Getting started with Arduino / Rainbowduino
I recently bought some Arduino microcontroller/prototyping boards and components. The plan is to rediscover my childhood interest in electronics and familiarise myself with these tools so that maybe in future I can help teach some of this at schools. This is because I believe that its the practical stuff that can integrate with other school lessons that can give young people the best start at programming.
The great thing is that actually, with only a little knowledge, doing this stuff is really easy. The Arduino board designs and software are open source, which is a good thing. However as usual this means the docs can be problematic.
Native will beat web apps on desktop too
It’s OK, I have two sets of flameproof clothing on.
Further to my contribution to the everlasting mobile web apps vs native debate I was discussing these issues again with good friend Richard (who is truly called a platform ninja), and again cropped up the “why is a tablet different from a desktop then? why is native better for tablets and not desktop?” question.
The web does not a mobile app make.
This is a rant about the Web vs. Native debate in mobile.
I’m very squarely on the “Native is best” side. Obviously if you don’t have the funds/expertise to make a native app then you’ll choose web – but I would wager this is only viable if you don’t actually want to make money out of the app. Unless you have some amazingly compelling content (like pictures of naked people) that can not be got at by native means.
Data sync on iPhone, iPod, iPad – the missing link?
Users and particularly developers of Palm’s old line of PalmOS devices will keenly remember that Palm were the only people to get syncing right at the time.
Aside from all the basics, they allowed 3rd party applications on the device AND the desktop to talk to each other directly to sync custom data. I’ve bitched about this before.
As an avid Mac, iPhone, MobileMe and soon to be iPad user, I have to wonder what is happening with this at Apple. My real-world gripe is this:
I was just about to open OmniFocus on my iPhone specifically so that it would sync with the latest data on my MacBook Pro, which is set to sync via MobileMe (using a pretty ugly file based solution). Why am I even doing this? Why isn’t this data synced (a) when I dock my iPhone to sync all the other iTunes stuff, and (b) why can’t it automatically sync wirelessly
Well part (b) is easier to answer, although it is a three-fold answer. First, there’s no background app support to allow automatic sync of the OmniFocus app on the phone. That should be addressed by the Push API functionality except that OmniFocus doesn’t support Push API (server cost to them to do so) and even if they did support Push, iPhone SDK Push is not able to automatically pass the data to the application to force it to sync – the user must acknowledge the event and run the app on the phone manually. It’s a pile of suck, surprisingly, with a real feel of “disconnected device”.
Part (a) is more tricky to answer. It must be trivial for Apple to add this kind of support for direct-to-app syncing. They already have/had Sync APIs for OS X for a long time. Lack of support for this apparently makes no sense.
In conclusion I am very surprised that Apple has not updated the OS X Sync APIs so that:
- Third party apps can sync any data they like to/from the iPhone/iPod/iPad with iTunes as the conduit (that was the concept’s name in PalmOS if I recall)
- The transport for sync is completely hidden from the applications such that sync will happen transparently via Dock, Wifi (direct between devices on local Wifi network), and via MobileMe cloud if the device is not on the same Wifi network.
This is not rocket science after all. And yet we still have to know / think about what networks our devices are connected to, manually make sure we run them frequently etc. It is pretty lame, Mr. Jobs.
My Apple tablet predictions – for what its worth
Might as well join in the fun eh.
Ironically, I think that there will not be that much hardware “frill” with the Apple tablet. I think that actually this is really all about software and the masses of computer users who are not “power users”.
Follow the logic:
Net books are very popular.
The iPhone and the new breed of beyond-smart phones is incredibly popular.
What is the common thread here? Both devices are very portable and offer most of the basic computing that people need day to day. What is it that most people – which I’m afraid guys means non-geeks, the truly massive market beyond geekdom – need?
- Web
That’s it. That’s what most people who are not raving geeks need. In fact some geeks may need only that. After all there isn’t much you can’t do with web apps now (e.g. bespin). Google OS/Chrome stuff has been geared to this from the get-go, its not a novel idea.
Functionally, most people also need to be able to write/edit documents that can be read by MS Word – not that they need MS Word, they just need to write out .doc files. This can be done via web apps or via lightweight local apps.
However Apple would not do something like this unless it also offered uniquely integrated stuff.
So on the back of this I reckon the tablet will:
- Not be that revolutionary hardware wise – eg physically this probably is like a giant iphone
- To include some web-hosted (with local offline usage) iWork for Pages (= docs & spreadsheets writing. maybe keynote too)
- Full access to all your iTunes audio and video media and photos (cloud or not) – I would be surprised if this is 100% cloud done at this stage, what with the awful 3G coverage and slow speeds to sync photos and videos. Access to this done “ipod style”, which is a killer recipe as the market has shown
- A first class large-form factor email app, geared to multitouch
- And as suspected the delivery of formerly-print media, possibly opening up iTunes marketplace to any author who wants to prepare and sell content. Who knows perhaps you will even be able to create new textual/mixed content on the iPad and sell it via iTunes. This content provision is probably the one really new thing that helps make such a pad a really attractive proposition.
In a nutshell, a beautiful portable computer that is most definitely NOT a laptop because a great deal of people will never see themselves as the laptop carrying kind. However they are likely to part with cash for something that is much smaller than that but a true lifestyle accessory that “just works”. Obviously it will support custom apps and app store too – which has already shown on iPhone that a lot of people just want little stuff that makes life easier.
Several programmers including myself have wondered “Why do I need something like that?”. The answer is if you have an iPhone and laptop, you don’t. The big market win here is not people like us, its everyone else in the real world! Laptops are complete overkill for a lot of people and the netbook market has sort of shown that. They’re not so much winning against laptops as a result of price, they’re winning on form factor and simplicity. If people really needed high-end laptop features, they’d still buy a laptop instead of a netbook.
I’m pretty sure netbooks aren’t aimed at programmers either – although I am confident some masochists code Perl on them and swear that its the best calculator computer they’ve ever had. The tablet on the other hand, is squarely aimed at attacking the netbook and light-use laptop market.
Let’s see what Wednesday brings!
