Paul Jacobson

I have been resisting the urge to speculate about the iPad since it was announced. I have a history of seizing upon the latest Apple/Nokia gear and proclaiming it to be the next best thing since the printed word (or the last Apple/Nokia gear). I have generally been wrong about just how awesome the device initially appeared to be and so I have decided to avoid the repetitive speculation about the iPad (except for the speculation below) until I have had a chance to actually fondle one.

The one topic I can’t resist writing about is the iPad as an eReader. My interest in such a device would be largely as an eReader as well as a general tablet Internet device. eReaders seem to be pretty special beasts. The biggest issue seems to be the screen which needs to be as close to paper while remaining versatile enough to handle a variety of publications. We have all had eReaders in front of us for years now, we call them laptops and desktops, but they haven’t been convenient eReaders for a variety of reasons including size, portability, orientation and, well, the screens themselves. I haven’t done a lot of ebook reading on my MacBook but the little reading I have done isn’t really as comfortable as a paper book.

One of the apps on the iPad is the iBooks application which is only available in the United States. Apple has signed up a couple publishers and the iBooks demo showed me a beautiful user interface, typical of just about anything Apple does. Steve showed us how turning the page is an experience in itself and the swish looking bookshelf. I don’t think I was the only person who cringed a little when I saw the Kindle on that big screen behind Steve right before it transitioned to the gorgeous looking iPad. There was obviously some clever psychology behind that Kindle portrayal and, having spent a good portion of the Stevenote looking at this gorgeous new device, listening to Steve’s superlatives, the Kindle does look a little dated and clunky.

Having said that, I wonder just how effective the iPad would be as an eReader. I haven’t heard anyone say that an LCD screen is as good as or better than the e-ink displays you find on modern eReaders when it comes to visibility in varying lighting conditions, general comfort or even power consumption (10 hours is still pretty respectable on the iPad and you can recharge the device). I came across a conversation thread on gdgt about LCDs compared to e-ink displays as an illustration of the general consensus. So the iPad may present a better looking interface for ebooks but will it be a good experience if you are going to use the device as your primary paper book replacement? The Kindle, for example, is often touted as pretty close to paper and so readable in every lighting condition a paper book works in, you probably won’t look back at your paper library again. That sort of thing makes a difference. On the topic of paper books, also remember that they tend to be pretty simple in terms of visual aesthetics and our reading experience need not be all that different. Of course our expectations will change when publications become more dynamic and start incorporating multimedia elements which e-ink devices currently don’t support all that much.

One big factor pretty much takes the iPad out of the equation as an eReader for anyone outside the United States. The iBooks application looks like it will only be available in the USA and, as yet, unspecified countries. If the iBooks’ availability is limited to those countries that support the iTunes Store then those people with illicit US iTunes Store accounts will probably be able to benefit from the application nonetheless. That still leaves those people with the question whether the iPad gives bibliophiles the sort of experience they would have on a Kindle?

Just to add to the debate, also consider Amazon’s Whispernet (free data wherever the Kindle is supported which is almost everywhere there is a GSM connection) and its catalogue (I am sure Apple will also boast a substantial catalogue soon enough).

I have had my eyes on a Kindle DX since they were first announced and I’ve been that much more excited about it since the global wireless version was announced last month. It is pretty big compared to the Kindle 2 (based on size comparisons) but my line of work makes it more useful to me. I really haven’t made my mind up about the iPad and probably won’t till I get to play with one. At the same time I am still pretty keen on the Kindle DX, even with its monochromatic screen and clunky form factor.

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I realised that my camera, a Canon Powershot SX100 IS which I bought in Japan in July/August 2008, has a lot more functionality that I realised. I’ve started learning how to use it better and that largely includes playing around with many of the manual or semi-automated settings which I have pretty much skipped over since I first got the camera. Granted the camera isn’t exactly a digital SLR camera but I have seen a lot of really great photos taken with this camera and compared to what I have been taking lately, I have a lot of room for improvement with this camera alone.

Aside from re-introducing myself to f-stops, shutter speeds, ISOs and other technical aspects of photography, I’ve also been thinking quite a bit about the software I use to process my photos. I’ve been using iPhoto ‘09 as my primary photo management and editing software for a while now and recently started playing around with Picasa 3 which is pretty good at a lot of things iPhoto still struggles with (including face recognition, aspects of photo editing and how it presents images and their metadata). I have seriously considered ditching iPhoto in favour of Picasa (I still am) but I’ve decided on iPhoto as my primary application and Picasa for ancillary stuff for now mainly because I have a tendency to act on software choices impulsively and regret it later.

I thought I’d also try out some of the more specialised applications available so I’ve just downloaded trial versions of both Lightroom 2 and Aperture 2 to test out. I haven’t a clue which one is best and I am sure it will be a pretty spirited debate to boot.

I’d love to have a digital SLR but I reckon that until I am using my compact camera about as well as it can be used, a DSLR will largely be wasted on me. I am pretty excited to be getting back into photography. I was really passionate about it when I was a teenager and I’ve always enjoyed taking photos. I just haven’t paid much attention to the technical aspects for over a decade and I’d like to change that. A couple people have started their own Project 365 which involves taking a photo a day for a year (one photographer doing this is Jeanette Verster who apparently really worked on her technique the first time she did this and she takes awesome photos).

I am not even going to compare myself to photographers like Jeanette but I do want to learn to take even better photos with what I have. I do love taking photos, even if that gets me into a bit of trouble at times, and maybe doing my own version of Project 365, together with learning more of the technical stuff, will help me get better.

I just think about how envious I feel when someone whips out a DSLR at an event or social function … that inspires me to take better photos and maybe even get myself a DSLR when I am all grown up.

You either have to love or run screaming from the hype cycle these days, particularly when it comes to Google and its products. We’ve seen it with hype over Chrome OS (which I regard as very limited), Google Docs (in the context of it being a Microsoft Office killer), Gmail and more. In some cases I think the hype is justified. Gmail revolutionised email with much bigger mailboxes, threaded conversations and dozens of innovations over the years. Google Docs is great for relatively simple document creation and innovation but it is hardly going to replace Microsoft Office in the near future.

Where I take issue with the hype is when it comes to Chrome and Chrome OS. I have already written about Chrome OS so I won’t write about that again but I haven’t really written much about Chrome, the browser. Most of the reports about Chrome say that the browser is fast and it is. It is really fast. I have a development version on my Mac and it loads in about 4 seconds. Firefox 3.6b5, on the other hand, loads in about double that amount of time.

One of the big attractions that Chrome has is that it is extensible (at least, the current betas on PC and Linux are – I believe – and the current Mac dev version is). This means that Chrome supports a range of extensions that extend its functionality beyond the basic browser. This was one of Firefox’s big advantages over Internet Explorer from the start and it remains a big plus for Firefox. The extension ecosystem for Firefox is pretty well developed and varied.

Chrome does a couple other things that make it a great choice. One of these things is how Chrome runs each tab as a separate process so even if a single tab crashes, the rest of the browser continues on. Chrome has done really well. As Duncan McLeod points out in a recent post on TechCentral:

In a short time, Chrome has unseated Safari to become the third-largest computer Web browser. Its market share is still only about 5%, but the speed at which it has overtaken Opera and Safari is telling.

I agree that Chrome is a great browser and it sits on my dock alongside my default browser, Firefox. I have lately been thinking about kicking Safari off my dock (applications I remove from my dock are basically the apps I don’t really see as that essential but are not useless enough to be deleted) and sticking with Firefox and Chrome. Whether Firefox will become largely irrelevant and fade away into obscurity as Duncan suggests it might in the coming years, I don’t know. I really hope that doesn’t happen because Firefox is important to us all, even in the face of Chrome. One of the reasons I say this is because of Firefox’s history:

It is important to remember that Firefox was born as an alternative to Internet Explorer which is possibly one of the worst applications that Microsoft has inflicted on Web users for a variety of reasons, not least of which is security and a disregard to Web standards. It rose out of the ashes of the bloated Netscape browser suite (I remember using the first Netscape browsers – I go that far back). I still remember the excitement as Firefox neared a 1.0 release (I managed to convince my last firm’s IT department to let me use Firefox rather than IE) and I have been using Firefox on and off ever since.

Firefox, to me at least, represents a vital movement that works to improve my Web experience. I have been disappointment with previous versions because of really slow load times (it turns out a lot of this depends on your extensions and, besides, just how fast must the browser really be when loading?), relatively slow browsing and even because it has seemed a little clunky compared to Safari’s simplicity. What I have found, though, is that I have become more and more passionate about Firefox despite Chrome. Chrome is interesting, it is fast and it has a big appeal. At the moment it just doesn’t have what it takes to persuade me to give up Firefox. The dev/beta versions for the Mac don’t have a working bookmark manager, font controls in the Mac beta and there are operating system compatibility issues with some of the extensions (that struck me as weird).

On the other hand, Firefox works pretty much the same on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. The extensions I prefer will work and enhancements like Weave make for a pretty seamless experience between browsers running on different platforms. To paraphrase Apple (ironically given Apple’s and the Mozilla Foundation’s philosophies), Firefox works. I recently had an opportunity to test a Nokia N900 and one of the apps I installed first was Firefox 3.5 beta for the N900.

Firefox is one of the few modern browsers that supports so much HTML 5. I don’t know if Safari supports HTML 5 (Chrome does) but I believe that IE is lagging far behind. I may be wrong on a technical level but it seems to me that Firefox already supports the next generation of offline Web apps and location based services. Its probably fair to say that it won’t be too long before all modern browsers support HTML 5 but I find it encouraging that Firefox has had some degree of support since Firefox 3.5.

I’d be lying if I tried to argue that Firefox has far more advanced functionality than Chrome or Safari. In many respects it does have better functionality or just functionality other browsers lack but most of the differences are fairly subtle and come down to that classic yardstick: personal preference. Despite all the hype about all the things Chrome can do and will be able to do, it is important to remember that Firefox does most of that stuff. In fact, aside from Firefox’s ACID 3 test results (can someone please explain the importance of this test?) and ring-fencing each tab as a separate set of processes, I can’t think of what Chrome does that Firefox doesn’t do, even if it is a little slower. Just as Firefox has innovated in the past and laid the groundwork for what we are seeing now (including Chrome which I believe to have been developed partly by Firefox engineers), it is going to continue to innovate going forward. We should see Firefox 3.6 release in the coming months (Firefox 3.5 was released just a few months ago) and there are plans for 3.7 and 4.0 in the year ahead.

Another aspect of Firefox that has a big appeal for me is the fact that it is developed by a community of passionate and independent developers. In contrast, Chrome was built largely by Google (the underlying code is open source) and I believe it is being developed to fit Google’s agenda for the broader Web. I think I just have a thing for the underdog and despite being the number 2 browser at the moment, Firefox is still the underdog on the Web that also happens to be excellent software. I believe that having a more independent initiative like Firefox that is not so closely aligned to any particular influencer like Google or even Apple is important. Firefox, in a sense, keeps the industry honest with its commitment to Web standards.

Firefox isn’t as trendy as Chrome and I can see the usual trendy folk on Twitter proclaiming Chrome the second coming of Google and the irrelevance of all other browsers but besides the fact that many of them are probably too young to remember what came before Firefox and the impact Firefox had, Firefox was around and thriving before Chrome and will continue to do so as long as there are people passionate about the browser.

Update: I had a couple other stray thoughts. It took a while for them to return to be processed by what passes for my mind (I may keep adding to this list …):

• Firefox has a working and pretty effective bookmark manager that lets me edit my bookmarks – still waiting for that from Chrome;
• As cool as search being integrated into Chrome’s Omnibar is, Firefox’s Awesome Bar is even better (just add search and Ubiquity and its a no-brainer)

I received a spam item as a Twitter direct message today. It wasn’t from some fake blonde, fraudster or the usual bunch of “@-reply” spammers. It was from a newspaper I followed on Twitter which spammed me using direct messaging:

I may be a little touchy with this one but there is something about spamming me using direct messaging which rubs me the wrong (and a more unpleasant) way. Only people you follow can direct message you so a degree of trust is implicit when you have the ability to DM someone on Twitter. Its one thing to push out this sort of spam in a general tweet stream but quite another to abuse the trust the DM seems to engender.

Actually, “spam” probably isn’t the right term. “Spam” implies the communication is unsolicited, the contact unwanted and yet when I follow someone I expressly want to receive messages from them. So what is it then? I suppose it is pseudo-spam. I don’t particularly want to receive these sorts of messages directly on Twitter, straight into my inbox. Whatever it is, Twitter provides a simple solution:

At first I thought it was their fault. There are so many of them and they are all so enticing, how could I resist? It felt wrong and at the same time it felt very right. So I just started moving between them, using them, switching to another … eventually I just wasn’t sure which one to go for so my choices became arbitrary and yet it still worked out well for me. Now I realise it was really me, not them.

The thing is, there are so many great applications available that do all the things we want to do everyday. Not only are there these great apps, there are often a couple excellent alternatives to your default application. The clearest example of this your web browser. While the majority of Internet users still use Internet Explorer, a growing number of Internet users prefer Firefox, Chrome, Safari and other browsers. When it comes to choosing a browser you don’t need to pick one and stick with it permanently, you can choose whichever browser suits your particular task or even the browser you are in the mood for. It is that easy. Sure some browsers may be a little more limited than others in terms of functionality but modern browsers are fast, powerful and will enable a whole new generation of Web applications when HTML 5 adoption becomes more widespread.

I’ve started using instant messaging applications on my Nokia N97 a little more (I’m a late bloomer) after my realisation just how expensive sms/texting is compared to IM messages and I have installed both Nimbuzz and Fring on my phone. I spent some time flipping between the two to see which one I prefer. While one may have some functionality the other lacks or doesn’t implement as well, they are both excellent apps and I could switch between the two ad hoc. Both applications access the instant messaging services I prefer. I can send messages on my phone, make VOIP calls and even check in with Twitter.

On that note I also have a number of options when it comes to instant messaging applications on my MacBook. I use Adium for most of the IM services I am registered with and Skype for all that Skype functionality (If Adium supported Skype text and voice, I’d probably just use Adium). I have iChat available on my Mac and while it doesn’t connect to most of the services Adium does, iChat does connect me with my primary Jabber/GTalk and MobileMe services. There are other alternatives too, some better than others.

This kind of choice goes beyond these sorts of applications and include mobile phone OS’s (Android, iPhone, Symbian, Maemo and even Windows Mobile?); VOIP providers (Skype or SIP?); voice telephony more broadly speaking (VOIP or mobile/fixed line voice); text-based messaging (IM or sms?); computer operating systems (Windows, Mac OS, Linux), and so on.

We have a range of choices when it comes to performing a range of tasks and there is an increasing degree of parity between many of those choices as technologies mature and converge on industry recognised standards. This degree of choice means companies need to innovate more to keep their users coming back.

Of course some services don’t have real alternatives or even satisfactory alternatives. Facebook has in excess of 350 million users and doesn’t have a feasible alternative. Google might be that alternative but its failure to implement a cohesive social strategy has given Facebook an opportunity to surge ahead, possibly out of reach.

Speaking of Google, Eric Schmidt has said that Google users have a perfectly suitable alternative to all of its services but are Yahoo! or Bing as good as Google search? Perhaps to some. Most Internet users prefer Google search by a comfortable margin. I am one of those users and I am ok with that although Google does control how I do much of what I do each day and that realisation brings with it a nagging fear in the background. I have similar concerns about Facebook because of its dominance in the space and its consistent failure to put its users first.

For the most part, though, we can choose the tool for a given task and that is refreshing. It wasn’t too long ago that Firefox’s introduction was a welcome relief from years of IE dominance and Netscape’s lackluster performance. As we enter a new decade (yes, I know 2011 is technically the beginning of the new decade, I still like to think of 2010 as the beginning of this new decade), we are likely to experience even more choice while, at the same time, we will see players like Google begin to tighten their grip and make it harder to leave their ecosystems simply because of the quality of their offerings. Apple and the iPhone is a good example of a tightly controlled ecosystem and a degree of lock-in, although Apple’s customers choose to live in that ecosystem because Apple makes such excellent products.

It all comes down to choice.

I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that is 2010 tomorrow. I realised that according to some popular science fiction stories, we should have ships somewhere in orbit around Jupiter by now.

Science fiction stories like 2010 are curious stories. 2010 was set in the context of tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. The movie features the famous HAL 9000 artificial intelligence and pseudo-villain of the story. In our time we have barely left Earth, might be returning to the Moon some day and Mars looks like a destination we might reach in a few more decades.

When it comes to our technology, we don’t really have AI in our daily life but who knows what the military is playing with. We could have a HAL 9000-SkyNet slowly waking up. Then again, we might be a few more innovations away from Google’s various services meshing together and becoming self-aware. That is probably just bad science fiction but the year ahead doesn’t seem to be as advanced as science fiction would have it in some respects and yet, in other respects we seem to have even more advanced technology.

I guess that is the problem with science fiction that is set in the near future. More often than not we get to that point in time and still don’t have flying cars, hoverboards or super smart, connected data networks.

Oh, wait …

The only thing Twitter has been consistent about is its failure to scale and develop a stable platform given its growth and all the hype about the service. How can Twitter not be able to handle search after 3 years in operation and $155 million in funding?

Yes Twitter helps people reach out to millions, get links across and it is being regarded as a pseudo-utility but in the absence of a stable infrastructure Twitter is a disaster waiting to happen. It is a bit like building on top of a fault line, in this case a fault line supporting in excess of 50 million users. Its all good till that big one hits and Twitter experiences the ultimate fail whale.

I’m tempted to say I am not against Twitter but I am increasingly disturbed by an apparent failure or inability to build a stable platform for this service. There are still regular outages (is that a feature and not a bug?) and basic features are still not working. What is going on here? How many times have you seen Facebook go down in recent years?

Its rewarding using Twitter and building your Twitter network but make sure you have a backup of not only your Twitter stream (there are a couple ways to do this – subscribe to the RSS feed or use a service like Backupify to backup your Twitter account). If Twitter does actually experience a major outage there are going to be a lot of people suddenly finding themselves in virtual silence, disconnected from what were previously regarded as invaluable communities.