I have just learned of the availability of a cool app for screen capture on iOS without needing to jail break anymore and have quickly tried it out to see if it could be useful for creating small videos for tutorials etc on iOS devices and it works nicely.
(I'm also trying to embed a video to demonstrate it in a blog press blog post from the phone for the first time so this may not display anything:)-
What do you think? It could make writing up app reviews so much easier and more dynamic as well as allowing lecturers to display "slides" using the Keynote app for instance and annotate them very simply - this could be a huge usability improvement for teaching and learning use.
I'm excited :)
- Posted using BlogPress from my phone
2011/09/11
New blog theme
Just to give this blog a bit of a spring clean, I've twiddled with the theme. Is it an improvement?
IPhone 5 - what would I want to see?
Update 2012-03-31 I have just read that Apple is working on 3d camera tech which it might use in the iphone 5, so that may be in the next version (see http://feeds.iphonehacks.com/~r/iphonehacks/~3/zr09cDP6PrA/3d-camera-for-iphone-ipad.html)
The Apple hype/rumour mill is churning and it seems we can probably expect a new iPhone version fairly soon. My own iphone 4 contract runs out in December too, so I'm looking ahead to what might convince me an upgrade is worth while. I thought I'd share my thoughts and also reflect on them later when we know what Apple have deigned to allow us to use.
More memory
This is my #1 bugbear with my current 32GB iPhone 4. I would like to keep more of my music collection and photos on the device as well as space for more of the many apps I've got. As it is, even the 64GB iPad is woefully short of space and I'm always having to compromise between space for apps and data.
What I would really like Apple to provide is a mechanism for upgrading/swapping the storage using SD cards, but given Apple's reluctance to allow any user expansion of any of their devices, I don't give that much chance to be included.
I also need a lot more dynamic RAM for apps to run well. Many apps for photo editing or movie editing, as well as games, "crash" (=are killed by the OS) on iOS when they need more RAM to run than is available. So a doubling of this would be nice - ideally I think 512MB would be nice. Apple don't tend to quote this figure though, and while it is important, I'm not going to include it as a specific wish.
So, my top wish would be for at least a 256GB option for storage.
Screen improvement
The retina display of the iPhone 4 is nice, but...
It's reflectiveness makes it a pain to use with certain indoor lighting in offices, it's barely usable in direct sunlight, its glass and fragile and it isn't 16:9 wide screen for watching certain media on.
So, what I'd really like to see is a new screen that is matt, transflective (if that's a word - using the sun to reflect back a brighter image is what I have in mind and I think someone made a display like this), flexible (!) and using the whole of the current size/shape of the iPhone to be wide screen.
Of these, I doubt Apple will announce any significant technology changes, not least due to them not owning the ideas, and so my second wish list item (I think the best I could hope for) would be a slightly larger and slightly matt screen.
Camera improvements
The camera on the iPhone 4 is pretty good already but I can see some scope for improvement, and i have read about some new camera solutions available off the shelf which include some of these and still fit the same form factor. So my third and fourth wish list items would be for an optical zoom and 1080p HD video recording.
Update: after posting, I realised I missed another obvious improvement which is eminently possible - 3d camera. This would need 2 cameras built in which would eat a lot of space internally, but could be cool. It's on my wish list now anyhow even if unlikely and impractical.
Ports
The fact that Apple have adopted a unified dock connector with their devices for quite a while is a really good thing as it allows many of the peripherals/chargers etc to be used between them, but...
The EU has declared that mini-USB should be the standard for charging for mobile phones as I understand and I think that would be a good thing for Apple to include - as long as they keep the standard dock connector too because so many other gadgets I take with me on trips use the mini-USB standard (GPS/mini-tv/etc).
I can't see how Apple could do this without impinging on the design though as every port means extra internal space and compromising the integrity of the case. Perhaps a very small dock/mini-USB "plug" could be included instead which could be left connected as a dock port protector while providing a mini-USB through port? That could then be used like the camera connection kit on the iPad for connecting other USB peripherals too - like midi-keyboards etc.
I can't see Apple making this compromise though, not least because with that "plug", their huge mark up on official Apple dock cables would be written off. I'm going to take a punt and guess that their include a separate mini-USB port for charging only and because I don't want to set my expectations too high, that's all I'll include on my wish list.
Battery life
OK, battery life on the iPhone 4 has been much better than the iPhone 3 for me, and much better than most people I know with Android phones, and usually it does last easily between charge opportunities - but I still have to plan ahead and be aware of taking those opportunities to top up when available, and I miss the days of phones that would last a week between charges if necessary (and that was basic smart phones not completely dumb phones).
So, if Apple could invent a mini fusion reactor, or a fantastically efficient solar charger built into the screen, or a kinetic booster that charges the phone from the vibration of carrying it around or....you get the idea.
In the meantime, I'll keep my wish list to the more pragmatic: at least the same battery life as the iPhone 4 and ideally a noticeable improvement (with little/no extra weight)
Some blue sky ideas
Now some more unlikely ideas which I really don't expect but could be cool:
What do you think? Anything that bugs you about the iPhone 4 or might convince you to switch to iPhone if you prefer Android now?
- Posted using BlogPress from mobile device
The Apple hype/rumour mill is churning and it seems we can probably expect a new iPhone version fairly soon. My own iphone 4 contract runs out in December too, so I'm looking ahead to what might convince me an upgrade is worth while. I thought I'd share my thoughts and also reflect on them later when we know what Apple have deigned to allow us to use.
More memory
This is my #1 bugbear with my current 32GB iPhone 4. I would like to keep more of my music collection and photos on the device as well as space for more of the many apps I've got. As it is, even the 64GB iPad is woefully short of space and I'm always having to compromise between space for apps and data.
What I would really like Apple to provide is a mechanism for upgrading/swapping the storage using SD cards, but given Apple's reluctance to allow any user expansion of any of their devices, I don't give that much chance to be included.
I also need a lot more dynamic RAM for apps to run well. Many apps for photo editing or movie editing, as well as games, "crash" (=are killed by the OS) on iOS when they need more RAM to run than is available. So a doubling of this would be nice - ideally I think 512MB would be nice. Apple don't tend to quote this figure though, and while it is important, I'm not going to include it as a specific wish.
So, my top wish would be for at least a 256GB option for storage.
Screen improvement
The retina display of the iPhone 4 is nice, but...
It's reflectiveness makes it a pain to use with certain indoor lighting in offices, it's barely usable in direct sunlight, its glass and fragile and it isn't 16:9 wide screen for watching certain media on.
So, what I'd really like to see is a new screen that is matt, transflective (if that's a word - using the sun to reflect back a brighter image is what I have in mind and I think someone made a display like this), flexible (!) and using the whole of the current size/shape of the iPhone to be wide screen.
Of these, I doubt Apple will announce any significant technology changes, not least due to them not owning the ideas, and so my second wish list item (I think the best I could hope for) would be a slightly larger and slightly matt screen.
Camera improvements
The camera on the iPhone 4 is pretty good already but I can see some scope for improvement, and i have read about some new camera solutions available off the shelf which include some of these and still fit the same form factor. So my third and fourth wish list items would be for an optical zoom and 1080p HD video recording.
Update: after posting, I realised I missed another obvious improvement which is eminently possible - 3d camera. This would need 2 cameras built in which would eat a lot of space internally, but could be cool. It's on my wish list now anyhow even if unlikely and impractical.
Ports
The fact that Apple have adopted a unified dock connector with their devices for quite a while is a really good thing as it allows many of the peripherals/chargers etc to be used between them, but...
The EU has declared that mini-USB should be the standard for charging for mobile phones as I understand and I think that would be a good thing for Apple to include - as long as they keep the standard dock connector too because so many other gadgets I take with me on trips use the mini-USB standard (GPS/mini-tv/etc).
I can't see how Apple could do this without impinging on the design though as every port means extra internal space and compromising the integrity of the case. Perhaps a very small dock/mini-USB "plug" could be included instead which could be left connected as a dock port protector while providing a mini-USB through port? That could then be used like the camera connection kit on the iPad for connecting other USB peripherals too - like midi-keyboards etc.
I can't see Apple making this compromise though, not least because with that "plug", their huge mark up on official Apple dock cables would be written off. I'm going to take a punt and guess that their include a separate mini-USB port for charging only and because I don't want to set my expectations too high, that's all I'll include on my wish list.
Battery life
OK, battery life on the iPhone 4 has been much better than the iPhone 3 for me, and much better than most people I know with Android phones, and usually it does last easily between charge opportunities - but I still have to plan ahead and be aware of taking those opportunities to top up when available, and I miss the days of phones that would last a week between charges if necessary (and that was basic smart phones not completely dumb phones).
So, if Apple could invent a mini fusion reactor, or a fantastically efficient solar charger built into the screen, or a kinetic booster that charges the phone from the vibration of carrying it around or....you get the idea.
In the meantime, I'll keep my wish list to the more pragmatic: at least the same battery life as the iPhone 4 and ideally a noticeable improvement (with little/no extra weight)
Some blue sky ideas
Now some more unlikely ideas which I really don't expect but could be cool:
- 3d glasses-less display - holographic even
- foldable form factor/flexible screen
- haptic feedback
- 4G support (actually that might be included, but it's not on my wish list really as we don't have the infrastructure for it and contracts would cost a fortune I expect)
What do you think? Anything that bugs you about the iPhone 4 or might convince you to switch to iPhone if you prefer Android now?
- Posted using BlogPress from mobile device
2011/07/12
Thoughts on "Enterprise IT sees phones/Facebook and tablets - oh-my" article
Some thoughts on this article:
http://gigaom.com/cloud/enterprise-it-sees-phones-facebook-and-tablets-oh-my/
(I tried adding a comment to the article but it seems to be taking a while t appear so thought I'd make a blog post instead - read the article first for the thoughts to have a context):
If people are already able to do so much without IT systems/processes/services changing then is this an issue? The reason things are taking off is because mobile tech has finally reached a point where it can deliver a near desktop experience for web browsing (and with many apps) - so the IT systems don't actually need to change to be usable.
Also, IT systems have adopted many open standards for a long time so things like email, calendars etc all "just work" as far as users of mobile devices are concerned. Yes, there are security issues etc which they are probably stumbling into without knowing the minefield they have entered, but with the genie out of the bottle, I can't see many areas successfully closing the door now the horse has settled down in a nice villa and completely forgotten ever running away.
Next, there are now so many IT services provided "for free" in the cloud that users can effectively by pass any/all corporate IT services and still work effectively if they choose to - and because it's their own device on their own (mobile) network and often in their own time, there's very little that IT policies could do to reign this chaos in. Of course this chaos is also a creative maelstrom - sometimes time wasting, risky or even reckless but also agile, flexible, responsive.
Lastly, investment. Most IT departments are being squeezed to cost the organisation less rather than being seen as an area requiring investment. This is no surprise when senior execs see services provided for free out there and an old creaking IT system which has lost it's shine - not seeing it as needing investment to improve the overall organisational efficiency.
I also see these things in waves. Mainframes used to be single task systems, then people were liberated to be able to run their own jobs on them in batch runs. Then mainframes became seen as centrally controlled and PCs became popular as people felt they had control back. Slowly as networks took off and PCs became subservient to centrally controlled server, people lost that sense of control again. Now, people feel liberated from all central control again and are running free - eventually, the problems with this will become more apparent (data loss etc) and corporations will find a way to regain control again and eventually, something else will come along to liberate people's creative spirit again. Things look so dramatic right now as we're in the middle of a transition - this isn't the end of the world or a periminant condition, it'll settle down and balance out again eventually...or not.
Perhaps it's a reverse industrial revolution where the individual in an organisation becomes independent and the whole nature of corporations will eventually have to change to be more amorphous and fluid?
- Posted using BlogPress from mobile device
http://gigaom.com/cloud/enterprise-it-sees-phones-facebook-and-tablets-oh-my/
(I tried adding a comment to the article but it seems to be taking a while t appear so thought I'd make a blog post instead - read the article first for the thoughts to have a context):
If people are already able to do so much without IT systems/processes/services changing then is this an issue? The reason things are taking off is because mobile tech has finally reached a point where it can deliver a near desktop experience for web browsing (and with many apps) - so the IT systems don't actually need to change to be usable.
Also, IT systems have adopted many open standards for a long time so things like email, calendars etc all "just work" as far as users of mobile devices are concerned. Yes, there are security issues etc which they are probably stumbling into without knowing the minefield they have entered, but with the genie out of the bottle, I can't see many areas successfully closing the door now the horse has settled down in a nice villa and completely forgotten ever running away.
Next, there are now so many IT services provided "for free" in the cloud that users can effectively by pass any/all corporate IT services and still work effectively if they choose to - and because it's their own device on their own (mobile) network and often in their own time, there's very little that IT policies could do to reign this chaos in. Of course this chaos is also a creative maelstrom - sometimes time wasting, risky or even reckless but also agile, flexible, responsive.
Lastly, investment. Most IT departments are being squeezed to cost the organisation less rather than being seen as an area requiring investment. This is no surprise when senior execs see services provided for free out there and an old creaking IT system which has lost it's shine - not seeing it as needing investment to improve the overall organisational efficiency.
I also see these things in waves. Mainframes used to be single task systems, then people were liberated to be able to run their own jobs on them in batch runs. Then mainframes became seen as centrally controlled and PCs became popular as people felt they had control back. Slowly as networks took off and PCs became subservient to centrally controlled server, people lost that sense of control again. Now, people feel liberated from all central control again and are running free - eventually, the problems with this will become more apparent (data loss etc) and corporations will find a way to regain control again and eventually, something else will come along to liberate people's creative spirit again. Things look so dramatic right now as we're in the middle of a transition - this isn't the end of the world or a periminant condition, it'll settle down and balance out again eventually...or not.
Perhaps it's a reverse industrial revolution where the individual in an organisation becomes independent and the whole nature of corporations will eventually have to change to be more amorphous and fluid?
- Posted using BlogPress from mobile device
2011/07/08
On the NOTW closing
Opinion:
Firstly, NOTW closed not because of a twitter campaign etc but because the brand became tarnished when previous scurrilous (illegal) activities eventually came to light.
Once that happened, advertising revenue was going to vanish and print media needs that as it's life blood. The choice was to keep running at a huge lose or close.
I don't doubt that some element of parent company/owner brand management/protection influenced the decision too.
However, the real news will be how and why did the met police fail to follow up on the significant evidence they had for years until left with no choice. Once that story comes out, I'm sure some very big names and influential people will find their time pulling the strings will reach an end...leaving the corrupt influence in the hands of another set of people who may be even worse but will at least be more careful - for a while at least.
Cynical? Me?
- Posted using BlogPress from my phone
Firstly, NOTW closed not because of a twitter campaign etc but because the brand became tarnished when previous scurrilous (illegal) activities eventually came to light.
Once that happened, advertising revenue was going to vanish and print media needs that as it's life blood. The choice was to keep running at a huge lose or close.
I don't doubt that some element of parent company/owner brand management/protection influenced the decision too.
However, the real news will be how and why did the met police fail to follow up on the significant evidence they had for years until left with no choice. Once that story comes out, I'm sure some very big names and influential people will find their time pulling the strings will reach an end...leaving the corrupt influence in the hands of another set of people who may be even worse but will at least be more careful - for a while at least.
Cynical? Me?
- Posted using BlogPress from my phone
2011/02/26
Intellectual Property in the hive mind, music industry and how it all relates to education
This is an attempt to draw together a number of ideas I've been having about a number of subjects which may seem unrelated, but which I think actually have something in common.
(Its also the second stab at writing it as ironically, given that much of it relates to the Internet as an extended joint memory, I managed to write the whole thing and then lose it when I tried to post it having forgotten to save as I went along. On this 2nd writing, I'm not sure I've linked the concepts as well or articulated the issues for education as well either - but tough. Its close enough and I'm fed up with trying to articulate it now for a while at least ;)
The Internet is a wonderful tool for bringing people together. Social networking tools such as Facebook dominate many of the most visited sites on the web and almost every site includes a comments section. The number of ways we can interact with other people online grow and increase in complexity continually too. The Internet also remembers everything. This is both a good thing and a problem with much debate and effort currently looking for how to give it a way to forget the bad things (bad in this context can mean a lot of different things). Access to the Internet is also becoming both ubiquitous and universal. Putting these together is oft referred to as a manifestation of a Hive Mind. A kind of collective consciousness in which ideas spread as memes, where you can get answers to things you don't know yourself just by asking as someone somewhere is bound to know what you need. But it goes beyond a collective consciousness, it is also a collective memory. With a simple YouTube search, I can "remember" exactly what it was like (at least the visual/audio aspects) to witness the assassination of an american president who died before I was even born. I can "remember" what it is like to journey to the moon, including the entire dialogue of the Apollo 11 crew all the way there and back, including those parts not transmitted to earth. With music, with services such Spotify, I can "remember" a tune with perfect clarity on demand, wherever I am and at whatever time I choose. Let's take that last point first and imagine back what life would have been like before recorded music, before sheet music, before any technology had been invented to help share the essential transient nature of music. I focus here on music, but the principle applies to books, video, news etc just as well. At the time before any mechanism to record music, the only way to experience music "on demand" would be to remember it. Our memory is not perfect but it is quite effective. In that way, as soon as a piece of music is performed and experience by someone else, it is "owned" in some way by the listener since they can recall it later. The music gains a virtual existence in the mind which can not be controlled, or regulated by the originator. However, the wetware of our brain gives far from perfect recall; how many songs can you remember exactly, note perfect with all the words? A few maybe, but probably not many. So, as soon as technology came along which could augment that recollection process, it became highly valued. Sheet music (for those who can read it) could assist the accurate recollection of a piece of music - it can even be used to transmit that music to someone who has never heard the original performed. In that sense, it augments the individuals memory, but also their ability to sense things at a distance - both in time and space. Because of the value such technology brings, it was quickly highly rewarded and so became protected by law (which tends to be concerned with ensuring financial reward goes/stays where it is perceived it should be by those with power). This allowed the originator to gain reward not only from the initial performance, but from the transmission of the idea/music/etc through a medium other than direct experience. It also enabled/(required) 3rd parties to add value to this transmission process and they also gained reward from that process. Publishers of sheet music, shops who sold it and resellers all were able to gain a share of financial reward by adding value as the technology needed their help for it to work. This situation essentially continued as music became recorded and the fidelity of the transmission process improved. As each new technology came along which improved the fidelity of transmission, the value we attributed to the experience it granted us increased to, and as a result, it allowed greater accumulation of reward for those who could control the media, while those originating the memes could also (sometimes) gain greater reward too - but not necessarily. The media industries are just that - industries concerned with providing ad controlling a medium through which ideas are conveyed, making money from providing that medium. This is the old world, the world before the hive mind. ISPs (amongst others) provide the medium for the Internet, but completely disassociated from the content/ideas/memes being conveyed. Web sites such as FaceBook provide repositories for the memories/knowledge/ideas/memes, but as the things they hold are virtual, the ideas/concepts/memes can ebb and flow from one shore to another, endlessly duplicated and mutated in the process such that no one site can really be seen to "own" the content. Many services such as bittorrent even delegate responsibility for the storage down to the collective level. There are no barriers to bits and bytes moving wherever they are needed. Some "old media" are attempting to coral the content they seek to control behind pay walls, but that is a form of censorship, and as the saying goes, the Internet sees censorship as damage and just routes around it. In the case of paywalls, people who do have access act as vectors for the bits and bytes to leak out. They don't have to intentionally do so, but by sharing the thoughts and ideas they have around that "protected" content, it leaks. Essentially then, the Internet now provides a shared consciousness infrastructure such that what is in my mind can flow through it freely to your mind as you read this without the need for any moderation or "added value" beyond the infrastructure itself. Old media industries which fail to recognise this are quickly seeing the revenue streams on which they relied evaporating, and will continue to do so unless they reinvent themselves as "content creation industries" rather than media industries. The media to transmit ideas is no longer scarce or valued, it is becoming ubiquitous and universal, and taken for granted. Currently, the "music industry" (read: music media industry) continues to bemoan the "losses" they feel they are suffering due to piracy. In fact, what has happened is that everyone can now transmit music with incredible fidelity and the "added value" they used to rely on being valued and hence gratefully rewarded for is now essentially unnecessary. The barriers between an artist creating music and being able to share it with the world is now essentially nil. As an example, I've been creating lots of tunes recently and I've been able to put them online (through Soundcloud) and share them with the world for free. Now, one might feel the music I've created is awful - that's fine, I'm not that keen on it myself ;) and I certainly wouldn't pay for it or expect anyone else to pay for it either - I might think music being created by recognised artists is also awful too. The point though is artists can now share their works easily without the need for a media industry to mediate the exchange. Now, producing (quality) music can be expensive still. Studio time, engineers, equipment hire, travel expenses and 1,001 other things all cost money, and artists who produce expensive music will need a way to recoup those costs if their efforts are to be sustainable - but they can no longer rely on rewards accumulated through the transmission of their work to do this as that process is no longer valued. The film industry (currently) can still rely on accumulating revenue from the transmission process as people still value attending the cinema as a "value added experience", but the revenue from content for consumption in the home is certainly under threat as the speed of the Internet connections and infrastructure make the delivery of "content on demand" by using old technology of physically shipping media around the world much less valued (or by fewer people at least so far). Old media companies that fail to recognise this fundamental shift in the balance of where people attribute value will increasingly struggle. It is only by shifting their business models to be content creation industries seeking renumeration through adding value in other ways that they can continue. Now, how does all this relate to education? Historically, (bad) education has been about cramming young minds full of facts with the hope that wisdom will spontaneously emerge. Good education has always been about empowering people with a set of tools through which to see the world. In a world of the hive mind and "perfect recall", even of events which happened to other people in other places and at other times, the bad way of seeing education becomes even more obviously pointless. Clearly, there is still a need to provide some framework of basic "knowledge" with which to evaluate the collective knowledge of the hive mind, but the days of measuring someone's worth by their ability to recall facts has surely past. As Martin Bean said in his speech at ALT-C 2009, education needs to be about fostering the knowledge-able, not the knowledgable. Yet, much assessment in education is still based on the arbitrary recollection of facts/ideas from the limited local wetware available to us as individuals. In most exams, we cut people off from the hive mind and collective consciousness and then expect to assess their performance, when that environment is entirely alien, and akin to cutting off half of their brain. In a very real sense, our individuality has been partially subsumed within the hive mind, but we are also greatly augmented by it, which is why most of us willing engage with this technology. Most in education would now be incredulous if a teacher/professor insisted that students didn't use the Internet at all. Even in class, it is now common for students to be able to "check" things online, or to seek further clarification of points they may have missed, and many workplaces also now encourage, even expect, people to utilise the Internet to augment their knowledge when necessary. ...and yet, we still often assess students by artificially isolating them from the collective, despite this being unrealistic of the real world. Higher education in the UK is facing drastic changes to funding, in much the same way that the media industries are. Where HEIs have historically been the medium through which individuals can access materials (lectures/books etc) and then gain accreditation, much content is now available "for free" on the Internet (iTunesU etc) and the private sector is almost certainly going to provide flexible ways for students to gain accreditation of their skills/knowledge-ability. The business model on which UK HEI is based will need drastic and rapid re-invention if they are going to survive as the private sector is certainly going to seize any niches it can, which may otherwise leave existing HEIs as untenable. Content creation will be done by the best in the world and available for free. Assessment will be based on demonstrating real world benefit - which will mean demonstrating being knowledge-able, and so unlikely to be accurately assessed using exams or other artificial means of isolating students from the hive mind/collective consciousness. Revenue will be gained by demonstrating some other added value. That could be the study environment itself (libraries open 24/7), access to content behind pay walls (since the leaks are imperfect), access to experts directly (to provide a much greater augmentation of the individuals abilities by a more direct connection in the hive mind...perhaps with a commitment to provide this after graduation?)...who knows. Market forces will certainly influence where added services are valued, but sitting in a darkened room listening to an expert talk quite possibly won't be highly valued when the same content is available on demand provided by the worlds best presenters. So, any industry based on the value of the media for transmission of ideas/content/knowledge has been undermined by the Internet fostering a collective consciousness and memory. Any industry which fails to recognise that and resists it is doomed to fail. That goes for education as well as the traditional media industries. While that means difficult changing times for those industries, it is for the greater good of society as a whole. - Posted using BlogPress from mobile device
The Internet is a wonderful tool for bringing people together. Social networking tools such as Facebook dominate many of the most visited sites on the web and almost every site includes a comments section. The number of ways we can interact with other people online grow and increase in complexity continually too. The Internet also remembers everything. This is both a good thing and a problem with much debate and effort currently looking for how to give it a way to forget the bad things (bad in this context can mean a lot of different things). Access to the Internet is also becoming both ubiquitous and universal. Putting these together is oft referred to as a manifestation of a Hive Mind. A kind of collective consciousness in which ideas spread as memes, where you can get answers to things you don't know yourself just by asking as someone somewhere is bound to know what you need. But it goes beyond a collective consciousness, it is also a collective memory. With a simple YouTube search, I can "remember" exactly what it was like (at least the visual/audio aspects) to witness the assassination of an american president who died before I was even born. I can "remember" what it is like to journey to the moon, including the entire dialogue of the Apollo 11 crew all the way there and back, including those parts not transmitted to earth. With music, with services such Spotify, I can "remember" a tune with perfect clarity on demand, wherever I am and at whatever time I choose. Let's take that last point first and imagine back what life would have been like before recorded music, before sheet music, before any technology had been invented to help share the essential transient nature of music. I focus here on music, but the principle applies to books, video, news etc just as well. At the time before any mechanism to record music, the only way to experience music "on demand" would be to remember it. Our memory is not perfect but it is quite effective. In that way, as soon as a piece of music is performed and experience by someone else, it is "owned" in some way by the listener since they can recall it later. The music gains a virtual existence in the mind which can not be controlled, or regulated by the originator. However, the wetware of our brain gives far from perfect recall; how many songs can you remember exactly, note perfect with all the words? A few maybe, but probably not many. So, as soon as technology came along which could augment that recollection process, it became highly valued. Sheet music (for those who can read it) could assist the accurate recollection of a piece of music - it can even be used to transmit that music to someone who has never heard the original performed. In that sense, it augments the individuals memory, but also their ability to sense things at a distance - both in time and space. Because of the value such technology brings, it was quickly highly rewarded and so became protected by law (which tends to be concerned with ensuring financial reward goes/stays where it is perceived it should be by those with power). This allowed the originator to gain reward not only from the initial performance, but from the transmission of the idea/music/etc through a medium other than direct experience. It also enabled/(required) 3rd parties to add value to this transmission process and they also gained reward from that process. Publishers of sheet music, shops who sold it and resellers all were able to gain a share of financial reward by adding value as the technology needed their help for it to work. This situation essentially continued as music became recorded and the fidelity of the transmission process improved. As each new technology came along which improved the fidelity of transmission, the value we attributed to the experience it granted us increased to, and as a result, it allowed greater accumulation of reward for those who could control the media, while those originating the memes could also (sometimes) gain greater reward too - but not necessarily. The media industries are just that - industries concerned with providing ad controlling a medium through which ideas are conveyed, making money from providing that medium. This is the old world, the world before the hive mind. ISPs (amongst others) provide the medium for the Internet, but completely disassociated from the content/ideas/memes being conveyed. Web sites such as FaceBook provide repositories for the memories/knowledge/ideas/memes, but as the things they hold are virtual, the ideas/concepts/memes can ebb and flow from one shore to another, endlessly duplicated and mutated in the process such that no one site can really be seen to "own" the content. Many services such as bittorrent even delegate responsibility for the storage down to the collective level. There are no barriers to bits and bytes moving wherever they are needed. Some "old media" are attempting to coral the content they seek to control behind pay walls, but that is a form of censorship, and as the saying goes, the Internet sees censorship as damage and just routes around it. In the case of paywalls, people who do have access act as vectors for the bits and bytes to leak out. They don't have to intentionally do so, but by sharing the thoughts and ideas they have around that "protected" content, it leaks. Essentially then, the Internet now provides a shared consciousness infrastructure such that what is in my mind can flow through it freely to your mind as you read this without the need for any moderation or "added value" beyond the infrastructure itself. Old media industries which fail to recognise this are quickly seeing the revenue streams on which they relied evaporating, and will continue to do so unless they reinvent themselves as "content creation industries" rather than media industries. The media to transmit ideas is no longer scarce or valued, it is becoming ubiquitous and universal, and taken for granted. Currently, the "music industry" (read: music media industry) continues to bemoan the "losses" they feel they are suffering due to piracy. In fact, what has happened is that everyone can now transmit music with incredible fidelity and the "added value" they used to rely on being valued and hence gratefully rewarded for is now essentially unnecessary. The barriers between an artist creating music and being able to share it with the world is now essentially nil. As an example, I've been creating lots of tunes recently and I've been able to put them online (through Soundcloud) and share them with the world for free. Now, one might feel the music I've created is awful - that's fine, I'm not that keen on it myself ;) and I certainly wouldn't pay for it or expect anyone else to pay for it either - I might think music being created by recognised artists is also awful too. The point though is artists can now share their works easily without the need for a media industry to mediate the exchange. Now, producing (quality) music can be expensive still. Studio time, engineers, equipment hire, travel expenses and 1,001 other things all cost money, and artists who produce expensive music will need a way to recoup those costs if their efforts are to be sustainable - but they can no longer rely on rewards accumulated through the transmission of their work to do this as that process is no longer valued. The film industry (currently) can still rely on accumulating revenue from the transmission process as people still value attending the cinema as a "value added experience", but the revenue from content for consumption in the home is certainly under threat as the speed of the Internet connections and infrastructure make the delivery of "content on demand" by using old technology of physically shipping media around the world much less valued (or by fewer people at least so far). Old media companies that fail to recognise this fundamental shift in the balance of where people attribute value will increasingly struggle. It is only by shifting their business models to be content creation industries seeking renumeration through adding value in other ways that they can continue. Now, how does all this relate to education? Historically, (bad) education has been about cramming young minds full of facts with the hope that wisdom will spontaneously emerge. Good education has always been about empowering people with a set of tools through which to see the world. In a world of the hive mind and "perfect recall", even of events which happened to other people in other places and at other times, the bad way of seeing education becomes even more obviously pointless. Clearly, there is still a need to provide some framework of basic "knowledge" with which to evaluate the collective knowledge of the hive mind, but the days of measuring someone's worth by their ability to recall facts has surely past. As Martin Bean said in his speech at ALT-C 2009, education needs to be about fostering the knowledge-able, not the knowledgable. Yet, much assessment in education is still based on the arbitrary recollection of facts/ideas from the limited local wetware available to us as individuals. In most exams, we cut people off from the hive mind and collective consciousness and then expect to assess their performance, when that environment is entirely alien, and akin to cutting off half of their brain. In a very real sense, our individuality has been partially subsumed within the hive mind, but we are also greatly augmented by it, which is why most of us willing engage with this technology. Most in education would now be incredulous if a teacher/professor insisted that students didn't use the Internet at all. Even in class, it is now common for students to be able to "check" things online, or to seek further clarification of points they may have missed, and many workplaces also now encourage, even expect, people to utilise the Internet to augment their knowledge when necessary. ...and yet, we still often assess students by artificially isolating them from the collective, despite this being unrealistic of the real world. Higher education in the UK is facing drastic changes to funding, in much the same way that the media industries are. Where HEIs have historically been the medium through which individuals can access materials (lectures/books etc) and then gain accreditation, much content is now available "for free" on the Internet (iTunesU etc) and the private sector is almost certainly going to provide flexible ways for students to gain accreditation of their skills/knowledge-ability. The business model on which UK HEI is based will need drastic and rapid re-invention if they are going to survive as the private sector is certainly going to seize any niches it can, which may otherwise leave existing HEIs as untenable. Content creation will be done by the best in the world and available for free. Assessment will be based on demonstrating real world benefit - which will mean demonstrating being knowledge-able, and so unlikely to be accurately assessed using exams or other artificial means of isolating students from the hive mind/collective consciousness. Revenue will be gained by demonstrating some other added value. That could be the study environment itself (libraries open 24/7), access to content behind pay walls (since the leaks are imperfect), access to experts directly (to provide a much greater augmentation of the individuals abilities by a more direct connection in the hive mind...perhaps with a commitment to provide this after graduation?)...who knows. Market forces will certainly influence where added services are valued, but sitting in a darkened room listening to an expert talk quite possibly won't be highly valued when the same content is available on demand provided by the worlds best presenters. So, any industry based on the value of the media for transmission of ideas/content/knowledge has been undermined by the Internet fostering a collective consciousness and memory. Any industry which fails to recognise that and resists it is doomed to fail. That goes for education as well as the traditional media industries. While that means difficult changing times for those industries, it is for the greater good of society as a whole. - Posted using BlogPress from mobile device
2011/02/20
IPad app review Korg iMS-20 Analog Synth
Firstly, 
despite the title of this app, this is of course not an analogue synth of course, but it is a very good simulation of one, in this case, the Korg MS-20 (from 1978-1983) monophonic synth. It feels very analogue and really, its close enough to it that it justifies the use of the word in the name. The original device has been used by artists such as Gorillaz, Daft Punk, Goldfrapp, OMD and Aphex Twin....so this app has a lot to live up to.
What this app is, is a simulation of an (old) analogue synth (and a sequencer) by one of the most recognised names in professional music. Given that heritage, its not surprising that it isn't the cheapest of apps (I bought it for £9.49 but I see its since gone up to £19.99 - worth waiting for a price drop again perhaps). When you run the app, you see a loading screen showing what the genuine old synth looked like and it is quite intimidating, looking more like a home electronics kit for kids than a musical instrument, with only the piano like keyboard a clue that it is in fact a musical instrument (in fact, much much more than just an instrument - more on that later)
While I have no personal direct experience of the original synth, there are plenty of examples of how it sounds and what it can do out there, and based on what I could find to compare with and based on the statements of genuine professional musicians, this app makes an amazingly close simulation of that original kit.
That is both it's strength and weakness. The original was quite clearly a monster of a machine - capable of the most incredible creativity, but also a mind boggling array of options and technology that can be certainly quite daunting.
Take a
look at the initial screen you are presented with when running this app for the first time. Having seen a photo of the original in the loading screen, the similarity is clear, and OK, the keyboard at the bottom looks relatively familiar and inviting, but the array of tiny knobs, buttons and bazaar yellow patch cables is initially quite off putting. Certainly, the menu at the top of the screen with it's multiple sections, each with many many sub screens full of additional knobs and switches is hardly intuitive...and yet, given a little while, it really all works very very well.
That initial screen is actually a simplified view of the assortment of options around just the main synth part of the device.
For example, tapping the keyboard button at the top, hides the pop up recording keyboard to fill the screen with more of the options available. All of this is still available with the keyboard displayed too, but you have to scroll the panel to see it all then. On this screen, the top bank is what is "recorded" (programmed is probably a better term) for the current "pattern". each pattern can have a different synth sound, a different set of notes/parameters for the notes and a different drum pattern. A "song" is made up of up to 256 separate patterns.
Before getting to making songs though, its worth noting that you can also zoom in on the settings for the synth, which makes tweaking all those knobs a little less fiddly
but not by much. The synth is a collection of 2 "Voltage Controlled Oscillators" (VCOs), with a selection of waveforms and parameters for each. The 2 main oscillators can be combined, along with a frequency modulator, and shaped with various filters (Highpass and lowpass) and shaped by an envelope with attack, decay, sustain and release along with pitch and numerous other parameters. These settings alone are enough to produce a bewildering array of very different sounds, although even after much playing, I'm still struggling to really understand how the different sections interact and as a result, most sounds are arrived at with a lot more trial and error than intention - but that is part of the joy of playing with the thing - the feeling of exploration and discovery.
Thankfully, unlike the original, when you do find just the settings you like for that swooping laser sound or crashing base, you can save all the knob position and patching routes to load again whenever you like. There are also a number of pre-defined settings you can load to get you started. I can only imagine that musicians first getting such kit back in the 70s with no such luxury would have had to spend a lot longer getting familiar with the thing before they could get anything like the sounds they wanted :)
This is only the beginning
of how the sounds of the synth can be tweaked though. Zoomed in, the patch panel is a little more obvious as the tiny white "print" can be read, but its still a magic black box without understanding how the different elements work together and what each does. Again, after a lot of playing, I'm still only scratching the surface of really understanding any of this part, but it's clearly very powerful in how the wave forms going through the synth can be taken out and redirected into additional/different (virtual) circuitry. Thats the key I think to getting any understanding of what is going on - remembering that its all about voltages and waveforms, some of which become triggers for events and clocks for other bits of the system in a complex feedback loop. One thing I think the app can do that I'm not sure how the original would have managed is that it only lets you plug the output signals into places in the circuits for inputs. Heaven knowns what happened on the original of you tried feeding a voltage back in where another voltage was being produced!
The top section of the synth has 16 separate "notes", each with 12 parameters arranged in 4 sets selected by the white buttons on the left. The first bank are the "note", the "octave" and the "length" of each note. Length isn't what it sounds like however as the way the synth plays a pattern is at a fixed rate for each "note" (fixed meaning a rate set by another dial on a different screen), but length is the nearest term I can think of. The other banks of settings include volume, pan, and 3 parameters than can be selected to tweak (almost?) any of the settings in the dials below individually for each note. This works simplest for things like the high and low pass filters to give a characteristic "sweeping" type sound.
The next screen to look at is the drum pattern settings.
Anyone familiar with an old drum machine will probably recognise the way of setting a drum to sound or not on each of 16 beats in a pattern. This synth has up to 6 different "drum" sounds (7 channels in total with the synth track), with each drum being effectively a synth in it's own right with all the same settings and options. So for each drum sound, you can select to edit the sound and you are presented with a very similar screen to the synth screen.
Here, I've selected to edit the drum pattern in more detail rather than the sound (as the sound editing screen is really so similar to the synth screen). This shows the dual X-Y touch pads that can be used to interactively play or "record" edits to the various parameters instead of the piano keyboard.
Next
up is the master mixing screen. Each of the 7 channels can have a different overall pan applied (on top of the individual note pan settings), and an overall volume. You can select to mute any channel individually, or choose "solo" to mute all other channels except that one. There is also a master effect which can be selected from things like reverb, delay, chorus and flanger. This is again on top of the same choice of effect which can have been applied to each channel individually earlier in the sound chain!
Songs are made
of a sequence of patterns, and this is the screen for doing that. Here, the slider chooses which set of 16 places for patterns in the song is selected for the buttons below. Each button can be assigned to one of the 16 patterns on the pads below that (by clicking a button and then tapping the pad to assign to that slot). There are 2 special options too to either loop the song when the sequencer reaches that slot or end. The pads can also be "played" in real time, either changing the pattern being played as soon as a new one is pressed or sync'd to the track seamlessly. There is also a mixer on this screen for each channel and a BPM setting (which is what changes how quickly each note plays back on the synth and drum screens). You can choose to play the whole song or repeatedly play the selected pattern (until a new one is selected) using the menu at the top.
Last few things to note (excuse the pun), are the ability to save songs (with all the patterns/synth settings etc)
This bit is the nearest to looking like a standard iPad app. It integrates with Soundcloud for sharing your creations with others (my efforts with this app and others are here http://soundcloud.com/sputuk to get an indication of what it can sound like). There is also a community section on Soundcloud where everything everyone shares with the app is collected. One great thing is that depending on how people choose to share their creations, you can download their original rather than just the resulting song so you can dissect it and tweak it yourself to learn from how they produced certain sounds and effects - very useful for learning how to get what you want from the app :)
Finally,
this is the global menu for tweaking a few settings of how the app behaves (such as where the text pops up showing you the value of a dial when you're adjusting it) and also "bouncing" your song or individual patterns - which is the musician term for creating a final mix down of the sounds into a single file (in this case, wav files).
So, enough of how the app looks and works - I have only included so much on that because I think it's the only way to convey how complex, flexible but also bewildering this app is. The important things are, does it work, what can it do, and is it worth the money.
Does it work? Absolutely. I've not had it crash once and despite the non-standard look and feel of the UI, it all works really well once you get used to it.
What can it do? Well, just about anything you're likely to have heard in the form of electronica music. Dance, trance, pop, dub - you name it and you can create a suitable set of sounds and beats. There are lots and lots of examples on Soundcloud besides my few (search for iMS-20) which show the huge range of styles and sounds it's capable of. What I haven't even touched on here is how it can work with external midi equipment, making your iPad the hub of multiple controllers and keyboards acting as the synth and sequencer while using real full sized velocity sensitive keyboards and drum pads. Korg have a whole set of such items as well as those from other manufacturers, and these can be used through the camera kit thanks to the latest iOS4 update which includes CoreMidi support. This is something I certainly intend to investigate further. NB if you are thinking of this option, there is a web site that details which midi kit works through the camera kit and which doesn't. Most it seems does, but some which need to draw power through the USB will need connecting through a powered hub. I think there is also scope for someone to create a camera kit adaptor that allows charging the ipad at the same time. There is also a new device, the iConnectMIDI due to be released Q2 2011 that acts as a "midi hub" for the older 5 pin din devices as well as multiple USB midi devices and up to 2 iPad/iPod/iPhones at the same time. The videos of this kit working with apps such as iMS-20 as well as external hardware synths and multple simultaneous keyboards/pad (with up to 5 people jamming together on just an ipod and an ipad) shows just how advanced this stuff can get.
Is it worth the money? Well, at less than £10 (when I bought it) for a synth that sounds like something costing well over £1000 for vintage versions of the original (manuals for the original seem to cost as much as this app!), and with the ability to use it professionally for recording or live performances especially with the addition of midi controllers, I'd have to say yes. It's amazing fun to play with and despite making music so far that I would usually really hate to listen to, I'm having great fun making the music. Yet another example of how the myth of the iPad only being suitable for consuming content has been blown out of the water :)
- Posted using BlogPress from mobile device
despite the title of this app, this is of course not an analogue synth of course, but it is a very good simulation of one, in this case, the Korg MS-20 (from 1978-1983) monophonic synth. It feels very analogue and really, its close enough to it that it justifies the use of the word in the name. The original device has been used by artists such as Gorillaz, Daft Punk, Goldfrapp, OMD and Aphex Twin....so this app has a lot to live up to.What this app is, is a simulation of an (old) analogue synth (and a sequencer) by one of the most recognised names in professional music. Given that heritage, its not surprising that it isn't the cheapest of apps (I bought it for £9.49 but I see its since gone up to £19.99 - worth waiting for a price drop again perhaps). When you run the app, you see a loading screen showing what the genuine old synth looked like and it is quite intimidating, looking more like a home electronics kit for kids than a musical instrument, with only the piano like keyboard a clue that it is in fact a musical instrument (in fact, much much more than just an instrument - more on that later)
While I have no personal direct experience of the original synth, there are plenty of examples of how it sounds and what it can do out there, and based on what I could find to compare with and based on the statements of genuine professional musicians, this app makes an amazingly close simulation of that original kit.
That is both it's strength and weakness. The original was quite clearly a monster of a machine - capable of the most incredible creativity, but also a mind boggling array of options and technology that can be certainly quite daunting.
Take a
look at the initial screen you are presented with when running this app for the first time. Having seen a photo of the original in the loading screen, the similarity is clear, and OK, the keyboard at the bottom looks relatively familiar and inviting, but the array of tiny knobs, buttons and bazaar yellow patch cables is initially quite off putting. Certainly, the menu at the top of the screen with it's multiple sections, each with many many sub screens full of additional knobs and switches is hardly intuitive...and yet, given a little while, it really all works very very well.That initial screen is actually a simplified view of the assortment of options around just the main synth part of the device.
For example, tapping the keyboard button at the top, hides the pop up recording keyboard to fill the screen with more of the options available. All of this is still available with the keyboard displayed too, but you have to scroll the panel to see it all then. On this screen, the top bank is what is "recorded" (programmed is probably a better term) for the current "pattern". each pattern can have a different synth sound, a different set of notes/parameters for the notes and a different drum pattern. A "song" is made up of up to 256 separate patterns.Before getting to making songs though, its worth noting that you can also zoom in on the settings for the synth, which makes tweaking all those knobs a little less fiddly
but not by much. The synth is a collection of 2 "Voltage Controlled Oscillators" (VCOs), with a selection of waveforms and parameters for each. The 2 main oscillators can be combined, along with a frequency modulator, and shaped with various filters (Highpass and lowpass) and shaped by an envelope with attack, decay, sustain and release along with pitch and numerous other parameters. These settings alone are enough to produce a bewildering array of very different sounds, although even after much playing, I'm still struggling to really understand how the different sections interact and as a result, most sounds are arrived at with a lot more trial and error than intention - but that is part of the joy of playing with the thing - the feeling of exploration and discovery.Thankfully, unlike the original, when you do find just the settings you like for that swooping laser sound or crashing base, you can save all the knob position and patching routes to load again whenever you like. There are also a number of pre-defined settings you can load to get you started. I can only imagine that musicians first getting such kit back in the 70s with no such luxury would have had to spend a lot longer getting familiar with the thing before they could get anything like the sounds they wanted :)
This is only the beginning
of how the sounds of the synth can be tweaked though. Zoomed in, the patch panel is a little more obvious as the tiny white "print" can be read, but its still a magic black box without understanding how the different elements work together and what each does. Again, after a lot of playing, I'm still only scratching the surface of really understanding any of this part, but it's clearly very powerful in how the wave forms going through the synth can be taken out and redirected into additional/different (virtual) circuitry. Thats the key I think to getting any understanding of what is going on - remembering that its all about voltages and waveforms, some of which become triggers for events and clocks for other bits of the system in a complex feedback loop. One thing I think the app can do that I'm not sure how the original would have managed is that it only lets you plug the output signals into places in the circuits for inputs. Heaven knowns what happened on the original of you tried feeding a voltage back in where another voltage was being produced!The top section of the synth has 16 separate "notes", each with 12 parameters arranged in 4 sets selected by the white buttons on the left. The first bank are the "note", the "octave" and the "length" of each note. Length isn't what it sounds like however as the way the synth plays a pattern is at a fixed rate for each "note" (fixed meaning a rate set by another dial on a different screen), but length is the nearest term I can think of. The other banks of settings include volume, pan, and 3 parameters than can be selected to tweak (almost?) any of the settings in the dials below individually for each note. This works simplest for things like the high and low pass filters to give a characteristic "sweeping" type sound.
The next screen to look at is the drum pattern settings.
Anyone familiar with an old drum machine will probably recognise the way of setting a drum to sound or not on each of 16 beats in a pattern. This synth has up to 6 different "drum" sounds (7 channels in total with the synth track), with each drum being effectively a synth in it's own right with all the same settings and options. So for each drum sound, you can select to edit the sound and you are presented with a very similar screen to the synth screen.
Here, I've selected to edit the drum pattern in more detail rather than the sound (as the sound editing screen is really so similar to the synth screen). This shows the dual X-Y touch pads that can be used to interactively play or "record" edits to the various parameters instead of the piano keyboard.Next
up is the master mixing screen. Each of the 7 channels can have a different overall pan applied (on top of the individual note pan settings), and an overall volume. You can select to mute any channel individually, or choose "solo" to mute all other channels except that one. There is also a master effect which can be selected from things like reverb, delay, chorus and flanger. This is again on top of the same choice of effect which can have been applied to each channel individually earlier in the sound chain!Songs are made
of a sequence of patterns, and this is the screen for doing that. Here, the slider chooses which set of 16 places for patterns in the song is selected for the buttons below. Each button can be assigned to one of the 16 patterns on the pads below that (by clicking a button and then tapping the pad to assign to that slot). There are 2 special options too to either loop the song when the sequencer reaches that slot or end. The pads can also be "played" in real time, either changing the pattern being played as soon as a new one is pressed or sync'd to the track seamlessly. There is also a mixer on this screen for each channel and a BPM setting (which is what changes how quickly each note plays back on the synth and drum screens). You can choose to play the whole song or repeatedly play the selected pattern (until a new one is selected) using the menu at the top.Last few things to note (excuse the pun), are the ability to save songs (with all the patterns/synth settings etc)
This bit is the nearest to looking like a standard iPad app. It integrates with Soundcloud for sharing your creations with others (my efforts with this app and others are here http://soundcloud.com/sputuk to get an indication of what it can sound like). There is also a community section on Soundcloud where everything everyone shares with the app is collected. One great thing is that depending on how people choose to share their creations, you can download their original rather than just the resulting song so you can dissect it and tweak it yourself to learn from how they produced certain sounds and effects - very useful for learning how to get what you want from the app :)Finally,
this is the global menu for tweaking a few settings of how the app behaves (such as where the text pops up showing you the value of a dial when you're adjusting it) and also "bouncing" your song or individual patterns - which is the musician term for creating a final mix down of the sounds into a single file (in this case, wav files).So, enough of how the app looks and works - I have only included so much on that because I think it's the only way to convey how complex, flexible but also bewildering this app is. The important things are, does it work, what can it do, and is it worth the money.
Does it work? Absolutely. I've not had it crash once and despite the non-standard look and feel of the UI, it all works really well once you get used to it.
What can it do? Well, just about anything you're likely to have heard in the form of electronica music. Dance, trance, pop, dub - you name it and you can create a suitable set of sounds and beats. There are lots and lots of examples on Soundcloud besides my few (search for iMS-20) which show the huge range of styles and sounds it's capable of. What I haven't even touched on here is how it can work with external midi equipment, making your iPad the hub of multiple controllers and keyboards acting as the synth and sequencer while using real full sized velocity sensitive keyboards and drum pads. Korg have a whole set of such items as well as those from other manufacturers, and these can be used through the camera kit thanks to the latest iOS4 update which includes CoreMidi support. This is something I certainly intend to investigate further. NB if you are thinking of this option, there is a web site that details which midi kit works through the camera kit and which doesn't. Most it seems does, but some which need to draw power through the USB will need connecting through a powered hub. I think there is also scope for someone to create a camera kit adaptor that allows charging the ipad at the same time. There is also a new device, the iConnectMIDI due to be released Q2 2011 that acts as a "midi hub" for the older 5 pin din devices as well as multiple USB midi devices and up to 2 iPad/iPod/iPhones at the same time. The videos of this kit working with apps such as iMS-20 as well as external hardware synths and multple simultaneous keyboards/pad (with up to 5 people jamming together on just an ipod and an ipad) shows just how advanced this stuff can get.
Is it worth the money? Well, at less than £10 (when I bought it) for a synth that sounds like something costing well over £1000 for vintage versions of the original (manuals for the original seem to cost as much as this app!), and with the ability to use it professionally for recording or live performances especially with the addition of midi controllers, I'd have to say yes. It's amazing fun to play with and despite making music so far that I would usually really hate to listen to, I'm having great fun making the music. Yet another example of how the myth of the iPad only being suitable for consuming content has been blown out of the water :)
- Posted using BlogPress from mobile device
2011/02/01
IPad App review CartoMap - basic CAD editor
I'm not a great user of CAD but there are some occasions where it is the right tool for the job - room planning for example where the actual dimensions can be modelled for all the items.
As a result, I've been keeping an eye out for a "proper" CAD application for the iPad for a while and recently I spotted CartoMap and decided to give it a whirl.
I'd previously tried the AutoDesk AutoCad WS app and had been disappointed to discover it is only really a viewer, but CartoMap appeared from the review to give full editing features, and thankfully that's what it does.
The interface for this app has clearly inherited it's design from desktop based applications rather than sticking to the usual iPad ways of interacting. Some of these differences are for the better and much more suited to "big" applications like CAD. For example, If you choose to open a file when you already have a file open, rather than just prompting you to Save or Cancel, this app allows a Save changes, Close losing changes or cancel. That ability to close a file you've edited without saving the changes is often lacking from other apps, but it makes sense and with CAD being so easy to mess things up and need to revert to a saved version, it's welcome in this app.
The interface is quite minimal, leaving as much of the screen available to view your work as possible, and when you start adding or editing items, the interface gets even more out of the way leaving only a small window at the top prompting you what it is expecting next (eg to enter the radius of a circle) and a couple of little icons in the corners, one of which pops up a quick "snap to guide" selection tool.
The usual basic CAD drawing tools are present. Lines, arcs, polylines, circles, rectangles, points and text are obvious in the pop up tools. Other tools include dimension lines, creating and using symbols (collections of other drawing objects into a single new meta-object), delete and settings.
The interface works well and allows all the usual options of entering coordinates directly or using snap to guides for the usual list of points including, end points, intersections, mid-points, centre points of curves etc.
The app also includes an automatic snap to detection method where you just tap somewhere close to the snap point you want to use and the app presents you with a list of the points nearby to choose from. It does this by presenting a new screen with the snap to point shown with a pin and the element it relates to highlighted, which works very quickly simply and intuitively.
I'm far from an expert in CAD, but the little I have tried with it so far has all worked fine, but it is only basic editing. You wouldn't want to be creating the next London Gerkin floor plans with it - but you can load the plans in the field and could probably make slight corrections or additions and then sync those edits back in the office. As you can see, there a various file transfer options using wifi, iTunes or sending the file as an email. I also tested opening a file from Safari using the "open in..." option. This worked, although when it first displayed the more complicated file I used as a test, it just displayed a blank screen, but when I closed it and re-opened it, it worked fine.
It is not without it's bugs, even with the little testing and playing I've done it has crashed a few times on very simple files, but with regular saves just in case, it's possible to work with it.
I've probably missed mentioning 90% of the things this app can do, but if I say it includes layers, DWG/DXF/CTM files support, multiple undo/redo, Unicode support, cut/extend objects then I've at least mentioned some of them :)
It's not cheap in App terms at £11.99, but if it does what you need then it's probably cheap at twice the price.
- Posted using BlogPress from mobile device
As a result, I've been keeping an eye out for a "proper" CAD application for the iPad for a while and recently I spotted CartoMap and decided to give it a whirl.
I'd previously tried the AutoDesk AutoCad WS app and had been disappointed to discover it is only really a viewer, but CartoMap appeared from the review to give full editing features, and thankfully that's what it does.
The interface for this app has clearly inherited it's design from desktop based applications rather than sticking to the usual iPad ways of interacting. Some of these differences are for the better and much more suited to "big" applications like CAD. For example, If you choose to open a file when you already have a file open, rather than just prompting you to Save or Cancel, this app allows a Save changes, Close losing changes or cancel. That ability to close a file you've edited without saving the changes is often lacking from other apps, but it makes sense and with CAD being so easy to mess things up and need to revert to a saved version, it's welcome in this app.
The interface is quite minimal, leaving as much of the screen available to view your work as possible, and when you start adding or editing items, the interface gets even more out of the way leaving only a small window at the top prompting you what it is expecting next (eg to enter the radius of a circle) and a couple of little icons in the corners, one of which pops up a quick "snap to guide" selection tool.
The usual basic CAD drawing tools are present. Lines, arcs, polylines, circles, rectangles, points and text are obvious in the pop up tools. Other tools include dimension lines, creating and using symbols (collections of other drawing objects into a single new meta-object), delete and settings.
The interface works well and allows all the usual options of entering coordinates directly or using snap to guides for the usual list of points including, end points, intersections, mid-points, centre points of curves etc.
The app also includes an automatic snap to detection method where you just tap somewhere close to the snap point you want to use and the app presents you with a list of the points nearby to choose from. It does this by presenting a new screen with the snap to point shown with a pin and the element it relates to highlighted, which works very quickly simply and intuitively.
I'm far from an expert in CAD, but the little I have tried with it so far has all worked fine, but it is only basic editing. You wouldn't want to be creating the next London Gerkin floor plans with it - but you can load the plans in the field and could probably make slight corrections or additions and then sync those edits back in the office. As you can see, there a various file transfer options using wifi, iTunes or sending the file as an email. I also tested opening a file from Safari using the "open in..." option. This worked, although when it first displayed the more complicated file I used as a test, it just displayed a blank screen, but when I closed it and re-opened it, it worked fine.
It is not without it's bugs, even with the little testing and playing I've done it has crashed a few times on very simple files, but with regular saves just in case, it's possible to work with it.
I've probably missed mentioning 90% of the things this app can do, but if I say it includes layers, DWG/DXF/CTM files support, multiple undo/redo, Unicode support, cut/extend objects then I've at least mentioned some of them :)
It's not cheap in App terms at £11.99, but if it does what you need then it's probably cheap at twice the price.
- Posted using BlogPress from mobile device
2011/01/29
Windows 7 Tablet - 7 reasons it sucks (and a few why it's good)
I had a brief opportunity to experience one of the latest generation of Windows 7 tablet devices on Friday and here are my views of it.
In brief - Windows 7 is not designed for a touch device and it makes for an awful user experience just putting a desktop operating system into a touch device.
The device I had time with is brand new RM tablet. First impression seeing it in someone else's hands at a few paces was positive. It has an immediately obvious difference to an iPad - a much wider form factor. One of the criticisms of the iPad for consuming content is that it's form factor doesn't conform to wide screen movie aspect ratios.
Once held, the RM tablet feels weighty, but not overly heavier feeling than an iPad. The stats show it is something like 30% heavier, but I think partially because of the different form factor, this isn't drastically obvious even when holding one of each in both hands.
The material of the case is nice to hold with a warm rubberiness that feels sure in the hand. Where with an iPad I was immediately glad I'd bought the Apple case as it felt very slippery without it, this RM tablet felt quite sure to hold - evidenced by how I felt confident holding someone else's device in one hand while flipping it over to photograph the reverse :)
So, with so many positives already in this review, why is the title of this post so negative? Well, once Windows loads and you start trying to use it, is when the problems really start.
Reason Windows Tablets Suck 1: Where are the apps?
By this I mean that the user interface metaphor of the desktop works for large screens where organising your documents is the focus of your activity. Mobile devices tend not to work that way. They have much less storage and you are much less likely to be doing a lot of work on a document.
Instead, mobile devices need to be task oriented, making switching from one task to the next (or between tasks quickly), as simple, quick and intuitive as possible.
Now, Windows 7 does include the task bar at the bottom, which is certainly useful, but notice that by default, despite Office having been installed, the icons to launch the various apps have not been added to the task bar. Instead, apps like Adobe Acrobat tend to add their icons to the desktop, which would be OK if that was the place to find and launch your apps, but it isn't. Microsoft has retained the Start button metaphor as the default place to find applications and to initiate all other tasks, but this mixed metaphor means that sometimes the place to launch your app will be on the task bar, sometimes it will be easiest to hide any running apps and use the desktop, and for probably the majority of things, you'll need to open the start menu and navigate a hierarchy of folders with small fiddly icons (compared to the size of your finger) and eventually after 4 or 5 taps and swipes you'll have launched the app you wanted.
...and don't even get me started on the apps that are running but "appear" (meaning hidden behind a tiny little arrow you have to tap to show them) in the system tray.
The iPad isn't ideal for this I know, but at least it is fairly consistent, and the use of a dedicated button (home) to either click or double click (now we have "multitasking" in iOS) removes any need to stop and think "where is my app?"
Reason Windows Tablets Suck 2: Where did all my screen space go?
Not only is Windows designed for large screens, but so are the apps it ships with, and so are most 3rd party apps. As an example, this shot shows Paint running as default on the RM Tablet. The use of a title bar on the window eats some space, the ever present task bar eats more, the menu tab takes more still, the status bar takes it's share, and finally the ribbon (with nice big finger stabbing friendly icons at least) eats a huge chunk.
After all that detritus on screen, the actual visible working space is only about half the size of the screen! Now I know, the ribbon can be minimised, so can the task bar, and the status bar can be turned off, but the point is that apps are not designed out of the box at least, for this form factor or user interaction mechanism.
This isn't insurmountable as apps can be written specifically for this device type, or could sense the device type and adjust it's behaviour accordingly - but will this happen? In terms of volume, Windows Tablets are a tiny share of the Windows market and so I expect most programmer will only design for the majority market - desktops, and the interface choices that work for a desktop are almost entirely inappropriate for a small form factor touch based device.
Reason Windows Tablets Suck 3: I have 10 fingers, not just 2
As the screen shot above also shows with Paint, it seems this device (the OS?) only supports the use of 2 fingers concurrently in screen at a time. Now, often, apps only require the use of one finger at a time - two when you start pinching and zooming, but many apps on the iPad allow the use of many more fingers concurrently for more complex interactions. If the hardware or OS only copes with 2 fingers at a time, the applications ability to provide a rich intuitive user interaction are much more limited.
Reason Windows Tablets Suck 4: Even the bits designed for tablets fail to work well
Microsoft decided that tablets were the next big thing many years before rumours of Apple working on the iPad even started, so how come I'm saying they still haven't got things right?
Well, the big difference between the tablets Microsoft designed Windows for and the current new devices is touch instead of a stylus. The tablets that use a stylus were a flop - I know, I had use of a few way back when and they were too heavy, too hungry on battery charge and too clumsy to hold in one hand and use the stylus with the other. By contrast, the iPad is easy to hold and use at the same time, it is positively frugal in it's use of power (in comparison to the earlier tablets) and "just works".
So surely, Microsoft will have re-examined all the user interface elements to make them more suitable for the less precise input of fingers rather than a stylus? To put it bluntly, no.
Getting the onscreen keyboard right for example is vital as that is likely to be something the user is required to use a lot, so what have Microsoft done to make it touch rather than stylus friendly? Well, not a lot as far as I can see. The OS and built in apps at least do tend to recognise when the cursor enters a field where the user might like to type something and it pops up a little keyboard button which when clicked opens the full thing, but this button tends to pop up in different places each time as it is relative to the cursor position in the text box, and things only get worse once the on screen keyboard appears.
The default size of the keyboard is fairly small. It can be resized and moved around the screen but resizing is awkward as it needs a fairly accurate tap on the edges, and because it floats over the top of the running apps (rather than "shoving them out of the way" which the iPad does) it hides a lot of the screen, which more often than not I found included the space I was trying to type in!
Worse than that, compared to the trimmed down keyboard Apple have designed for the iPad, Microsoft have thrown the kitchen sink at the number of keys it puts on screen at once. This better matches a physical keyboard and does allow direct access to more symbols than on the iPad, but this isn't a real keyboard and you tend to need those symbols a lot less often than the letters of the alphabet and number so it's a reasonable compromise to keep them out of the way unless you do need them.
In addition, Apple on the iPad have actually implemented 3 (or more?) different keyboards which appear depending on the context of what you are typing - so for example, when typing in a web address, the keyboard includes a key for typing ".com" with one key press. Microsoft haven't included any of this context sensitive nature into their onscreen keyboard.
What absolutely infuriated me within minutes though was that when launching IE, if I started trying to type a URL straight away, once the default home page loaded, the content of the address bar was refreshed, losing anything I had already typed and completely scrambling what I typed next by putting it somewhere in the middle of the address it put in. Again, this could be improved by changing the default home page to blank, but why should I have to customise a device to stop me wanting to throw it out of the window? (is that why Microsoft call their OS Windows? ;)
Reason Windows Tablets Suck 5: Even the basics go wrong
One thing that made the iPhone and later the iPod touch and iPad "magical" was the way it automatically rotated the display to match whatever way you hold the thing. Well, this RM tablet does that too...except you have to wait a second or so before it realises it needs to do anything, and then instead of smoothly animating the rotation, the screen worryingly goes completely blank before reappearing a noter second or so later - and then the apps running often take a little while to readjust themselves to the new size they need to be, and the on screen keyboard just sits dumbly wherever it was before, meaning you have to manually move it to a new more suitable location on screen.
Once you've done all that, you might expect to be able to hold it any type with your thumbs as you can with the iPad, but the keyboard clutter is even more apparent at this size and typing becomes even more of a chore. A pity as the wide screen aspect ratio actually gives a more usable amount of working screen space in portrait instead of landscape, although notice how the ribbon in Word has compressed itself a lot so that many more functions now need multiple taps to get at them. Again, this changing user experience just from rotating the device makes it much less intuitive.
Reason Windows Tablets Suck 6: Tiny interface elements
I've said it before so this might be counting the same fault many times, but Windows is designed for an interface that allows precise activation of its user interface elements. Microsoft do allow the DPI setting of Windows to be adjusted to make everything bigger - I tried this on the RM Tablet and it helps, but makes the impact on workable space on screen much worse too. You can also selectively resize some of the UI elements, which Acer do on the touch screen desktop and laptop we've had in the office recently.
Other apps tend not to work well with a change in DPI in Windows and even less provide a way to tweak the size of the buttons they use to make them suitable for a touch interface. Take the included calculator app in Windows as an example. Even with the DPI set to 125%, because the app is actually designed to be usable on screen alongside other apps, it is positively tiny on this touch device, with the buttons much smaller than my finger tip. I could still often get the right buttons, but if I were typing a column of numbers in, I wouldn't feel any confidence I could do that accurately without taking great care, and losing patience.
Reason Windows Tablets Doesn't Suck 1:Media Centre
One application I feel Microsoft has (inadvertently) got right for touch is Media Centre. They have designed this for Nettop PCs that plug into a TV and tend to have quite an inaccurate pointing device to select options. As a result, the way it takes over the whole screen and provides nice big buttons to select things works on a touch device quite nicely.
In addition, as I mentioned earlier, the wide screen form factor of the RM Tablet does lend itself to watching HD video in it's native widescreen format using the whole screen to the full. As a result, even just quickly running the sample HD video that ships with Windows 7, it's apparent that this would be one area that Windows devices might eclipse the iPad.
Reason Windows Tablets Doesn't Suck 2: It's Windows - just like my desktop/laptop
This I think is the key positive for Windows based touch devices. The same apps can be run as on someone's desktop, with the same file types, the same rendering of pages, it can network with other Windows devices for sharing files and it doesn't need any effort searching for an app that does the same as you are used to using on the desktop - you can just use the same app - paid for again if needed of course.
...and that last point is actually my last Reason Windows Tablets DO suck 7: who wants to pay desktop prices for apps on a touch device?
One of the joys of using the iPad is that the apps cost peanuts compared to buying fully fledged desktop Windows programs. Many cost nothing (ad supported sometimes), or often only 0.59p in the UK. An "expensive" iPad app tends to still be less than £10, for instance the "MS Office like" Pages/Numbers and Keynote are each only £9.99, meaning you can have a practically complete office suite for less than £30. Compare that to the cost of adding even the cheapest version of MS Office to a Windows Tablet device.
Summary:
Is there a place for a Windows Tablet in my life? No. It would drive me crazy in no time and I can already do almost everything I need for work and personal computing on my iPad.
Would I get one if I didn't already have an iPad - more difficult, but I would still opt for an iPad. Despite its own many foibles and compromises, the iPad "just works" and can do almost everything I need of a device - assuming I have access to a Windows device I can remote desktop to if needed :)
Can I see a place for it for some people? Yes. If the most important thing for you is application and file compatibility with other people running Windows, then the huge compromise in usability is probably worth it.
So there you go. Which would you get and why?
- Posted using BlogPress from mobile device
In brief - Windows 7 is not designed for a touch device and it makes for an awful user experience just putting a desktop operating system into a touch device.
The device I had time with is brand new RM tablet. First impression seeing it in someone else's hands at a few paces was positive. It has an immediately obvious difference to an iPad - a much wider form factor. One of the criticisms of the iPad for consuming content is that it's form factor doesn't conform to wide screen movie aspect ratios.
Once held, the RM tablet feels weighty, but not overly heavier feeling than an iPad. The stats show it is something like 30% heavier, but I think partially because of the different form factor, this isn't drastically obvious even when holding one of each in both hands.
The material of the case is nice to hold with a warm rubberiness that feels sure in the hand. Where with an iPad I was immediately glad I'd bought the Apple case as it felt very slippery without it, this RM tablet felt quite sure to hold - evidenced by how I felt confident holding someone else's device in one hand while flipping it over to photograph the reverse :)
So, with so many positives already in this review, why is the title of this post so negative? Well, once Windows loads and you start trying to use it, is when the problems really start.
Reason Windows Tablets Suck 1: Where are the apps?
By this I mean that the user interface metaphor of the desktop works for large screens where organising your documents is the focus of your activity. Mobile devices tend not to work that way. They have much less storage and you are much less likely to be doing a lot of work on a document.
Instead, mobile devices need to be task oriented, making switching from one task to the next (or between tasks quickly), as simple, quick and intuitive as possible.
Now, Windows 7 does include the task bar at the bottom, which is certainly useful, but notice that by default, despite Office having been installed, the icons to launch the various apps have not been added to the task bar. Instead, apps like Adobe Acrobat tend to add their icons to the desktop, which would be OK if that was the place to find and launch your apps, but it isn't. Microsoft has retained the Start button metaphor as the default place to find applications and to initiate all other tasks, but this mixed metaphor means that sometimes the place to launch your app will be on the task bar, sometimes it will be easiest to hide any running apps and use the desktop, and for probably the majority of things, you'll need to open the start menu and navigate a hierarchy of folders with small fiddly icons (compared to the size of your finger) and eventually after 4 or 5 taps and swipes you'll have launched the app you wanted.
...and don't even get me started on the apps that are running but "appear" (meaning hidden behind a tiny little arrow you have to tap to show them) in the system tray.
The iPad isn't ideal for this I know, but at least it is fairly consistent, and the use of a dedicated button (home) to either click or double click (now we have "multitasking" in iOS) removes any need to stop and think "where is my app?"
Reason Windows Tablets Suck 2: Where did all my screen space go?
Not only is Windows designed for large screens, but so are the apps it ships with, and so are most 3rd party apps. As an example, this shot shows Paint running as default on the RM Tablet. The use of a title bar on the window eats some space, the ever present task bar eats more, the menu tab takes more still, the status bar takes it's share, and finally the ribbon (with nice big finger stabbing friendly icons at least) eats a huge chunk.
After all that detritus on screen, the actual visible working space is only about half the size of the screen! Now I know, the ribbon can be minimised, so can the task bar, and the status bar can be turned off, but the point is that apps are not designed out of the box at least, for this form factor or user interaction mechanism.
This isn't insurmountable as apps can be written specifically for this device type, or could sense the device type and adjust it's behaviour accordingly - but will this happen? In terms of volume, Windows Tablets are a tiny share of the Windows market and so I expect most programmer will only design for the majority market - desktops, and the interface choices that work for a desktop are almost entirely inappropriate for a small form factor touch based device.
Reason Windows Tablets Suck 3: I have 10 fingers, not just 2
As the screen shot above also shows with Paint, it seems this device (the OS?) only supports the use of 2 fingers concurrently in screen at a time. Now, often, apps only require the use of one finger at a time - two when you start pinching and zooming, but many apps on the iPad allow the use of many more fingers concurrently for more complex interactions. If the hardware or OS only copes with 2 fingers at a time, the applications ability to provide a rich intuitive user interaction are much more limited.
Reason Windows Tablets Suck 4: Even the bits designed for tablets fail to work well
Microsoft decided that tablets were the next big thing many years before rumours of Apple working on the iPad even started, so how come I'm saying they still haven't got things right?
Well, the big difference between the tablets Microsoft designed Windows for and the current new devices is touch instead of a stylus. The tablets that use a stylus were a flop - I know, I had use of a few way back when and they were too heavy, too hungry on battery charge and too clumsy to hold in one hand and use the stylus with the other. By contrast, the iPad is easy to hold and use at the same time, it is positively frugal in it's use of power (in comparison to the earlier tablets) and "just works".
So surely, Microsoft will have re-examined all the user interface elements to make them more suitable for the less precise input of fingers rather than a stylus? To put it bluntly, no.
Getting the onscreen keyboard right for example is vital as that is likely to be something the user is required to use a lot, so what have Microsoft done to make it touch rather than stylus friendly? Well, not a lot as far as I can see. The OS and built in apps at least do tend to recognise when the cursor enters a field where the user might like to type something and it pops up a little keyboard button which when clicked opens the full thing, but this button tends to pop up in different places each time as it is relative to the cursor position in the text box, and things only get worse once the on screen keyboard appears.
The default size of the keyboard is fairly small. It can be resized and moved around the screen but resizing is awkward as it needs a fairly accurate tap on the edges, and because it floats over the top of the running apps (rather than "shoving them out of the way" which the iPad does) it hides a lot of the screen, which more often than not I found included the space I was trying to type in!
Worse than that, compared to the trimmed down keyboard Apple have designed for the iPad, Microsoft have thrown the kitchen sink at the number of keys it puts on screen at once. This better matches a physical keyboard and does allow direct access to more symbols than on the iPad, but this isn't a real keyboard and you tend to need those symbols a lot less often than the letters of the alphabet and number so it's a reasonable compromise to keep them out of the way unless you do need them.
In addition, Apple on the iPad have actually implemented 3 (or more?) different keyboards which appear depending on the context of what you are typing - so for example, when typing in a web address, the keyboard includes a key for typing ".com" with one key press. Microsoft haven't included any of this context sensitive nature into their onscreen keyboard.
What absolutely infuriated me within minutes though was that when launching IE, if I started trying to type a URL straight away, once the default home page loaded, the content of the address bar was refreshed, losing anything I had already typed and completely scrambling what I typed next by putting it somewhere in the middle of the address it put in. Again, this could be improved by changing the default home page to blank, but why should I have to customise a device to stop me wanting to throw it out of the window? (is that why Microsoft call their OS Windows? ;)
Reason Windows Tablets Suck 5: Even the basics go wrong
One thing that made the iPhone and later the iPod touch and iPad "magical" was the way it automatically rotated the display to match whatever way you hold the thing. Well, this RM tablet does that too...except you have to wait a second or so before it realises it needs to do anything, and then instead of smoothly animating the rotation, the screen worryingly goes completely blank before reappearing a noter second or so later - and then the apps running often take a little while to readjust themselves to the new size they need to be, and the on screen keyboard just sits dumbly wherever it was before, meaning you have to manually move it to a new more suitable location on screen.
Once you've done all that, you might expect to be able to hold it any type with your thumbs as you can with the iPad, but the keyboard clutter is even more apparent at this size and typing becomes even more of a chore. A pity as the wide screen aspect ratio actually gives a more usable amount of working screen space in portrait instead of landscape, although notice how the ribbon in Word has compressed itself a lot so that many more functions now need multiple taps to get at them. Again, this changing user experience just from rotating the device makes it much less intuitive.
Reason Windows Tablets Suck 6: Tiny interface elements
I've said it before so this might be counting the same fault many times, but Windows is designed for an interface that allows precise activation of its user interface elements. Microsoft do allow the DPI setting of Windows to be adjusted to make everything bigger - I tried this on the RM Tablet and it helps, but makes the impact on workable space on screen much worse too. You can also selectively resize some of the UI elements, which Acer do on the touch screen desktop and laptop we've had in the office recently.
Other apps tend not to work well with a change in DPI in Windows and even less provide a way to tweak the size of the buttons they use to make them suitable for a touch interface. Take the included calculator app in Windows as an example. Even with the DPI set to 125%, because the app is actually designed to be usable on screen alongside other apps, it is positively tiny on this touch device, with the buttons much smaller than my finger tip. I could still often get the right buttons, but if I were typing a column of numbers in, I wouldn't feel any confidence I could do that accurately without taking great care, and losing patience.
Reason Windows Tablets Doesn't Suck 1:Media Centre
One application I feel Microsoft has (inadvertently) got right for touch is Media Centre. They have designed this for Nettop PCs that plug into a TV and tend to have quite an inaccurate pointing device to select options. As a result, the way it takes over the whole screen and provides nice big buttons to select things works on a touch device quite nicely.
In addition, as I mentioned earlier, the wide screen form factor of the RM Tablet does lend itself to watching HD video in it's native widescreen format using the whole screen to the full. As a result, even just quickly running the sample HD video that ships with Windows 7, it's apparent that this would be one area that Windows devices might eclipse the iPad.
Reason Windows Tablets Doesn't Suck 2: It's Windows - just like my desktop/laptop
This I think is the key positive for Windows based touch devices. The same apps can be run as on someone's desktop, with the same file types, the same rendering of pages, it can network with other Windows devices for sharing files and it doesn't need any effort searching for an app that does the same as you are used to using on the desktop - you can just use the same app - paid for again if needed of course.
...and that last point is actually my last Reason Windows Tablets DO suck 7: who wants to pay desktop prices for apps on a touch device?
One of the joys of using the iPad is that the apps cost peanuts compared to buying fully fledged desktop Windows programs. Many cost nothing (ad supported sometimes), or often only 0.59p in the UK. An "expensive" iPad app tends to still be less than £10, for instance the "MS Office like" Pages/Numbers and Keynote are each only £9.99, meaning you can have a practically complete office suite for less than £30. Compare that to the cost of adding even the cheapest version of MS Office to a Windows Tablet device.
Summary:
Is there a place for a Windows Tablet in my life? No. It would drive me crazy in no time and I can already do almost everything I need for work and personal computing on my iPad.
Would I get one if I didn't already have an iPad - more difficult, but I would still opt for an iPad. Despite its own many foibles and compromises, the iPad "just works" and can do almost everything I need of a device - assuming I have access to a Windows device I can remote desktop to if needed :)
Can I see a place for it for some people? Yes. If the most important thing for you is application and file compatibility with other people running Windows, then the huge compromise in usability is probably worth it.
So there you go. Which would you get and why?
- Posted using BlogPress from mobile device
2011/01/15
Almost a year on - reflections on the iPad
With rumours of the iPad 2 growing daily, I thought it timely to reflect on the impact of the iPad almost a year after it was first announced.
Meeting the hype?:
In many ways, I feel the iPad has exceeded its hype in practice. It was introduced as a game changer, and the rush of copy cat devices already on the market and the flood of others expected in 2011 I think shows it really has introduced the tablet form factor to the mass market and stimulated demand for a form factor that had been tried many times before but always to luke warm reception.
Why has Apple found a way to make this form factor work when others before had failed? Well, I think it's because they approached it backwards. Rather than seeing it as a scaled down laptop or desktop, the iPad was created as a scaled up mobile device. Apple did well initially with the UI of the iPhone, but they also had a few years experience of refining the design before looking to scale the form factor up. I'm sure everyone remembers how they were criticised initially for "forgetting" about simple things such as copy and paste with the iPhone - well, such omissions would have been unforgivable with a device the size and utility of the iPad where as it was just about accepted with the iPhone as less was expected to be done with it.
By all accounts, that period of evolution and development of the UI had the iPad in mind all along. According to one blog I read, Steve Jobs had the iPad form factor in mind when the iPhone was designed and the iPhone was a deliberate step to get the design improved and wait for the technology to be ready before launching the iPad. True or not, I certainly feel the detour via the smart phone has served the iPad UI well and is really why Apple have delivered a device that has captured the imagination where others failed.
Only good for content consumption?:
Early after the launch, most (including me) expressed the view that the iPad was all about content consumption rather than creation. I have to admit that this hasn't proven the case though. Yes, the iPad is excellent for consuming content, but thanks to the plethora of excellent apps that have emerged to exploit its strengths, it is also now an excellent content creation tool. The fact that I'm writing this using the iPad Blogpress app is testament to that :)
For me, the unexpected area that the iPad has excelled at is photo editing. Sure, there is no substitute for Photoshop/Lightroom on a "real" computer on a big monitor, but the intuitive manipulation of images for scaling, cropping has made the iPad my weapon of choice for initial image viewing as it allows me to quickly and naturally manipulate images as if they were physical prints - even better in many ways. The addition of apps like TouchRetouch which performs a basic version of the content aware fill/deletion and colour manipulation apps like ColorSplash and CinemaFX provide for immediate and relatively competent editing on the device.
I also find the iPad an excellent device to show off my photos to other people. The natural interface allows it to be passed around a group of people without having to explain how to manipulate the interface. The excellent screen makes the images look good and the ability to plug it into the 50" flat screen TV to really show them off to family and friends all work well. OK, I may be guilty of inflicting my photos on people like going back to the old stereotype of projector slide shows of years past, but at least with this technology, you can quickly skip through to the best images and read your audience better than having to switch all the lights off and have them doze off in the dark ;)
With creative apps for audio/music, video editing, blogging, databases AND mind mapping among many others, I now find myself only rarely feeling "hmm, I need a real computer for this". Even then, the remote desktop app usually leads me to use the iPad as the interface while using apps on a PC.
Security:
OK, firstly, no computer connected to the Internet is ever going to be 100% secure, but the iPad (any iOS device) isn't doing badly at resisting exploits. From the ground up, Apple have employed just about every type of security best practice, and for the most part their efforts seem to be paying off. Famous last words perhaps :)
This emphasis on security isn't without its drawbacks however. Because each app lives in its own walled garden, its taken some time for apps to be able to interoperate on files. Apple have now introduced a mechanism to "open this file in another app" which has helped a lot, but for the most part, apps need to rely on off device storage in the cloud to be able to interact.
Which leads me to another point...
Do we need the 3G version?:
Early on, I hadn't intended to get the 3G version as the pattern of use I expected would have been in areas almost always with WiFi coverage. I opted for the 3G version in the end as a "just in case" decision, and I am so glad I did.
Within a few days, I found myself using the iPad in a cafe and needing the 3G to be able to access almost anything useful.
What I realised is that this device had forced a paradigm shift on me - embracing the cloud for almost everything. This requires of course an "always connected" device to be practical.
This could be achieved using a MiFi or other tethered 3G => wifi smartphone type solution, but I prefer the single device elegance possible with the 3G version of the iPad (although the single point of failure does concern me).
I now feel that without buying in to this shift to the cloud, it's almost impossible to get the best from the iPad and I suspect this will be the case for any similar form factor device. Perhaps the abundance and ubiquity of such services is another reason why the time was right for the iPad where other devices had failed before?
So what are the issues?:
While I'm certainly an advocate for the iPad having been won over to the UI by having an iPhone first, I'm not blinded to it's many remaining short falls.
The lack of a standard USB port to be able to transfer files (or extend the storage) is a real pain. I suspect this will be one shortfall that will remain unsolved with the iPad 2 though despite much speculation to the contrary. The reason I think this is because Apple apply a premium to the larger storage capacity devices they sell, and allowing users to buy the lower spec device and then increase the storage using someone else's hardware would be anathema to their marketing ethos. I hope I'm wrong though.
No camera. While I doubt I'd ever want to use a device the size of an iPad as a camera, there are lots of apps which would benefit from having a built in camera. Augmented reality apps, google goggles, video conference (facetime) and document capture/scanning are all applications I can see immediate benefits for but there are undoubtedly many other doors this addition could open. The low cost/impact of adding this hardware to the design means this is something I'm certain (ish) to be in the iPad v2.
Screen issues. The screen on the iPad v1 is already very good, but it could be better. The aliphatic (?) coating on the screen makes removing smudges fairly easy, but it does get a lot of smudges from finger grease in the first place. I understand from some rumours that Apple have improved this coating and this would certainly be welcome.
The screen is also very bright and clear, but the introduction of the retina display in the iPhone 4 has shown that it could be even better. I'm probably 50/50 on if a retina screen will be included in an iPad v2 as it comes down to cost. Its not a "must have" upgrade, but if the cost is manageable, it probably will be included as it would look great on marketing materials for when compared with the competition. Personally, I'd rather see an improvement to make the screen more readable in direct sunlight and/or a move to thinner and lighter OLED technology (even better would be to make the whole form factor flexible to make it more pocket friendly, but I suspect that is 3-4 years away at least still)
Summary:
The landscape for the future of mobile computing certainly looks very different at the start of 2011 compared to 2010 thanks largely to the success of the iPad.
- Posted using BlogPress from mobile device
Meeting the hype?:
In many ways, I feel the iPad has exceeded its hype in practice. It was introduced as a game changer, and the rush of copy cat devices already on the market and the flood of others expected in 2011 I think shows it really has introduced the tablet form factor to the mass market and stimulated demand for a form factor that had been tried many times before but always to luke warm reception.
Why has Apple found a way to make this form factor work when others before had failed? Well, I think it's because they approached it backwards. Rather than seeing it as a scaled down laptop or desktop, the iPad was created as a scaled up mobile device. Apple did well initially with the UI of the iPhone, but they also had a few years experience of refining the design before looking to scale the form factor up. I'm sure everyone remembers how they were criticised initially for "forgetting" about simple things such as copy and paste with the iPhone - well, such omissions would have been unforgivable with a device the size and utility of the iPad where as it was just about accepted with the iPhone as less was expected to be done with it.
By all accounts, that period of evolution and development of the UI had the iPad in mind all along. According to one blog I read, Steve Jobs had the iPad form factor in mind when the iPhone was designed and the iPhone was a deliberate step to get the design improved and wait for the technology to be ready before launching the iPad. True or not, I certainly feel the detour via the smart phone has served the iPad UI well and is really why Apple have delivered a device that has captured the imagination where others failed.
Only good for content consumption?:
Early after the launch, most (including me) expressed the view that the iPad was all about content consumption rather than creation. I have to admit that this hasn't proven the case though. Yes, the iPad is excellent for consuming content, but thanks to the plethora of excellent apps that have emerged to exploit its strengths, it is also now an excellent content creation tool. The fact that I'm writing this using the iPad Blogpress app is testament to that :)
For me, the unexpected area that the iPad has excelled at is photo editing. Sure, there is no substitute for Photoshop/Lightroom on a "real" computer on a big monitor, but the intuitive manipulation of images for scaling, cropping has made the iPad my weapon of choice for initial image viewing as it allows me to quickly and naturally manipulate images as if they were physical prints - even better in many ways. The addition of apps like TouchRetouch which performs a basic version of the content aware fill/deletion and colour manipulation apps like ColorSplash and CinemaFX provide for immediate and relatively competent editing on the device.
I also find the iPad an excellent device to show off my photos to other people. The natural interface allows it to be passed around a group of people without having to explain how to manipulate the interface. The excellent screen makes the images look good and the ability to plug it into the 50" flat screen TV to really show them off to family and friends all work well. OK, I may be guilty of inflicting my photos on people like going back to the old stereotype of projector slide shows of years past, but at least with this technology, you can quickly skip through to the best images and read your audience better than having to switch all the lights off and have them doze off in the dark ;)
With creative apps for audio/music, video editing, blogging, databases AND mind mapping among many others, I now find myself only rarely feeling "hmm, I need a real computer for this". Even then, the remote desktop app usually leads me to use the iPad as the interface while using apps on a PC.
Security:
OK, firstly, no computer connected to the Internet is ever going to be 100% secure, but the iPad (any iOS device) isn't doing badly at resisting exploits. From the ground up, Apple have employed just about every type of security best practice, and for the most part their efforts seem to be paying off. Famous last words perhaps :)
This emphasis on security isn't without its drawbacks however. Because each app lives in its own walled garden, its taken some time for apps to be able to interoperate on files. Apple have now introduced a mechanism to "open this file in another app" which has helped a lot, but for the most part, apps need to rely on off device storage in the cloud to be able to interact.
Which leads me to another point...
Do we need the 3G version?:
Early on, I hadn't intended to get the 3G version as the pattern of use I expected would have been in areas almost always with WiFi coverage. I opted for the 3G version in the end as a "just in case" decision, and I am so glad I did.
Within a few days, I found myself using the iPad in a cafe and needing the 3G to be able to access almost anything useful.
What I realised is that this device had forced a paradigm shift on me - embracing the cloud for almost everything. This requires of course an "always connected" device to be practical.
This could be achieved using a MiFi or other tethered 3G => wifi smartphone type solution, but I prefer the single device elegance possible with the 3G version of the iPad (although the single point of failure does concern me).
I now feel that without buying in to this shift to the cloud, it's almost impossible to get the best from the iPad and I suspect this will be the case for any similar form factor device. Perhaps the abundance and ubiquity of such services is another reason why the time was right for the iPad where other devices had failed before?
So what are the issues?:
While I'm certainly an advocate for the iPad having been won over to the UI by having an iPhone first, I'm not blinded to it's many remaining short falls.
The lack of a standard USB port to be able to transfer files (or extend the storage) is a real pain. I suspect this will be one shortfall that will remain unsolved with the iPad 2 though despite much speculation to the contrary. The reason I think this is because Apple apply a premium to the larger storage capacity devices they sell, and allowing users to buy the lower spec device and then increase the storage using someone else's hardware would be anathema to their marketing ethos. I hope I'm wrong though.
No camera. While I doubt I'd ever want to use a device the size of an iPad as a camera, there are lots of apps which would benefit from having a built in camera. Augmented reality apps, google goggles, video conference (facetime) and document capture/scanning are all applications I can see immediate benefits for but there are undoubtedly many other doors this addition could open. The low cost/impact of adding this hardware to the design means this is something I'm certain (ish) to be in the iPad v2.
Screen issues. The screen on the iPad v1 is already very good, but it could be better. The aliphatic (?) coating on the screen makes removing smudges fairly easy, but it does get a lot of smudges from finger grease in the first place. I understand from some rumours that Apple have improved this coating and this would certainly be welcome.
The screen is also very bright and clear, but the introduction of the retina display in the iPhone 4 has shown that it could be even better. I'm probably 50/50 on if a retina screen will be included in an iPad v2 as it comes down to cost. Its not a "must have" upgrade, but if the cost is manageable, it probably will be included as it would look great on marketing materials for when compared with the competition. Personally, I'd rather see an improvement to make the screen more readable in direct sunlight and/or a move to thinner and lighter OLED technology (even better would be to make the whole form factor flexible to make it more pocket friendly, but I suspect that is 3-4 years away at least still)
Summary:
The landscape for the future of mobile computing certainly looks very different at the start of 2011 compared to 2010 thanks largely to the success of the iPad.
- Posted using BlogPress from mobile device
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