Fiat Lux
For the last 2+ years, my primary home computer has been a 13″ Macbook Pro. And although I love the easy portability of a smaller laptop, I’m also a little frustrated by the small screen. Editing photos, playing games, and Powerpoint all suffer when you’ve got that little screen real estate.
So as much as I love portability, I’m also seriously thinking about buying a nice big monitor and spending more time at my long-neglected home office desk instead of computing on the couch. I’m even considering buying a small desktop computer to go with it. With so many cloud sharing services these days, synching files across devices isn’t the pain it used to be.
The main thing that’s holding me back is what going back to a desktop might do to my back. I screwed my back up badly before I got the laptop by not paying enough attention to my chair and desk quality, and I don’t want to make the same mistake twice. On the other hand, I don’t really want to spend a bunch of time trolling Craigslist for used Aeron chairs.
It might be a fun Xmas Shutdown project though… Hmmm…
To go big (screen) or not? What do you think?
TL; DR: There’s no such thing as the perfect tablet. My MacBook Pro rules.
I spent a good chunk of the weekend giving the Xoom a workout. I truly wanted to like it but I have to say I’m less than enthused.
There’s things I like about it, to be sure. Being able to turn the device on, log in, and poof! Google starts synching all my stuff. That is great. Or it would be if it actually downloaded all my apps and bookmarks. Most of them got re-synched but not all.
The Xoom is fast and app switching is really smooth and easy. Want to jump from a link in Tweetdeck (which runs beautifully) or even email to a web browser? Click, you’re there. The web page loads fast, and then getting back into Tweetdeck is one tap of the Back button. It’s nice and I find it an intuitive workflow. On the iPad I have never liked having to hit the Home button and re-launch an app to jump back and forth.
Oh, and the battery life is excellent. After 8 hours of near continuous use with the wifi turned on, I still had 15% battery left. More than enough time for a cross-country flight, and that’s a key use-case for me.
Then there are the things that are annoying. The keyboard, despite being on a bigger screen, isn’t easy to type on, because some of the elements from the layout have been switched from where they are in Froyo devices. This is annoying and slows down my typing speed. Some apps and widgets are great, others, not so much. Scaled-up Android apps generally don’t look as bad as scaled-up iPhone-to-iPad apps do, mostly because they’re nowhere near as badly pixelated. It’s true that few apps are designed to take advantage of the expanded real estate of available on a tablet but my apps worked well
I have issues with the iPad as well, though. I hate the browser, and not just because it doesn’t run Flash. I can’t import bookmarks from Chrome into it, for one thing. It’s also slow, even when on wifi. I miss my Android widgets. I wish I could customize the screen more. And several of my favorite tools look like crap on the iPad – notably Tripit, Foursquare, Facebook. And sadly my much-loved Tweetdeck is buggy as hell on the iPad.
On the other hand, the iPad wins for email hands-down. I find the keyboard easy to use and the unified inbox is very nice.
Either the iPad or the Xoom will do just fine for the two main things I’ll be using them for – airplanes and some lightweight email management in the bedroom. They’re both decent devices but neither has my heart. That still belongs to my trusty MacBook Pro.
18 months from now who knows? Maybe I’ll be typing my blog post on a tablet instead of my laptop and laughing at how I ever thought a laptop was better. So far, color me unconvinced.
So last night, we added a Google TV device to the household. It’s a Logitech Revue, one of the three current gTV options.
Setting the Revue up is pretty simple. Power cable. HDMI in from your DVR or cable box, HDMI out to the TV (one HDMI cable is included). Wifi built in (or you can jack in an ethernet cable if you wish). The on-screen setup went smoothly, although the Revue did hang after downloading an update. needing a quick power off / power on to get things going again. You’re asked for a Google account, which isn’t a big deal but does create an issue for households with more than one Google user — whose account do you add to the TV? Or should you create a special gTV account to be shared by all? The hardest part was setting up the connection to your TV and DVR or other set-top box — you’ll be asked for the specific model numbers for each.
At any rate, eventually you’re all done and your new Google TV is ready to roll.
So what did I do first? Check out YouTube. gTV has something called “YouTube Leanback” built in as a custom channel – mostly music videos and content from key partners. You can also use the built-in Chrome browser to log into your own YouTube account and use YouTube just like you would on your computer (my choice). The Logitech keyboard / touchpad works well for navigating around the screen and I was quickly able to start watching my saved favorites in full-screen mode on our 46″ TV.
Performance was a non-issue. Of course, watching older, non-HD video on a big HDTV isn’t exactly a challenge, so next I gave Netflix a shot. After activating the gTV with my Netflix account, my queue came up on screen and I was able to dive right in. Performance was no different than what I get when watching Netflix streamed via my TiVo. [Side note, this is now device #3 in the living room capable of streaming Netflix to our TV. I really need to get streaming Netflix into other rooms of the house now.]
So far, so good. I don’t like basketball so I gave the NBA app a pass, nor do I have a lot of photos in Picasa so I couldn’t do much with that. There are some other apps (HBO GO, CNBC, Twitter, etc) I have yet to check out as well.
I’d like to see more apps on the gTV of course – for example, as a Last.fm subscriber it’s a little frustrating to see Napster and Pandora there but not my preferred streaming music provider. It will be a few months before there’s a healthy pipeline of new gTV apps, so I’ll have to be patient.
At this point, my main concern is — who is the target market for the Google TV? As The Spouse pointed out, people like us already generally watch TV with a laptop parked in our laps. We can search, Tweet, etc in the living room already. For that kind of user, the use-case would be in rooms of the house where you have a TV set up but don’t necessarily want to haul a laptop – like the kitchen or bedroom. Originally I was going to set the gTV up in the bedroom, in fact, but we have an older cable box and DVR in there and as such don’t have the necessary HD connectivity.
For slightly less geeky families, having a Google TV in the living room could be a big win — if they nail the user experience. It’s good, especially for a 1.0 version, but could be a little more friendly.
With US midterm elections this Tuesday, I’m really interested to see how well the web browser / TV picture in picture setup will play out – having Twitter and MSNBC on the same screen could be a lot of fun.
The release of Android 2.2 (Froyo) and going on vacation inspired me to try dumping my Crackberry altogether and just using the Nexus One fulltime. All in all it’s been working out quite well.
I’ve also been adding apps like a demon. Here’s the current list:
Adobe Flash
Adobe Reader
Advanced Task Killer
AIM
ASTRO File Manager
AT&T myWireless
Barcode Scanner
CaltrainDroid
CardioTrainer
Compass
DoubleTwist
Dropbox
Foursquare
Gowalla
Last.fm
NewsRob
OpenTable
Photoshop.com Mobile
Ringdroid
Shazam
Shopper
The Weather Channel
Tripit
Urbanspoon
WordPress
And for fun:
Android LightSaber
Bubble
Bump
iVuvuzela
Jewels
Magic 8-Ball
Even better? Every single one of those apps are free (note that DoubleTwist is currently “free for a limited time”, YMMV).
Plus there’s the built-in apps, some of which are new or significantly improved in 2.2, including the email and gmail clients, calendar, Navigation, Voice Search, and the Google Sky Map.
The only things I miss from my Blackberry are the battery life and the real keyboard, and with any luck there’ll be more Androids with keyboards out this fall.
It’s hard to put together a blog post on Facebook and privacy when Stowe Boyd has already said pretty much everything I wanted to say, and said it far better than I.
Still, after seeing several friends severely cut back their Facebook presence or outright leave Facebook altogether, I though I’d have my say.
Ever since the Internet has been around, the concept of sharing not with the world, but with a select subset of the world, has been a huge part of the fabric of the social web. It still is. Wanting to share information via a website with a chosen set of people is not the same thing as wanting to share that information with everyone on the Internet (plus major search engines as well). Telling someone “well, the world has changed, get over it” is a crappy, unhelpful, and disrespectful response.
It all gets down to control over your information. If you set up a website based around the idea that you can share information with only a select group of people (and yes I am looking at you, Facebook) then don’t be surprised if people get pissed off when you change your mind and decide that catering to advertisers is more important than user privacy.
It’s why Gowalla and Foursquare are popular — because users are in control of what they share. Twitter too, for that matter. In all three cases, what’s private or public in those services is simple to understand, and the rules don’t change.
Complexity — especially when it comes to privacy — breeds distrust. Simplicity is always better.
Which, perversely, is why “if you want it private don’t put it on the Internet” makes an appealing argument to some (especially Valley geeks). It’s simple, clean, binary — everything geeks like. And most of the people who make it also operate from a position of high privilege. What I mean by “privilege” is that they are well-educated and well-connected people who do not need to worry about where their next job or paycheck is going to come from, have stable homes and personal lives, and should their privacy be breached in a serious way, they have the ability and resources to get as much assistance as they need in repairing the damage.
The world isn’t binary though. And not everyone has as much privilege in their lives that they can afford to be cavalier about their privacy.
I don’t know whether Facebook will succeed in their desire to become the one true arbiter of the Social Web (and make billions while they’re at it) or not. Short-term, they probably will do very well for themselves. Over the long haul, though, I’m not so sure. Privacy still matters.
I am still on Facebook, although I’ve locked my settings down as much as Facebook will allow, removed some information about myself, and cut back on my friends list. What happens next will depend on Facebook. Keep screwing with my sense of control and I may well join the list of people who’ve bid Facebook farewell.
With Spring in the air I’ve been making some changes (or trying to) on my personal technology use. It’s been a mixed bag of success, which leaves me currently caught in transition — not quite ready to let go of the old and not fully embracing the new.
First off, Chrome for Mac is at the point where it’s usable and I’m starting to switch over to it. As a browser, it lives up to its reports — fast, stripped down, easy to use. My bookmarks were easy to transfer, too. I don’t love how Chrome handles their bookmark display but I’m adjusting fairly easily. And I like the choice of themes, they are much nicer looking that the Firefox themes.
What’s been keeping me from full-out Chrome adoption is that I have a huge pile of passwords stored in Firefox and Xmarks and getting them ported over hasn’t worked. Some of my friends have told me that they should be portable, but so far I haven’t found the setting or application that will help me do it.
This raises the whole issue of password management. Like many people who try to be reasonably secure with my passwords, I have a lot of them and if I don’t visit a site frequently I don’t always remember what password I used. Hence I’ve gotten pretty dependent on tools to help me manage them all (which is also a possible source of insecurity, I know). I haven’t tried 1Password or LastPass yet but I probably should. (Got any suggestions?)
I expect I’ll make a full transition pretty soon but sometimes it’s just easier to open a page in Firefox than try to remember exactly what password I used for what site. So for now I’m still switching between the two.
I’ve also been giving Windows 7 a look. Boot Camp makes trying Win7 on my MacBook Pro pretty painless, so I created a new partition on my personal laptop and installed a copy.
It’s been a few years since Windows was my full-time OS and that was XP, so Win7 is a new experience. Microsoft has clearly done a lot of work on the OS and it’s a more visually-appealing OS these days. I’d be lying if I said I was enthusiastic about making a complete switch though. Having to re-buy all my software, unlearn all the keyboard shortcuts I rely on, and deal with a much more complex set of system settings (not to mention having to worry about viruses again) is not something I’m looking forward to.
Still, it’s been fun to play with something new, and there are a few games I had to give up when I went Mac that I’d like to be able to play again (if I ever have time!). I’ll keep testing & see how I feel after a little more time using it.
It could also be that if I had different hardware I’d feel a little differently — the MacBook Pro’s touchpad isn’t really designed for use with Windows and that’s giving me some issues. I’ve looked at a few Dell and Toshiba possibilities but given that this MBP is less thsn a year old, I’m not feeling the need to go out and buy a new laptop just now.
I’m also still stuck in transition on the phone front, carrying both the Nexus One and my Blackberry. The N1 is a really nice handheld computer and I like it a lot; I’ve gotten rid of my iPod Touch now that I have it. For e-mail though, I still can’t shake free of the Blackberry. The keyboard and Exchange integration are too good.
My deepest wish is that RIM would hurry up and put out a Flash-enabled phone with a big screen and a slider keyboard. I may have to suck it up and go with another solution though, because my much-loved old Curve has taken quite a beating these past 2 years and I’m not sure how much longer I can wait for a replacement for it. I know there will be a lot more options coming soon but I am finding it hard to be patient.