Category Archives: Technology

What Open Can Look Like

For the record, I really do think that open systems are better than closed ones. But not always. Sometimes, open systems turn into a complete mess.

I was thinking about this as we get into the holiday season, a time when lots of new consumer audio-visual electronics are purchased and make their ways into our homes. Last year I purchased what was recommended to me as a very good “home theater in a box,” i.e., a single-unit, multi-speaker system that serves as a central hub for audio from my cable box, Mac mini, Apple TV, Blu-Ray player, Wii console etc. Along with our television, it’s the principal interface for basically everything my family does in the living room.

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The Only Thing a Router Is Good For

Like many people reading this, I have a broadband connection in my home that manifests itself as a router — a vaguely futuristic, plastic box attached to a cable that runs into my wall. To that router, I’ve attached an Apple AirPort Extreme, a VOIP router and a switch for additional Ethernet connections. It’s a bit of a mess, and it could probably be simplified, but for the most part it works fine.

I make whatever minor adjustments are needed to these devices through software; either browser-based interfaces or Apple’s own AirPort utility. In fact, the only time I ever have to physically touch the whole setup is on the rare occasion when something goes wrong with the cable connection itself. Admittedly, in recent months that’s been more often than I’d like with my current Internet provider, but for the most part it happens rarely.

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Apple Blinks in the Living Room

AppleTVNo one’s happier than I am that Apple hasn’t thrown in the towel with its living room efforts. After much neglect, the new Apple TV, announced today, is a step in the right direction: sleeker in size, more capable in content access, network savvier in its diskless approach to media, and — the clincher — more wallet-friendly at US$99. That’s a winning combination, I think.

On the other hand, this new generation of Apple TV doesn’t appear to do too much more that I can’t already do with the older Apple TV and the Netflix Instant Watch-capable Blu-Ray player that I currently have in my living room. In fact, it’s telling that it’s still called just “Apple TV” without some new suffix indicating that it’s a second generation product. For all intents and purposes, it’s the same as what I already have.

That’s fair. I’ve always thought the core Apple TV feature set makes for a device that can do well in the marketplace, and its new price point and other alterations give it a fighting chance.

However, when rumors of an Apple TV reboot first started gaining momentum, what I hoped for was that Apple would undertake a bigger challenge than just making it a more attractive device for consumers. Much in the same way that they fixed the mobile space with the iPhone, and much in the same way they’re trying to fix the problem of true consumer computing with the iPad, I hoped that they would also try to fix the living room. This is a challenge that I wrote about in a general way a year ago in a blog post called “The Living Room Problem,” but luckily for those reading now, I’m going to revisit those sentiments here.

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Contractual Basis

Since I left my job at The New York Times in July, I’ve been working with a few companies in various capacities, and each of these relationships has in their own way required me to sign paperwork of some kind. Non-disclosure forms, independent contractor agreements, tax forms and the like.

The thorniest ones have been the contracts, which require not just my signature but a counter-signature too. This stuff typically comes to me via email attachments. I’ll print them out, initial each page and sign on the dotted line. Then I’ll run the whole document through my indispensable Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M document scanner, which creates a PDF version in practically a blink of the eye, and send it back to the other party as an email attachment. If that party has scanning capabilities, then they’ll send me back a new PDF with their signature; just as often as not, they’ll have to put final copies in the mail or defer the handoff until we next meet face-to-face.

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I’m Feeling Lucky

Last week, Google announced a new feature that lets users customize Google.com with their own pictures. When I read about this, I groaned; here was another perfect example of Google peddling unbridled visual pollution in its unconscious drive to become the new Microsoft, purveyor of aesthetic misfires. I just couldn’t imagine a photograph that I’d like to see running in the background of their home page, the only truly elegant product that Google has ever designed. I mean, what would the point be?

Then Laura showed me the photo she uploaded. I stand corrected.

See the full-size image here.

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Better Screen, Same Typography

Three years ago I waited in line to buy the original iPhone and I haven’t upgraded since, so I’m definitely warming up my credit card for Apple’s newly announced iPhone 4. I admit that it took some will power to sit out the subsequent releases of the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3GS; the not-insignificant speed gains that those models brought would’ve come in really handy. Still, neither of those updates struck me as particularly impressive. They were incremental, at best, where iPhone 4 seems like a major leap forward.

Even the new phone’s screen, the so-called Retina Display, is an important development on its own. Its incredibly high concentration of pixels (326 ppi, or four times the density of previous iPhones) promises a quality of resolution that’s positively print-like, where the pixels seem to disappear to the eye and rendering of curved shapes is much smoother. The advent of higher and higher density screens like this one will continue to have some subtle but important changes on the way we practice design for digital media, eventually pushing us to work in a resolution-independent framework that’s currently foreign to most.

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Notes on iPad

It’s not as if I haven’t had a point of view on all of this tablet computing device stuff that’s been lighting up the Internets for the past several months, but for professional reasons, I’ve had to keep mum. Suffice it to say, I’m really excited about Apple’s iPad, announced today, and I’m even more excited about what can be done with it.

However. I’m pretty sure that I’m in the camp that believes that this is not the salvation that most publishing companies have been looking for. Not that the device falls short in some way, but rather because nothing can save publishing as it’s been operating for the past several decades. The iPad does nothing to change the brutal mandate that has been pushing publishers to change for these many years; if anything it compounds the imperative.

iPad

As a general principle, there’s no way around evolution, and in this specific instance the reality is that there is no direct translation of the print experience to digital media. That is, the content can be translated, but it’s not likely to be as literal as many might expect or even hope. Those looking to the iPad to return us to some semblance of a print-like reading experience are basically wrong, I believe. In fact, lots of really smart people will continue to get this wrong going forward. We’re all still figuring out. That’s the definition of an opportunity.

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Backing Up Over Broadband

Over the course of the last few months, I’ve tested a number of online backup solutions, and found them all lacking. Some are disappointingly constructed and others seem feature-poor, but no matter how well they were designed they all share a single fatal flaw: consumer broadband in the United States is insufficient for backing up the dozens of gigabytes that an average user requires.

Still, the fact that broadband is the problem is progress, given my past experiences with backing up my data. I used to find that backup solutions were expensive or complicated to implement — a decade ago, I used the completely bewildering Retrospect and a prohibitively expensive tape backup system to back up my files — or tried to, anyway. The setup was unwieldy enough that I ran backups erratically, at best, and an erratic backup is not much better than none at all.

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MobileUs

MobileMeApple’s MobileMe is such a shoddy, poorly implemented product that I’m long past hoping that any complaining about it will help the situation. It is what it is, and I make my own bed every year when I renew my subscription to it.

At the same time, I also feel that there is a nontrivial subset of the Macintosh population who, like me, are beholden to MobileMe, who rely on it and continue to renew annually in spite of Apple’s flagrant neglect. Some might say that we should vote with our wallets and leave the service altogether. But for whatever personal or professional reasons, MobileMe is the best solution we have. For those folks, I kind of think we owe it to one another to fill in the gaps that Apple leaves.

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Up for Air

Adobe Air LogoI was a skeptic of Adobe’s fledgling Air platform when I initially started hearing about it several years ago. At first, Air seemed more of the same of Adobe’s famously insurrectionist tendencies. I’ve long disliked the way the company tries to shoehorn in an entirely new platform onto my computer when I install or upgrade one of their marquee, indispensable software packages. Like most consumers, I see Photoshop, Acrobat, Flash etc. as applications that serve limited purposes — namely my own. But Adobe clearly regards them as beachheads through which they’re working to establish their own, Adobe-centric operating system. The result, invariably, has been bloated software. To put it mildly.

But the more exposure I get to Air, the more impressed I am. Granted, that exposure is somewhat limited, but I’m enjoying a handful of Air-based applications much more than I thought I would, even using some very regularly. Though Air apps are still conspicuously less than fully native to any of the major operating systems, they’re much closer to the ‘fit and finish’ of a true, dyed-in-the-wool Mac OS X application, say, than I had anticipated. Adobe has apparently gone to great lengths to provide a framework in which applications authored for this platform seem comfortable alongside truly native applications. Most casual users won’t be able to tell the difference.

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