clear as mud

It’s clear that Google spends a lot of time on the web. A LOT. During the announcement of Chrome OS I had to keep telling myself, “It’s only for netbooks.” Without that statement, Chrome OS seems rather preposterous… kind of. I’m a huge fan of using web technologies as replacements for heavier programming languages.

I guess the big concern I have is what this means for Android. I think Google has too many independent arms all moving in opposite directions. A little over 2 years ago Google announced a mobile platform built on Linux with APIs leveraging Java. Now, they are developing an entirely new OS for netbooks based on linux and HTML. Wha? Java or HTML? Make up your mind.

As a potential developer for Android this strikes me as unsettling for the shear fact of not knowing what it means for future Android development. Is Google going to continue supporting Java on Android devices? Are they going to migrate towards HTML like the Pre. Why the hell did they bother with Android in the first place if they were just going to reverse course?

I’d love to develop in CSS/JS/HTML5 for Android devices, and the fact that it’s not really available as an option right now blows me away, especially after what Palm has done and what Google is doing with Chrome OS. Unify Google, and stop getting all Microsoft on us.

The announcement of Chrome OS makes me want to develop for Android less. The opposite should be the case.

Pre view

Want to search for something on your iPhone? You can’t. Want to copy some text and paste it somewhere else? You can’t. Want to switch from your map app to web browsing without taking a stop at the home screen? You can’t. Want to simply send a file from your phone to your computer using bluetooth? You can’t. Do you want to see multiple calendars at the same time? Would you like to have contacts come from multiple locations and be consolidated or expanded as you need them? Do you want to not quite deal with your new SMS yet and continue on with what you are doing with out dismissing it? Do you want your last.fm to scrobble directly from your phone? Oh wait, I know, do you want to touch type on a physical keyboard? What if you want to have 2 drafts open at a time, or god forbid see a single consolidated view of all your email accounts? Nope, Nada, No, Zip, Zilch, No way.

You can do every single one of the above with the Pre by Palm. If you accept an event in facebook, it will show up on your calendar. If you have contacts from facebook, gmail, exchange, and address book, they will all show up consolidated or not depending on what you choose. If you do indeed decide to setup your facebook account on your Pre you will also see statuses next to each one of your contacts in your contact list… along with their facebook picture.

I haven’t been this excited about a mobile phone in a long time. I was excited about the iPhone because it was so unexpected, but the Pre by Palm is what the iPhone should have been all along.

Underscoring what could be the second coming of the Jesus Phone is how hostile Apple has been toward developers since the iPhone introduction. First Web Apps are good enough, deal with it. Then it was, “we’ll let you put an icon to your web app on your home screen.” Then finally (and how it stands now is, “We’ll let you build apps, but don’t build anything better than us, and don’t expect to give trials of apps.” Palm on the other hand is asking developers how they want to distribute their apps, lending itself to doing a best of both worlds, single distribution, yet developer choice.

Do yourself a favor and go check out the biggest competition the iPhone has ever seen. The Pre marks the first phone that truly competes against the iPhone and blows past it on many levels.

Mini

What doesn’t take up an entire coffee shop table, is stylish, runs linux (with decent power management) and costs $349?

The Dell Mini 9… a 9″ wide netbook that weighs less than 2.5 pounds. I could significantly lighten my load with this… ever since I got rid of my 12″ powerbook I’ve hated how big my 13″ Macbook is. The Mini 9 may be a good interim solution until Apple pulls it’s head out and realizes people care more about width than they do about thinness. No one cares how thin a laptop is when it still takes up the majority of a small table.

Obsessing over cloud computing

The idea behind cloud computing is to store all your information on a server, and have it accessible from anywhere. The Browser, Google, Flickr, and Microsoft Exchange are all leading the pack to this idea of ubiqitous information exchange.

Let’s say I need to do a flyer design for a BBQ, and I need to send the PDF for approval to my Mom who lives in Idaho. I simply pull open my email client on my mac and send it without thinking twice. Fast forward days later when I need to print the flyer at work, and I haven’t brought my laptop. No problem. I saved my PDF with Illustrator editing capabilities, and the entire email was stored on my work’s exchange server. I look at my sent items, download to one of the local macs, and continue working.

In this scenario, if there wasn’t a server (cloud) storing the email, I would have been out of luck… I would have had to go home and grab the laptop for the original file. If you take this scenario and apply it to any type of document, whether it be music, photos, video, excel docs, word docs you can see the power in ubiquitous information availability. I write a todo on my phone, it simply shows up on my desktop waiting to be completed. None of this, “I have it here, but I don’t have that there, maybe i could duplicate it over there.” cluster-fuck of information duplication. How many copies of a single document do you really need to have? The answer? One.

It’s always amazing to me to see how clients store their documents. “New Document (5).docx” is a common moniker that I see when visiting most small businesses. The ideas of revision control or a central location to store information might as well be a completely different language… this is where email can become a problem…

If I send another PDF to 5 people regarding the BBQ and I attach the PDF, how many copies have now been created? Five. Why wouldn’t I just put the one document on a website somewhere, point that email to the one location, and I now have 1 PDF that is downloadable on demand… rather than forcing 5 people to immediately download the contents of the PDF. If I have to make any changes, I simply update one copy rather than sending another 5 PDFs… with no telling who saved what to their desktop…. “BBQ Invite (2).pdf” sound framiliar? Is there a third? A fourth? No one knows, and I certainly don’t know what you have kept. Rather than going to the same location for the most updated information, we have now muddied the waters with who knows how many copies.

Unfortunately, where cloud computing has failed is in files over 5mb. It is simply PAINFUL to store any amount of massive information on a site, and it makes it incredibly unruly to make updates. High quality movies are next to impossible to keep on a cloud, music is on the cusp of being unbearable, and photos just barely make it. Flickr does an incredible job of storing high quality jpegs, but if I want to store my RAW files, I’m looking towards nearline storage as my most viable alternative.

Cloud computing means mobility and peace of mind. It means that I don’t have to lug around my laptop or camera to show off pictures of my most recent trip to San Francisco… I pull up the Flickr webpage on my iPhone and browse through all the photos that made the cut. How many times have you watched someone pull out their camera only to see them skip 2/3rds of the pictures while giving you an ad-hoc slideshow… how many times do you think they skip through those photos… EVERY TIME THEY SHOW SOMEONE. Why not make the edits once, publish them to flickr/facebook, then browse off their phone? Some would argue phones don’t have the screens quite yet (sans iPhone). I sure hope this will become the norm as phones get better screens, and users become more savy at valuing their time. Unfortunately, people still take the lazy, and admitedly easier, way out of just buying huge ass memory cards and never downloading their photos to their computer. But what happens when their camera is stolen/washed/broken? Shit out of luck.

Music is a semi-interesting issue. Every time I download an album from Amazon, I really have no desire to re-upload back onto my server, meanwhile not having any means to access that music, without re-downloading it when needed. This is where services like SimplifyMedia come into play. They give a cloud-like experience without the cloud-like hassles for music. I setup a tiny little program on my Mac and I can now instantly access my Mac music from anywhere… including my phone. Sure the issue of redundancy is placed in my hands, but I still don’t have to copy files and have duplicates of Mp3s.

I look forward to seeing internet connection speeds mature, and online storage becomes the norm. I look forward to the day when we can all capture, edit, and store once; while sharing many many times. A cloud like experience indeed.