MeeGo First Impressions

It isn't often I plug the efforts of the company i work for but in the case of MeeGo I feel justified. I have been continually swapping operating systems on my two netbooks and have run the gamut of Windows (too big and slow), Chromium (too basic) and Jolicloud. The latter had been my staple go to operating system as it offered a good mix of reliability, speed and breadth of applications. I had also tinkered with Moblin but found it to be too unstable and this was my worry when I found myself downloading the MeeGo image and and burning it onto a USB stick. To my surprise what I ended up with was a very nice netbook interface which is lightening fast on my EeePC 1000HA and comes with a nice basic set of applications and hopefully more on the way. Many of the trouble spots i found with Moblin such as the ability to hang onto a network connection were gone and the system boots fast, the GUI is responsive and as such this has become (even in such a early state) my primary netbook OS.

Obviously it lacks a few things, including a broad set of applications but I assume that things can only get better, here. I had to work (harder than necessary) to an MP3 decoder up and running but other than that this is a very promising start.

Ipad my first 24 hours

My first 24 hours with my iPad 3G under the belt and so I figured i should probably provide my initial impressions. You mileage may differ....This was my initial experience.

The out of the box experience was disappointing, I opened the box peeled off all the protective skins and pressed the power button. The device sprang to life and commanded me to connect it to iTunes. I have to wonder why such a connected device needs to be tethered to breath it's first breath. i duly connected it and nothing happened. Nothing at all!. I concluded that perhaps iTunes needed an upgrade and this was so. About 30mins and two restarts later my new iPad was connected, filled out a few forms and we were synchronizing. Then i realized it was copying all my iPhone apps. Sure enough when I finally managed to untether it and start to play, I spent another hour removing all the apps that just did not belong on the iPad. Sorry apple, compared to the Kindle the out of box experience of the iPad was a bad one for me.

Playing around with the device I was impressed with the speed and responsiveness of the UI. Love that you can orient the device any way you want. Text entry is ok, the virtual keyboard is adequate but not sufficient to do real work and the typing position isn't ideal. Drawing is really finger painting, the control is minimal and the drawing apps I brought down had created controls (mainly sliders) that required ant sized fingers to select and move. I gave up. Perhaps adding a pen support might have been a good idea if this was an important design center for this device. I haven't tried the dictation or voice oriented applications which might help the input restrictions but there is something about talking to a screen that feels wrong. Talking to a phone is where I draw the line.

So basically this is a big iPod touch and this is the point, it really shines with applications that need that extra display surface to add punch. This means the experience of most consumption based apps that are available for both devices have been improved. Where the iPad really shines (and I think the design center) is book reading. Clearly this is the new commercial addition to the Itunes paid media family and this device was made for iBook. I was also surprised to find that the Kindle App worked very well too. Sans battery life this might be the Kindle killer. i can see the potential for better quality ebooks and ones that exploit more media and even context (see an earlier post).


Really wish it had a camera and better in the moment sharing facilities with the iPhone. Try sharing an image (given there is no camera on the iPad) the amazing Bump app doesn't work on the iPad the only shared service that works is iTunes which mean devices have to tethered to a specific itunes instance or possibly through iLife.In the end I found two essential apps if you the reader are stuck. iPad camera is very cool it connects the iPhone (iPad-touch) camera to the iPad as a remote device but falls short if you want to share images already capture on the iPhone. A second app was required to share captured images, the one I found was Pic-Z-Share.

So in summary, great consumption device, will banish my kindle to the drawer, and an average social device. Want to see a camera and possibly some kind of pen support or better drawing experience and more peer connectivity with other devices. And can we finally get away from the incessant tethering for these highly connected devices. The iPad is not an ambient device even though it is highly connected it is not the device I wont leave at home. it serves a thin vertical within my digital lifestyle, a convenient a capable media consumption device but I will be interested to see how future products and applications change this initial take

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Aster Ln,Cupertino,United States

Immersive Media

In the last decade we saw the explosion of social media, in this decade I wonder if the time has come for Immersive media. At the recent CES (I wasn't there but read the press reports and blogs) it was clear that the Z axis was as important as X and Y given the amount of 3D technology being rolled out and it can't be long before depth cameras are commonplace on computing devices to give depth to gesture interfaces. Another popular subject at CES seemed to be the mass digitization of the written word into various e-book devices and services was quite apparent.

And it was the latter that started me thinking about Immersive media and what it might mean in the context of traditional media such as books. We have had Imax and wrap around cinemas for many years, and Virtual reality simulators all of which cost large amounts of money. In a little while I will have 3D content on the small screen in my home as long as I want to make a negative fashion statement and wear glasses. Digitizing books seems ok to me, making a them more portable and the sales experience more direct. But what if the experience could be more immersive?

In a digital book there is more opportunity for interaction, more opportunity for secondary media streams (e.g audio) that can make things more real and engaging. As can be seen in this CNET interview at CES with Ray Kurzweil

CNET: Ray Kurzweil on the future of reading

The Blio platform seems very interesting and will certain will have the potential for authors to make books more engaging and interactive. I can imagine two key opportunities emerging, augmenting existing art and new purpose authored content for such a platform.

So if platforms like Blio are almost here, what else might be done. Well what is the book could reach out into the environment/context of the reader and cause actions to occur. For example what if the cookery book can control aspects of the kitchen. With knowledge of inventory it could suggest recipes, and instead of asking you to pre-heat the over it could do it for you and maintain cooking time and optimum temperature.  Such things might be the next enhancement for immersive media and further blur the physical and virtual worlds.

Why do the clouds in cloud computing have to be so large?

The current view of cloud computing is one where processing and data storage is moved onto a set of services accessed over a network and served up to a number of small and/or lightweight clients.

The benefits of such a model are often touted in terms of potential cost reduction and ubiquity of access for users and small businesses. Cheaper, more mobile client hardware, less localized fixed infrastructure costs, simpler management and update, extensible resources, potential for global access etc.

There are also some significant issues with the traditional characterization of cloud computing including ubiquitous and consistent connectivity, potential performance issues, richness and controllability of the experience delivered, security, and balkanization of services and information.

So why do the clouds have to be so large? Any system architect will tell you that design is a constant tradeoff between simplicity through the centralization of resources, the cost tradeoffs in resource sharing, verses driving complexity to the edge to achieve performance and more localized and richer experience; and that management of data ultimately becomes an issue of trust rather than one of technology.

A differentiated viewpoint on cloud computing would allow, support and embrace the inclusion of smaller clouds operating at different levels in the system working in concert with larger clouds.

With appropriate infrastructure the the clouds themselves then become a composable fabric of computing, processing, storage and other services enabling the architectural tradeoffs required to support effective pervasive computing. For example a cloud formed by devices in a room create a basis for entertainment (locative context), the cloud formed by the chance meeting of two individuals provide the potential for collaboration and sharing even commerce (social context). This doesn’t invalidate the existing vision and notions of cloud computing it extends this notion maintaining a balance between iron in the sky and local resources. The devil is in the details requiring a new platform that allows the creation (dynamic) and integration of computing elements at the local and global level. It will require a new set of tools, born out of the current web based tools that allow solutions to be created (authored) and deployed across the cloud infrastructure.

Even with the current vision of cloud computing, it is unlikely that there will be one cloud. Major computing vendors are all rushing to the pump and creating their cloud vision and deploying infrastructure this will create a balkanized services landscape with the same integration barriers that exist today in service oriented infrastructures and large web based communities. Other factors such as information security will naturally drive towards a more fragmented cloud computing view. So I ask the question again why do the clouds in cloud computing have to be so big?

Dropbox

A little while ago I started playing with Dropbox, the concept of such a thing has been something I have been waiting to see for quite a while. There are some other products out there that do a similar thing perhaps the most well known is livemesh from Microsoft. I drifted to Dropbox because of the extensive platform coverage which now includes the IPhone. My first dip into this technology was to simply move photo's around. I was travelling and took a camera and a netbook and wasn't about to try and load up gimp on the netbook but I wanted a place to offload the pictures I had taken. Netbox worked extremely well every image I uploaded form the camera was nicely waiting for me on my desktop when I got home for me to process. Seamless, simple and convenient if only all software was like this.



Since this initial foray into Dropbox I have been using it for other purposes. I helped a friend share images of his grand daughter with his father (great grand dad) using the folder sharing. I also started to need to put more sensitive information between machines so I started experimenting with integration of TrueCrypt and Dropbox.

The general idea is to create a Truecrypt volume on a file which is within dropbox. When mounted the filesystem can be treated like any other through the mount point. Once the volume is unmounted Dropbox will synchronize it. Not only that but it does this quite intelligently only transferring the delta rather than the whole drive.

Now playing around with the Wordpress, Dropbox and TrueCrypt to see if I can create a distributed private journal.

TV3.0 How watching TV is evolving

For me growing up, TV was in black and white and the first major evolution that I can remember was color (or coming from the UK Colour) TV which added a new visual dimension. Things remained fairly much the same in terms of consuming broadcast content for the next 20 odd years until Tivo came along. Yes you could make the argument that VCR's pre-dated the Tivo but for me I consumed mostly movies on this medium. Tivo allowed me to time shift and it wasn't long before that impacted the way my family and I consumed broadcast TV. I was on the leading edge of the PVR wave and so most of my friends are fairly much caught up now but I am already onto my third evolution of TV and this is really providing a different shift entirely. Not only am I time shifting my viewing I am also shifting geography. For the last two months my wife and I have watched mostly british TV restricting our use of local services to the delivery of live sports and a couple of specific shows, everything else has been from the UK.

The UK content was delivered into the home via torrents and the community is so active that for the popular soaps and drama's we were able to watch them the same day they were aired in the UK. So ok so this is illegal consumption of content but I rationalize it more as a missed business opportunity for the networks and advertisers. I do restrict what I download to broadcast material and would happily pay for it if somebody wanted to deliver it to me as a service (see BBC iplayer) rather than running the whole operation myself as I do today. My setup requires a certain amount of manual selection of shows and the upkeep and maintenance would not be for the naive user. The setup involves an in-home media server which runs the torrent package and is used to download the shows and then distribute within the home. I have a separate 803.11n network to which are attached client devices that can browse and play the content hosted. These clients are running Boxee which is great little integrated client for audio and video that is attached to a community network so my friends can see what I am watching and vice versa. The Boxee clients are connected to HDTVs.

Through this setup I think I have had a glimsp at the next version of TV whereby community (rather than networks) influence what we watch and it will be delivered on a global scale from production houses connected to a peer sharing network with appropriate funding from advertizing and PPV. Waiting to see who does this first....

Fettling Friday: Digging into Opensocial (Part 1)

Defining the social dimension of the social desktop has led perhaps unsurprisingly to needing to understand the scope and role of opensocial in this context. Opensocial was created by google with the help of myspace and was designed to allow social applications/networks to share their social data with each other. From a users point of view this means that the social applications that you use can have access to your tribe independent of the hosting network on that tribe. From a programming standpoint it is a set of API's that enable implementers to create opensocial containers (social networks like Myspace) and applications.

Specifically there are four API's

• Javascript API for clients
• Friends: People and relationship API
• Activities: publishing and accessing user activity information (e.g live feed)
  
• Persistence: simple key-value pair data for server-free statefull apps

The general application model is just like any other webapp in that there some interface that a user interacts with a client interface  (standalone application, gadget etc.etc) and this in turn requests data from the social service to be rendered at the client. The data requests are asynchronous utilizing ajax like semantics but the data request protocol adds a layer which can stack multiple requests into a single HTTP request thus optimizing the network utilization. I suspect that this does push more complexity at either end of the interaction but will need to dive deeper to substantiate and quantify this suspicion. Which I will cover in the next post for fettling Friday..