Information Overdose

About This Site

I am Some Random Nerd. I work in "Digital Media", and this is where I play with it. Call it a personal home page, blog, realtime lifestream or whatever the buzzword of the moment is. It just is what it is, so please enjoy your visit.

Thoughts and theories are my own (other than where quoted) and are personal rather than professional.

Multitouch and Apple's patents

A big downside of open source software is how it clashes with patent issues. Installing a Linux operating system is very easy– the slightly more complicated part comes afterwards, when you usually have to install additional components, ranging from graphics card drivers to media codecs. Companies like Canonical (who distribute the Ubuntu Linux operating system) have to be very careful about what they do and don't include with their packages. While they might not be troubled by issues like patents, there is the risk that a partner down the line will be.

In short, owning a patent for a particular idea gives you either the exclusive right to use it, or a way to make money by licensing other companies to use it. Or to swap patents, where two companies agree to let each other use their patented ideas. (Which makes it difficult for a startup entering a big competitive business like the mobile phone industry to get a foothold.)

However, if you're a software company like Apple, it's a different game. So it's interesting to see that after Apple are filing a suit against HTC over mobile phone software patents.

The facts;

  • Apple's iPhone led the pack of the current range of touchscreen smartphones.
  • The iPhone was the first mobile phone to feature a multitouch touch screen. Along with the Apps Store, it's a major USP of the iPhone– especially "pinch to zoom."
  • Although Android phones have had multitouch hardware, it hasn't been properly supported in the software-– so far.
  • A recent software update enabled multitouch features for the Nexus One Android phone– manufactured by HTC, but de-branded and sold via http://google.com/phone. These include pinch-to-zoom in the web browser, Google maps and the photo application– just like the iPhone.
  • Apple have 20 patents that they are claiming HTC are in breach of. Many of these relate to technical issues unrelated to the pinch-to-zoom aspect– which will probably be raising questions for other handset manufacturers using the Android operating system.

So ultimate

This is a snippet- read the full post.

Why the internet will still be a failure in 2025

An interesting article from Newsweek has made it's way onto the internet;

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

You might have guessed from the CD-ROM reference that this isn't a recent article– it was written by Clifford Stoll, and published in 1995. From the magazine issue dated Feb 27, 1995, to be exact.

The interesting thing is how many of the criticisms still apply. Sure– there are problems which might have seemed insurmountable 15 years ago which have now been solved (for example, the fact that there are now trustworthy ways to send money over the internet), the root of many of the problems remain the same. And it's those roots that are now more interesting than ever.

Pretty much all of the technical problems that were readily identifiable in 1995 have now been solved. But take a look past the issues of whether people will buy airline tickets or talk to their friends over the internet, and ask yourself about the social, human problems still exist, or whether they've been dealt with quite as easily.

This is a snippet- read the full post.

>>Now Silverlight Does Augmented Reality Too

Some news about a couple of interesting developments in the world of Augmented Reality on the desktop, with technologies developed for Flash and Silverlight.

Although the desktop AR has a couple of interesting applications, I don't think I've seen anything that really interests me in that area– they just seem to be more gimmicky than really interesting or useful. The mobile world, where a cameraphone becomes more than just something for taking quick snaps and becomes a tool for accessing and interacting with information from the internet seems much more exciting to me– and of course, we haven't yet seen any mobile devices that can properly run Flash or Silverlight applications. And my guess is that by the time we do, there will be other programming platforms that will be much more strongly established.

But still– it's interesting to see platforms being established that will make desktop AR easier to implement.

Link to original article

You Are Not a Gadget

I think there are three different kinds of "big thinkers" in the digital world.

There are the people who have taken a good look around and seem to really understand what's going on; what's happened, and how we got where we are. These are the people who are great at commenting on and explaining what's happening right now in the industry, not just knowing what is happening, but why things are happening. There are lots of people like these– usually, they will specialise in a particular field (because the only way you can really keep track of everything that's going on is to keep a tight, narrow focus on what you're looking at.) So— to take a particular example from the world of technology— someone might have a very deep understanding of eBooks through knowing about the different devices available, the different publishers selling work for each device and the drivers and barriers to their growth.

This is a snippet- read the full post.

>>A conversation I have every month or so

I posted recently about the mobile web and Apple's dominance over it as a platform, and the problem that it causes from a development point of view. I avoided the issue of Flash, saving it for another post (which is still a work in progress.)

But in the meantime, this post neatly sums up a couple of things that tend to be wrong with websites built by people who don't understand the web.

Link to original article

iPad Price Guesstimates

I came across this article by Charles Arthur on the Guardian website, looking for clues for the iPad's UK pricing.

In short, he takes a look at the price of the new version of the Aperture software in the UK compared to the US, and uses it as a base to estimate the iPad costs. His methodology is to knock off VAT at 17.5%, convert UK to US (at a rate of £0.603 = $1)- revealing about a 20% premium for the UK's price. He then extrapolates that conversion rate to get some guesstimates for the iPad's price over here– which as yet have not been announced.

The problem with this approach is that the price for Aperture looks like an odd point to start out with. The reason I think this is because I'd already done some back-of-a-napkin maths myself to take a guess at the iPad prices, looking at the costs of iPods and iPod Touches to get a fix on the relative prices, simply by converting the prices (at $0.619=$1 at the time I did it.)

This is a snippet- read the full post.

Apple and the Mobile Web

As he warmed up before unveiling the iPad a few weeks ago, Steve Jobs made the point that if you look at the Macbook range as "mobile devices", then Apple is the largest manufacturer of mobile devices in the world. Which is an impressive feat on it's own– especially considering the premium nature of most of Apple's product line. But potentially a little worrying if you pause to consider the domination that Apple has over the development of the growing mobile platform.

A post I came across via Daring Fireball over on quirksmode by PPK that argues that we're looking at a similar position in the mobile web to where we were with Internet Explorer on the desktop back in 2000.

It's a passionate argument, clearly put together to prompt the debate, and I certainly don't disagree with the principle that it espouses; a single web, independent of devices, operating systems and browsers. (Well, it actually talks of a single "mobile web", but I'm going to assume that's a simple oversight.)

Put simply, I don't believe that there's such a thing as a good mobile web developer. There are simply good web developers.

This is a snippet- read the full post.

A nod to Daring Fireball

One of my favourite blogs is John Gruber's Daring Fireball.

Right now, in the middle of Apple season, when the rumour, guesses and speculation have turned into reactions and informed opinions (but still mainly from people who haven't ever seen, held or used the actual object they are talking about), his site is the first one I turn to for an informed and educated view of what's going on before I try to put together my own views. Not just for his own thoughts, but as a signpost to others' views that are worth reading.

I read a lot of stuff online, from personal blogs to professional websites, but looking through at the stuff that inspires me to write or post something myself, I notice that a lot of it comes from Daring Fireball.

This is a snippet- read the full post.

The edges of the networks

Sometimes, you can take a great and insightful idea or discovery and distil it to it's simplest form, and it tells a great story. Other times, in distilling it down to a simple form (often a newspaper headline), it becomes something different.

A story that's currently going through the "report, recycle, repeat" process of what we call "news" is the story about how your brain can't handle all your Facebook friends; any more than 150 "friends" is just a meaningless figure, because our brains can't handle that many.

That's the short version of the story: OMG: Brains can't handle our Facebook friends.

A slightly longer version (less headline-friendly) would explain that Robin Dunbar came up with a theory some years ago, based on observations of social units of primates and the relationship between the size of the social groups and a particular area of the brain, concluding that the human brain is suited to groups no bigger than 150 people. Later this year, he plans to publish the results of some newer research which will show that social networks like Facebook don't affect this number; even if you have 1,500 friends, an analysis of traffic shows that you maintain the same inner circle of about 150 people.

Two big questions come to my mind about those findings. Firstly, how does something like Facebook change those relationships? My own Facebook friends who post regular updates get more of my attention, and I know more about what's happening in their lives than those who post less frequently. Some who post incessantly will get ignored or even "defriended." Then there are the friends who either aren't using Facebook, or aren't very active— who miss updates, event invitations and other activity that's happening on the site. I simply can't believe that Facebook hasn't changed the way that friendships— even within those inner circles of 150— are functioning.

But a different spin on the same story (and I think a more interesting one) is that the fact that our brains "can't handle it" is the point.

This is a snippet- read the full post.

>>★ Apple, Adobe, and Flash

Gruber's take on the Apple/Flash situation.

I'm not a Flash fan either. Partly the proprietary thing, partly the way that it hogs resources. Partly the way it's abused by online advertising, partly the way it's abused by designers to do things that can be done perfectly well using web standards (which should get more interesting with HTML5...)

I suppose the main point I'd add to Gruber's post is that Apple's history shows that, given the choice between doing something mediocre and not doing it, they just don't do it. Which is why I'm not expecting to see Flash appear on a "closed" Apple platform like the iPhone any time soon. After this long, the appearance would be worth of an announcement, and Apple aren't going to announce something that's not just "not great", but would be best described with adjectives like "buggy", "juddery", "slow" or "unusable" (which describe Flash implementations on other mobile platforms.)

Link to original article

Everything else is advertising

It's Apple season again. The time when the technology world is ablaze with rumours, speculation and predictions about the Next Big Thing that Apple are about to unveil next week. By now, everyone has written up their thoughts on what it will be, how it will work, how it will cope without a keyboard, what it will be great for, or not so great for. (I'm no exception.)

So we're already starting to see the "I'm bored of Tablet talk" posts. And it's going to get a lot worse over the next couple of weeks. We've got the increasing amount of speculation, the "Apple are about to announce…" stories, and the "Today, Apple unveiled…" stories.

Afterwards, we'll have a round of "it's incredible, and I can't wait", along with a dose of "so what— my [insert manufacturer] device can do that already", and a fair amount of "this isn't the Second Coming— I'm disappointed and let down" from people who confused the rumours and guesses of the last month or two with actual Apple announcements.

This is a snippet- read the full post.

>>Everything you need to know about Windows Mobile 7

Apparently Microsoft are going for a total refresh of the Windows Mobile platform with Windows Mobile 7— meaning developers who have worked on the Windows Mobile platform will have to rebuild their applications from scratch.

I don't think it's a bad idea to unite Microsoft's mobile offerings (Windows Mobile and Zune are completely seperate at the moment), but it might be a bit late in the game now…

Link to original article

Unwritten rules of privacy

One of the reasons I put my own website together was a kind of reaction to Facebook. I figured that if I was going to have all my "stuff" online collected in one place, I'd rather it was in my own place than someone else's, and I knew enough about website design to be able to do it myself.

There has been a lot of fuss about Facebook's privacy changes at the end of last year. Without going into all the details, they declared that they were making it easier for people to control their privacy and the way they shared things and were encouraging people to review their settings, but looking into what they were doing (rather than what they were saying) it was pretty clear that what it was really about was trying to get more people to make more of their "stuff" public.

One of the changes that was made is that users no longer have control over who can see their "friends" lists, and some other settings (if they hadn't already been set) would default to being public.

To me, this is breaking the unwritten rules, or the "social contract" that they have with their users. I'm sure that there's nothing illegal about the changes (after all, those lengthy terms and conditions that you click through without reading aren't there to protect the users.) But it seems to me that there's an ethical violation that's taken place.

But does it really matter? If you haven't changed your privacy settings in the first place, then should you care if the default changes?

This is a snippet- read the full post.

My poster has it covered

Since reading the fifth HHGTTG book (where Arthur Dent becomes The Sandwich Maker), I genuinely worry what use I would be to a society that doesn't have the internet, computers, technology, science-fiction culture, and all the other stuff that I've grown up with, know, love, and completely take for granted. (Only occasionally, mind you— but genuinely.)

Having a degree level education in Chemistry is all well and good, so long as you have a fully stocked laboratory and would like me to run some experiments, but I'm not so sure what I'd be able to do with it if I was stuck in a thousand year old culture. Other than maybe baffle them with stories about atomic science, quantum and relativity which I'm not entirely sure I understand myself.

Luckily, when I do find myself with a time machine, I've now got the first thing I'll want to put in it.

(Now I just need to figure out how I'd get to Greenland...)

pense-bete-futur.jpg

(From here, via Bobulate

This is a snippet- read the full post.

>>Boy Genius: ‘Apple’s Tablet Is an “iPhone on Steroids”’

The idea that the iPhone— a device that, after three years is still setting the benchmark for "smartphones"— is just a little version of the Tablet may or may not have some truth to it. But it's a hell of a story.

Link to original article

User login