Monthly Archives: May 2011

Study finds many iPad apps confusing, unnecessary

Wired Magazine reports on a new study that indicates many iPad applications have poor usability and may actually provide a worse iPad experience than the conventional website they were meant to replace…

A report released by the Nielsen Norman Group shows that many iPad apps are confusing users by being too subtle about the gestures needed to navigate them, and some are not sensitive enough to the accuracy limit of fingertips. The authors also found that many companies with perfectly functional websites are wasting their time making a less-functional iPad app.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/05/ipad-apps-form-over-function/

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More troubles in the cloud(s)

On top of problems with cloud and cloud type services from Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, and Apple, here comes Google…

Writing on ZDNet, i-biz commentator Ed Bott writes:

The same week that Google made its strongest pitch ever for putting your entire business online, one of its flagship services has failed spectacularly.

Earlier this week, Google rolled out a maintenance release for its Blogger service. Something went terribly wrong, and its Blogger customers have been locked out of their accounts for more than a day. Google’s engineers have been frantically working to restore service ever since, although they haven’t shared any details about the problem.

Bott counts up almost 48 hours of downtime and counting at the time of his post, and then goes on to speculate, what will happen if one of the more mission-critical Google services goes similarly goes down?

My question is, “What if this had happened to another Google service?” Say, Google Docs? What if every document you wrote and saved on Wednesday was suddenly taken offline on Thursday, and you no longer had your presentation or your notes or your research for a client meeting today? How does this promise from Google sound now?

Noting that Google has owned one time blogging kingpin Blogger since 2003 and has few excuses…

Google has owned and operated Blogger since 2003. It’s not like they’re still trying to figure out how to integrate the service into their operation. If it can happen at Blogger, why can’t it happen with another Google service?

Yes, Blogger is a free, ad-supported service. Just like Google Docs and Gmail. In fact, Gmail and YouTube have their official blogs on Blogspot.com (the domain used by the Blogger service). If either one of those teams announced any news in the last 48 hours, you’ll have to wait to read about it.

As a one time Blogger user, Google’s acquisition and subsequent management/mismanagement of that service finally drove me out the door.

Actually, perhaps I shoud say, Thank you, Google, because WordPress blows Blogger out of the water and over a couple of continents. My life has been so much happier since I moved my blogs, particularly my 500 or so post A Year of Songs blog, which I’d had to completely back-rig myself with database and other tricky web-dude type stuff, since the old Blogger platform was so stunted — and became even worse, if possible, under Google.

Mind you, such talk is not easy for a one-time/part-time Google fanboi. They have done so much right in a few areas, it makes their fumbling incompetence in other areas just that much more vexing.

But, in terms of cloud failures — they are far from the only fumblers.

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A restless giant stretches… the Google Home…

Now that Google has, from a number of angles, pretty successfully created a sort of laissez faire, open source Project Xanadu (the grand dream of computer-use visionary Ted Nelson, which Wired once called the longest running vaporware project in history, a universal information system envisioned by Nelson beginning in 1960 but never really practically implemented, and which, under one version of Nelson’s vision, would have been serviced by a “McDonalds-like” brick and mortar chain where people would go to buy information and research), it now turns its attention to the really big guns…

Next in the target sites… X10?

I refer, of course, to the open standard modular home automation system — which has been around almost as long. X10 was conceived and implemented first by Pico Electronics, a Scottish firm, in 1975, and devoted to a practical approach to domotics — the application of automation technologies to the home. In 1978 x10-enabled products began appearing in Radio Shack and other consumer electronic stores.

According to PC Magazine, who sent writers to the recent Google I/O conference to cover a wide range of Google’s activities, there was a lot of buzz about Android@Home, which has been described as no less than the future of Google’s enormously popular Android mobile operating system.

Android@Home, by contrast, will connect a user’s Android device to other appliances in the home via a suite of new services that will be released at an undisclosed future time. Examples of this include “Project Tungsten,” a wireless speaker system that can be synced via Android, as well as wireless light switches and other appliances. Lighting Science was also named as a partner, and will launch wireless lighting products to support Android@Home.

“We want to think of every device in your home as a connection to Android apps,” said Hugo Barra, product management director for Google, in the keynote.

I’ve been trying to make sense out of the potential for ‘home-sized’ slates like the iPad since it was introduced and the one use scenario that has remained in my mind one of the most promising applications of mid-size handheld tablet computers (slates or pads, if you will) beyond coffee table-ware has been that of a sort of media satellite and home entertainment center remote control. (Imagine a remote control to which you could stream the internet or video content… so you could browse the web while you’re watching the big idiot box, or send a slate along with junior so he can watch his favorite death metal videos in the privacy of his room. Better yet, get that boy a shrink.)

Once out of incubation, Android@Home will be open-sourced, according to Google, obviously hoping for the same sort of 3rd party market explosion we’ve seen with the Android (and, on the software side, with the iPhone and Android app markets). The system will be relatively low power but still have the bandwidth necessary to stream audio and video over it and will integrate with Google’s planned online music and video networks.

A demonstration of the latter was the ability to touch or ‘swipe’ an enabled CD to the Android@Home system and have it instantly added to the user’s cloud-based library. (This seems perilously close to the system that the old Mp3.com began to implement but which ran afoul of black letter law provisions of the Millennium Copyright Act that ended up opening Mp3.com to summary judgments that all but bankrupted the company, which was then sold to Universal Vivendi, who essentially dismantled it.)

According to PC Magazine:

“At Home is going to be huge,” said Richard Shim, a mobile analyst for DisplaySearch. “I think it’s something that’s very ambitious. It’s what I like to call the next level. Everyone now has this synchronization of data, where you put it in one place with multiple devices. The next step is controlling these different devices, and no one has been able to crack that nut.”

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385158,00.asp

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