From Five Problems with Google Android:

The quality of the user experience on the iPhone makes a major difference to Apple’s bottom line. The quality of the Android experience has only a slight connection to Google’s. Sure, everyone on the project would like it to succeed.

It’s not about the users. It’s about the advertising.

The rest of the article describes some of the issues facing customers and developers of Android. The fact it’s a plain-jane implementation of an OS. That the development environments are Java and Javascript. That it breaks no new ground.

A very good read.

I’ve been thinking of applications which would suit the iPhone and iPod touch and mused about how the original iPod models had a click wheel and yet no-one managed to bring out a driving game

One area that I’d love to see some work in would be gaming on iPod touch and iPhone. John Carmack has criticised the iPhone already in this area despite not seeing the SDK and not knowing therefore what Apple’s strategy was for gaming on the iPhone.

Casual Games work because they can be picked up and dropped off. SIMCity and SIMTower (the less complex version and include SIMAnt here) were the olden days versions of Tamagotchis. They were games that you could spend an hour or ten minutes messing with and then wander off for a few hours. Come back and then see where it had got to. Tamagotchis had the same thing but with a little more tech and a little more demanding on the attention. Ignore the little device with the little animal and it died. So sad, too bad. Nothing was more fun than coming back to SIMtower and seeing that floors 9-13 had cockroach infestations and 24-30 had a fire about half an hour after you left it. So, you’d repair the problems and then wander off for dinner.

Attention is the resource we’re striving for. But we’re not looking to completely capture it.

Games like Strategy, racing games and FPS require absolute attention. We’re talking about games that will run on a phone so people might be just trying to kill time while waiting for someone to come out of a shop. So the games have to let you in quickly. There also has to be a SaveState or not much of a penalty for dumping a game. Games which require you to drop back to arbitrary save points are a pain - and why would you as a developer of entertainment want to cause your viewers pain? That would be like a TV programmer, after each commercial, show the last minute of what happened before the commercial. I’ve seen this done in the US….and I didn’t like it.

It’s a bit like Splash screens in games. Man - how annoying are the splash screens in Battlefield 2142? Yes, we know it’s EA. Yes, we know some company called DICE had something to do with it. After the first time, we don’t care who made it. At least on most Mac versions of games you can delve into the bundle and ditch the movies which make up the splash screens and the game just continues on. Saved us from the overly long sequences in the Mac version of Halo I can tell ya. These are only slightly less annoying than companies which insist on showing you splash screens after the game is finished. You quit out only to be hit by an advert. Thanks but no thanks.

We’re looking to grab the attention, hold the attention and be able to release attention quickly. So our game must load fast, not be in your face too long, and get you into gameplay as soon as possible. And when done - it should allow you to exit quickly.

That’s a pretty brief review of Outlook 2003 when connected to an Exchange Server.

When my IMAP server isn’t responding, I still have my local data. And it works. And when things change, they sync up nicely. Yesterday I spent the morning restarting Outlook as it kept crashing every time the network connection went down. Today I have this:

The little exclamation mark shows that I can’t get access to my Exchange Server. This means that at intervals the application freezes up. Considering that my calendar is part of this application as is my mail and most of my to-do list, I find myself pretty much unable to be 100% effective.

On the other hand, using a more decoupled service like IMAP with subscribed ICS feeds (a la Google Calendar) I’d still be able to work. At the moment I can just sit and look at the wait cursor and the little exclamation mark. Most of my work is, to be honest, in message passing and making sure people are doing things. As such, my reminders lists, calendars, follow-ups and email are crucial. When I can’t access the server I can’t even search my email. (and yes, I know I could change some of this, if I had access in my profile/policy to change things).

This is why I’m keen on decentralised outsourced services. If you’re not an IT company then why have a server on site. Why tie yourself down like that. Use decentralised services so if your broadband goes down you can pop down to any WiFi hotspot and use theirs. If your hosted email service goes down, you’ve still got access to other services and plenty of opportunity to change to a provider that won’t go down. This is why I use Pair Networks - pretty unrivalled in terms of reliability.

I loathe Windows and Outlook.

I’m interested in seeing what Amazon has come up with, as scooped by Newsweek. We’ll see a lot more information tomorrow as the NDAs clear.

It’s a paperback-sized eBook reader with a 167dpi screen (just slightly sharper than the iPhone and iPod touch), with a always-on internet connection and 30 hours of battery life.

It might be good. It might not.

[UPDATE: It looks like ass. Screen seems sharp enough but they’ve wrapped it in the skin of an old Apple II. Someone get Jeff Bezos over to Cupertino. Stat!]

The always entertaining John Welch rips the Scobleizer a new one when Robert Scoble, media darling, has a hissy fit because an update didn’t work out the way he thought it would.

Just how out of touch do you have to be to start acting like you have the right to special treatment. What level of entitlement do you have to possess to think this way? Make no mistake, that’s what this is: the pouting of the biggest, most spoiled entitlement queen in the “blogosphere”. This is what happens when you start thinking of yourself as better than everyone else. This great swollen ego is what happens when you start believing the sycophants who tell you that your shit really doesn’t stink, and that anyone telling you different is just a “hater”.

Of course, Scoble’s comments field is filled with Windows guys shouting about how he’s finally validated their choice in Windows. What? You mean that before the rant you were unsure and insecure about your lifestyle choices and needed that kind of positive validation? Wow. Some people need to work on their self-image a lot. I wonder did it hurt to realise that Scoble seems to have just been impatient and the system sorted itself out? (Something that was left to the depths of the comments rather than adding an [UPDATE] to the main text.

I like John’s writing a lot. And spotted him on FaceBook though I’d never add anyone without actually having spoken to them in some real sense.

I hate agreeing with John Dvorak. I hate it because it usually means I’m wrong. Not just “Oh well” wrong but seriously, dangerously, life-threateningly wrong.

Article

Until now, Microsoft could sell code better than anyone, but it seems the company would rather sell services: software as a service, ads, search engine results—you name it. This is like the local storefront that opens as a knife-sharpening business and is soon selling junk jewelry, moose heads, toaster repair, and cheap chocolate. In the meantime, the knife-sharpening business goes by the wayside. This is what has happened to Microsoft, and Vista is the result.

Worse, he threatens to switch to Linux or the Mac.

Well the hoopla surrounding the iPhone is now one week old and yes, I was tenth in line to get my grubby little hands on one.

Since I live in Northern Ireland, just North of Belfast, there are no Apple stores over here, or indeed, any part of Ireland full stop. So I just had to make do with the O2 store in CastleCourt, Belfast. There was a small queue forming outside an hour before opening, and it was enough to worry the shop next door, calling security to get the number of people moved away from their doors.

Getting the iPhone in my hands and getting home was filled with an air of great anticipation, something that I though wasn’t going to happen to me. Actually seeing the screen light up after registration was a great relief, especially reading that some people had difficulties. This boys details went through in under 3 minutes.

Now that I’ve had the iPhone for a week now, I’m still very pleased with it. I can quite safely say that this is the first phone where I can use nearly every aspect of it without needing a manual or just plain giving up. In fact it is so simple, my mum was able to operate it and she can’t even get the DVD player to work.

I’m going to go through each function of the iPhone and tell you what I think of it. First up is the SMS text messaging service.

Anyone who has used the iChat application on the Apple Mac will feel right at home with SMS. Rather than a list of mixed up SMS messages being displayed on your screen you have a list of those you’ve sent or received messages from. Tapping on their name brings up a your current conversation.

This whole concept of seeing your full conversation is great, no more looking through a list of 30, 40 or even more numbers and peoples names to find out what someone was replying to. I love this if nothing else.

I’ve very rarely used a calendaring option on any mobile phone. I’ve tried a number of times but all that fiddling about with small keyboards and multiple button pushes, just simply put me off.

This on the other hand is a breeze to use, a breath of fresh air. Everything is at hand and really intuitive. Entering repeating events couldn’t be easier, short of actually talking to your phone. The amount of calendar information is growing by the day and it even syncs back to your iCal application.

Unfortunately the timing of the iPhone release over here happened to be the same time as I was updating to Leopard, Apple Macs newest operating system, version 10.5. I was looking to install the new range of iLife applications onto my MacBook Pro One of these applications is iPhoto, which help you organise your photograph collection. I currently don’t have iPhoto installed and as such am missing out on the great photograph experience.

I have however created a number of sub folders in my Pictures folder and dumped part of my photographic collection in there. These are synced to the iPhone and any changes automatically taken care of. I’m really, really impressed by the way the iPhone handles these photos. Due to the way the touch sensitive panel works, you are able to use two fingers to enlarge or reduce the photo on screen. Using your finger to simply flip through your collection is amazing, just watch peoples faces when you do it. If a photo is taken in landscape mode, rotate the phone and the photo is automatically rotated and stretched to fill the screen. Absolutely brilliant.

Photos can be used as your wallpaper, or sent via email with simply a touch of the screen. If you like taking quick snaps using the phone, see below, these are instantly available to view.

This has to be one of my disappointments with the iPhone. The camera sensor supplied is a mere 2.1 mega pixels. In this day and age, many ordinary lower end phones are coming out with 3 or 4 mega pixels now, and with the price of the iPhone I half expected for a better built in camera.

If your just after a quick snap, and don;t really care what the quality is like then I guess it will suffice. The quality of the image is not too bad, but being at such a low resolution, graining is very much in evidence, and when moving the camera around the image displayed on screen can get very blurred.

One large omission from the phone is the lack of any form of movie capture facility, although seeing the slow display update this might be why.

That is it for the moment, as this post is getting a little long. I’ll be posting another 3 blogs covering the rest of the current available options on the iPhone.

When Leopard was delayed early this year, a lot of my friends who use Windows took the opportunity to guffaw that the four month delay was equivalent to Vista’s five year delay.

Pricks. The lot of them.

Playing with an iPhone this weekend has made me realise where we’re going with operating system. The earlier realisation that Apple had “stuck NeXTStep on a phone” was one thing.

I’m pretty sure that Apple will charge iPhone users for a 2.0 software release is a second thing altogether. I bought Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”. Would I buy iPhone OS X 2.0?

My iPhone and my Mac are both running flavours of Leopard. In the next two years we’re going to see probably 12 dot updates to Leopard (10.5.1 is about to hit the streets) and we’re likely to see some updates to the iPhone software too, most notably in February when they’re about to release the SDK. These can be seen as maintenance updates much like the dot releases in Mac OS X. They tend to add minor functionality as well, but the major advances are left to pay upgrades.

I don’t remember ever paying for an upgrade for my Palm, Newton or mobile phone. But then the Newt didn’t even last a year before it was canned. The Palm Vx ended up in a drawer when I got my Sony Ericsson T39m and since then I’ve had a new mobile every year and never bothered upgrading any software. The ability to upgrade has never been advertised…

I did upgrade my Nokia N800 and I will again when OS2008 is released later this year. Nokia have stated they’re not expecting everyone to buy these devices as this is part of a strategy to build a platform rather than make a killing just yet.

From that point of view I think Nokia and Apple are the platforms to watch.

Obviously I’d rather not be charged for an OS upgrade for a phone, even a phone as sexy and capable as an iPhone, and I’d hope it was included in the monthly fees that Apple is gouging out of O2 (which in turn it gouges out of me).

There’s a meme going round that you don’t need a college degree to be a success especially if you’re going to start your own business.

It’s true.

Citing examples such as Bill Gates, Henry Ford and Simon Cowell, it goes to show that success is not made out of paper qualifications. It’s all about talent, hard work, savvy and not a small amount of luck.

However you shouldn’t go through life thinking that college is a waste of time. I once told Aidan that I believed that you would only end up working in the field you studied in if you were very unlucky. My own example, a degree in Genetics, and yet I work in information technology and I’m glad of it. Though I love biology/genetics as a subject and I love being informed about it, I’d not have been as happy to work in that field for the rest of my life.

It’s natural to wonder whether college is really necessary. A college degree, as many have found, is no guarantee of a good career.

Going to college is not a guarantee of a career - you actually have to put some work in and keep working after the fact. Any fool that thinks a college degree is going to guarantee them success probably doesn’t need the degree (they’ve probably got the family connections).

As a commenter on the article remarked: you’ll be lucky to get the kind of success they describe with three college degrees. Using Richard Branson or Michael Dell as your life guru is one thing but don’t consider yourself a failure of you don’t achieve their lofty heights.

In many cases the luck element in terms of timing was just right. It would be hard for Michael Dell to make his fortune now if he were a college student building PCs in his dorm room. The same goes for Henry Ford. Looking at a recent example, Mark Zuckerberg is currently riding the crest of the wave that is Facebook which was started in February 2004 and has just been valued at $15 billion (which is about enough to get two gravy chips and a pastie by todays inflation).

Of course, some companies won’t even look at you if you don’t have a college degree. I remember campaigning to a manager in Nortel back in 1996 that they should get a recruiter out to see the writer of Dreadling, who was a Belfast teen. The reply was “But he wouldn’t have a degree.” which, as you can tell, is a bllinkered attitude directly linked to their share price (I’m kidding here). I hear he was whisked off to Apple after a stint at Biznet. He was described to me about a year later as a “star” by one of the seniors at Biznet. Every company should look for stars, college degree or not.

A college degree is a piece of paper which says “This person is capable of a standard of work.” There will always be cheats in the system (like one girl who got her boyfriend to do all of her coursework. She did tremendously well in coursework and then did badly in the exam, coming out with the lowest Honours classification after being a star pupil all year - which goes to show, you don’t have to work hard when there’s coursework involved). For the most part, however, it is a certification of some ability to think, write and prepare reports. There’s not much room for innovation as an undergraduate - the equipment you’re given is substandard, the teaching you’re given is full of personal bias and the postgraduates assigned to you actually hate you passionately with an intensity that increases every time to speak to them - so any undergrad who shows some innovation is going to be outside the norm.

Some of the most talented people I know don’t have college degrees yet they have managed to build up a resume which has some of the biggest names in business. They’ve proved their worth in terms of their ability to produce extraordinary results, their ability to learn quickly and make good relationships with colleagues.

I’m glad I went to college. I learned a lot, made some friends (retained very few) and had some fabulous experiences. I didn’t spend any of it “off my face” on drugs or alcohol (which makes me a bit of an oddity apparently) but I don’t feel I missed out any. I fell in with a “bad crowd” in terms of nocturnal entertainment because having reliable lab partners was of more value to me than a night out with the lads. College gave me my first exposure to real computers. Before this I’d had a Spectrum. In college I was logged into some DEC UNIX workstations and playing with telnet, finger, ftp because that’s all we had. There was no WWW at the time. I remember logging in one day and seeing a new icon in the Applications folder. Mosaic? And of course there wasn’t much out there. We certainly couldn’t buy anything over the net. And there was almost zero advertising. You had to go and look for it. But we had email, we had instant messenger (zwrite on the DECs, and talk to chat to people on other UNIX systems worldwide.), we met in virtual worlds (MUDs, MUSHes) and we built simple web sites. I find it a little bizarre that I can Google for my student ID from 1990 and find posts I made to newsgroups and mailing lists. I guess that’s a rather unfortunate non omnis moriar and not one I’d hoped for. I was in the College OTC and that meant I travelled, learned to shoot guns, went climbing an abseiling, flew in helicopters, drove tanks and otherwise had a great time. I’d not have missed that for the world.

College gave me a grounding in Information Technology. It gave me some great experiences. And it taught me a little about biology, evolution, genetics, chemistry and people.

Some idiot gets quoted in the Irish Times:

Third in the line was Matt Johnston, a 35-year-old self-confessed “computer geek” from Belfast. “A nice bit of kit,” he said, after buying the iPhone.

Whatever about the quiet level of interest last night, this is the future, according to Johnston.

“Look, in 10 years’ time having an iPhone will be the same as having a watch. You’ll look strange if you don’t have one.”

That’s a bit of paraphrasing. What I said was that if you don’t have a phone like an iPhone then you’ll look strange. That includes all sorts of smartphone obviously. As people in the UK are now considering SMS texts as part of their normal communication, in ten years we’ll all be connected…

The turnout was lukewarm in Belfast but it wasn’t bad chatting to the people there. You have to remember there’s 280 million people in the US and less than a quarter of that in the UK. And there’s only 1.5 million people in Northern Ireland. iPhone will sell in the hundreds or thousands in Northern Ireland, not the millions.