Spilling the Beans
May 6th, 2010
Traditionally humans were required to use mechanical peripherals to interact with computers, mice, joysticks, and keyboards, have been a part of your digital life. Mechanical peripherals have enabled us to interact with computers in complex ways, but I believe the complexity of our well-established interaction-model is leaving a lot of users behind, the mouse might seem like the most natural tool for you, but it still has a learning curve, and though it may be fast to learn the basics, the initial step is to frightening for many.
What I see in the personal computer industry, is a movement towards natural interaction, a peripheral less world, where interaction is direct, and computers use your motion, your voice, and your touch, to interact with data in complex yet natural ways.
Apple is at the forefront of this movement, their focus on accessibility has not only made their products better for the disabled, but it has also benefitted the majority of users in indirect ways, VoiceOver and VoiceControl are two great examples of technologies that are being actively used by people who are ‘enabled’.
We are at a primitive stage in natural interaction, using mostly touch and gestures to communicate with our devices, but the products that are being developed and adopted by the market are slowly gaining the ability to understand language, intentions, and emotion.
Whether you like it or not, the computer interface is becoming more human, in some ways it is fascinating, and in some ways it is terrifying.
May 4th, 2010
I find Apple’s recent acquisition of Siri quite interesting, I already find myself conversing on a basic level with my iPhone when biking, phrases like “Call John Appleseed”, and “Play Album Dark Side of The Moon”, I can do a lot while still focusing on the traffic.
My iPhone mostly interprets my orders correctly, and responds by repeating my intended action, with Siri I believe Apple wishes to expand the idea of the conversing computer even further, and possibly open up the Voice Control features for 3rd party applications, confirming Apple’s commitment to producing accessible devices.
The iPhone is my first experience of a natural interaction with an AI, though it is not perfect, and very limited, I do not feel stupid giving my phone voice-commands, because most of the time the iPhone interprets my intentions correctly. Apple is creating what many tech-prophets have foreseen, a personal AI or “The Conversing Computer”, they are doing this while their competitors are still having a hard time making their touch-screens work properly, the hard truth is that no company is working harder on an iPhone killer than Apple, and if tide does not turn soon, Palm will not be their only victim.
May 3rd, 2010
I recently traded my iPhone 3Gs for a Google Nexus One (temporarily), I am not going to review the handset, but instead give my perspective on why the current Android cooperative cannot cope with Apple’s successful iPhone.
The greatest difference between Google and Apple, is that Google strives to make great open products, and that Apple strives to make great consumer products. I am an avid user of many Google products, I prefer Gmail over MobileMe, and I believe that Google has a much better take on online services than Apple.
The interesting thing is that both companies are entering each others market, Apple is entering the cloud with the same mindset that led their hardware to success, and Google is entering the OS/Hardware scene with the ideals of openness that has benefitted the Mountain View company profoundly.
Even with many successful products, both companies have a hard time establishing themselves in the markets they recently entered.
My experience with an Android OS device can be boiled down to the lack of focus, there is no single Android experience, it is a fragmented platform that has a hard time finding it’s identity. Normally when i use a Google web-product I can sense the identity straight away, they are the company that made ‘open’ work, Gmail is a great example, any day I could dump all my emails to another provider, but I do not want to switch because Gmail is the best. The thing that made Gmail so great was not it’s openness alone, it was a focused team of Google engineers all working on one common goal, to make email better, and they did.
Android is a whole other story, even though Google leads the development of the Android OS, they cannot make radical decisions without hurting the Alliance, and the handset-companies use their time on customizing the Android OS, to differentiate themselves from their competitors, without committing most of their achievements back to the Alliance. Google is having a hard time, because none of their partners truly understand the two-way relationship in open source, and the handset companies could never dream of writing a significant line of code, that could lead a competitors device to success.
If the rest of the industry wants to beat Apple, they should truly join forces, and begin giving back to a great project Google has sat in motion, even tough Apple is big, and has a lot of talent, they would have to work really hard if all their competitors were developing in unison.
Open can work, Ubuntu is proof of that, and the reason Ubuntu works, is that they have focus and control of their product, as soon as users can sense focus in a product, the product will gain focus in the market.
Apple has focus, and they are still leading the smartphone pack, if Google want’s to catch-up, they need to take control and unify the Open Handset Alliance, without the fear of being evil.
May 3rd, 2010
Remember NSCoder Night Tomorrow (4th of May 2010), as usual we will meet at Café Retro Knabrostræde 26 Copenhagen, 19:00.
Bring your Mac and come code with friends.
April 23rd, 2010
As the claws of Eyjafjallajokull slowly loosen their grip of Europe’s airways, one would assume that the world quickly returned to a more ordinary state, not quite so.
The hosts of iPhone Dev Day have chosen to postpone the event to the 7th of June, because the speakers can not reach London.
I still have a ticket for London Monday morning and now I have no conference to attend, so I was wondering if any of my readers situated in London would like to hang out, Google Analytics tells me there a few of my regular visitors whom are from the London area.
Leave a comment if you are interested.
April 20th, 2010
Remember NSCoder Night this evening, we meet at Café Retro 19:00 (Knabrostræde 26). Bring your Mac and come code with friends.
April 11th, 2010
CocoaHeads will be hosting their April meet-up this Tuesday (the 13th of April).
It starts at 19:00 at JayWay’s offices in Copenhagen (see this post for exact details & signup).
Per-Erik Bergmann will be talking OpenGL ES.
As usual there will be no NSCoder Night when there is a CocoaHeads event.
April 5th, 2010
Remember NSCoder Night this Tuesday (6th of April). We will be hanging out at Café Retro from 19:00.
Bring your Mac and code with friends!
March 29th, 2010
Remember NSCoder Night this Tuesday (30th of March). We will be hanging out at Café Retro from 19:00.
Bring your Mac and code with friends!
March 22nd, 2010
Remember NSCoder Night this Tuesday (23rd of March). We will be hanging out at Café Retro from 19:00.
Bring your Mac and code with friends!