Gone Pro
After much deliberation, and the need to be actually be able to playback and edit the HD video I’m now shooting for Dear Toronto, I took the leap and upgraded my couple-year-old white 13″ MacBook to a 15″ MacBook Pro. A fella named Shawn Blanc wrote a great review of it and all of its features (via TUAW) that I pretty much agree with (although I’m still not entirely sold on the necessity of using multi-touch on the trackpad).
It’s been a really treat to use so far, and takes me back to the days where I had my 12″ PowerBook and it was a joy to use. The MacBook, while a worthwhile upgrade in terms of performance and under-the-hood improvements, was a step back in hardware design. There’s really something special about being able to work on a fully aluminum surface, and the look-and-feel of it just feels nice, and the design really tends to stand the test of time much better than plastic. It’s all about the experience, inside and out of the computer.
Google iPhone Portal
More evidence that Google just gets it - their just launched portal of applications for iPhone users is absolutely brilliant.
Just point your browser to Google.com on the iPhone and you’re presented with a seamless, usable interface to all of Google’s applications. Nice. (image from AppleInsider)
Apple + Starbucks = Money
I’m watching some of the live feeds for today’s Apple press event, and they’ve just announced (among other things) the iPod Touch, essentially an iPhone without the phone, shown above. I’ll almost certainly be getting one immediately; It looks real slick.
The biggest announcement to me though, is this new partnership between Apple and Starbucks that will let you buy tracks currently playing in Starbucks from the iTunes Store on your iPod. This is just the first step, but will surely change the way people shop for media. Location and context-based digital shopping is now here, in a small way, but it’s here nonetheless.
I do have an issue with this, though (as does Ryan Block at Engadget). While they’re giving you ‘free access to the iTunes Store’ on your iPod (goodie!), it doesn’t sound like they’ll give you free WiFi access as well. That’s pretty shady for a company that’s clearly going to massively benefit from this arrangement. Giving people the ability to surf the Web while on the store is only going to keep them there longer — potential for more sales, both of product in store and through the iTunes WiFi store.
Extend the ability to buy songs playing in Starbucks to other retailers, movie theaters for instance, where you could buy the soundtrack to the movie or even the movie itself immediately on the spot. This would absolutely clean up, but would require Apple to make partnerships with a ton of movie theaters, film producers, and so on. In other words, lots of red tape.
Go further with the idea.
Let me browse a retail store’s inventory from my iPod, from anywhere with WiFi. Let me add things to a cart, purchase them with my iTunes account, and then pick up the pre-paid items in store.
Embed an RFID chip into the iPod and link it to my iTunes account. Allow Starbucks, or any other retailer to let me use my iPod to pay for stuff like you can already do with the Mastercard touch-n-go and so on. The possibilities are really endless with this when you have such a ubiquitous device.
What’s in this for Apple? Commission. Just like they get sales from every song and video they sell on the iTunes Store, they could charge retailers a fraction of each purchase, generating huge revenue.
New iPods this Wednesday?
There’s a ton of rumours floating around that a press event Apple is holding Wednesday will see the introduction of a new line of iPods. I say it’s about time. Though I haven’t even had my 30 GB black one for a year now, the design of this one dates back about two years and is starting to look a little stale next to the iPhone. Then there’s the issue of storage; I don’t have a problem with hard drive-based media players from a capacity standpoint (though mine is almost completely full, as shown above), but the performance on the full-sized iPod compared to the Nano (which uses flash storage) is just awful.
The iPod uses some pretty aggressive power saving mechanism that spins down the hard drive fairly often. While this is great for battery life, this also means that when I hit the next button, there’s a delay of sometimes one up to sometimes four seconds before the track changes, and even then, the album artwork takes a couple extra seconds to refresh. This is a lousy user experience. The Nano changes songs without skipping a beat, so I’d like to see them move to flash storage across all platforms.
Basic Needs and UX
There’s a little slideshow about user experience and the iPhone as an example over at GoodExperience.com today. They make a great point about features not being the iPhone’s raison d’etre, and that in fact the features it provides are pre-existing, and fairly basic.
The clincher is UX, and with that, there’s a quote in there that I’ve pulled into my quotes page:
When technology delivers basic needs, user experience dominates.
— Don Norman
Ridiculous Data Plans from Rogers (and others) Keep iPhone out of Canada
Fresh off the wire over at AppleInsider is speculation from Michael Geist, quoted in the National Post saying that it’s not contract negotiations keeping the iPhone out of Canada, but instead our completely obscene and unreasonable mobile data plans. I don’t doubt it for a second.
Geist compares the $60 AT&T plan in the USA with 450 minute and unlimited data to how much you’d pay for a similar setup in Canada, and it ends up being about $300 here. Even then, you don’t get truly unlimited data (Rogers doesn’t even offer this at all!), you just get 500MB.
I worried a while back that my initial usage of my BlackBerry Pearl would rack me up a steep bill, and boy was I right to worry. My first few days of usage with Rogers, using only 1.5MB of data, I went 1MB over my 500KB plan and ended up with close to a $300 bill in the mail. After this, I immediately deactivated all e-mail accounts and stopped Web browsing on the phone, which essentially eliminates any of the functionality the BlackBerry has over a regular phone beyond the keypad.
So how’s an iPhone any good to you if all you can do is place calls and send text messages? Maybe a more important question; How much longer are Canadians willing to tolerate our worse-than-third-world-country wireless data plans?
The (in)feasibility of Cover Flow
It’s been a while since I’ve talked tech on here, and there’s a number of reasons for that, which I won’t get into here, but I wanted to touch a bit on Cover Flow, a relatively new user interface that Apple is heavily promoting for both the iPhone and its next OS, Leopard (branded as Quick Look).
With Cover Flow, as Apple describes it, “you can flip through your digital music and video collection the same way you flip through CDs or DVDs” and it “displays all the album art in your music collection in one easy-to-navigate interface that mimics a CD collection or jukebox selection.”
Designing a user interface as a metaphor to the real world is always risky business, and in this case I don’t know that it’s at all relevant. I’m not sure about you, but I don’t own a single music CD (well, that is beyond my “I’m cool and listen to music” stage of 12 years-old when I picked up Dance Mix 95 and many other rather embarrassing albums). So right away, the metaphor is lost on me. I have never, and I don’t anticipate ever flipping through CDs or DVDs. I’m also smack dab in the middle of the target demographic for both the iPhone and Mac, so what gives?
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Adam is a User Experience Specialist at IBM in Toronto and also produces content of all kinds around the Web.
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