iCloud, My Cloud?

Posted on June 24, 2011 by Tom Long
Go to Apple site

Well, everyone else is talking about it. Why not me? Actually, that’s pretty much all it is until iOS 5 comes out this fall – talk. Apple has announced that they, too, have cloud aspirations for the future of computing. With iCloud they will forge ahead to where free services Hotmail and Gmail have been forever, and where $99 MobileMe has stumbled along.

We the Apple-people will have our mail stored on servers not in our abodes. Likewise our documents and even our music storage will be outsourced. You know what I mean, like Google Docs and and Windows Live (and Zoho) have been doing for a while now. Actually, more like DropBox. As my friend (and by friend I mean someone who writes stuff I read and whom I’ve never met nor with whom have I ever corresponded) Joshua Topolsky points out in his lovely opinion piece, Apple appears at this time to have missed something critical. The cloud is not about the cloud.

The entire reason we entrust our music, photos, videos, documents, and data to off-site servers is so that we can use that stuff when we’re not at our primary base of operations. If I want to edit an Excel spreadsheet, I can pull it up anywhere – including your computer when I visit you – make the changes I want and they are there when I get to work, or on my phone on the train, or on my tablet at home. I don’t need a specific device. I routinely use this Microsoft product on my MacBook Pro. Now, I’m guessing that Apple’s iCloud will work seamlessly with my iPad 2 and my MacBook Pro. (I sold my iPhone 3GS.) But what about on my Droid Incredible or my Toshiba notebook? What about the Web? Not only do Google and Microsoft let me store my stuff, they let me use it on the web and across platforms. iWork.com is in beta and may eventually allow us to do more than view our stuff on the web, but as of today Apple is looking pretty web-phobic.

One reason that this might be happening is that while Google is primarily an internet company and Microsoft a software company, Apple is a device designer. The reason they go around suing people who have app stores for calling them app stores (the nerve), is because device apps are at the heart of adding value to and driving customers toward Apple hardware. I don’t love my iPad 2’s appearance more than say the HTC Flyer. What I love is what I can do with that sucker. Web apps using HTML5 are going to move us away from being wed to a particular device in order to get the functionality we want. I’m guessing that if Apple sees any real threat to its future, it is not that someone else is going to make a better device. Apple may not have the latest, greatest device specs, but they are ninja designers who leave wannabe’s like Motorola looking pathetic with their SD card slots-to-nowhere among other Xoom features or RIMs Playbooks that have no standalone email client. The threat is that they will lose their monopolistic hold on us via apps. If I want to use FilterStorm Pro or GarageBand, I better have an iPad. Move those apps from being Apple-centric to the device agnostic web and I’ll have to think even harder before I buy an iPad 3. So, I totally see where Apple is coming from with their web-less iCloud.

I know a lot of folks disagree, but I like managing my media in iTunes. I like the idea of pushing the media out to my devices according to my iTunes decrees. But guess what? I pretty much do that with my music via Google Music and I get to listen from the web on pretty much any device I choose. Ironically, Google is tails to the same coin on which Apple finds itself heads. Google is wonderful on the web, but struggles with availability when I go offline.

So, I’m going to say something here you may never have expected to hear. I believe Windows Live beats both the Apple iCloud and Google Docs/Gmail in that Microsoft provides an ecosystem that supports both online and offline as well as virtually any device. Their web apps used to be slow and clunky but I find myself zipping through work at the speed of Google lately. Not as full powered as the desktop programs, the webapps are overall the best of the web. Couple that with 25GB of online storage and frankly MS has the lead by a couple of lengths.

Of course, MS still lacks cloud music (unless you count Zune Pass) so everyone is playing catch up in some area. While the Google Music engineering is pretty sweet the UI is unremarkable. Uploading music to Amazon is a pain and their UI is equally plain. If Apple wanted to own this space, I’m sure that they could come up with a web app whose beauty would make us forget that Apple didn’t hit the web first.

But today Apple appears to be content to use their apps to tether us to their devices. I love their hardware, but it isn’t everywhere I want to work, look at pictures, watch videos, check mail, or listen to my tunes. As cool as the iCloud appears to be, I wonder if it will go far enough to hold us in the Apple ecosystem.

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Google v Facebook

Posted on June 18, 2011 by Tom Long
courtesy of Укларочить on Flickrcourtesy of Укларочить on Flickr

As things currently stand, I think we can say that Google dominates the search market. Bing has scrapped and bought its way to a significant market share, but in search Google rules. As a social platform however, Facebook is taking over the world. Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt is reported to have claimed that failure to claim the ‘identity’ space was his most significant failure. Meanwhile, Twitter lurks in the background as a quick way to IM the world.

Imagine, if you will, that your town (or campus) has two coffee shops. In one coffee shop, the service, beverages, and pastries rival those anywhere you’ve been in the world. At the other coffee shop, not only is the product hit or miss, but the staff has occasionally been known to remove portions of their patron’s clothing exposing them to the world. The problem? Most of your friends hang out at the crappy joint.

So, is that the situation with Google versus Facebook. Does Google offer a better product and greater likelihood of respecting your privacy but Facebook is where your friends and family congregate? I got to wondering whether Google actually offered a viable alternative to Facebook if you took out the problem of where your people hang out. Here is what I came up with.

If we accept the rulings of the courts, Mark Zuckerberg, founded Facebook in February of 2004. What I like about Facebook is its integrated features. Want to look at your friends’ photo? Go to Facebook. Want to hear a quick word about what they’re up to? Go to Facebook. Want to know what their favorite book, movie, TV show, etc. is? Go to Facebook. What day in August is their birthday? Go to Facebook. Want to know what websites or Facebook pages they like? You know what to do.

Now, Google offers everything Facebook and Twitter combined offer. But let’s compare integration. Instead of a Facebook page, I have a Google profile. And, yes, if you want to see my pictures you can click on my PicasaWeb link; if you want to see my status, click on my Buzz link; want to see the websites I’ve +1’d (liked) click the +1 (as a side note I think that is a dumb moniker) link. Want to know my interests and background? It is all there under my ‘About’ tab. In addition, Google displays links to my websites and profiles on several other web services. Facebook doesn’t so much want to point people to who you are on the web as it wants to be the web for us.

Where Google shines is that each of these products is better than those of the Facebook counterpart. For example, PicasaWeb versus Facebook Photos? Oh, Facebook is KO’d in the first round. So what’s wrong with this picture?

If you go to Buzz in your Gmail, click on the ‘Following’ link at the top of the page and there are all your friends and links to their profiles. The Buzz stream is much like your Facebook ‘News Feed’.

Now, Buzz has been much maligned. It started out on a bad note by pulling a Facebook. It exposed my private Gmail contacts to the public for a couple of days. Facebook pulls this routinely. In fact, to write this post I went into Facebook and started to post my status and noticed that the default had changed to Everyone instead of Friends of Friends. Facebook is notorious for publicly de-pantsing us in this way. Every time they add a new feature, Mark Suckerberg, um, I mean Zuckerberg, turns the default to public and we have to navigate the labyrinth of privacy settings to correct this. The good news is that lately, Facebook at least notifies us of such changes. Google only did this once to my knowledge. Sadly, it was our first impression of Buzz and the buzz about Buzz was enough to virtually guarantee that our friends would forever avoid the product. (Recently, Google added +1 to our profiles, but you have to opt in to making it public.)

Buzz can be a lot like Twitter. You can easily make your status public. The difference being that it will be a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear it. But the advantage of Buzz over Twitter is that conversations arise around your Buzz. If you Tweet, I might @reply you, but Bill does not see that even though he follows you. If Bill @replies the same Tweet, I won’t know what he said nor will I have the opportunity to respond. Buzz is a far better product than Twitter in this regard. Twitter is a broadcast tool. Buzz is a conversation tool.

Buzz also had, I mean has, an advantage over Facebook when it comes to posting a status update. Facebook has lists but you can’t post to a list. You are limited to posting to yourself (huh?), Friends, Friends of Friends, Everyone, or a list of names. Buzz lets you select any Gmail contact group to whom to post. I believe the ease and flexibility of this feature is killer.

Discovery of “new” friends seems much better on Facebook than Buzz. I also prefer the appearance of Facebook, although the most recent update to the Google Profile is much more slick than the original Profile. Buzz still has a cluttered Gmail look.

Because Buzz is a link within Gmail it is an easy transition from checking your email to touching base socially.

When you click on ‘Contacts’ in your Gmail sidepanel the side panel changes to reflect Contacts-related options. I would like to see Buzz receive equal stature to mail, contacts, and tasks.

There you have it. Google handles privacy (opt in), profiles, pictures, and status better than the Facebook-Twitter duo. Facebook is better looking and has a much more logical way of discovering “new” friends. As it stands, I think Google offers a better product (with room for improvement) than Facebook. There really is only one major flaw. It is hard to be social without any of your friends and family there.

We’ll talk more later. Right now I’m heading over to Facebook to see what’s going on with my son this weekend.

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Plus One Button More

Posted on June 8, 2011 by Tom Long
+1 in search results

So sue me. Yes, I’ve added another button to share this post. I’m sick of all the button-proliferation, too. BUT, on that subject (think about those words), you probably found this post by using Google. To make discovery easier, I am adding the new +1 button from Google.

What happens if you click the button? Friends searching for an article on social buttons will see that you clicked plus one in their search results under my site. Check out the picture at the top of the story to see how this works. (Tip: Click +1 again to remove your +1.)

Plus, one more thing. Anyone viewing your Google profile will see a +1 tab. Under that tab they can see the sites that you have recommended. Check that out in the first picture below. But, Google did learn something from their Buzz release. On your profile, the +1 tab is private by default. (sound of cheering and applause here) It will still be counted and displayed in search results, however. (Otherwise, why click it at all?) You need to turn it on to make your +1’s public on your Google profile, as shown in the second picture below.

Guys like us are hoping +1 will help our posts move up in Google’s search results. Readers are hoping their friends will steer them toward “the good stuff” on the internet. I think Google missed an opportunity by not allowing us the option to comment when we click as one can do on StumbleUpon or Digg. They could even go plus one step further. They could have the comment and link show up in one’s Buzz stream. I believe Google is that close to moving in on Facebook’s identity turf. Stay tuned to see where they go with this. Remember they started by only allowing us to +1 search results. Now, we can +1 sites. Tomorrow, who knows?

Google Explains

P.S. Would you Like to Tweet about how you clicked +1 on this site you Stumble(d)Upon?


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Net Neutrality

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Tom Long
Photo courtesy of jpoesen

How does the internet fit into local, regional, national, and global societies? What roles should individual, corporate, charitable, and governmental entities play with respect to the internet? It is difficult to imagine a broader topic.

There are some who want to perpetuate the gold rush town-libertarian antinomian atmosphere. Historically, in gold rush towns that resulted in gangs running communities, women exploited for sex, and animals abused to the point of death when they were of no further economic benefit. In some countries, the internet is used to promote infanticide. In most countries, victims of human trafficking are used to produce pornographic and sadistic videos and photos. We resent the tight grip of established companies and governments on intellectual properties and free expression. To some IP stake holders, Fair Use is anathema. On the other side of the coin, there are pirates who steal art or technologies and believe it is their right to freely snatch from the easel or work bench that which others have produced. The anti-Fair Use crowd, patent trolls, and frivolous patent lawsuits for the sole purpose of discouraging competition have elicited extreme responses like the old wild west gangs that just took what they wanted.

In parallel to the IP issue, in most countries, there is the Internet Service Provider (ISP) issue. Our little driveway onto the internet highway is controlled by a hegemony of corporations. In the United States, these include companies like Time-Warner Cable and Comcast as well as the wireless service providers like Verizon and AT&T. These ISPs express themselves as thugs when they try to control who can and cannot use my “driveway”. I may want to watch video from Netflix but the ISP’s have pay-per-view of their own. To look out for their profits, they limit the bandwidth given to competitors.

When the public was terrorized by gangs in the wild west, at least as portrayed in the movies, there came a time when a gunslinger was hired as sheriff to protect the safety of the public. This gunman would dramatically announce, “There’s a new sheriff in town, boys,” and then proceed to kick the villainous gang’s tails.

Lastly, there is the threat of governmental control of free speech and expression. This is very closely tied to the right to assemble peacefully explicitly provided in my country’s constitution (the First Amendment). A negative example of this was in Egypt when the internet was virtually shut down by the government to silence the voices of opposition. Another example of this, was when the United States government shut down websites accused of pirating without providing them due process.

So, what do you think? How do we protect Fair Use without stealing from artists? How do we stop anti-competitive patent law suits without stealing from the innovators? How do we keep the data flowing freely without causing other ISPs to follow Adelphia into bankruptcy? Who can be “the new sheriff in town” when governments have shown themselves to be unfriendly to our freedoms?

There is always a tension between freedom and security. It is not clear, wherein the proper balance lies. Nor is it clear, what entity can be trusted to play sheriff. There are a lot of simplistic answers being offered at the extremes of lawless free-for-all and internet tyranny. But at some point, we the people are going to have to put on big boy and big girl pants and give these complex but important issues the attention and action they deserve. Please don’t swallow whole the arguments of any one side. Do some critical thinking and post about it. Put a link to your post everywhere you can (including the comments here). Let’s get to work.



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Tech Travel

Posted on May 25, 2011 by Tom Long

For someone like myself travel consists of three phases – planning, doing, and “lessons learned”.  But travel also consists of layers: experiencing the place, building relationships with fellow travelers, recording impressions (primarily through photography), and sharing my experience with others not traveling with me.   Technology plays a role in all of these phases and layers.

Planning

I do my planning primarily with Evernote.  I clip web pages containing information about my itinerary and the places I will visit.  I also make packing lists using the convenient little checkbox.  I also upload copies of important documents like my passport to Evernote.  Before finally disconnecting from the wireless network at home, I open each note I want to take with me on my iPad 2 so that it is cached for offline use.   I do the same thing with the PDF manuals for my gear using Dropbox and GoodReader.  Test whether you have everything you want when you don’t have an internet connection before you leave.

On my Android phone, a Droid Incredible, I enter my flight information into the Flightview Free app.  For fun, I check in at my waypoints on Google Latitude.

If you have and use an iPhone 4 or another phone that takes great pictures, this next bit may be pretty useless to you.  But if you want the higher quality that can be had with the lenses available with a camera, I have one little tip.  Get a camera, like my Sony DSC-HX5V, that stores GPS information in the EXIF of each picture.  It will allow you to see on a map where each picture was taken.  The map view in Picasa or Gallery2 is quite fun when viewing your set of vacation pictures with pins at all of your stops.  A camera like the Pentax WG-1 GPS is great for vacations where underwater shots might be desired.   If you’re not going to use the optical zoom, macro lens, or waterproofing of a camera and you have a good phone camera, the GPS on your phone will supply the EXIF location data.  Test this before leaving on your vacation of course.  Results may vary.

If you are traveling out of country, be sure you don’t rack up message roaming charges for calls, SMS, MMS, email, or data.  Before you leave the country, be sure to turn off 3G/4G roaming on your portable devices.  Most devices have an airplane mode that will take care of this for you and prevent you from even receiving an expensive phone call.  It is just sad how quickly data transfers when you’re standing on foreign soil trying to play with your settings.  Then the bill comes.  Ouch.

Whatever videos or documents were on my iPad, but which I didn’t expect to use on vacation, I took off.  That way I would have room to store all the pictures and videos I planned to generate on vacation.

Google maps are great, but useless without an internet connection.  MapDroyd on my phone and You Need A Map on my iPad gave me access to maps offline.   We used You Need a Map and the GPS on my iPad 2 to track our ship’s voyage up Tracy Arm Fjord and know how close we were to the glacier.

Doing

On this cruise, I opted not to use the shipboard wireless service.  I didn’t want to spend time playing with my tech that I could be spending with my wife and fellow travelers.

Photography plays a major part in every vacation for me.  When I first started out in digital photography, I wound up excluding nearly 97% of my pictures from my albums.   Years later, I used over 600 of my 3100 photos from the last vacation.  Practice has definitely improved the quality of the pictures I take.  But I have also learned how to salvage what might have been a throw away.  I have used a lot of great desktop tools for photo editing.  Windows Live Photo Gallery, Picasa, GIMP, and PhotoShop  have all played a part in my learning curve.  Those are great tools after one gets home.

I took my iPad 2 with me on this trip.  I quickly learned that I could accomplish most of what could be done on desktop editors using apps like Photogene and Filterstorm Pro.   Photogene is a great value, but I liked being able to organize my photos into albums using Filterstorm Pro.  I learned that I actually preferred the iPad’s touch interface for photo editing – even though I could be more precise with a mouse on my computer.

I think my wife enjoyed the instant gratification of seeing our pictures at the end of the day – complete with the editing needed to show them off in their best light.  Hopefully, it was some compensation for the time I spent working on them (aka “playing with my iPad”).

ReelDirector was the bomb for playing with my videos.   Sadly, iMovie is pretty much limited to movies taken with my iPad 2 camera and a handful of other makes of cameras (none of which I have).  But ReelDirector kept me from being disappointed about that.  I could string together a day’s video vignettes into one little story with very little effort.  I do my family videos via Vimeo so I had to use their app to upload the movies I had saved from ReelDirector to the Camera Roll.  ReelDirector only uploads directly to YouTube or email.  Some reviewers criticize how long ReelDirector takes to render a video before it can played.  Others point out that clips can’t be played within the app.  It is a multi-step process to split a clip into more than three sections.  I think for a portable device those are excusable.  Unlike Apple’s own iMovie, ReelDirector can use Apple’s provided API to import my camera’s movies and for $2 that makes it a life saver.

For those of us who primarily have dealt with digital photos on a Windows system, let me quickly explain what Apple refers to as ‘Events’.   Events are psuedo-albums within iPhoto on a Mac or the Photos app on the iPad.  If you import, the pictures taken over several days on your camera card, the photos will be grouped into one Event for each day.  If  the pictures are from the same day, but you imported your morning pictures at lunch, your afternoon pictures at dinner, and your evening pictures before bed, you will have three Events for that day.  If you have pictures from more than one card, each card will also have its own set of Events.  This turned out to be very helpful when trying to find a specific picture out of the thousands we took.

The downside of using our Eye-Fi cards to wirelessly transfer pictures, was that they load directly into the Camera Roll folder on the iPad and are excluded from Events.  Events only applied to pictures manually imported using the camera connection kit.  As a result, we ended up putting our old-fashioned cards back into our cameras.  It also became difficult to establish the Wi-Fi connection between the iPad and the card for Direct Mode use.  Once I changed the setup on the card to leave it searchable for three minutes after it comes on and not to prioritize any home network, that problem appeared to have gone away.   The Eye-Fi worked as advertised, but I found the usefulness of Events outweighed the convenience of wireless transfers.

Even the most adventurous vacations, usually include some time to just chill.  I love my iPad, but honestly, nothing beats the much cheaper Kindle for chill-axing.  Get every book out of your archives and onto your Kindle before you go.  Do the same thing with your Kindle app on the iPad (or iPhone or Android phone) for reading in the dark.  A book in your Kindle archive may as well not exist if you don’t have internet access when you want to read it.  Riding on a plane or sipping coffee in my stateroom will never be the same.  I did sneak in a few races in Real Racing HD on my iPad while my wife was getting ready for us to go out, but mostly I just grabbed the Kindle to make the most out of any down time.

I debated whether to take the iPad’s Bluetooth keyboard.   I didn’t figure my wife would be doing any typing and I wanted to see what I could do with the iPad’s touch keyboard.  It turned out that it didn’t take me long to get the hang of it and I don’t ever plan to take a keyboard on vacation.   I could quickly jot down thoughts I wanted to remember about each day offline  in my WordPress app.  This gave me a jump start  in blogging about my travel when I got home.

Lessons Learned

1) Remember to remind everyone in your party about roaming charges and to have their devices properly set before disembarking from their home country.

2) Familiarize yourself with apps you expect to use on the trip so that you don’t waste any more time with your tech than necessary when you’re supposed to be enjoying your vacation.

3) Leave the Eye-Fi cards at home, but bring the camera connection kit.

4) Update your packing list in Evernote when you get home with the lessons you learned on this trip.  What clothes or gear did you take and not use ?  What clothes or gear did you really miss?  The first time I travel to a different part of the world I generally over pack.  When I get back, I refine my list to include only those things that proved themselves useful on the first visit.

5) I average just under 1 GB of data in pictures and video each day.  I need to have enough storage on my iPad and/or SD cards to not restrict my nearly insatiable appetite for taking pictures.

Summary and Conclusion

Technology exists to enhance not engulf our experience with family and friends as we travel.  I hope these tips will streamline your process of selecting, preparing, and using technology to enjoy and share what for many is the highlight of our year, our vacation.

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