Tagged with apple …

Jun 02 2011
Technology

The next Windows, 8 – radical change at last?

At last, an end to the tired old Windows interface, itself a poor derivation of the original Apple Mac and Xerox windowed interfaces. Yes, Windows 7 is quite slick and has some useful innovations, but it’s stuck in a 1980s paradigm.

Microsoft’s preview (video below) of the next version of Windows (for release perhaps in early 2012?) is a radical leap from Windows 7. It’s designed for touchscreen as well as conventional mouse/keyboard setups, and draws on the different ways we’re learning to use touchscreen devices such as iPads and smartphones.

Applications appear in tiles that you manipulate and navigate with fingers (on a touchscreen) or mouse (on a desktop). The file browser is replaced by an interface that bridges and combines different stores and sources of data. And you can still run traditional applications such as MS Office.

It’s just a preview so there’s no sense in a critique – but it’s promising. As Apple’s mouse OS X and touchscreen iOS converge into a single OS, can MS leapfrog them with a fresh start? Competition, when it gets through to Microsoft, can be a wonderful thing.

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Mar 28 2011
Technology

Is the iPad useful for business and is iPad2 worth the upgrade?

Yes and no.

This Observer article shows how useful the iPad has become for many people at work - How the iPad revolution has transformed working lives. The answer I give: I find myself using it far more than my laptop when out of the office, though I still need the laptop.

But the iPad 2 doesn’t offer much over the original iPad unless you’re a gamer or use video-chat. Apple got it pretty much right first time.

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Jan 26 2011
Start ups, Technology

IT fit for startups | The Hubble

Just posted - IT fit for startups | The Hubble.

Whilst we at Conosco support highly capable server platforms for companies such as Moonpig, Anya Hindmarch and Cadogan Estates, we also try to keep startups’ cash in their pockets for as long as possible. This is a guide for startups who want enterprise-class IT which won’t cost much to set up but will scale painlessly.

Caution: I recommend an Apple Mac laptop… if you have any kind of Windows server infrastructure such as a domain controller or fileserver, as most larger businesses do, then a Mac is not painless (but still fine with a little savvy).

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May 29 2010
Technology

iPad apps that make the most of the touchscreen interface

You’re in the old world, you’ve got your new iPad and after the first rush of excitement you might be feeling a little deflated, especially if you’re an iPhone user. A bigger screen, yes, but… um… web sites and apps… all rather familiar… where’s the rush of the new?

The answer may well be quite subtle: the iPad is revolutionising our stale old 1960s computer-user interface. With a touch screen, you interact directly with the content under your fingers. For instance, WIRED magazine lets you scroll horizontally across articles’ opening pages and then down into their further pages; the FT lets you touch companies’ names for a profile and then pinch-zoom their stock charts; and many apps switch between a functional interface in landscape mode and a pure reading pane in portrait.

Here are some early apps that make the most of this new world:

  • WIRED magazine – the first magazine formatted for the iPad, a triumph even in this early form and the best demonstration of how revolutionary the tablet interface will be.
  • Alice for the iPad – the first book formatted for the iPad, with parts of the illustrations responding to the iPad’s movements in a way that begs for a Monty Python app. Nice, but this genre will improve.
  • Financial Times – the selection of articles is limited but you can search for all. The way you drill down through text to data is elegant and bodes well for data-rich content. Downloads articles for offline reading.
  • Brushes – paint onscreen and send the results to your friends. As used by David Hockney.
  • Epicurious – with its prop-up cover and glass screen the iPad is a perfect substitute for a cookbook.
  • iBooks – it’s free from Apple but you have to install it; includes a selection of free Gutenberg classics as well as some heavyweights such as Wolf Hall.

And some other iPad essentials:

  • WeatherBug – there’s no iPad weather app so add this – you get a map with clear overlays of temperature, pressure, humidity and more.
  • Instapaper – lets you bookmark pages (on any computer) for reading later on your iPad. Great for reading when you’re offline.
  • TweetDeck (no Twitter/Tweetie app yet).
  • Wikipanion Plus – lets you save pages for offline reading.
  • A MobileMe account to sync your Safari web bookmarks between your computers, iPad and iPhone.
  • BBC iPlayer – iPads need to use the ‘bigscreen’ version
  • (The BBC News app is not yet available in the UK due to the fear and ineptitude of the BBC’s UK competitors.)
  • Air Video – use you iPad to watch videos stored on your computer.
  • Jaadu VNC for remote access to a Mac computer; Mocha Remote Desktop for Windows.
  • Apple’s iPad case – essential for propping it up.
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May 14 2010
Technology

MobileMe Mail Beta – elegant personal webmail

Apple has released a beta of its new MobileMe web email service. It’s slick and elegant in an Apple way, and should be great for personal use.

You get some decent semi-pro features too

  • rule-based filtering
  • out-of-office replies
  • forwarding
  • signatures

For business or heavy use it doesn’t compare to Google’s Gmail, which has better features for heavy emailers and allows you to manage a domain and administer multiple users, but aesthetes will appreciate Apple’s polished interface.

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Mar 16 2010
Technology

Apple at war with Google, a Good Thing

There’s a lot of chatter about this post by an engineer who’s joining Google from Oracle. He chose Google because its technologies are open and many of Apple’s are closed

The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.

I hate it.

So don’t buy an iPhone. Millions of others love the way it just works. We have a choice and the intensifying competition between Apple and Google will only improve it. Oh, and Disney’s quite successful too.

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Feb 24 2010
Technology

Apple’s secret of success – focus

Apple sells $40bn a year but has so few products you could fit the whole range on a desk.

We are the most focused company that I know of or have read of or have any knowledge of. We say no to good ideas every day. We say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number so that we can put enormous energy behind the ones we do choose. The table each of you are sitting at today, you could probably put every product on it that Apple makes, yet Apple’s revenue last year was $40 billion. I think any other company that could say that is an oil company. That’s not just saying yes to the right products, it’s saying no to many products that are good ideas, but just not nearly as good as the other ones. I think this is so ingrained in our company that this hubris you talk about that happens to companies that are successful and sole role in life is to get bigger, I can tell you the management team at Apple would never let that happen. That’s not what we’re about. Small list of things to focus on.

- Apple CEO Tim Cook

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Feb 04 2010
Technology

ARM boss forecasts mass migration to netbooks

Will netbooks replace laptops and desktops? The boss of ARM, the UK company that dominates the design of chips for mobile devices, reckons netbooks will shoot from 10% to 90% of the PC market in a few years.

Even if he means 90% of the mobile computer market, I don’t think so… At Conosco we saw laptop sales outstrip desktops in summer 2008 – we now sell 50% more laptops than desktops – but netbook keyboards and screens are too small for serious use.

I’m watching Apple’s bet on the iPad with more interest – Apple thinks there is room for small computers, but ones that live alongside larger ones and don’t try to do everything.

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Nov 13 2009
Uncategorized

Apple’s cantilevered beauty

More effortless than computing… but such a beautiful example of a true cantilevered staircase, in Apple’s new store in New York:

Upper West Side Apple Store by mattbuchanan.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattbuchanan/4098990406/in/set-72157622666078981/

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Nov 09 2009
Technology

The best isn’t good enough for Steve Jobs

The difference between me and Steve is that I’m willing to live with the best the world can provide. With Steve that’s not always good enough.

More applause from the tech elite on Steve Jobs winning Fortune’s “CEO of the decade”.

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