Field Notes Spring Colours ⇥
Comes with three notebooks and a dry-transfer text kit. Fantastic.
[W]hen these are gone, you’re once again stuck with the letters F, I, E, L, D, N, O, T, E, and S, placed in an order of our choosing.
Comes with three notebooks and a dry-transfer text kit. Fantastic.
[W]hen these are gone, you’re once again stuck with the letters F, I, E, L, D, N, O, T, E, and S, placed in an order of our choosing.
Well, that was fast.
As usual, some spectacular before & after photos from The Big Picture. In slightly embarrassing news, Calgary chose not to participate by any measurable amount. The real effect of Earth Hour, though, should not be that one hour, but a lasting reminder bucking waste.
$35 every four weeks for iPad, smartphone and web access seems a bit expensive, especially when you don’t get extra crosswords, and other features that may have “restrictions applied.” I don’t see why they think tiered access is the right approach. That said, it’s always easier for them to bring the price down if it tanks.
Also of note, they will be offering subscriptions at a reduced price to students and faculty of some schools, though which schools will have this opportunity is unclear.
Subscriptions wouldn’t fail so spectacularly if they kept the pricing simple and reasonable, and made their apps work well (the Times’ smartphone and iPad apps both are second-rate when compared to news apps from Reuters, the BBC and various RSS readers).
The Times has a much better attitude than the music industry.
I ended up only standing in line for a few hours, but I got exactly the iPad I wanted. A few thoughts on what I’ve discovered so far:
Elizabeth Taylor passed away today, but the writer of her New York Times obituary passed away in 2005.
As a Bowie fan, I’m intrigued.
I may have linked to this already, but it doesn’t matter. It’s worth a second link.
All three major crime groups—the Yamaguchi-gumi, the Sumiyoshi-kai, and the Inagawa-kai—have “compiled squads to patrol the streets of their turf and keep an eye out to make sure looting and robbery doesn’t occur,” writes Jake Adelstein
Compare and contrast with this.
As you’re a human being, you’ll have no-doubt grasped that this post is largely about multitasking. Specifically, it’s a discussion of mobile OS multitasking, its disconnect to human multitasking, and the larger scope of it all. As you can imagine, this will be a fairly long post. Not a novel, but not a couple of paragraphs either. So go grab something to drink now. I’ll wait.
Before I begin, some quick housekeeping notes:
Everyone is an enthusiast, a know-it-all and a devotee of something. Some people are crazy about music, others about fly fishing. I, for instance, am a bit of a nut for cars and photography. I’m not an expert in either field, but I respect and admire both. Let’s start with photography.
Professional photographers would scoff at the default camera app in the iPhone. It’s far too simple, and far too imprecise. There’s no way to adjust the ISO, the exposure or the white balance. But most people don’t care about adjusting those things. They open the camera app to get a quick snap of the events of that moment, and that’s it. For most people, the default camera app is all they need. For enthusiasts, alternative apps exist (such as Tap Tap Tap’s fantastic Camera+, which offers much finer control).
Let’s talk about cars[2]. Normal people want a reliable car that doesn’t look too ugly to get them from point A to point B (and maybe the elusive point C, if they’re feeling frisky). They care about the comfort of the seats, the quality of the stereo and the colour of the paint. Non-human-beings like myself want to know whether or not the engine is direct-injected, what kind of transmission it has and the power distribution ratio (if it’s four-wheel drive). I’m an enthusiast who actually cares about that sort of thing, but if I were marketing an average car, I shouldn’t expect an average customer to deal with those sorts of decisions.
In both cases, an average consumer simply wants the best outcome possible, with the fewest nitty-gritty detail decisions. They just want their photos to look good, and their car to drive well.
To begin, let’s state the obvious: iOS doesn’t multitask. It does something I like to think of as task juggling. Sure, a few of Apple’s applications do true multitasking: emails and SMS messages and sent and received in the background, and new events on an Exchange calendar get automatically pushed to the device. But third-party apps aren’t allowed to do true multitasking.
There are a few multitasking APIs developers have access to. Pandora can continue to stream music in the background, Flickr can upload your snapshots, and Skype can receive incoming calls. Despite the initial whininess by some pundits, it actually works pretty well in most apps for most users. Apps that don’t really do any of these things (say, a game) get put into a “sleep” state when you switch away from them. When you switch back, it restores to the state it was in before you had to answer your modal iOS notification.
This implementation has a huge upside: it helps keep battery life high by only running the most relevant background processes. It also offers a downside: applications can’t periodically refresh. That means your Twitter client, RSS reader and Facebook will refresh next time you switch to them, but not while they’re sitting in the background. Some clever people have devised some clever hackish workarounds, like Boxcar which shows push notifications for Twitter and Facebook.
These two rudimentary paragraphs are probably obvious to those who are tech-savvy, and were probably boring. They’ll tie into the overall story, though, so keep reading.
This method of task-switching works pretty well in the single-task, single window environment of a phone. Imagine trying to juggle a couple of instances of Safari on a 3.5-inch display. It’s hopeless. Despite its 10″ display, the iPad also adopts these UI conventions. The larger screen, running at the same resolution of desktop displays of not-that-long-ago, is dominated entirely by one application, no matter the mental real-estate that application occupies. Watching a movie, writing a tweet and editing a document are all done at 1024 × 768.
When writing a blog post, I often have a few Safari windows open, a plain text editor and my Twitter client. I’m often referencing them all, and it’s easier to keep them all open on my XXL canvas (since tidied). A computer OS treats these as separate tasks — its definition of task is an application process. My definition of task is “the thing I’m working on.” Since a modern desktop architecture supports multitasking and multiwindowing, I can adapt and treat them as one task, even if the OS doesn’t. This is in stark contrast to the iPad, because it lacks both. Another example of this would be my web development setup. Again, it consists of multiple windows for various discrete tasks, even though it’s only one thing I’m working on.
On a phone, users don’t want to micromanage tasks. Every time I use someone else’s iPhone, their multitasking tray is full of every application they’ve ever launched. This is OK, because none of them are actually running on an iPhone (Android also puts unused applications into sleep mode, and Windows Phone 7 doesn’t have multitasking).
On the larger screen of the iPad, this doesn’t work as well. Multiple OS tasks may be one user task on that kind of device, and iOS only supports single-window tasks. Viewing only one app at a time is inelegant and inefficient. If you have an Android tablet, a Finnish company has developed an application called Ixonos, which allows you to have multiple windows open at once. But if you watch the video, it also proves itself as inelegant and clunky. The controls are far too small on a 10″ screen[3] [4].
I briefly mentioned my web development setup above. It usually consists of a Photoshop window or two, a tabbed plain text editor, Transmit, and a couple of browsers to test in. It’s a setup that works really well on my desk, but is hopeless on a 10″ tablet (let alone the Samsung Galaxy Tab’s much smaller 7″ screen). But, and this is important, it isn’t the OS itself that makes web development on a tablet a horrible experience[5].
As I pointed out above, it isn’t just multitasking and multiwindowing (or the lack thereof) that affect the user experience. Even if the iPad had multi-both, it’s just too small to switch between all of those windows. In this case, as usual, it’s up to the user to delineate what is, and what is not appropriate for a tablet.
When Apple introduced the first iPad, they told people exactly what the tablet’s focus would be. They showed off the web experience, email, productivity, multimedia, books and games. It’s casual computing for average people. When Apple introduced the iPad 2, they didn’t change their focus one bit. The addition of cameras are the only slightly broadening factor, but even they fit into the scope of a casual computing device (the rear camera is an crappalicious 0.7MP). The increased RAM and the faster CPU are only there to enhance user experience when running and switching apps, not to provide the ability to run many at the same time, on the same screen.
Average people (my dad, not my IT pro dad) understand the multiple windows ∴ multiple apps paradigm. They would be absolutely comfortable with a larger-display tablet. The trouble with a large tablet is that it further grains the market, because it’s niche is confusable with that of a consumer laptop. Instead of a simple tablet → consumer laptop → power laptop product line, it becomes something closer to simple tablet → power tablet and/or consumer laptop depending on what you’re doing with it → power laptop (never mind that the MacBook Air throws a wrench into Apple’s own product line).
I didn’t bring up the MacBook Air arbitrarily there, by the way. I see this hypothetical future iPad XL (or whatever) as being the Air of the tablet line. The Air is very specific: it’s a lightweight, go-anywhere MacBook that drains power from the battery through a pipette. In much the same way, an iPad XL would be the combination of the OS X desktop experience and the iOS touch interface. It’s probably the future.
This vulnerability […] could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.
There’s gotta be a reason for not having Flash on iOS besides battery life. I’m just struggling to think of what it might be.
What a novel concept.
Pack your bags for a version of the Bahamas that’s seven light years away.
Today Tokyo is strangely subdued. The streets of Harajuku are unusually quiet. Many shops are closed and the Lawson convenience store next to the Monocle office has been cleared of almost everything apart from chewing gum and make-up.
A stark portrait of a stoic and professional response to such a devastating tragedy.
Spoiler: low framerate in some videos, slow user experience.
It’s a pity the display hasn’t been glued to the glass, but I’m sure I’ll love mine on the 25th.
Vintage-styled carbon fibre bodywork belays a modern 911 drivetrain and underpinnings. Beautiful.
Via Cabel Sasser:
Ladies and gents: the pathetic, desperate groans of an outpaced, frightened dinosaur, in words. Pure poetry, @VeriFone.