The magic continues

Of the entire ruckus going around with the iPhone4 launch and all the “new” and “magical” features that it brings to the people I feel that something is amiss and perhaps no one is taking a note.

Let’s talk about the all the “magical” features and see how well do other devices match up. With the Android Froyo in the field there have been comparisons between the features of iPhone and Android.

Recently I saw a blog titled “New” to iOS 4 is Old for Android. Of the features they have mentioned here lets tackle them one including WinMo as well

• Multi-tasking - Goes back to the very first Android phone, the G1 (circa 2008)
  • Windows mobile had it since ancient times.
• Threaded Email - Same as above, G1 had it 2 years ago.
  • There are programs available that do it. No one restricts you to whims of some “Jobs” on WinMo.
• Folders, Video Sharing & tap to focus has existed on previous versions of Android for a while now
  • Forever.
• Tethering - This has been around on Android for a while as well. But Sprint is more gung-ho about it with their EVO 4G
  • Do I even need to talk about this one?

From what I feel a certain Mr. Jobs is all about showmanship and ability to get people excited with small upgrades making money for his company and cheating the asses off the fans.

Take the plain old “Copy Paste” for example. He said no one needed it. Then in some version down the line the turtleneck was up the stage presenting the absolutely magical way of sharing the data between apps running on the same system welcome “Copy Paste”.

It’s the same story with almost all the features you find on the iPhone today.

Lets see how new are the various features on iPhone and WinMo.

	iPhone	WinMo
Native Apps	Medieval	Ancient
Multitasking	Fresh off the line	Ancient
Copy Paste	Modern	Ancient
Video recording	Fresh off the line	Ancient
Video conferencing	Fresh off the line (Restricted)	Ancient
Folder for apps	Fresh off the line	Ancient
Home Screen	Fresh off the line	Ancient
Noise Suppression	Fresh off the line	Ancient
Mail	Fresh off the line	Ancient
Voice Control	Fresh off the line	Ancient
MMS	Modern	Ancient
Soft Keyboard (customizable)	Unborn	Ancient
Search	Medieval	Ancient
Voice Memos	Fresh off the line	Ancient
Calendar	Fresh off the line	Ancient
Weather	Old	Ancient
Notes	Fresh off the line	Ancient
Tethering	Fresh off the line	Ancient
Encryption	Fresh off the line	Ancient

Source for Features http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/more-features.html

Wow, it seems that WinMo had all the features that have been described “Magical” by the singular authority on all things apple (you never know when and what will change) since ancient times. Only thing that held WinMo from being the leader is that MS gave up on beautifying the OS and there never was a fast device which carried WinMo even though hardware was there. This is one mistake that cannot be overseen but still letting Mr. Jobs take all the credit for revolutionizing the phone industry is most certainly an overstatement. He did what he does best – Presentations and Copy Paste (earlier from Xerox and now from other Phones).

Need for rationality…

There are times when you are asked to maybe go over a few things and give your comments on them, or maybe try and find some bugs or design flaws. This usually is a common practice in IT world where software engineers often enlist their peers for validating and verifying the design and the code they write.

Most of the time this process is nothing more than a quick scan of the code/Design to see if there are any design flaws as these are the ones that cause immense pain in the ass if left unchecked. Implementation details on the other hand are mostly trivial and easy to fix.

The details pertaining to the communication between modules or the way they go about storing the data which might be of some use to any other module are very important and should be addressed before even a single line of code is written. And the details regarding alignments of various UI elements though very apparent are the easiest things to fix.

But I have seen people fighting over the best way to align a textbox to a radio button and not care about the data that is going to be passed on to an asynchronous function.

The event handlers in question take something akin to void* from C/C++ world and then use runtime queries to determine the properties it has and then take some actions. The best part is all these could have asked for a specific type of object and then done the same actions with compile time bindings. That’s the beauty of languages like JS/AS/Python, you don’t need to know what is the data type of any given variable. You can query the variable for the property you think it should have and the variable will tell you if it has that property. So far so good, but the developers who use these languages forget that this is a feature of the language and like all good things it has a price to pay for.

For starters anytime you use this kind of run time data binding and property search its going to be freakily expensive. Computing cost apart, this type of code will be a nightmare for the next guy who comes in to maintain/develop the code/product. Anywhere you go it’s a discovery process all over again. He cannot be sure of the content of the variable unless he/she has gone through all the possible execution paths to get to that variable and even then it’s a bitch to keep track of all those pathways and the various properties they might infect.

Compare this type of code with Compile time binding and anyone looking at any isolated piece of code can tell what exactly is going on in the localized view that he/she has. They know the data coming in and the format and type and they know what is going out. The guessing game has been replaced with a much cleaner and well defined set of rules.

Back to the original topic, I recently was a witness to a lengthy discussion about how to align a textbox to the label part of a radio button and believe me the guy who was fighting for the implementation details of some UI element was the very same guy who didn’t give a rats ass for the sanity of data being passed around in asynchronous function calls where each and every function had to go through the same data discovery stage as nothing was clearly defined.

Imagine the person fighting for how should the text box placement go and not caring about the way all important data flows through the system. I choose to believe that the guy who does this has no interest in the product as a whole but is concerned with how it looks to that in when the demo time comes up he can have a pretty thing to showcase. I’m not saying that software should not be pretty but first and foremost it should be functional.

But then I look around in this world of mine and see that everything pretty (functional or not) usually get what they want. Take Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan or any other bombshell out there. No one care whether or not they have acting talents but just because they are pretty they can do pretty much everything and get away with it. The irony is it’s not limited to just glamour world, in out tech world a insanely could have been great product is crapped just because it was not pretty (Looks at windows Mobile) and a stupid crippled product goes ahead and becomes one of the bestselling things ever just because it was pretty (iPhone/Pad).

Sigh…

When the body says no…

There comes a time in everybody’s life when the person want to go on, for the reward that’s on the far end of the road is worth it but the body simply says “Not happening”.

What do you do then? Do you keep going or do you stop and rest and then continue the journey.

The answer is to let the current take you to the Promised Land. Agreed that the current alone will not be able to make the same time but the effort you save doing so will allow you to savor the end result.

I’m talking about rafting and the end result is the thrill you get while on a rapid, rocking in all the directions and not knowing when the water that’s supporting the raft is going to disappear allowing the raft to free fall till it hits the trough.

So what’s it going to be…

The Dream

All of a sudden you find yourself contemplating what is going on.

You have a good thing going and all of a sudden you start having doubts about it, you get ideas and not the ones with the good ending. On one level you don’t want anything changed but then an increasingly bigger part of you wants the thing to cease to exist.

I don’t know if this is true for all the subjects or it’s just me but I do feel there is something more to the world than it meets the eye. There used to be a time when all you could want was to make things the way they are right now but now that the thing are in place you begin to wonder.

Was this what you wanted? Has the dream been altered en-route subtly that you have been caught off guard? Were the changes so subtle that you didn’t notice them while you were working toward the dream but now that you thing you have achieved it the bigger picture looks nothing like the dream?

These are just some of the questions that I could think of, maybe there are more questions and possibly even more answers than I can possible begin to fathom.

But what do I know! My friends say I lag socially by almost 2-3 years and maybe that’s true, but to think of it...

Too much!

When is it right to consider the news items you get in RSS feeds too much?

What do you think is the right frequency to check those feeds?

When is it a right time to get off the bandwagon and join the real life?

How much of the general discussion that goes-on on Slashdot or techmeme is relevant anyway?

Well there is no straightforward answer to that. It’s more than what it should be when any of the following happens.

• You dread opening the reader of your choice if you have been away from the aforementioned reader for more than a day.
  • Reason: you basically are afraid of the huge amount of unread item count that you are afraid that you are gonna miss out on some important nugget of information that you want going through all the junk that’s posted there.
• You repeatedly recheck for any new feed content every five minutes and there is none.
  • You should stop doing that. Simple. Stop it.
• Whenever you feel a disconnect between the facts that you know and the fact other people are talking about is probably a good time to get to the real world.
  • And by other people I mean normal folk who do not work in computer related business.

One thing that you have been looking for!

If someone asks you what’s the one thing that has greatest influence on your life? Would the answer be Parents or some teacher who had a big influence or some friend who you always look up to or something you always wanted to find but were just unable until you found it?

If I have learned anything about the way life behaves it would have to be this. The one thing would be the very thing whose existence you have been denying your entire life because it made you feel that you might lose control over yourself in case you found it. You do not actively search for it because deep down you believe that it’s too good to be true. It’s the one thing that always has a higher priority, however small the margin may be.

For some people it’s a teacher or their parents or some friend or some colleague but for some people it’s completely different.

I’m not going to delve on what it is/has been/will be for me but just think about it and maybe it makes sense.

There was a time when platform was for trains

Where do we start and most importantly where the hell do we end?

Roll back to the year 1984 and there was a revolutionary advertisement. Anyone remember what it was? No points for getting it right (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8). It was an ad from Apple against Big Brother as is described in 1984 by George Orwelll. It’s core message was to break free be independent be different and promote thought.

We will fast forward to 2009 when the restrictions from Apple Computers Inc. force all kind of people to question what the fuck is going on in this world and why in the hell’s name all the anti-trust regulators so hell bent on Microsoft and Intel are turning a blind eye to the current mess.

Let’s take two platforms and compare them

	Microsoft	Apple
Default Browser	IE	Safari
Available browsers	IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera	Firefox, Safari, Opera
Default media player	Windows Media Player	ITunes
Available Media players	Can’t count	Can’t count
Slapped with an anti-trust case for browser	Yes	No
Slapped with an anti-trust case for Media player	Yes	No
Current state	MS offers Windows versions without Browser and Media player	Apple enjoys no problems whatsoever

What I fail to understand is why is Apple getting away while Microsoft is getting screwed like anything.

The both bundle their own browsers and Media players. They both have a lot of choices in both departments but only MS is made to pay the fine. EU are you listening?

Where is the anti-trust case on Apple?

With the advent of iPhone Apple seems to have gone a step further. At least on a mac you could install whatever application you wanted but on an iPhone you have been restricted to a fixed set of applications to choose from.

Some very good apps are not allowed in the AppStore because Apple thinks that they duplicate the functionality provided by iPhone’s stock applications and they might cause confusion in the user community. What!!! Apple is now questioning my ability to differentiate between Safari and Opera? You made a good phone, be happy and gloat all you want and nobody is going to say anything to you. But then you want to restrict me from using the phone the way I want is going a bit too far. It’s like Ford telling me the roads I can drive my car on and in case I want to take my car (did I forget to mention that I purchased the goddamn phone) to a dusty road then the car is remotely turned off by Ford to protect your car from getting dirty. What if I wanted to do that Ford, come on.

Apple allows some 100+ variants of iFart in the AppStore but doesn’t allow one browser. Reasons given are that it will confuse users and it can be used to view adult content. Come on Apple, your default browser, Safari was it can also be used to view objectionable content and I don’t see a ban against Safari yet! Sure you can refuse to distribute the application which violates your rules but why the hell are you playing god. If I want I should be able to view pornography on my phone as I see fit, law allows me to do so. Who allowed you to be the moral police and restrict me to whatever you deem fit.

One of the reasons given by Apple on why isn’t multitasking allowed on iPhone is that multiple applications will drain battery life away. So now the duration for which my phone has to be active is going to be decided by apple too. Brilliant! Come on and admit it that you could not handle multiple applications like almost all other mobiles (even Symbian S60 and S40) do and you packaged it into a statement which makes the users think that you have the best of the intentions. Slick job Jobs!

I wonder, the WinMo phones from a generation ago had paltry 200 or so MHz processors and much less RAM but they allowed multitasking. This was when iPhone wasn’t even a dream! Come iPhone and you have 600+ MHz processor, powerful graphics and bigger screen and yet you don’t have multitasking. Am I the only one missing something here? You have better hardware and the OS is kind of a bully. It allows only the application that came preinstalled to be run in parallel (iPod on iPhone I’m looking at you). Anything else and they don’t deserve to run unless the user is using them actively, what a shame.

On a footnote I’m dying to see a lawsuit against apple.

There’s just one thing i asked for…

Sometimes expecting anyone to behave in a certain manner no matter how many times you have told them to do so is a bit too much and apparently it doesn’t go down nicely.

So there you are and you have told a certain somebody that you don’t like a certain aspect of how that certain somebody lives their life and that certain somebody agrees to the fact. In the future the conditions that lead up to the action you don’t like are avoided but inevitably there comes a moment when the action which you hate and have already expressed a hatred for is repeated.

You confront the person saying you don’t like this and it should have been done differently and they shoot back at you saying that this time the affected person is not you (did I forget to mention that you developed a hatred because you were subjected to that action many a times and that made you realize it’s not you who was the only affected but this was a general attitude problem). You say that it’s not being subjected to the action you hated; it’s the action itself that make you want to puke. Sure the action is sometimes unavoidable; sometimes situation get out of hand and there is nothing you can do to help it. In those times you would think you are obliged to inform the person affected that the action has to be taken and you are sorry. But you know better, you have been the target of the action many a times without any information that’s its going down.

When you confront the person about the hatred, this stops happening and you feel good. But you overlook the reason of it not happening; the steps leading up to the action are now being avoided. It’s like avoiding internet to protect you from spyware and viruses rather than keep a vigil and avoid malicious sites. Sometime later when everything is fine and dandy out of the blue you see the action being carried out without a slightest second thought. You ask why and the answer you get stuns you. “It’s not you who is going to be affected by this, so please stop asking about the justification of the action” WTF. You try explaining you never hated being the affected person rather you hated the action itself. No effect! You try asking for an explanation and all you get is silence and silence. Instead of an answer or reason you get blamed back that you have never curbed some of your actions that were objected against. You know you have curbed them but… never mind.

And sometimes silence is not enough.

Don’t want to tread the path.

Sometimes you wonder what you are doing with your life.

You work, play, party, roam around and do lots of stuff. But at the end of the day when you head back to the place you call home it feels kind of sad. Its not like “Gonna go home, yay!!!” but more like “Gotta go home, WTF”.

The place kind of sucks compared to all the liveliness of outside world.
Agreed the place you call home has all the amenities you could ever want and it has a cozy bed and a big ass TV but still something doesn't feel right.

You go to “Home” and tread across the hallway on the same path over and over again; taking care not to disturb the dust that has settled over the area you don’t walk over. The chair or the unused table serving as a stand for the unread papers you just pick up every day because you are too lazy to get up in the morning and tell the paper-boy to stop delivering the news paper. The only use of paper is when you get some food items (ordered or carry out) and you are too lazy to wash the dishes. Just pick up some paper, use that as the table cum disposable plate when you are done just throw the whole thing away.

Even though the “Home” you live in has more than one room you don't really remember what to do with or why is the other room present. The primary use of the kitchen is to serve as a place to store the fridge (which of course you cannot put in your bedroom as it generates heat ;) ). And the only time you ever wander into the kitchen is when you need some cold water.

All the appliances you own are present within reaching distances of the bed or at least in the same room so that you can be sure you don't have to leave the room at any time, because the only time you want to go out of the room is when you are going out of “Home”.

Sometimes when you can’t sleep you get up and pick you phone up and thumb through all you contact wondering who you could call up at this hour and have a conversation and not be frowned upon. But the moment the scroll bar of the contact list touches the end you sigh and light up a cigarette and puff your life/time away.

But along comes someone who cares about the place you call “home” and suddenly things start looking bright. You try to go home early because you know that it won’t be just the four walls of the room but someone to talk to as well at the place you call “Home”. There would be food on the table that used to be creaking under the pile of unread and untouched newspapers. Although you would be subjected to torture by being made to watch all kinds of soap operas but you still are a lot happier now.

The only thing sad is the transformation is not permanent and soon it will the loneliness and “confined to the bed times” again.

There was a sentimental fool.

Some people give in to relationships so much so that they don’t realize the boundaries and the limits. They go so far that they stop realizing what is right and what needs to be done to make things right. They allow people to run over themselves when they are in the early part of relationship and when they have been romped over and over again they realize they have been reduced to a pulp and they don’t like being pulp and then they start looking for someone they can lay the blame on to. In this process they realize that the only person they came in contact through the entire period was the person who was marching right over their heads the entire time. So naturally the blame goes to the person who wasn’t even told that they were wrong in the first place.

The question that begs to be asked is who the culprit is in this scenario.

Is it the person who allowed the rampage or the person doing it? Many people would like to think otherwise. But then it’s a personal choice.