What IS a "PC" Anyway?

I've been thinking about PCs lately (as in "Personal Computers" not "Politically Correct"). When us old timers think of a "PC" we generally think of that first IBM PC or the Apple II - with the glowing green screen, and a hip, cool user interface called DOS.

I bet if you asked my kids what "PC" means - they would say "Politically Correct" (hopefully). To them, there is no concept of a "personal" computer because they grew up in a world where all computers are "personal." In their limited experience these computing devices are the default:

1. A computer (or two) in your house
2. A mobile telephone ("but my phone sucks - I need a smartphone")
3. A tablet
4. An e-reader
5. A XBOX 360 (or Wii)
6. A handheld (non-phone) gaming platform
7. Video screen in the car
8. Streaming custom radio station based on your music preferences (e.g. Pandora, Spotify)

We of the older generation didn't have any of these things growing up. Here's our list:

1. A rock
2. A cardboard box
3. Duct Tape
4. 5 Hot Wheels cars
5. Hammer and nails
6. Firecrackers (or some other equally dangerous explosives)
7. Pong (if you were LUCKY!)
8. 8 track tapes - and then cassettes (if you were a 1%er back then)

When "personal" computers came out - it was a revolutionary concept. "A computer in every home" was such a far-fetched idea that it simply boggled the imagination.

Once the PC came out - there was a "war." The war between operating systems that has raged for 20+ years. Microsoft became the dominant player - because they were first with some business applications that went along with the hardware that IBM was selling into businesses.

Apple was trying (sort of) to do the same thing - but they focused less on business and more on education and the hobbyist. The techie. The artistic nerds.

And so the battle "raged" on (not really - because Apple only had 3% to 5% of the worldwide market, anyway). There are passionate "Windows" guys, and passionate "Mac" aficionados - and even a small sect of Linux lovers.

Then, came the iPhone. The paradigm of what computing "should be" and "could be" changed. Forever. A phone with no buttons. A phone that was a slab of glass. A phone that could surf the web. A phone that could contain "apps" that would amuse/help/inform/guide/save-your-sorry-lost-butt... a phone that would (later) include FaceTime video conferencing (hello, Jetsons!)...

Then, came the Android phone.

Then came the iPad.

Then came the Samsung Galaxy Tab and the Amazon Kindle Fire.

Then came the end of the "personal computer."

What's coming next?

There's talk of a Facebook phone running a modified version of Android (yes, a Facebook Operating System... *groan* ) so you could obsessively update your status 24/7. There are already 5 variants of tablets coming in the next quarter - and desktop computer sales have fallen off considerably. Mac OS X for non-phone, non-tablet computers has been re-vamped to include features from the iOS version. Microsoft is jonesing to get their Windows 7 Phone platform going with Nokia.

There are free applications for personal music, personal text messaging, group text chat, group video chat. We can Linkedin our Tublr Facebook Twitter stream with our Flickr YouTube Picasa stream to broadcast our lives in realtime.

We have phones with 5-10 megapixel cameras. That also do VIDEO. That we can upload LIVE at the event!

We can buy books, movies, TV shows with a single click from our phone then watch them on our TV at home - or on our laptop on an airplane.

Yes, the term "PC" ("Personal Computing") is as dead as Flash. Information is becoming a a commodity - sharing our pictures, where we are, what we "like" and what we stand for in a live 24 hour per day, 7 day per week stream - now that is personal computing.

Moving To OS X Lion - The Way OS Upgrades SHOULD Be

With the release of  OS X 10.7.2 (aka "Lion") - I decided it was time to make the jump from Snow Leopard (aka 10.6.x) to the new OS.

Now, I'm not a huge fan of major updates to any operating system. I dreaded going from Windows XP to Windows 7, and although it was less painful jumping from Leopard (10.5) to Snow Leopard - I still had to update a bunch of applications so they would work properly.

Plus, there are only two ways you can update to Lion - download the updater from the Apple App Store application for $30 - or buy a thumb drive at an Apple Store for $70.

I decided to go with the all-digital version - and downloaded the 3.3GB(!) update from the App Store application on my MacBook Pro.

After it completed the download, it took about 5 minutes to install some installer files - asked to reboot, and then there was simply a splash screen with a progress bar telling me it would be about 33 minutes.

Uh oh.

I know that when XP installs - it also gives a time "estimate" as well. It'll say 20 minutes, then jumps to 40 minutes, then 5 minutes, then 18 minutes then it finishes. I was ready for more of the same...

Nope.

33 minutes - and it was done. Just like the progress indicator showed.

And everything was where it was before. All my desktop icons were exactly where I put them (no auto "helpful" clean up and reorganization), all my shortcuts worked, everything was smooth as silk.

Then, ever a glutton for punishment, I upgraded my iPhone to iOS 5.0... it was the same kind of thing. Download, push down to the phone, phone restarts itself, done.

To be fair there were a couple of moved icons - it tried to put the bookshelf in the lower left of the first screen, so it moved the icon that was there to a (new) blank page 2 - and added the new icon for the video application on to page 2 as well... but that was easy to change in iTunes.

Then I decided to update Quickbooks on my virtual machine (running XP) - from QB 2008 to QB 2012.

What an utter nightmare.

I had to up the memory allocation (which mean re-booting XP), then I had to free disk space, then run the installer. So the installer first checks the download (4 minutes), unpacks the installer stuff (5 minutes), prompts for the registration code (in step 2), installs .NET Framework 4 (15 minutes) - and then crashes because of some unintelligible error it hit when installing the .NET framework.

Restart XP again, restart installer - goes through the download check (4 minutes), unpacks the installer (5 minutes), prompts for registration code, installs .NET Framework (10 minutes), installs who-the-hell-knows what else (10 minutes) - and then it says it needs to reboot (!).

Restart XP again. I've just spent a little less than an hour to install one application - versus 33 minutes to install a major OS update (plus about the same amount of time downloading the huge OS X installer).

My experience with the Apple stuff remains consistently good. I'm not saying Apple is 100% - there have been some "fails" as well - but they have been few and in between - versus consistently constant on the Windows side of the house. What's your experience been?

Attention In-Flight Users - Put Down Your iPhone! [INFOGRAPHIC]

I came across this infographic today - and, as it turns out, the people that use WiFi on airplanes are... well... almost all iOS users!

Is it because iOS users don't know how to relax? Are we so determined to play Angry Birds or Bejeweled Blitz that we can't bear to go for a couple of hours without it? Good news fellow iOS users - apparently, we're not alone!

SOURCE

What Does Your Mobile Phone Say About You? [INFOGRAPHIC]

There's that saying "you are what you eat" - and that got me to thinking... if you are what you eat - what does the operating system on your phone say about you?

Naw, not really.

I'm not THAT lame.

I just found this infographic, and thought it was cool:



SOURCE

Adobe Caves To HTML5 - Creates New "Edge" Tool

Adobe announced this week that it's released a new (pre beta) tool called "Edge" that is designed to replace... er... "compliment" Flash. This still-in-the-oven tool will allow users to create fluid animations of objects on new (or existing) web pages with a graphical user interface using nothing more than HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3.

Steve Jobs must be laughing his ass off right now.

Let's face it - Flash is soooooo 1996. That's when a product called "FutureSplash Animator" was released. Never heard of it? Well, after the creators tried to sell the product to Adobe (in 1996) and Adobe passed - another heavy hitter (back in the day) - Macromedia heard about it and acquired the small company and their development team.

Macromedia (itself acquired by Adobe in 2005 for $3.4 billion!)  changed the name "SuperSplash Animator" to "Flash" - a combination of "Future" + "Splash" - and thanks to companies like Disney and MSN - Flash took off (MSN actually delayed their initial launch until Flash 1.0 was finished)

So, why did Flash succeed? Basically because plain HTML sucked. At the time, doing a plug-in to the browser was the only way to do these advanced animations and graphics. And, oh yeah, once Adobe got their hands on it - they convinced OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturers) to bundle Flash with their operating systems/browsers - so no one had to really "install" it.

Designers loved it because it allows them to create beautiful artwork in, say, Photoshop and then turn it over to the animators/designers to work their coding magic on the finished piece.

Animators/designers loved it - because... well... there simply was nothing else (well, besides Macromedia Director - which became Adobe Director).

So - that's how we got to where we are. Now - where are we headed? Answer: HTML5.

Why? Because Google and Steve Jobs say so. Period.

Nowadays everyone except Adobe hates flash.

Apple hates Flash.
Google hates Apple - but it really hates Flash as well.
Microsoft hates Flash so much they created a Flash rip-off called Silverlight (which they now also hate as well).

The fact that (finally) HTML is major getting a face lift (and tummy tuck, liposuction, and boob job) finally means that browser plug-ins that provide core functions will no longer be necessary. He said hopefully...

HTML should have been updated 10 years ago. But, 10 years ago, everyone was still going nuts on this whole "Internet thing" - and focusing more on business models and valuations than on the underlying technology to make it all work.

To make matters worse, HTML is open-source and free - which means the old view of "... I'm not spending my developer's time to enhance something for everyone - it doesn't provide value for our company" - or, as I like to call it, selfish greed - caused us to be where we are.

It was just easier and cheaper to write stuff in Flash - and because it was already installed on 90% of all computers out-of-the-box, it became a standard. It took someone with a strong personality (Steve Jobs) to draw a line in the sand (like he also did with software distribution and music distribution and iTunes, etc) to say enough is enough.

Besides Steve Jobs' temper tantrum, we also have a renaissance in the browser industry - spurred on first by Firefox and then by Google. Both of these "new" browsers decided to go with HTML5 at their core (or at least to adopt Apple's open-source WebKit HTML rendering engine). Even Microsoft - the king of "me too" - decided to "embrace" HTML5 in Internet Exploder Explorer 9 (or they would have lost the browser wars over time).

So, now that you're all hyped-up on HTML5 and as you wait for Edge to come out of the oven - there's a $30 Mac-based application called Hype that will do more than Edge does (for now) - and it'll help you get your feet wet with HTML5.

So, let's recap:

HTML5/JavaScript/CSS3 = "good".
Flash = "bad".
Adobe = "we better get on the train or we will become as irrelevant as Microsoft".

I, for one, sure hope that Flash goes the way of the floppy disk - and that "plain old" HTML continues to be actively extended as we move forward. It won't happen overnight, but fellow Internet users rejoice: a Flash-free browser experience is on the horizon!

More Talking, Less Typing

Lately I've been trying out a couple of these "dictation" type of applications (Lord knows I do enough typing every day!) - and I have to say, that overall, I'm not very impressed. There is the Google Voice Recognition - that works OK for simple things you're searching for - but a complete mess when you're trying to dictate, let's say an email to someone.

Portable Media - The Beginning of Apple Domination?

Last Friday I blogged about Chrome OS and the pontificated on life using only browser-based applications. I was thinking over the weekend about the impending release of iOS 5 and Lion for the Mac - and I came up with an interesting theory. Could Apple being trying its own hand at an instant-on, lightweight OS "experience"... ummmm... "for the rest of us?"