More Than Just A Podcast

Peter Kafka reports that Apple will release a stand alone Podcast app for iOS 6 this fall. I initially saw this as great news because I felt that Apple’s current offering has been lacking attention. Currently, podcasts can only be subscribed to in iTunes and have to be manually synchronized to iOS devices. When Apple announced iCloud last summer I had assumed that podcasts would get features such as on-device subscribing, iCloud syncing of listening position, and automatic downloads of new episodes. That wasn’t the case, and thankfully there are a couple of third party apps that provide similar features.

This recent rumour got me thinking of something even bigger. The aforementioned iCloud features will be nothing compared to what Apple has the potential to release. What if Apple announces a Podcast Store, creating a new market on a very strong platform. It might not seem like a big deal to many, but it’s not just about paying a buck to listen to Joe Rogan.

A Podcast Store would be the first step towards the disruption1 of the entertainment industry. Just as the App Store empowered indie developers to be as successful as major software developing companies, the Podcast Store would provide a chance for independent content creators to sell shows and films to a massive customer base.

Here are a few preliminary thoughts on the hypothetical Podcast Store:

• Content creators get exposure to 400 million Apple Id accounts with registered credit cards
• Better purchasing experience results in more sales for creators
• Direct relationship between creators and consumers
• Eliminating other middle-men reduces distribution costs
• Cost of producing shows remains a barrier to entry for indie creators, but Apple’s platform would provide them equal footing with major distributors in terms of exposure
• Apple will take 30 percent cut, but will be worth it just as we have seen from the App Store.
• Reduces reliance on advertising for financial success
• Consumers won’t have to deal with silly release delays, DRM, or region issues
• Low barrier to entry could accelerate creativity
• Creators will have exact download numbers, no need for Nielsen ratings to determine success of content.
• High volume sales can result in cheaper prices for consumers

I’m excited.

Link: Read MG Siegler’s post discussing some of the problems with buying media today.

Update: I was wrong

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1. I apologize for using this word. ↩

Classic Car: Renault 5

Predating the Volkswagen Golf, to me this was the original hot hatch. It was for the pretty ladies sporting brown-framed Wayfarers, stuck in traffic during hot weather without any air conditioning. It was for the young men that had a thrilling ride by never shifting before 4000 rpm. The Renault 5 was to thank for beautiful french hatchbacks that followed, such as the Renault Clio, Peugeot 206, and the Citroen C2.

Image courtesy of Supercarfreak on flickr (click for source)

OS X is Dead. Long Live the Mac

With the introduction of OS X 10.8, also known as Mountain Lion, Apple dropped the “Mac” from “Mac OS X”.

There are a few good thoughts that could explain why Apple chose to rebrand. I speculate that Apple plans to introduce a brand new operating system one day in the future, which won’t go by the name of OS X or iOS. That will be the day that OS X gets discontinued, and I imagine Apple can handle the death of “OS X” and all the sensational tech news headlines that would follow, but would not want the iconic Mac name anywhere close to that.

An Impressive Number

The new iPad (third generation) has an impressive 3.1 million pixel display, but another number really caught my eye: 42.5 watt-hour battery capacity. I feared that the graphics intensive hardware will affect the iPad’s battery life (a very important factor to me), but Apple has managed to keep it at 10 hours by increasing the capacity by 70%. Amazingly, this improvement only resulted in 50 g of extra weight and .6 mm extra thickness. To put it into perspective, I have included a chart of Apple’s devices and their battery capacities.

Device	Capacity (Whr)	Weight (g)	Ratio (Whr/g)
iPod nano	0.39	21.1	.018
iPod classic	1.78	140	.013
iPod touch	3.44	101	.034
iPhone 3GS	4.51	135	.033
iPhone 4	5.25	137	.038
iPhone 4S	5.30	140	.038
iPad 2	25	601	.042
iPad 3rd gen	42.2	652	.065
MacBook Air 11”	35	1080	.032
MacBook Air 13”	50	1350	.037
MacBook Pro 13”	63.5	2040	.031
MacBook Pro 15”	77.5	2540	.030
MacBook Pro 17”	95	2990	.032

Data taken from Apple and iFixit

Note that I do not present this table in order to draw any conclusions regarding the battery life and its effect on usage experience. Apple’s devices vary in their intended tasks, display sizes, and processing power. But I really expect the capacity to size ratio to get a big boost this year, which would allow for very interesting devices.

Apple’s technical specification pages lists battery life in hours for all its devices, but provides the capacity in watt-hours for MacBooks and iPads only. Similarly, it provides processor speeds for MacBooks only — the chip description for the third generation iPad is “Dual-core A5X”. This brings up the specs matter (or don’t) debate. Some writers argue that specs are an important indicator of a product’s performance, and others argue that specs are losing their relevance. My view is that specs should be presented to the customer in a way which is relevant to them. Customers don’t know what a GHz is, and most have never even heard of a watt-hour. All what matters to the user is that the device feels fast and has a long battery life.

Rango

Oscar night. It’s time to watch Grumpy Old Men decide what are the best or funniest movies. It’s a night of bliss, anger, love, hate, and the inevitable dip into conspiracy.

I just have one wish for tonight, for Rango to win the Best Animated Film Award. It is visually stunning, hilarious, and has a great score. It deserves the recognition.

One Number

It has happened again. After years of convincing close relatives and friends to switch away from MSN or AIM and join Skype, something new pops up. It’s too early to say whether iMessage and FaceTime are better alternatives, but I am worried that if I do like this communication platform I will have to go through the horrible transitioning process once more.

I’m the kind of person that quite often switches to a new service with little hesitation, but I do understand the reasoning behind resistance to change. One downside to early adoption is simple: not everyone is on it. But that changes, and at a rate which is affected by different factors such as ease of use, popularity, or integration into successful platforms. There’s also a risk that the new service fails and no one is interested in using it anymore. But if taking a risk results in a better experience, I’m going to make the jump and try to take people with me.

Then there is the period of time when people resist to switching because they are content with what they have, regardless of the acknowledged benefits from using a new service. We’ve seen it before with AOL, Hotmail, MySpace, XP, and BBM.

At this point, the little voice in my head who likes to argue with me is saying “OKAY we get your point, we should all switch to better services so that you can have more Twitter followers and more contacts on your iMessage buddy list. But it will never stop, something new will always come up and we’re tired of signing up for things just because they have cool websites.” My response is: “It’s NOT because they have a cool website..” and then proceed to list useful features. But I agree.

User ID

Aside from all the previously discussed problems, my major issue is with the many User IDs or addresses we have to deal with. There’s the Twitter @ handle, Google+’s blurb of numbers, Hotmail address, Gmail address, custom domain address, .mac, MobileMe, iCloud, Apple ID, phone number, and various usernames for all other services. And it is only safe if you have a different password for every one of those. All we had to deal with in the past was a phone number and a mailing address that rarely changed.

Having options for aliases is great for privacy but increases complexity. And here’s the queue for Apple Inc. to come in and solve our petty frustrations. Sarcasm aside, Apple seems to be going in that direction. With one Apple ID, you can buy media from iTunes, buy apps, sync documents in iCloud, and now send messages or make video calls across iOS and OS X products. The only thing missing is the traditional voice call.

This topic is sensitive, because Apple’s mobile devices use data on the cell phone carrier’s networks to provide these services. Apple can provide an “iCall” service, but that would create conflict with the carriers since their business depends on charging customers for phone calls and Apple depends on them to sell their devices subsidized with voice plans. If Apple offered phone calls over the internet, the carriers would be pushed towards even lesser significance in the market. I can only hope for that – but who knows, they currently have almost a hundred billion dollars in cash on hand.

Rogers One Number

Tech pundits may downplay Apple’s significance, but cell phone carriers are smarter than that. In response to a growing threat to their business from Apple and Skype, Rogers now offers a service named One Number. It basically allows you to call, text, and e-mail from numerous devices using a single 10-digit number as your ID. Smart move. I would give try it out if I was a Rogers customer, but they have an ugly website.

iCloud is Apple’s One Number. Apple is not forcing anyone to live in their iCloud bubble, you can still use Gmail, Skype, and Dropbox on their devices without worrying about walled garden conspiracies. But they offer a very attractive bubble to live in, one Apple ID for everything. It seems to me that this just might be the last major switch for a while.

Microwave Defrosting Process

1. Place frozen raw chicken in microwave and initiate “defrost”
2. Status after 60 seconds: frozen
3. Status after 90 seconds: frozen
4. Status after 180 seconds: frozen
5. Status after 181 seconds: COOKED
6. Throw chicken away

Animated Feature Film

Rango has become my favourite animated movie. I hope it wins the Oscar this year.

Digital Textbooks

Apple’s announcement of interactive textbooks on the iPad brings up a few thoughts regarding the practicality of digital textbooks for use in education. I prefer e-books over paper books for obvious reasons such as portability, ease of purchase, and zero-displacement of space at home. The same advantages apply to digital textbooks, except textbooks and novels are not read in the same way.

I normally read novels from start to finish without frequently referring back to chapters that have already been read. When reading textbooks, on the other hand, I find that I am continuously referring to different positions throughout the text book (going back and forth between two pages or looking at content from different chapters at the same time). It gets to the point where you have two fingers, a ruler, and a pen as temporary bookmarks. This direct physical manipulation makes it very efficient to access information as opposed to one screen view at a time.

Furthermore, it is often very handy to have two or more textbooks open at once so that you can quickly refer to related content from different sources. Granted, digital textbooks have search functions which make it easier to find content in the first place. But once you have the content needed and are trying to solve a problem, you’re going to need to flip back and forth between pages very quickly in order to reduce frustration.

Side Comment: Scribbling down notes and highlighting text can be done in both digital and traditional forms so it’s not a big issue.

I tried PDF and electronic textbooks in the past and experienced this frustration. The iPad will be a bit of an improvement since it offers a more direct manipulation of content when compared to a mouse and keyboard, but there’s still the issue of one screen at a time. I’m sticking to e-book novels and traditional textbooks for now, but perhaps my opinion will change once I try a digital textbook some day.

If you are interested in more discussion regarding digital textbooks, I recommend that you read Glenn Fleishman's article on the topic.

Explaining RSS

RSS is a very powerful tool and it is safe to assume that the majority of the people using it are tech geeks. I find that it would be very useful for people that are not “tech savvy”, but it is very confusing to people who don’t know what it is. I was a bit intimidated by RSS when I was first trying to learn about it, but once I finally understood what it was all about I became very comfortable with it. The Wikipedia entry on RSS won’t help in providing a clear explanation, just take a look at the “example” it provides. In this post I will try to explain RSS to my parents.

This post is not an extensive explanation of RSS because I am trying to keep it very simple in order to minimize confusion.

The Problem

You’ve been on the internet for a while now, and have come across many websites and blogs that you like to read. In order to remember these websites so that you can re-visit them, you “bookmark” or “favourite” them into a list. When you have free time to browse the internet, you open your bookmarks and go to your favourite websites to see what’s new. This list will grow as you discover new and interesting websites that you want to keep visiting. As a result, opening bookmarks presents you with a few problems:

1. It becomes tedious to open bookmarks one at a time in order to see what’s new.
2. Often times you may open a bookmark and find that the website has no new content.
3. You may forget which bookmarks you already visited on any given day.
4. It becomes difficult to keep track of what articles you have read or vice versa.

The RSS Application

RSS is a solution to these problems. It allows you to subscribe to all your favourite websites in one central location: the RSS application (or RSS client). Below is a screenshot of an RSS application. 

In the left pane under “FEEDS”, I have a list of websites which I am subscribed to. The application also indicates how many unread articles there are for each website and in total. When clicking on one of my websites, I can see all the unread articles and choose which I want to read. Upon selecting an article and reading it, the application automatically marks it as read. You can also click on “All Unread” at the top left and read all the articles from all your subscriptions in one place.

  

The RSS application refreshes itself from time to time and downloads any new articles that have been posted to the websites you’re subscribed to. This way you don’t need to keep revisiting the website to find out if there’s anything new.

How to Add Websites to Your RSS Application

Most websites will offer an “RSS feed” that you can subscribe to. There are numerous ways to add websites to your RSS, but I will show the two easiest ways I can think of. The first way is by clicking the “add" button in the RSS application and typing in the website’s address. The application will then automatically try to find the feed. The second way is by finding an RSS button on the website you want to subscribe to. Clicking it will automatically bring up your default RSS application prompting you to subscribe to the website.

Caveats and Closing Comments

Note that not all websites offer an RSS feed that you can subscribe to, and some provide feeds that are truncated. Truncated feeds only show an excerpt of the article you want to read, but provide you with a link to the article’s webpage. There are a lot more features and details that I didn’t mention, but you will probably discover them on your own. I might follow-up this post with more information if I am successful with getting my parents to use RSS.

When I first learned about RSS I did not think it was a big deal, but it really changed the way I browse the internet. It allows me to keep track of anything in an organized manner and makes reading more enjoyable. Most importantly, I am know that I am not missing out on any articles that my favourite websites are providing. I hope you will at least be able to try RSS out for yourself and experience some of the benefits.

On Twitter vs RSS

Many people are using Twitter as an alternative to RSS. You can follow certain websites on Twitter as they tweet links to their articles when they are posted. The problem with Twitter is that it is not as reliable as RSS (tweets don’t always show up in your timeline on time) and doesn’t keep track of what was read. Furthermore, your Twitter timeline can only go back a finite number of days at a time, so if you stop reading twitter for a week you will miss out on articles that were posted during that period.

The Ikea iOS App

The Ikea app for iOS is garbage. I was expecting it to be a half-decent catalogue app like those offered by Best Buy or Canadian Tire. Except it turned out to be a big PDF with a repulsive interface. When launched, the app shows you two mis-aligned thumbnails of the catalogue in English and French.

Tapping one of them prompts you to download a 47 MB PDF (I should have just quit and deleted the app then, but I continued to investigate in the name of science). After the download is complete, it presents a scan of Ikea’s catalogue and a set of intimidating buttons.

Upon flipping through the catalogue I came across “+” buttons on some of the items. Tapping them opens a new pane with the item’s picture, name, short description, price, and a “More information” button. Tapping “More information” takes you to the item’s webpage on Ikea’s website. So instead of providing me with quick and easily accessible information as an alternative to their website, it wasted 10 minutes of my time, frustrated me, confused me, and then redirected me to the website. The app’s search feature is perhaps the worst. Searching for “couch” presented me with two results, compared to 1,280 on the Ikea website.

Dear Comedy Central

Please end this:

1. A person residing in the U.S shares a link to an interesting Comedy Central video.
2. I open the link and command the embedded video to play.
3. The video does not play, and instead provides me with a link to view the video on the Comedy Now! website because I reside in Canada.
4. I open the link and find myself on the home page of Comedy Now! instead of being directed to the video’s page.
5. I Waste 15 minutes in frustration searching for that video by guessing what day it aired and checking the videos for that day.
6. Repeat step 5 until I find that video or start bleeding from the eyes, whichever comes first.

Please provide proper linking or just end this geo-restriction silliness.

For now, there is TunnelBear. It lets your browser pretend you are in the U.K or U.S, allowing you to watch geo-restricted videos.

Updates (Leave Me Alone Firefox)

Mozilla released five major updates to its Firefox browser in a span of six months. I usually look forward to updates and often download beta releases in order to get new features. I checked my version of Firefox, however, and found that I was still on 4.0.1 (current stable release is 9.0.1).

A common method of notifying the user about an update is by displaying a pop-up window. As a user, I find that method to be flawed due to one major reason: the notification pops up on launch or very soon after and disrupts the user. Users launch an application in order to complete a necessary task, and the notification update just becomes an annoying obstacle. If you’re in a debate with a friend, for example, and launch firefox to search for a wikipedia entry, you’re not going to sit and wait for an update to install instead of proving your point and winning the debate.

The update window is just disregarded and the user continues using the application until it is no longer needed and quit. Some applications, such as browsers, are rarely quit and thus there are fewer opportunities for displaying an update notification. As a result, these notifications fail to achieve their purpose and annoy the user in the process.

Luckily, some developers are finding new ways to update applications. I’ve been using Google Chrome as well and I like how it auto-updates itself. Auto-updates may not be easily applicable to all applications though. An alternative method would be for the application to notify the user of an update when it is commanded to quit. This gives the user the option to update the app in the background before it is closed and then have it updated and ready the next time it is launched (most apps have to be re-launched when updated anyway).

As a result of all these update annoyances and ambiguities, I’ve been steering myself towards centrally distributed applications such as those available through Steam or the Mac App Store. These app stores make it very easy to update software (Steam updates automatically), and I find the moments during which I am browsing the stores perfect for updating apps that are not in use.

The iPod Wallet

I am a fan of hard wallets. They are often limited in terms of how much they can hold or their ability to categorically organize your cards. But they are perfectly suitable for my minimalistic approach to carrying things wherever I go. I try to keep as little as I can on me: one identification card, two banking cards, and an empty space for any annoying cash or receipts I might come across.

About four months ago I decided to make my own wallet out of a malfunctioning iPod Classic. The body was in poor condition when I acquired it, but I like aged gadgets. The hard drive, battery, and a few connectors were the only parts removed. The logic board, screen, and buttons are still there and completely functional (I enjoy pressing buttons). The screen even displays the “Charging, Please Wait…” image when plugged in.

It is easy to open and closes firmly. Whomever sees it just assumes its an iPod before figuring out why it doesn’t work. It can hold five credit cards but cash has to be folded in order to fit.

  

How Pop Culture Spoiled Star Wars

(Warning! The content below may give away important plot points.)

I had not watched the original Star Wars trilogy until recently. I wasn’t very aware of it when growing up and didn’t have any nerdy friends or parents that sat me down to watch it. It was a great series but I was a bit disappointed because pop culture ruined it for me.

I already knew about the Death Star, that Vader is his father, that Vader can remotely choke people, about the cantina scene, and that Greedo shoots first (or second). I had heard “I am your father” in so many TV shows and movies that it kept popping up in my mind while watching the trilogy. I was waiting for that famous scene instead of being surprised by it.

As a result, one of my objectives as a future parent is to show the original trilogy to my children as soon as they are old enough to enjoy them. 

Image Credits: Comic strip originally published in MAD #197