Posts Tagged: apple

Main — No Comments
27
Dec 11

Doing is The Work

Saw this quote a while back:

Things fail when they are not taken seriously, things work when they are respected and effort is applied to them.  - David Green, Department of Ageing, Disability and Home Care, New South Wales, Australia

And then more recently:

To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions. – Steve Jobs

And again:

You know, one of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90 percent of the work. And if you just tell all these other people “here’s this great idea,” then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. – Steve Jobs

An idea is a start. But only a start. It seems silly to say it, but the hard work – the real work – of any project is not in the concept, but in the execution. I could come up with 100 perfectly fine ideas every week. Even every hour? But you don’t know if they are any good until you carry out the idea to fruition. That could take weeks, if not years, of very hard work.

My aim for 2012: Respect ideas a little less, and respect effort and doing more.

Main — Comments Off
2
Dec 11

No Money in Android

Why Marco doesn’t make Instapaper for Android:

“Android has a very large installed base, but a disproportionally small number of people paying for apps.”

Main — Comments Off
30
Nov 11

To iCloud or Not to iCloud?

The short answer: Yes, use it. It makes your life easier, and stuff “just works” a little bit better.

The longer answer: First, let’s assume you’ve read through the promotional site already. There is a lot of good information there, and I find that Apple talks pretty straight without a lot of hyperbole that you hear from other tech giants. Now on to my experiences…

Photo Stream – By far my favorite new iCloud feature. It isn’t so much a photo backup as an photo distribution mechanism. I take a photo on my iPhone, and it shows up on the iMac (which happens to be automatically backed up by the good folks at CrashPlan). My kids take a picture on their iPod Touch, and it automatically shows up on my iPad. No importing, and no iTunes synchronizing. It just works. If I were to criticize anything about the photo stream, I’d say it works too good and too fast. I might take three pictures of a bird in our backyard – with the intent to save only one. By the time I’ve reviewed the pictures and deleted two, all three will already have been added to the stream and sync’d out to all of the devices.

Documents in the Cloud – if you are doing work in Keynote, Pages, or Numbers, this works well between the iPhone and iPad, but unfortunately leaves the desktop out. Technically, you can go to iCloud.com and download/edit/upload a document on your desktop, but it’s klunky. This will really sing when the desktop iWork apps are iCloud-enabled. But till then, it’s not quite helpful for my workflow.

Other App data – I recently installed the Apple Store app. It figured out who I was, and linked me straight in to my account. I was able to check on my recent photo order from iPhoto with only a quick confirm of my Apple ID password. I can only assume that this was because if iCloud, and I liked it. It’s like single-sign-on, for all of your apps. And at this particular moment in history, I trust Apple more than Facebook, Twitter, or Google for single-sign-on. More apps need to use this!

Contacts – I’d been synchronizing all my contacts through Google for the last few years using their Exchange protocol. It worked well enough, except for a few small things. Home email addresses would occasionally switch to Other email addresses. Two-part names might double up: Mary Jo Johnson might change into Mary Jo Jo Johnson. … None of it horrendous, and I don’t think I ever lost data: it just got mangled from time to time. I’ve switched to iCloud for my address book storage to avoid these inconveniences. A couple weeks later: so far, so good!

Calendar – Like contacts, I recently switched my personal calendar from Google to iCloud. The Exchange sync protocol Google uses isn’t bad, it just isn’t perfect. Time will tell. It was sort of a pain to switch each appointment from one service to the other.

iOS Backup – Thus seems like a no-brainier to me. The more backups, the better! I restored from a cloud backup to my iPhone once, and it worked like a charm. The biggest surprise was that the restore process let me use the device while it was still restoring the apps.

Music Match – Haven’t tried it yet. I’m one of the early iTunes users that built some complex smart playlists and rated my entire music collection. Of my 30+GB music collection, I almost always have the 2-3GB of songs automatically on my phone that I want to listen to. It sounds like a neat service, but I’m not ready to part with $25 to try it.

Find my friends – This is both cool, and creepy. This would be better as “Find my family” because you probably won’t want too many people to know that you are not at your house at any particular time. This might work well in college or for high school students. But as a family man, few people will get added into Find my Friends.

All told, I’m hopeful for iCloud. There are a lot of good things in there, and I can’t wait for more apps to leverage it.

Main — 2 Comments
25
Nov 11

Apple, the Low Cost Leader

Some of you still believe that Apple and their products are “nice, but over-priced”. This may have been true at one point in history, but your information is old and needs to be updated.

Let me help:

  • So Far Rivals Can’t Beat iPad’s Price (NYTimes, 3/2011)
  • “Would-be rivals to Apple’s iPad have more of a chance in Europe than they do in the United States, but they need to cut prices fast to grasp the opportunity, IT research firm Forrester said on Tuesday. [...] their prices cannot yet compete with Apple, which has far larger scale in the tablet market and an efficient supply chain.” (Reuters 8/2011)
  • “PC makers are struggling to match Apple’s prices” (Daring Fireball, DigiTimes 8/2011)
  • “Something unexpected has happened at Apple, once known as the tech industry’s high-price leader. Over the last several years it began beating rivals on price.” (NYTimes, 10/2011)
  • “The first crop of Android tablets that hit the market failed to come close to the iPad’s entry-level price of $499″ (CNET, 10/2011)

 

Main — Comments Off
9
Jun 11

iCloud Single Sign-On

Apple announced iCloud earlier this week, and this has been a long time coming. Not in that the feature itself is something that everyone has been asking for, but it solves a problem many applications have: maintaining state between hardware devices.

Google’s answer to this problem is that the device doesn’t matter. Its all about the browser. Apples answer is iCloud — it’s all about apps.

[A short recap for those just joining the conversation, iCloud is a thing that enables sharing of data between your devices. You take a picture on your iPhone, and moments later that photo is on your iPad, in iPhoto on your Mac, and even the photos folder on your PC. Apple is initially building this into many apps: iTunes, Photos, App Store, iBooks, Pages, Keynote, Numbers, Backup, Contacts, Calendar, and Mail]

Why is this important?
Today maintaining state between computers, smartphones and tablets relies on a hodge-podge of technologies:

  • Mail is kept in sync using special imap server settings on each device.
  • Music is sync’d only with a cable connected to iTunes running on just one computer. Same for bookmarks, photos, iBooks.
  • Kindle books, probable the closest in style to iCloud, syncs through my Anazon login. Yet that one login on each device gets me precious little beyond the books.
  • Calendars use a mashup of CalDAV, Googles services, and Microsoft Exchange. My address book is in a similar situation.
  • OmniFocus todo’s are sync’d through a custom WebDAV folder on my edstrom.net server.
  • Dropbox, one of my favorite utilities, also comes close. Their big claim to fame is their open API which many applications have adopted instead of building their own sync layer. And there is certainly demand for it: take a look at all the Dropbox apps.
  • Games may or may not save state…

In a lot of ways, I think iCloud is the answer to the old buzz catch-phrase: Single Sign-On. Now I can sign into any device -once- and all my apps, my photos, my documents, my music … will all be there. Outside of the browser window.

 

← Older Entries