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Big article on the front page of the NYT business section about Andrew Rubin - formerly of Apple, WebTV, Danger (creators of the Sidekick,) and now director of mobile platforms at Google. In other words, he's in charge of the Google phone, which isn't itself a phone but a mobile operating system (a modified version of Linux) that phone handset manufacturers can use to run their products. There isn't any information in the article about the phone because Google is still not talking about it, but if we believe the Wall St. Journal an announcement from them is very near. There will be a ton of press about this, so I guess the Times is just jumping to the head of the line with this background piece on the man running the show.
I have a bunch of thoughts on this, but no time to get them down. Maybe I'll leave some comments here over the next few days. But one thing that really struck me, although it's not touched on in the article, is the extent to which Google and Apple, while competing with each other, may create the perfect storm which disrupts the rather staid telecom industry.
The speculation, especially given Rubin's background, and Google's track record with open eco systems, is that the Google mobile OS will be *very* open to 3rd party development. Telecoms don't necessarily like open products because they are dinosaurs intent on bringing their own destruction with the unholy alliance of closed platforms and user hostile product designs. Apple tends towards the closed side, but is very strong on design (both physical and UI.) I think this might lead to an interesting struggle where the consumer will be the winner.
If it wasn't for Apple and the iPhone, I think the telecoms might line up against Google, and just not permit phones running the Google operating system to connect to their networks. But because of the iPhone's success I think they will be more open to it as the non AT&T operators search for a counter to AT&T's iPhone exclusive. So that's one win. But then, in the other direction, it may well be the case that the openness of the Google platform will tip Apple - which presently seems to be trying to exactly straddle the line - over into the more open camp. Another win for consumers. We get better phones, with better design, more open to outside development - and the cellular operators wind up with less control. I like.
Stephen Fry has a new column in the Guardian, Welcome To Dork Talk, and I couldn't agree more with his first effort:
I hope you'll believe I'm not an unthinking slave to Cupertino. Apple gets plenty of small things wrong, but one big thing it gets right: when you use a device every day, you cannot help, as a human being, but have an emotional relationship with it. It's true of cars and cookers, and it's true of computers. It's true of office blocks and houses, and it's true of mobiles and satnavs. A grey box is not good enough, clunky and ugly is not good enough. Sick building syndrome exists, and so does sick hand-held device syndrome. Fiddly buttons, blocky icons, sickeningly stupid nested menus - these are the enemy.I found this via Daring Fireball who adds some nice thoughts of his own.
I would never have predicted this:
We've done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:Tog is the man, and they did an incredible amount of user testing (as opposed to just thinking about it,) so I'm sure this is right. On the other hand, I know I'm faster with keyboard shortcuts than the mouse, and I don't think it's amnesia. (via daring fireball)
- Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
- The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers' belief that the keyboard is faster.
People new to the mouse find the process of acquiring it every time they want to do anything other than type to be incredibly time-wasting. And therein lies the very advantage of the mouse: it is boring to find it because the two-second search does not require high-level cognitive engagement.
It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist.
Have to look into this more closely: QuTags - "AJAX for PHP without JAX."
When debugging in PHP I've always used the crude method of inserting echo statements all over the place to print out my variable values. I'm a bit embarrassed to say that I never thought to use syslog() for this purpose. Much more elegant.
These IBM developerworks articles are great.
New, much longer video of Jeff Han demonstrating his giant multitouch interface. I blogged about Han and multitouch back in February of last year. It's all very Minority Report-ish. Obviously, since the iPhone debut, this stuff seems much more mainstream. And it is really cool - but only for certain data sets. For instance, it's hard to see how this augments any text based work. But for manipulating photos it's incredible.
My guess is that Apple is taking this very seriously. Adding coverflow (stolen from iTunes) to the Finder in Leopard makes it hard to think that multitouch isn't coming to all Macs. I expect the next round of laptops to have some sort of multitouch track pad.
And, while not specifically multitouch related, this Apple patent application for keystroke tacility arrangement on a smooth touch surface might offer a glimpse at the solution for touch screen keyboards. I hadn't thought of that route. Could you really deform a screen into something like a keyboard? That would be incredible and would solve the biggest issue with the iPhone. Sounds a little too sci-fi for me to believe it's anywhere near production though.
Interesting, although I'm not sure very useful, interactive CSS generator for styling text. I guess this idea could maybe be folded into a blogging/CMS system.
Longtime Apple appreciator and WSJ columnist Walt Mossberg likes OS X 10.4 Leopard:
On Friday evening, Apple will release yet another new version of OS X, called Leopard, to replace the current version, known as Tiger. I've been testing Leopard, and while it is an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, release, I believe it builds on Apple's quality advantage over Windows. In my view, Leopard is better and faster than Vista, with a set of new features that make Macs even easier to use.Evolutionary, not revolutionary, sounds right to me. Still there's nothing wrong with a little evolution, and there are some cool new features, plus some long standing annoyances have been worked out. Definitely worth the upgrade, but I won't be standing in line on Friday night or anything.
Gmail gets IMAP support. Very cool. Only having POP access was an annoyance, especially on b.'s iPhone.
IMAP allows you to keep your mail account in sync even when you are using multiple clients. So now mail read, say, on the iPhone will show up as read when you later check from your desktop. And mail sent from your desktop will show up in the sent mail folder on your phone.
Apple reported some very high fourth quarter earnings yesterday after the market closed, and, uh, Wall St. liked what they heard. I swear I saw it rise 10% in less than an hour. Apple now has a larger market cap than Intel and IBM. What a world.
The iPhone "is a game-changing product," said Stephen Coleman, chief investment officer at Daedalus Capital LLC.But I think it was really Mac sales that drove the stock up. They were incredibly strong. Over 2 million Macs sold - 400,000 more than in any previous quarter. And that's in a quarter immediately preceding a huge OS release (often people put off computer purchases until a new OS is released since you get it free with a new computer.) Apple is now the number three computer retailer in the U.S. (behind Dell and HP who, sure, sell a lot more but on *much* lower margins.)
Based on income from the iPhone alone, he said, "I expect Apple's earnings to continually grow materially at 50 percent a year, for the next three years."
I think they are at the tipping point, especially with their laptop sales. They can easily gobble up market share percentage points from here. 10% of the global market doesn't seem out of reach. And then, yeah, there's that whole iPod thing. Still, I don't trust the market in general right now and I think I'm going to sell my rather tiny holdings. It's been a very fun ride.