Dreaming Of Beetles

Update: I started writing this post and realized I’m finding so much about the iPad on a daily basis, I’ll never finish this. I’m going make this sticky and continue to expand on it as I uncover new notions of what this thing is.

There seem to be two warring factions over the iPad, those that think it makes sense and those that don’t. I’m firmly in the “think it makes sense” group.

Flash
I hate Flash. I hate the AIR runtime. I don’t even have the browser plugin installed (my hatred extends beyond ClickToFlash). But most of the people that will buy this device will have some sort of affinity for it. I can just see my sister, buying this for use on the couch, firing it up and Farmville being a blue square. The lack of Flash matters most to those who don’t even know what it is.

This is the New Apple OS
Some fear that iPhone OS X, which will most likely be re-branded Mobile OS X, will creep upwards to laptops and desktops. Apple is not stupid, this will never happen. Do you think they haven’t noticed the huge developer community that lives and loves OS X? This is the community that create the applications and apps that make iP and Macs such a pleasure to use. Apple is not going to do anything to interfere with the love.

The iPad is for my Mom
Recently, my parents hashed it out over my mom’s desire for an Apple laptop. My dad was against it as he didn’t want to learn a new OS. She ended up with a Dell. The iPad would be perfect for her, no learning required. What we’re seeing here is the wii-ification of the game console. Bringing a somewhat arcane device to the masses. But my mom is going to be awfully pissed her genealogy software doesn’t work on it.

It’s Just a Big iPod Touch
And my iPhone is just a smaller, less powerful, less capable iPad. The only things that matter about the physical aspects are a) the size of the screen and b) it’s running Apple’s A4 chip (which I’ll get to later). Watching the Jobs announcement was boring, truly boring. I wasn’t there so I checked out the live blogs without the benefit of motion. It was the 7 minute iPad intro video that blew my mind. And the word on the street is that you “have to use it to understand it”. Watching the video was enough for me. It is the interface that allows this device to excel where everyone else has failed.

It Doesn’t have X, Y, or Z
I firmly believe that Apple has introduced what the market will bear, not what Apple is capable of. You can see evidence of this tactic with the camera in the iPod Nano and a lack of one in the iPod Touch. The iPod Touch can survive with its current specs, the Nano, not so much. I bet Apple is currently working on the 3rd or even 4th generation of the iPad right now. I also believe this product line will be pushed more aggressively, no once per year updates.

This is Not a “Hobby” Product
When we got the iPod Touch, it wasn’t called the iTouch. Same with Nano, Shuffle, and now Classic. The branding remains consistent – iP. The iPad fits into this branding mold, whereas a “Hobby” product does not – tv.

The Apple A4 CPU/GPU
I don’t have any knowledge that isn’t already out there, but I’m damn curious how many cores this thing has. Apple, with its PA Semi purchase, has brought us a screaming, power-sipping monster. We all know the next iPhone will be called the iPhone A4. I bet this is what has postponed the launch of the tablet for so long, Jobs just was not comfortable releasing an underpowered device that did not hold up well in battery life.

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Just got this in the mail… Nailed them on the clarity/timeliness of app reviews and suggested they post guidelines for acceptable apps or at the very least have a pre-review process.

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My take on the announcements:

• This is a revolutionary product (I didn’t realize this until the point below).
• The new app interfaces have sold me.
• The announcement was boring. Demos are boring, watch the 7-min iPad video by Apple to see what this is all about.
• The A4 chip and the amazing battery life will kill the Kindle and the rest of the eReader market.
• The price is amazing. Again, Kindle dead.
• There is far more to this product than what we’ve seen today.

Here are some pics of the simulator. I rushed these out so ask questions in the comments:

Lock Screen

Initial Home Screen

Settings

Search

Settings App

About

Keyboard

Accessibility

Contact App

Contact App w/ Keyboard

Contact App w/ Keyboard Horizontal

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Mashups. That name seems to grate on me now, never liked it. Several years ago, 2005 maybe, web apps or even web functions became much more liberal with sharing information. We saw the pioneers like Flickr and Delicious open up their data to 3rd parties through APIs. The seminal event was probably Google Maps. Closed to 3rd parties in the beginning but pried open, the map data was too enticing. Before there was an API for Google Maps, I was one of the few to mash data on top of it. This gave rise to the term Mashups.

Fast forward to today, where providing an API is no longer an option, but a necessity. If you don’t provide one, your competitor definitely will.

One of the most successful and open APIs is Twitter’s. Spawning tens of thousands of 3rd party apps, cementing Twitter’s lead in the micro-blogging sector. Nobody can come close to them.

In this post, I want to go over two examples. The first example is what got me onto this train of thought, more below.

Shelfari vs. Goodreads
I’ve been using both sites for over a year, but Goodreads is now, frankly, kicking Shelfari’s ass. Though I think Shelfari is a superior website – I’ve invested so much time into Shelfari and am somewhat miffed that it is destined for oblivion.

Why?

You can probably guess by now, they have no frikkin’ API! FriendFeed, Cliqset, Ping.fm, etc. cannot interface with Shelfari (and Shelfari doesn’t integrate with anything else) so none of your content ends up in your Activity Stream. People don’t see what you are doing on the site, people never learn it exists, people don’t use it.

Gowalla vs. Foursquare
This one is a bit less obvious, but the lack of an API in Gowalla is killing it. Their blog states, on January 13th, the API is nearly complete. NEARLY COMPLETE! What, are they waiting for it to be perfect before rolling it out? Bad idea. Do you think Twitter waited until their API was golden before letting others use it?

On the other hand, Foursquare has had their API out since at least May 27, 2009, this is when the first message was posted to the discussion group. They even have an app gallery!

Now for some objective data, (kind of). Since I cross link a lot of my social accounts, I get a lot of spillover from Twitter. When an social app really starts taking off, I start to get an increasing number of requests. Request numbers for these sites:

• Shelfari – ZERO. EVER.
• Goodreads – 1 to 2 per day.
• Gowalla – 2 to 4 per day.
• Foursquare – 10+ per day.

If you’re aggregating data or building a social site and don’t have an API, you’re history.

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Since I don’t have all the time in the world, I haven’t been benchmarking the newer builds I’ve posted lately. In particular, I’ve never benchmarked the 64-bit Firefox 3.7a1 against the 32-bit nightly. A kind soul pointed out that my builds yielded no speed gains and are inferior to the official Mozilla nightlies. Having done numerous builds of 64-bit WebKit (pre-WWDC), and testing against the 32-bit WebKit and finding no gains, I didn’t doubt Firefox suffered the same fate.

But it seems faster. Everything seems faster. New iPhone OS releases always seem faster, new point releases of OS X seem faster, new stuff just seems faster. So I decided to spend most of my day trying to quantify this seemingly faster build.

Here’s what I got.

Dromaeo
Mozilla JavaScript performance test suite. I ran ALL tests, which takes about 30 mins, so I have one result per browser. The nightly wins by .5%!!

Bigger Numbers Are Better

SunSpider
I ran this three times for each browser and took the average. The beetle build wins by 2%!!

Smaller Numbers Are Better

V8 Benchmark Suite – Version 5
Ran this three times and took the average. The beetle build wins by 5%!!

Smaller Numbers Are Better

Peacekeeper
Some cheez generic browser benchmark site. Never heard of it. Ran the test three times and took the average. Firefox nightly wins by 3%!!

Bigger Numbers Are Better

Tab Loading
Here is where the seeming speed gets put to the test. Loaded a cross section of 25 sites in 25 tabs. Used the ol’ iPhone stopwatch, ran three times from a warm launch and took the average.

Smaller Numbers Are Better

Well, look at that. The beetle build whomps Firefox by over 30%!!

Yes, the nightlies might be better. I’m pretty sure they’re more stable, I’m positive they’ll at least load Flash, and they’re probably even better optimized for your machine. My builds are optimized for myself, more tuned for 10.6.x and 64-bit so I’m going after the bleeding edge.

Oh yeah, here’s the Firefox nightly and the beetle build used in these tests.

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It’s finally here! You can also find other builds of Firefox and Camino and occasionally other stuff on my downloads page.

Let me know how you like it!

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I think we all know about this Microsoft business tactic, but if not, read up on FUD. In this little exercise, I’m going to go through a couple examples:

The Slatabletbook
Once the Apple rumor engine shifted into high gear around September, Microsoft announced the Courier. This is actually a cool concept so they do deserve some credit. Not surprisingly, the project was led by J. Allard, the only person doing anything worthwhile over there. This is just a reference design, who knows when it will ship and by whom.^[1]

When CES rolled around and a Courier prototype wasn’t ready, Ballmer showed off the “HP Slate” which is to be available “sometime this year”. Hmm, wonder where they got the name “Slate“.

Capacitive Multi Touch
The iPhone’s had it for almost three years. Oh yeah, Windows Mobile 7 will have it in the second half of 2010, or was that February, or will WM 6.6 have it, or 6.5.3, or something else, yeah.

Media Streaming
Apple just bought Lala and is building a massive data center in North Carolina. Seems like media streams are just around the corner, gotta announce something. Yeah, the next Zune HD firmware update, expected sometime in spring, will have music streaming from “the cloud”.

Game Consoles
Wow, in 2009 Nintendo almost sold more Wiis than Microsoft and Sony, combined. Maybe that newfangled controller has potential. We’ve got one too, Project Natal, to be released “Holiday 2010″.

Search Engines (err, Decision Engines)
This doesn’t really fall under the FUD department, more into the “staged demo” depo. Bing is good, rivals and even beats Google in some categories. There is just one fatal flaw that was never announced: The Bing Indexer Sucks. Basically, it boils down to:

1. The MSNBot is slow as it does a long process of semantic analysis
2. Bing pretties up areas like Auto & Travel to hide their small indeces
3. “Real-Time” results come from structured data provided by partners

This choice quote sums it up pretty well:

While Bing has a lot of great features, it continues to struggle with the same issue previous incarnations of the service have. The actual index size, and the corresponding relevant results that come with those searches for the less popular queries, pales in comparison to what Google and Yahoo offer.

As Steve Jobs says, Real Artists Ship. Microsoft seems to have its hands in almost every pie there is, sometimes this FUD is to thwart a project as in the case of the slate, but more often than not, it’s probably to determine if a particular market exists before investing heavily into it. Either way, announcing so much vaporware is turning MS into something of a laughing stock.

Announcing something a year out is just ludichrist. Technological change is accelerating at a rate close to Moore’s Law so indeed the Singularity Is Near.

Disclaimer: I’m an Apple fanboy, so am quite tainted.

^[1] Apple never pre-announces anything unless their hand is forced. This is what we saw with the iPhone and this is why the rumored Apple device (RAD) will be announced in the same way. The RAD will include wireless technology that must be approved by the FCC.

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Update: Seems that TrueTwit has brought out their “premium” paid model where you aren’t forced to TT your potential followers. Sounds more like blackmail than a service.

Update 2: How are you supposed to validate if the fraking site is down? Screenshot at very bottom. FAIL.

There are many great services popping up in the Twitter ecosphere, but there is one that I fail to understand. This wouldn’t be a big deal if I could just ignore it, but it is forced upon me. There is also a viral mechanism in play that is causing this dreadful service to propagate and I can barely stand it anymore. I left a comment on their blog and sent a message to their Twitter account about this negative viral impact. The blog comment was deleted within 24 hours. The service I speak of is TrueTwit (no link for you!).

This is what the service does:

Stop wasting time with spammers on twitter. We will validate your followers so you don’t have to.

Use Case
A bit of head scratching later, I realized this service is catered to those that auto-follow. If you didn’t, you could weed out the spammers/bots yourself.

Flaws In This Model

• Auto-Followers are most likely to be spammers/bots themselves.
• Putting up barriers for followers is only going to turn people off.
• If you don’t auto-follow, what difference does it make that a spammer is following you?

Negative Virality
This is where things really start to suck. According to the site, you can bypass all this CAPTCHA nonsense if you sign up with the service. What isn’t apparent is that when you sign up, you become one of them, now making your potential followers jump through hoops. And on it goes.

Much anecdotal evidence points to these facts:

1. Using the service will greatly decrease your followers
2. People aren’t always aware that they have been assimilated

I’ve attempted to discuss these problems with the service, but they are unwilling. I could be wrong about all this and this service could be the best thing since sliced bread, but I don’t see the light.

Please post a comment on your thoughts of this service. I’m very interested in what you have to say.

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I don’t think I can write about anything more esoteric and useless, but maybe this will help one person somewhere.

Xubuntu? What the hell is that? I knew of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, etc. but never heard of Xubuntu. I found it when trying to get an Ubuntu distro on my old G3 iBook. According to DistroWatch, Xubuntu is

a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. Unlike its parent, however, Xubuntu uses the light-weight XFce desktop environment and is optimised for lower-end machines. The distribution includes only GTK+ applications where possible.

Perfect.

I go and grab the PPC iso image and try to burn to disc, but the image is too large to fit on a CD. I realize I’m not the only one with this problem and there is no solution other than installing from an iPod, USB drive, etc. which I don’t have. I then stumbled upon the Minimal CD Installation for Ubuntu and this what I did:

1) Get a host machine connected online as a proxy
The iBook only comes AirPort ready and I have a wireless network and am too lazy to walk downstairs to plug straight into the router. With My MacBook Pro, I set up Internet sharing. Next is an important step that I see many people get wrong. In System Preferences, go to Sharing, click on Internet Sharing and set your machine to share From AirPort To Ethernet. You don’t have to touch anything in the Network pane. Last step is to obviously connect the computers via Ethernet cable (crossover not required).

2) Boot client machine from the Minimal CD
Startup the iBook with the CD in the tray and hold down ‘c’. This will initiate the install sequence. Don’t worry about seeing Ubuntu everywhere, we will get into Xubuntu. There are a few steps to go through here – keyboard layout, timezone, etc – just follow along until you get to the main distro installation page. Select Xubuntu and proceed with the installation. If everything went correctly with the tethering in Step 1, you’re pretty much done.

3) Possible problems
USB errors – “unable to enumerate USB device on port X” errors. These popped up during the initial installation, but after getting Xubuntu running, they went away.
Tethering fails – try changing the host machine network settings to DHCP.

There really isn’t much more to it than that. This was actually an easy project, but required a bunch of wasted time on the original PPC ISO. Hope this helps someone.

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Update: I know that Google pays its way into Firefox, Safari, etc. but the relationship here is very different than that of MS and OEM.

I hate Steve Ballmer. When I met him, he was a total dick. I went to the CES keynote in 2000 (Bill Gates) and was in the reserved area seated close to him. I got up and went to talk to Masayoshi Son and Ballmer kept sneering and making odd comments. I wonder why he was so interested in our conversation that I was obviously trying to exclude him from.

Anyway, none of that matters. It’s just my personal perception of the man. What does matter is an announcement made during HIS keynote this year:

Bing will be the default search engine on
ALL HP computers shipping from now on.

Does this sound familiar? Is Microsoft not capable of innovating to the top? Do they have to strong arm everyone? There’s also Verizon forcing Bing on their users, crazy.

And the sad thing is, the other 800 lb. gorilla is making the same plays. Google is promoting the Nexus One on the single most trafficked piece of real estate on the web, Google’s front page. Is this right? I wonder how all Motorola and others feel about this. For some reason, this doesn’t feel dirty though. Probably because it doesn’t feel like anyone is being strong armed.

How do you feel about Microsoft’s strategy here? Let me know in the comments.

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