Henrik Carlsson's Blog

All things me.

More facts on usage of iOS vs Android

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Here’s another report of iOS vs Android use. According to Mobile Marketing Watch iOS represents two thirds of the mobile traffic that hits Google Search.

”The perils of possession without utilization”

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Horace Dediu makes a chart of ”Possession vs. Utilization for Android and iPhone”.

This data seems to support the hypothesis that Android users are disproportionately less willing to spend money (note that the data does not say that users don’t have money, but simply that they are not spending it).

Which is why my current idea for a smartphone app will be realized as an iOS app, not an Android one. (Click through to the original post to se the actual charts.)

The iPad as a travel companion, part 2

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Last week I wrote a blog post about my upcoming trip to Warsaw with the band Hedningarna and the fact that I would use my iPad as my main digital entertainment during the trip, and as my only computer-like work device. The trip ended on Saturday last week but didn’t really turn out the way I thought. (I will likely write a separate post about the music-related part of the trip.)

The plane ride was over a lot faster than I thought, which meant I really didn’t get to use the iPad as much as I thought I would on the way there or on the way home. This in turn meant I didn’t spend as much time watching movies and video clips as I thought. However in Warsaw I used the iPad a lot, both for entertainment/infotainment and for business.

For the entertainment part I mainly used Instapaper. I always have a fairly long list of unread articles in it that I never seem to get around to in my everyday life. However on a trip abroad I’m usually unable to update the list (due to horrible data roaming fees) which in turn gives me the time to read ”old” news. The work-related stuff was mostly done with Evernote because of it’s great offline-functionality.

At the time of this writing (Tuesday around 7 pm) I’m once again traveling. This time I’m on a train from Falun to Gothenburg. Al though a much shorter distance then from Falun to Warsaw, the fact that the trip is made by train means a whole lot of time to use the iPad. So far I’ve used it for everyday stuff like checking twitter (Twitteriffic), checking my RSS-subscriptions (Reeder) and checking mail. I’ve also watched a movie (Vanilla Sky), looked at some video clips (from Webstock ’11), composed and sent an invoice (with Numbers) and now I’m blogging, so it’s safe to say that the iPad enables me to do a whole lot of things.

What’s really great is mainly the fact that I can use it for most of the stuff that I would normally use a laptop for, but with a whole lot less weight to carry around and a whole lot longer battery life. It’s super easy to simply pick it out of the bag, do one or two quick things and then put it away. The on screen keyboard is probably not something I would write a novel on, but it’s a lot easier to use than I imagined before buying the unit.

When I bought it I decided to go for the 32GB WiFi-only version, a decision that I’m now happy that I made. The 32GB was chosen to be able to store my entire iPhoto library on it (which is somewhere around 20-20GB in size) but that proved to be a real overkill since iTunes optimizes image sizes to match the resolution of the iPad. But the extra headroom proved very useful once I started to want to put multiple movies on it. Since syncing can be a pain in the ass, I’d prefer to do it as seldom as possible. (I can’t wait for iCloud!) The fact that it’s WiFi-only hasn’t been a problem at all since I always keep my iPhone with me and sharing Internet from it is really easy.

What’s less great is the highly reflective glass screen. Sure, glass I pretty and it does make it look really expensive, but the high reflectiveness of it makes watching movies in any sort of daylight really hard. Seeing my own reflection in everything can be quite distracting. (In contrast, when I watched a movie in a pitch black room last night the iPad was perfect.) The fact that glass is quite heavy is another thing that’s not so great. The iPad is not really heavy per se, but if it were even less heavy it would be even more great, especially for long form reading when I’m sitting with it in my hand.

And speaking of long form reading, that’s one thing that is really, really awesome on the iPad. Instapaper is such a great app and the fact that I can sit in much couch or chair (or airplane seat or train seat etc.) and read articles like I would read a magazine is simply amazing. For this train ride I’ve also bought my first Kindle book (Clear and Present Danger, by Tom Clancy) for the Kindle for iPad app. So far I have not had time to read anything in it so I guess I will revisit this topic with yet another blog post.

To be concluded…

More Final Cut Pro X

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Serenity Caldwell’s written a thoughtful article in MacWorld about Final Cut Pro X, titled How Apple re-cut Final Cut Pro for the better. One of many very interesting points:

Final Cut Pro X isn’t about alienating professionals: It’s about finding out just what a “professional” looks like in this day and age.

Some thoughts on Final Cut Pro X

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You, my tech savvy readers, probably already know about Apple’s release of Final Cut Pro X, a totally ”rebooted” Final Cut Pro. This has been a very controversial move from Apple since it lacks a lot of the features that professional video editors need (and that the previous version, Final Cut Pro 7, had). A lot of bytes has been used to comment on the issue. One really good take on it is Jeffery Harrel’s blog post ”What went wrong with Final Cut Pro X”, and I won’t rewrite what he already written. If you’re unfamiliar with the FCPX controversy but interested in knowing more, read his post. You can also read numerous posts on Daring Fireball or listen to The Talk Show, Episode #49 to get John Gruber’s take on it. (Or just Google, a lot of people has raised their voices.)

Now I’m not a Final Cut user, so it really doesn’t affect me that much, but I feel a need to express my opinion. Some have argued that this is the latest in Apple’s ever-ongoing attempt to ”dumb-down” the technical world. Final Cut Pro X should, according to those expressing these kind of opinions, now be targeted at prosumers and normal users and be more of a pro version of iMovie and Apple is moving away from the pro market. (Clarification: This opinion is not expressed by those who I link to.)

I don’t think that this is the case. I don’t doubt that it lacks a few very important features and that Apple’s handling of this has been very, very poor. However I think that is what it is, poor handling, not evidence that they are abandoning the pro market. Marco Arment really said it best in Episode #31 of Build and AnalyzeCasual consumers don’t spend $300 on software very often.

That is a very important point. Pros are the ones that really pay for expensive software. Sure, the Mac App Store has made it a lot easier to impulse buy software, but nobody will impulse buy something that expensive. So even if the new price is a bargain compared to what FCP 7 used to cost it’s still to much money for the everyday Mac user who just want to edit some video he/she shot with his/her iPhone, especially since iMovie is basically free.

So isn’t it possible that Apple made a mistake? That they thought that prosumers and consumers would rush to this new product in such great numbers that losing the pros wouldn’t matter? Sure it’s possible, but I think it’s more likely that the huge mistake was to discontinue Final Cut Pro 7 on the same day that FCPX came out. If they had just let the two product coexist for a year or two (like with XCode 3 and XCode 4) I guess everyone would have happily migrated to FCPX as it got more and more great features.

I also think that the best solution for Apple is to admit being wrong in killing FCP 7 and put it back on sale for something like a year. If this is likely or not, I don’t know. Abruptly cutting ties with the past and head straight down the highway of tomorrow is a very typical Apple move. It will be very interesting to see if something similar will happen with Logic Pro in a not-so-distant future.

The iPad and iPhone as travel companions

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Today I will be flying to Poland with the folkrock band ”Hedningarna” for a gig in Warsaw. I’m going to be their FOH engineer. (The guy that controls the sound that the audience hears). This post will not be about sound engineering or about Hedningarna though. It will be about the fact that this little adventure will involve a plane flight from Stockholm to Warsaw. During this flight I will really try out my iPad (and iPhone) as travel companion.

I liked my iPhone from the second I bought it, however I think that my love for it started when I took a long train ride from Arvika to Falun two years ago. I had an Apple keynote video loaded into it and I’d just started using Instapaper. That long boring train ride with poor Internet coverage had never felt fater and less boring.

Now I’m hoping that the iPad will do the same for the plane ride. It’s loaded with a lot of articles in Instapaper, a few comics and some videos from Webstock ’11.

I will revisit this topic (although in a new post) once I’m back from the trip.

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More info about Apples IR-patent

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http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2011/06/apple-working-on-a-sophisticated-infrared-system-for-ios-cameras.html

A few days ago I wrote about a patent application from Apple regarding a use of IR to augment the iPhone’s camera. Mikael Jorhult (@mikaeljorhult) then gave me this link to a very comprehensive overview. Please note the large number of possible uses that isn’t about obsessive control.

Will Apple prevent us from taking iPhone-pictures at concerts?

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A news-story about Apple attempting to patent a technology that will prevent you from filming certain live-events has been floating around for a few days now. Yesterday it started to filter into the swedish press as well. (You can read more about it in swedish at MacFeber and in english at MicroBlogBuzz). Needless to say the haters hate, the tin-foil hats go crazy and the press gets a few ad-clicks more.

So what’s my take on this? First of all, I think a patent and a real world implementation are two totally different things. For all I know this might be a move to mess with another hardware-vendor rather then us customers. I don’t think it can be exactly what the press predicts since the backlash on Apple would be far to big.

Second, interestingly enough I haven’t seen anything about this in neither Macworld nor Daring Fireball, even though these are generally the best sources of Apple news. Sure, the tin-foil hat might say. That’s because the Macworld staff and John Gruber (then man behind Daring Fireball) are Apple fan-boys who wants to cover it up! Anyone with half a brain will off-course realize how stupid that sounds.

And third, Apple is not the devil! (Neither is Google, Microsoft, Facebook or any other large corporation.) It’s a technology company interested in making money by selling hardware and software to people. The things they do aren’t motivated by some evil plan to rule the world. It’s simple business decisions. Stop seeing every move by a big company as something inherently evil.

Why Instapaper still matters to me

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A few days ago Apple opened its WWDC with a keynote showcasing some of the news in iOS 5OS X Lion and the semi-new service iCloud. One of the features that was announced was Safari Reading List, a special bookmarks folder inside Safari where you can save pages for later reading. This is more or less in direct competition to one of my very favorite iOS apps; Instapaper.

If you by any chance haven’t heard of Instapaper, here is a quick explanation. Instapaper let’s you save articles from the web to a list of things to read later. You can do all your reading for free on instapaper.com, or you can buy (for $5 i think) the iOS app that also downloads the articles you saved so you can read them offline (perfect for people like me who chose the WiFi iPad).

I could go on and on about the greatness of Instapaper because it’s an app and service that is absolutely essential to the way I browse content on the web, but I won’t. There’s however one more thing I have to explain about Instapaper before I get to the point of this post and that is the way you get articles to Instapaper. Thera are a few different ways to do this. The most important ones (according to me, off course) is:

Safari Reader uses more or less the same approach as the second point. Though not a bookmarklet it will be a special menu alternative inside Safari. The first item in my list is not really something that the user of Safari Reading List will miss since it is not necessary because Reading List is inside Safari. You do not interact with another app.

For some people this might replace the functionality of Instapaper. Marco Arment, the creator of the Instapaper software and the owner of Instapaper LLC (and also the host of the brilliant 5by5 podcast Build and Analyze) has commented on it, both in his blog (link to Marco’s blog post), in his podcast (link the the episode ”Circling Birds”) and in some other tech related news. He brings up a lot of valid arguments why Safari Reading List might actually prove to strengthen his business. However I think he misses one very important feature where Instapaper will likely kick Reading Lists ass; The API.

The Simple Instapaper API allows third-party applications to add URLs to Instapaper.

And a lot of third-party applications on iOS and OS X does this. As far as I know every respectable RSS-reader or Twitter-client (again on iOS and OS X) is integrated with Instapaper via the API. Whenever you stumble upon an article in you RSS-feed that is too long to read right now, just send it to Instapaper. When you browse you Twitter-stream and find a link to an article but haven’t got time to follow the link, send it to Instapaper. Especially for twitter this is great for me since I usually check my twitter-feed when I’m on the go or have a few minutes break. It’s enough time to see what’s new, but not to do any quality reading. (Yes, I know that by now I’m starting to sound like an Instapaper commercial.)

So that’s that. Quite a lot of text to make a small point; Instapaper’s API is it’s best feature compared to Safari’s Reading List, for me and probably for a lot of other geeks.

OS X Lion and multitouch

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After watching the video from the WWDC keynote I must say OS X Lion shows great promise. However it seems like most multitouch gestures are backwards compared to the same functions today. That means it will probably take something like a week to get adjusted and back in the flow. Well, that’s what holidays are for.