Alexander Chalkidis

Category: Technology

  • Mobile revolution in perspective

    Some people on the planet feel the need to bring some balance to this debate.   Not that there is much debate.   Everyone seems sure that mobile devices will conquer the planet.   Apps are growing like mushrooms.   Many with less meaningful content than an edible fungus.  This doesn’t stop marketing departments investing in mobile platforms for everything.   Everything.

    Don’t get me wrong.   I am happy that this is leading to some interoperability.   (Not so happy we are wasting a lot of global energy pandering to a very small minority of …well whatever Apple dreams up of, often on its own little island.  We should be talking about “tablet compatible” things, not “iPad” compatible.)   It is great that websites are getting better to navigate from different resolution screens.   I have been a road warrior and smart phone user since the days when this involved carrying a brick in my back pocket and being laughed at in meetings for using it.

    I have done work on a mobile phone.   Back in the days when you could find a phone with a decent keyboard I would even write thoughts like this on one.   But real individual information processing work gets done on a PC.   Unless you are in the business of only reading stuff or killing pigs by throwing birds at them from a slingshot.

    There are some rock solid obstructions to a mobile device being truly capable:  1. Screen resolution.   I struggle with netbooks because the 600 pixel limitation to the height makes getting anything done on the internet difficult.  Even 768 on many laptops is annoying.   2. Screen size.   Some of us are lucky enough to not mind ridiculously small fonts.   Not everyone.   The Galaxy Note is a step in the right direction. 3. Keyboard.  Again netbooks are a good example.  Read reviews and all the complaints people make about smaller keyboards.   For anyone that writes to make their living this is serious.   Virtual keyboards on touch screen never, ever, ever come even close and voice recognition remains a problem in the real world.  4. Multi tasking.   Even if Alt-tab isn’t your second nature, when you are working you are very often multitasking.   I’m not talking about an iPhone finally being able to run essential tasks simultaneously.   I am talking about 5 spreadsheets, 8 browser windows, a business app and a few other things running at the same time because I need to them to put something together.   Even a simple presentation will often demand 6 or 7 software applications running concurrently.  5. Speed.   When we are talking about serious work, the speed of the device is essentially stalling your thought process.   I am annoyed at upgrading to an 18 megapixel DSLR because it takes that much longer for my Core i7, SSD laptop to process the images.  Time is money and mobile devices are wasteful in this respect.  Unless they are a laptop.   Mobile enough!

    The list continues with other major or minor niggles.   “Niggles” being things that bother you.   Like the room being too cold.   Like your chair not being comfortable.   Like all those things you don’t want bothering you when you actually try to get some work done.   For anyone wanting to focus on a task involving the use of technology, a PC will continue to be the best place to get it done.

    Niggle free.

  • Apple doesn’t break the rules; it doesn’t have any!

    What is Apple’s mission statement?

    Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.

    Seriously.  Not kidding, it is from the Apple website under “Investor Relations”.   If I had written a mission statement like that, even at that project at the end of Year 1 of business studies they would have failed me.    Even the other gem, hidden in the same section isn’t much better:

    Apple is committed to bringing the best personal computing experience to students, educators, creative professionals and consumers around the world through its innovative hardware, software and Internet offerings.

    Yeah right.   That defies all rules of mission statement making.   Pretty sure nobody in the company even knows it.   Apple’s mission statement was probably more like:

    We all do whatever is cool and seems to please the Allmighty Steve Jobs.   He always knows best, even when it doesn’t seem to make sense; he will make it work sooner or later.

    Forget social responsibility (no charity, iKill workers abroad) it is all about profit maximisation.   And now that Jobs is gone a few shareholders are daring to ask whether they might actually have a share of the monumental cash pile at last.    You can only pretend to be emotionally impaired by those times aeons ago when you were cash strapped and even borrowed from Microsoft.    Apple is one of the richest companies in the world.   More than 100 billion in the bank just sitting there for what?   And they don’t even pretend to have some masterplan!

    Forget increasing market share.   They could easily drop prices, increase product range or just buy a few companies and give away something of value like Google does.   Buy Adobe, give away Photoshop or something.   (More or less what they did with the digital video market which they then almost abandoned.)  But no, the ghost of Jobs walks the sleek halls of Apple still.   They still shamelessly do everything they can to maximise profit.   Nothing else.   After all, if everyone has a Mac how could they urge you to “Think Different”?

    But that is no mission statement either.   To cater to weird designer type people and make them feel special.   I made that up but it would still be more accurate than what they have now.    So Macs are stuck at much less than 10% market share globally and iPhones not much more than that, 25% globally for the optimists.   Depending on your mood you can do statistical hoopjumping to consider iPads a threat to the global status quo or not.  To force other technology companies to produce cooler gadgets than the geeky stuff they did so far.   That would show some awareness, some commitment to helping the planet in some way.   It would give us an idea where it might be heading and all that stuff we learnt about missions statements.   We all thought it was really necessary for a well functioning company…

    Sorry to be the party pooper but this doesn’t make sense.   What is the point of this company again?   And without a magician to tell us that the emperor is not naked, how will it pull off any future tricks?

  • Mac vs PC: is anyone ever going to run proper benchmarks again?

    OK, it is a sign of age.   Do you remember back when people actually tested computers for their performance?   I especially fondly remember Charlie White’s heroic efforts.   He is now high up the Mashable food chain and doesn’t “attack” Macs anymore…. heck he writes about them like everyone else.   But who does actually give Apple machines an honest run for their money?   I’m not talking about their business practices, whether they do any charitable donations (they don’t) or kill loads of people in their factories without any serious signs of caring or doing much about it.   This is a techie question, not a social responsibility sermon.

    It is a well established (statistically, theoretically, practically and well…obviously!) that Apple has journalists wrapped around its finger.   It’s i-finger or i-whatever it does.   It gets more coverage for free, more positive coverage and more simply adoring coverage than anyone else.   It gets in more movies than anyone else.   And it doesn’t pay for it.   They are marketing demi-gods.   The only recent mac vs pc test I could find ends up almost equating the two solutions even though the Mac is $450 more expensive!    (To be fair they end the comparison like this: “So, if you love Macs, stay put. For everyone else, the choice is simple: Save your money and buy a PC. It’ll get the job done.” )

    But wait a minute.   These are, for the most part, tools.   Not gadgets but machines we use to get a job done.   Sure most of the iPad lot are just scrolling up and down aimlessly and playing Angry Birds.   But for every 100 PCs out there, at least half are for actually producing something.   In a finite Universe with finite time.   We should care how quickly it gets done.   If you are crunching numbers, running a business, serving a customer, these things matter.   Which is why you don’t see Macs in mission critical environments.   They are not only more expensive; some businesses would pay for the style.   They are also slower.

    I will gloss over the pro Apple arguments.   About a sleeker interface, myths about it being more stable or more safe none of which apply for many years now and especially since Windows 7.  I am talking about performance.   You use Photoshop?   You should care if it takes forever to load an image, or twice as long to execute a plugin effect as an equally priced PC.   You spend all day doing it.   You could be gaining valuable hours of free time.   There are good business reasons why Apples are slower.   Not just because Apple spends all day figuring out how to sell phones, not PCs anymore.   Even seemingly secondary things like hybrid HDD drives have good Windows drivers months or years before they have any compatibility with Macs.   It’s simply not worth the time of any manufacturer to bother doing any research for a company like Apple with such a small hold on worldwide PC sales.   And on top of that, Apple doesn’t make any partner’s life easy of course…

    Back then, even with huge, proven differences in performance of common tasks, Mac fanatics simply refused to change.   Even when they finally conceded that they were slower, much slower, they came back with “yeah, but PCs are ugly“!

    What’s your excuse?

  • The apps you need for your divorce

    I am a happily divorced father of three children of which I have sole custody.  By Greek standards that is crazy unlikely verging on impossible.  Several years later I am glad I never got too worked up about the whole thing.  I also realize that technology played a major part.  Yeah, I know I am plugging all Google products and yes of course if you want to get technical there are other options, but this is the real world.  I have an army of 7-8 phones (including spares and seconds) to maintain.  Stock Android and similar look and feel all over for us. And preinstalled apps wherever I can get them.

    Here are some pointers for those that are in a less relaxed place than me right now:

    1. Google Maps.  This post is continuing on from a presentation I did recently about the Timeline feature in Google Maps which seemed to resonate.  Given permission, Google tracks where you log in from.  You can all share location with each other if you like.  If you connect to a wifi for example it knows where you are.  Or if you have your data connection switched on.  So when you get a law suit claiming that on the 23d of some month and year you can’t remember your daughter fell and hurt her chin, you can easily get reminders.  What is really cool about timeline is that not only does it show you on a map, but it also combines with…
    2. …Google Photos.  Aha, there is that chin on that very same day and it was a minor scratch.  Proof! We also track school reports (just snap), doctor visits (only takes a second.  Snap!) or screen grabs of SMS.  (No need to snap, just make sure it is backing up the ‘screenshots’ folder – you will have to select it.)  Who needs more paper and files around the house?  Snap and throw.  Google Photos offers a mind boggling infinite amount of space for free and has amazing AI tools for searching them instantly.
    3. Google Calendar.  Kids in divorces have everybody shoving agendas down their throats.  Personally I am a soft touch kind of parent.  So it is a widgets on their front screen, with our shared calendar in purple for our shared activities.    I might spend five minutes getting all his basketball games in there for us all to find easily but it is worth it.  If and when he wants to know, it is there waiting for him, right next to the appointment with the orthodontist.
    4. Google Hangouts.  Yes, they use Instagram for their friends, or Messenger or Snapchat or whatever is fashionable.  Which leaves Hangouts, the conveniently preinstalled on every Android phone app, for family.  Unless they look around Settings, it will ping on top of the game they are playing on the phone without destroying their attempt at a record.  If your ex is funny about letting them speak on the phone, use this backdoor.
    5. Google Docs.  It isn’t just about homework.  You also have a million multi page legal documents to work on.  Sometimes you want to share them with your lawyer, sometimes your kids demand to read them.  Again, depending on your parenting style and their maturity you might want the kids to be involved in these documents, to comment, to collaborate, to be able to view if they feel like it sometime at any time in the future, much like….
    6. …Google Drive which is your shared master memory.  Forget saving to physical drives and USB sticks which will get you into trouble sooner or later.  Send those important documents to Drive for future reference.  If you’re lucky, you will archive them and forget them.  If not you might want to dig up those Call Recorder app files which backed up to Drive, or the SMS and call lists in there.
    7. Google Contacts.  I easily export other parents phones from my account to theirs.  No excuses!  YOU call your friend’s mum to arrange that play date!  This also works in reverse as they start saving their friend’s numbers and I can – in emergencies – track down someone in their posse with the damn thing actually switched on.

    I can go on and on with such real world examples of how Google is the backbone of our family.  My kids got Gmail accounts the day they were born.  If it was absolutely necessary I guess I could easily dial in to their Chrome browser history.  Haven’t needed to yet and they will be locking me out of their Gmail accounts soon I hope as they approach puberty and don’t need me helping them with it anymore.  When a phone is confiscated by your ex, lost or broken (as happens with kids, OK, actually I destroy more phones than they do!) we just log in with their Gmail and all apps, games and contacts reappear magically.  For a long time I had all our accounts signed in on my phone for them to play their favorite game when they had to collect chests, feed chickens, collect apples or whatever the current crisis was at the time.  Google assistant is a great way to learn English and a fantastic tool for kids in general.  We share pictures in Photos which is even more important in divorces for making shared happy memories and coming to terms with the past.

    You couldn’t really do all this with any other app ecosystem.  Apple’s is restrictive, lacks many key features, makes you pay for others and has way too many hoops for you to jump through.   Microsoft is no longer in phones and generally tries to sell these sort of solutions to business customers.  So give your kids Gmail accounts, pick up a 150 dollar Chinese Android phone and your family is in business.  All you need to do is remember the passwords.   Well, actually, you don’t even need to that.  Because…

    8. …Google Chrome remembers all passwords.  ; )

  • How social networks are improving the whole software industry

    Few people realize how important the Google Plus “Real names”policy really is.   Maybe it’s just me having spent so much energy taking advantage of Facebook’s completely chaotic structure over the past years.  Sure, it ran contrary to most Facebook official policies but any business person would be an idiot not too.  What?   You can see all the ‘friends’ of your competitors’ fan page. That is often their customer list.  Damn sure I will take them even it has to be done one by one manually from a user profile.   Facebook has plugged the holes over time but Google Plus in comparison feels like a straight jacket from it’s beginning.   No free lunches here.

    So point No1:  1. How strict and honest a social network is.

    And then today everyone is talking about the “new” Facebook, changing their profiles to “look slick”.   Looks like a waste of prime screen real estate to me.   Hello?  Most people are still on 768 pixel vertical resolution you know…that big picture takes almost all of it up!   And these new fangled timeline adjustments of course will fly over the head of most users who have started whining about the “great old interface” as usual…  Point 2. Simplicity

    It sort of reminds me of the WordPress vs Tumblr debate.   Users get used to something simple and figure out how to work around it.   Hash tags and loads of third party developers built the ecosystem that works for million of users.   Then  Twitter added photos, then comes video and…before you know it we have another Facebook like experience on our hands.   And then we will need complex settings and choices explained to get it to do what we want it to.  How our privacy is controlled.   Who sees what.   Point No3 is Control.

    As anyone who has worked in the software industry knows, there is no perfect interface.   Every user wants something different and it will depend on their experience, background and …well…their mood really!   Your energy levels at different points in the day even.   What Facebook and Google are getting better at is getting the interface to morph constantly using intelligence, a little user input and a whole lot of bravado.   It takes balls to change a user interface, especially when you are a market leader with everything to lose.   But Facebook is right to do it now while it is still a virtual monopoly.

    As users switch from software to online applications and from computers to smartphones, a lot of the old “big boys” in software better pay attention…  HP, if you really want to get into software, don’t go chasing the SAP business model…

     

  • Why Google wants to stop me blogging

    If you are posting original content on Facebook or Twitter, you’re stupid.  No polite way to put it.   You’re an idiot.   Every day I see great thoughts, photos and other inspiring original content posted on Facebook and it makes me cringe.   It is like cooking an interesting organic and original meal and then giving it away to McDonald’s to sell for you.   It is also inexcusable because there are so many easy ways around it.

    When blogging started it was just that.   Blogging.   Horrible aesthetics for web logs= very rough diary like things.   But now you have Tumblr and all sorts of prettier choices.   You can put your stuff in your website and then get it to automatically update Facebook, Twitter or almost anything else you want.   But you control the environment in which your content lives and breathes.   You organise it as you want it presented, not as Facebook deems best in its latest incarnation.

    Yeah, even those witty one liners you are posting on Twitter.   Post them in your world and then think where you are distributing them.

    There is however a larger picture on this issue.   And that is that even Google is keen to stop you blogging.   The demise of the blogger.com platform is intentional.   Because if you are controlling a “castle” of a blog with all your information and all it’s unique traffic, they can’t make money out of it as easily.   You might even start to want to sell banners yourself!  Facebook and Google+ or Twitter are in effect using you as slave journalists and content producers.   They make the interface and the media chanel, you provide the content.   Sure, loads of it is rubbish, but even rubbish provides really useful data about how you, and your friends, think.   What they like, what they shop, where they go.

    Blogger isn’t one of Google’s failures.   It was useful when it started and now it is purposely being winded down.   They don’t completely cancel the service as it provides useful information.   And WordPress would simply be too powerful if left unchecked.    But now they want most of you to start working for them for free on Google+…

     

  • How to know when not to buy the latest gadget

    It’s almost a decade since I bought my first DSLR.   A Canon 10D.   “Barely” 6.3 megapixel resolution, most smartphones I would consider buying these days have more than that.   But it used all my EF lenses and has served me well.   Too well in fact.

    For all of us in technology, the words “early adopters” or “gadget fans” imply the opposite of zombies.   Fast moving, fickle creatures that can’t resist the smell of fresh tech flesh.   Can’t be seen with a device whose specs are outdated.   So how has this old camera survived so long?   And, more to the point, how have I resisted buying a new one for so many years?   Especially during visits to Photokina and other photo tech wizardry shows?

    If you check out the rate with which I put pictures up on various blogs, flickr or panoramio you would say I am a pretty heavy user of the device.   In fact these are a small proportion of my camera clicking activity.   The DSLR came just in time for my first child, and now that I am up to three, there are more than twenty thousand pictures of them.   Then there is work photography.     Most marketing departments are too stingey to pay for a good photographer and too boring to take a good picture so I often try to fill the gap.   I have enjoyed taking it along to consulting projects and shooting anything from jewellery to coffee.

    New DSLRs have tried to entice me.   Almost immediately after the 10D came smaller and lighter cameras.   But not that much smaller or lighter to make it worth changing.   Resolution increased but most end up being seen on computers anyway.   Even photos of mine which have been used commercially in ads by Saab and the like have never suffered from lack of resolution, even in print ads.  Higher sensitivity for shooting in low light situations enticed me.   High Definition video makes sense so you don’t need to carry a second device for that.  Included time lapse features would be useful.   The tables are turning…

    Alex vs photo marketing crowd = 1-0 I would say!

  • Interface time (again) – supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

    You know that something is changing when Google talks about a “beautiful interface”…   As the world tries to figure out how to keep their day job and still find time to check up their facebook, twitter, linked in and Google Plus accounts, it seems we are going full circle to the operating system debate again.   Whether it is thin clients, cloud computing, mobile or whatever.

    Google and Microsoft have shown which way they are going, trying to make it all “seamless“.   Same buttons at more or less the same place.   Get used to it.  Literally, that is an order:  “Get used to it!”  and then “buy our stuff, not the competition!”   That is what the interface wars are always about.   More than a decade ago I publicly predicted Nokia’s demise based on the premise that their interface couldn’t make the upgrade to a smartphone world.   Even things that seems minor, like the way Google real time operates, quickly become addictive, our brains just demand them afterwards.

    And now I would put my money on…Wordpress!   Not the interface so much (yet, though they are improving) as the design of a personal publishing platform.   I don’t want Facebook to organise the presentation of my information.   Nor Google or Microsoft.   Tumblr is very pretty and visually entertaining but no, I want a no-nonsense environment in which to make decisions about the stuff I care about.  I don’t want folders of Google Docs.   I need what comes when you put together the dynamic development rates of wordpress.org with the user friendliness of wordpress.com with…all that social stuff.   I don’t want comments from my friends to be in Facebook OR Google plus OR anything else.   I want them under my blog post where I can collect them and control them.  Without having to log in and out of ten different systems or hope that Hootsuite will get it right.

    My nieces just started a blog, just for the family, all about their holiday in Greece and what they are doing in the three weeks they are over from the U.S.   Nope, they couldn’t do it on Facebook, they don’t have accounts and I don’t think they should have accounts in a social network at their age anyway.    I have used WordPress for collaborating with just one other person (writing a kids book) or for a group of people on a work project which ended up running for more than a year and now has more than 150 very useful posts; it has become an internal resource to them.    To me it is testament to my skills as a consultant.   Beats a powerpoint presentation on many levels and it is alive.   But it couldn’t be done without Worpdress.   It is the business model as much as the technology.   You can start up a free personal blog one day for fun and end up at whatever other side of the publishing world the next.   I put some basic FAQs about electric bikes simply because I was tired of people stopping me to ask the same questions.   A few months later it is the No1 resource (and any Google search in Greek on the topic will get you there) for ebikes in Greece!  It’s Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious:

    Mary Poppins:  “You’d better use it carefully or it may change your life. ”

    Bert: “For example, one night I said it to me girl, and now me girl’s my wife!”

    Sure, there are other platforms which do some of this stuff well.   But I will be looking at “My Dashboard” on WordPress.com with renewed hopes that if “there can only be one” interface, these guys will get it right.

  • I miss those old IBM laptops

    The keyboard was magic.    You didn’t realize quite how good it was until you fumbled around with anything else.  I can touch type in the dark almost unconsciously on one of those IBM keyboards.   Then again I didn’t have to because they had that cool little light built in the top which would light up your keyboard for just enough light to see in a dark airplane cabin or children’s bedroom.   IBM laptops were always under the specifications of other laptops in their price range.   They looked boring.   You didn’t ask for one so much as find it on your desk as the company IT guy seemed to love them for some boring IT reason…

    Yet somehow they performed better.   And they always lasted longer. You wished they would fall apart so you could get something with a new CPU that looked better but they plod on.   In fact they hardly ever die!   That hidden partition for system recovery they have makes sure you can always bounce back and get a brand new system in an hour or so.

    Maybe some other manufacturer has similar quality and attention to detail nowadays.   I haven’t bumped into it.   Macs are cool but not a work-horse like those IBM laptops, so much as a style or fun pony.  HP top end models are impressive in specs sometimes but the component quality varies enormously from model to model.   IBM laptops consistently included features which came out of serious research.   Sure, they often got their marketing wrong and some models were just plain silly.   But I very much doubt anyone, ever regretted the money they spent on any laptop IBM made.

    This is not to say that quality is dead or to lament ages bygone as tech dinosaurs often do.   But for people like me that will always have at least one dual disk, RAID, SSD, as-many-core-processors-as-possible, massive graphic card and all the bells and whistles type laptop, it seems like there is a bit of a gap in the market.   Laptops are commodities which is great since they cost less but not so great when they don’t help us produce more.

    So I watch my kids play on old IBM laptops and sing their praise retrospectively.  Machines ten and fifteen years old running amazingly well.   (I think we have to give some credit to Microsoft for the fact that Windows XP is still so widely supported.)   I love technology and enjoy trying out the latest and greatest.   I just miss those seriously scientific IBM engineers that gave us these gems and hope to find more of their spirit somewhere down the line.

  • Do evil: using social media to destroy competitors. Or anyone you don’t like

    Social media failures are fast becoming a part of my daily entertainment.  Large and small corporations suddenly naked and unarmed, it is the stuff of slapstick comedy.   We all see that long ladder swinging around except Hardy and…bang!  Laurel knocks him down.   The fun part is that – just like in social media – the stars getting injured often don’t even know what is going on.

    Fun, that is, until it comes to your doorstep.   Because what the iPad wielding crowd of advertising cracks won’t tell you is that many things can go wrong. The problem is essentially that Facebook, even more than Google, tends to change everything around with no notice.   They don’t even tell us what exactly they have changed.   It is “magic sauce”.   So you are putting your marketing on a platform which you don’t control.   At all. The analogy I came up with is that you are making public the name and contact details of every lead coming in.   I can see on your wall every “friend” commenting or posting and I can contact him or her.   How bad is that?

    It all started as I was writing about social media failures on a Greek branding blog.  A summary of common or famous mistakes, anything from rogue employees to Boeing not responding warmly enough to fuzzy kids drawings.   Incoming message was about a social media conference in Athens and one of the topics was “how Lacta got to have the biggest Facebook brand page in Greece”.   (You can watch it here.)   Maybe I was in a bad mood, maybe I just didn’t appreciate the tone, mostly for fun I put up a picture on their wall.   Their brand of chocolates but they fell out of the bag roughly in the shape of male genitalia.  Only if you have a dirty mind of course, I noticed the snow and the scenery personally of course.

    Whoops!   Three hundred thousand fans of the chocolate saw it.   If I was Osama Bin Laden this would be the equivalent of CNN giving me a five minute interview to express my views. It is as if Lacta spent all this money and energy to build a wall, a media platform on which I can shout anything I want.   And they can’t stop me!  In fact a junior person in the team even clicked “like” from their own brand on it!   The picture attracted more likes and was on the wall for a while before they pulled it off.   Of course the photo remained in the “Photos” section of their Facebook page for several days.   I did another post, they read it and eventually pulled it off from there too.   I talked about useful paradigms from technology, well here is a great one for social media: this is just like the way we explore security vulnerabilities!

    I can think of hundreds of awful things to do to a brand with social media which won’t even cost much in time all of which have a pretty good chance of enabling a negative backlash.   As I explained in another post today, it will happen even without your competitors hiring me.   As soon as you reach a critical mass of people that like you and express it publicly, you can be sure that a new group of people, negatively charged will appear.   And some of them will want to hurt you.

    You can patch a software vulnerability and it is final.   Negative publicity however is much harder to deal with.