The iPad is an appliance not a computer & you should be happy about that

Picture this.





You've spent ten straight hours hunched over the laptop/desktop at work, hammering out code/composing a TPS report or whatever it is that you do at work that involves the use of a computer.





You've reached home. Now, you settle into the couch & want some relief. You pick up your home laptop/netbook to read a Dilbert comic strip to see the humor in your incredibly obtuse manager or the nefarious cost cutting.





Instead, you see the Virus Scanner reporting 3 new viruses found. Or that your disk has run out of space & needs defragmenting. Or, there are 16 new updates in the OS & you need to patch the OS. Now.





Tell me truthfully, do you look forward to this?





You maybe a Unix hacker by the day, but hey, this is entertainment! Do you tinker with the frequency bands in your TV everyday? Do you try to optimize the sound bitrate in your stereo? No? 





I've been using an iPod Touch since November 2009. I've been using a home desktop & an office laptop during the same period. When I want to play a racing game or quickly check my email on my iPod, I have yet to face a scenario like the one mentioned above.





And I'm glad about that, however much I may love tinkering with technology.





So, if the iPad is a 'dumb' device that doesn't allow installing software and isn't letting you hack away at it's internals, why bother? It's a radio, a TV, a car. Use it for a few hours and forget about it. 





Enough said.

Why the iPad is for old people? (Not the diaper, the device)

Various tech pundits have said that, the newly released iPad is for 'older people'. http://gizmodo.com/5458855/the-apple-ipad-is-for-old-people.

I'm trying to hazard a guess as to why that is so.

You see I attended this talk recently. http://www.upabangalore.in/mwiki/mediawiki-1.15.1/index.php?title=Jan_2010_talk. One of the speakers outlined the concept of Personas in design. These are dummy people, with character & quirks & needs & wants that designers setup & then test against. 

Who is the Persona numero uno at Apple? One Mr.Steven P Jobs. It is anecdotal that Apple builds what 'Steve wakes up and wants looking at his mirror'. Any surprise then, that the iPad makes the oldies happier than the rest? Or is supposed to? 

Do I buy the fact that the iPad is for oldies? I'm not sure I do. But this seems to lend credence to the beliefs of those who do.

The Long Tail of iPhone Apps

I recently read this article on how there are too many Apps in the iTunes App store and most of them are Crap.


This particular article is arguing that the actual barrier to entry for other smartphone App Marketplaces is much lower than Apple advertises it to be (some 100,000 apps in the iTunes App Store). This might be true, but I think the argument on which that conclusion is based, that is, their lament about most of the apps being crap, is not so sound.


Yes there are a lot of fart apps. Yes there are other apps that you or I may not find useful.
But lets not forget, what makes eBay auctions tick, what makes the iTunes Music Store tick, what makes (illegally, no doubt) peer-to-peer music downloads tick and what makes the Web in general tick is millions of people adding content that they think will be useful to others in their 'tribe'. 


Given that the content is digital, there is a low barrier to entry and consumers have infinite choice (as per The Long Tail of Marketing, Chris Anderson), so platforms that support this mass of niches are the ones that win.


Do you read all of the several million Google text ads? What makes you think they are all relevant to you? Does that mean, except for the ones that are relevant to you, all the rest are crap? :-) This simple analogy, when applied to Apps will show how the argument, that there's a lot of 'crap' in a marketplace is equal to that marketplace being doomed or useless, is flawed.


That even a control freak company like Apple has realized this in two markets - Music & Smartphone Apps is sure enough pointer that this is a way to keep from being relegated to the museum of technology. After all, Apple could have decreed, like they do in so many other areas that twenty Apps, all written by Apple would suffice for any user. They didn't. 


I don't know if we'll ever see this or not, but a graph of The number of apps sold/downloaded versus their unique rank in the iTunes App Store would make for fascinating analysis. I suspect that graph would look like a ... long tail.

Wall-E : The Review

It’s not often that a movie review starts with a look at the credits of a movie. However, such is the artistry and attention to detail in WALL-E, that I have to mention this upfront.

This is a plea to you, if you haven’t seen WALL-E. Don’t miss the credits. The artwork is dazzling, to say the least. It covers various styles, from raw pencil sketches to Van Gogh style pointillism. If you already saw WALL-E, go back and see the credits. They’re worth it.

What about the rest of the movie, whose credits are so noteworthy? The rest is brilliant. This is the story of the last robot on Planet Earth. Humans, continuing their wasteful ways have brought upon so great a pollution, that they have been forced to leave the planet. They have left behind skyscrapers of trash, and an army of cleanup robots, or WALL-E’s.

When the movie starts, just one of these are left functioning. I was tempted to use ‘alive’ instead of ‘functioning’ there. So human-like is WALL-E in his ways.

In a tip of a hat to all those engineers in Silicon Valley, WALL-E’s character is extremely similar to that of an Engineer.

We see how WALL-E follows a daily routine of drudgery, has OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), leading to the neat lining up of his ‘treads’ when he returns ‘home’. He’s also a collector, of Zippo’s, among other things. He has in iPod and is a Noah of sorts, cataloging the artifacts of the age gone by. He is also desperately lonely. His only friend is a cockroach who rides on his ‘back’ when he is cleaning up the waste wastelands and making little cubes of trash and lining them up.

On one such day of drudgery, WALL-E finds a sapling, in an otherwise barren landscape of what looks like New York City. He takes it back home.

Soon after, his humdrum routine is severely disturbed by the arrival of EVA. Although it is never explicitly pointed out, Eva is ‘female’. Such is the enormous skill of the people who made this movie. This is the kind of subtlety that we hope to see in Bollywood more often. Fortunately, we have already directors of the caliber of Ram Gopal Varma, who demonstrated the power of the Language of Film in the movie – Sarkar. Hopefully, more such directors will come along.

Eva is obviously looking for something, and it is apparent she has come from the ‘future’. She is far more sophisticated (she packs a weapons system on her forearm, WALL-E only has claws), and far shinier. Like a gadget from Apple, no less. The similarity is not a coincidence because Jonathan Ive, Apple’s Vice President of Design, designer of such icons as the original iMac, the iPod, the Powerbook etc spent a few days at Pixar designing and/or providing inputs about what Eva should look like.

It then turns out Eva had been sent to find signs of life on Earth, and when she see’s the sapling in WALL-E’s den, she becomes a static container and goes into Hibernation, much to the dismay of WALL-E, who has already started to behave like a star struck lover.

WALL-E then follows Eva into Axiom, which is a huge space ship where humans have taken refuge, waiting for Earth to detoxify.

The humans of the future are presented in poor light. They’re fat, have baby feet and cannot walk anymore. Neither do they talk to each other, or take care of their kids. In a salute to movies like THX-118, humans exist purely to consume. They are also incredibly stupid, and it is clear that it is their robots that keep them alive.

After this, there’s the obvious appearance of the villain, a couple of chases, and a happy ending.

However, I have to mention a couple of things, because they were so magnificent.

The villain is a look alike of Arthur C Clarke’s HAL 9000. That evil red eye, malignantly staring, and controlling the ship as well as its captain. This of course, is not the end to the salute to Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke. When the captain stands up for the first time, we hear Thus Spake Zarathusastra which we heard in the exceptional opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the apes first stand up.

The other thing, which I’m beginning to notice is all Pixar movies, is the reference to the Misfits, The Pirates. Ratatouille had a dialogue where the female chef actually says – “We’re not workers, we’re artists, pirates!”

There’s some element of that in Cars, with the bizarre bunch of cars, road rollers etc that finally help McQueen to glory.

And we see that here too. In a strictly controlled society of robots, the one’s that finally help Eva and WALL-E are the ones from the Robot Mental Asylum. The crazy one's, The Misfits.

A subtle message from Apple, reminding us to Think Different!

All in all, watch this for exceptional animation, a great story, tremendous attention to detail and clean, wholesome entertainment. Highly recommended, for both young and old.