2 posts tagged “apple”
Today, I was asked about my thoughts on the new Apple iPhone 3G S.
I'm disappointed to not see an iPod Touch with a camera. Basically, I think the iPod Touch should be an iPhone without the phone option. Obviously this is a deliberate decision. I think a lot of people would decide to keep another phone, and supplement it with an iPod Touch.
Obviously the iPhone 3G S is a must have phone for me. I take pictures with the iPhone all the time, and having a higher resolution camera with auto-focus is a compelling improvement. And video will be great too, especially if I can upload it to flickr, and tweet it, just like I do with pictures using our FlickrTweet service. Video will make the extra memory in the phone important.
Not being able to tether with AT&T remains annoying as hell for the time I'm in the US and very mobile, but with limited Internet connectivity. Without tethering, I am confined to Wifi locations for serious work on my laptop (although thanks to Google, this covers all of Mountain View).
The compass in itself is rather boring (even for me with my navigation compass-using background - I just came back from a week sailing in Thailand, plotting our course all the way), but it will probably add some marginal benefit to navigation accuracy, directions and the intuitive user experience. It, along with voice, is probably designed to help kill the in-car GPS navigation system category.
I'm starting to think I need to have a mobile.me account even though it is priced very unfavourably. The features to find and/or wipe an iPhone seem compelling. Although perhaps not enough in themselves to justify the cost, it does start to tip the balance.
The extra speed should be nice. I find I wait ten or twenty seconds at times for the camera app to open.
Of course, most of this stuff I'll just get to use occasionally when I am in the US. Most of the time I will be confined to an iPhone that I can unlock. I will be most interested in seeing if an unlock for the iPhone 3G S becomes available. As an alternatie, it might even be worth a visit to Hong Kong to get a premium priced unlocked iPhone 3G S when they become available there.
KATA BEACH, THAILAND -- I have actually been quite impressed by the amount of innovation in Vista. In my personal list of “brilliant new business ventures” was adding file tagging to XP and integrating it with a file organization tool like Windows Explorer. While there is still more to do, a few months ago, I took this idea of my list because I noticed that Microsoft had largely implemented this idea in Vista. I wasn’t really too disappointed by being trumped by Microsoft on this since I soon will have something I expect to be really helpful to me, and I can focus my attention on other things. See “Organization” and “Tagging your Files” on the Microsoft site about two thirds of the way down the page. My hope is that this will enable Del.icio.us style organization of files under Vista. This is the first step in a process that will see an end to the limited folder-sub-folder/directory-sub-directory paradigm for organizing information.
Not Running Vista on my Mac Yet: Virtual Machines
Legal Issues
I held off on installing since I am currently experimenting with having Windows (XP) run as a Virtual Machine (VM) using Parallels’ VM software on a tiny portable little Mac Mini. Apparently, only Vista’s more expensive versions allow running in a virtual machine (VM). There is, however, some debate online about the existence of this restriction in the End User License Agreement (EULA). Also, Parallels has only just introduced Vista support. And it may be a minor point since I already use the OS X side for music and some video, but Microsoft’s EULA bans the use of content protected by Microsoft (Microsoft DRM) in virtual machines. This last seems like a bit of a self destructive restriction since, by definition, users affected by it will have an alternative operating system at their fingertips and will be driven towards it. Besides it has only been a couple months since I spent $300 for a copy of XP to run in my Parallels VM. Still, next week I will be in for a couple days, and I may buy V ista there.
Microsoft Windows XP on Apple OS X
One nice thing about running Windows in a VM on a Mac is that it really lets me compare the two operating systems side by side.
The pleasant thing about the Mac OS X operating system is that it is a really nicely pure Unix operating system under the hood. However, it really does not have the depth of support and applications that Linux has, yet for serious server and application development work it is every bit as complicated as Linux. Mac OS X seems really quite stable, but not as stable as Linux. I have always been impressed with how Linux will somehow find a way to stay up even in the face of horrifying hardware failure.
Occasionally, I find my XP machine bogged down by some messy misbehaving application, and it is nice to simple continue working in the host OS X environment using a web browser, completely unaffected by the dire straights in the Windows XP machine running on the same hardware. I rarely have the opposite experience, mostly because there is virtually no software I want to run that is available on the Mac. Ironically, even graphics software like Adobe Photoshop is only available in native Intel form on Windows. The same is true about the best open source video processing tools. There are a few really nice applications that are available only for a Mac, such as the excellent Videocue application for teleprompted video blogging.
Despite all the Apple hype, and a few nice graphical animation effects to move applications off the screen, the OS X graphical user interface (GUI) system seems to be a little sparse compared with even XP. The gap will widen even more with Vista. For example, when I copy pictures from my digital camera to upload to Flickr, I find myself using Windows for this task since I can right click to rotate the images in the file explorer before I save them to my local system. OS X has no such feature. If I want to change the shape of a window, I can grab any corner or edge in Windows, but only the lower right corner in OS X. Thoughtful features like this exist throughout XP.
Migration
One of the things that has really got me excited about using VMs, on every host platform, is the promise of insanely easy moves from one piece of hardware to another. If I decide it is tedious traveling the world carrying a 24 inch flat panel display in my suitcase, I can always buy a big screen laptop computer and move my Windows virtual machine to it. It will be as simple as installing parallels, and then dragging and dropping to that new machine my entire Windows VM with all of its associated software installations and environments. The whole process might take five minutes. It could be so easy one might consider doing it on a daily basis moving from one computer (home or office) to another.
In an enterprise environment, VMs offer the promise of just as easily scaling from one machine to ten. Or in an Amazon Computer Cloud, one might scale from three machines to hundreds of machines in a few minutes to meet varying needs, such as those associated with a natural disaster, a financial crisis, or a media event.
