Two More Weeks

[Andrew Tarpinian]

On Feb 19, 2013, at 6:47 AM, Peter Korsten <peter at severity-one.com> wrote:

> Op 18-2-2013 22:21, Andrew Tarpinian schreef:
> 
>> As we see with android, if it was more generic it may not exist. Whether you like Apple or not, they had the vision to build an audio engine into iOS that gave developers the hooks to dig deep. Android is as you say generic, but their vision is generic too. It's a vision of technology without including art.
> 
> The way I see it, Apple is mostly a marketing firm that also sells hardware, because otherwise there would be nothing to market. I imagine that they have a lot of non-technical people dreaming up new features, in meetings that see a lot of buzzwords such as 'synergy', 'the way forward' and 'win-win situation'.

To me that is what a "new" Microsoft meeting would sound like.

IMO Apple starts with the problem and creates a solution through technology.

Example: Dad wants to record his child. How do we make shooting, editing and sharing video from a phone that a dad shoots of his child as simple and fun as possible.

> Google, in contrast, is more of a firm that thinks 'now what would happen if I press this button?', even though there's a big sign saying 'do not press button – will cause thermonuclear blast'. They just come up with a product that often nobody likes (Pulse, Wave, Plus), and sometimes it's actually a success (Chrome). Almost everybody working there has a PhD, which is a bit of an issue because practically none of their customers have one.

I think this is a misconception. People say that Android is hard to use for average people because it is made for smart people, uhh no, it's just badly designed. You can make shit really complicated but still follow ui design guidelines and not make things ugly.  And on top of that they let the hardware makers do pretty much whatever they want, this leads to inconsistent crap on top of crap. 

I would like android to be really cool, but well it's not. It just reminds of when skinning windows was really popular and you would download all these seemingly cool scifi themes that would make your computer look like its from the future, but in reality it looked like shit and made your computer really slow.

> 
>> The good news is by accident (or maybe on purpose) the excuse of a phone has thrust us into the future of computers.
> 
> Well, that I'm not so sure about. Computers at home, maybe or even probably, but computers at work, no. There's no way I could do my day job on a 10" screen, without a keyboard and mouse. Things will diversify, though.

Yea but a screen and keyboard are just accessories, dummy terminals when you feel like using them. Your computer/tablet/device can just be sitting anywhere and wirelessly connected. 

> 
>> Actually probably over 10 years ago I heard a talk at a video editing confernce about how we would be moving away from the desktop into a future where instead the computers we would use would actually just live in the devices we use, camera's etc..
> 
> Well, apparently my favourite car maker is going to run its in-car entertainment and navigation system on Android. And the first Android cameras are here as well. But rather than replacing the desktop entirely, we'd be using devices like these for things that we didn't have any better solution than the desktop. But let's face it: you're not going to do word processing, spreadsheets or graphic design on a tablet. Because you would see that a new message had come in, you'd check Facebook, look at photos of cats... :-)


Android is also free, and similar to Linux in it's adaptability, companies have a starting point they can build upon, in that way it's good. 

I think we will do work on these machines but just have different I interfaces to connector them based on the task, think Wacom tablet, or midi controller. 

Also at that time Facebook will have been taken over by cats and everyone will stop using it because they don't want to feed their egos.