Ryan Boswell

Google’s Home Entertainment Venture

2012-02-10T02:28:29Z

Rumor has it that Google is working on bringing a streaming media device to market. This won’t be another hardware partner device like Android phones and Google TV have been. This is supposedly a Google designed and built device, with no hardware partners anywhere in the mix. This alone is quite the departure for Google, who historically has only really brought software to market, leaving the nitty-gritty of hardware to other, more experienced vendors. And this is also the reason that I’m excited for it, more so than Google TV.

I have owned an Apple TV for the better part of a year now. I absolutely love it. Because I have a Mac and two iOS devices, using it couldn’t be simpler. Everything just works, magically. Even my die-hard Android friends admit that some of the feature-interplay between devices is amazing (AirPlay for videos/screen sharing on iOS most notably so). And yet, I’m excited about a Google-branded media streaming device, and I would very likely buy one. Why? Because I love Google. I really do. While my allegiance is primarily to Apple, that is only because I very much enjoy a streamlined and perfected user-experience across all of my devices. I like that everything just works (most of the time). Google doesn’t have a non-mobile OS (Chrome OS doesn’t count in this because it’s not quite as fully-featured as Mac OS X), and so they can only play half the field. Google TV doesn’t really work with other Android devices if you don’t count the remote app which is just a remote. There isn’t the same level of integration between Google TV and other Android devices that Apple has achieved with Apple TV and iOS, not to mention the ability to stream anything from a local iTunes library, whether it is Windows or Mac.

But this device is Google’s chance to get it right. Obviously it will likely be hooked up to Google Music, but with Google-branded hardware, they finally have full control over every aspect of the device from software to hardware, just like Apple. Google has come out with some really awesome things, and after watching a presentation from a few of their engineers last week on campus, I can’t wait to see what cool things they can come up with when they throw hardware into the mix. One of the things I took away the most from that presentation was the more or less free-reign the engineers had when it came to re-designing Google Search for tablet devices. There wasn’t a directive handed down from upper-management detailing what features they would implement and how it would work. The engineers themselves got to come up with their own ideas, play with them and find out what worked and what didn’t. If this is the same philosophy that the team building this device used, this thing is going to kick ass. Because no one comes up with better ideas than a bunch of really smart people having fun and geeking out.

Windows Upgrade History

2012-02-10T03:41:10Z

I stumbled across this video from last March that goes through every major OS upgrade from MS DOS to Windows 7 (with the exception of Windows ME which was skipped because there was no upgrade option to Windows 2000). Even with my distaste for Windows, I have to admit, the backwards compatibility that Windows 7 still has is quite impressive, programs from the MS DOS days still ran without error. That’s roughly 25 years of backwards-compatibility. The one thing that didn’t survive were appearance/theme settings from Windows XP on, although theme settings from Windows 2.0 were persistent up through Windows 2000.

Apple, on the other hand, has made several large jumps in the last decade alone that have broken backwards compatibility. First was the decision to kill off support for OS 9 applications after they jumped to an Intel-based chipset in 2005. This was the end of the Classic environment, which was an emulator that allowed users to run OS 9 applications on Mac OS X. With this change, Apple introduced another emulator called Rosetta, which allowed the user to run applications compiled to run on the previous PowerPC architecture. Rosetta was supported and included with Tiger (starting at 10.4.4) and Leopard (10.5), but was only an optional install for Snow Leopard (10.6). With Lion (10.7), Apple dropped support for Rosetta all-together, forcing developers to move forward with their applications.

There are benefits and downfalls to both approaches. Windows can claim that almost every program written will run on any version since the release date. But, this means there is a lot of legacy code bundled with Windows, which takes up precious space and makes things complicated. Apple doesn’t much care about legacy support and this can sometimes leave users out in the cold if they rely on applications that were never updated for the newer architecture and OS-level APIs. But on the other hand, Apple also forces developers that want to stay relevant to continually update and improve their applications to support the newer capabilities of the hardware and OS, which can only benefit the end-user.

Personally, I’ve been bitten by Apple’s decision to drop support for old architecture, and there are a few applications I used that were abandoned by their developers and never updated. But I also appreciate that applications I am able to use now are built with newer and more advanced OS capabilities in mind, and I wouldn’t ever trade that.

Sayonara To My Optical Drive

2012-02-10T02:08:40Z

Note: Earlier today I discovered this post I wrote on July 27, 2011, but for some reason I never got around to publishing it. So I decided to get it out there now, albeit 6 months late. Enjoy!

Earlier this evening I embarked on one of the biggest hardware mod projects I’ve done. I decided to take the jump and replace my MacBook Pro’s Optical Drive with a Solid State Drive. I ordered the same OWC Data Doubler kit listed in the article, which came with a 115GB SSD.

The hardware swap only took about half an hour in all. I took a break before replacing the cover to go buy some Endust and clean out my computer, something I probably should have done a year ago. I did run into a slight problem with not properly reconnecting the wireless antenna for WiFi and Bluetooth, it is deceptively difficult to get it back into place properly.

Once I had the drive installed, I turned on my laptop and was quickly alerted that OS X couldn’t initialize the device I connected, aka, the new internal drive wasn’t formatted and it was freaking out. I quickly formatted it and started up SuperDuper! to clone my hard drive over to the new SSD. I decided to leave out my iTunes and iPhoto libraries and keep them on my internal drive since they don’t need to be as zippy as everything else. It took just over an hour to copy the 60GB remaining to the SSD.

After booting from the SSD once as a dry run to make sure all the application configuration files and settings copied over properly (some didn’t), and update those that didn’t. After that I shut it down and got my iPhone stopwatch ready for the first speed test. The first real cold boot got me to the login screen in 25.4 seconds, and another 9 seconds to type in my password and launch my first application. Previously I hadn’t even gotten to the login screen that fast, and logging in and starting up all the background apps that I use regularly another 1-2 full minutes. Mind you, I’m still running on Snow Leopard here.

I ran 3 more speed tests, and all gave me pretty much the same results (24 and 10, 27 and 8, 25, 11).

Ultimately I am very happy so far with my decision, especially considering my optical drive has been dead for the past 15 months and just wasted space. I’ve still got a few things to move around and get setup (ie. creating a symlink for my iTunes and iPhoto libraries), but I’m pretty much settled now and it feels nice and zippy.

Your New Assistant

2012-02-08T07:17:53Z

The co-founder of Siri (before Apple bought it), Dag Kittlaus wrote up a wonderful view of the future with AI Assistants as the norm in the next decade or two. It is definitely worth a read as it paints quite the picture about how cool the future could/would/will be with AI Assistants like Siri.

I am very excited about a future like this, and Artificial Intelligence is one of the areas in computing that I am most fascinated by. As Dag writes, imagine if your assistant knew that your flight was delayed 2.5 hours and it found a replacement flight to the same destination that was leaving sooner. Or you could tell your assistant to book a doctor’s appointment for next week. All of these things can be done now with real, human assistants. But imagine your assistant was virtual. It was on your phone and your computer, and maybe even in your car, so that wherever you are, you’re assistant is with you and ready to help. If your assistant knew everything about you, personal preferences, credit card information, contact and relationships list, etc.. it could help you bridge the gap for making like so much easier than it is now.

Of course, then there is the Big Brother aspect of it all. With all of that information digitized and stored in one central location, it would make it that much easier to completely steal someone’s identity. Not just their name and social security number, but everything about them, who they talk to most often, where they live, what food/music/movies they like, financial information, and more. Becoming someone else would be almost trivial. The potential success of AI Assistants all comes down to trust; trust in the company that makes the software, trust in the company that makes the hardware, and trust in the company that stores the information on their servers to be analyzed and retrieved by the AI Assistant. I feel like the privacy issues surrounding something like this would be far greater than anything we’ve seen so far, even making Google’s unification move look trivial in comparison.

I would like to think that if Apple expanded Siri to become like these fabled AI Assistants, I would have little concern with trusting them with all of my information, because between iCloud and iTunes they already have a good chunk of that (documents, email, calendars, contacts, photos, credit card information, music and app purchase history). Of course, none of it is correlated together to create a personal profile of me for predictions and the like (save for iTunes Genius, but I have that turned off), but still. Google could even come out with a Siri competitor and I would probably feel ok with trusting my information with them since they have an even larger chunk of personal information on me (everything Apple has plus my search history, Latitude location history, news reading habits through Reader, text and call history).

But there will likely be millions that won’t ever be comfortable with that. It’s unfortunate that such advancements in technology are so hampered by the paranoia and fear people have of having their information and identity stolen. It is of course a very valid fear, it seems that once or twice a month there is some big data security breach with some company and information gets stolen. Sometimes it’s more or less harmless, other times it is very harmful to those affected. If only that weren’t so.

Timbuk2 Appreciation Post

2012-02-01T08:41:10Z

Can I just say that the bags that Timbuk2 makes are amazing? I’ve had one of their laptop messenger bags for somewhere around 8 years and it is still my absolute favorite bag I’ve ever owned, and I have a lot of bags, somewhere between 15 and 20. There are no tears, no holes, and nothing on the bag is wearing. It looks as if I bought it last week, but it’s nearly 8 years old. I still use the bag 2-3 days a week if not more and I wouldn’t give it up for anything except maybe a new Timbuk2 bag, and even that is iffy because how awesome would it be to have two? As of right now, I’m considered adding their Zeitgeist Backpack to my collection, but I’m also looking at their other messenger bags.

I have the original Commute messenger, and I like that the current model has a more efficient use of space in the main pocket, moving the laptop compartment to a second pocket in the back. That is one complaint I would have is that the laptop compartment (which is placed inside the main pocket) takes up almost half of the useable space in that pocket, especially if I have more than a few items in the front pockets. But what I don’t like is that they no longer have the secondary strap clips on the rear bottom corners of the bag, which allow you to adjust the strap to fit more tightly to your back, almost like a sling backpack. I wear my Commute in that fashion most often because it is more comfortable and secure when I am moving around. Meanwhile their Classic Messenger has two additional rings even though the bag’s strap is not removable. As a matter of fact, they don’t sell any messenger bags with the removable/adjustable strap that the original Commute had, which is a shame, because that is one of my favorite features of that bag.

Apple’s Record Profits for Q1 2012

2012-01-26T04:28:16Z

I’m just going to leave this here and let you figure out the rest

Privacy Concerns and Google’s New Privacy Policy

2012-01-26T04:22:20Z

The other day, Google announced that they would be streamlining a large number of the more than 60 privacy policies across their various products and services into one single policy. With this change, they would also unify user profile data across these services. Lots of people are getting up in arms over this news, saying that it could be a privacy violation to do this. Google would have the ability to track and correlate massive amounts of user data and use this data to alter search results for logged in users to provide them results that could be more relevant to what they are looking for.

I don’t understand why people are so upset about this. With most web services, if you have an account, all your information is already unified and it is kept unified. But with Google people somehow think that it should be different because it has always been separated into various silos, mainly by virtue of most products being born from a startup that Google acquired, which meant that user data was stored in a different manner than how Google stores everything. Thus the idea of a unified user profile was a lofty idea and something that most people got used to not having.

Personally, I welcome the changes and to be honest, I wonder what has taken Google so long to do this. It’s been one of my biggest annoyances with using Google that my information is so disparate. For example, YouTube has had profiles for years (even before Google acquired them), and when Google announced it’s own Profiles service (before Google+), the two remained completely independent from each other and I had to update them individually if I wanted to change anything. To their credit, I can attest that reorganizing a database structure on a production web service is no small task. And I’ve only dealt with databases and services the smallest hint of a fraction of the size that Google has.

But I also welcome the advances in personalized search recommendations it will likely bring. I want Google to use my entire profile in aggregate to give me more relevant search results. I want Google to make it easy for me to transition data across different services. I want the benefits of unified information.

One Step Closer to Unification

2012-01-25T08:11:11Z

One of my oldest wishes is for a truly connected and modern address book application. Many have tried to fill that void, but for one reason or another, they just didn’t quite get it right or it didn’t really do everything I wanted. Time and time again I’ve written about one product or service or another that almost made it or how I’ve sort of hacked something together that almost works. But 4 years ago I discovered Xobni. Back then, it was just an Outlook plugin that included information from various social network profiles for whoever the current email is from. I gave up on it at the time since I don’t use Outlook and so it was useless to me.

Last year they released a Google Chrome extension that put a sidebar in the Gmail web interface that did the same thing as the Outlook plugin (which had been expanded and much improved in the 3 years since). This was awesome, except, I also don’t use the Gmail web interface very often, except for work, but I found that at my job it didn’t offer much help or usefulness since I rarely contact people outside of the company. So, while this was a huge improvement, it still didn’t make it for me.

But today they finally did something for me. Something huge. A contacts application for iOS. I’ve been waiting for something like this for so long it’s not even funny. I’ve always hated the fact that I have to manually create an address book entry for every contact or friend on a social network to be able to find and unify their contact information. But now, this automatically creates a unified contact card for every friend on every social network I have (Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter at the moment) as well as all of my Google Contacts (which covers Google+). I’ve been addicted to it all day and it is massively useful for the most part. The one hangup is that the one-click call and SMS buttons don’t work for me because I use Google Voice on my iPhone, and the one-click buttons go to the default apps. A minor hangup for sure, but at least I have the ability to look up contact info for everyone I know from one place rather than jumping from one app to another trying to find where their phone number or email address is kept. Although it would be really nice if the app provided the ability to copy the number or email address to the clipboard.

A Small Wishlist

The app does have some areas it could definitely improve on, which is to be expected with the first version of an app. Below is a short list of some of the things that I came across that would be really useful (at least for me) to see in the future.

For starters providing the ability to copy contact info to the clipboard so that people like me can more easily jump over to Google Voice (or another application) and use that information.
Providing a way to jump to the local Address Book card to make edits (if one exists) would be nice.
Show all the contact card information available, or make it an option in the app settings. Currently it only shows phone numbers and email addresses, but I would like to see birthdays, street addresses, instant message handles, and anything else that I have stored in an address book card.

What’s Missing

The only two things that keep this new development from being a complete god-send for me are a native Mac application (or Address Book plugin of some kind), and contact syncing between different services. I need a local Mac app so that I can use my universal address book when drafting emails or searching for contact info for someone without having to go to my phone every time.

And contact syncing is a problem that I (and thousands of others I am sure) have been plagued with for years. Up until Apple released iCloud I was in a happy place with my local Address Book contacts and Google contacts because there was an easy, built-in way to sync between them. But now with how iCloud works, there is no way to sync with Google anymore. Which means that my Google contacts are usually disastrously out-of-date (a major problem because of my dependence on Google Voice) because I keep my “master” copy with iCloud since that is what feeds into my desktop email client (Sparrow) and it automatically syncs between my computer and phone. Having something else in the middle seems like the only way that I’ll be able to return to that happy medium, but for now, that’s a lost hope.

Ok, so I lied, there’s really three things, but this last one is somewhat more minor than the first two. There should (eventually) be a way to manually link social profiles to address book cards. I have many friends that do not use their real last names on Facebook, and so Xobni has a difficult time connecting that with their ‘other’ card that pulls information from my address book, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

All in all, Smartr Contacts is an awesome app and it’s going to save me more time than I care to admit and I only hope that with a few additions and improvements, I will finally get my wish.

SOPA Strike Update

2012-01-20T00:52:49Z

It seems like yesterday’s Internet Blackout strike against SOPA and PIPA worked pretty well and reached quite a lot of people. Fight for the Future as a great info-graphic with more numbers and stats than you can shake a stick at. Enjoy!

As for my own websites, I’ve removed the overlay calling for action, but I’m leaving the ribbon on the side for the time being.

Blackout SOPA

2012-01-18T17:23:35Z

This thing is everywhere now. Almost literally. Today, what seems like half (or more) of the internet is staging a global protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and ProtectIP Act (PIPA) by “blacking out” themselves. Some websites are completely offline today and only show a message about what SOPA and PIPA are and how to take action, while others (like mine) are only showing an overlay to new visitors encouraging them to take action to stop these two bills.

I’m not going to go on at length about these bills, since there are plenty of other places you can do this. So if you haven’t already, read up and sign a petition at one of those websites, contact your representatives in Congress and lets protect the future of the internet.