Archive for category Issues

What exactly does the Apple iPad do better?

Posted by David Hurst in Apple, Guides, Hardware, Issues, Reviews, Technology on January 28th, 2010

When Steve Jobs launched the iPad yesterday, he made a compelling case for a device to fill the gap between a smartphone and a PC/Mac. In his words, “If there’s gonna be a third category, it has to be better at these tasks — otherwise it has no reason for being.” Which tasks?

  • Browsing
  • Email
  • Photos
  • Video
  • Music
  • Games
  • eBooks

So, I thought it might be interesting to look at each of these things and see whether it is better at these key tasks than any of the alternatives.

Browsing
I think browsing the Internet on the iPad would be a nice experience. The screen size and touch interface combined with the portability of the device would seem to offer a better experience than a smartphone, netbook or PC/Mac. However, at the moment there is no Flash player on the iPad, and given that much of the video streaming done on the Internet now runs through Flash, I would see this as a huge fault.

Verdict: better than a smartphone, but simply cannot compete with a PC/Mac. Probably a better browsing experience with that screen than a netbook, but at least my netbook has the Flash player, not to mention a choice of browsers. I don’t believe anyone could say the iPad is better at browsing.

Email
Apple have vastly improved the iPhone email interface for the iPad, but the iPad is not a phone. Surely they should have used Mac Mail as the starting point? By virtue of the bigger screen, the iPad will be more pleasant to use than a smartphone, but given the superior portability of a phone and the cheaper cost of connectivity, it doesn’t really win out in the mobile email stakes. And of course, it can’t match a standard OS for email power and choice of email clients.

Verdict: what’s better? Nothing that I can see. Smartphones are better for mobile email, netbooks and PC/Macs are better at general email. Another defeat for iPad I’m afraid.

Photos
I’m just confused by this. I could see a use for the iPad as a way to share and enjoy photos with family and friends, but its lack of standard USB connectivity ruins this. You can’t just plug your digital camera into your iPad (not without the special adapter/connector, which will be a cost extra anyway), nor can you copy photos onto a memory stick or external hard disk. Presumably you will be reduced to copying all those 10MP photos in your collection via the incredibly slow Bluetooth, or by WiFi, assuming you have an access point nearby.

There’s no camera in the iPad, and it’s not like you would want to actually take photos with a device of this size anyway. Many smartphones on the other hand, do have cameras, and some of them are very good. My Palm Pre has an acceptable camera, with a flash, and is able to upload directly to Facebook, which is actually where I share photos with my friends and family.

Verdict: better than a smartphone or netbook for browsing photos, but much more difficult to get the photos on the device in the first place. Can’t match a PC/Mac for this at all.

Video
This I really don’t understand. The screen is 1024 x 768 resolution, or 4:3 in aspect ratio terms, so there’s no widescreen and given that most video produced now is widescreen, that means you will be chopping part of the video off to make it fit, or you will be forced to watch video in a strip across the middle of the screen. Most smartphones are widescreen, and so is pretty much every netbook or PC/Mac you can buy.

The lack of Flash player means that there’s no chance of watching online TV with BBC iPlayer or other services, and that’s just a huge flaw. And that lack of USB also means no DVD drive either.

Verdict: smartphones may be small but they are at least widescreen. Netbooks have the Flash player and can play DVDs with external drives. Your PC/Mac can do all of these things much better. So where does that leave iPad?

Music
Music? Really? Who is going to want a portable music player with a 9.7″ screen? It could be useful, plugged into an amp whilst streaming music from your main iTunes collection, but on its own the iPad does not look like a revolutionary music device, nor can it do anything better than any other devices.

Perhaps Apple are referring to music production, but given they have supplied no apps for this, I think I’ll stick to Garageband and Logic on my more powerful and usable Macs.

Verdict: iPad does nothing better than anything else.

Games
Again, I don’t get it. Touchscreen games are all well and good on an iPhone or iPod touch, but on a larger device it is a nonsense interface. Plus, the graphics power is hardly going to be blowing anyone away. For the price of a decent iPad you can have a reasonable PC games rig, or you could have a netbook and a games console.

Verdict: smartphones are better for mobile games, and PC/Mac is better for proper games. The iPad probably beats a netbook here, although mine does run Quake3 at perfectly acceptable speeds. I remain entirely unconvinced.

eBooks
And here we get to the core of the issue. If Apple had launched the iPad as the iReader, I think everyone would be happy. Whether or not its screen works as well as the Kindle’s e-ink screen for reading books, remains to be seen. But given the closeness of the pricing on the various reader devices, the iPad makes a lot of sense: pay a little more, get a lot more. Personally, I’d rather sit and read a well thumbed paperback.

Verdict: the iPad’s true reason for being.

Should you buy an iPad?
If you are in the market for an e-reader, then the iPad has to be worthy of consideration. If not, then I don’t believe iPad will do anything for you other than giving you a short period of popularity whilst all your friends and colleagues come to stroke it and dribble on it. I guess if you have money to burn and you want to buy into Apple’s sexily packaged gadget du jour, then go for it.

If you do buy it, just remember that Apple will eventually address all the flaws, just as they did with iPhone, and then in short order they will bring out a better specced, more powerful and cheaper second version, leaving you with an obsolete but attractive door stop.

Apple has always treated its early adopters with an attitude bordering on contempt, yet the fanboys keep coming back for more, always failing to realise Apple couldn’t give a crap about them - they are, and always have been, a corporation interested only in the bottom line, and a bunch of early adopters buying what is essentially a beta version are simply helping to pay for the research and development of the final version, and that is very good for the bottom line.

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Internet Explorer - the world’s most popular browser?

Posted by David Hurst in Apple, Issues, Rants, Technology on January 13th, 2010

Question: is Internet Explorer the world’s most popular browser?

Let’s look at the stats for the major players (correct at January 2010)…

(EDIT: no doubt these stats will be completely inaccurate by now, particularly given the massive security flaw in IE that allowed Google email accounts to be spied on by Chinese hackers, and the subsequent warning from the German Government that people should find an alternative browser to use)

62.69% - Internet Explorer
24.61% - Firefox
4.63% - Chrome
4.46% - Safari
2.40% - Opera

Internet Explorer still has a considerable lead in the market share (although this is steadily decreasing), but this is simply because the PC buying public are force-fed the IE browser as it comes built into their Windows installation. So, Internet Explorer is certainly the most used browser, but I wouldn’t say it was the most popular, particularly when you consider that Firefox is not shipped with major operating systems (it is usually the default browser in most Linux distributions, but Linux as an OS only has 1.02% of the world market). So, in order to be using Firefox, the user has to have actively voted with their feet and installed the Firefox browser, rather than use the default browser forced upon them by Microsoft. In my opinion, this makes Firefox the most popular browser, if not the most used. I don’t think you can call something “popular” if it’s something that’s foisted upon people - people who probably don’t realise there’s an alternative.

Some might call this semantics, but for me it’s about getting to the core of the issue. Serious computer users, and anyone with any sense or IT knowledge, will most likely not be using Internet Explorer.

IE as a browser is the worst of the five listed above. Microsoft resolutely refuse to abide by standards set by W3C and others. When W3C compliant code doesn’t work as expected in Internet Explorer, the Microsoft support stance is that their browser is flawless and it is the developer who is at fault. This means that web developers everywhere are having to develop code twice: once to standards, and then a second time to adapt it for Microsoft’s flaws. Microsoft’s arrogance beggars belief! It’s equivalent to buying a car that doesn’t support highway standards, then when you complain to the company involved that your car doesn’t work with the road network in your country, they just turn around and say “change the road network to suit our car”. What a joke!

Worse still, IE is the principal reason for many of the viruses and trojans that plague Windows users (but not Mac or Linux users). Do a Windows update and you will notice that it runs through Internet Explorer. This means that it is possible for a remote computer to access your files and setup details, and update those files and configurations via your web browser! Microsoft may occasionally patch and secure it, but this is a totally flawed mechanism that will always have vulnerabilities no matter what they do.

If most Windows users were told the truth about Internet Explorer, I think the market share data above would be very different. If you are currently using Internet Explorer, I strongly suggest you try Firefox, Chrome or Safari - they’re all free, faster than IE, standards compliant, feature rich and more secure than Internet Explorer.

Microsoft is losing it’s global dominance, albeit very slowly. Apple are selling more computers than ever - in fact every quarter they post record sales of Apple desktops and laptops. Linux has also properly arrived in the mainstream - the latest version of Ubuntu is exceptional. Consumers are getting more savvy and will start to demand better. Why should you have to put up with a virus-riddled, unreliable dog of an operating system when the competition is more secure, more stable, faster and cheaper?

Beats me why anyone would choose to use IE or Windows. My business partner swears by a PC with Windows… well actually, he swears at his PC with windows. A lot. There is continual talk of “rebuilds” (re-installation of Windows and wiping of the hard disk), whereas my three and a half year old Apple MacBook Pro is still going strong despite never being re-installed, and never having any anti-virus software whatsoever installed. It’s a no brainer.

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Microsoft Staff Living in Dream Land

Posted by David Hurst in Issues, Rants, Technology on November 13th, 2009

I just spotted this quote from Simon Aldous, Partner Group Manager at Microsoft, on the BBC News website:

“What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 - whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format - is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics. We’ve significantly improved the graphical user interface, but it’s built on that very stable core Vista technology, which is far more stable than the current Mac platform, for instance.”

Uhm gosh. Stop the press. Microsoft copying Apple? Nothing new there at all. All these companies copy each other all the time. Apple copy others too.

But, is he serious - Vista more stable than OS X?

Which planet are you living on Mr Aldous?!

Vista is a dog horrible operating system and there’s no way anybody is going to believe it’s more stable than the highly secure UNIX-based OS X.

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft are distancing themselves from the comments. The guy clearly doesn’t have a clue.

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IT support services and computer repair in Swindon

Posted by David Hurst in Announcements, Hardware, Issues, Technology on September 4th, 2009

My good friend Mike Southby has started working for himself in the Swindon and Gloucester area. He is a dab hand at server management, IT support and computer repairs. He’s fully MCSE and MCSA qualified and offers very fair rates.

If you have need of computer support, networking help or anything IT related, drop him a line. There’s an email link on his web page: Mike Southby Computer Services.

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The Facebook facelift

Posted by David Hurst in Issues, Rants, Reviews on March 26th, 2009

Facebook users have recently suffered their once coherent Facebook layout being bastardised beyond comprehension. If this is a “facelift”, then you can expect it to appear soon on “When Surgery Goes Wrong”.

Have you ever heard the time honoured maxim, “don’t fix what ain’t broke”? Here is a classic example. There was nothing wrong with the way Facebook was, having just been improved upon recently anyway. Sometimes, things are just right the way they are - no more engineering is required, just minor tweaks here and there as new technology becomes available. Examples of this might include: the car (4 wheels, an engine and seats - it works); the computer mouse (no, it will not be replaced by gestural systems and touch screens), and; that timeless classic - the wheel.

You can almost imagine the thumb twiddling and finger tapping going on in the Facebook design office as hapless designers and developers struggle to deal with the overwhelming possibility that they’ve already peaked. “Surely there must be something else we can do”, they say. Well, yes. You could bugger it all up completely. You could take all the nice functionality and then just roll it all up into one messy blob and call it the new home page. It’s like the plasticene that you used to play with at school. It came out of the packet in beautiful pristine coloured strips, then the fat kid with the snotty nose and the shorts that don’t quite fit properly, just mindlessly splodges it all together into a green/brown mush. Of course you don’t want to play with it after that, because everything you make will just look like a turd. And that’s how Facebook is now. A turd.

I have a mish mash of different types of information all appearing in one place. Status comments, photos, videos, wall posts, groups et al, all appear in the same confusing list, along with application posts from all manner of ridiculous apps, quizzes, games, virtual gifts and other completely useless crap. I can no longer hide other people’s application posts, I can only hide ALL updates from the person.

Everything has become much less private and much more in your face. In the past, I could see whether one friend had written on another friend’s wall, and if I so desired I could click to read the message. Now, the message is broadcast on my “news feed” which appears to have replaced everything else. However, messages sent to me are nowhere to be seen. I know that someone has written on my wall, because the notifications widget tells me so, but when I click the link, it just takes me to my feed and leaves me then to fend for myself, and I invariably cannot find the message.

In actual fact, if I click on my own name in the navigation, I get something more sensible with a Wall that I can actually navigate, but mysteriously, this feature rarely works properly. Most times, the page doesn’t load, or it just shows the news feed instead. Are Facebook still working on this? Have they forced an untested Beta onto everybody?

I imagine if the Facebook designers were actually tasked with improving the wheel, some bright spark would pipe up: “why not make it octagonal, that way it would be simpler?”, and all around the room wise designers would nod sagely and make it so.

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