Reuters reports on the just-started trial over the copyrights and licensing fees between the two biggest rivals in the technology industry. It is a great introduction into the trial. What I found disarming, though, is this picture:
Seriously, how is Samsung even supposed to defend its case after the jury sees this? Go, Apple. No reason why you should invest your money into inventing the designs that others will steal, sell & get away with it.
Microsoft launched a preview of its new web mail interface today. I tried it out myself, because I was curious. Here are my thoughts.
If you want to use the new interface and you don't have a hotmail account, you need to register for a @outlook.com email address. Microsoft is following Google's @gmail.com and Apple's @icloud.com/@me.com as a new signature domain. Everyone knows that nowadays your email domain is a part of the first impression you make. Microsoft finally gave their customers a chance to feel fresh and modern again with their @outlook.com suffix.
What I really like about the interface is speed. It's Metro-styled, so it will fit into Windows 8. It seems faster than Apple's iCloud, Yahoo!'s yahoo.com and even Google's Gmail interface. It's very usable on low broadband (which is something that both Apple and Google suck at). It's very simplistic, which is something I feel like a webmail interface should be (sorry Gmail, all those flags, labels and groups make me dizzy).
Even though I didn't play with the contacts too much, it seems capable of everything you need to do. Skype integration is pretty cool, but they're already late to this game since Microsoft should have used Skype better for over a year (they did pay a couple of billion dollars for it).
It's just a preview, so we can be sure Microsoft will try to make it even better in the future. Let's just hope they won't pack it with useless features while trying to improve it.
My call is that is has a bright future. Try it out for yourself.
Speaking of easily and fast spreading news, I took the liberty of putting together a little graph. It shows how this particular piece of information has been traveling around the internet.
From most of the articles, I figured out that iMore.com's was the first one. Then allthingsd.com picked it up. And then all the Apple news servers such as theverge.com, macrumors.com, cultofmac.com and appleinsider.com just copy-pasted it. (Which is kind of pathetic). Feelings aside, this would look like a solid, credible information flow.
The weird part is that even though allthingsd.com used the original iMore.com article as their source, in an edited version of the post, iMore.com sourced back to allthingsd.com. So, it's as convincing of an argument as agreeing with your own opinions.
Even though this particular piece of news is probably true, I can't imagine an easier thing to do than to make up something ridiculous (such as a 4-inch iPhone) and then make sure I send slightly alternated piece of this junk to news-hungry journalists without mentioning my name every week. Or I could just make one up. Then, after a couple of months of hearing a lie, it just becomes a truth and later, a dogma. That could be how we got to those many "sure thing" Apple products that have never seen the surface of the Earth (two Easter Eggs in there), but were supposed to come out years ago.
So again, I might be wrong about the new iPhone. But that doesn't change anything on the fact that these news sites work with such vague information which they sell through ads, that it's actually genius. They make up news, people read it. The crazier news, the more readers they get.
The Verge and other major news sites published a story today saying that the new iPhone is coming soon:
"The rumor cycle this time around for the next iPhone has been a bit unusual — multiple leaks have all depicted the exact same components — but it looks like we'll be seeing what Apple has up its sleeves come Wednesday, September 12th."
We soon shall see whether I was right or not.
I don't have a reason to not believe this story, early September seems logical. We should get both the new iPhone and iOS 6 in that announcement. The last iPhone (4S) was released on October 6th, 2011 along with iOS 5.
If you are interested in science, check out my other blog science by a weirdo…. I started writing that blog last year and discontinued it after a couple of months, but now I'm going back to it. You can find more about artificial intelligence, advanced physics, mathematics etc there. I plan on posting on both these blogs and no worries, I'll add the links to new posts there both on Twitter and here.
I honestly wish I lived in the Kansas City (either one) right now. Google bringing a super high speed internet there is enough of a reason to move, I think.
Google has been working on the Fiber project for a couple of years and chose the Kansas City as the first place to launch it. You pay $300 to get your place wired up and then there's like a $70 monthly payment for a 1000 Mbit down and 1000 Mbit up. Yeah, amazing speeds.
This is still a new project of Google's, though. We know how Google likes to kill successful projects for no reason (R.I.P., Google Wave), so let's hope that Fiber lives on to provide the fastest internet connection in the world.
Even though I support this project, there's still something strange about it. Google is losing millions of dollars on this (the customer-payed fees don't cover pretty much anything, they're basically giving it away for free). There are clues flowing around that Google want to gain political influence in the USA. Maybe they will only enable Google Play store and block Apple iTunes Store over the connection (see: net neutrality). Or they will be able to track your search/web surfing habits better. I don't know. And to be honest, I don't think that Google knows, either. Right now they are building a huge competitive advantage and I am sure that they will use it really well when their time comes.
Because I just don't believe that Google is giving away free internet for no reason. It's still great that they are doing it. And by my observations and experience, these kinds of speed will get to the Czech Republic in about 15 years. Yup. Bummer.
The Verge published today another article about the new iPhone 'five'. I am not a big fan of this news, if it's a true leak and the new iPhone will look like that. But there's so many things that are wrong with this whole situation.
We read tens or hundreds of posts about the iPad 3 before Apple released the new device this March under the simple name new iPad. It makes so much sense - especially for future-proofing Apple's strategy. Who will want to buy an iPad 6 in 2015? I think it makes a lot of sense to call it the iPad and then specify the year it was released in. Works for Macs, should work for iPads. And I think Apple will use this strategy in the upcoming iPhone, too. My guess is - Apple is releasing the new iPhone this fall. So I don't really get why the tech journalists still use the name iPhone 5. (Plus, extra confusion is added when you remember that the iPhone 4S was too called '5' before launch last year).
I love the design of the iPhone 4S. I own one and it's still the best looking phone out there, even though the design is two years old. But I don't think the new iPhone (yes, using the new terminology) will have such a similar looks to the 4/4S. Apple already got under attack after releasing the 4S (people wanted a change in form factor and the visual concept), but they agreed that it's just a tweaked 4. I don't think they can get away with releasing such highly anticipated device with the good ol' design.
Cut the crap. I DON'T BELIEVE THE WHOLE 4-inch SCREEN iPHONE BULLSHIT! I might be wrong. I probably am. I am also an iOS developer. Even after releasing auto-layout in iOS 6, Apple can't change the aspect ratio. Technologically, they can, of course. They're the most valuable company in the world. The developers would get pissed off, though. It's enough to tweak the apps for 4 types of devices:
Seriously, try adding another aspect ratio and the quality of customisation for each device will get worse. The developers just don't have the time and money to spend their time on tweaking their apps for each device category. Which is also the reason why most Android apps just suck (the fragmentation doesn't allow devs to have their app look great on every device out there). Maybe not content-wise, but definitely visual-wise.
I just really hope this is not the next iPhone. I want to see something new. Jony Ive needs to show us that he hasn't been chilling for the last two years. It's your turn, Apple.
I myself am not a great writer. I would say it out loud anytime, anywhere. I make typos, I get off topic at times and my style might not be the most catching one out there. But at least my writings are based on thoughts from my head.
Let me clarify what I'm trying to say. There's a big difference between reporting on facts and reporting on opinions. Both are OK, if you mention the source. I can't wrap my mind around the fact that some (most) journalists (especially in the tech industry) don't have a problem giving credit to the source of facts, but often forget to do the same with opinions.
I am of course talking about the suspicious uniformity of opinions in the tech industry. The one example for all, that actually forced me to write this article and formulate my thoughts that have been flying around my mind for a long time, happened today. Apple released three new commercials today (link). My opinion? They're not their best ones so far, but I find them rather humorous.
But let's look the major tech sites and how they handled this story.
"They all star a single actor who portrays an Apple Genius Bar employee, and stupidity appears to be the other unifying theme."
"From the famous '1984' ad for Macintosh, 1997's 'Think Different,' the 2006 John Hodgman / Justin Long 'Get a Mac' series through to today's iPhone ads, the work of TBWA/Chiat/Day has been consistently simple and clever, …"
"The quality falls off when the same genius (who apparently sleeps in a blue Apple T-shirt and puts on his name tag to answer the door) interacts with increasingly silly customers, one whose wife is about give birth and another who bought a PC thinking it was a Mac."
"The three commercials are related by the stupidity - and the naivety of the company that made the commercials."(translated from Czech)
So we can see that a certain number of the tech news sites have this opinion (that they are entitled to). It might be the majority of the articles published on this topic today that is negative. The weird part is that when you look into the comments on these websites - it seems like the readers have a different opinion. By my count, with readers, it's about 60 % pro and 40 % con. But the tech news sites? About 10 % pro and 90 % con.
I ask myself, is it different people? Is it one world, where the readers live and the technology they use affects their life in some way - and then a different world, where the writers and publishers live, where everything is awful? I say, no way.
I call copycat bullshit. If you read a few of these articles, you can see that most of them link to about five original stories. Are the writers nowadays so lazy that they not only re-write articles to get readers (money from ads, of course), but they even copy opinions? The same thing happened a couple of months ago with the realistic designs of Apple apps. One influential article published on theverge.com and suuuudenly, everyone hates skeuomorphism.
I don't know guys. I understand that the readers pay for the ads that pay your bills. But seriously, you should not publish at all cost. Source facts of course, but please, make your own opinions. I'm fed up with reading the same exact opinion on ten different sites.
Imagine a world, where there wouldn't be one/two sources and the rest wasn't full of copycats. Imagine a world, in which everyone created something new. Can you imagine how cool that would be?
Last Christmas I got a very thoughtful present from one of my best friends: a voucher for four laps on a racing circuit in a sports car. Even though I drive regularly, I had not been the typical fan of fast cars. Not that I disliked them, I just had no special interest in them. That changed today.
We finally set up the time and place with the firm that offers these cars for rent and I was originally supposed to drive a Chevy Camaro this morning. After we arrived, though, I was told that they couldn't get hold of one. Instead they had four other sports cars parked outside the hangar (it was a circuit set up at an old airport). There was a BMW of some sort, a Porsche 911, a white roofless Ferrari and one Nissan GT-R. Since I wanted to drive a Camaro and the GT-R's looks are the most similar with its, I couldn't not have picked it. My other friend who knows much more about sports cars than I do (not surprisingly, I don't really know much more than I need to) told me, that I made the right choice. In fact, the GT-R was the only car not designed, but computed. The Nissan dev team just tried to find the most aerodynamic shape for a car and the GT-R is what the got (see pic here).
I love this approach, it's just so … strait forward. You need a car to be fast? Cut down the friction. Done.
The actual ride was amazing, the straight parts of the circuit with that 500 horse power pushing me ahead were - surreal. Cannot be described to someone who has never tried it or hasn't ridden a roller coaster.
The outcome of this? I want to know more about this car. I want to know more about cars in general. This is a thing I never though I would be interested in, now I am. I want to go drive on a circuit again. Same thing, never thought I would like to do it again.
And this is just one interesting field I came up by by accident (pun intended). Who knows how many more there are still waiting?
Let's go and explore.