a vital step - but I respectfully suggest that you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Re: Why I think the Kindle’s already succeeded

rbarooah — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 16:31:55 -0000

I didn't end up getting a kindle - I've been using it on the iPhone. I
expected it to be unusable regardless of the quality of the software but
since it was free, I gave it a go and it turns out I was wrong.
Since the phone is with me during all kinds of 'waiting periods' and a
kindle would not be, the kindle is of marginal value to me, although if I
buy more books this way it may well end up being a requisite item for home
use.

Yeah - I am not totally convinced about the jumbo ipod tablet yet. What I
do know is that my MacBook Air is not a good ebook. I have read a few
long-form pieces on it, and even the iPhone would have been better.

How much would it actually cost I wonder? $600? Backup to time-capsule,
etc. It could end up being as good a solution for the grandparents as for
the always-on generation. Think star-trek rather than tablet-pc. It's
really all about the software, and it's really only a matter of time. For
all we know it could still be a year away.

In any case, I encourage you to try the kindle iPhone app. The experience
has definitely taught me something.

Re: Why I think the Kindle’s already succeeded

rbarooah — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 14:53:58 -0000

Totally agree about the kindle being successful. I was skeptical before, but even the iPhone app is great. Incidentally you were right about the free intro chapter being enough. It's worked perfectly for me, and I haven't once wanted the $99c per chapter that I suggested back at the time.

However, I do think there is going to be a market for an Apple tablet device. It has to be a multi-touch device closer in operation to the iPhone than the desktop OS - and that's where i think the opportunity lies. I've owned multiple tablet PCs in the past - actually dating back to Windows for Pen! - all for research purposes at one job or another and yes- they've all been little more than a curiosity, but that's because they were running an OS tailored for office content creation. Mac OS is still mostly tailored for media creation, but the iPhone OS is a player/consumer device, and if the tablet is a large media player where media = games, connected apps, books, video, and websites, then I think they will have a winner.

Re: On iPhone 3.0

rbarooah — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:52:14 -0000

Yeah - I used to think that brick would be the way of things. Of course I wasn't thinking about making it razor thin and using the surface as a multi-touch UI, so that shows how much I know!

Comments are not enabled by accident. Someone said they'd had to put the page through 'readability' http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ in order to read it, and out of shame I changed the theme, but forgot to re-add the disqus. Thanks for pointing that out!

Re: On iPhone 3.0

rbarooah — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:49:04 -0000

Apparently, the G1 does not do it: http://awurl.com/rQN0Tzq8U#first_awesome_highlight

As far as these ideas go - I think the scrutiny aspect would be hard to control - for now, Apple aren't soak testing apps in any particular way, and the problems could easily emerge later in the usage.

Secondly, there would be no easy way to know for the end user to know which App was the culprit, so either the switch would just end up being OFF, or the battery life would unpredictable.

In both cases, everyone would regard Apple's solution as a failure, as opposed to blaming the buggy app - which is what they would probably prefer. Also, "No Task Manager on the Phone" is #1 on the 10 commandments of Steve IIRC.

I think the time slicing idea has more merit. Apps could indeed register for a callback and get woken up. However the question is - what do they do then? Poll something on the Net? If they are polling then they have to do it frequently and fire up the radio etc. every time otherwise they can't deliver a timely notification to the user - something which push notifications optimize across all the apps. If they aren't polling something, then what are they doing? Background grinding of some sort? If so, your battery is dead again, and that work should be something done in the cloud.

With a timed solution, there could be a safeguard whereby only a fixed time is allowed before the OS kills you, to prevent runaway mandelbrots ( :-) ) - but that would be fiddly because again if you are polling, the CPU timeout will interfere with network latency etc. Also, what if the user starts the UI while the background component is running?

Basically this route leads to the madness associated with concurrency in general, which is usually most easily solved by queues - which is essentially what they've provided. Remember many of the programmers will not be careful - they will be rushing to make money out of farts.

I think my conclusion is that polling is bad, and grinding is also bad and should be done on a big fat machine in the cloud.

The part of the equation that I don't see solved yet, is how you upload data to the cloud without keeping the user waiting. Apple uses mail for this. Obviously, apps can now use mail attachments, but the user is still in the loop. It would be nice to see a queue going to the cloud in the other direction, although that's a trickier issue because of the variability of the data size.

Perhaps they could provide a global mechanism to queue up HTTP posts, for data going the other way for stuff like uploading photos etc.

And WRT the IM client security issue - yeah - for sure that's an issue. If the IM network wanted, they could provide OAUTH tokens, or whatever, but the lack of backgrounding doesn't change this - you have to trust the app developer not to phone home with your credentials anyway.

I look forward to seeing how Palm solve it, if they do.

Re: On iPhone 3.0

rbarooah — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:29:31 -0000

Well for once I wrote a bit (breathlessly) about an apple event before you did. I feel my previous long retorts to your postings give me the moral right to post my link here without it being blatant self promotion:

http://notes.sublime.org/post/87351443/iphone-3...

Having said that - in response to your actual points:

Firstly let me wholeheartedly agree with your disappointment about the lack of a trial system. That's the one genuine disappointment I felt. Not sure what the ideal mechanism would look like, but it's definitely a weak point in the current experience.

As to backgrounding though - I still haven't seen anyone yet explain how to genuinely enable background apps without seeing everyone's battery go dead immediately.

People rush out buggy apps all the time, and with the sheer number that are being developed and installed, a whole bunch of them would surely not even bother to code for efficiency, use the CPU for something trivial (probably to irritate people with random background fart sounds), and then vast numbers of batteries would be dying all the time, calls missed, revenue lost, people sad etc. etc.

This already happens with symbian even with apps carefully developed by reputable companies because of bugs etc. We don't hear about it, because nobody cares. Also sadly, in those 80 countries, not everyone has unlimited data. A background app could therefore run up a bill for you without you knowing or as a result of a bug.

Now I know all of this this is Apple's job to solve, but they aren't actually magicians, and I haven't heard anyone else yet present a credible alternative. Palm claim that the Pre will do it, but then Microsoft claimed that ActiveX security wouldn't be a problem, and we all know how that played out.

Apple really only need to get us from here to the middle of next year, and what they have done will do that. CPU power will increase, battery life will lengthen, the cloud will get easier and cheaper to use and offline regions will continue to shrink, so these things are on their side.

My predictions (which are worth what you paid me for them) tell me to expect new hardware this year. The 3G was really just a 'bump' in Apple-land, and so we're at the 2 year point and ready for a real upgrade. Also - if you notice the 'inflexion points' on their sales graph - they point out the increased acceptance when the 3G came out, but they don't draw attention to the other inflexion point that shows slowing sales growth of the 3G - on top of that there is the usual phone replacement cycle of 2 years, and original contracts ending etc, plus their predictable machine like cycles. Of course, I am just speculating from the outside.

But if they are going to release new hardware this year, one thing you can bet is that they have tried not to leak information about it in this presentation or the 3.0 preview, so perhaps there may be some surprises in store.

Apple tries to avoid doing anything where they can't take the lead out of the door. Given how much investment they have made in video so far on the desktop, I would imagine they won't put it on the phone until it can dominate the category. We know that steve has been scrutinizing this area down to the chip level. My guess would be that at the very least they would want hardware encoding, and to pair it with higher flash capacities on the device and a better mic, rather than do something 'phone quality'. We also have the 2 camera videophone rumors - which although I'm not feeling them strongly would make a lot of sense - especially now that they have all of the infrastructure to do a seamless iChat. Working against this would be the possibility that the hardware simply isn't ready yet.

We haven't had "One More Thing" for a while now, have we?

Re: Chrome’s overinflated importance

rbarooah — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 16:06:26 -0000

Yeah - that's fair. I have been a safari user and for me 4.0 is
nothing but goodness. I was using chrome on windows machines but am
now using safari there too. Chrome did not stick for my fiancé
because she has FF extensions she likes, and everyone else I know
personally is either using FF or Safari.

I previously would have recommended chrome to people of my parents
generation who still have pcs, but would now go for safari because
it's easier to support what you use yourself.

So my anecdotal experience supports your view. However I am not yet
prepared to give up the idea that chrome changes the perception of the
browser wars in a way that tilts things more solidly against IE.
Perhaps more from a psychological standpoint than in terms of real
usage. Whilst you or I might not have believed someone saying there
wasn't true competition, it's the 65% of ie users who's opinions
really count here, and i'd bet that most of them make their choices
based on secondhand perceptions and not by making their own analyses.

Re: Chrome’s overinflated importance

rbarooah — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:41:26 -0000

Irrespective of the history component, don't you think that the existence of Chrome and the fact that it is strong and competently executed, even thought it might not be to everyone's taste, gives legitimacy to the notion that there actually is real competition in the browser space? Safari could always have been sidelined as 'the mac browser', and FireFox although strong is far from perfect and was still perceived by many as "something to do with idealism". Chrome's very existence legitimizes the other two browsers.

Before Chrome, the battle was between the two flawed princes, and the old king who wasn't about to abdicate any time soon. Now the three princes are busy dividing the lands between them while the old king frets in his counting house.

Re: How to create a PayPal certificate for the Java NVP API

rbarooah — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:26:18 -0000

Did you make up a password and type it in? I'm not sure that it actually displays anything. If you look at the screenshot, you'll see that the password is hidden. Make sure to write the password down first.

Re: I don’t think O’Reilly’s right about the Kindle

rbarooah — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:05:28 -0000

Most of my books are non-fiction, and many of them are pretty dense,
so it would be tough for me to have read them all cover to cover soon
after purchase.

However, I'll grant that I am very much an outlier given figures that
I've heard that the average number of books owned per person is in the
single figures. Saying that, early adopters - i.e. people who want to
read a lot may not be the average either.

My point about buying a book chapter by chapter wouldn't be too much
to deal with for the end user - it would be transparent - I didn't
mean that they should force the user to keep making purchasing
decisions. Imagine being able to read any chapter of any book on
amazon right now for $1 - that's what I'm talking about. Maybe a
chapter is too arbitrary and gameable and it would need to be
quantized into chapters / blocks of page numbers, but you get the
idea. If we're going to put the worlds books online, we don't need to
keep selling them as if they were still printed on blocks of woodpulp.

Re: I don’t think O’Reilly’s right about the Kindle

rbarooah — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 11:53:06 -0000

Interesting discussion points. The major thing I take issue with is that being able to get one's existing library on the device is unimportant. It is certainly a major stumbling block for me. About 50% of my books are ones I have never read. I went through them a couple of days ago as I am moving house, and I still want to read most of the unread ones, however my time is fragmented, and I don't have the books that I want to read with me when I have the time - particularly not the ones that have been sitting on the shelf for a while.

I would immediately buy a kindle if I could have them at hand, and not have to spend $5000 re-buying them.

What occurs to me is that I would have less objection to buying them again if I knew for certain that I was actually reading them.

If Amazon offered a $1 per chapter model payable after you read past the first page in the chapter, I would also immediately buy one, and I'd probably read a lot more. A lot of the deterrent for this stuff for me, is laying down $20 for a book I'm not sure about and dropping it after couple of chapters.

'Strangely' enough that's one of the core value propositions of the iTunes store too.

Re: http://comments.deasil.com/2009/02/17/microsoft-zune/

rbarooah — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 11:58:01 -0000

Right On! I think a lot of people want to see Microsoft have a few more failures - which is why you see so much "come on admit it" talk on the blogosphere. I have to say, I'm in that camp too.

I used to be a 'hater' - because I personally witnessed their representatives explaining how it was in their interest to undermine the competition through trade practices rather than innovation. However they are clearly doing a lot of good stuff too - certainly in programming languages, and their lab technologies, and it would be great to see this stuff get out into the world.

I'd love to see them be a real competitor. The problem is that they still have a gigantic market share and huge control over the computer industry in general. I think that if they start to achieve real success again, we'll be back to the place we were before - with another lost decade in terms of innovation.

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

rbarooah — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 21:28:24 -0000

Surely the answer to that is basically because IE doesn't support it: http://a.deveria.com/caniuse/#agents=All&cats=A... (scroll to the bottom for a summary). Flash is the only way around it on the desktop.

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

rbarooah — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 21:22:11 -0000

Well, the 'solution 2' example would only involve one download for all sites which is no more than you have to do to get the flash plugin when it is
updated.

Running in the browser is fine when you have lots of space for tabs or background windows etc, but the idea of having to zoom in and interact with flash apps on my iPhone just seems too fiddly.

One of the issues with 'flash' on the phone, is that most people interpret that to mean whatever runs in flash right now, running on the phone exactly as is.

Irrespective of whether the flash player/vm is portable, most of the applications themselves are likely to be just plain unusable on the phone and need to be redesigned.

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

rbarooah — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 19:22:40 -0000

At the risk of engaging in a thread that's tainted with negativity (I don't think you're stupid, or that the comment wasn't thoughtful - even though I do think you've missed a few salient facts in your analysis)...

If the central issue is the streaming audio and video, then there are many ways for Adobe to address this completely within the restrictions of the app store, and without needing to deal with the technical challenges of a full flash port.

Solution: 1. The video and audio components of flash are just codecs, and they are already written in C and run on OSX. There's nothing to stop Adobe releasing them as components for content providers to drop into their iPhone applications. This should not take a lot of effort, and would let existing sites leverage their flash audio and video within their own iPhone Apps. Obviously developing an iPhone app is more work than many sites want to do so...

Solution: 2. Adobe could provide an Adobe Media Player app in the app store. This would not have to break any of the app store guidelines. It wouldn't run flash applets, but it would be an optimized user experience for playing flash audio and video. It would have its own URL scheme, and so existing sites would have to make only minimal changes to their HTML to enable it.

The iPhone APIs and the App store guidelines already fully support both of these models.

The second model would almost certainly be a better experience than somehow 'simply enabling the flash plugin', since the player would have a high quality mobile optimized interface - akin to the youtube player.

A straight port of the flash plugin would leave you controlling an audio stream on your iphone by leaving a browser pane open and stretch zooming some fiddly little controls, whereas a url handling application would give you a fully native experience with history and bookmarking for the streams and content etc, as well as the ability to be interrupted e.g. to take a call, and go back to where you were in the stream, or even to switch to another application etc. It could provide fancy multi-touch scanning across the timeline etc, and content providers would get these features for free.

As far as I can see it would be straightforward for Adobe to implement solution 2, and trivial for content providers to leverage it. I speculate that the reason that Adobe are not doing this is because it would undermine their proprietary application platform.

As far as I can see, Apple is the one being open here (see my comment about Apple's contribution to open web standards earlier), and Adobe are the ones who are trying to leverage their proprietary position to control web application development.

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

rbarooah — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 14:24:56 -0000

I have to go as far to say - you're dead wrong, Fred. Apple is clearly aware of the issue and is already pushing the open web harder than anyone else.

MobileSafari actually supports more of the HTML5 standards that will displace flash than any other browser:

http://a.deveria.com/caniuse/#agents=All&cats=A...

The code was developed by Apple, and is in WebKit, which is free for anyone to use in their browsers. Webkit is used by the Nokia's browser, and the Palm Pre browser, and Google Chrome.

How much more open and 'before the tipping point' could they be? They are the ones driving us towards the tipping point.

Flash is a proprietary format with an implementation that is weak on mobile devices so far. Obviously it makes sense for Apple's competitors to include it as a marketing bullet point, but its window is closing fast.

Re: On Apple customer service

rbarooah — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:06:26 -0000

That's the best one I've heard. I was impressed I went to a store that was out of stock of the specific color of jawbone I wanted to buy as a gift for someone. I too live within range of a number of Apple stores, and so I asked if they could check the stock at one of the other stores. They did, but they also told me that they had checked the stock at a best buy that was much closer and more convenient, and went on to show me a google map of directions to the store. They saved me most of the afternoon by doing that.

Re: http://comments.deasil.com/2009/02/06/breakfast-links-britain-facebook-suicide-girls-interviews-dushku/

rbarooah — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 00:30:42 -0000

I actually wrote a response to your reply to my response in which I furthered my argument about the merits of the House of Lords, but it would appear that disqus has disappeared it.

Now having seen that portrait, I feel that additional words are not necessary.

Re: http://comments.deasil.com/2009/02/06/breakfast-links-britain-facebook-suicide-girls-interviews-dushku/

rbarooah — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 15:37:22 -0000

And I look forward to being invited to your mansion to admire said portraits
:-)

Re: http://comments.deasil.com/2009/02/06/breakfast-links-britain-facebook-suicide-girls-interviews-dushku/

rbarooah — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 12:51:24 -0000

The lords thing doesn't surprise me. After all, these people don't have to worry about reelection, and aren't terrified by the latest media crime scare. When they go back to their stately homes, they can gaze on portraits of their ancestors on horseback wearing their medals from some battle or other and ask themselves "what kind of country were these people trying to build?". Furthermore hereditary peers may well remember hearing their parents talking about bad laws of the past etc. etc.

The idea of someone being born into a position of privilege and power may be reprehensible to those of us who believe that people should be able to succeed based on their own merits, but how else do you pass that kind of experience from generation to generation?

Re: Microsoft Problems

rbarooah — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 13:22:08 -0000

One way of looking at Microsoft is that for three decades, they led in the commercialization of packaged software. One can argue about whether they did any real innovation in terms of user experience or ideas - but they did a better job of anyone else in commercializing it. This resulted in them gaining huge amounts of cash, as well as a significant degree of control over the market. Controlling a market isn't actually a long-term advantage because it closes you off from information about what people really want - i.e you impose your will on consumers rather than listening to their needs. Success reinforces the behaviors you have been doing, whether or not they have any causal relationship to the outcome. These things are in the DNA of the organization - both its structure, and its top management, some of whom have lived their entire professional lives within this environment. Their brains are literally wired for this and won't be unwired any time soon.

Right now, it looks as though they are seeing other people being successful, not understanding why, and trying to copy their behaviors. In particular they know they aren't perceived as cool and are trying to become cool.

I this is actually a very rational response - we do most of our learning though mimicry even if it looks silly and derivative at first, and their cash means they can afford to do this for a while.

At the same time, they're struggling with their addiction to being in control. Not being dependent on being in control is what enabled Apple to rise to where they are now, and of course their challenge is to avoid becoming dependent on the control they now enjoy, because this dependency is how Microsoft painted itself into it's current corner.

Re: My beef with other people’s beefs with the App Store

rbarooah — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:14:51 -0000

Yeah - I've posted about them needing a web based interface in the past -
then it was because google favors amazon heavily when searching for music
for obvious reasons. I totally agree about the overhaul, although I am
expecting tweaks rather than anything radical - it would be nice to be
surprised on this one.
In practice, I discover most apps through the web, and then buy the on the
device because I'm often mobile when I do, and I sync my phone with my
desktop machine rather than my laptop because that's where my music is.

So for me, the ideal would be a browser based store, with push notification
to the device to begin downloads.

To much to hope for?

Re: My beef with other people’s beefs with the App Store

rbarooah — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 14:32:52 -0000

Nice analysis. Totally agree with you. The key to what's happening on the app store is that placement on the 'first screen' of the store it self or any category results in conversions. That real-estate is very limited - a few hundred apps total out of > 15,000, so people are optimizing for placement rather than anything else.

The paradox of all the situation is that currently as you point out, Apple is not doing directly to fix price points, whereas if they started to pick arbitrary "weight classes", they actually would be. I'm not saying this wouldn't be better than the current state of affairs, but it would require oversight (to make sure the classes were working), and it would still discriminate against apps in the top band. It also risks wasting real estate on underperforming apps.

Like I say - I am not saying this wouldn't be an improvement, nor that I have a better alternative, however I can see why Apple would hesitate to interfere. Perhaps there is a more organic solution to the problem, perhaps the market will mature in some way, and maybe higher value apps simply take longer to prove themselves.

Re: My further thoughts on Palm’s WebOS

rbarooah — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 14:25:28 -0000

I've been using my iPhone for pretty serious work recently - beyond even typical PDA type stuff. I haven't missed classical multitasking as much as I have fast context switching. I think Apple could go a long way towards remedying that if they could just freeze processes in memory and let you switch between apps without having to restart them from cold every time. Obviously more memory in the phone would help with that a lot, but that 's a relatively simple thing for them to increase. Landon would be better placed to say whether there are technical barriers to that approach.

Palm may actually be doing something like this with the Javascript apps, which would not be that hard to implement given that they are in control of the VM. They only have to appear to be multitasking as a user-facing feature. They don't actually have to be fully preemptively scheduled in the way that desktop apps traditionally are.