The unknown man who has such an outsized impact on our lives. That’s John Karlin. If I would have heard his name in passing I would have never known who he was. But when I hear what he is responsible for, his “inventions,” I know him instantly. The man basically invented the modern telephone. A couple of weeks ago Mr. Karlin past away at age 94. The New York Times had a nice obituary for him, available here.
powerOne Scientific Test Ready Edition
Last night Apple approved our latest powerOne app. This version, powerOne Scientific Test Ready Edition, was specifically designed with a school district in New York that needed a scientific calculator for their state exams. We were happy to do the work to make this possible.
Infinity Softworks has a long history of working with schools. Our Palm OS powerOne Graph version was beloved by schools and is still the only AP committee-approved software product ever. In addition, Infinity Softworks provides the graphing calculator used in College Board CLEP online exams.
powerOne Scientific Test Ready Edition is iOS only. It includes an algebraic calculator with basic math, trig, powers, logs, memory locations, history and fractional math. All help and external links have been removed from the app, enabling the students to use it during an exam period. The app itself is $0.99 but only $0.50 for schools through the volume purchase program.
Whether using it for exams, in the classroom or just for personal use, it’s a fantastic and inexpensive alternative to hardware calculators.
Juggling
In December I had one ball in the air. Juggling with a single ball is quite easy, after all, as long as I keep my eye on it. In January I added a second ball. Cash has been short here so I started talking to some friends about contract work. By February we added a third ball, a contract job. Now it’s the end of February and suddenly I’ve added two new balls but get to stop searching for contract work so dropped one. That’s a total of four balls now in the air. Things are getting much more complicated.
And then yesterday happens. I’m about to step into a team meeting to discuss timing and priorities when I get a call from a partner. Can you bring that test server back up again so we can finalize the requirements for a project we have been talking about for a few months? Sure! I say. These folks have been great partners and figured it would take an hour or so to get it running.
Ten hours later I got the server up.
The details aren’t important, just know it had to do with a version of Linux that apparently is no longer supported, although that really shouldn’t matter when recovering from a backup. What is important is that failure in the system can happen at any time, or as Murphy might have said, it is bound to happen when you least need it to.
It’s all fine. I’ve gotten better at not letting chaos annoy me. (Amazingly my ability to handle chaos improved once I had kids.) But it is inevitable.
The iPad’s Failing
Jean-Louis Gassée has written a couple of interesting pieces lately on the viability of the iPad as a productivity tool. The first, called The Missing Workflow, outlines how creating a simple blog post is very complicated on an iPad:
For example, can I compose this Monday Note on an iPad? Answering in the affirmative would be to commit the Third Lie of Computing: You Can Do It. (The first two are Of Course It’s Compatible and Chief, We’ll be in Golden Master by Monday.)
I do research on the Web and accumulate documents, such as Dan Frommer’s blog post mentioned above. On a PC or Mac, saving a Web page to Evernote for future reference takes a right click (or a two finger tap).
On an iPad, things get complicated. The Share button in Safari gives me two clumsy choices: I can mail the page to my Evernote account, or I can Copy the URL, launch Evernote, paste the URL, compose a title for the note I just created, and perhaps add a few tags.
Once I start writing, I want to look through the research material I’ve compiled. On a Mac, I simply open an Evernote window, side-by-side with my Pages document: select, drag, drop. I take some partial screenshots, annotate graphs (such as the iPad Pro prices above), convert images to the .png format used to put the Monday Note on the Web…
On the iPad, these tasks are complicated and cumbersome.
The second article, entitled iPad and File Systems: Failure of Empathy, outlines how the hidden file system complicates, well, everything:
This is all well and good, but with success comes side effects. As the iPad gets used in ways its progenitors didn’t anticipate, another failure of empathy looms: Ignoring the needs of people who want to perform “complicated” tasks on their iPads.
When the iPad was introduced, even the most obliging reviewers saw the device as a vehicle for consumption, not creation. David Pogue in the New York Times:
“…the iPad is not a laptop. It’s not nearly as good for creating stuff. On the other hand, it’s infinitely more convenient for consuming it — books, music, video, photos, Web, e-mail and so on.”
This is still true…but that hasn’t stopped users from trying — struggling — to use their iPads for more ambitious tasks: Building rich media presentations and product brochures, preparing course material, even running a business. Conventional wisdom tells us that these are tasks that fall into the province of “true” personal computers, but these driven users can’t help themselves, they want to do it all on their iPads. They want the best of both worlds: The power of a PC but without its size, weight, (relative) unresponsiveness, and, certainly, price.
And this, frankly, is the iPad’s shortcoming. I love my iPad. I use it constantly and even for some basic content creation. But there is no way I’m editing Excel files, doing full-blown Word docs, creating a PowerPoint, even trying to create a blog post with more than text. Even taking notes on an iPad, with fat fingers and styli, is ridiculous. It’s just not conducive to those tasks.
The Burden Of Generations Past
The reality is that each successive generation must deal with the mistakes made by the generations that came before. In particular what I am referring to is the decisions they made while in power that impacted generations that followed. For instance my great-grandparents generation, those born between the Civil War and turn of the 19th century, were in power from 1920 to 1960, encompassing Presidents Coolidge, Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower. Their legacy was not only the Great Depression and recovery from it, but also WWII, Korea, the atomic age, Israel and the beginnings of the Cold War. These events shaped the lives of my grandparents’ generation, who were coming of age in this time period.
My grandparent’s generation, born in the time period between 1900 and 1925, were in power for 32 years. This includes Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and George HW Bush. Just like the generation before, this generation had to deal with events already set in motion before its time. This includes Jim Crow/separate but equal, the Cold War, and the rise and fall of the US as the only industrial power. This group, though, also set events in action that shaped the next generation. Abortion rights, Vietnam, the rise of the Religious Right, the Kennedy assassinations, and The Great Society legislations, just to name a few. These are all events that shaped their children, the Baby Boomers, who are now in power.
It is easy to demonstrate these burdens. For example the US policy, in the time of my great-grandparents and grandparents, was to win the Cold War by playing god in other countries. We toppled leaders all around the globe, inserting our own favorites, even if those people were despots. One famous example, of course, is Saddam Hussein, who we armed in the fight against Iran. Another is Afghanistan, who we armed and trained in the fight again the Soviet Union and then abandoned as soon as “we” won. That war destabilized the country and led directly to the rise of the Taliban. In both cases, we ended up fighting wars to topple those we made powerful.
Iran, of course is another example. We directly disposed of a leader, inserted our own, who was later disposed by religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini, which led to the Iran hostage situation that the movie Argo portrayed. These events, while dealt with by Carter of my grandparent’s generation, were set in motion by great-grandparent generation leader Eisenhower when he helped the Shah come to power in 1953. The Baby Boomers in power now (and likely the generations to follow) will still be dealing with this fateful decision put in motion 60 years ago.
Of course not all burdens remain. I was born in 1973. Just a few years before, Rosa Parks refused to move, the march on Birmingham occurred, Selma happened, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were shot, Watts burned. But these events didn’t encompass my generation; they are the burden of my parents generation and grandparent’s generation. I only know these events because of what I’m told and what I’ve read. They are not apart of my psyche. I’m not certain that the guilt over slavery, the guilt of “separate but equal,” hangs over my generation as it burdens my parents and shapes their politics and world views. The same is true of abortion and gay rights.
The Baby Boomers have now been in power for 24 years now (or rather will be when Barack Obama’s second term is complete). We are likely to see one or two more Baby Boomers elected president before us Generation Xers and Yers get our shot. What burdens will we carry forward? And which will roll off our backs?
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