Kindle Fire: Return of the Desktop?

Much has been written about the Amazon Kindle Fire (Amazon's new Android based touchscreen Kindle e-reader/media player).

Is it a game changer? Maybe. We'll see.

I've certainly ordered one, and though many say its no threat to the iPad, given its media capabilities... I dunno --- people might be surprised. If its reasonably performant (and compatible) for browsing, and given its e-commerce, e-book, and media capabilities... well, we'll see.

Certainly its going to make it tough for other Android tablet vendors; Jeff Bezos is right in asserting that devices alone don't sell (and this is old news) -- it's devices+services, as Apple has amply demonstrated again and again.

All that said, there's another interesting thing about the Kindle Fire that distinguishes its market approach from Apple's.

It's about content.

Apple sells activities -- a lifestyle; Amazon sells content.

Contrast Amazon's pitch with Apple's:

Disagree if you want, but its a philosophy difference that extends to the VERY FIRST SCREEN: Amazon hilights the content, not the application(s) -- go watch the Amazon video at the top of the post again.

Sure, you can by music, movies, and books with your iOS device, and there's no question that's a big part of the appeal -- but Apple's metaphor is about the task (books-->'Winnie the Pooh', videos-->'Inception'), and Amazon's is the reverse.

Interesting.

And here I thought "document-centric" computing, and the desktop metaphor it implies, was dead (I even wrote a eulogy).

Is it going to work? Maybe. We'll see.

But, either way, I have to give props to Amazon, and Bezos, for, well, trying to Think Different... :P

Browser benchmarks: When did they get so stupid?

So, the claim that IE is faster than Firefox, Safari, or Chrome, is ridiculous at many levels (MS claims IE faster than other browsers), and Microsoft was appropriately ridiculed for it.

But so is the idea that you have a test that demonstrates that the new Safari builds are "above 15 times better performance than Internet Explorer 7 in the same system".

Seriously, that's just stupid., and renders the index meaningless.

Why not just multiple the index scores by 10? Then you can claim Safari is 150X faster than IE7.

Without scaling the index into a range that meaningfully communicates (or at least correlates) to user experience (which things like FPS and even 3DMark did for video cards), it renders the testing both invalid and irrelevant.

Redux: Touch UI and the Art of Intent

Some very interesting research into touch UI from Microsoft Research, University of Toronto, and the good folks at Mitsubishi (MERL's been doing some great work) illustrates how to improve the precision and efficacy of touch screen computing. This isn't strictly a technology problem (touch screens are pretty accurate) - its a human factors problem (an affordance issue).

I wrote on this a while ago - the mouse is pretty accurate, but one of the significant reasons I think it succeeded as an "intuitive" input device was that it created an interface paradigm that allowed "intent".

Touch screens allow us to create programmable input devices (the hardwares becomes "soft" - the rest is just wiring) - I don't think its tactility that's makes it intriguing.

While the article posits that they solve the "fat fingering" problem by allowing the interactive to happen "above" your fingers - that is, you can touch the front *and* back of the screen, I'll posit that its actually the recapturing of *intent* in the interaction flow that makes the difference here.

Judge for yourself:



In any case, pretty cool.

Apple: "Who needs Flash?"

Ouch - from the grand poobah, Steve Jobs: "version of Flash formatted to personal computers is too slow on the iPhone"

Adobe's response notes the difference between "Flash lite" (for mobile) and "Flash" (the desktop version Jobs alluded to in his comments).

From a technology perspective, this hilights a subtlety Jobs implies that most (including Adobe's Ryan Stewart) either missed or mis-directed in their responses: Jobs doesn't want the half-assed version of the Web that most users experience on their handsets - he wants the real thing.

And that means, for the iPhone, Flash, not Flash Lite. The point being, the iPhone is a general purose computing device, and, though it may require interaction paradigm adjustments (form factor, input schema, etc.), it shouldn't have to compromise richness and robustness.

The current Flash Player really is optimized for the desktop (especially the Intel platform)- but, to be fair, that's an engineering deficiency, not a phyics problem; it is possible for the Flash platform to address...

MacWorld 2008: Software Industry R.I.P.

It's only fair, and certainly poetic, but the circle is now complete. As Apple, with the Apple II (and a little nudge from VisiCalc), heralded the beginning, so too did Steve Jobs (and Apple) herald the end (or at least, the end of the beginning) of the software industry.

No longer is a "what" (as in, "What do you?"), its now officially a "how". I'm calling it: Time of Death - January 15th, 2008, 9:48am PST (or thereabouts :))

What's am I going on and on about?

Steve Jobs made some cool announcements at the annual Apple-o-phile incest/love-fest: iPhone/iTouch upgrades, AppleTV stuff, MacBook Air, Time Capsule/Airport, and no mention of OS X...

(Tiger? Leopard? What's next? I dunno!! - some damn cat??)

Its not THAT wierd he didn't mention it - after all, Leopard just shipped, and I expect the OS enhancements will probably debut at the Apple Worldwide Developer's conference in June.

What was wierd was that nobody noticed... or cared.

It's a trend that's been developing for some time, but, these days, saying you do "software" is now as meaningful as saying you're in the "customer business" (or as insightful as having an "Audience business"? :P)...... just not that descriptive, dipsh!t.

And 2008 just made it official.

If you'll forgive the math mangling: It's only a hyperbole, if you can't see the asymptopes.

Touch UI and the Art of Intent

Observation: One of the great things about the mouse as an input device is the idea of "intent" - that your cursor indicates your locus of attention when used for interaction (Roll-over states and tool-tips being trivial expressions of this).

You have a simpler model of this semantic with the Blackberry trackball (and the Blackberry jog wheel before that), and a crappier version with things like using your remote control with a TV EPG (guide) or the arrow keys on your cell phone to navigate menus.

Touch interaction systems, like the iPhone, lack that model completely - just like most older (read: HW only) Consumer Electronics UIs (think VCR or DVD player).

In some cases, that really doesn't matter much... and in other cases, the directness of interaction provides a far better paradigm.... but, it suggests the question: is "intent" a semantic that will disappear for Touch UI? Or is it a temporarily "lost" item, like tactile feedback - just a gap to be crossed?

Safari for Windows

Get it here.

(Though be warned, at a 28MB download its WAAAAAAAAAAY larger than either Firefox, IE 7, or Opera)

Not Steve Jobs

I've been reading the "Fake Steve Jobs" blog for a while... but today's entry (concerning Microsoft's Surface computing device - yes, I'll be buying one) was frikkin' priceless...

An excerpt:
"And what is up with all these stories like this one where the writer gushes about how you can just squeeze photos to make them smaller or stretch them to make them bigger. Golly, can you believe it? Well, yeah, I can, since I introduced this several months ago and I'm going to be shipping a real product that employs this technique in only a few weeks.

This Surface thing is such classic Gates. He copies our idea, but in a frigtarded, impractical way..."

Funny.

High Frikkin' Larious

I mentioned this about Vista the other day, but Apple already got the joke.

And decided to share :)

Ouch.

Apple iPhone: Wow

Everything is software - the rest is just wiring.

I've mentioned the idea of the specific trumping the general for UI, and the value of general purpose computing environments for providing more specialization of application and eliminating distribution barriers (and mentioned Jeff Han's multi-touch work before).

And Apple's built something real - much sooner than I expected. Lots and lots of details to follow I'm sure, but the key innovations are:

• Ubiquituous connectivity,
• Portable form factor, and
  
• "Hardware as software" (most importantly multi-touch)
  

I think this is disruptive for reasons we don't even know yet. I'm sure many will predict failure, but they're wrong because the killer app won't be your cel phone replacement - though that'll be the excuse to buy it.

Read about Steve's Keynote here (and the iPhone here).

There's plenty of Jobs-ian hyperbole ("the first fully usable browser on a cellphone?" the Opera guys, or the Nokia S60 browser team, or the mobile Internet Explorer team might disagree - for very good reason) but its a doozy of an event and signals a significant transformation: Apple wants to become the last mile (the UI) for everything you do. Let everyone fight over the increasing commoditization of infrastructure and networks; Apple just wants the users.

That doesn't mean they're going to get them, but I do think this is a real effort... its no iWork (like that's a real replacement for Microsoft Office) or (*cough*) Zune... in fact...

...this is what the Origami should have been...