Category Archives: Technology (General)

Writings on technology that is not laptop or smartphone related.

An Unbelievably Awesome Retail Experience

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I don’t say this very often but buying at the Apple Store tonight was an amazing experience. I had the new Apple Store (version 2.0) app on my iPhone and needed to buy an external DVD/CD player. I grabbed one off the shelf and pulled up the app. It immediately recognized that I was in an Apple retail store and brought up a bar code scanner. I centered it on the barcode and, ching, it registered the product without me hitting a button. I hit check out, it asked for my iTunes password, and showed me the final receipt. It also emailed it to me.

I didn’t have to wait for someone to check me out, I didn’t have to pull out a credit card and repeat all my info painstakingly slowly to an Apple sales person. I was literally in and out of the store in under 2 minutes.

I hate shopping. I hate the lines and the crowds. But this was an experience I won’t mind repeating. Great job, Apple! Now… get every other retail store on this system, too.

Thoughts on Jobs

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A few thoughts with Steve Jobs’ passing today at age 56.

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There is something about artists and dying young:

  • Vincent van Gogh, age 37
  • Jim Morrison, age 27
  • Janis Joplin, age 26
  • John Lennon, age 40
  • Jimi Hendrix, age 26

There is no doubt that Jobs was an artist and visionary. A little older than the others listed above, but young for this modern era where he could have led Apple for another 20 years at least.

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I bought my first computer, an Apple IIc, in 1986. I was 13 years old and had been making card-based and dice-based baseball and football games for a few years already by then, starting at age 9. I loved that computer. I learned to program in BASIC on it, learned to write code, learned what it meant to invent.

In college I went crazy and abandoned my calling for a few years, along with a number of other discrepancies. But I rediscovered my love of code in 1994. It isn’t really the love of code, though, I learned much later. It is really a love of invention.

I can thank Steve Jobs for all of this.

—-

What is well-known is that The Beatles were Steve Jobs’ favorite band. What I never realized before, though, is how similar the personal histories of Steve Jobs and John Lennon are. Adopted as children, college drop outs, inventors in their own rights, ability to morph and evolve their product in time, interests in Buddhism, dead way before their contributions to society were exhausted. It is stunning how much the two are alike.

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He survived a long time for a person with pancreatic cancer. Only 4% of pancreatic cancer patients survive five years, the worst survival rate of all cancers. Thank goodness, too. If he had died in 2004 when he first took a leave of absence, we might not have had the iPhone or the iPad.

Jobs’ passing has brought some powerful emotions for me. My aunt died from pancreatic cancer three years ago.

—-

Steve, wherever you are, I want to make you a promise: I will do my best to always tackle the important problems. Every day, I will bring passion to my job and bring magic to my software. It’s the least I can do given the passion and magic you have brought to my life.

Bringing the App To You

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I have been thinking about a fundamental shift that is starting to occur in the world of software. Instead of you going to the application, the application is starting to come to you.

In the old days, when I wanted to send an email or create a document or calculate in a spreadsheet, you would go to some sort of launch screen, find the application you want to use, launch it and get to work.

It seems in the last few years this is fundamentally changing. It started for me in 2006 when we started working on the BlackBerry. If I created a web link within powerOne, such as how all the help is integrated, it would seamlessly launch the browser and display the content. A simple hit on the back button would bring you back to exactly where you were in powerOne.

But this isn’t really new. You could always do this with email and the Office suite was always linked together, and apps like the old “Works” systems had similar features. Even other apps had an “email” link in them that would launch the email client and automatically create a new address. Internet Explorer and Firefox have always done this.

Given that it was the seamless nature of how this capability worked on the BlackBerry that made me take notice. There was no splash screen, no visible change in app at all, that made this situation unique and started opening my eyes to the possibility]ies.

And as we have progressed through the last few years I am seeing more and more examples. Facebook and Google+ can now seamlessly access my contacts and look for people I know. iPhoto can send pictures to Facebook. The on-device video app can send created content to YouTube. Almost every smartphone and tablet news app makes it seamless to Facebook, Tweet, and email, among other options, a story. iOS 5 will have Twitter integration available to any app that wants it.

To me, though, this is just the start. What happens when all of your apps are integrated seamlessly across the web and device? What happens when you don’t have to deal with files but instead can just say “I want this memory [or comment or post or article or note or contact] over here.”

I don’t hear as much talk of this idea but think the idea of bring the app to you will be a significant driver of innovation on the web and mobile devices as we move forward. So developers… how does your app do this?

Generational Technology Change Means New Winners

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We are in the midst of a massive disruption of an entire industry: the technology space. My children, currently aged 5 and 3, are already using technology in a way that previous generations did not. And we are seeing a massive change coming from the major providers of software in this space: Apple and Microsoft.

Apple, of course, built off of the work Palm did a decade ago to make touch interfaces mainstream. The iPad, though, is the culmination of that effort and companies are rushing to emulate their work. Microsoft, too, is now demonstrating a massive change in the next generation of Windows. The video is extremely intriguing and could modernize Microsoft in one fell swoop… if the rest of the company falls in line.

There has been a lot of commentary on Windows 8 preview. John Gruber, Jared Newman and others focused on the touch interface and whether it really can be combined with the old world of mouse-driven interfaces or whether a clean break is required from the past. I’m less interested in this issue. I think we need to play with it to see if it really works.

Instead I want to focus on the massive change this means for developers. I’ve been analyzing the history of spreadsheets and realized that each successive computing generation meant a new leader in the area of spreadsheet. Visicalc dominated the first wave when the Apple II series was the most popular. Lotus 1-2-3 dominated the second wave when DOS was the powerhouse. Then Microsoft took over when windows-oriented machines (small “w”) took over. Excel has been the mainstay on Windows (big “W”) and Macintosh computers ever since.

But what is emerging now is the fourth generation. The iPad, Android devices, Windows 8 all signify this change. And the question becomes how does the software we use change to match? With this change is a massive opportunity to re-write products and change expectations. Was the spreadsheet (and calculators) the past for calculation and something else is the future or will a new company emerge with a slightly improved spreadsheet but the form factor and functionality will likely remain the same?

Mike Mace said it cleanly:

…ask yourself how a new competitor could use the platform transition to challenge your current products.  Here’s a sobering thought to keep you awake tonight: the odds are that the challengers will win.

I’m placing my bet: I think the future will be different. I’m betting that the direct manipulation of on-screen objects by touching them makes products designed for a mouse and keyboard obsolete.

Thank You, IBM

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I watched Jeopardy! the last couple of nights to see how Watson did against the humans. To make a computer think in abstract terms is an amazing accomplishment. My hats off to the folks at IBM.

But it isn’t just basic research in artificial intelligence that sets IBM apart. They have their fingers in lots of huge problems that could have a major impact on society. For example, Robert Scoble has an interview up at the Building 43 site by Rackspace that talks about IBM’s work on building a lithium battery that can hold enough energy to power a car 500 miles.

At a time when our federal government is cutting basic research done by the Department of Energy, DARPA, NASA and the National Science Foundation, among others, it is great to see an iconic American company picking up the slack.