Applepeels

No Apple Under The Tree This Year

It is the end of the year and time for my biennial technology refresh. My computers get heavy use since I work in the technology industry, write and take thousands of photos.  I also build websites and have a few books to my credit including one on my career at Apple.  During my last refresh in late 2012-early 2013, I bought a new Mac Mini and a new Lenovo Yoga laptop and a Lenovo I5 desktop.

My desktop is not a normal one but it has gotten to the point that I could use a new Mac. My I5 iMac is four years old and my I5 Mac Mini will be two years old in January.  The hard drives are both are nearly full and the back of my Mac Mini is a cable nightmare.  The Mac Mini chugs along much slower running Mavericks than it once did.  Yosemite has not wowed me on my somewhat cursed iMac. 

With earlier Apple products, I might have just popped the cases open and put in larger hard drives as I did many times in my still running dual G5 that I bought in December 2004, for $1795.  I think it started life as a system with a single 80GB drive.  It now has a pair of 1TB drives.

Popping the case open is not much of an option on either of my current Mac systems, but I work for a company that uses Macs which means Pages, Keynote, and Numbers are part of my daily work life.  So I need a very functional system.  Considering my job and the fact that I also spent almost two decades working at Apple, a new Mac would look like a shoe-in.

My history with Apple computers began with an Apple II+ and I got my first Mac when I joined Apple in 1984. When we sold our home in Roanoke, Virginia and made our final transition to the North Carolina coast, I cleaned out my home office equipment closet which had a wonderful collection of Macs that I had purchased over the years including my Mac IIcx/Quadra 700, Mac 8600, and Blue and White G3. I even had the motherboard and hard drive of the Mac II that I got as my company own-a-Mac  when I moved from Apple Canada to Apple USA in 1987. The closet also had a couple of the six iMacs that I had purchased for my wife and daughters.

With that much history with Macs, it would seem that I would be a perfect candidate for a new Mac. Unfortunately Apple does not have a product that fits my needs. iMacs are hard to repair and the Mac Mini is just not expandable enough without resorting to expensive Thunderbolt upgrades. Even then the memory is limited to 16GB.

The dual G5 I got ten years ago is one of my favorite Macs of all time. It still runs whenever I need it.  The $1,795 that I paid for it was a good investment and I would gladly pay something close to that for another updated version of an expandable Mac with a couple of easily swappable hard drives.

Unfortantely Apple has abandoned this segment of market. If I want a nice I7 system with 32GBs of RAM, a hybrid 2TB hard drive with a DVD drive and lots of USB ports, I have no choice but to look elsewhere. I can find something like that at Lenovo with a nice video card for $1,050 before taxes.

I would be happy to pay a 30% premium on that or close to $1,400 to Apple if I could get a product that really meets my needs.

What kind of desktops could I get from Apple for $1,000 but less than $1,500. It is a pretty unimpressive list.

I could get a 2.8Ghz I5 MacMini with 8GB of RAM and a 1TB fusion drive for $999.  If I bump the Mac Mini to an I7 and 16GB of RAM, the price goes to $1,399.  Unfortunately the Mac Mini now comes with soldered in RAM so even if it supported 32GB, there would be no way to get it there.  You don't have to take my word for the latest Mac Mini not being what people might have wanted.  Here is what Ars Technica has to say.

But as iFixit's teardown confirms, the system is no longer as versatile as it has been for the last few years. It's sad to see upgradeability thrown out the window even though the computer still has room for it on the inside.

The 21.5 inch iMac is limited to 8GB of memory and already costs $1,099. If I step up to the iMac with 2.7GHz Quad-core Intel Core i5 and !6GB of RAM, my cost goes up to $1,499.  I am still stuck with a 1TB drive for that price, 16GB, and no DVD drive.  I can get 32GB of RAM if I go to the iMac with Retina display. That would set me back $3,099 and I would still just have 1TB of storage, no DVD and an iMac that is even harder to service than the one I have.  One of my least favorite things about the new Apple is how they force you to go up the line to get basic functionality.  When I bought my I5 iMac, I had to buy the one with the largest screen at the time just to get an I5 processor.

I sold Apple products for years and understand well the mantra that specs are not everything.  However, if you seriously use your computer for work like I do, the amount of RAM matters a lot.  I already have a 16GB Mac Mini and I find it is not up to the job.  So why would I replace it something just like it which by the way now costs more than the one I bought in 2013.  The current low end Mac Mini is less expensive than what I paid for my Mac Mini but the processor is slower.  A Mac Mini with the same processor that mine has costs $100 more than what I paid for mine and comes with RAM that cannot be removed.  What a deal you have given us Apple.

So here I am wanting to buy a Mac that will go to 32B and have the potential for lots of extra storage. It appears that I have no choice but to look at the Mac Pro. The $2,999 Mac Pro comes with plenty of processing power but only 12GBs of RAM and only a 256GB SSD.  It costs twice what I want to spend, has less RAM than I want and I still have to buy some Thunderbolt drives with enclosures to get to a couple of TBs and a DVD reader. A Mac Pro system would be well over $3,700. Would it last ten years? Who cares?

It does not matter whether Apple builds better sytems or worse ones. If they do not have anything that will meet your needs, you are out of luck.  I hate to see Apple walk away from this segment, but I for one am tired of waiting for Apple to address its core computing markets.  I will make do with the Macs that I have for work, but I plan to buy a new Windows machine that matches my needs. I will transfer more and more of my work to a Windows computer.  Then I'll take my old Windows computer and make it a very nice Linux box.  It was only about one and half years ago when I gave away my 2004 Dell Pentium running  Ubuntu to a young student interested in Computer Science.

I have delayed this decision far longer than I should have.  Apple with its less than stellar software, so-so Cloud software, inattention to the education market, attempts to force me to upgrade and lack of backwards compatibility should have already convinced me to long ago run away to another platform.

Apple built its computer business on the fact that you could customize its computers to your needs.  Thunderbolt is way too expensive for most of us. I just need a serious computer with lots of RAM and the ability to have a couple of drives that I can change as technology moves forward.  Apple is MIA in this segment.  It might come back to bite them.

But I am tired of fighting it.  Apple I get your message, I will go buy a new 32GB Windows machine with a 2TB drive and use the leftover money from what I had reserved for your coffers as a start towards a new camera.

That is it from the Crystal Coast where the cold you feel on a big river in December is nothing compared to what a serious computer user looking for a reasonably powerful system feels from Apple.

 

Apple Closer To A Real Cloud With iCloud

With the latest operating system release, Yosemite, Apple is the closest it has been in a long time to figuring out the cloud.  With the previous version of iCloud you could not actually see what files were in Apple’s cloud.  You could also only save files from Apple apps and a few other App Store blessed apps.  It was a strange way to run a cloud even for Apple.

 

Days before Yosemite’s release I heard rumors that you could see your files on iCloud using a Windows 7 or 8 device.  That turned out to be only partially true, it would work but only if you also had an iOS 8 device.  Since I am married to the map-happy world of Android that did me little good.

 

When Yosemite was released, I downloaded it and installed it on my backup Mac, my infamous iMac.  I have been around long enough to not install a first round Apple operating system release on my production machine, but other than a couple of fonts that refuse to work and the things that I share from iPhoto disappearing into a black hole, the upgrade went almost as uneventfully my last triple upgrade a year ago.

 

What I really wanted to see with Yosemite was if Apple was truly making some progress in the cloud.  It turned out that they are.  It still has an Apple gotcha or two, but iCloud looks a lot more like a real cloud solution than it did a year ago.

 

I have uploaded and downloaded a variety of files from my Windows 7 & 8 machines and my Mac Mini running Mavericks.  iCloud appears to work flawlessly on all of them assuming you don’t try to use Opera as your browser or try to save directly from Mavericks. When I do that, I still cannot see iCloud folders or find the file once I have saved it.  It appears Apple does not want me to use anything on my Macs except Yosemite.

 

When I login from a browser, there are folders and I can see what is in the folders.  The interface is slick.  Uploading and downloading works well and seems speedy. 

 

I was even surprised that I could get iCloud to work on Xubuntu Linux using Firefox.  You can also easily email a file with your iCloud email account.  If you are using Pages, Numbers, or Keynote, you can share a document.  The iCloud options are only slightly less flexible than the ones you get from your Google Drive.

 Options for Google Docs

One Drive, Box, and DropBox all have slightly different options.  On DropBox and Box, you can set when a link to document expires. Box has some additional options as you can see.

 

 

For uploading and downloading documents, all of them, now including iCloud work very well.  If you want to edit documents on the web, either iCloud or One Drive are pretty good options depending on your platform preference.

 

However, if you have an Android tablet or phone, you will be out of luck with iCloud.  I could not get it to work on my original Kindle Fire or my Nexus tablet.  I am actually a big fan of One Drive on my Android devices.  I am able to access and see Word and Excel files without any problems.

 

iCloud is a workable solution for storing files and offers iPhone and iPad users some benefits that my ecosystem does not let me test.  

 

There is only one complaint that I still have with iCloud.  I can download files from iCloud to my ten year old dual G5 but I cannot upload them.

 

 

Somehow it seems like enabling uploading of files from an old computer would be more important than downloading files to it, but I am not going to lose any sleep over it since Dropbox works fine.  I am just happy to have a ten year old computer that still boots and allows me to rummage around in the files once in a while.

 

So compliments to Apple on making some substantial progress with iCloud.  Now if Apple would just figure out that supporting Android would not be the end of the world, a few of my friends who have Android and iPhone smartphones might be able to use iCloud instead of Dropbox.

 

That is it from North Carolina's Crystal Coast where Macs are scarcier than people who don't like water.

Not so fast Apple, iCloud is part of the problem

Apple was pretty quick to point the finger someplace besides themselves in the recent celebrity photo brouhaha.  It is an Apple tradition that there are never problems with Apple products or services.  The only problems are with how customers use Apple products.  Remember the Apple response that customers were holding their iPhones wrong?

I will admit to being a long time critic of Apple and its cloud efforts. Part of the reason is that I worked at Apple for so many years and was in the cloud with them from the start.  Because of Apple's many tries at getting the web right, I am certain I still have broken website links and lost photo albums not to mention abandoned webpages that I trusted Apple to host.

Still I am going to point the finger at Apple because Apple has never understood the web and the latest implementation of iCloud shows that basic lack of understanding of the web and how most people use it.

Back in 2012, I complained about about Apple's cloud world and said this.

Adding photos to your Picasa web albums, Google drive, Dropbox or your Microsoft Skydrive is much easier than fooling around with your photostream.

I could have also said deleting them is much less of a challenge.

So here is the real problem and it is Apple's problem and not something that users can fix on their own.  You cannot administer and manage the photos on your iCloud account from a web interface.  In fact you cannot even use a web interface to see what photos are in your iCloud photostream.  You have to find the Apple device that put the photos there and delete them from that device.

Just think how backwards that is from the way that the web and other cloud services work?  All services that I have used allow me to log into my account and manage my content from the web.  If I see a photo album that I do not want to be on the web, I can delete it.  I hate to break the news to Tim Cook and his developers but the web usually outlasts Apple devices.  I had the problem when I was at Apple.  One of my Apple devices would disappear and it was impossible to manage what the device had put on the web.

It is the fatal flaw in Apple's web strategy.  Apple is a device centric company and putting a web interface on something means that you could manage your iPhone photos with a Windows or even a Linux computer.

A basic computing rule that web centric companies have figured is that your data should be device independent.  I should be able to manage my web photos or content with any device not just one manufactured by Apple.

This becomes very important when devices die or when you decide to switch to another platform. Of course Apple does not want you to switch so they put you in a walled garden where it is inconvenient to switch.

I am not exactly sure how the hackers got the photos that were on iCloud, but I suspect the photos just synced to whatever Apple device they used to get into the account.

By protecting its users from actually seeing files in iCloud, Apple has actually made it much easier for the wrong files to end up and remain on the web.  Now I am not defending anyone who is crazy enough to take nude pictures of themselves but in making it so easy for photos to get on the web with an Apple device and so hard to tell what is actually there, Apple bears some responsibility and can help fix the problem.

Apple owes users a web interface and a way to see what photos it is storing on iCloud.  I think Apple's brilliant software team could figure that out if Tim Cook told them to do it. Isn't it about time that Apple got the web right.  While they are doing it maybe that could fix that document black hole that they have promised to fix.

That's my take on it from the summery Crystal Coast.  Come visit, the best of the beach season is yet to come and our warm salt water will help you to stop worrying about what pictures are in your iCloud account.

For more recent articles about Apple, check my ReadWrite author page.

Apple's New Blog Doesn't Impress Me Much

We can be pretty sure that hell has frozen over.  Apple has launched a blog and the Wall Street Journal is falling all over itself talking about the kinder, gentler Apple. 

I continue to use my MacMini daily but it is far from my only computer. If asked about Tim Cook and Apple products, I would be more likely to subscribe to this view, Tim Cook’s Apple: Middling Products Designed to Pad the Bottom Line While Gouging Loyal Customers.

Some place between the two views of Apple lies the truth, but as a heavy user of technology and one who sees problems that could use the magic Apple touch, I remain unconvinced that the changes at Apple are anything more than cosmetic or that we will see products that might help us have an easier time doing our jobs in a digital world that Apple helped create and even complicate.

Still I am glad to see Apple finally embracing a blog even if it is just for developers who have had a special relationship with Apple for many years.  In fact developers have often had a better relationship with Apple than many Apple employees who oft times are in the dark about what the Cupertino mothership has planned. Maybe having a blog will help Apple better understand the needs of web content creators.

Perhaps as a heavy technology user who creates content I am in a small minority, but I remember well the days when Apple brought us WYSIWYG technology that worked very well in the black and white print world of the mid-eighties.  Apple kept pace for many years delivering color printing capabilities that set the standard for the rest of the industry.

As content also found a home on the web, Apple got lost.  It never came up with a web tool that was worth using.  In fact Apple ignored the whole blogging world and missed one of the essences of the web, that your content has to be editable on all sorts of devices even one that you might not manufacture.  I always thought Apple was clueless about blogging because no one at Apple ever did any blogging. Certainly iWeb was never a serious competitor.

I started my first blog using TypePad not long after leaving Apple in 2004.  That was ten years ago and Apple has finally decided to do a blog but only to try to win developers over to yet another new language. I would be much more impressed if some Apple executives were blogging and trying to learn what Apple needs to do next.

While other companies have been figuring out the web and using it to better understand their customers, Apple has been busy becoming a consumer company with just as much secrecy as the old Apple. Those of us who still use products like RapidWeaver for the Mac to create content are obviously in the minority but I do not think Apple should give up on people like me. While Apple let the whole web world slide by and has been inconsistent with its tools, there is still a vast opportunity out there for an innovative company.

Unfortunately Apple's recent products have not helped.  While I like the new Pages 5 tool, you cannot even export HTML from it.  With the Beats acquisition, I see Apple moving farther from its roots as company that provides great productivity to users who have to work with digital assets.

We are in a strange world right now where often content is on the web, in ebooks, and in print. It is a very complex process to take content and have it work in a variety of environments.  There are tools out there that promise to do this, but they are either expensive or complex to use.

The real genius of Apple that kept the company alive was reducing the complex to simple. When the Mac was introduced, we could print what we saw on the screen.  Screen resolution and printer resolution did not increase in lock step but it was close enough and the tools were good enough that we could do a pretty good job producing print jobs and eventually that included color ones.

I just finished publishing the third version of my book, A Week at The Beach - The Emerald Ise Travel Guide.  I ended up doing the final Kindle version on Word for Windows and the final print version on Word for the Macintosh.  It would have been nice to pull everything together with an Apple product, but Apple obviously wants you to use iAuthor and publish only on their store. Word on the Mac does not do well what the Kindle world requires which is filtered HTML.

While I can understand Apple wanting to tie content to its devices, it would seem logical to me if Apple's devices are the best products for writing Kindle books that Apple will sell more products and probably get more books for the Apple platform.  Yet the most recent version of iBooks Author will only export as an iBook, PDF, or Text.

I am not going to pretend this is an easy area to tackle but neither were products like iMovie and iPhoto.  There is a huge opportunity for Apple to create an amazing writing tool that gives content creators more flexibility than iBooks Author and also lets them create books for Apple's store, the Kindle store, and for the print world.  Apple already has a leg up on being able to use video in iBooks Author but the company also has a serious tilt towards a closed eco-system instead of an open one.

There are also sort of directions Apple could take, but I would love to see something like John Gruber's Markdown language used so that the same content could have different formatting applied to it.  I already use a cloud-based product called Draft. Draft has introduced Kindle support so I am anxious to try it.

Right now those of us trying to publish in multiple environments would probably jump on an Apple solution.  One that would let me publish to a blog, a web page, a PDF(x3 of course), or a real paper book would be most welcome.  Third parties can build those things, but those of use who used the old Apple LaserWriters remember how well things worked when Apple worked closely with Adobe to make sure software, hardware, and printers all worked together seamlessly.  I would love to no longer worry about hidden HTML in a Word document.

Amazon with its Kindle reader product for virtually every platform has done a great job making sure a work published on the Kindle store is widely available even on Apple hardware.  They also have CreateSpace as an in house paper print publishing firm.  They have their delivery mechanism down pat.  However, other than emulators to check your work, they provide little help in the actual creation.

If Tim Cook's Apple is truly a more cooperative Apple, it would be great to see Apple become the publishing platform of choice once again even it means having to talk nicely to Amazon.

When I am not trying to coerce last generation tools to produce next generation books and content, you can often find me  here on North Carolina's Crystal Coast enjoying one of the most beautiful places on earth.

Even Apple Stuff Does Not Work All The Time

Macs have a long tradition of "just working." Windows stuff is often considered unreliable and unworkable by dedicated Mac users. Some of that is a myth and the reality is probably a little more complex.

I recently spent a little more time on my Mac than is normal in my multi-platform world.  I had three things on my plate, doing a mini-review of Pages 5 for ReadWrite and working on a new mailing and an email newsletter for WideOpen Networks, the company where I work. 

In the world of businesses, WideOpen is a rarity, we are a Mac shop.  While we have other platforms available, we do all of our proposals in Pages 09 and most of our work is done using Macs.  I cheat a little since I handle most of my email correspondence from Thunderbird running in Xubuntu Linux which runs on VMware's Fusion 6 on my MacMini with 16GB of RAM.

One task that I tackled for WideOpen brought home the complexity of today's computing environment.  We wanted to export some contacts from Highrise, which is a great cloud-based CRM solution that we use to stay in sync from multiple locations.  Someone else had tried to get what we wanted out of Highrise and decided that there was no easy way to do it.  That is when the old Mac guy, that would be me, got called in to look at the situation.

Moving contacts from one place to another has never been a favorite task of mine.  The way Google handles contacts while not perfect has continued to keep me a fan of their platform.  Apple's address book on the other hand has always been a little challenging when trying to get things in or out of it.

Our goal at WideOpen was to have the ability to print address labels for a limited set of contacts that we tagged in Highrise.   It seems like a simple enough task but as might be expected getting the results we wanted gave us a few surprises.

I first hoped get a clean .csv file that would let me import the file into my Dymo LaserWriter 400 Turbo software's address book and print from my Windows 8.1 machine.  I moved my label printer to my Windows desktop when my iMac died an untimedly death.  I had so many early challenges with my MacMini that I never moved it back.  Somehow I had managed to carry the old address book from my Mac over.  I cannot remember how I did it and it now appears to not be very easy.

First off exporting as a .csv file from Highrise was not much fun since the platform has so many fields which are not needed in address label printing.  If there is a way to choose what fields are exported, I have been unable to discover it.

After looking at the .csv file in Excel and trying a few things, I stumbled on the Highrise suggestion that I export my tagged contacts as a multiple-person vCard.  I tried it and much to my surprise the contacts came over to my Mac address book.  It showed as a Last Import and so I saved it as Smart Group with the name of First Mailing.  I then printed it to my regular Brother HL-2270DW using a standard Avery Label format.  It worked perfectly.

However, when I sent the instructions to my boss who has his Dymo Turbo LaserWriter label printer hooked to his Mac, the printer was not happy and screwed up the printing.  It was late in the day so we gave up. 

At dinner that evening, I wondered if my label printer was hooked to one of the very accessible front USB ports on my Lenovo tower or the hard to reach ports on the back.  It did not take me long to wander up to my office that evening and discover the label printer was hooked to a front port.  I unceremoniously unhooked it and plugged it into the USB port of the Mac keyboard on my Mac Mini.  I added the new USB label printer, changed the page setting to Dymo and Address labels, and my test set of labels printed in under a minute.

The whole operation of switching the printer from my Windows computer to my Mac had taken less than five minutes.  I was pretty excited and sent a screen shot of the settings to my boss.

When we talked the next morning, I found he had been unsuccessful in using my settings. Even after fooling with it for 45 minutes, he had not been able to get it to work.  We have both been serious Mac users since 1984 so there probably little that I could have done in his situation to change the results.  Our offices are six hours apart so he finally figured out that the Dymo software can be used with the Mac address book.  However, there is a problem with tags in the Dymo software that makes it an imperfect solution.  It will be an issue that will take more time than it deserves.

There was a time when Apple made everything from printers and scanners to cameras and almost all the software.  There was also a time when the choices in the world of technology were limited.  I started with an Apple II+, an Epson MX80, and AppleWriter II. There were not many other choices in those days.   Making a few things work well is relatively easy.  Making a lot of things work well is much harder.  It has always been one of the reasons that the Windows world is more complex.

As Apple has moved to a company that does not make everything,  things have become more complex like the Windows world.  Back in October 2006, I bought an HP AIO printer and eventually got it working on my Mac and even my Linux computer using Ethernet.

Until this past summer, the HP AIO printer has worked fine on whatever Mac I used.  However, when I upgraded to Mountain Lion, the printer would show up but the computer could never connect to it.  The printer is on an Ethernet network and four Windows computers have no problem printing to it and they represent Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1.  When I upgraded to Mavericks the HP printer worked fine for two days on the network and then stopped again.  I tried removing it and adding it back with no change in the problem.  Finally I hooked it up using the USB port and everything is fine and the Windows computers still work via Ethernet.

There are mysteries in the computer world and sometimes they are just not worth solving.  When I upgraded all three of my computer operating systems recently, the built-in SD card reader stopped working on my Lenovo Windows tower when I took it to Windows 8.1.  I chose the easy way out, I just plugged in an external USB reader.  That task, just like hooking up the HP printer by USB took seconds and figuring out either problem could take days.

 

 

 

 

It is not the Pixel that should worry Apple

Google's Pixel has certainly generated plenty of publicity.  I have read more in a shorter time about the Pixel than any other Google hardware product.  If nothing else Google seems to have learned how to get some free publicity on a product.

Some articles like the one on CNET, Google laptop shows Apple a thing or two, argue "that cool hardware is the first step in luring consumers to a new operating environment."  Then David Pogue at the NY Times writes that " The Chromebook Pixel is lovely, polished and just a little bit silly."

The truth has more to do with what you want out of a computer than what someone on the web writes, but it is not the hardware that I would worry about if I were in Tim Cook's shoes.   The Pixel is certainly a nice effort at hardware that has made the industry take notice, but it really is not the biggest danger for Apple.  The Pixel does not fit the needs of many people unless you happen to be among those of us who have mostly moved to the web.  Certainly, the Pixel shows that Google can create a compelling hardware product, but there a few pieces to the puzzle missing including price and USB 3.0.

However, most writers are completely missing the point.  It is not the Pixel's hardware that is an immediate danger to Apple.  The issue is that Google is making enough progress with the Chrome OS in one of Apple's strategic businesses that they feel comfortable putting out a device that is very attractive but likely will not sell in substantial numbers.  It certainly should be a wake-up call for Apple.

Beyond that Apple should be more worried about the Chrome environment as detailed in this article, Google In Education: Chromebooks Now Embraced By More Than 2000 Schools, than the hardware specs of the PIxel.

It could be argued that Apple's business has been built on education and education is still a key market for the company.  The iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone are the current hot products for Apple and in general, are well received in the education market. However, no product stays at the top of education forever and Google attacking Apple's education pond is a much bigger problem than Google coming out with an arguably over-priced Chromebook.

It is certainly time for a little dose of reality when it comes to tablets of any stripe in education.  Let's be honest and admit that writing a paper on a tablet without a real keyboard is just not a lot of fun.  Once you put a keyboard with a tablet you have essentially gone with something that looks a lot like a laptop and in Apple's case probably puts the cost per student pretty close to what you would pay for an inexpensive Windows laptop. 

It gets dicier for Apple if the keyboard comes with an even less expensive Chromebook with software designed with the web in mind.

This article, Why Three Districts Chose Chromebooks Over Tablets,  talks about production devices and consumption devices.

Tablets, especially iPads, have received a lot of attention recently.  They’re great for some things, but I still think of tablets as consumption devices and laptops as production devices.  Some kids can type on a tab but if teachers want kids to write a lot and to produce media, they need a keyboard.  Chromebooks have the instant on and long batter life of tabs but with a full keyboard and the functionality of a laptop.

A less apparent difference is that Chromebooks are fully web-centric and are not locked in to one family of mobile apps.  When instructional resources, portfolios, and communication streams are all web based, they are available any where on any screen.

My own use of tablets confirms that they are not what you want to use if you are producing a lot of content.  However, I wrote much of my most recent book, A Taste for the Wild, Canada's Maritimes, using Google Docs. I had no issue when I moved the document to Word for final formatting to get my book on the Kindle Store.

What is so powerful about Google Docs and many of the applications that run in the Chrome browser or OS is that I can use them anywhere.  Google Docs work on the Mac, Windows, and Linux.  While I am not certain that I see the need, I can certainly look at and edit any Google Docs document on my first generation Kindle Fire tablet and for that matter on my Android smart-phone. 

The Google document is divorced from the hardware. The whole Chromebook concept is web-centric and that just happens to be where Apple needs to improve its game. iCloud is just not a suitable environment for collaboration as currently structured. To be blunt, Google understands the web, sharing, and the whole suite of web services that Apple just cannot seem to get right.

Google Drive is a much better-designed solution for collaboration, sharing, and working.  Apple's inability to get the web right for its users is likely the company's biggest weakness currently.  They have tried many iterations and keep misfiring.  I have been writing about Apple's challenges on the web for over six years, and unfortunately, I have been using their web services for even longer.

Google's web-centric Chrome OS should worry Apple.  Getting web services right is a lot harder than it looks.  I just do not see Apple's abandoned Pages and Numbers as real competition to Google Docs.

If Google is getting its software in shape to match its already strong understanding of web services and sharing of all things on the web, I think Apple needs to rethink its web strategy yesterday.  I still believe the heart of the problem lies with having a leadership at Apple that does not have a real vision for where technology should go beyond the next gadget.  Apple loves to make gadgets.  But what happens if the learning or work environment around Apple's gadgets does not look as good as the solution environment around another company's gadgets,  Apple will be in serious trouble especially if the other company has already figured out how to make gadgets almost as nice as the ones that Apple produces.

I would suggest this quotation is very worrisome for Apple.

Having said that, I’ve spent the last week using the Chromebook Pixel not because I felt like I had to, but because it’s a joy to use. It’s been the machine that I’ve picked up rather than my MacBook Air, out of choice, because using it with the web services that I use every day is a brilliant experience. I love the feel of its keyboard. I love its pixel-free screen. I love its purity, it’s single-minded devotion to the web and just the web. I don’t love the fans, which just kicked in and (compared to the almost-silent Air) sound like a small but irritating vacuum cleaner being used in the room next door.

But I do love the Pixel. And I am really going to miss it when it goes back....

If part of the reason for the Pixel was to prove that Google can create really good hardware design, it’s done its job: The Pixel is the best laptop I’ve used that didn’t have an Apple badge on it (and it’s better than quite a few laptops which did). It’s a different concept, it’s not fussy old Windows, and it’s making me want to be at least occasionally unfaithful to my beloved Mac. For a first attempt at hardware from a software-and-services company, that’s pretty damn good.

Isn’t competition great?

It comes from Ian Betterridge's article, A Mac user’s view of the Chromebook Pixel.  I have a lot of respect for Ian and his opinions.

I also have to agree with Ian.  The Pixel is a very attractive laptop, especially when combined with Googles services and the software that has developed around Chrome.  I don't see an iMovie but there is not much missing in the Google world. Undoubtedly schools will find Chromebooks a compelling solution that is less expensive to support and manage especially when compared to expensive Apple products.  I would argue Chromebooks certainly serve the older grades better than iPads.

It looks like a perfect storm for Apple when there are already doubts about the man at the helm of the spaceship in Cupertino.  This time the doubts are more than just the ones that I have already expressed. 

I still maintain Apple needs a leader, not a manager, and the leader needs to be someone who lives and breaths technology not someone just in it for the money.

 

A Sign That Apple Cares About The Desktop?

We all have different expectations from the companies that have helped define our lives.  My hopes for Apple revolve around the tools that the company created or helped popularize over the years. Many of those innovations let me do things that I could hardly imagine.

With me it started with an Apple II+, AppleWriter II, and an Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer.  Then there was the Mac, Pagemaker, and Illutrator, iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD. While not all of these came from Apple, their initial releases were tied closely to the Macintosh.  Since the announcement of the Mac, the Mac desktop has been an important part of my life. Today I still use the Mac, just not as much. Linux has won a significant piece of my desktop.

Even when I gave my desktop over completely to Apple, it was not always been a smooth ride. Products like Claris Emailer and iDVD were dropped.  Some things like iPhoto's integration with the Cloud and web pages have changed for the worse.  Perhaps iWeb was the best indication that Apple never could quite understand that to be successful on the web you need to divorce the device from the data. Google certainly understands that.  I would even argue that Microsoft is better at it than Apple. Then there is an application like Pages which took me a long time to embrace for a few things only to watch Apple decide to ignore it.  I might not agree with Microsoft's direction on Excel, but I doubt they will ever ignore it.

Apple's misunderstanding of the cloud imight someday be looked upon as a major mistake. Still there is no question that Apple remains a money machine.  What I am wondering is can Apple still innovate in a way that really matters.  It is not a new question.  I found this August 18, 2011 article by Brandt Dainow, Why the iAd was a failure, an interesting read.  I especially like this quotation which refers to an earlier article of his.

The thrust of my criticism was that if Apple creates aspirational and innovative new products, but then restricts access to them, it forces others to create competing systems. By refusing hardware manufacturers such as Samsung and Nokia access to the iOS system, Apple forced them into the arms of Google and Microsoft. I argued that, just as the Mac had gone from 30 percent market share at its peak to less than 3 percent today, so would the iPhone go in the mobile market.

While the Mac has gotten up to 10% or so of market share, there are those who are now arguing that it has peaked. 

It turns out that a lot of what Apple has done throughout its history is to create innovations and then to try to wall them off.  There was a time before Windows 7 when many computer users would have loved to have the more secure and capable OS X running on their Dell or HP.  Apple was sure that letting OS X into the wild would destroy the company.  It turned out that Apple's success was not destined to come from OS X anyway.  It was going to come from the iPod, iPhone, and iPad and related services which now make up close to 86% of Apple's revenue.  I always thought that it was funny that I had to buy a third-party add-on for iPhoto just to do something as simple as put my photos in Google's Picasa web albums without resorting to a browser.

In a sense Apple is now trying to use OS X to drag along those of us still creating content with Macs.  It likely will not work.  The web is changing everything and Apple's walled worlds are showing some huge cracks.  Android may be as unstoppable in the mobile market as Windows was in the desktop market.

Android runs on a lot of hardware from different companies.  I like to compare the sharing options that I get when viewing an image on the Mac with what I get when viewing an image in the gallery on my Android phone.  There are twenty choices on my LG Spectrum phone instead of the seven choices in Apple's Preview.  Of course Apple is not the only guilty party in limiting our choices.  When I want to share a photo from my Amazon Cloud Drive using my Kindle Fire, I only get four choices.  That lack of choice has a lot to do with my decision to make a Nexus 7 my main tablet.  I get more choice on a lot of things.

By trying to control everything, Apple limits our choice and opens the door to innovation from others. But if the limitations that Apple forces on us are severe enough, then the market is guaranteed to respond with other choices.  Some of the choices might not be goods ones, but then again some of those choices might be really good ones like the Nexus 7 that I'm using.

While some argue that the only way for a good user experience is to let Apple control everything, my experience has shown that Apple cares little about the user experience except to want to use it to prod me towards their vision of a pure world with only Apple products and services.

It will be interesting to see how well Microsoft's experiment in using their operating system to prod us toward tablets and the Surface Pro will work.  Actually the operating systems of both Microsoft and Apple are not very high on my list these days.  I am moving towards a roll your environment using virtualization. Look for my upcoming article on it at readwrite.

For now I would like just one sign that Apple cares about my user experience.  I will nominate bringing back the "Escape" key in iPhoto as a way to return to the library instead of clicking on the annoying "Photos" button.  I doubt we will see that since the march of Mac OS X towards iOS likely will accelerate instead of slow down. 

In truth, it does not matter.  I have found a new solution, Adobe's Lightroom.  Guess what?  The "Escape key" works like it should there.  A better sign for me to pay attention to is Frank, our great egret from Canada.

When Apple, Google, and others can't agree, things can get messy

Apple is probably to blame for a fascination that I have had with video.  Sometime in mid-eighties when I was working for Apple, I won a Sony Video8 camera in an Apple sales contest.  I was hooked.

Like any good father, I took hours of soccer, hockey, and dance video over the years.  I still have some of the video of our children playing on the beaches north of Halifax, Nova Scotia, one spring in the late eighties.  I ended up with at least two other Sony video cameras over the years.  A few years ago I spent days going through video and putting some clips on a DVD using iDVD.  That DVD is now a family treasure.

I can also remember taking photos, movies, and music and creating a great prom video for my youngest daughter almost twelve years ago.  I used iMovie and eventually did a version in Final Cut Pro.

When Apple's original .Mac service came along and eventually offered the opportunity to post movies on the web, I was quick to try that.  Over the years Apple has changed .Mac and its descendant, MobileMe, so much that my early movies are no longer visible on the web.

I have long looked at the web as my filing cabinet, but Apple's propensity for change has made it a challenging storage partner.  However, I suspect the motives of other "clouds" on the web are probably just as suspect.  Google's motives are often especially hard to determine, and I'm not exactly excited about the somewhat forced connection between Picasa Web Albums and Google+ albums.

For almost four years I have been posting my videos to YouTube instead of Apple's cloud.  Some, like this simple one of a sail boat docking in Beaufort, NC have been viewed thousands of times.

I find it rather ironic that Apple, the creator of Quicktime, has made it so difficult to keep my movies created using their software and hardware in their own on line world.  With iCloud maybe things will get better, but Apple's track record doesn't give me a lot of confidence.

Unfortunately, things have gotten even messier than a few early pages with Quicktime clips not working.  Apple's war against Adobe's Flash and other vendors' worries about the H.264 standard have created a mess if you want to do your own video and post it on the web on your own site.

It is to the point that the easiest way to do video on the web is to embed a YouTube video in a web page.  Today, except on an experimental basis and for mobile users, YouTube video is Flash based.

You can get an idea of the problem for web developers by going to this YouTube site which lets you opt into their HTML5 trial.  Depending on which browser you use and how your browser is configured if you use Internet Explorer, you will see different things.  Just taking the time to visit the YouTube HTML5 site with both Safari and Firefox will give you an idea of the challenges faced by webpage developers who want to use movies.

Being very geeky, on my Windows laptop I have Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer. On my Macs I have the same without of course Internet Exploer.  On my Ubuntu Linux machine, I have Firefox and Chromium.  I also have a Kindle Fire and a new LG Spectrum Android phone where I use Opera Mini.  I have friends with iPhones and iPads.

While all my browsers on most of my machines are the latest versions, there are plenty of old browsers out there.  Even my 2004 Dual G5 is running a very old build of Firefox.  Getting a web video to work on all of these is not easy.

I can remember when getting someone to see a video posted on the web was as simple as making sure they had installed a Quicktime plug-in.  Of course a lot of people never could figure out how to install plug-ins, and they do cause troubles.

All of this led me to experiment with posting some video on the web. Over Christmas I got a new beach camera, a Nikon COOLPIX P500.  I bought the COOLPIX so I wouldn't have to subject my Nikon D3100 and nice telephone lens to sand and surf dangers.  So far it has been a great beach camera.

It turns out that the COOLPIX P500 takes some really great long distance HD video as long as you use a tripod.

One of the reasons that I wanted to do my own movies on the web is that I have seen increasing difficulty in posting YouTube videos directly from either iMovie or Quicktime exports.  However, I can upload a movie directly from the Mac using the YouTube up-loader.  Unfortunately the Mac program connections seemed to be broken on my iMac.

I actually didn't learn how bad the video mess was until after my first efforts which involved using code directly generated from Quicktime using save for the web.  When I started testing that site with different browsers, I figured out there was a problem with most other browsers besides Safari and Internet Explorer.

I had an Apple friend runs some tests, and he also was surprised at the challenges.  I did some searching on the web and came up with the site Video for Everybody.  It has a pretty good discussion of the issues.  Even more useful to me was an automatic code generator.

Of course Quicktime is no help in generating the new formats that some of the browsers are using so I ended up using two video converters, the Miro Video Converter and a video to Flash converter which I can't remember.

Based on all that I created a site with several movies in different formats of a Pelican preening itself.  While I was working on all this, I put the Pelican movie up on YouTube.

After a little tweaking, I now have this Pelican Movie site which seems to work on all computers using all browers including Firefox and Chromium on Ubuntu Linux, my Kindle, and my Android phone.  However, in order to get the Pelican movie working on the iPad and and iPhone I ended up creating another site done with Apple code and a reference movie.  It also works with many but not all browsers.

This was an interesting experience, and certainly convinced me that embedding a YouTube movie into your website is the easy way to go.  It does appear to me that most of the other vendors are lining up against Apple, but in the world of technology, today's enemy is often tomorrow's strategic partner.

On a side note I use Picasa on my Windows computer to manage most of my photos and video clips. So far I have had no problems directly exporting video from it to YouTube. That shouldn't be too surprising.

This summer I used a small Sony pocket camera to take some ACVHD video including the clip that I exported to YouTube for this great run down the White Oak River in our skiff. 

However, the only way that I could deal with AVCHD video was through Sony's movie software.  My Mac using Apple software didn't recognize the movies.  Picasa on Windows was also no help at the time.  I have noticed some conversion utilities recently, but I am using the Nikon with HD format now so the problem went away for me.

Perhaps these issues will get better over time, but someone is going to have to give in, and none of these large technology companies like to do that.  My personal bet is that however YouTube goes, so will go the majority of the web.

If the end of January has you thinking about nice places to visit, read my post on why Beaufort, NC is such a nice place to visit.

Perhaps my tales of Beaufort's uniqueness might convince you to vote for Beaufort in Budget Travel's Coolest Small Towns of 2012 contest.  Those of us living on North Carolina's Crystal Coast would greatly appreciate the votes of technology folks interested enough to read about the challenges in posting web video.

You are even welcome to join us during the fantastic weather that has given us some magic moments on the beaches even during the heart of winter.

 

 

Balanced technology with Apple at the core

Over the years I have worked myself into a technology solution that might be described as revolving around Apple but by no means dependent on the whims of Cupertino.  It works well for me, and lets me have the best of both worlds without being tied to any particular technology vendor.  How I got to this point, and how my solution works is something of a twisted story.

When I started using Apple computers back in 1982, it was not very hard to use an all Apple solution.  The only non Apple hardware I had was an Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer. Times changed, the Mac was introduced, and I went to work for Apple in 1984, but lots of business software came out for IBM compatible computers.  While I was working for Apple, the experience I had using and selling MS/DOS computers gradually faded into the past. Macs and Apple peripherals from printers to scanners and even cameras dominated my life.

Even during the years at  Apple when there was a concerted effort by the company to provide DOS compatibility, Apple was vehemently anti-Windows internally.  If you wanted to demonstrate Windows compatibility on a network, you had to be pretty creative with your local budget dollars.  We managed to get a few PCs in our Reston office.  They were invaluable in helping us learn what our customers' faced in getting Macs to work in their enterprise.

I sometimes felt like our work with Windows computers was a skunk works project. We actually ended up driving a lot of Apple's ActiveDirectory solution with a system engineer on my staff doing much of the development, but the reality even then was that Apple was a consumer company at its heart. Our enterprise efforts were just a holding action until Apple could find hits that would free it from the need to pay any serious attention to the enterprise.

Most people would agree that I bled rainbow colors in those days, so it would be no surprise that my family's personal technology and my own remained 100% Apple. I was even pretty happy with a Nokia cell phone that I synced with my Mac. When I was happiest, the Nokia was on Cingular which eventually got bought by AT&T. Then there was my departure from Apple just shy of my 20th anniversary and just after I reached the magic age of 55 at Apple.

Within a month after leaving Apple I bought a 15" Aluminum Powerbook.  It got a lot of use, but that same fall I also bought a Dell Dimension Pentium desktop.  Probably some of the reason I bought the Dell was Apple deciding they no longer needed my services, but I also really wanted to see how the majority of the people using technology got along in their daily tasks.  For about six months I didn't have a job, so learning about Windows XP and Linux was a way to make myself more marketable. It was an interesting experience and was my start in blogging.  I did purchase my trusty dual G5 PowerMac in December of 2004.  I am still using it and the Dell. I sampled a lot Linux over the years before deciding to stay with Ubuntu.

Both my next two jobs were in the government space.  I eventually got tired of being the only person in the room with a Mac so I bought a Dell laptop in the fall of 2005.  Eventually I gave up the world of a consultant for a job with benefits.  I became the VP of sales and marketing at an email services company.  The Dell laptop turned out to be a necessity with that job.  There were a couple of apps that we used which just would not work on the Mac so through some of 2006, I came to work carrying both a Mac laptop and a Dell laptop.  By that time I was pretty proficient with Windows XP. Eventually I managed to get most things working well in my new workplace, but I had sort gotten to like having two machines on my desktop.

In the summer of 2006, I bought a new MacBook.  My aluminum PB had sucumbed to a number of problems, including a bad lower memory slot and flaky ribbon cable, neither of which were covered by extended warranties.  In the fall of 2006 we moved to coast, and I started looking for a new job.  I wanted something where I did not have to live and breathe technology.

Somehow I thought that was real estate, and just as the the market was tanking, I ended up becoming a REALTOR®.  I did not understand at the time that I sticking my foot into a field which had the potential to require an even greater use of technology than selling computers, networking or cloud services.

By then I had loaned my Dell laptop to my youngest daughter for final years of college, but I was able to get by the first nine months as a REALTOR® using my MacBook and my old Dell desktop at home.  Our office provided us with an ancient Window XP desktop to use while on duty so that helped.

Eventually when I got to the point of writing contracts, I decided that I needed a new Windows laptop so I bought a new Vista laptop just when Apple was introducing Leopard.  It was a lesson in Windows humility. There were some challenges with XP, Vista was a nightmare. and I eventually concluded that it as quagmire.

I bought the Vista laptop because it was a cheaper solution for generating forms than anything else.  Supporting myself on Vista was a time whirlpool.  If anything Vista made me appreciate Macs more.

During all this time I continued to do my website and creative work on Macs.  My Windows computer let me access one of our MLS systems which required IE and let me create approved real estate forms.  It also let me print on our office printer which I could never make work on my Macs after some security software was installed on the printer.

In the winter of 2009 I was hoping that Apple would ship some new I5 and I7 laptops at a reasonable price.  Considering the tough state of the real estate market, spending money on a premium laptop like a Mac seemed like a gamble especially when it stil had an old processor.  Of course I was also to the point that I could no longer take Vista even though it had improved somewhat.

After listening to a lot of technology people whom I respect, I ended up buying both myself and my wife new Windows 7 laptops.  In about a month, we will have used those two laptops for a year without any problems. Windows 7 has proved to be a great operating system that might even be more reliable than OS X.

I have ended up helping a couple of folks get I5 laptops similar to my wife's HP.  Neither has expressed any regrets. I also convinced my daughter to stay with Macs because I thought it was right for her.  If money had been no object I would have bought both my wife and myself Macs.  But as it ended up, we both got very good systems, mine an I7 and my wife's an I5 for less than the price of one I5 Mac which didn't ship until months later.  Of course all my real estate software worked out of the box with Windows 7.  My son's company is all Windows so he long ago stopped using a Mac.  He also loves gaming so he has a souped up Dell I7 desktop with a solid state drive at home.  My youngest daughter is still using a desk lamp iMac. 

A week or so after I bought the HP laptops, I ended up choosing a Droid as my smartphone.  I was completely frustrated with AT&T's service in our area. Three years of it had been a lesson in dropped and missed calls. I only managed to get 50% or less of the phone calls when I was in my home, and the idea that I would pay AT&T more to fix their problem by installing something in my home just drove me up the wall.

Through all of this Apple peripherals including monitors have mostly disappeared. I have added HP, Epson, and Brother printers to my technology solutions.  I have an HP AIO printing/scanning/fax solution and an Epson scanner.  I live with a mixed wireless/wired network. It has a fair amount of old network equipment in it, but with some help from my son, I manage to keep the network running.

This winter I finally gave in and bought a new I5 iMac.  The old Dual G5 was getting very slow in spite of a number of hard drive upgrades. While I am pleased with the speed I have gotten with the new iMac, I stll believe it could be a better product.  Both my Windows I7 laptop and my old Ubuntu Dell boot faster.

The one thing that I have on every piece of hardware is Dropbox.  It is a great utility.  I spend a lot of time in Firebox, an increasing amount of time in Chrome, and a little time using Safari.  I useTweetDeck on my Windows box and my Macs.  I have the latest version of Office on the Mac, but I am stuck on Office 2007 on Windows.  I use Thunderbird for most of my mail on Windows, but I do access my Gmail with Chrome.  My Linux box runs little more than Firefox with an extra tab for Gmail.

On the Macs I run Apple's Mail client, but I find it getting a little creaky.  I have used Powermail in the past so I might go back to that eventually.  Right now I am using Dreamweaver and Rapidweaver, but I am evaluating other solutions.  I do use Pages for some brochures.  For word processing I use Word on Windows, OpenOffice on Linux, and Nisus Writer Express on the Mac.  I have given up Photoshop on the Mac for Pixelmator.  I manage my photos on Windows with Picasa and on the Mac with iPhoto 09. I find the most recent release of iPhoto an abomination so I am looking for alternatives.

I really like SnagIt on Windows, and while I have it for the Mac, I rarely use it there for some weird reason. It is a great tool on Windows for creating directions on a map.  Building my Housevision.us services site pushed me back firmly in the Mac world because I could not find an inexpensive Windows CAD solution that fit my work style so I now use MacDraft PE.

I have made lots of movies on the Mac, but I have also done some recently on Windows because of some trouble getting iMovie to work with YouTube.

MobileMe is not a service that I find worthwhile even though I am still paying for it because I have a couple of family members who just don't want to change their email addresses.  I am still bent out of shape over Apple taking down some photo sites that I had there for years.  I now store all my photos on Picasa web albums though I still maintain a presence on Flickr.  I will sometimes do photo editing on Pixelmator on the iMac, save the photos to my Dropbox, and them import them to Picasa on my I7 Windows laptop and then upload them from there. The uploads seem to go faster than on the iMac, but I have not sat down with a stopwatch and timed it.

Living in a world of IMAP email, Microsoft Office, and Dropbox makes it relatively easy for me to be platform agnostic. Even the brochures that I do with Pages, I save as Word files and modify them in Word on Windows and eventually print them on our doubled sided color laser printer at the office which I cannot get to work with a Mac.

The fact that I don't use Macs for everything is not a slam against Apple, it is just a response to Apple's expensive pricing, and the fact that not everything that I need can be found on a Mac unless I run Windows on a Mac which I don't want to do.  It is also just the way things happened.

For a variety of reasons I have chosen to have Windows hardware for Windows and use my Macs as dedicated Macs.  While I could easily run Windows on the new I5 iMac, I have no need to do so.  I would rather have the redundancy from the extra hardware.  I also like the feel of competence that I get from being able to use multiple platforms.  When I was still doing duty at the real estate office, I was often pressed into service to solve Windows problems.

Fortunately after my recent home network repair, all my technology tools are working well and doing what I need them to do.  I like having three screens on my desktop. The integration between My Tracks on my Droid and my Google maps is just icing on the cake of my technology world. I am happy that I no longer have to use the somewhat flaky i-gotU software on Windows to do my GPS tracks.

I don't ever expect to give one vendor all of my business. I would far sooner have them compete for my business.  I expect over the short term, Apple, Google, and Microsoft will all continue to find me both someone who users their products and a critic when something needs improving.

Over the long term, I am not placing any bets, but I sure would like to see Apple focus a little more energy and competitiveness on their laptops and desktops.  I think there is still a big place for them in the world.  I hate to see Apple give up that space completely to Windows vendors.

The recent news on developers and smartphone app intentions is a pretty good sign that no one has the market sewn up.  That market will be interesting to watch.

I am happy to report that we finally got a normal storm this winter and that Wednesday morning we woke up to 54 degrees Fahrenheit.  That is a nice change from the snowstorm we saw last weekend.  Even this winter's weather has not shaken my belief that the Southern Outer Banks is a great place to live.  It was nice to make it to 59.7 Fahrenheit on Wednesday.  I even ordered the seeds for my tomato plants.  It's almost time for the great tomato race to start.