Thanks.

Thanks for Google Search.
Thanks for Google Maps.
Thanks for Gmail.
Thanks for YouTube.
Thanks for Google Calendar.
Thanks for Google Chrome.

I use these services every day and they are awesome.

I am almost 30 and remember when web-based email was a joke. I remember when we didn’t need thumbnails for our online videos because the online videos were thumbnails. I remember when the idea of using an online map seemed ridiculous. I remember when searching was, literally, an exercise in futility.

I am under no illusion that these services are free. I realise there’s a transaction going on.

Some people seem to think that if your business model revolves around advertising then you’ll never have my best interests first and foremost. I tend to think every business cares about itself first and foremost. What I’d like is honesty. I think this becomes more difficult as the relationship involves more people. But it is not impossible.

I’ll certainly admit I’m disappointed in you from time to time. More so recently than before. Most of the time it’s because I think you’re worrying about the wrong things. Please don’t worry about Facebook. Or Apple. Or Amazon. Or whoever is really successful next week.

Worry about solving problems. You’re pretty good at that.

I imagine that I use my iPhone home screen differently to most people. Here’s a screenshot:

As is quickly evident, I keep the home screen basically filled with Apple’s default apps. The third party apps I use the most are actually on screen two:

Why this setup? There are two reasons.

The first is that I have a thing for things being in ‘factory condition’. I don’t take it to the extreme of leaving my living room furniture in plastic wrap, but I get close. When I was a child, I would not play very much with my toys in the traditional manner, preferring instead to construct diaromas where the toys were put into their ’natural state’ and left to be admired.

The second, and more practical, reason is that having my second screen be my ’real home screen’ means I have 27 ’icon slots’ of iPhone real estate within a single swipe (31 if you count the four slots in the iPhone’s dock). This is because if I go left to the first home screen, I have nine slots and if I go right to the third home screen, I have nine slots. These together with the nine on the second screen equal 27. This compare with just 18 if you do things the traditional way.

I imagine for many people this might seem silly. Why not just use folders if you’re so worried about the number of icons you can fit on a single screen? Well, the problem is that I much prefer the look of an icon rather than a collection of folders. I am often aghast when I pick up someone’s iPhone only to find row after row of folders.¹

I’ve yet to meet anyone that uses their home screens like this but figure there probably are some other second screen weirdos out there.² But what about you? How do you use your smart phone home screen?

First, the screen. My thoughts on the screen differ from most of what’s likely out there and I feel it’s necessary to put them into the appropriate context.

The first iOS device I ever owned was an iPhone 4. While I had seen, and briefly used, iPhones and iPod Touches prior to this, the 4 was my first real experience using iOS. Furthermore, I bought it in October of 2010, by which time every app that I could find had been updated to use Retina display graphics.

As such, the Retina display that Apple first shipped on the iPhone 4 is my baseline and it’s what I’ve measured all screens against since. Other screens have not fared well, and this includes the iPad 2.

This is not to say that I haven’t enjoyed using the iPad 2. I certainly have. I used it on average once a day for at least 30 minutes or so (and often far longer). It has travelled with me to other countries, been a tool I use at work and entertained me with video, text and more.

But the screen has always been a disappointment. Nowhere is this more apparent for me than with the loupe tool that’s used when you want precise placement of the cursor in a text field. Sometimes it feels as if this tool was created especially to demonstrate just how low the resolution is.

The new iPad fixes this problem. The screen is brilliant (in the literal sense of the word). However, I will admit that I wasn’t blown away by it as others sound like they were. For me, the screen is not so much a revolution as the fulfilment of the iPad’s promise. It is what I have always wanted the iPad’s screen to be. I am happy that it has reached that point but I would not call it a life-changing event.

The second thought is about Internet connectivity. While I purchased the ’4G’ model, I’m not referring to the download speeds or the antenna or whether the lower left corner gets hot through use. What I’m talking about is the ability to get on the Internet.

Much has been made of the differences between post-PC devices and traditional PCs (both laptops and desktops). Post-PC devices emphasise touch over other forms of user interaction, they generally enforce a simpler conceptual model of an application, they abstract away the file system.

But I think there is another important difference between post-PC devices and traditional computers that I didn’t fully appreciate until using the new iPad: post-PC devices need to be on the Internet.

Again, some context. I purchased the 16 GB Wi-Fi only model of the iPad 2 thinking that, while I obviously wouldn’t be able to use the Internet everywhere I went, I’d at least be able to use it in places that had public Wi-Fi. Before I had this thought, I should have considered more carefully where I live. Japan, for all its reputation as a technological wonderland, has not jumped on the free public Wi-Fi train with gay abandon. Or, indeed, any abandon. I have seen free public Wi-Fi spots in select places but it’s really been in very, very select places.

Private Wi-Fi networks, however, are everywhere. Mostly these are deployed by the mobile phone carriers. I’m not sure exactly why this is although I assume it’s to offload some of the capacity from the cellular networks. Whatever the reason, it means that, while there’s plenty of Wi-Fi around, if you don’t have an account with one of the carriers, it may as well not exist.

There is perhaps no more frustrating (#firstworld) problem than trying desperately to maintain a connection to the free public Wi-Fi network in Kansai International Airport before you get on your plane so you can download a book from Amazon to read on the flight. Well, no there is. It’s trying to desperately to maintain that connection while your phone happily jumps on SoftBank’s Wi-Fi network at McDonald’s. And Starbucks. And the airport’s train station. And numerous other locations.¹

When the time came to purchase the new iPad, I knew that this time I didn’t want to have that experience again. So I purchased the iPad through SoftBank and, in return for a small monthly fee, I now have access to their very extensive network of wireless hot spots. And it is glorious. It is easily my favourite part of the new device (even ahead of the screen). Again, having Internet connectivity is not so much a revolution as it is a step closer towards the perfect iPad. It feels silly to talk about iterations of the iPad as a progression towards some Platonic ideal but, well, I just spent $680 on the new iPad when I already own the previous model so let’s not get into semantics about what is and isn’t absurd.

Which brings me to the third thing. The New Yorker app on the iPad sucks ass. To be sure, 1) it has always sucked ass; and 2) this is not Apple’s fault. But these are my impressions and this left something of an impression on me.

For reasons that one presumes can only make sense to people that never actually use the app, the New Yorker on the iPad does not display content by getting the iPad to do the relatively straightforward task of rendering text on the screen (that’s exactly what they’d expect us to do!).² No, instead the kooks at Condé Nast have decided that they’ll serve the New Yorker to you as a gigantic series of compressed images. This bloats each issue out to 110 MB, an absurd amount for a publication that is mostly just words on a screen.

The decision to do this is bone-headed for any number of reasons (you can’t adjust the text size, you can’t select text) but the stupidity really comes into its own on the glossy 9.7″ Retina display. Unfortunately (for paying customers), the Retina display and its crazy high resolution doesn’t do the New Yorker’s flat images any favours. They’re blown up to fill the screen and, although the pixels on the Retina display are too small to create the pixelated effect you sometimes see on PCs, it nevertheless results in an image that, well, sucks ass.

I want to make clear that I love the New Yorker. It is literally my favourite publication and I think one of the three or four most important English-language periodicals in the world today. But fucking BusinessWeek has an app that doesn’t have this problem. BusinessWeek. The (rich) poor man’s Economist.

Please, for the love of God, I know you aren’t part of management, but Jason Schwartzman, you star in that delightful video telling us all how to use the New Yorker on our iPad. Please use your magic powers to solve this problem once and for all.³ I am begging you.

Consider Vlad Savov’s recent review of the Sony Xperia S for The Verge.¹ Savov gives the device a 7.1 making you think this might be a phone worth getting. Not the best of the best, but something you wouldn’t feel bad about buying. However, in the slick video² that accompanies the review, Savov signs off by saying:

Overall, the Xperia S is a well-spec’d, well performing device that seems like a phone that could have been released three months ago. It has the same processor, display specs and base operating system as the HTC Rezound but comes so much later. I can’t advise anyone to go for the Xperia S today when the HTC One X and One S are set to arrive in early April with Ice Cream Sandwich, far better processors and, some might argue, even prettier design.

(Similar comments are made in the wrap-up of the text of the review itself.)

So we have a comment that this phone cannot be recommended for any one and then a score over 7? Sony isn’t a 5-year-old finger painting for the first time, Vlad. If their product is not one that you can recommend, then it should be by definition not a good product.

Would Savov have copped a lot of shit from Sony fans if he’d given the Xperia S a score of, say, 2? Probably. Worse, would he have been cut off by Sony PR from receiving future review units? I wouldn’t be surprised. But you know what the alternative has produced? A situation in which I no longer trust Savov’s reviews.

The good news is that I have a simple solution for The Verge: change your scale. Instead of using one out of 10, make it 5 (and only use whole numbers).³ Having a far narrower range of possible scores will focus the mind and help you to avoid this type of issue in the future. Does anyone think that if Savov had only the numbers from 1 to 5 available to him he would selected 4? (7.1 divided by two and then rounded up.) He would have at the very least gone 3 and, if he’d been game, maybe even 2.

The article is terrible and I have no idea why anyone has linked to it (and, frankly, why Businessweek published it). It does little more than briefly summarise the situation at Sony over the past decade. Critical analysis is kept to the bare minimum. This despite the fact that it’s over 3,000 words. Where do all those words go? Partly into laying out Sony’s problems (or, to be more accurate, the problems identified by the apparently sole source for the story: Howard Stringer) and partly into just talking about Howard Stringer and his background. Don’t know who he is and can’t be bothered reading his Wikipedia entry? Don’t worry because the boffins at Businessweek have you covered. Want actual analysis? Well, shit.

As I was reading it, two things gave me pause to wonder how well the story had been researched. At one point, the authors Bryan Gruley and Cliff Edwards (as difficult as it is to believe, this piece of reporting required the efforts of two people!) point out that relations between the hardware engineers at Sony in Japan and the content guys in the U.S. were so strained at one point that Sony’s U.S. movie studio had difficulty getting Sony products for use in its movies. It contrasts this with the ease with which Samsung could put its phones in blockbusters like The Matrix.

By Samsung I guess they meant Nokia. Which, you know, is an easy mistake to make: one being a South Korean electronic behemoth and the other being a Nordic mobile phone manufacturer. I for one am constantly confusing Koreans and Finns (the ears are how you tell them apart).

Later in the article, Stringer uses the phrase ‘Lehman shock’ to refer to the global financial crisis that began with the failure of the investment bank Lehman Brothers. The article says that this is Stringer’s ‘shorthand’ for the GFC. This should be setting off warning bells. Have the writers of this piece done any research about Japan? ‘Lehman shock’ is not Stringer’s shorthand; it is the way that Japan refers to the global financial crisis. Shouldn’t you have, like, asked someone what this term meant if you hadn’t heard before? Maybe it would have cropped up in all the background interviews you did with Japanese people?

It’s then that it hits you that there is a remarkable absence of any reporting involving Japan.¹ Sure, Sony’s a global company, Stringer himself is Welsh-born (which the article duly notes) and Kazuo Hirai (the article suggests he is likely to succeed Stringer) divides his time between the United States and Japan but Sony is still a quintessentially Japanese company. What do its problems about combining hardware with software say about Japan’s problems combining hardware and software? What do its problems about embracing the Internet as a delivery platform say about Japan’s problems embracing the Internet as a delivery platform? What do its problems about adapting to change, particularly that brought by a foreign CEO say about Japan’s problems adapting to change, particularly that brought by a foreign CEO? I don’t know because these questions are never even asked, let alone answered.

Sony is a company of engineers, we’re told, and that’s the reason software sucks. Memo to Businessweek: Google? Chock full of engineers. Microsoft? Ditto. Apple? It’s engineers all the way down (to Jony Ive).

Now granted they’re a different type of engineer and maybe what you meant were hardware engineers. Maybe this says something about the problem besetting Sony. (Ooh, an avenue for inquiry!) Any reason to believe that’s changed? All these new whizz-bang products from Sony like tablets and phones and laptops, I guess they’re all going to be running same great new Sony software now that Stringer’s reoriented the ship? Oh, what? They’re running Windows and Android? Software written by someone else? That Sony has no relationship with? Did you ask Stringer (or indeed any Sony executive) about whether they consider the outsourcing of their software to third parties an issue? That it prevents them from adding anything unique to their products that might differentiate them from cheaper ones from Samsung and other manufacturers? Oh. No, I guess not. I guess you were too busy admiring the Central Park reservoir.

There is a great article to be written about Sony. This is not it.

Jim Dalrymple is also not a smart phone analyst. He is also not a technology analyst. He is a professional blogger, focusing on Apple. I think he does a good job when he writes about Apple but he shows his ignorance in this post about what RIM did wrong.

Dalrymple suggests that RIM’s problem was that they didn’t ‘innovate’. This is wrong. RIM’s problem was that their product was dependent on a network for its value and they didn’t control the network. I had a BlackBerry and it was great. It was particularly great at email. You know who really cares about email? Business people. Business people live and breathe email. The BlackBerry cleaned up in that market.

You know who else really loves email? Everybody. The problem for RIM is that while business people could get BlackBerries, safe in the knowledge that the office was going to cover that data charge, consumers couldn’t. Consumers were left to fret over how much it would cost (surely too much) and what the pay off would be in additional convenience (surely not enough).

RIM tried to create consumer phones but they couldn’t get the interest of a public that had been taught to fear data charges. The original iPhone didn’t have this problem because: a) Apple negotiated a sweet deal for customers with AT&T; and b) even if you had just used your iPhone like your Nokia 6100, it at least got rid of needing to carry around an iPod and a phone.

So RIM’s problem wasn’t innovation. RIM’s problem was that it didn’t control the part of its business where the value came from.

As it is, we now live in a world where this is the reality. RIM has to beat not only that but Samsung, Motorola, HTC, Google and Microsoft. They have no hope.

Those seemless updates have a downside, though. I use Google Maps three or four times a week. I also live in Japan. Until Saturday, when viewing Google Maps in English, the application displayed placed names in both kanji and romaji. On Saturday that feature was turned off in favour of what Google trumpets as single-language labels.

Bryce Stout, the Product Manager, proudly writes:

Using a single language can help users by making the map easier to read.

Really? Did any users ask for this feature to be enabled? Was it tested with users? Was it tested with users that actually use Maps in those countries? Surely there’s at least a good reason for why you did this:

We hope this change makes it easier to browse, explore and discover the world around you.

So the rationale behind this change is so that those playing at home can be virtual tourists? That’s great but I actually live here and was using Google Maps to, you know, get around.

Japanese kanji are notoriously difficult to read. This is particularly the case for place names. That said, names will often be written in kanji in addresses and so on. For those of us living in Japan whose language isn’t at native levels, Google Maps was a godsend for showing both kanji names and their transliterations. What Google seems to think made Maps easier to use has in fact made it more difficult.

Google allows you to switch native labels on but why is there not an option just to display both? Why am I being told what’s easier for me? And why is existing functionality being removed?

This is the world of web software. You are renting time. If you like something and it changes, tough. File a feature request and hope (pray?) that it is answered. I’ve written before about the impotent rage a user can feel when a software company makes a change to software you use and depend upon. I suppose it is a feeling to which we should become accustomed.

In all of this Google hate, I would like to note the helpfulness of Google’s Maps Twitter account. After realising the complete uselessness of Google’s Help Forum from my previous encounter, I decided this time to take to Twitter. My blasts of fury provoked sympathetic tweets from my friends and followers and (much to my surprise) an actual response from Google! In fact, two responses!

As grateful as I am that Google’s employees took the time to respond to my pleas (and I am grateful), it’s still frustrating to have a feature just removed without warning. That this came basically the day after Google changed the behaviour of Google Instant felt like a classic one-two. A reminder that web software is theirs, not yours.

There is no substitute for hard work and no short cuts to success. You want to build a business? Great. Be prepared to put the time into it. Don’t believe someone who says that, for $100, they’ll show you how to do it in 48 hours.

Well, the other day I signed up to, and was invited into, Stellar. Stellar is kind of like an automated curation service. It can automate your own curated stream of content and it can expose you to curated streams of content from others.

In terms of automating your own curated content, basically you hook Stellar up to the various services it supports (currently Flickr, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube) and Stellar then checks those services and copies the content you have starred/favourited into your stream (called your ‘flow’).

The immediate benefit of this is that there’s no special toolbar or extension to install, you just use the starring/favouriting tools that are already provided by these services. Consequently, it’s super easy to start curating and, in fact, if you’ve already been starring/favouriting items, Stellar will pull that data right in and you’ll have a flow of content without having to put in any additional work.

However, the real value of Stellar comes from the curated flows of others.

Stellar uses the same follower/followed mechanic as Twitter meaning that you can easily follow as many Stellar users as you want without requiring them to follow you. In this manner, you can curate your own group of curators. When you view this combined flow, you see a stream of different content being presented to you.

I’ve been using Stellar for five days and so far I love it. It has a great work to payoff ratio. It feels like I do very little and yet when I periodically check it throughout the day, a collection of interesting content is there for me to browse.

So, since I’ve been using it for all of five days, I must have a lot of ideas for how to improve it? Not really, actually. Jason Kottke (he of kottke.org fame) has put in a lot of thought and there’s no a whole lot that jumps out at me. But there are two things.¹ Two things that I’ve come across so far (to be completely honest I’m not 100% certain that one of them is a good idea but I’ve put it here for good measure).

The idea I’m least sure about is allowing Stellar to incorporate retweets into your flow instead of just favourites. What I’ve found myself doing the last couple of days when I see something on Twitter that I like is retweet it (so that my followers will see it) and then favouriting it (so that it goes into my flow). It would be less work if retweets (which, at least in my usage, indicate that this is content I think others should see) were incorporated directly into the flow.

I say I’m uncertain about this idea because, to an extent, I can see the benefit of Stellar’s approach. A retweet isn’t a favourite and, while retweeting might work well in the fast-paced world of Twitter, it might not work so well for Stellar where you want something a little more considered.

The one I’m more certain about is filters. It’s only five days in and, although I haven’t had a problem yet, I can see that I’m going to get to the point where the amount of content coming into my flow is overwhelming. What I need is the ability to create filters.

I’ve chosen the word ‘filter’ rather than ‘list’ because I think Twitter’s lists are great example of how limiting lists can be. I don’t just want to collect together certain people into lists because, well, certain people don’t always post the same type of content. Instead what I want is a filter.

Imagine that I have a photo filter. It only shows content that’s obviously a photo (say something posted to Flickr) or links to a photo (like a tweet). If I’m wondering what photos have been posted then I can easily check my photo filter. Ditto with video and links generally.

Maybe I only want to see content which has been liked by a certain number of people that I follow, or a combination of those people. You can see that, when you start thinking about it, the possibilities feel limitless. Indeed, the more I think about it, the more disappointed I become that it’s not already there.

Still, overall, I’m super happy with Stellar. If it sounds like something you’re interested in, I highly recommend signing up. Unfortunately, it’s not the type of service that grants beta users invites but put in your email and try your luck. Hopefully, you’ll get in quite quickly.

Oh, and if you want to see what I’m pulling into Stellar, check me out.

You’d think it’d be fun, wouldn’t you? Writing about “The Simpsons” and such for money. It’s every slacker’s dream job. And I was making $35,000! I remember that I crossed a certain threshold, soon after I got my new job: I stopped buying “Sensor” brand razor blades, and upgraded to “Schick Quattro” brand razor blades. This was exciting. The “Quattro” had four blades instead of the measly two blades of the “Sensor,” plus a sideburn trimmer on the back, plus it vibrated to supposedly aid the shaving process. This was the big time.

(via Justin Blanton.)