Abisola Fatokun

The iPad

On the 27th of January, Apple Inc made an announcement (and released a product) that they believe could completely change the way we think about computing and the associated tasks. This is in stark contrast, though, to the tech punditry and the majority of hard-core techies who have publicly expressed their views either though their personal blogs or via telling comments in blog articles associated with this product.

Pro-Apple bloggers are torn between their love for the company and their dashed hopes on the feature list (or lack thereof) of the Apple iPad. I can’t blame them either. At a point I was also expecting biometric identification, front and rear multi-touch controls, and not even discarding the possibility for teleportation and ability to shoot tractor beams at my enemies!!! Clear case of ‘featuritis‘ if ever there was any.

Disclaimer: My friends call me a mac head and I’m currently composing this blog on my iPhone on the train from London.

I’d like to start with the negatives that my close tech-friends have highlighted. Before I do though, I can’t help categorising them into those Apple naysayers who would criticise sliced bread if it had been introduced by Apple, and the neutrals who are just sceptical. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t bother addressing the former who are just zealots in my opinion. But I will try. No point letting them stand in the path of an onrushing train with their eyes firmly shut and their fingers plugging their ears!!

Here are their major gripes, in no particular order:

1. The iPad is underpowered with a mere max of 64GB of hard disk space and 1GHz CPU;
2. The iPad is not portable and can’t be put in the pocket;
3. It’s based on a closed platform iPhone OS and therefore places users in Apple’s walled garden – an annoyance for people who want more control;
4. Lack of multitasking;
5. No support for Adobe Flash;
6. The bezel is too wide and it makes the device ugly;
7. There’s just no category of user this device could appeal to;
8. Lack of a physical keyboard makes it impractical for long-term use;
9. It’s just a big iPhone. No revolution, just an evolution.

Why I think the iPad is an important revolution in computing

Every so often, we encounter a new technology. A disruptive product which shakes our very foundational beliefs on HOW things are meant to be done that possibly also threatens our careers and suddenly makes us aware that we’ve just spent a couple of decades of our lives learning a technology that suddenly becomes irrelevant. Let me try to explain.

In 1984, when Apple introduced the Mac, majority (if not all) of computer users were typing commands into their white text on black screen consoles for every single thing they needed to do on their computer. The idea of using a mouse with a pointer and a GUI met with a LOT of sniggering from the geek community and was considered a toy until Microsoft realised the potential of the GUI and introduced it in their own Operating System as Windows OS. People then started to take interest and suddenly, they could not live without the mouse. At that moment, those techies whose jobs involved memorising all those DOS commands suddenly became much less relevant than they used to be (of course, Windows OS was so terrible in the early days that it wasn’t uncommon to see people ducking and diving between the DOS prompt and Windows to fix one issue after the other). Even in the *nix community, it is clearly established that the only way to compete with Apple is to give people simple ways to do things. Canonical (the stewards of Ubuntu) share this philosophy and my own little social experiment of throwing my sister in front of a computer installed with Ubuntu 9.10 and watching her use Firefox to browse Facebook, use OpenOffice to work on a document and playing music all of which which she was able to do successfully.

Fast-forward to 2007. Apple announces the iPhone. Again, this announcement is met with derision, sniggers, and suggestions from the technology world that the iPhone was going to fail. How can Apple release a phone into an already saturated market and hope to take 1% of the market share? And yet, 75 million iPhones have been sold since July 2007 and most of the users of the device are happy with it (except AT&T users in the US who have network problems to contend with). The same touch screen that was derided and mocked in 2007 was quickly adopted by ALL of the major (and minor) handset manufacturers and this form factor is now ubiquitous in mobile technology.

There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.
– Steve Ballmer, 2007

All of the complaints about lack of tactile feedback on the keyboard have been replaced by admiration for the way the software keyboard on the iPhone and Android devices have been implemented. Hardcore BlackBerrry users (and employees) will, of course, argue that you cannot substitute the effect of the physical keyboard on their mobiles in the same way that I would argue that you can’t substitute the mouse totally for the keyboard/command line combo as the techie guys out there know that there are still a lot of tasks that can be done better and quicker through the command line than via the GUI. That the iPhone has been a roaring success is a fact that cannot be disputed. It should, in fact, be applauded because it survived despite the efforts of the mobile carriers who didn’t have the iPhone exclusivity deal and the handset manufacturers who suddenly realised that Apple was sneaking into their garden uninvited and with a game-changing product. Now, we are finally delivered from the diabolical mobile software of Samsung and Motorola and have been shown that Nokia’s OS can be bettered. Dramatically! We are now empowered with the knowledge that we can ask for more, and we can get it. And Google is now riding on top of all of the momentum that is being built by Apple to basically give away their software for free. All the better for the consumer and choice.

Finally, Apple have delivered yet another game-changing technology. The iPad. With all due respect to Microsoft in acknowledgement of their being first to produce Tablet computers back in 2001, I should instead say that Apple has applied their ‘touch’ to yet another technology to show us how we can truly interact with Tablet computers. From now onwards, permit me to refer to these devices as Tablets or Tablet Devices because I believe Apple is now trying to abstract us away from computers and computing so we can leave computing to programmers, office workers, computer scientists, engineers, data analysts, video editors, etc. Those people who REALLY NEED to compute anything. For the rest of us, we just need a device that can perform the tasks that we take on when we are at home or/and on the move. We mostly want to check and update our Facebook and Twitter status, check and send emails, listen to music, share photos with friends and family, update our blogs, visit our favourite websites, etc. No rocket science or neurosurgery. Just plain everyday stuff we do with our computers nowadays.

John Gruber could not have said this any better when he illustrated the abstraction as being analogous to modern cars and how we just jump into them nowadays and drive off and just expect them to work.

Used to be that to drive a car, you, the driver, needed to operate a clutch pedal and gear shifter and manually change gears for the transmission as you accelerated and decelerated. Then came the automatic transmission. With an automatic, the transmission is entirely abstracted away. The clutch is gone. To go faster, you just press harder on the gas pedal.

That’s where Apple is taking computing. A car with an automatic transmission still shifts gears; the driver just doesn’t need to know about it. A computer running iPhone OS still has a hierarchical file system; the user just never sees it.

The computer industry has jerked its knees yet again and is once more claiming that this is yet another Apple product that will fail. Catastrophically, they say. There is no room for this technology in people’s lives. I have given quite some thought to this iPad criticism and I find it to be valid but mostly unfounded.

The iPad is underpowered with a mere max 64GB of hard disk space and 1GHz CPU

I spend about 14 hours a day on my computer (not counting the time I spend with my iPhone, which is more-or-less a computer and the time I spend with my camera) most of which time can be roughly divided into developing software (Java EE, PHP) and processing the images I’ve taken with my camera using Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. I am what you would describe as a power hungry user. I’ve got a 64-bit Macbook Pro with 4GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive (as well as a 2 TeraByte NAS) and I’m still hungry for more. For the kind of stuff I do daily, the iPad is grossly underpowered and I would agree with anyone who made that claim. However, I do have reason to share my web creations with people and even more so my photos – especially now that I can’t stop taking photos of my newly born daughter so I can hear everyone around exclaim just how gorgeous she is! My digital SLR shoots images at 10.1 megapixels and since I shoot my images in RAW mode, each image file is 10.1MB. I don’t share RAW images, though. I share processed jpegs that are much smaller. If I, therefore, had loads of images of my daughter that I wanted to share with friends I would still need about 64,000 high resolution pictures of her (at 1MB each) to test the space limit of the iPad. Of course, this is not taking Moore’s law into consideration.

The iPad is not portable and can’t be put in the pocket

I was not privileged to be at the Keynote last week but have seen the video since. Not once was it mentioned there that this device was meant to be slipped in the pockets. When Microsoft announced the tablet computer back in 2001, no one complained about its not being portable enough! What’s the problem now? I believe this device is meant to be used at home although it can be used on the road if it’s put in a satchel and can be used in airport lounges, on trains, and even for presentations. I do like Rob Foster’s take on this (see the second example).

As I mentioned from the previous post, I do like to share pictures I’ve taken with friends when they visit. At the moment, I either have to load up my PlayStation 3 image gallery which connects to my NAS and can browse through the pictures I’ve stored in it or I hand them my mac. The former means that no one can watch TV for the duration that one or two people are checking the images and the latter makes me very nervous as I like to be the only person that touches my computer! It is much more convenient to hand my tablet device across the room to our visiting friends than to hand them my precious laptop.

It’s based on a closed platform iPhone OS and therefore places users in Apple’s walled garden – an annoyance for people who want more control

75 million are in this ‘walled garden’ and hardly anyone is complaining. Those who were complaining have moved to the the Nexus one Motorola Droid and they’re happy with it! Everyone goes home smiling

Seriously, though, those who are complaining about Apple’s draconian handling of the App Store and what applications to allow on it are not far off the mark. They can improve on things in that department. What we don’t want, though, is the much-lauded cavalier (open) nature of the Android store which allowed ‘rogue applications’ to be installed onto Android users’ phones with the net result that their financial details were stolen by malicious hackers.

Lack of multitasking

It will come. I’ll hedge my bets on iPhone OS 4.0 coming with Apple’s implementation of multitasking. Again, the millions of iPhone users out there don’t even know what multitasking is and therefore don’t care about it. The upside for them, of course, is optimal battery life.

No support for Adobe Flash

I don’t think I can do as much justice to this topic as John Gruber has done. Do visit his blog to read on Flash and its relevance in today’s world.

The bezel is too wide and it makes the device ugly

I’ll reserve my comment on this until I see the device and actually hold it in my hands.

There’s just no category of user this device could appeal to

I’ll let you in on something that has worried me over the past few weeks. My mother-in-law came in to town to help with the little one and she wants to learn to use a computer. She’s not had any reason to interact with one all her life but now wants an email account so that she can communicate with her family and her children. I’ve been wondering how to approach teaching her. Should I teach her on a Mac, a PC, a Linux computer? (problem is we only run Mac OS and Ubuntu in my home) How do I explain the right-click vs left-click paradigm to her? It’s daunting and I didn’t think I could do it until I saw the video of the unveiling of the Tablet. This device will do everything that mama wants without all the hassle and hair-pulling of learning about computers or going to computer school! It’s perfect for what she wants to do. A no-brainer!! Already, Omni Group have laid out plans to move their entire product line to the iPad and are starting to do so. All the major gaming houses want to develop games for this gorgeous screen real-estate. The publishing industry has gone crazy and the effect is already being felt with Amazon and Macmillan having a public tiff. I think with a little mind-expansion exercise and patience to see what developers come up with in terms of application, we will see the potential that this device has.

Lack of a physical keyboard makes it impractical for long-term use

Maybe. Maybe not. We can’t tell for sure until we’ve used it. Initial criticism of the iPhone software keyboard turned out to be baseless as the typing experience on it (after a couple of frustrating hours), turned out way better than anything I had experienced previously with Nokia’s T9. I’ll withhold my opinion on this until I can base it on fact.

It’s just a big iPhone. No revolution, just an evolution.

Like Bill Gates said back in the days: “Developers! Developers!! Developers!!!” I’m really excited about the fact that the iPhone developers have already started downloading and working with the SDK for the iPad. I’m looking forward to what’s in stock and I’m pretty sure that we will all be astonished at what they are able to come up with – much as we were with the Ocarina and Shazam apps!

Everyone is welcome to the table

Google is starting to flex their brain muscle in development of a touch-based UI for their Chrome operating system and any development in this can only be welcome as this would drive innovation and provide competition which will bring down the cost of ownership and ultimately benefit the consumer. You. But, in the mean time, don’t fold your arms and declare that because something beats your imagination it means no one else can envision it!

Over the past couple of weeks, anyone who has had one ear on the ground for technology-related news would (must) have heard that Google’s servers got attacked by the Chinese government. What people may not know, in addition, is that many other top Silicon Valley corporations were hit by these audacious attacks.

I don’t know if some of these attacks were successful. They were definitely detected, though and Google reckons they were only able to get the subject lines of the emails sent and received by the people being ‘investigated’ by the Chinese government (mostly human rights activists). I give kudos to Google for standing up to the Chinese government and risking the potential loss of the largest single market in the world.

The typical Internet user (myself inclusive) will – at this point – turn to something else just after thinking to myself “all this hacker stuff is beyond me anyways… don’t these guys have time for more productive stuff?” That’s not the right thing to do or think at this moment, though. Why? Because Microsoft has fessed up that their Internet Explorer browser has had a huge security flaw since September last year that has been exploited by these hackers.

Again, you may wonder what exactly that has to do with you. Simply put, the Internet Explorer browser (possibly your browser of choice) was used as the ‘attack vector’ for targeting Google and other Silicon Valley corporations. This got so worrying that the French and German governments officially advised their citizens to download other browsers and stop using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer – at least until the vulnerabilities were fixed.

Which leads me to the Nigerian situation. I use Google Analytics to monitor web traffic to all my websites and the trend over the past month is as follows:

• Internet Explorer : 32%
• Mozilla Firefox : 29%

Quite a number of my website visitors are Nigerians (in the country and outside of it) and from these statistics, it’s clear that Nigerians still prefer Microsoft. The reasons for this would be multiple and I can immediately think of the difficulty of downloading any other browser substitute with the extremely slow and metered Internet access that is available in the country. Also, a lack of education on how much better Firefox is than IE and the paucity of computers in primary and secondary schools as well as in our tertiary institutions ensure that any knowledge of better browsers than IE – or even the recognition that IE is merely the window to the Internet and not the Internet itself, remains esoteric and limited to the knowing few who are probably from rich or upper-middle class families and have the computers and access at home.

It does not behoove our government to educate us about this either as Microsoft have them pocketed. Deep-pocketed. Embarrassingly so. Technology solutions in the upper echelons of our government mean only one thing: Microsoft. Anyone advocating any alternative solution is mocked and summarily ignored. I won’t go into that, though.

Instead, I would like to know what the relevant technology bodies in our country are actually doing to protect us from cyber crime? This especially as a great percentage of global cybercrime originates from Nigeria … why have we not been warned as a country to be careful what we click online? We have not been told that there is a security vulnerability in IE that could leave us open to compromise and could lead to our computers being used as attack vectors on other people?

Does anyone know the name of the organisation in Nigeria that exists for the purpose of policing this kind of stuff?

For a few weeks now, I have started to wonder if our dear President is alive at all, or even in a state to ‘hand over’ to Goodluck Jonathan.

It looks as though my fears have been confirmed by unconfirmed – so far – reports in 234Next and other media outlets that cite the exclusive, that Yar’dizzle is in fact brain dead and has been so since the 10th of December.

That’s over a month ago! If true, that’s terribly disgusting!!

I host my websites with eApps.com but I somehow got affected by Rackspace’s failure yesterday… What’s particularly fascinating about all this is how a ‘relatively’ insignificant web host like Rackspace can affect so many websites out there.

The interfonnectivity of all these websites is quite frightening

It’s snowing right now and I’m fascinated by how peaceful everything is right now. I think it’s very ‘Christmassy’ because when best to be reminded of how nice and cosy and wonderful life can be than at this moment…

I wonder if any bookmakers will be willing to take bets on my being snowed in tomorrow

I’m really excited about google’s new toy for developers – the Speed Tracer. Now that I’ve finally taken the plunge and installed the beta version of Chrome on my mac, I’ll be trying out the Speed Tracer plugin to see just how deep it goes in reporting performance issues with my web apps.

It seems as if Kachi Ozumba’s “The Shadow of a Smile” has alerted the BBC to Police Brutality in Nigeria. Now, we have reports of extra-judicial killings and almost a hundred corpses being dumped in a hospital morgue for mass burial.

An extrapolation of this to include all major hospitals in Nigeria would indicate that thousands of people are being killed in ‘on the spot’ justice by the Nigerian Police without being given the right to defend the accusation of being criminals.

I remember vividly during my first year in University, at about 5 in the morning, there were shouts of “ole, ole” – “thief, thief” and sounds and thuds of scrambling feet in hot pursuit of the alleged thief. I – not being the most courageous person – declined to leave my room to join the pursuit. A masterstroke of a decision, it turned out eventually when it was discovered that the person in front of the pack – who was also chasing after the alleged thief was caught and beaten severely.

His saving grace was that he claimed to be the son of a Professor on campus and on further enquiry, it turned out to be true. There have been several reported cases of accused thieves, witches, wizards, etc being burned to death on the spot by vigilantes and this is a sorry state that Nigeria is in.

Yet, we very proudly beat our breasts and proclaim how religious we are and how we are a nation blessed by the Creator Himself. I hope further investigations by the international press (as our local media don’t have the balls to take these types of tasks on) will  expose more of these extra-judicial killings and embarrass our Government into taking steps to fix this.

If you, like me, need to maintain and build old applications – those that need Java 1.5 for instance, then you’re not in luck if you jumped on the Snow Leopard train.

“Why?” you ask. Well, Apple has magnanimously decided to support only Java 1.6. I don’t know why but it is really sickening that I run the Apple Software update and lose all ability to compile java 1.5 applications. See details in Apple discussion board.

Thankfully, with this online tutorial, I’ve been able to use Pacifist to restore my Java 1.5 to the default install location:

/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/1.5.0

/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/1.5

I’m now worried about any future Java updates because I suspect the same will happen again. Please Apple, Java developers – believe it or not – still exist out there!!

I’m waiting with bated breath for Wikimedia Foundation to release their feature that will allow subject matter experts to take ‘ownership’ of their pages and prevent trolls from taking over others’ pages and posting nonsense on there.

Community editing and knowledge sharing is a fantastic way for learning, but the flip side to this is the deliberate disinformation that can easily be perpetuated via these unreviewed entries.

So after we’ve listened to the “we’re on our knees begging you to bail us out” drivel from the bankers last year, and after eventually capitulating to reason and listening to our collective conscience, we give our tacit go-ahead to the government to bail them out – not that our opinions were sought, anyways.

These same bankers are now threatening to resign unless they are allowed to pay themselves their typically huge bonuses. I’m at a loss for words and can only express my complete disgust at this abhorrent behaviour from the investment bankers. I’m a firm believer in karma and it’s only a matter of time – in this life or the hereafter – that the wages of greed and selfishness will be reaped.

The bank’s lawyers say the directors had a duty to make the firm, which is 70%-owned by the taxpayer, competitive and that may mean raising bonus levels.

Total rubbish.