Archive for the ‘Prediction’ Category

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Visual TrackPad of tomorrow

Jul 10
27

What Apple Should have released for a desktop trackpad

Apple released a product that was decidedly un-magical when it released the Magic Trackpad. Despite the use of the word “Magic” the device was really just a big trackpad with nothing to amaze or delight the end-user.  The battery charger that comes with it was more impressive.

The true trackpad of tomorrow would have the following characteristics:

  • Control the computer pointer with touch gestures (duh)
  • Provide application  specific touch interface enhancements
  • Web browser specific controls at your fingertips
  • Formatting tools from your word processor at your fingertips
  • Crop and resize photos with your fingers visually.
  • When typing a number show a calculator keypad
  • Many of the interface enhancments that are taking place on the iPad could be transposed to desktop apps.

A huge efficiency is in minimizing the number of times your hand has to move from the keyboard to the mouse and back. This is why there are so many keyboard shortcuts for things that can be done with a mouse. The mouse/trackpad can evolve to present visual ways to process input in a way that would be more efficient then either the keyboard or a mouse.

There’s an opportunity to create a true visual and magical input device that combines the best aspects of a trackpad the iPad and the mouse.

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Posted in Apple, Ideas, Prediction, User Interface | No Comments »

Why the iPad will succeed and fail

Feb 10
15

Why it will succeed

  • The iPad will crush the Kindle market.  It’s cooler, slicker, has a color screen and will have thousands of apps at lau nch. While people can read books and newspapers the bulk of the interesting content is on the web and the web is much better on the iPad then the Kindle.
  • The iPad will crush netbooks.  It’s a more portable experience and it’s touch enabled. The keyboard is close to full size. The apps are designed to be portable unlike a netbook where you’re trying to use full size apps on a 1/2 size screen.  Netbooks are underpowered from a performance standpoint to run typical productivity apps (Office.)
  • The computer has traditionally been in the office or the den. This is a move into the living room. If the phone is a communication device and a laptop is for creating content then the iPad is for consuming it and that hasn’t existed before.

Why it is doomed to fail

  • The potential owners of the iPad already have an iPhone and a laptop. While some of the scenarios could be better on such a device they are not sufficiently better and the limitations of the platform out-weigh the advantages.
  • If the device is a browsing device then the browser makes a huge difference. Because of the closed nature of the iPad we can’t expect to see Chrome, Firefox or Opera on the iPad.  Last I checked Safari only had a minority browser share. Add the lack of flash to the equation and a lot of sites will have you reaching for a laptop.
  • The iPhone was a success because when the device was released all the existing phones were terrible. The iPhone was a replacement device to something that was flawed. With the iPad it’s not a replacement device. It’s a supplemental device. The problem it’s solving is less of a pain point.
  • Basic multi-tasking is obvious and needed on a larger device (music+browsing) or (homework + calculator.) While a single app makes for a simpler experience there’s no reason that I can’t be productive while other apps are loading data, syncing, downloading or doing other background tasks.

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    Posted in Apple, Prediction, mobile | 2 Comments »

    Apple’s Tablet, Slate, Canvas, Taplet

    Jan 10
    24

    Tablet style computing has been one of the most failed technologies ever. History is full of examples of similar devices that have crashed and burned.

    1950′s Styalator electronic tablet, 1960′s RAND Tablet and Dynabook. Various generations of Apple Newton devices, Microsoft Slate’s and Windows for Pen based computers. Even the Kindle that has sold about 1.5 million units total could be viewed as a failure when compared to numbers like 40-60 million iPhone’s and iPod Touch devices.

    Why have so many companies tried and so many failed? Perhaps more importantly what does Apple think it can do to succeed? Here’s what I predict:

    • Best overall device for consuming content. Books, Magazines, Music, DVD’s.
      Devices of the past focused on creating content (usually with a pen) only the Kindle was good at reading content and only book form at that.
    • Best mobile web-browser. Sure you can pinch and zoom on your phone but if you really want to surf you need something larger. This middle ground is great for a tablet sized device.  You can finally read a website on a bus or train without trying to balance a laptop or looking too conspicuous.
    • Interface based on the iPhone. Clearly Apple has nailed the iPhone UI. They will take this base and extend it to a larger device. Not as big as a laptop but somewhere in between. The touch based interface will be enhanced with a two hand multi-touch predictive keyboard.  Everyone will hate it at first.  Three months later everyone will call it brilliant.
    • It’ll look like a flat iPhone.  90% screen, a little edge. Thin as hell.  It’ll be priced so that people perceive it as being expensive and premium compared to everything else. $799, maybe more.  Expect people to say…  Why would I get that when I can get a Kindle for $259.  That sort of thing just makes people desire it even more.
    • App developers will flock to it.
    • Magazines will be the killer content.
    • Social games will be the killer app.

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    Posted in Apple, Design, Prediction | 2 Comments »

    Application design for mobile phones

    Jun 08
    5

    I love designing applications for mobile phones. It forces you to think about the essential features. Often times this is exactly the type of design you want on larger applications but it’s tougher to convince clients that the application gets better when you take away features. Many larger applications can learn from this.

    • Do one thing, do it well
    • Linear flow top-down
    • Purposeful word choice
    • Large fonts for readability
    • Keyboard accessibility
    • The details matter

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    Posted in Apple, Design, Experience, Prediction, Telephone | 2 Comments »

    Data and bandwidth are going to be free

    May 08
    10

    The price per megabyte of storage and data transfer is going to approach a per user cost that is less then the value of one advertisement per year. Assume that a typical user generates 5mb of content per day. I may generate more from photos while most of my relatives will generate far less. Over a year that’s that’s under 2GB of new data.

    If we use Amazon S3 as a pricing guide the current cost of storing and uploading 2GB is conservatively about $16/year.

    That’s not terrible but now consider that while the speed of transistors has been following Moore’s law of doubling every 18 months the storage density of drives has been doubling about every 12 months.

    This means that 12 months from now the cost will drop to $8… $4… $2… $1 and so on. In 5-10 years we can expect storage costs to be well under a penny for a 1GB of storage. At that price it’s essentially free since any add on services or products sold will be far more significant to the bottom line then the actual cost of the storage.

    Since content is personal and sticky the companies that will succeed in this space are the ones that can provide such a service today at a loss in order to aquire the customers of tomorrow.

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    Posted in Prediction | 2 Comments »

    Gigapixel images

    Feb 08
    22

    Your camera takes megapixel images. A single screen resolution of 1024×768 is 786,000 pixels or almost a megapixel. This resolution is great for everyday viewing and gives you enough resolution to produce a decent 4×6″ print.  Common wisdom is that past a certain number of pixels it just doesn’t matter. Who needs a 20 megapixel image of stuff on their cat? Of course interesting things can start to happen when the image gets really big.

    A group of people are exploring the idea of Gigapixel images or 1000 megapixels.  When you have resolutions that high you can discover new things in the photo. It’s like being able to take a microoscope to the picture after you’ve taken it.  There are a couple examples including HD View from Microsoft reasearch that uses a pretty amazing viewer to zoom-in on photos. Xrez that uses both the MS viewer as well as the Google maps style viewer as well as Flash style viewers for gigapixel content such as Harlem 13 Gigapixels. I don’t expect that Gigapixels will get to consumer cameras anytime soon but I do expect to see more high-rez photography used in sports, news, and other professional areas.

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    Posted in Misc., Photos, Prediction | No Comments »

    My phone is my digital wallet

    Oct 07
    12

    I left my wallet at home today but I remembered my phone. That got me thinking. Why can’t my phone be my wallet? I have too much crap in my wallet. Credit cards, shopping cards, health cards, drivers license, social security info, etc, etc. I propose a new ID system that lives on your phone. Here’s a picture:

    Your ID lives on your phone

    The idea is to allow your physical cards to live in your digital world. Here are the main advantages:

    • Works on any device with a display (color or B&W) no need for bluetooth, RFID or other radios.
    • Each ID is independant so your privacy and security isn’t compromised. This isn’t a universal ID, each ID is seperate so your privacy is secure but since it is digital it’s easy to find the one you need
    • Cards can be read optically with existing bar-code scanners.
    • Cards can auto-expire so if someone steals your card they only have a set time to use it. So you don’t have to worry about using it on the internet.
    • Since each time you use it it’s unique it’s very difficult cryptographically to forge a card that’s valid.
    • Since it’s digital and has an internet connection if you loose your phone you could use a secure website to close off access to all your cards at once.
    • Use the ‘i’ to flip the card over and see the CCV code if needed.
    • If your phone does have bluetooth or RFID you could show on-screen prompts to confirm a purchase at a point of sale.
    • Since RFID and bluetooth aren’t the primary mechanism you can’t steal someones credit card wirelessly the way you can with other touch and tap cards.

    Disadvantages:

    • Existing stores aren’t setup to read/swipe an optical card and may require updated hardware or software
    • You would need a seperate solution for cash. How do you deal with physical money?
    • Adding new cards to your digital wallet may be complex, idealy new cards could be emailed to you or snapped with a digital camera.
    • What do you do with cards that won’t go digital? Do you still need a wallet or do you just ignore those? State and local goverments are likely to drag their feet on digital liscenses, social security cards, passports and other similar goverment issue ID’s could hold such an idea back.

    Posted in Ideas, Prediction, Telephone | 6 Comments »

    Digital Home Sweet Home

    May 07
    13

    About a year back I was asked to explore some concepts for a digital home of the future. The following are some concept notes I thought I’d share.

    Core principal
    - Technology should augment the experince of being at home. It should not pester, annoy, interfeer or intrude.
    - Technology should be there when I need it and hidden otherwise
    - Technology should serve a human purpose, it should not be for show
    - The cell phone is the primary control device, no extra displays, intercoms or other wall mounted technology

    Entering the house
    - House detects the car coming home and begins to prep the environment. The house is no longer in hibernation mode saving energy, the boiler warms up, the temperature is increased 5 degrees, the house lights are setup for the time of day.
    - Keyless entry, allows a person to walk in with groceries without reaching in their pocket.
    - Music from your car playlist is synced with your house music so the song that was halfway done can be resumed (at your request)
    - Other people in the house are alterted to your arrival, tv’s & computers show a notification and possibly show video of the entry way
    - People who don’t have a key can be buzzed in from a cell phone
    - As you enter the center of the house along the floor you can see the household family members names outlined in text and lightly projected on the floor with arrows telling you where different people are in the house. No need to yell or go looking for people. Following the arrows leads you to the people.

    Food and Dining
    - When you pull up a recipie on the kitchen computer selecting an ingredient illuminates a shelf, the handle to the fridge or a cabinet drawer allowing you to quickly find items for your recipie.
    - The computer keeps track of food items in the house via RFID and recommends recipies based on the food you have and the prep-time that you would like. The computer knows when the skillet is on the stove and when food is in the skillet (by weight), it can adjust the temperature to match the recipie, pre-heat the oven, etc.
    - If you tell it you want a particular meal it’ll put together a shopping list. You can either pickit up yourself or get the ingredients delivered.

    TV and Entertainment
    - Your cell phone is the universal remote control with directional controls and a small screen can be used anywhere in the house.
    - Point the remote at the TV and you can change channels, use a DVR play music, etc.
    - Point the remote at a light and the screen shows you that you can turn the light up/down/off
    - Point it at the door and you can open/close/lock
    - Point it at a window and you can open/close/ or control the AC in the house
    - Point it at a speaker and you can control the volume

    Bathroom
    - Magic Mirror – shows you what parts of your face you missed while shaving
    - Displays your daily calendar in the morning, allows you to start coffee maker as you get out of the shower
    - Reminds you to take your pills/vitamins
    - Digital newspaper/magazine for when you are sitting down ;)

    Wiring
    - There is no wiring. Or at least almost no wiring. Typically when someone builds a showcase house or a tech house they like to tought the fact that there are 5000 miles of wires and cables though the house. This is a bad bad thing. This means:
    - A no one can maintain or repair the house becuse it’s so complex.
    - No one could ever build such a house because of the infrastructure cost.
    I true house of the future would just have electrical wiring through the body of the house perhaps a duel plug that supports both AC and DC power. All video, audio and ethernet data should be wireless. A home server should sit in the basement storing files, backing things up and managing the complexity.

    Posted in Ideas, Prediction | No Comments »

    Fullscreen Google Video and YouTube

    Oct 06
    4

    One of the drawbacks of Google Video, YouTube and many other online video sites is that the video can’t be played full screen from a flash player. Well it looks like Adobe thought the same thing as they just introduced fullscreen playback in Flash 9.

    One concern of full-screen mode is that it could be used to trick people into typing passwords into fake login screens. Those clever folks at Adobe thought of this scenario and prevent keyboard input while in full-screen mode.

    The flash 9 player seems to be in beta but I expect that before the holidays all the main video playback sites will be sporting full-screen video playback.

    Posted in Prediction | No Comments »

    The Universal Binary

    Apr 06
    21

    People are fond of making predictions about Apple so I’ll make one of my one. Apple will release a universal binary interpreter for Windows.

    What does that mean? It means that developers who develop applications on the MAC will be able to run those applications on Windows. Do I have any proof? Nope, but there is some interesting nuggets that got me thinking…

    ITunes is cross platform application developed by Apple that looks and works identically on both the MAC and PC. It’s possible that the application has separate code-bases and a core library that allows the two to be simultaneously developed but here’s the interesting thing… Not only does the application work the same but all the controls, effects, buttons and screens have the exact same look and feel. Even beyond the look and feel the network stack and database layer is there as well. This implies that there may be a more generic foundation library that is being developed for use on the PC. All the core components of a generic application are being tested within Itunes: Installation , Database Interaction, Networking, Graphics Subsystem, Common Controls, even hardware interaction, File IO, CD burning, etc. If such a library is in the works it may be very attractive to a lot of developers.

    What’s in it for Apple? Well those guys want to win over developer mind-share. If they can get people developing applications for the Mac then developers may begin to take advantage of features such as Aqua that aren’t available on Windows. Developer mind-share leads to more applications on the MAC, and thus to more end-users.

    What’s in it for developers?
    - Develop applications on one machine.
    - Test and debug applications on one machine
    - Have a single code-base
    - Know that your application is truly universal and will run on almost any personal computer in the world.

    Doing the emulation is complicated but interestingly the technology used to get MAC applications running on new Intel chips may be used to run MAC application within Windows.

    There’s no down-side for Apple and no other company can offer this trifecta. If this prediction is to hold true it’ll likely happen after all the core laptops and desktop transitions have been announced. (You don’t want to shake things up more then once every 8 months, or do you?)

    Posted in Apple, Prediction | No Comments »

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